What Good is Free Speech if No One Listens?

by Kurt Luedtke

I was for 15 years a journalist, a vocation in which you'd think you would learn a lot. I learned three things: The accused you've never met is more guilty than the one you've talked to. Truth and accuracy are not the same. Things are never, ever, as they appear to be.

Because I am less and less convinced of where the truth lies and more and more dubious of our ability to find it, I would like to point out a particular kind of responsibility -- a personal responsibility -- that I think is in danger of being unmet.

For better and often for worse, this is a pluralistic and democratic society. It is relatively new and still experimental; it is probably only three or four generations ago that the country was effectively governed by an oligarchy that protected us from the tyranny of the majority. As we come closer and closer to true democracy, we are ever more susceptible to a certain kind of mob rule in which popularity substitutes for principle and consensus is mistaken for wisdom.

It is, I suppose, inevitable that we must pay a price for our exaltation of the common man; if, for instance, we measure democracy's viability by what the citizens choose to watch on television, I think we're entitled to question how in the world this electorate is entitled to be in charge of anything.

But we have no better idea. We can only hope that the rule of law and our willingness to abide by it will protect against the worst of which we are collectively capable.

It is the law in this country, as in no other, that the individual has an extraordinary right to personal expression. The First Amendment to the Constitution protects the right to speak and to publish; these rights and the degree to which they are safeguarded are the distinguishing characteristics of American society.

For that we have only the courts to thank. Americans seem to be almost completely uninterested in any point of view other than their individual own. We are absolutely up to our necks in groups and blocs and religious and economic interests certain beyond all reason that they are correct and actively interested in imposing their rules and values and self-selected morals on the rest of us. They prattle about democracy, and use it when it suits them without the slightest regard or respect for what it means and costs and requires. These people are -- please believe me -- dangerous.

The right to speak is meaningless if no one will listen, and the right to publish is not worth having if no one will read. It is simply not enough that we reject censorship and will not countenance suppression; we have an affirmative responsibility to hear the argument before we disagree with it.

I think that you think that you agree with me, that you are fair and open-minded and good citizens. But if we put it to the test -- if I make up some speeches about gun control, abortion, gay rights, racial and ethnic characteristics, political terrorism and genocide -- I believe that I can make you boo and jeer or at least walk out in protest.

We cannot operate that way. It's not difficult to listen to the philosophy you agree with or don't care about. It's the one that galls that must be heard. No idea is so repugnant that it must not be advocated. If we are not free to speak heresy and utter awful thoughts, we are not free at all. And if we are unwilling to hear that with which we most violently disagree, we are no longer citizens but have become part of the mob.

Nowhere is the willingness to listen more important than at a university, and nowhere is our failure more apparent than at the university whose faculty members or students think that it's legitimate to parade their own moral or political purity by shouting down the unpopular view of the day.

It will not be a week, and certainly not a month, before you will become aware that someone in your own circle of influence is saying something or thinking something very wrong. I think you have to do something about that. I think you have to help them be heard. I think you are required to listen.

Kurt Luedtke, formerly an editor at the Detroit Free Press, won an Academy Award for his screenplay for "Out of Africa." His commentary is excerpted from his speech in acceptance of the William Rogers alumni award at Brown University last fall.