E-Pluribus | June 15, 2022
Free speech without due process isn't free, a different kind of "purity" culture, and are algorithms illiberal?
A round-up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Peter Berkowitz: Cornell, Due Process, and Liberal Education
At Minding the Campus (originally in Real Clear Politics), Peter Berkowitz uses the occasion of an appeals court decision in the due process case of Vengalattore v. Cornell University to lay out how due process and free speech are inextricably linked.
The circumscribing of due process and free speech not only undercut justice on campus, but also weakened liberal education. Free speech creates the conditions under which students and faculty can transmit knowledge, exchange ideas, pose tough questions, float probing conjectures and unorthodox hypotheses, examine vexing issues from a variety of angles, and revise and refine positions in light of changing circumstances and fresh evidence. Due process establishes impartial procedures for determining whether members of the community have acted within their rights and complied with their obligations.
The two principles work together. Promises of free speech, for example, are worthless if universities can arbitrarily shut down inquiry, disinvite controversial speakers, and punish unfashionable views. If, in addition, some members of the campus community are presumed guilty until proven innocent, then students will internalize the lesson that accusations and not evidence and reasoned argument decide serious matters. That lesson, in turn, subverts the case for free speech.
Free speech and due process stem from the same beliefs about the dignity and the fallibility of human beings. Both involve essential rights that apply equally to all without regard to power, status, or identity. And both presuppose that all of us – without regard to power, status, or identity – are fallible human beings, prone to skewed interpretations, biased judgments, and self-serving assessments. Consequently, we are all bound to benefit from the illumination that comes from the vigorous give and take that free speech makes possible, and all need the protections against abuse of power provided by rigorous guarantees of due process.
Read it all here.
Virginia Postrel: Purity, Sorcery, and Cancel Culture
At her Substack Virginia’s Newsletter, writer Virginia Postrel explores the concept of purity as it applies in today’s discourse. While “purity” is sometimes used pejoratively against conservatives, Postrel shows how purity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and is just as likely to factor into the thinking of progressives as conservatives.
Purity is about identifying and eliminating contaminants—anomalies that are sources of danger. The danger may be physical, spiritual, cultural, or moral. To purify is to purge whatever is out of place. It establishes what belongs by banishing what does not. “The quest for purity is pursued by rejection,” writes anthropologist Mary Douglas in her landmark 1966 book Purity and Danger.
Every culture and every person beyond infancy maintains standards separating clean from unclean, safe from hazardous, permitted from forbidden. We police purity when we do laundry, copyedit manuscripts, or recite religious creeds. Vegans observe one system of dietary purity, paleo adherents another. Concepts of purity are among the essential classifications we use to navigate the world.
“Ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience,” writes Douglas. Shared purity standards define communities. The rituals, customs, and mores that maintain purity embody communal values and beliefs.
The critical question, then, is not whether we care about purity but what we count as contamination. What characterizes an impurity? How small a trace constitutes pollution? Who decides? In many forms, these are the questions roiling our culture.
While many discussions of purity focus on the first question, the second and third are just as important—and not just for environmental regulators measuring effluents in parts per million. The law of diffusion dictates that every vegan dinner contains microscopic traces of dead animals, yet the alternative to ingesting them is starvation. Absolute purity is intolerable. At some level, the pollutant must cease to count. But how do we determine what that level is?
Read the whole thing.
Berny Belvedere: Are Algorithms Incompatible With Free Speech?
At Arc Digital, Berny Belvedere takes issue with a recent assertion by Matt Yglesias that Twitter’s “algorithmic amplification and suppression of certain tweets” is incompatible on some level with “free speech.” Belvedere writes that while a commitment to free speech rejects silencing anyone for their views, it does not mean guaranteeing an equal audience for those views.
[I]n the case of a platform that filters for ideology, we would be correct to say that the platform is favoring some speech more than other speech (as when we say that a particular site favors left-leaning commentary to right-leaning commentary). But the point is we would be incorrect to suggest the platform is against free speech.
Yglesias’s error, I think, stems from his contention that “free speech is fundamentally about neutrality with regard to content.” This is true in some contexts but not in others—for example, the government’s observance of free speech has to take this understanding of free speech, but a private academic institution does not. Consider the example of allowing people equal access to certain goods. If a local government allows a member of political group x to use a megaphone at a public park, it must also allow a member of political group y to do the same thing. If a university is going to honor free speech, it must do the same, with one important difference: while the university must allow groups with differing views equal access to its goods (all the student groups must be equally eligible to book its auditorium, for example), it doesn’t have to grant each group equal visibility in its promotional materials (pamphlets, advertisements, etc.). Twitter is more like the private university, and its algorithm is like the uni’s promotional channels.
Certainly, for a platform to exhibit a genuine commitment to free speech, its rules must be applied fairly. But that’s a separate matter. That has to do with the company refraining from selective application of its rules (“If you’re a liberal, you can get away with it,” etc.). Yglesias’s point, rather, is that the presence of an algorithm, which favors some speech and disfavors other speech, is necessarily at odds with the very idea of free speech. That doesn’t follow for the simple reason that free speech, for a private social media platform, is about allowing an instance of speech to exist more than it is about granting that instance of speech the same algorithmic propulsion as any other instance of speech. The fact that the algorithm picks out my tweets over yours doesn’t mean you are dispossessed of free speech; it means my tweets are better, or better received, or incorporate some favored element (like a picture or something else the algorithm might select for).
Read it all.
Around Twitter
Author Helen Joyce comments on a recent New York Times article on gender therapy:





Via the Young America's Foundation, George Washington University moves one step closer to possibly just cancelling itself:



And finally, Glenn Greenwald with an observation about stupidity - maybe there’s more out there than most people are willing to say?