The First Amendment and first principles

The issue of free speech is showing up everywhere. Vice President J. D. Vance went to the Munich Security Conference in mid-February and told the Europeans that they needed to get their act together and stop the erosion of free speech in European countries. He was direct and, some might even say, confrontational. But it is difficult to dismiss his very concerns given the growing numbers arrested for social media posts in the United Kingdom.

Then, on Feb. 26, it was revealed that Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, had emailed staff that from then on the opinion pages would “be writing in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” The New York Times reported that the Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, had resigned in protest. One comment on X was especially fascinating.

Something inherently wrong with what Bezos wrote. He claims he wants @wapo to “support personal liberties,” but he prevents his editors from exercising these very rights as freedom of speech and dissent. The paper is becoming a propaganda tool of the state.

Postmodern Neo-Marxists have declared war on free speech. “Cancel culture” is a deliberate and necessary strategy for those who believe that language creates reality and that all disagreements can be reduced to power struggles. They hold that the right cannot be allowed free speech because that would be tolerating violence.

Their whole argument is parasitic. Free speech has developed in conjunction with ideas such as freedom of religion, representative democracy, limited government, habeas corpus, and the rule of law. These principles arose organically out of the soil of Christian culture over two millennia. They only make sense within the context of Jewish monotheism, Roman law, and Greek metaphysics.

Christianity taught the masses that there is such a thing as law that is rooted in created reality itself and not invented by human beings. Greek philosophy had arrived at that knowledge but lacked the ability to persuade the masses until Christianity took control of the Roman Empire in the centuries after Christ. The Christian Empire made it possible for cultural institutions to evolve on the basis of first principles, such as the existence of God and the natural law, which were known by reason and ratified by revelation. This resulted in the development of the Christian West, the greatest and wealthiest civilization in history.

Free speech grows and flourishes in the soil of Christian culture, but it withers in the barren and rocky soil of post-Christian, postmodern, Western culture. Here is why.

Free speech is not mainly for the benefit of the individual, but for the larger society. Its value is that it allows debate to occur when a society is trying to solve a problem. Very often, the solution comes from an unexpected quarter and sounds completely crazy when first suggested. Yet, outside-the-box thinking, which is the opposite of group think, is precisely what we need to solve seemingly intractable problems.

The postmodern, neo-Marxist approach encourages group think and thus stymies real social progress. It produces stagnation and poverty. But the neo-Marxists try to use our commitment to free speech to overthrow it. Whenever they propose something that goes against natural law, such as transgenderism, and you tell them no you can’t do that, what do they do? They say you are inhibiting their free speech! We forget too easily that they don’t even believe in free speech. They just want freedom to speak openly while shutting down those who disagree.

That Western countries appear to be incapable of shutting down Hamas supporters in our streets shows how effectively our enemies use our own principles against us. The loss of a social consensus on the truth of the first principles of natural law means that society can only be held together by coercion, which is what Vance and many others see happening in Europe.

Western society is based on the premise that there is a God and that even those who do not believe in Christianity can see that there is an objective moral order in the universe. Human beings stand under authority. As the Declaration of Independence says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Every new generation needs to learn that certain basic convictions about the true nature of reality are preconditions for liberties such as free speech. Thomas Jefferson did not invent these truths. They are not just “constructs.” They are moral truths that no society dare spurn.