John Stuart Mill's On Liberty in 2021
I recently read John Stuart Mill’s 1859 essay On Liberty, in which he defends free thought, free expression, and the freedom on an individual to decide what sort of life she will lead. It’s not too long, but here is the tl;dr: Mill is concerned with unpopular opinions and behaviors. He worries that the government will follow the will of the majority, and suppress the opinions of the minority. Mill argues that to silence the expression of an unusual opinion hurts the silencers more than the silenced. If the silenced opinion is true, then stopping its expression prevents dissenters from correcting their errors. If the silenced opinion is false, airing it would deepen the understanding and vigor of those who hold the correct point of view.
These arguments have stronger implications in 2021 than they did in 1859. When there were only a small number of public venues where speeches could be made and pamphlets handed out, a person was likely to be exposed to all manner of ideas. As long as the government did not prevent someone from speaking in a city’s main square, she would have been heard by many who disagree with her. Today, public squares are more private. Through following either those like themselves or those whose opinions they largely agree with on social media, modern people are much less likely to be confronted by opinions unlike their own. Merely allowing people to speak is not enough to make dissenting opinions heard. A 21st century Mill would need to push further.
Most of Mill’s examples come from the perspective of a Christian. If you are like me – a typical enlightenment atheist – you may not understand how deeply offensive 19th century Christians would have found anti-Christian speech. These Christians had deep faith church teachings on nature and morality. Not only did they know that contradictory ideas were false, they also believed gullible people would accept the lies as truth, and suffer for it eternally in the afterlife. More prosaically, questioning God-given social morals would result in a dangerous society without principles. As Dostoevsky wrote a few years after Mill: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” In Mill’s time, there was a long tradition of censoring ideas whose spread had dangerous consequences.
As it turned out, these arguments were more or less sound. There are far fewer devout Christians in England today then there were in Mill’s time. There is far more social acceptance of homosexuality, which is condemned in the bible. Divorce is up, church attendance is down, and state schools teach natural history contrary to the Christian truths. By the lights of Mill’s contemporaries, many people today are being unnecessarily doomed. Of course morality did not disappear, but old-fashioned Christian morality is on the endangered list.
Mill was a believer himself, so he understood the serious negative consequences which free expression entails. Even so, he was a strong supporter of free expression, because of its consequences. Banning freedom of expression presumes that the authority knows the truth. Reflect a moment on past societies, and one quickly realizes how often conventional wisdom has been mistaken. Why would modern society be any different? If we hold these truths to be self-evident and beyond argument, mistaken beliefs may never be corrected. By suppressing unpopular ideas, a society delays the exposure of its own false beliefs.
That argument works if the popular belief is false and the dissenter’s point of view is correct. Mill argues that even if the dissenter is wrong, it is good that his arguments are heard. Unchallenged convictions are fragile. Defending correct beliefs against contrary arguments deepens and strengthens them. Moreover, the truth of conventional wisdom is often dully accepted as a truism until the belief is challenged through either argument or personal experience. The act of defending a belief gives the defender a deeper understanding. Defending a belief keeps it alive.
Mill did not believe that freedom of expression was a natural right. He didn’t believe that there were any natural rights. He was a consequentialist. If society should do something, it is because of that something’s effects. If freedom of expression should be protected, it is because allowing free expression has better effects than disallowing it. Fundamentally, Mill’s argument is an empirical argument, arguably even scientific. That free speech results in the good outcomes could be disproved by observing what happens in the real world.
As an empirical proposition, what is good for one society might be different than what is good for another. As it happens, Mill’s arguments apply to modern society even more strongly than they did in his day. Through the internet and social media, people today curate the content they see. Since similar people are likely to be interested in similar things, there is a large degree of homogeneity in people’s social media friend networks. Through social media, each user’s opinions are the majority opinion in her own public square. Through a combination of algorithms and personal choice, users are never confronted with dissenting views. In the echo chambers of Twitter or Instagram, views which users never hear properly defended become unreasonable. I have a Facebook account which I use to keep in touch with friends from back home. Even though nearly half of all American voters supported Trump in 2020, before the election I can count the number of pro-Trump posts I saw on one hand. I’m sure other Facebook users had an opposite experience.
Mill worried that by censoring minority views, the majority in society would be sluggish in correcting its incorrect beliefs. Each social media user is part of the majority in her own public square. If algorithms remove dissenting opinions from feeds, then incorrect beliefs are unlikely to be corrected. The difference with Mill’s age is that today, not only majority views, but every view is protected from attack. The dream of the internet was the democratization of knowledge. The cost of expressing a fringe idea on a website is nearly nothing. Instead of only being exposed to only ideas in print, netizens would find information on all sorts of unpopular ideas. After thirty years, it is clear that the internet has not democratized the ideas people are exposed to, but personalized them. Rather than pushing people toward the truth, it has pulled them toward their own truths.
Let’s bring Mill back from the dead. What would he advocate today? It is clear that free expression is still desirable, but it alone is not enough to make sure that ideas are challenged and brought to life. Mill was a classical economist and a great defender of lassaiz-faire, but not without limits. He was a critic of monopoly power, and suggested regulation of what we would today call natural monopolies. Online social networks are natural monopolies. If all my friends are part of a social network, I gain more from joining that network than another, even if the other all else equal would have been more attractive to me. Mill would support limits on personalized social media algorithms, as proposed in recent European Union legislation. He would also be against large social media companies choosing what views can and cannot be shared on their own platforms.
Mill cared exclusively about consequences. It can be hurtful for someone to hear their fundamental beliefs challenged. This sentiment is captured by the popular quote from Robert Jones, Jr on Twitter: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” Mill’s argument is that the benefits outweigh the costs. Debate deepens the debaters understanding of their own ideas, and helps both sides of the argument and their observers approach the truth. With the right regulation, social media might lead people to the truth, rather than simply echo affirmations of the correctness of their own opinions.