Is Speech VIOLENCE? | Dartmouth College

speech is violence five four three two one move slightly disagree oh where are you i'm gonna say i'll explain you can see you can keep moving i'll just put the mic down okay you you happy there yeah you cooler is everything cool you're cooler okay okay well you can move at any time that's it's you're free to move okay uh so you strongly tell us why i think it's really an issue of definitions i think violence is anything that causes physical harm to a person a being or i guess maybe a material object so i don't think that speech can cause physical harm it can certainly incite a physical harm so speech can cause violence but that doesn't mean it is violence um so for you and i want to make sure i understand this quickly so for you speeches violence is a definitional thing and you define violence like a physical yeah violent i think it speech can certainly cause emotional harm but i don't think that that is violence okay oh you're agreeing with him oh oh so yeah i'm on this side uh because i think that like speech is not inherently violent um but i think that there's like critical distinctions that uh differentiate why i'm on disagree versus uh strongly disagree so i think that um i think i'm a member of the dpu i think free speech of uh is very important on college campuses and and just generally in society because it allows people of different views to like better understand each other and i think that we get that through rigorous debate of ideas and by seeing people principally disagree on things uh but i do know that there's like scientific research on uh how um obscenities or how offensive speech such as using like racial slurs against people can cause stress and that uh causes um a shortening of our telomeres which are i believe in our chromosomes and not assemblers that don't cite me on this but it does uh cause this process that um uh leads to adverse health outcomes and so i know that that's why that's a cause of obscenity of offensive speech that can happen but i think if that makes sense so i'm i'm trying to differentiate between you know the cause and the inherent quality of speech okay so you were a little unsure at first are you still unsure it's in it's 100 okay to be unsure yeah i think i am unsure just because this is a very like heavy definition statement yes and i i my original thought was okay speech can't hurt anybody so i'm just going to sort of be on the side but then after considering it more what if speech incites violence i think in that situation we as a society would put some fault on the person who said the words that incited the violence so given that fault is placed on this person for violence i think that in this scenario it's possible that speech could be violence are you are you buying that i mean is that is that sufficient to persuade you well i think i think it's really like a definitional problem so i think that it's this is a very general question and i think it i don't know um i think it depends on the situation so i don't know if we're talking about like free speech on uh allowing like if if this if this is a question of like speech between two individuals on the street or if it's a issue of like bringing a speaker to campus and like that effect like is that speech violence if you disagree with some like a speaker's view or is it violence if someone's saying a racial slur to you so i think that that those are maybe that's what you're getting at i would love to hear what you said yeah i guess what i was sort of getting at is that if somebody says okay murder this person now and here's exactly how you do it and here's exactly where they live then would this person be committing an act of violence and my original inclination would be and i think what james was trying to say is that no it's not violence because you're not physically harming this person but at the same time our legal system and our society would place fault on this person for the violence that was committed so i would say yeah maybe it's sort of violent did she convince you no and i think i have also responses to both the arguments have been made please i think um firstly to your argument the if i if i shouted in a room like an empty room to nobody you know kill that man it would not decide any violence if i unshouted in a crowded room of people kill that man it might incite violence i think that it's this but in both cases it's the same speech it's the same words being said it's the same action really and so i don't think you can really call that action violence if if the only thing that can make it cause violence are the conditions around it and the choices of the people who you're in like telling the speech to and speaking two because this person can choose not to kill that man or they could choose to kill that man so i don't think that it can really be violence in that case because in my mind violence always causes damage if i punch somebody okay it will always hurt them really yeah no i'm just like okay so she said she said something that you know like if i got up in your face i'm not gonna do it and i started yelling you know like whatever i'm gonna yell about you but that would especially you know camera size that would cause a physical reaction even though i'm here and i make sure that there's distance so there's no physicality and you said that it has to cause some yeah i think to that point you know there are rather conclusive studies that find that looking at people's stories in social media can cause depression in people i think that you know you you see somebody's life looks happier than yours and it makes you sad because you see the best parts of their life and you have the entirety of yours in your mind right and i don't think that like i think you know that can cause stress and depression and error telomere de-lengthening or whatever in a person or it cannot i think it's really a reaction on the part of the recipient but you can't choose not to like take physical damage from like a gunshot right so so that's what i was gonna ask you i was gonna ask you that um i'm not sure this is relevant to the question i'm trying to i'm working through these ideas myself but shouldn't the or let me phrase it more neutrally should the burden be placed upon people like sticks and stones may break my bones so if someone says something mean to you that we teach people how not to have that right because you can't you can't count on other people to not be jerks you can only count on yourself to respond to it a certain way so if that's the if we so is the one of the reasons that we think speech is violent is because we have a culture in which we're so quick to take offense and claim injury i mean that could certainly be the case i think maybe the reason why i'm here is i'm sort of a historian by trade so i sort of look at the effects of historical processes things like discrimination or racist language and how that affects people so i think maybe um i'm just seeing this question