The Right to be Wrong (Free Speech is for Those You Disagree With)

At Encounter, we are big proponents of open and respectful dialogue. The ways we learn, nurture trust, and create community is by exchanging ideas, listening to one another and importantly, understanding that we don’t need to agree or share the same beliefs to be respectful. 

Today’s blog is about the importance of free speech, or freedom of expression as it is referred to in Canadian law. Freedom of expression is fundamental to so much of our societal values including religious freedom. I have been pondering how these ideas relate and how the narrowing support for free speech and freedom of expression may impact the functioning of our communities and the religious tolerance and respect that has been a hallmark of Western liberal democracies. In this blog I’ve done a deep dive into free speech, the current forces working to constrict it, and the pitfalls for all of us when freedom of expression is not protected – especially for those with whom we disagree. While the blog is a bit of a departure from our normal content, I hope you’ll indulge me and I look forward to your feedback. 

 

Many liberal and democratic norms that we long took for granted seem under threat today. Analysts are concerned about this “democratic backsliding” (1, 2) as these key norms weaken including, unfortunately, a decline in support for free speech (e.g. 1, 2, 3). The freedom to speak is a bedrock principle of liberalism and a bulwark against tyranny – protecting it helps preserve our way of life. 

This threat comes on multiple fronts. The right’s threats are frequently top-down, using government power to suppress speech they regard as dangerous. On the left, some threats have been top-down but others have come from civil society actors – universities, activists, online communities – that depict speech as harmful or violent so that censoring it seems sensitive and moral. 

Free speech is central to Encounter’s work promoting religious literacy in two ways. First, religious freedom ties intimately to freedom of speech. When religious minorities are persecuted, inevitably the freedom to speak out against that persecution is soon undermined (see Iran and India for recent examples). We should consider the freedoms of speech and religion as twin canaries in the coal mine of liberalism. When one is threatened, the other soon follows, and before long, other freedoms become jeopardized as well. 

Second, freedom of expression is not merely about the absence of constraints (e.g. losing your job, criminal charges, online bullying). It is also about a cultural norm that values dialogue across difference. This norm underlays all of Encounter’s work that encourages us to respond to difference with values that foster understanding. In our diverse communities, being able to speak and to listen is a way to foster social cohesion – namely through shared commitments to each other’s liberties – and to creating a place where we all belong. Let’s then look at free speech, this bedrock of our liberal societies.

 

4 Reasons to Protect Freedom of Speech

Greg Lukianoff, head of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (or FIRE) in the USA, is probably the clearest, most consistent voice defending freedom of speech in North America. During a Vancouver TED talk he gave last year, he provided four reasons to protect free speech:

1. Free speech makes us safer – Lukianoff suggests that you can better navigate the world if you have an accurate picture of what people actually think (even if this is dark). Knowing less about what your neighbours, your colleagues, and your politicians think doesn’t help protect you or society.

2. Free speech cures violence – During the past decade, many voices have framed free speech as conveying “harm” or as violent. While actually inciting violence has always been prohibited, these recent shifts frame disagreement on sensitive issues as violence. Lukianoff makes the opposite claim, suggesting that speech is “the best peaceful substitute” for violence. Allowing people to voice disagreements will not create perfect harmony but it does act like a pressure valve releasing frustration. Democracies are partly an agreement to settle differences by debate and by voting instead of using force. The alternatives – which require using force to suppress speech – are much worse.

Framing speech as violence entitles organizations to police our speech in universities, workplaces, and elsewhere. And in our private lives, it can perniciously corrode interpersonal norms. If disagreement is assault, then those in our lives who disagree with us become toxic and people we should cut off. Relationships and living together require some capacity to handle disagreement. Truly abusive situations should be exited but this rhetoric increasingly is being applied to regular disagreements.

Lukianoff adds that calling speech violence insults victims of real violence (in Ukraine or in your neighbourhood). What they endure is not akin to hearing words we don’t like. I fear too that equating words with violence may encourage actual violence. If Charlie Kirk’s words are violence, some more radical folks will find it easier to justify actual violence to stop his words.

3. Free speech protects the powerless — Lukianoff counters the claim that freedom of speech is a tool of the oppressor (by enabling them to go after the vulnerable). He maintains the opposite is true. The powerful always have ways to be heard and to get their way. But every minority cause – women’s rights, abolishing slavery, the Civil Rights movement, gay rights, etc. – made its case and often achieved victories through the power of speech. Elsewhere, Lukianoff has smartly summarized that “free speech is for losers,” meaning that it helps the politically weak. Yes, some will use free speech to demean others but, in the long run, preserving free speech will help protect the vulnerable.

