Liberals, in general, are motivated fundamentally by empathy. While conservatives take their moral norms from a variety of places, such as traditional values and religion, “progressive morality is largely one-dimensional, driven primarily by the care ethic,” Lukianoff says. And because liberals just want people be happy and comfortable, he argues, they attack speech they deem offensive or threatening to others.

Greg Lukianoff, Freedom from Speech

Two and a half millennia ago, Aristotle made one of the most fundamental statements ever about human society: “Man is by nature a political animal.”

Aristotle meant more than that people group together for their survival and reproduction. People actually group together to strive for higher goods beyond mere preservation. This is politics—a community’s pursuit of a good life together.

And it is our speech that makes us political, Aristotle teaches. Through speech we communicate our needs, but we also argue about the deeper things—what is right and wrong, “the just and the unjust,” as Aristotle puts it. Politics is about governing society justly, and it is our speech, our rational discourse, that makes politics possible.

A brief new book by Greg Lukianoff, Freedom from Speech, sheds valuable light on what Aristotle sees as the foundation of our political nature. Lukianoff examines the state of free speech in our culture. He examines not the First Amendment, although as the head of the free-speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, he is certainly qualified to do so. Rather, Lukianoff examines “Free speech as a cultural value.”

And free speech is in decline. Freedom from Speech concisely lays out the ways that speech is being limited in America. Lukianoff begins by listing a number of high profile cases where figures had their reputations tarnished and even their livelihoods threatened because of things they said, sometimes in private. He then goes on to discuss a couple of noteworthy trends in academia where speech is being curtailed.

His book focuses on academia because universities are one of the most obvious places where speech is being limited. Both “trigger warnings” and commencement-speaker “dis-invitations” have made headlines in recent months. Lukianoff excoriates both of these trends with precision. They are attempts to limit what students hear, and thus what people say. By discussing the academy at some length, Lukianoff builds on his previous book from 2012, Unlearning Liberty, which examined the decline of free speech in universities.

But Lukianoff also notes that the university cannot be the sole source of curbs on free speech. “I continue to believe that the increased national focus on punishing offensive speech stems, in large part, from the ‘bleeding out’ of the bad intellectual habits of American higher education,” Lukianoff writes. “However, I do not think—nor have I ever thought—that blame for the erosion of support for the cultural value of freedom of speech can be laid entirely on the ivory tower.” The erosion of free speech in other Western countries, such as Britain, or countries with democratic values, such as India, demonstrates that the problem is deeper and more pervasive than the silly movements in universities.

Lukianoff sees a deeper and more disturbing problem in Western society. The modern age has led to the creation of tremendous wealth, and with it, tremendous comfort. But such comfort gives rise to complacency: “A society in which people can avoid physical pain comparatively easily will produce people who are less prepared to deal with it.”

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