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Teresa Bejan is a professor of political theory at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Oriel College. She is the author of Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration and the forthcoming First Among Equals, which explores ideas of equality before modern egalitarianism.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Teresa Bejan discuss how liberals should think about the role of virtue in society; why a robust culture of free speech requires more than just legal protections; and why "mere" civility is the key to unlocking a broader conception of tolerance.
The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: One of my longstanding pet-peeves is the word problematic. I know you have some thoughts about it.
Teresa Bejan: I do have some thoughts. I ended up writing a piece for The Atlantic a few years ago about the problem with the word problematic, but was just noticing the proliferation of this word not only online but in academic discourse. And actually it was probably a good example of the case where something jumped out of academia and went sort of unfortunately mainstream. I was interested in what the word problematic means, and it means, roughly, there might be some kind of problem here.
Mounk: It sort of means “boo,” right?
Bejan: Well, yeah, and I argue that the word problematic functions as a kind of evaluative descriptive term, a way of indicating that something is objectionable without specifying why, as a kind of strategy. I like to think of it as an “insinuendo.”
Mounk: That's a lovely term because it sort of says, this is something you should dislike while relieving me of the effort of explaining why.
Bejan: Or warning you if you don't immediately intuit what the problem is that you better not ask, because in asking you would reveal yourself not to be in the know.
I think one of the reasons I was motivated to actually write the piece instead of just sort of griping about it privately with my friends was just to say: I think when academics, especially, rely on these kinds of insinuendos, we're really falling short of our duties as teachers to be able to explain and articulate that there is a problem, and what the problem is, and to be able to persuade those who don't already know or maybe aren't convinced that they should take that problem seriously.
Mounk: I was thinking back to your definition of the word problematic recently because I was asked about the term misinformation, and it suddenly struck me that that might also fall under the category of insinuendo, that the word misinformation is imprecise in a very similar way—you don't have to actually justify what's wrong about it. You don't have to be specific (“this is wrong for these specific reasons, this is a lie for these specific reasons”) and instead you use misinformation as a residual category of “We don't like this.”
To go in a completely different direction, you've been thinking a lot about the concept of free speech as well. You're a defender of free speech, and you go back to the history of ideas and to intellectual history to help us sort of rethink what the nature and the purpose of a concept really is.
What's wrong with the way that we tend to think about free speech today? And why is it that even some of the people who might defend the concept of free speech think about it a little bit in the wrong way?
Bejan: Free speech is a great example of a kind of important political value or a set of problems where the concepts we use sometimes get in the way. Very often we use free speech as a kind of shorthand for a cluster of values or a set of principles or things that we might care about. So we might think about other associated freedoms like freedom of the press, freedom of protest, academic freedom, philosophical inquiry, these kinds of things. I do, as you say, go to history to shed some light on the difference between what we might think of, on the one hand, as “having a say,” which we might think of as an important democratic value and a democratic form of free speech, but thinking of that as being different from free speech in the sense of speaking your mind. These are going to be values that are very often complementary, but they're also maybe going to be in tension at some point.
Mounk: At a certain superficial level, they sound quite similar, right? So how is it that speaking your mind or having your say might come to be in tension? Where do those two concepts end up pointing us in different directions? And which do you think is more important?
Bejan: I think a really good example is actually just if we look to the 19th century and some of these great works of political philosophy that are interested in freedom of speech. So, Tocqueville in Democracy in America, he observes that there's no country in the world where speech is more free politically than in the United States and, nevertheless, no country where there's less independence of mind or true freedom of discussion. Tocqueville draws a contrast there, and It's actually one I kind of wrestle with in the essay that I just wrote for Persuasion. We can have a situation where speech is formally free, but nevertheless the drive to social conformity is such that no one is saying what they actually think. And indeed, it's Tocqueville’s formulation of that problem that actually sets John Stuart Mill up in On Liberty to then observe that actually the political liberation of speech is over, right? But what matters now, says Mill, is this problem of what we might think of as social tyranny—the fact that one might nevertheless be subjected to social consequences for speech that are actually in many cases more effective inhibitors of speaking freely or speaking your mind than formal legal restrictions on speech.