in a little bit of a different way and so uh i am a little hesitant to go on to strongly disagree because i'm sort of thinking of the effect of words on on on people even though it's not like sticks or stones may break with your bones i'm i'm trying to work through sort of like the health effects that can still occur so um i think what you said could be true but i think that there's also other ways of saying that so i'm going to argue against my own point if that's okay so i'm just trying to think of um trying to think i was in a uh i was just in budapest and uh it's very moving i went to the the jewish holocaust memorial and i heard some just you don't even i'm not even repeat the stories i heard but um i was thinking like if you had a system in which it was literally i know everybody loves to throw around the word system ties but i mean like it was actually a system um then the constant verbal abuse from people it would i don't know why i'm telling you i should be telling you this then then wouldn't the constant verbal abuse that people suffered it doesn't have to be jews it could be literally anybody wouldn't that couldn't that be if you stretch the semantic range of violence just a teeny bit couldn't that be considered to be physical enough so that you would move to disagree no i i mean first of all i think i've objected the idea of stretching the the semantics of violence i mean that's kind of the point of definitions i think if you if you want to use a a def like a wider definition then yeah but i'm just not operating at the definition i think under the different definitions that i'm operating under speech cannot be violence okay all right that's fair so he he so it's it's a definitional thing that speech cannot be violence by definition well i i think that the funny thing is that i actually agree with a lot of the things that they're both saying but i and like the policy implications that would probably arise from all of our opinions would probably be very similar um can i apologize so you you basically agree with them in in some ways but in other ways i i think that the like speech that people has the potential people have and speech that people give have a lot more power than they're giving them credit for and i particularly took issue with this idea that you could somehow like block yourself from speech but you can't block yourself from violence like it's almost like saying what if i went everywhere wearing a bulletproof vest and then somebody shot me well everybody not wearing a bullet poop vest somehow is at fault for them dying when they're shot like i just i just feel like or the example of shouting into a an empty room like what if i stab and to rent like an empty space like it wouldn't hurt anybody because nobody's there but that's not the point of speech just like that's not the point of stabbing like the point of speech is to influence people and if you're influencing people towards violence then that's sort of violence so it's a point of isn't the point of speech what someone wants it to be exactly but some speech is meant to incite violence so i guess it depends on the speech like honestly the example of a professor talking in a university i think that's completely fine because universities are meant to learn and they're meant to sort of what if they're talking about something that people consider deeply offensive i think that's still okay because it's the place that people are in they're putting themselves into a situation where they want to learn and where this is a space where people want to share ideas but the problem with speech is that you can't always control when and where people do it right so yeah so like if i was if i was shouted at while walking in the street after repeatedly telling people to stop this would be very different than me going to a lecture and hearing somebody say something offensive like these are just completely different examples okay i think i i do do you want so you understand their positions yeah you understand both of their positions yeah yeah but you just disagree but you understand you understand that okay and you you understand that one in that one okay real quick is there anything that would cause you to move off the line um i don't think so and i think your answer is going to be no because for you it's strictly definitional yeah i mean it's not even necessarily definitional i think for me it's you know for example in the the the the the example you mentioned with the memorial it wasn't the speech that caused the harm in the speech causing people to do the actions that caused the harmony but that's that sort of removal right and i was thinking in that question yeah so so i was thinking that question like how horrible it would be to live because i actually heard the stories from people yeah like how horrible it would be to live in that situation where people are like hating on your con like maybe just a nightmare but the question is i was trying to find an argument in my head for why for a context because she was talking about context historical context for when it could be so again i'm not using the word systemic capriciously i'm using it very specifically in this case like institutional laws not laws we had from the books 50 years ago did that that would be so heinous that it could could a reasonable person consider that an act of violence yeah i would just simply respond that people say those same kinds of words today just they don't cause violence you know people you know you can go on weird dark web chat rooms and find people saying stuff just as vitriolic as this stuff hitler said but nobody obeys them and i think it really and the violent part of that is people's reaction to the speech it's peop it's what people do be like because of the speech not the speech itself okay cool all right questions questions we got three questions got one two and everybody runs for the third yeah that's the attitude good all right three questions and then we're gonna and please say who the question is for um i guess maybe for you two um but you can also answer because this is also general definitional by definition abuse is violence so is verbal abuse violence or not um i would argue that by def i mean physical abuse is by definition violence it's physical abuse i would say that verbal abuse is not by definition violence no so so we should um really basically just not call verbal abuse verbal abuse because by definition abuse by itself is um an act of harm or violence towards another person i mean it can be an active it can it can be an act that causes harm but i don't think it's a violence i think if if you're defining abuse that way if you're defining abuse as violent i wouldn't define abuse as violent i would define abuse differently but you know it's really i think that at that point that becomes an issue of the definition of abuse all right please send your questions for um everybody it seems to me this question was worded really badly and you didn't get to