The Freedoms We're Losing

In my 54 laps around the sun, I've learned that valuing freedom of speech is not natural for humans.  We all want it for ourselves, of course, but our atavistic instinct is to crush or silence views and people we don't support.  Belief in freedom of speech for everyone has to be learned.

I used to believe that all humans yearned to be free, that people didn't want to be oppressed.  I knew the Iraqis did not want to be under Saddam Hussein's boot, and was not surprised when American troops were welcomed as liberators.  "Democracy, whiskey, sexy", indeed.  What I've since learned is that, while no one wants to be oppressed, our natural instincts allow us to easily oppress others. 

Since the founding of our country, Americans lived the ideal of individual freedoms.  These freedoms were actively promoted, and even though we didn't always agree with what people said, there was still a strong pillar of support that they had a right to say it.  For generations, these civic virtues--unnatural and rare, but oh so valuable--were taught in our schools.

Ronald Reagan was right when he said, "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."  I'm concerned that the freedoms cherished since the founding are not being universally taught in our schools anymore, and we're approaching that generation that will have to be told what it was like to live free.

The tenets of so-called social justice elevate some and diminish others.  Cancel culture, triggering, safe spaces--these run roughshod through popular culture and didn't even exist when I was in school; then again, my teachers had been trained by the World War 2 generation.  Voltaire's quote about defending to the death your right to say something was something they lived by, but that isn't the case in our culture, or our schools, today.

Because we had these freedoms so long, it's perhaps possible that some people think they can never go away.  They abuse these freedoms, not understanding what Reagan said.  Or perhaps, since most haven't had to fight for these freedoms, they don't value them--they weren't taught to value them, and let their own emotions and instincts hold sway.

I lay some of the blame at the foot of public education.  Government schools are where American students for generations have learned the "civic culture" of our country (did anyone learn the Pledge of Allegiance or the Star Spangled Banner at home?), and that link is in the process of being broken.  I don't know how to fix this problem, though, because I don't see how the very teachers who are causing the problem can be expected to stop on a dime and start fixing it.

I thought of all this while reading Freedom of Speech and Liberal Education.

Update, 1/7/20:  I'm not the only one who thinks so:

Free speech…free expression generally…is under attack in America and throughout the Western world to a degree not seen in a long time. I think there are some specific phenomena and (partially-overlapping) categories of people which are largely driving this attack–I’ve written about this subject previously, here, but the situation has gotten even more serious since that post, and some of the important factors were underemphasized.  Here are the current fronts, as I see it, in the war (not too strong a word, I’m afraid) on free speech.