The Heckler's Veto

Maintaining the ability to decide for yourself in a social environment that increasingly demands you should let others decide for you

"Pushback is not censorship," said one comment in defense of angry students shouting down and harassing controversial campus speakers. "That should be on a tshirt," another commenter approvingly remarked. The comments were posted in reply to a piece written by an author whose work I generally respect, but who had written a thoughtless and indignantly reactive piece regarding a poll conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the results of which indicated that, when broken down in categories of religion, atheists on college campuses prove less accommodating to Free Speech than their pious peers. At least, atheists were more likely to accept the "shouting down" of campus speakers whose views they find to be offensive. 

These results do not surprise me.

It is not that I think atheists are intrinsically more hostile to Free Speech by virtue of their disbelief. I certainly do not think that traditional religionists have typically been less inclined towards censorship, or will be in the future, on occasions in which they find themselves given the power to veto acts of expression that they deem offensive. 

Nonetheless, in current surveys, given current events, a question regarding “shouting down” offensive speech is almost certainly going to be interpreted by respondents in reference to recent instances in which conservative campus speakers were censored by screaming “activists.” Given the prevalent cognitive difficulty that so many seem to have in ever imagining the power of ideological might running the other direction, the question almost certainly was largely internally translated into “has the shouting down of conservative speakers on campus been justified?” to which the largely left-identifying atheist student survey respondents chose to believe, yes, it is.

Speaking last week at Georgetown University alongside my fellow co-founder of The Satanic Temple, Malcolm Jarry, we were made aware of a petition that was circulated by Catholic students in an effort to halt our presentation. Their primary criticism was that our organization’s documented and intentional acts of performative blasphemy constitute “hate speech,” and in preservation of their “safety” and emotional well-being, we should not enjoy a platform at their university with which to spread our vile propaganda.

Of course, I do not agree with the perspective put forth in the petition, but in reading it over, I could understand how the Catholic students came to the conclusions they did. Originally, I had intended to write this piece in reply to the criticisms presented by the petition, and as a preamble I was going to explain what my reply is not. It is not a defensive rationalization of unprincipled behavior I accept only when used to my advantage. It is not a mere re-labeling of actions, as when one simply decides to call their censorship “pushback” in a magical attempt at transforming its qualitative value. It is not simply another citation to throw at somebody without reading, assuring them that our position has been “proven.” 

It is also not this piece. It will be separate. For now, I felt it important to recognize the proliferation of juvenile foot-stomping irrational rationalizations that currently pass for intellectual engagement and call for higher standards. 

I loathe the idea of posting another essay that is seen as a "clever" reply rather than a straightforward answer. I despise the fact that so many poorly-thought, contradictory, and irresponsible outrage pieces which serve as attempts to justify the worst behavior of our most counterproductive and unthinking, inflammatory keyboard culture warriors are proliferated shamelessly and mistaken for coherent position pieces. 

How often do we accept pseudo-intellectual drivel that claims to respect Free Speech but opposes "hate speech" without bothering to clearly define what hate speech actually means and who decides? How is it we take anybody seriously when they say it is simply a matter of determining which speech is willfully “punching down” upon marginalized groups as though that has an objective and clearly defined meaning? Are we “punching down” on Catholics, as non-Catholics, in our usage of “blasphemous” iconography? Or are we “punching up” from our position as members of a smaller religious minority? What about American ex-Muslims? Are they free to criticize the religion that was imposed upon them from a position as minorities within a minority, or are they simply categorized in the larger population of secular Americans? Should they be understood as bigots who are “punching down”? Who decides? 

How did it happen that so many people have completely shut off their minds to the point that they desperately evade these questions and denigrate those who ask them as “Free Speech absolutists” whose only goal is to protect the speech they most disagree with? How is it that I have posed these questions for years, yet people who claim my position on Free Speech is erroneous never bother to discuss why they apparently feel these questions are invalid? Why do so many rally behind simpletons who are so unprincipled that they are incapable of comprehending what it even means to support a principle? 

It never fails to amaze me that there are people who know who I am, they know what I do, they know that I am the recipient of hate mail and threats, they know I represent a controversial religious minority organization, they know people protest my speaking events, they know petitions circulate in efforts to shut down our every event… and yet they still find my concern for principled Free Speech standards to be somehow suspect. 

They, I believe, have so outsourced the cognitive load of forming opinions and positions away from their own reasoning processes and to the unthinking online mob in their social media feeds that they can no longer even recognize a unique situation or new information that falls outside of the well-defined boundaries of their simplified ideological worldview. They are blind to events that take place right before their faces because those events have not yet been reduced to bite-sized pieces telling them who to be infuriated at. It is a practiced type of stupidity that takes on an ugly theistic-religious quality of unquestioned faith in the herd. 

I do not want to write a piece that is mistaken for my justifying the right of The Satanic Temple to speak at college campuses as distinct from the right of other controversial speakers to do the same. I do not ask that people only recognize the positions of The Satanic Temple as acceptable for campus discussions, but that they internalize the value of Free Speech more generally, and stop acting as arbiters of what is appropriate for everybody else. 

When we spoke at Georgetown last week, students were there who seemed sympathetic to the Catholic petition, and when the Q & A took place, they asked the hard questions. They listened to our answers. They did not shout over us. They did not disrupt our presentation. Had we not been able to answer such questions competently, we would have looked like fools. Had they screamed and prevented us from speaking at all, we would have simply looked like yet more victims of an increasingly intolerant and demanding campus environment. 

That is how this works. That is how public speakers pass or fail. Some die on the stage under the weight of their own growing pile of indefensible bullshit, some offer a corrective point of view that might make you see their position in a whole new light, and yet others become household name celebrities claiming the title of Free Speech-defending hero by virtue of the fact that campus protesters would not let them speak.

If you do not have any difficult questions to pose to a speaker, maybe you do not disagree with their positions after all. If you can not face their logic and dismantle it, you are not qualified to say they are wrong. And even if you can dismantle their logic and say that they are wrong, do not expect others to take your word for it. More importantly, do not take anybody else’s word for it. Make sure you are familiar with the source material before you criticize it. Do not rely on the irresponsible translations of sloganeering online imbeciles who will avoid difficult criticisms with freshly created catch-phrases like, “pushback is not censorship.” 

Free Speech is fundamental to a functioning liberal democracy. Engaging with the opposition can be infuriating, but only by engaging are we actually doing the work of confronting and laying bad ideas to rest. Do not mistake the shout-down “activists” for your allies. They presume to tell everybody, including you, what is and is not appropriate to hear. They presume to act as translators, conveying the ideas of others to you through a possibly deformed ideological filter, demanding that you take them at their word. Stop allowing the angry mob to dictate to you what your immediate reaction needs to be in all things before you have had a chance to consider the facts on your own.

And if you identify as a Satanist, this can all be summarized in three words: act like one.