What is the goal of a protest? What is the goal of boycott?
Is it to persuade an opponent of the truth of your position? Or is it to compel
your opponent, via the use of coercion, to accept your position regardless of
how they judge the merits of it? As a Christian, I believe that we should only
use persuasion against ideas that we oppose. Coercion consists in bodily
punishing or compelling someone to change their thinking—it uses external
pressure to change something internal—and in that it insults the dignity of a
human being. For this reason I do not support boycotts or protests.
There have been a number of protests the past couple of
years. People have protested against Scott Walker’s reforms, greed on Wall
Street, and President Obama’s health care initiatives. Likewise, there have been
organized or threatened boycotts against supporters of gay marriage as well as
opponents of gay marriage. Regardless of whether or not I agree or disagree
with any of these positions, I think that protesting or boycotting or in any
way punishing someone because they have a different opinion than you is
insulting and inappropriate.
Why is the Inquisition so noxious in our minds? We rightly hate
the idea of using force to change someone’s mind. We justly hate the
inquisition because men used torture and death to force people to agree with
them and killed those who refused to acquiesce? Yet how is that any different
from what we are doing today, outside of the fact that we’ve grown more humane
and sophisticated in our methods? Instead of attacking the body, we attack a
person’s livelihood. For example, a person can be a CEO of a company, like Mozilla,
and be forced to resign because they supported an unpopular initiative years
ago. If this is not tyranny, then what is? A tyrant seeks to control a person
completely. What is more personal to a person than their opinions? How can we
claim to be a free society and force a person out of a job because we dislike
their opinion on a particular subject matter?
But how can this be tyranny? It’s not a king or aristocracy,
it’s the people making these demands. We must keep in mind that the tyranny of
the majority is always the worst. Tocqueville recognized this. In any monarchy
or aristocracy, there is always internal conflict. Nobles are resisting each
other and the king, and the people are always a check on both. But when you
destroy the nobility and the monarch all that is left is the people. And they
can fall into a monolithic group think that destroys free thought and its
expression.
Take another example. Recently the owner of a professional
sports team was banned from the league and will be forced to sell his team for offensive
comments that he made in private.[1]
Make no mistake, what this man had to say was offensive and reprehensible. But
instead of punishing him, shouldn’t our goal be correction? I am not sure what
that would look like, but to punish a person because of what they think, even
if those thoughts are ignorant and hateful, seems to insult their inherent
dignity as a human being created in God’s image. Our goal should be persuasion.
We should try to persuade with the truth and correct and reform people.
Someone can ask, what value is his speech? He’s an old
racist, why should we allow him to spout his racist views? I am in no way a
supporter of racism in any form, but sometimes the cure can be worse than the
disease—like the doctor that advocates decapitation to cure a headache. If we
limit free speech in order to destroy hate speech, we may in fact be putting
ourselves in a worse situation. If we set the precedent that some thoughts and
ideas have no value and therefore should not be expressed, we set ourselves on
a slippery slope. What other ideas should we not express? What is acceptable
today may not be acceptable tomorrow. And as we begin to limit expression, we
limit thought. As we limit thought, we limit imagination and potential, we
limit our humanity. That is why our goal must be persuasion and not coercion.
But we can only believe in persuasion if we believe in the
truth. And we live in a postmodern society that does not believe in the truth.
If there is no truth, then all that remains is power. Nietzsche and his
disciples recognized this very clearly. And that is why we have protests and
boycotts in the place of well thought out speeches and editorials. As we no
longer believe in truth, all that remains for us is power. So instead of trying
to persuade, we coerce and compel.
If I ever say anything ignorant, offensive, or even hateful,
I hope that someone will love me enough to take the time to correct me and draw
me from error and lies into goodness and truth. I hope someone would care
enough about me to work towards my reformation and redemption and not condemn
me to remain lost in my folly and ignorance. Truth does exist and I hope
someone would take the time to persuade me to accept it. For after all, the
truth does and will set us free.
[1] If
you think this doesn’t have the seeds of totalitarianism in it, consider
Orwell’s 1984. In that work citizens
were routinely punished for “thought crimes,” that is for thinking things the
state deemed to be inappropriate. Students and coworkers, parents and children,
husbands and wives were all expected to inform on each other for the expression
of any type of unorthodox thought. We don’t inform on each other, we simply
record and post. And then we punish those who have opinions that we don’t agree
with. Again I am in no way condoning this man’s opinions and beliefs. As a
Christian, they are anathema to me. But I hate the principle of punishing a person for their ideas or the expression
of them.
*Added: I should mention that I absolutely uphold the right to protest. I should also mention that I believe that protests against unjust actions (as opposed to beliefs) are morally justified. We can and should use force to counter unjust actions (though the amount of force we should use is obviously up for debate). I am also skeptical regarding the efficacy of protests. They can bring about significant and good changes in the law (e.g. civil rights protests ended segregation) but real change requires a change of mind (we have to want and be willing to integrate, something we have yet to do).
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