There’s no point in beating around the bush: freedom of speech invariably creates a mess that verges on disaster. The broadening of effective access to the public sphere in every instance has been followed by an explosion of every imaginable manner of conspiracy theory, crankery, fraud, and innocent stupidity. Thomas Jefferson, no enemy of freedom of speech and the press, began to express his doubts as to their viability during the perilous early days of the republic.
But the timing in which Jefferson had his second thoughts cuts the other direction. The press of his youth had no fewer warts than the press of the early republic; it just directed most of its ire at the authorities of the day—the British. The cause of Jefferson’s later misgivings were those papers who began to print unkind things about the man himself, something they did because America had moved on to a new regime under which Jefferson was undeniably a powerful and important person. The shortcomings of free speech are always more apparent to those with power than those without it.
Some defend freedom of speech as providing a marketplace of ideas in which the best rises to the top. I think those who put it quite as bluntly as that are few, but many cling to the vestiges of this simplistic liberal expectancy. There are many good reasons to defend freedom of speech, from the intellectual fallibility of the censor to the dangers of empowering the state to potentially go after the political speech of those supporting the opposition, to the cruelty of banning people from voicing their own conscience. From the point of view of knowledge, however, the main virtue of freedom of speech is that it hedges our bets.
Authoritarians from Russia to China prefer to go all in and bet big on the competence of their own authorities. This creates the illusion of decisiveness and competence when in reality it produces a great deal of fragility. Hardly any perspectives available to Vladimir Putin would have cast doubt on the practical feasibility of his invasion of Ukraine beforehand, and the end result is the complete implosion of nearly all of his domestic and foreign ambitions. Meanwhile, the power of local party officials to censor and the fear of bearing responsibility for an outbreak led to a heavy handed attempt to hide the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, something that has had consequences well beyond China’s borders.
Hedging means that when the consensus in America was that masks would not help, there were people arguing that we should be wearing masks. When there were people arguing that COVID was no worse than the flu, there were people arguing that it was much worse. When there were people arguing for continued remote learning, there were people arguing that children were much safer than adults, and that remote learning had little value for a six or seven year old. Of course, there were also people arguing that it was no worse than the flu, that masks did not help, that social distancing did not work, and of course, that vaccines did not work or made things worse, throughout. But at any point, a curious person had easy access to arguments for any position; an official or a candidate or just a private person could take some perspective and run with it as far as they were individually or institutionally able.
Hedging creates possibilities. That’s all, but that turns out to matter quite a lot.
Both the marketplace of ideas notion and the idea of censoring misinformation or otherwise enforcing factual accuracy rest on a similar desperation to establish domains where politics cannot interfere. One attempts to do so intellectually, while the other, more troublingly, through the machinery of government. But both speak to a certain naivete about politics in any society, never mind an open society.
There is no silver bullet to ensure that the correct and good ideas are always adopted, the competent and good people are always in charge, or the right choices will always be made. Good liberal democrats make these and other human limitations central to how we think about the world. Liberal democracy is, in many ways, a series of hedges. There is no way, finally, to hedge against the weakness of hedging itself; there are times when one must go all in and it can be very difficult for actors in a system not used to doing so to make that leap. But time and again, liberal democracies and, by way of contrast, rival forms of government, demonstrate that it is much better to have options than to preclude them from the outset.