Do we still believe in freedom of speech? Apparently, fewer of us do. With “cancel culture” in laws that limit what teachers can teach, or in campus protests that shout down right-leaning speakers, some are freer to speak than others, and all of us are less free overall.
There is a holier-than-thou tone to a lot of what we all say, in our overheated public spaces. We are a less tolerant nation. The gulf between us is widening. Our inability to hear other voices has reached a boiling point. And not just in politics. The United Methodist Church, one of Protestantism’s strongest and richest traditions, officially split in two on May 1st, largely over their inability to agree on LGBTQ+ inclusion.
And we know how hard it is to come together politically, when vaccines and masks, American history, abortion, and LGBTQ+ inclusion—are turning everything from Congress to school board meetings to family dinners, into battlegrounds. Also: “…social media is awash in speech of the point-scoring, picking apart, piling on, putdown variety.” Only a third of us (34%) believe that we all have truly free speech; 46% of us feel less free to share our views than we did a decade ago.
That came from a recent survey printed in the New York Times, that bastion of liberalism, which had some harsh words for liberals too, on whether they really believe in—or at least, practice—tolerance of contrary words and ideas. Among those who admitted to responding harshly to or retaliating against someone for what they said, liberals were more likely to do so than moderates or conservatives. “In the course of their fight for tolerance, many progressives have become intolerant of those who disagree with them or express other opinions, and take on a kind of self-righteousness and censoriousness that the right long displayed and the left long abhorred.”
You’d probably describe me as a progressive. But I am just as vulnerable as anyone to intolerant listening (come to think about it, “intolerant listening” is an oxymoron). I want to do better. I want to listen to “the other side,” or any side for that matter. Because we are poorly served by all-or-nothing conflicts that are all about winning (or at least, inflicting as much pain as possible on the other side) and not about learning. This is killing us.
So can we chill, people? All I ask is a bit of calm . . . perhaps five seconds of silence, before talking back.
