I spent part of the week speaking on several college campuses in Texas, and my subject was free speech and the threats against it on campus and beyond. The students were in the main shocked and dismayed at the revitalization of censorship as a political ideal and by the widespread support for censorship among so-called liberals. Most of them were genuinely unaware of just how far and wide the war against free expression currently ranges.
This is strange, because the war on free speech starts on campus.
In March of 2014, Professor Lawrence Torcello of the Rochester Institute of Technology, the seal of which appears alongside the definition of “second-rate” in many dictionaries, published a short article online calling for the criminalization of what he calls “climate denial,” meaning the holding, perpetuating, and, especially, the financial support of heretical ideas about global warming. A few articles were written criticizing the article, and the response was the expected one: “It’s just one crank nobody professor from some second-rate philosophy department publishing a blog post, don’t make such a big deal about it!” Professor Torcello subsequently denied that he had argued what he plainly does argue, namely that legal protections for free speech should not encircle those who dissent from the received dogma of global warming. “Misguided concern regarding free speech,” he wrote, should be no impediment to imposing criminal sanctions on those whose activism “remains a serious deterrent against meaningful political action” on the issue.
We’ve taken this ride before: An obscure academic writes something loony. We withstood “feminist physics” and “queer algebra,” and we’ll get through this, too.
Unless we don’t.
Shortly after Professor Torcello’s tentative exploration of criminalizing political disagreement, Gawker published an article by Adam Weinstein bearing the straightforward headline: “Arrest climate-change deniers.” Building on Professor Torcello’s argument, Weinstein called explicitly for the imprisonment (“denialists should face jail”) of those working to further particular political goals (“quietist agenda posturing as skepticism”) on climate change. Never mind that protecting people and institutions attempting to further a political agenda is precisely the reason we have a First Amendment. Weinstein dismisses the First Amendment out of hand, with the expected dread cliché: “First Amendment rights have never been absolute. You still can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. You shouldn’t be able to yell ‘balderdash’ at 10,883 scientific journal articles a year, all saying the same thing.”
Yelling “balderdash” at the conventional wisdom has a very long and proud tradition. (Not that it should matter to this debate, but I suppose I should here note for the record that I hold more or less conventional views on climate change as a phenomenon but prefer mitigatory policies to preventative ones.) The name “Elsevier” is not beloved on college campuses (the modern company is a publisher of academic journals and sometimes is criticized for its pricing), but it is to that company’s spiritual ancestor, the Dutch printing house of Lodewijk Elzevir and his descendants, that we owe the publication of, among other articles of samizdat, the works of Galileo, at that time under Inquisitorial interdict. (The story of Elzevir’s 1636 covert mission to Arcetri to meet with Galileo and smuggle his manuscripts to Amsterdam, a city that was then as now a byword for liberality, would make a pretty good movie.) It isn’t that it’s likely that our contemporary global-warming critics are doing work as important as Galileo’s: It’s that no one knows or can predict, which is the practical case for free expression, which should be of some concern even to our modern progressives, self-styled empiricists and pragmatists who reject the moral case for free expression.