And that kind of 19th century problem is one that's cropping up again in the context of social media and the rise of the Internet. So we have more freedom to speak and a wider range of people can actually put their thoughts out there online. But nevertheless, there's a kind of rise also, in a sense, of the importance of self-censorship. and being very careful about what you say and to whom you say it.
Mounk: So today, it's very easy for us to have our say. We all can be on social media and mouth off however much we want, in theory. But many of us are constrained by situations; students in college who have to live with their classmates and might be very worried about how they're going to be treated if they say the wrong things; you might have an employer who would fire you, etc.
Though we can have our say in principle, we don't feel empowered to speak our mind. Does that go to the heart of your concern?
Bejan: Absolutely. And recognizing that as a genuine tension, I think should lead us then to be a bit more precise and a bit more pluralistic with respect to what it is we're trying to protect when we're talking about free speech, and why free speech matters. So we might say that having your say is deeply connected with democratic justifications for speech, with the idea that all citizens should have a formal say in the decisions that are being taken collectively within the political community. And I trace this idea of free speech all the way back to democratic Athens and the golden age and this Greek idea of isegoria, which is translated regularly into modern English as freedom of speech, but actually you might say it's a bit more like equal speech or equal public address. Specifically, it’s the right of every Athenian man in good standing to formally address the democratic assembly. And this was really seen as being definitive of Athenian democracy for contemporaries, because this was the thing that the Athenians were doing that no other society at the time was doing. They were allowing poor men to actually stand up and to take the speaker's platform in the same way that they would allow aristocrats or trained rhetoricians.
The second sense of speaking one's mind—again, if we look to the Greek, there's this concept of parrhesia, which is literally in Greek something like speaking freely or frankly, but in Greek, it's sort of saying anything, “all saying.” Speaking truth to power very often is the way that we think about it today. That was seen as being something that could and should happen when citizens exercise their rights to isegoria in the assembly, but it wasn't limited to the assembly.
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Mounk: When we think about how we create a culture where people actually feel empowered to speak, it becomes difficult, and in part because some of the behaviors that restrain our ability to speak freely are themselves an exercise of some form of free speech. One of the best attempts, I think, to define cancel culture, for example, by Jonathan Rauch, goes through various behaviors that he thinks are a hallmark of a cancel culture rather than a critical culture. It's calls to boycott people, it's secondary boycotts: if you associate with this person, I don’t want to associate with you and all of those kinds of things. But Jonathan is very clear about the fact that, of course, people are legally free to engage in these behaviors in a liberal democracy because they are themselves expressions of free speech. But we should recognize that when you're engaging in these behaviors, you really are making it much harder for people to feel that they can truly speak their minds. And so therefore we should have forms of self-restraint or perhaps we should have social norms that discourage people from engaging in these hallmarks of cancel culture. But that's a very hard thing to sustain.
So what do you think our society is doing wrong in terms of making it harder to empower people to speak their minds fully in that way?
Bejan: I very much like the distinction between cancel and critical culture. Firstly, I think that example reveals the limits of appealing to free speech. As you say, freedom of speech sort of implies its own limit in a way. If I'm exercising my free speech in a way that interferes with your right to speak freely, then that would seem to be an abuse of my right. But if we are committed to a maximally free kind of legal and political culture around speech, it seems like there's very little we can do about that.
For my own part, I'm an American, and I do affiliate with that kind of understanding of free speech, while also acknowledging the ways in which it is truly exceptional. We don't tend to think about free speech in the same way in the UK. But part of the problem with just kind of appealing to the First Amendment in the way that a lot of American civil libertarians do is that the First Amendment simply doesn't apply—so many of the institutions and contexts in which these issues of cancel culture crop up are precisely what we would think of as voluntary associations: universities, churches, et cetera. And I think maybe some of my fellow free speech fundamentalists might get frustrated with me, but I think that actually one of the crucial things to create the right sort of culture around free speech in society more broadly is getting the way that we approach and regulate speech in these other contexts right.