4. Even bad people can have good ideas — The Latin term ad hominem means trying to discredit a speaker instead of their ideas. It is considered a weak debating tactic and a logic error because the speaker’s failings are irrelevant to whether their point is true. I recently heard a great podcast on Thomas Jefferson whose words in the Declaration of Independence are amongst the most important ever written. Yet, Jefferson had children with his teenage female slave, Sally Hemings. Jefferson almost epitomizes brilliant, world-changing ideas paired with horrific behaviour. Lukianoff gives opposite examples too – of very kind people whose ideas were terribly mistaken. The true test for us all is to defend the free speech of those we disagree with or find morally off-putting. In his TED Talk, Lukianoff playfully has the audience face their neighbour and say “just because I hate your guts, doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

 

 

The Pursuit of Knowledge

If Lukianoff is free speech’s best spokesperson today, the classic defender of free speech is the 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill. Mill’s argument focused primariliy on Lukianoff’s fourth point – that free speech leads to better, more accurate knowledge of the world. 

Sometimes this occurs because the opposing view turns out to be right. But Mill argues that even when opposing views are in error, they may not be completely in error. They will have parts of the truth and highlight gaps or oversights in our perspective. Exposure to opposing views can lead us to sharpen and refine our ideas and make them better and truer. 

Further, Mill contends that testing our ideas against competing views forces us to undergo important mental work. The struggle to defend the position helps us understand why something is true and to not just accept as fact that it’s true. It’s the difference between blindly reciting a dogma (which will prove flimsy when attacked) versus firmly holding a truth whose importance we deeply understand.

(This Atlantic article highlights research that conservative students gain the most from liberal universities precisely because being surrounded by ideological opponents challenges you to reconsider and refine your views; conversely, the research finds that liberal students gain less from a campus culture that repeatedly affirms and rarely challenges their perspectives). 

Mill’s whole view is quite simply this: truth is hard to find and we simply cannot determine in advance who has found it. Hearing good and weak arguments, refining our position over time, letting new voices emerge…none of this guarantees we will find the truth but there is no better process for finding stronger and clearer ideas in the long run. 

In our society, universities and social media play a large role in shaping norms around free speech. Let us consider each in turn.

 

 

The Universities

If Mill is correct that weakening free speech can impede learning and developing clearer ideas, this does particular harm at the very institutions focused on the pursuit of knowledge: universities. 

Cancel culture has had a chilling effect in the universities. A revealing example for me was Harvard historian Jill Lepore. Lepore shared how the censorious university culture almost caused her to quit while she also expressed regret that she did not oppose it more vocally. If someone with the fame, accomplishments, and status of Lepore has feared to speak up, what does this mean for everyone else?

FIRE provides a partial answer as its surveys of professors found large proportions say they change their writing (35%), feel unable to speak freely (27%), or worry their reputation will be harmed by saying something in class (40%). These percentages, troubling as they are, are worse than they look – professors after all overwhelming lean left to far left and yet they fear censorship from their more left-leaning students not for being conservative, but merely for not leaning left enough. 

FIRE claims far more professors have lost their jobs in the past decade than at the height of McCarthyism (see chart below). This censorious culture impacts students too. A survey of students at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University found students go beyond self-censorship – rather 88% actively pretend to have views they don’t hold due to fear of campus culture. A similar study of Canadian university students found 2/3rds of political moderates fear sharing their views could lead to a formal complaint or a lower grade. 

It is stunning to say what a betrayal this is of the universities’ mission. Moreover, these institutions train future elites who will come to play a large role in society. A society with the diversity of ours – ideological diversity, religious diversity, cultural diversity – desperately needs a culture that approaches difference and disagreement with dialogue, conversation, and civility.

These attacks on free speech in the universities have generated a backlash, especially in the USA, but this has resulted not in defending free speech but rather to justify government coercion. Florida has tried enacting draconian laws controlling what professors can say or teach while the federal government threatens the funding of other schools. 

Upholding free speech is a critical step in preserving our universities. It will lead them to generate more original and useful ideas. Graduates, as noted in the Atlantic piece above, will feel challenged and emerge with the sense of having learned important things rather than – as the study above shows – having almost 90% of students at prestigious schools who are paying enormous tuition to learn to fake an opinion they do not hold. The failure to do so is hurting the public perception of universities, damaging one of our more important institutions. 

