The Limits of "Free Speech"

It is surprising--and disappointing--that many Catholics and "Christians" are rabid supporters of "Free Speech," which often means "Anything Goes Blabber."

They are wrong.

...But what about the free-speech advocates?  Most of them, too, are relativists.  Their “free speech” is a proceduralist ethic,  mostly agnostic about any intrinsic goods or evils about what is spoken.  For them, “good” or “evil” consist in everybody abiding by a particular set of procedures.

No real goods (or evils) underline those procedures, only a “diversity” of “values” that a “democratic society” must “respect” or at least “tolerate.”  Most of these free speech advocates are also in a perennial quest for truth but equally convinced that truth is an unreachable star.  Challenged by certitude they ask, like Pilate: “What is truth?”

My objection to free speech absolutists is their ultimate conflation of the “good” with “free speech” itself....

That is the key sentence.  "Free Speech" in itself is not always "Good," no matter the ravings you get from the Libertarians and their ethically/morally confused disciples.

...A more substantive ethic (like Catholicism, which once upon a time was called “the Judeo-Christian ethic”) has a set of principles to assess what is being said or done.

“Innocent people should not be deliberately killed” would be one principle in such a substantive ethic.  By implication, it excludes advocacy of genocide in thought, word, or deed.  Obviously, as we progress from thought to word to deed the moral gravity increases as what is proposed becomes more actual....

Summarily:

Free speech unanchored to a moral substructure leads to a dead end. . .and dead people.

He puts it another way:

...Speak freely – but be held to account for what you say.  You’re free to promote driving Israel into the sea.  But a truly intellectual and moral community would answer: “not on my campus.”

Is this wokeness by another name?  No, precisely because “woke” is an ideology whose “truth” is ever-shifting, ever-adapting, ever “evolving.”  The Judeo-Christian ethic stands on moral absolutes (e.g., advocating killing innocent people is intrinsically evil) that fix boundaries.  I won’t let a relativistic ideology brand that ethic just another “viewpoint” because, implicit in that leveling is the relativist’s flight from truth qua truth, “transitioning” it into just another “opinion.”...

That is what the 'dictatorship of relativism' actually means.  There IS no 'right,' there IS no 'wrong.'  There is "my" truth.  There is "your" truth.

There, friends, lies Chaos.