I don't think it's appropriate to just have a kind of First Amendment-style approach to free speech in all these different contexts. I think that a university, and indeed different kinds of universities, are educational communities and communities of inquiry that might have a very clear and important interest in regulating the speech of their members. But the point is to regulate speech in such a way that it creates the kind of culture that supports the maximally tolerant approach that we want to have in society at large.
Private universities should err on the side of tolerance as opposed to not. But I think here I'm just pointing to the importance of the freedom of association. So I think that private associations should be able to regulate their members' speech in ways that go beyond the First Amendment standard. Universities, I think, are kind of special in a sense because of what they're for. My own view is of the university as a kind of educational community and that it's about teaching and learning and knowledge production. In that sense, you're absolutely right, we want to also foster a culture of tolerance with respect to unpopular or offensive views. But I think maybe what I would point to is my, to put it crudely, beef with applying the First Amendment standard to universities is that the First Amendment actually has, I think, an all-too-capacious understanding of what counts as speech. And I think universities have an interest in saying, no, we're talking about speech. We're talking about the spoken and the written word. And part of what we're trying to encourage students to do is to use their words in this discursive way. And a place where this comes up, I think very forcefully, is in the issue of campus protest and the ways in which words are used in that context and whether or not what's happening is creating an opportunity for conversation as opposed to creating an opportunity to shut down campus or to shut certain people out.
Mounk: I ordinarily would make the argument that you should have unlimited free speech and that, for example, we need to tolerate people saying very offensive things on campus. But at the same time, we should be able to have very strict limitations on the time, place, and manner of such speech, right? Nothing in the history of free speech, as I understand it, entitles a student to go disrupt the lecture of somebody else, nothing entitles them to intimidate somebody else.
That inspires a question in me which I wasn't going to ask, but that our conversation kind of leads me to, which is what the role of virtue is in a liberal society more broadly? How is it that we should think about cultivating a sense of how to act well, how to act virtuously, if you like, in a liberal society, that gives individuals the freedom of choice about how to live, and that therefore leads to something that is in itself, in a sense, a liberal virtue, which is the slight reluctance to say, “Well, I live my way and you live your way. I'm not going to tell you how to live.”
But that also seems to be limiting because then we're not actually engaged in serious reflection about what a good moral life is. So what does liberal virtue look like?
Bejan: I'm glad you've asked this question, because I think it really goes to the heart of the matter. So you're right, I think that part of the liberal allergy to talking about virtue, if you will, is precisely the sense that virtue is part of this older sort of pre-modern ethic, very often associated with Aristotle. Virtues are defined relative to what it is to be a good human being, and that’s a kind of comprehensive and holistic way of thinking about what the good life is. As such, it's necessarily quite prescriptive and perhaps a little bit condemnatory with respect to lives that are considered less good.
If we're talking in the case of Aristotle, a virtue of a woman will be silence, right? Because to be a woman is to be a defective man, and in order to make up for that defect, women should cultivate the virtue of silence—I articulate that view not to endorse it, but to illustrate the point and the problem. And so we might think of part of what happens in early modernity, which is very much the period that I study in these debates about religious toleration, and particularly the kind of contests between church and state, is that we achieve a kind of separation that says we can distinguish between what it means to be a good citizen and what it means to be a good Christian. And that it's actually really important that we distinguish between these. And indeed, for many Protestants, and I think that this is the tradition that maybe comes to define what we think of as liberalism, we say, “Well, actually, we just don't care if you are a good human being or a good Christian, all that matters is that you kind of abide by the rules of the society in which you live.” I guess what I would say as a liberal is to say, actually, no, rejecting virtue entirely, or virtue talk entirely, is wrong, because what liberalism relies on is this ability precisely to separate spheres and to think of not only our society but also our very lives as being defined by our occupying different roles in different contexts.
