Free Speech is Great, But Have You Tried Hospitality?

Political and Legal Fixes are No Substitute For The Hard Work of Human Decency

“Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 10:19)

Today, I’m hearing this Biblical command as a command to love those with whom you disagree, either on values, or simply on temperament and aesthetics.

I.

I enjoyed this debate between Bret Stephens and Patrick Deneen, hosted by Bari Weiss. It’s refreshing to listen to a good faith, respectful conversation between people who strongly disagree.

The conversation was about whether liberalism is good (Stephens) or bad (Deneen). But actually, both agree that liberty used for the right things is good and liberty deployed toward bad ends is bad—they just disagree about whether there is more downside in letting people pursue their own version of happiness or in the state deciding what happiness we should be pursuing. The political question matters a lot at the societal level, but I don’t think it matters as much when we are trying to ask what we should personally value. I’m going to take the issue of free speech to see if I can split the difference between Stephens and Deneen, which basically means being a liberal in the public square but a non-liberal in the semi-public and private square.

II.

The right to offend, to disagree, and to take a contrarian stand seems to me to be one of the best features of a modern, liberal society. I think the right to voice one’s own opinion is good for two sets of reasons: intrinsic and instrumental. Intrinsically, self-expression is part of a good, meaningful life, part of the adventure of self-discovery, a source of dignity. This is so even if what we’re calling self-expression is something uttered in bad faith. Instrumentally, I don’t think we can learn as a society and error-correct unless we tolerate the intolerable; open and wide-ranging debate is one of the best cultural technologies we have at our disposal to push the frontiers of understanding.

I’m fine with limits on free speech, for instance speech that incites violence. I don’t think it’s good, to take an easy and question-begging example that ISIS uses NFTs to recruit terrorists. No right is, can be, or should be absolute—here, I agree with Jamal Greene’s thesis in How Rights Went Wrong, that the rub is in adjudicating multiple rights of multiple parties, rather than enshrining one interest group as 100% right and the other group as total losers.

BUT…the fact that we talk about free speech as a right should not obstruct a different question which is what kind of speech is ideal. Virtuous speech and legally licit speech are two totally different things.

The problem with blank slate liberalism is that it treats individuals as abstractions, on equal footing, stripped of identity, stripped of power differences, stripped of heritage, custom. We come to the world already “encumbered” as Michael Sandel puts it. We are “thrown” beings to use Heidegger’s turn of phrase. Thus, to think of speech ethics as applying in the same way to all is to miss the fundamental asymmetry of conversation.

Even forgetting the standard critique of liberalism, we know that good conversations are not robotic things in which I speak 50 percent of the time and you speak 50 percent of the time, or in which we each take turns saying our opinions. That would be very stilted. Good conversations flow. Some like to listen more. Some like to talk more. Some like to agree, some like to challenge. Some like humor, some like seriousness. Conversation is a tuning of mood as much as content. And bad conversations can be thought of as failures to reach a common frequency, a shared attunement.

III.

My proposal is that we think of discourse in terms of hospitality. The goal is to be either a good host or a good guest. Good hosts lead and decide the inputs—after all, you are staying in their home. But they can’t super-impose. If you have a dietary need it is their job to make sure that you can eat. On the other hand, a good guest is not too demanding, because the guest is a visitor. The guest can return to her own home tomorrow and paint the walls yellow, but it would be rude to paint the host’s walls yellow just because.

IV

Who owns a conversation? Arguably, a lot of anguish, especially on the internet, and in semi-public spaces like university lecture halls, or office cafeteria, is the result of a lack of clarity of who is host and who is guest. And some of it is the typical fare of cultural difference—I think a host should make me feel comfortable by asking what I need, you think a host should make me feel comfortable by letting me be and not bothering me too much. The virtue required for good speech is not something that precedes the conversation but something that needs to be negotiated. Still, we know a bad host or bad guest when we see one. Both express entitlement, both are controlling, both lack proper boundaries.

V.

The problem is this: by the time we get to court, we are talking about communicative breakdown. Rights should be a last resort. The world would be a much better place—and our public discourse would be much better—if people asked themselves how they might be good hosts and/or good guests. Of course, if you’re the host you have a right to serve food you like that the guest doesn’t—but why would you? Of course, if you are a guest and you don’t like the art hanging on the wall, you could take it down, but should you? You don’t have to clean up after dinner, but it would be a nice thing to do.

Of course, this doesn’t solve the hard questions, but it’s a start. If I could change one thing in the free speech discussion it would be the assumption that what is legally permissible is morally desirable. Liberalism is not enough on its own: a good society isn’t only one that has formal rights, but also one where people choose to forgo their rights in favor of other ideals, like hospitality and xenophilia.