Social Media’s Polarizing Influence

Social media originally promised to be an immense boon to free speech by allowing more people to speak and be heard by a wider audience. 

However, as noted above, free speech requires certain cultural norms and unfortunately, social media’s incentives seem to corrode these underlying values. This was brilliantly put just days ago by Jeremiah Johnson in his blog post Can Liberalism Survive the Algorithm:

He calls liberalism “a social technology that allows people with profoundly different value systems to live together.” Unfortunately, he claims that the “internet’s toxicity…is especially bad for liberals.” Social media encourages simplistic “good-versus-evil narratives” and leaves no space for ambiguity or for tolerance. The algorithms reward you – with likes, clicks, sharing – for black and white narratives that collapse the “distinction between and opponent and an enemy.” He sums up that “illiberal politics thrives in this kind of environment.” 

Johnson’s suggestion that social media drives polarization is backed by research. One study shows that X’s algorithm amplifies emotional content (especially for expressing hostility towards out-groups) which causes us to see our political in-group more positively and the out-group more negatively. 

Another study shows that you will receive positive reinforcement when you express moral outrage online which in turn increases our tendency to express moral outrage. 

A revealing study about social media’s tendencies followed relationship advice given on reddit. When social media was new, in 2010, much of the advice encouraged compromise. But by 2025, the use of terms like “communicate,” “compromise,” or “give space” had declined significantly while advice to end the relationship leaped from 30% of the comments to fully 50%. 

Social media encourages erecting boundaries and cutting people off. None of this encourages the norms of speaking and listening that plural, democratic societies need. Instead, the algorithms encourage demonization and pile-ons. How is any of this consistent with the values needed to live harmoniously in communities that are plural religiously and otherwise? 

The Errors We Make

Polarization is so pronounced today that I think many of us feel Mill is wrong. Our opponents are different – they are so profoundly wrong (or evil) that there is nothing to learn from them. Our own faction, in turn becomes morally infallible in a way.

But it was interesting to hear Alexandria Occasion-Cortez recently joke that “woke 1 was crazy,” signalling a big shift from her rhetoric from a few years ago. She seems to acknowledge here that her opponents from just a few years ago may have had a point.

I don’t mean to point at her however – the same holds for me. For example, during Covid, I opposed quickly re-opening schools thinking the students would just spread the virus to adults which, I thought, made no sense. I now realize I completely underestimated the impact the isolation was having on the students’ long-term educational and social development. I had no idea the price those kids would pay.

More poignant was an experience I had at a conference in Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed. The main plenary session had local people of colour to reflect on the event. I had assumed they would discuss police violence but instead they discussed the rioting afterwards and the massive destruction to a key commercial district with many minority-owned businesses. Locals lost their livelihood and the community lost a valuable part of the town. 

I was humbled remembering that those news outlets that highlighted the rioting were dismissed at the time as being racist and as downplaying Floyd’s murder while tarnishing protesters as rioters. And per Lukianoff’s point #4 above, maybe some of these accusations regarding motives were true – but it was eye-opening to hear these local folks describe the devastation of the rioting in ways I had not previously took to heart.

In short, our opponents’ ideas deserve an airing and serious consideration. You may have your own examples. It might be worthwhile to remind ourselves, regularly, that inevitably our opponents will sometimes be right. Another good practice Mill would encourage is to intentionally seek out the best, most cogent defender of an opposing view (those terrible social media algorithms do the opposite, feeding you people dunking on the weakest, most foolish stances instead). Humility and seeking out thoughtful dissenting views are perhaps a good path forward for society and our own wisdom.

 

 

Democracy is More Than Voting

Democracy is far more than just an election held every few years. It’s a day-by-day cultural practice where we exchange our reasons. We speak with one another and we listen, even when it’s hard. 

If we lose this fundamental democratic practice, governments will feel more empowered to quash someone’s right to speak. Most importantly, defend your opponents’ right to speak because, if we don’t, their turn will come and, having been slighted, they will feel ample justification in going even further to quash your speech. It’s a vicious cycle. History is rife with autocracies and dictatorships that police speech – protecting free speech that is unique and rare and worth preserving.

At Encounter, we encourage dialogue and engagement to better understand one another. This doesn’t foster unity, but we do learn from one another’s different takes, backgrounds, and assumptions.

If you disagree with me, we welcome any and all comments below. Others might benefit from your insight, thoughts, or critique. And thanks for listening.