Effective Speech in the Age of Constant Speech
In the United States, the first amendment to the constitution guarantees — among other things — that congress shall not enact laws that restrict the free speech of the people. For the past few centuries, the freedom of speech — in both spoken and written form — have been highly valued by people not just in the U.S., but around the world.
Recently, a big deal has been made about an agitator who lost a book deal about some unabashed commentary regarding pederasty. I won’t dig into the story itself (you can read the link), but the whole thing has made me wonder why we value free speech. I guess like so many of our freedoms, I wonder if it has morphed into a crutch that allows us to be utterly terrible and careless people, rather than making us better.
So here I am asking two questions:
- What value do we see in free speech?
- Does the current free speech paradigm serve the value we see in speech?
The Proposed Value of Speech
In the world of liberal democracy, freedom in general is a cornerstone value of any society. People ought to be free to live their lives in the best way they see fit — with as little interference as possible. In the case of speech, I think that the reasons that we value free speech fall into two basic categories:
- We value the freedom to express ourselves — how we feel, who we are, and what we want.
- We value the freedom to effectively drive change through the things we say. We want our words to matter, and to wield real power — the power of making things happen.
I think that the article of faith, especially in America, for the past 200 years or so has been that both of these aims work together. We have blindly believed that expressing how you feel and what you want end up effectively driving change and giving power to your words, and to you, the speaker. But I see very little reason to believe this.
In fact, I believe that expressing yourself as freely as possible tends to diminish the ability of your words to drive real change. To see why this is, we need to examine the relationship between speech and power.
The Dynamics of Speech and Power
Speech and power are related, but the relationship is more complicated than we often think it is.
The power of speech can come in two ways:
- the speech is backed by physical or systemic power (laws, social structures, military, physical strength, etc.)
- the speech itself is powerful due to its message and its delivery
At the level of everyday interactions — personal and professional — the more frequent and unrestrained your speech, the less likely it is to be effective in anything more than the short term. The less effective your speech is, the less power you retain.
Everyone has some level of power. They have the power to influence others, and drive change. That power has never been equal among people. Belonging to a certain group or class of society automatically gives certain people’s speech more or less power. But power can be gained based on how you say what you say, when you say it, and to whom.
How you deliver a message is of the utmost importance. Some people or organizations are not ready to hear a certain message. So if it is to be delivered effectively, it needs to be done with that in mind. That is where the two motives for expressing yourself work against each other.
The more your message is expression — of your feelings, desires, or other emotion, the less likely it will be received by those who have reason to fear it. Just think of how much you have gotten done by yelling and venting your frustration at people, as opposed to sitting them down, and trying to make your point calmly. The more you frame your speech as expression, the less effective it will tend to be at achieving any other goal aside from expressing your feelings.
Making Speech Work
Whenever your defense of what you say is “I have the right to free speech, I can say this if I please” — you’re closing off 80% of the probability of having a real conversation. That’s fine if you don’t want to push through change; if you’re just trying to vent. But making change, unless you already have tremendous power, requires a conversation.
A conversation requires at least two engaged parties talking on common terms, and both staying engaged. Yelling loudly over others, and not bothering to frame things in a way they might find digestible is never going to keep anyone engaged. Free speech that involves yelling slogans, taking shots at the opposition, and being unwilling to yield in order to allow conversation — that’s merely expression, not a push for change.
If you wish to have your speech affect real change, your defense shouldn’t be “I have the right to free speech, I can say this if I please”. Rather your defense should be “what I am saying is really important, and here are some reasons why it would benefit you to listen to me.”
When we fail to convey to those who disagree why they should listen to us, we show ourselves to be quite conversationally stupid. This is especially true if we think the other party is selfish and ignorant. If we really think that the other party is selfish, it’s even more important to convey why our message is important for them — because that’s what they’re most interested in!
You Either Value Your Speech or Your Cause — Not Both
Ultimately, if you’re not merely using speech to express yourself, but to promote a cause, you have to choose whether you value that cause more than speech. What I mean is this: there are myriad ways of arguing for your cause. If you really value the cause, the speech that you use to push for it should matter little.
If you really believe in your cause, you should be 100% willing to change your message — so that it is as palatable as possible to those who disagree with you. If your goal is changing hearts and minds, then using abrasive and abusive statements won’t do that. Neither will casting blame, caricaturing, stereotyping, and other tactics.
If your language is abusive and abrasive, it won’t work. So what happens is, you end up doing one of two things:
- you end up abandoning or diminishing the cause that motivated your speech because you care more about what you said than whether it effectively promotes your cause
OR - you end up having to use force to achieve your goals. In that case, you would have been better off to use force in the first place.
My take is this: social media has made it easy for us to favor one motivation for speech (expression), while weakening the other (conversing in order to affect real change). Because more people are seen as simply expressing unfiltered emotion, very few on the other aside care to listen.
The more everyone continue to do this, the less we listen to each other. We stop talking with each other, and keep talking at each other — yelling, as well. The chances for any kind of progress fade away.
I’m no futurist, nor am I a social scientist. But I am genuinely interested in how exactly we as people will keep communication intact. Oddly enough, the ability for more of us to speak more often seems to have done more to dismantle communication than keep it intact. But for some reason, I still have faith.
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