"The fight over other people's minds never ends, do it?"
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An earlier post today lists a number of challenges to freedom of mind, which encompasses expression that others dislike, gleaned from one days take in the news. http://tinyurl.com/3b7yr6
It struck me that I've finally discovered what the First Amendment, as interpreted by our courts, is all about.
It's not just about legal protection, i.e. government protection or our right to think and express ourselves through our courts, of freedom of mind and expression, although it is all of that. Sometimes the protection exists, and sometimes it doesn't.
The greatest difficulty we have with recognizing such freedom in all of the various areas where the right is claimed, the various contexts, is that in order to recognize your right to think and express yourself freely, we have to limit, legally, the former right claimed by others to shut you up.
For example, when a society is ruled by a church, the church takes for itself ("arrogates" for itself) the right to tell you what you must think and believe, which is why I don't have much use for churches of any kind or belief, apart from the Church of Free Thinking which I may start myself some day, given a few disciples. You won't have to bow down to anyone, although we may light a candle to St. Richard of Feynman.
I recall as a kid asking my mother about such things as ghosts and elves and the like. She replied, "People used to believe in such things; they no longer do." That was good enough for me as a kid. If Mom said we don't believe in certain stuff, that it was nonsense, there was no sense in my going down that road.
Mom was thus freeing me up to think for myself. That was important. It was a gift.
Here's what the Cohen and Varat text from Cases and Materials on Constitutional Law says about the theory of the control of the content of speech (Foundation Press, 11th Ed.)
Freedom of thought and expression is taken so much as a matter of course in most western societies today that we are apt to forget how recently it has come to be accepted. As the distinguished English historian, J.B. Bury, emphasized in A History of Freedom of Thought (1913), "human societies (there are some brilliant exceptions) have been generally opposed to freedom of thought" and "it has taken centuries to persuade the most enlightened peoples that liberty to publish one's opinions and to discuss all questions is a good and not a bad thing." (Home University Library Ed., 1952, p. 2) This is due in part to the persistent inclination of people to cling to familiar and accepted opinion, and to dislike what is new, but other reasons are not difficult to discover.
Both the society and outlook of the Middle Ages were authoritarian; truth was divinely revealed and error was sin. Consequently to extirpate erroneous views was not only permissible but a high moral obligation and the unifying structure of the medieval Church provided the central authority for determining what was true and what was false. Thus the churchmen who in 1633 condemned Galileo to live the rest of his life in seclusion because he insisted that the earth was not the stationary center of the universe were only performing their duty as determined by the standards under which they had lived. [Footnote omitted]
Even after the impact of the Renaissance and Reformation, the rebirth of learning, and the development of nation-states, the modern concept of freedom of thought was slow to develop. Diversity replaced the unity of the Middle Ages and the invention of the printing press brought a new and previously unequaled medium of communication. But on the whole, the dissenters and reformers sought only to establish a new brand of truth (their own) and did not recognize the value of general freedom of thought and speech as the means of arriving at truth.
[The authors proceed briefly to discuss the 300 year English experience beginning with the first book printed, by Caxton in 1476 until our Declaration of Independence of 1776. Imagining the death of a king ("compassing" the death of a king) was made a criminal offense, as was seditious libel (criticizing government officials in an era when it was thought that the public needed to respect, not ridicule them, making telling the truth worse than telling a lie about them), and control of the press through state monopoly and licensing, were the principal means of preventing inconvenient thought to go abroad.
The problem with free speech and free expression, is that we don't always want to allow it.
A recruit joins the U.S. Marines. A mental reconstruction job is in order. Civilian clothing is locked away and uniforms issued.
Civilian haircuts wind up on the floor in exchange for high-and-tight, the famous 'jarhead' look.
The recruit's original family, and friends, are relegated their spheres while he lives on a training base. A new family is issued, the Marines.
A fighting, killing machine is manufactured. Free expression is not encouraged during training, and I doubt much afterward.
A recruit for the priesthood enters seminary as a young man, before he experiences much of the world. He is taught the Church view of the world, not any view he may develop independently.
A college student (back in my day) joins the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative, Republican, political movement. "Yaffers" we called them, not with respect, as they seemed out of it. longing for an older world while the rest of us looked forward to the brave new world, as Shakespeare put it. They tended to favor Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review, who passed away last week.
It seemed silly to close the doors to independent thinking while still in college, but that's how the Yaffers seemed to me, at least, narrowing their window when they should've been opening it. Who's to say who was right. A matter of free choice, I should think, like joining the Marines or a seminary.
As opposed to the Marines and the seminary, civilians are encouraged to think for themselves. This is what the current political campaigns and choices are. The theory is that the candidates and their supporters get out their messages. The media, blogs, family members, friends and neighbors discuss the candidates, their messages and positions, and make a choice. We call the process democracy.
