Steven Pinker defends free speech

[Alex K]

Critical thinking makes the real difference as I see it. Dogmatism breeds bigotry.

Scapegoating "despised" demographics is a method of absolving oneself of personal accountability, and demagogues can do a lot of harm there using such methods. Their aim is not to get people to think.

Again, critical thought, in addition to encouraging freethought as opposed to a herd mentality, seem to make all the difference here.

Free thought requires allowing everyone to speak, even the people you don't agree with. Deciding one type of speech is dogmatism and should therefore be censored is in itself dogmatism and prejudice. Let the bigots speak. The rest of us are plenty capable of responding. We don't need to have the government turn off some kinds of speech. Giving it that power is dangerous.

I understand where you're coming from. I'm not sure whether you're USian, Canadian, Irish or UKian, but to stick with the US which probably has the most lax freedom of speech laws - it's a lucky country which now has been a pretty stable democracy for over 200 years. I'm German, and we have several laws in place which restrict hate speech and, of course, in particular of the political and racist kind. I'm not entriely sure about the origin of these laws, it is very well possible that the Americans had their hand in it back in '45-'49. Either way, they were set up to make sure that demagogues like the national socialist party would never get a foothold in society again by taking away their oxygen in the first place. In other words, there was not enough trust in society to regulate itself. In the US, we have this peculiar situation where the state and its founding myth itself are some kind of ersatz religion which may not be shared by the extremist groups in the country, but is embraced by the majority such that extremist anti-democracy ideas don't seem to be able to gain widespread support, even the loony wing of the tea party crowd which is very anti-government I reckon won't go very far. The question is whether the US is really immune to fascist demagogues taking over - one more devastating terror attack which can be pinned on Muslim perps connected with an economic crisis, and the country might just need hate speech laws to keep the American Nazi resurgence at bay. Let's just hope that never happens. In the meantime, we can watch the "arabs" getting killed the slow way.