Should we defend the free speech of everyone — extremists included? | Michael Shermer | Big Think

Should we defend the free speech of everyone — extremists included? Watch the newest video from Big Think: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos: https://bigth.ink/Edge ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To fully understand your own stance on political subjects such as abortion, you have to listen to and understand both sides. Defending free speech, according to bestselling author and skeptic Michael Shermer, means ensuring that those you vehemently disagree with are given a fair platform to speak. This principle should also be applied to extremists and those who choose to listen to them. Protesting ideas should not equal silencing them. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MICHAEL SHERMER: Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. Check Michael Shermer's latest book Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist at https://amzn.to/3e7fDkp ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT: MICHAEL SHERMER: If we can't think and say what we want how are we going to understand the nature of reality and the way the world works with out communications. And with out that then all other rights – the right to worship religiously or the right to assemble, the right to debate and dispute and criticize the government and then all the others that fall from that – civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, animal rights and so on. All of it depends on us understanding the nature of reality and it depends on us communicating. The reason for that comes straight out of cognitive psychology. That is we are wrong about so much of what we believe that the only way to find out if you're on the right track or you've gone off the rails is to actually talk to other people. Even if you're completely right by listening to what somebody else says you have an opportunity to strengthen your own position as John Stuart Mill said in his foundational text 1959 on liberty. He who knows only his own position doesn't even know that. So, for example most of my students that I teach they're pretty liberal, they're prochoice on the abortion issue. But when I ask them to articulate the prolife position which over half of Americans take they mostly can't do it. I tell them that you don't really understand prochoice arguments if you don't understand the pro-life arguments. You've got to have both sides. Even if the prochoice position is absolutely the right one you're still not really understanding until you understand the other side. Then there's the fact that you might be wrong, partially wrong or completely wrong. And again, the only way to find out is by listening to what other people say. Then there's the right not just of the speaker to speak but of the listeners to listen. So when protesters shut down talks at say colleges and universities when a conservative comes to speak it's not just the right of the speaker to speak or the administrators or deans who brought that person in, but the audience. There might be a lot of students that want to hear what this person has to say. And even if they are completely liberal and totally opposed to this conservative's ideas they still have a right to hear if they want to. And so when protesters get these speakers deplatformed, that is they're not even allowed to speak, they don't even come to campus or if they do come and they try to speak and then they're shouted down – it's called the heckler's veto – that's violating the rights of listeners, not just the speakers. I'll tell you how far I go in defending free speech. I would defend the free speech of holocaust deniers. My example of this is David Irving whose the most prominent of the holocaust deniers. I've known him a long time since the 1990s. He's definitely the smartest of the bunch and I think he's absolutely wrong and I've confronted him with what I think why I think he's wrong. And as is apparent in his trial he's also pretty anti-semitic, or at least he lies for Hitler. But that's beside the point. The idea that he went to Austria to give a talk and was arrested at the airport. They scan your passport and the name pops up and they call the police and they come and arrest him. He was tried and then convicted and put in jail. And he didn't even give a speech. He was just thinking about giving a speech. So that is the very definition of a thought crime. Do we really want to go down that road? I mean that's what countries like North Korea do. That's what the Soviet Union did under Stalin, arrest people for thought crimes. This is a terrible way to go and I even went so far as to write a letter to the judge in that case on behalf of David Irving... Read the full transcript at https://ift.tt/34qbYtJ