Censorship is the virus, free speech is the vaccine
Free speech, grounded in the principle of dispersed knowledge and “epistemic modesty” championed by Hayek, is far less dangerous than censorship, which empowers a self-appointed elite to enforce their biases on others, says Paul Marshall
It is always dangerous to make binary distinctions, as they are over simplistic – but in the debate over free speech and censorship it can be a helpful starting place. For in this debate there are really two alternative poles. At one end of the spectrum are those who prefer to embrace the noise of the public square and trust the people to ensure that truth will emerge from the cauldron. This is the preferred model of Elon Musk and of the free speech absolutists. At the other extreme is rule by censorship, with truth determined and safeguarded by a narrow and self-appointed group of “experts”.
At the free speech end of the spectrum you run the risk of giving voice to insalubrious characters and bad ideas. At the censorship end of the spectrum you also run the risk of bad ideas but you couple that with the clear danger of giving excessive power to a small and unaccountable cadre of bureaucrats. Both models produce bad ideas, but the censorship model is much more dangerous as it can lead to bad ideas, like excessive lockdowns and net zero, gaining much more extensive and dangerous sway.
Beware the fatal conceit
Belief in a self-appointed cadre who should make decisions on our behalf, is nothing new and has deep philosophical roots which arguably go all the way back to Plato, who had reservations about Athenian democracy. He felt that the majority were not educated or intelligent enough to rule themselves well and that politics required “experts” as well as just rulers who should be carefully selected and trained. One person who understood the dangers of this approach was Friedrich Hayek. In his final book The Fatal Conceit, written in 1988, he draws a distinction between socialism and free markets. “Socialism”, he said “assumes that all the available knowledge can be used by a single central authority. It overlooks that modern society is based on the utilisation of widely dispersed knowledge of millions of men”.
Hayek’s argument was deployed primarily in the realm of economics and he harkened back to Adam Smith’s notion of the invisible hand which, in the economic sphere, relies on a model of dispersed knowledge rather than centralised knowledge to deliver the best outcomes. This notion of dispersed knowledge transfers very well to the sphere of free speech, and that is because the roots of the idea lie even deeper – in the domain of epistemology and how we know things.
One of the most important foundational ideas of Friedrich Hayek was that of “epistemic modesty”. He recognised that no individual or group, however brilliant, can be all knowing. A particular phrase that Hayek used to describe the fatal conceit was the “presumption of reason”. Hayek was not against what he termed “reason properly used”, but rather against its naïve and uncritical use, against the reliance on axiomatic thinking, or biased assumptions, and against the making of excessive claims on shaky foundations.
He would not, I think, have been a fan of the OBR. He was particularly opposed to what he called “scientism”, which he described as a “false theory of science and rationality in which reason is abused”, and which he traced back to Descartes. One of his most telling remarks was that “intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence”.
We live in an age when roughly 50 per cent of the western population goes to university and the other 50 per cent does not. Those who go to university overvalue the fact that they are good at passing exams and they equate it, rightly or wrongly, with intelligence. They also equate it, entirely wrongly, with superior levels of moral intelligence or wisdom. I am afraid the exam passing classes are just as subject to motivated reasoning as everyone else. Perhaps even more so. Indeed, it is notable that all through our history it is more often than not, and especially in the 1930s, the working men and women who have shown the real wisdom when our governing classes have lost the plot.
The wisdom of unlettered men
Burke referred to this as the “wisdom of Unlettered Men”. Over the last 30 years, the exam-passing classes, who tend to occupy most of the senior positions in the government and the wider bureaucracy, have delivered a long catalogue of policy failures from China’s accession to the WTO to Covid lockdowns and from unrestricted open borders to net zero. They have embraced and implemented policies which may have suited their own interests but which were often against the interests of what that great exam-passer, Hilary Clinton, called the “deplorables”. And these bad policies have been enforced by a vigorous application of “scientism” and censorship, using the authority of so-called “experts” to close down discussion.
This is a comparatively recent phenomenon. According to google trends, worldwide searches for the term “disinformation” quadrupled between June and December 2016 and then increased by more than 30 times by 2022. This new model of information control has been dubbed “the cathedral” – rule by an ideologically aligned network of politicians, journalists, academics, NGOs, permanent bureaucracy and internet trolls, all seeking to ensure that people fall into line behind a prescribed narrative. In the cathedral, the social media platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter (pre-Musk) are the spires. The trolling organisations like Stop Funding People Hate are the gargoyles – ugly demons doing the dirty work. This approach to media governance is not about finding or protecting the truth. It is all about narrative control. And it is highly self-serving.
Isn’t it curious how the people who are the biggest advocates of censorship and controlled narrative always include themselves amongst the people who should be exercising the control? Ursula van Der Leyen recently likened misinformation to a “virus”.
In fact, censorship is the virus and free speech is the vaccine. Hayek knew what he was doing when he employed the term “conceit”. As we know it has a double meaning. It is arrogance that is the fatal flaw of the censorship class – the arrogance to believe that their world view is superior to that of others. They are no more immune to motivated reasoning than anyone else. Censorship is simply the means to enforce their biases.
This is an edited excerpt from Sir Paul Marshall’s speech delivered to the Pharos Foundation in Oxford this week. Sir Paul is an investor, philanthropist, proprietor of UnHerd and The Spectator and co-owner of GB News.