I think using more ancient language can help here in thinking of not just roles, but offices. So within the family, I hold the office of daughter, with respect to my parents. I hold the office of wife with respect to my husband. In my professional life, I hold the office of professor, which is one which comes with all of this like pomp and circumstance and fun titles and these kinds of things. But all of those different offices are defined by the particular duties that constitute the office. And so I think virtue becomes crucially relevant in terms of how I exercise or fulfill those duties well. What are the qualities that constitute the kind of good exercise of this office? So I don't think that way of thinking about virtue is at odds with liberalism. It’s actually pretty much essential. But the problem with it is that it relies on our willingness to divide ourselves and separate ourselves. Maybe, to put it provocatively, it requires the rejection of authenticity, and thinking of virtue as role-specific in a way that I think a lot of people may be allergic to.
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Mounk: That's really interesting, but there's this weird tension where liberal theory doesn't preclude talking about virtue or having a robust public sphere where we actually reflect about the moral life. But it complicates it. And I think what you were saying clarified this in my mind in two slightly distinct ways. The first is that we always have to keep the distinction in mind that I can give you advice about how you should live but I shouldn't seek to impose the good life on you via legal or coercive terms. The foundation of our society for good reason is that we don't allow that.
And then the second is a little bit harder to put my finger on, but it is the sense that there's not just the legal setup that we want to protect—that we have freedom of worship and freedom of assembly and freedom of speech and all these things—but that there is a kind of broader liberal virtue of tolerance that we need to sustain in order to live in this deeply diverse society, and that therefore we really should encourage people to have an attitude of, “Well, you do whatever you want and I do whatever I want.” And if, with or without serious moral reflection, you decide to live one particular way, I should happily let you pass. But both of those things are logically consistent with saying that I'm going to write a book and make speeches in which I hold forth about what a more worthwhile way to live is and what a less worthwhile way to live is. We should be free to say those things—and we are, if you understand the precise implications of liberal political thought in the right way. But it's so complicated to keep those fears apart and to keep it unmuddled in our mind that you always end up feeling a little bit icky when you do that. There always is something about the person who stands up in the liberal public sphere and says “This is how people should live” that is so easily ridiculed that the people who end up doing that are often fanatics or driven by the wrong kind of motives, and the people who might have value to offer tend to desist.
Bejan: The way you've just formulated those two thoughts maps on, I think, to the kind of transformation of the meaning of tolerance in liberal societies, and the shift from thinking of tolerance as a virtue of restraint, where we resist interfering with the thing of which we disapprove, to a kind of a virtue of non-judgment, of ceasing to disapprove at all (or if we disapprove, ceasing to express that disapproval). And I think that modern liberals might have erred in going too far into the second form of tolerance. That loses the pretty fundamental connection between, let's say, tolerance in that original sense and speaking freely, right? Which is that, yes, I tolerate, but I also express the view that this is or is not worthy. And you're absolutely right that that can come off as judgmental and worse. I'm not saying that we all need to get our soap boxes out of the garage. But I am saying that we need to, I think, be honest about the true nature of tolerance as a virtue. And I think this brings us around, in a way, to the question of civility as a virtue and kind of the role that it plays in liberal societies in particular.
Mounk: I was just about to ask you about civility, actually, because there's been a lot of contestation over the last 10 years about the idea of civility, which for a long time has been this kind of somewhat uncontroversial, bland political value, but that was sort of universally accepted as a good thing. And then there was a moment in which many activists and some writers were saying, actually, civility is constraining us from being able to speak the truth. And it is one of those kinds of bourgeois liberal values that really explains why there's terrible injustice in the world.
Where do you fall on that? How do you think about the value of civility in our society?
Bejan: I believe that civility is a virtue, Yascha. But it's complicated. Civility is the topic of my first book and I got into the topic precisely because I noticed the kind of debates around it, the sense that civility is on the one hand a virtue that we are in danger of losing in American political discourse. And then there’s a kind of worry on the other hand that, actually, civility is not a virtue but a vice; it's a way of suppressing and excluding and marginalizing already marginal voices.