They had something they called an election last week in Russia. Vladimir Putin, the premiere or president (or Czar, for that matter) selected his clerk of seventeen years, Dmitri Medvedev, to succeed him, as the Russian Constitution, adopted after the collapse of the Soviet Union in when was it, 1989? 1991? forbade Putin from another term. He was term limited and, it appears to the credulous, that he has respected his nation's constitution. Maybe, we'll see. At least he bowed to the rule of law, which is something. We'll see what happens when Putin, who gave himself the position of interior minister, and his nominal boss, Medvedev, disagree on something, as if this could happen. M has the power to remove P. I'll believe it when I see it.
Other candidates were barred from running. They got no air time on the state controlled media. No TV, no campaign, as the Russian federation is to large for stumping across eight or eleven time zones. So M wins by a knockout before the others enter the ring.
This is something other than democracy. Voters can think what they want, but can't vote for their own candidate, only Putin's. Maybe it works for them. Maybe China is a democracy too, as they get to cast ballots and pull levers. Cargo-cult democracy, where you go through some of the motions without getting the theory. See Cargo Cult Science, by Richard Feynman, in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, on the question of integrity in science, only here we're talking about integrity in politics. You can see why we have such a long way to go.
At any rate, to get back to the main question, we have a need to control the thinking of others, lest something bad occur, such as someone else achieving political (or spiritual, or religious) power instead of us, or Putin.
It seems that each of our heads contains a brain, and in this brain is a mind, something grander than a motion picture theater, greater than the Internet, and all of the books in all of the libraries of the world. When we look inside our mind we can imagine anything we want.
Our problem is when we let escape from our mind a thought, an idea, an image, that someone else does not want us to have, or express. We might tell the truth, which contradicts theirs. Their power, their church, their nation may fall as a result. There are two things they must do to protect themselves against the power of our mind:
(1) They must prevent the possibility of our even thinking inconvenient thoughts. This means, as in North Korea, the imposition of a form of mind control such that little in grade school are taught that their leader is this wonderful person who can do no wrong, like a god, like his father before him. These poor kids, and the adults who came before them, are in for a rude awakening when the windows open in that sad land. The N.Y. Philharmonic visited and played in Pyongyang a week or so ago. That should be good, but I don't know who got to see them play. I doubt that the windows are now open in N. Korea. I doubt that the North Koreans are allowed to think inconvenient thoughts without being severely punished.
(2) The must prevent any expression of inconvenient thought. The fact is that all thought is inconvenient. You're against slavery? You'd have been tarred and feathered back in the day. Now that we don't have the institution of slavery in this country any more, courtesy of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln and the northern troops, it's easy for us to say we oppose slavery. Good for us, always ready with answers to the easy, moot questions. How about the death penalty? Are you for or against that? This is a harder question because we still like the idea of eliminating really bad people who murder and don't they deserve this? Of course, but what does it do to the rest of us? It makes us ready to kill. We become what we despise. We even torture as a matter of law and policy, according to our president who vetoed an anti-water-boarding bill this morning.
Good for Bush. Torture will be his legacy. He could've done better with his time on earth, and in the White House. A moral pygmy of the first order.
Ah, well, some fights never end, and freedom of mind is one of them. Torturing a prisoner to find out what's in his mind is the opposite of freedom of mind. This is using a can-opener to find out what's in your head. You may be a prisoner some day. How do you feel about your enemy using a can-opener on your head?
The thing that gets lost in legal/moral debates is the question of what happens when the shoe is on the other foot. Our soldiers find themselves in captivity often enough, and we don't like it when we see them paraded, or with a gun to their head, being forced to sing the party line of their captors, do we? No. We don't.
So we have to ask this question, what if the prisoner were us. Otherwise it's not much of a discussion, is it.
To draw a conclusion to the foregoing, here's the deal. Our First Amendment, which protects our right to think, believe, speak, dance, paint, draw, demonstrate, march, write poetry, novels, stories, assemble, pray, curse out or enemies, etc., etc., could more profitably be called the Freedom of Mind Amendment. It protects the movie that's playing inside your head, and all of the other things going on inside it as well, with very few limitations, which I'll mention.
Our Freedom of Mind Amendment protects you against the efforts of others to dictate to you how you must think, or, more likely, how you must not think. There are always people who want to control your mind. We see this more starkly in other cultures than our own. Muslim culture is centuries behind freedom of thought in the West. The Saudis have made a deal to invite Cal (Berkeley) and Stanford to join in opening a campus in the kingdom. That is, or could be, big. That is opening a big window, assuming that what goes on inside the campus is not confined to the campus. The Saudis have placed a bet, not just on oil, but on minds, on the assumption that oil runs out; it is finite. The mental powers of Saudi youth are infinite. This looks like a good bet. It will have to be protected, carefully, over a long time, against all sorts of storms that will blow fiercely before this story is done.
The fight over other people's minds is always just beginning, as we have new minds coming along all the time. Each is born into his or her own context, which favors, more or less, freedom of mind. In each context there are those who will wish to control that mind.
The problem for the individual is to remain an individual, and not to give up his/her mind to the group, however good that group may be seen at any particular moment.
Freedom of Mind is Freedom From Mind Control, by anyone.