Michael Knowles gained some notoriety by publishing a joke for his first book “Reasons to Vote for Democrats“, which consisted of 250 blank pages. Very clever. It also ironically foretold the antagonist in his second book, “Speechless” which took aim at the illiberal left and their war on speech.
In his first earnest book, Knowles provides a fascinating history of the totalitarian Left and its campaign to first gain a voice on the world stage by advocating for free speech and then using that freedom to shut down any and all opposing speech. Along the way, Knowles exposes the illogic behind the movement in such features as what Stephen Pinker called the euphemism treadmill, in which a culture keeps changing the name to identify an unpleasant idea because people think they can make an unpleasant idea pleasant by changing the name (eg calling people with low intelligence imbeciles then mentally retarded then mentally handicapped then developmentally delayed).
This manifestation of the nominalist philosophy rejects the fact that there are universal truths and pretends that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” It is a cankerous lie that would eventually lead to the mentality that Orwell warned of in Nineteen Eighty-Four and must be rejected at every instance.
Knowles writes that the Right, for its part, has fallen prey to the “free speech trap” by combating political correctness with impotent pleas for the “right to free speech”. He correctly criticizes this approach as being futile in the face of such vile totalitarianism.
His solution isn’t to try to defend free speech. It’s instead to censor the speech that threatens speech. He quotes GK Chesterton in his critique of “the thought that stops thought” which is the only thought that shouldn’t be thought (a more apt analogy might be Dr. Seuss’s Glunk that can’t be unthunk).
Knowles’s answer to the Left’s political correctness isn’t to get rid of political correctness but to change what’s deemed politically correct.
This seems logical on its face. You can’t be tolerant of intolerance, right? You can’t allow speech that threatens speech, right?
There is certainly speech that prevents speech—that infantile screaming that drowns out another person talking—and that should certainly be prohibited as a matter of self defense. But that isn’t what Knowles wants to prohibit. Knowles envisions a new speech code aimed at the cultural Marxist philosophy that spawned critical theory and political correctness: limit that speech on the Left that is hateful to the free exchange of ideas in order to save the free exchange of ideas.
But with all due respect to Chesterton, a thought cannot stop another thought. And with all due respect to Knowles, you cannot limit the free exchange of ideas in order to save it. That is contradictory.
The problem is that Knowles knows his philosophy is correct and therefore opposition to it must be silenced lest his correct philosophy be silenced.
But that’s a false dichotomy. The goal of free speech isn’t for your idea to win. The goal of free speech is to get to the truth and you can’t attain truth without challenging ideas, even deeply held convictions. There’s no way to really know if your idea is true unless you subject it to opposition through the free exchange of ideas.
Free speech isn’t a trap. It’s the surest means to the truth, which shall prevail if only we have the courage to allow the free exchange of ideas.