When Norms Fail, Rights Follow

A journey upstream from the First Amendment

We were shocked when we learned, but in a sense it was inevitable. His controversial views had him living under a death threat for years.  Finally, someone acted. An armed attacker rushed the stage where the controversial speaker was scheduled to give remarks. The knife-wielding assailant was stopped before he could commit murder. This time.

You can see where I might be going with this. If we in the United States continue to demonize speech, to equate it with violence, it’s just a matter of time before some day we are no different from the mullahs in Iran, issuing fatwas against apostates.  

Except I wasn’t talking about Salman Rushdie. I was referring to Dave Chappelle. That “someday” is now.

The First Amendment has been on my mind recently. I was reminded of it on July 24th, when a group of medical students at the University of Michigan walked out during the keynote address of their “White Coat Ceremony.” The tradition, in which students are given a version of the jacket they will one day use as a doctor, is an important milestone. It marks the progression from hard-grinding college pre-med to a junior membership in the profession of physician. It’s a celebration, and speeches are a big part of it. 

The students were staging a protest over the person delivering the keynote address, Associate Professor Dr. Kristen Collier. Dr. Collier had previously expressed views on abortion that the students found unacceptable. They presented the university with a petition asking to have her removed as speaker, even though her topic, humanism in medicine, did not include reference to abortion.  

I saw the students hailed for staging a peaceful protest. They were celebrated for exercising one of their own fundamental freedom of expression. I don’t disagree that they were within their rights, but I believe they made the wrong decision. It points to a broader problem with our society, that we increasingly have moved from a norm of free expression to one of closed-mindedness.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death and here’s my petition to have you silenced.” - Bizarro Voltaire

Once you start looking for it, you see this approach everywhere, and it is all too often cheered.

A more recent example is the American Public Health Association (APHA) and its invitation to Dr. Leana Wen to speak about “backlash” against public health officials. One suspects that Wen has an ever-growing well of personal experience on this topic from which she can draw. She has been a prominent media voice on health during the pandemic, and her views, until recently, could be construed as pressing aggressively for social restriction and enforced policy on COVID vaccination. She has lately changed some of her positions and in the process angered previous supporters. She has been treated as an apostate by the zero-COVID movement for endorsing such “controversial” ideas as a return to in-person education and limiting masking. For the record, I disagreed with her earlier positions and welcome her to the fight for a more balanced approach to COVID as it move to its endemic phase.

The protesting members didn’t literally nail their petition to the door of the APHA, but they came pretty close to having the proverbial 95 theses. Their list of objections to Wen include thought crimes that spanned from old standbys like “unethical” to more trendy complaints like “ableist” and “fatphobic” (the last for suggesting, like Cookie Monster now does for cookies, that Krispy Kreme donuts are a “sometimes food”). But one suspects Wen’s main sin has been that of straying from the party line of COVID restrictions. Again, we see the tactic, stated explicitly in this complaint, that even allowing Wen to speak is to “platform” her views. She doesn’t have a contrary opinion to be countered with debate, she is a bad person who must be silenced.

And once you start slapping around using the Thought Police Paintbrush, it isn’t long before some censorship splashes on you. Which brings me to my final example. 

Early in the COVID pandemic, there were competing schools of thought. One side, which ended up being the majority public health opinion in the US, was summarized in the John Snow Memorandum. It argued for attempting to shield the entire population, discounted post-infection immunity and emphasized strict adherence to such non-pharmaceutical measures as masking and social distancing. The alternative was summarized in the Great Barrington Declaration. This approach placed emphasis on a balance between the dangers of COVID and the unintended psychological and physical harms of shutting down society. It recommended focused protection on more vulnerable populations and more free movement among younger, healthier individuals.

My opinion is that the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) got closer to the mark of a good strategy than did John Snow, and that part of the relative success seen in Nordic countries like Sweden and Denmark in their COVID approach had to do with such focused protection. 

But my opinion is not the point.

What is the point is how US officials acted during this era. Dr. Francis Collins, at the time Director of the National Institute of Health, emailed Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, regarding the GBD. Collins  wrote “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. (emphasis added) Is it underway?” The fringe epidemiologists were Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya. We should all be so fringe.

And, as it turns out, Collins and Fauci may have enlisted a little help to do so. There is currently an active legal suit against the government for colluding with social media mega-corporations to censor points of view deemed as “misinformation.” I have had Twitter posts of actual FDA slides labeled misinformation because they discussed vaccine side effects. I can attest that the government/tech collaboration  to suppress viewpoints has been one-sided, heavy-handed, and often ridiculous on its face. 

This has real consequences for individuals and for the discussion of ideas in general. In part because of this suppression at the highest levels, the US did not have a robust discussion of COVID policy options. It became tracked into a one-sided strategy that focused almost exclusively on cases, suppressing discussion of topics like vaccine side effects and post-infection immunity. Not only did this approach take what proved to be a successful strategy largely off the table for discussion, it created an impression of a public health apparatus unwilling to hear contrary points of view or consider nuance. There’s a reason the US ended up with much longer school closures, masking of children under 5 years old, and school-mandated vaccinations of young men at high risk for side effects. Inability to listen ultimately led to inability to adapt. 

The common response to my objection is that Wen, Collier, Chappelle and Bhattacharya have every right to speak, but that nobody is under any obligation to listen. And as long as the protests are from the private sector, not the government, then no censorship has occurred. Walkouts and deplatforming are the actions of individuals or corporations, and are therefore permitted. This is correct, of course, but it misses the point. Something can be allowed under the Constitution and still be a bad idea. 

Shutting down speech is a bad idea.

There is a saying popularized by the late Andrew Breitbart, that politics is downstream of culture. This means that our politicians and their behavior reflect our choices, rather than cause them. I propose a corollary, that rights are downstream from norms. That the wonderful words of the First Amendment that “Congress shall make no law…prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech” will mean nothing if we accept a norm that speech should be silenced, avoided, or deplatformed, just so long as it isn't government doing it. 

Back to what started me on this essay, the White Coat Walkout. The government had nothing to do with the UM medical students leaving. Their unwillingness to hear a speaker was not about rights, but about what we are choosing to normalize. Nobody in Washington, DC has been forcing us to use social media to surround ourselves with like-minded individuals. The algorithm of platforms like Facebook and Twitter act like echo chambers because their customers want to hear repetitions of what they already believe. Congress has made no law abridging free expression that has driven us to view those who disagree with us as having an invalid moral foundation. We did this to ourselves.

We need to undo it.

Should the Michigan medical students have had the right to walk out in peaceful protest? Of course. But was it wise? I think not. The address was a wonderful discussion about retaining your humanity in the face of modern medicine. The students not only missed a chance to potentially grow, but if nothing else to learn how a person who disagrees with them thinks. It was lovely, and they are poorer for having skipped it.

I believe the students would characterize themselves as being on the side of humanistic care for their future patients. By walking out, they robbed themselves of the chance to learn that Dr. Collier is an ally in that mission. These students will have many other chances to learn from professors and patients with whom they have differing views on a number of important moral issues. I hope that the next time, they find it in themselves to listen.

I hope we all do.

The First Amendment is downstream from a culture of free exchange of ideas. 

Take away the latter, and freedom of speech loses all meaning.

Thanks for listening.

Cheers, y’all.

Image by Wynn Pointaux from Pixabay