I would define civility as a sort of standard of conversational conduct that is relevant to disagreement in particular. And it's the kind of virtue whereby we conduct our disagreements in such a way that they do not become violent, right? A civil disagreement is one that remains peaceful. And that's it. So I would define civility, I think, rather more minimally than a lot of other theorists do. I think there's a tendency to engage in a kind of civility inflation, where we want to say that civility is good manners, politeness, respect for persons, etc. And I'm pretty emphatic that, no, civility in the way that I regard as virtuous is what we would think of as “mere” civility. It's a kind of low bar met grudgingly, but it's nevertheless absolutely essential if disagreements are going to be able to continue.
It is a thin conception. And one of the virtues of thin conceptions is that they end up ruling out less, if you will, with respect to the behavior we regard as uncivil. But mere civility is nonetheless quite demanding, and, in particular, it's demanding of us with respect to other people's incivility. Here I think that there's actually a close connection between mere civility as a virtue and tolerance and this kind of traditional sense of putting up with something of which we disapprove. Civility actually demands our willingness to tolerate the incivility of others. And I think that is the element of it that is often most foreign, because very often I find that people talk about civility most confidently when it comes to kind of pointing out the incivility of others and why that ought to be intolerable. But by my definition, that is itself a highly uncivil thing to do.
Mounk: That connects in a way that I hadn't realized until a moment ago to an essay I wrote a few months ago about the kind of, I think, quite misguided invocations of Karl Popper and the paradox of tolerance. Popper is somebody who cared very deeply about the open society, as his most famous book is called, and about free inquiry and who defended a pretty far-reaching conception of free speech in most contexts. And the idea that when somebody is being uncivil, when they say something offensive, for example, then we really have a right to shut them out of our political discourse is really based on one footnote, literally, in that work, that is quite ambiguous in how it's written. And the idea is that we are entitled to shut people down whose speech we don't like. But the idea that liberal societies can't sustain some people who preach illiberal and tolerant views is, I think, normatively confused and empirically simply wrong.
Bejan: I'm very glad to hear that you're tackling that and sort of defending Popper against this kind of memification to which he's been subject lately. I've written a bit about this and my frustration with this line because, firstly, if you kind of take the idea that you can't tolerate intolerance seriously, it's just a recipe for a circular firing squad—it becomes an excuse for your own intolerance. It's a bit self-defeating. And if you look historically, a tolerant society cannot pick and choose its materials and remain tolerant for long. It's precisely the putting up with the thing we regard as objectionable, including forms of religious and social intolerance that we regard as objectionable. And you're right that the distinction between speech and act is important there—putting up with sort of objectionable speech as opposed to objectionable actions.
I think one of the things that motivated me in writing my book about civility was trying to make sense of the way in which religious tolerance actually developed in what became the United States—and particularly the most vocal and I would say heroic kind of defenders of toleration in a really kind of maximally inclusive way. These are people that modern liberals would maybe snigger at behind their hands as fundamentalist Christians, evangelical Christians—people like Roger Williams. Williams was the founder of Rhode Island. Basically, he was too Puritan for his fellow Puritans, so he ends up getting exiled from Massachusetts Bay. But it's from this perspective of what today we would think of as extreme religious intolerance that Williams ends up endorsing precisely the institutional arrangements that we regard as definitive of the liberal management of religious diversity, namely the disestablishment of religion and the total separation of civil rights from spiritual condition or church membership.
To bring it back to where our conversation started, what's distinctive about the kind of evangelical understanding of toleration in someone like Williams that really gets a firmer foothold in the kind of British colonies of North America than it does anywhere else in the world is also the fact that these evangelicals see a very close connection between liberty of conscience, on the one hand, and freedom of speech on the other, precisely because they see evangelism as a signal religious freedom. So again, that American exceptionalism with respect to free speech actually comes out of this Protestant tradition in ways that I think modern liberals are ignorant of. It leads a lot of people who identify as liberals culturally to, I think, be too intolerant of religious traditions and cultures that are actually quite important in accounting for their own values.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Teresa discuss why it is worth studying intellectual history and the history of political thought, in particular. This discussion is reserved for paying members...
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