“Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It’s 1183 and we’re barbarians!” - Eleanor of Aquitaine, “The Lion in Winter”
Today, Eleanor might say, (it’s best if you imagine it in Katherine Hepburn’s voice), “Of course he has a Facebook page, he always has a YouTube channel, we all have smartphones. It’s 2017 and we’re barbarians.”
This was supposed to be the Golden Age of Free Speech. World-wide communications at prices ranging from affordable to free. Download the sum total of human knowledge. Upload any damn thing you want. All with a machine you carry in your pocket.
Speak truth to power. Get the truth about power. Communicate with a hundred people you know and a million you’ve never heard of. Or they you. In most places, no government, church or even parents to get in your way.
People can crab about the amount of time other people spend staring at these devices, to the exclusion of the human beings who are the closest to you, both in terms of space and of family ties. But it’s all based on the human desire to communicate and learn and, on balance, it is a clear advancement in human social evolution.
Of course, there are still a few bugs in the system.
The internet and the slightly less democratic medium of cable TV are also used to spread lies, libels and hate. They make media stars out of people who otherwise would be talking to themselves in the corner of a crummy bar in Cairo, Ill., poisoning nobody but themselves, safely ignored by the rest of the world.
But, thanks to mutations such as Fox News, Breitbart, Info Wars and the like, people who otherwise would only be an embarrassment to their ex-wives find themselves as temporary celebrities who’s main accomplishment is to make the lives of university presidents miserable.
That includes the doofus who is scheduled to speak at the University of Utah later this month. This particular alt-right bomb-thrower has been invited to lather up the U.’s chapter of the Young America’s Foundation by, the organizers say, taking on, “leftist myths of white privilege, trigger warnings, microaggressions and diversity.”
That rant that would be much easier to ignore had not some other University-recognized groups assembled at the office of U. President David Pershing the other day to, quite inadvertently, give credence to the rightest myth that everyone who isn’t a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant is, at the same time, weak and violent, passive and destructive. Schrodinger’s liberal.
The demands that the U. put a halt to the speech are, of course, absurd. Yes, this may well be a vile person who has been invited by other vile people to say vile things, just to prove they can. Nobody would be doing that, and nobody else would care, were it not for the 21st century mass/micro media that gives such ideas a goofy sort of respectability by giving them reach they don’t deserve and, in an old-fashioned gate-keeper media atmosphere, wouldn’t have.
These are the kinds of hairballs an open society has to put up with in order to remain open. The answer is not to roll in the mud with such people, which gets you dirty and makes the pig happy. It is to register an objection, maybe organize a counter-demonstration or meeting, and have some faith in that the whole Madisonian idea that everyone gets to talk and, after a while, only the smart people get listened to.
In the wider world of cyberspace and traditional media, we are still looking back at an election where the outcome may have been influenced, if not determined, by leaks, lies and $100,000 worth of Facebook ads targeted at people who, based on their search history, would be interested in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.
But this whole freedom of speech thingy just won’t work if the mass of us aren’t smart enough to figure it out, filter out the dreck, double-check assertions, pay attention to professional media fact-checkers and, with the occasional wrong turn, make the right decision.
The folks who embedded this idea in our national DNA were not unfamiliar with the Big Lie. The media of the 18th and 19th centuries was unabashedly partisan. To Madison, Jefferson and Washington, the idea of an unbiased media was as foreign as curved space. They had never seen, heard nor smelled such a beast.
The problem is not that we have Russian propaganda, Breitbart racism and Fox News tomfoolery in our media. The problem is that some of us believe it.
George Pyle, the Tribune’s editorial page editor, is management and labor, hip and square, particle and wave. gpyle@sltrib.com