the real point of this question which is is ought the concept of violence extend only to physical pain as james uh claims or audit also extend to certain level of mental abuse as uh i'm sorry i'm forgetting your name the previous person said um but uh i think that is the question of so what's your question my question is what is your opinion on the actual like meat of this which is should violence as a concept uh or should are we by using violence as a concept to only apply to physical violence misconstruing as a society that physical violence is in some way more harmful than uh verbal violence because we uh synonymize harm with violence oh okay yeah i i thought i tried to answer that question maybe i didn't um but i i think the distinction i was trying to make is i do agree in some in some ways i'm going to distinguish this further i i do think that um speech can cause violence both in the the punching or no sorry violence can both involve sort of like the punching the physical action but it can also be uh be caused by like uh saying racial slurs offensive speech that hurt but i also think that like i'm hesitant to say speech in general is violence because i think there's different venues that offensive speech can come up in uh like there's like very specific things that the supreme court has rolled on as what is protected speech what is free speech and so i tend to like be a little bit more um hesitant to say generally uh you know speeches violence okay cool thanks um so i have a question for rhea uh you were saying um uh that you were using that example of a of somebody ordering someone else to murder um someone and you were saying that uh that specific instance of speech could be construed as violence because obviously our legal system will probably say this person is partially guilty but i think actually our legal system would be a bit more um precise maybe than than to say this speech is violence um i think our legal system could just say okay this speech has perpetuated violence it has led to violence but it is not violence and so i know this is a purely a definitional thing but i would be i was wondering what would compel you to um move a bit further in this direction and uh and say you should i should give you the mic uh and and just say that um uh that this definition may be useful um because it's more precise okay good question yeah i mean if we change the definition of violence to be solely something like the final the final act like the final contributing act then i think i would move to neutral um as well but i also sort of by jess's argument about racial slurs and the mental abuse that comes from that um so that would sort of keep me from moving too far that way almost ironically um but but what what he said could cause you could cause you to move to the neutral yeah i mean if we made our definition of violence like tight enough and specific enough then i would move i mean i don't think my opinions would change but my physical location would so interesting all right oh well last one last one thank you great question you're gonna have the mic next time so essentially if somebody says something to me that triggers an automatic uncontrollable vagal response which would cause things like physical muscle pain nausea vomiting uncontrollable physical harm isn't that speech causing me physical violence if it triggers an uncontrollable human response yeah if there's some sort of like magic word that causes like instant death yeah then then i guess the word would be cause yeah the word would be causing violence certainly i don't think the word would be violence itself the word is not violent it's it's just it's a word that causes a violent reaction i mean if go ahead sorry so if the statement was speech is violent versus speech is violence would that change where you stand the same in speech equals like is violent that speech equals violence but like that isn't true but speech can be violent maybe i think you can make that argument yeah i mean if that's the case you really should be under professional care well no i mean i think it's actually fairly common if somebody says something like you should go kill yourself and it causes you to have an uncontrollable panic attack response that's a fairly common issue with that is that if you said that to say like do like a random person or to another person or an opening up in a like empty room it wouldn't cause a reaction i think if it's if it's really con like if it's if the the impact of speech always depends on the person you're saying it to and sort of their own reaction to it the impact of physical violence is pretty much independent of the reaction of the person all right we're going to give her the last word and have a quick summary well actually i wanted to throw the question back onto you because i raised this question because oh is this your question that you you are like i raised this claim because this is something that you have talked about in articles and has also been mentioned by other professors so if you want to answer it um what's your definition of violence [Laughter] go ahead do to me what i just did to everybody else so i'll count five four hey hey hey i mean i know you're not from dartmouth but i'm expecting some minimum standard here come on you made it up um four five three two one okay that's an interesting choice why are you standing here uh well a couple of things i agree with the the fellow who's standing on this line yeah blue jack james james james i try not to use people's names because this when the the the video goes out it's probably anyway james um i agree with james i think first it's a definitional thing and second of all i think it is a been weaponized to be political because i constantly hear all speeches violence silences violence everything is violence doing nothing as violence and i think it is a kind of fast in play way to disingenuously use language but i mean there is a point to be made that uh you could you could say there are certain things that have similar effects as violence and maybe if they are so physiologically similar we could actually consume them as being similar we can put them in the same category yeah and jonathan height and greg glucanoff have written about that in the atlantic it's a wonderful piece and they further addressed that in uh the calling of the american mind their arguments are far better than than mine so we've got two issues here one is the physiological response and the other is how it's used practically and so i just want to address the second one quickly so if the idea is that speech is violence so you could like construct a syllogism speech is violence we have to stop violence therefore we have to stop speech that's something i hear over and over again like we have to there are certain things we just are not allowed to say so it would be under that that rubric and the second thing is i'm not the mo i can't somebody ask you about the match is a magic word and makes people go anaphylactic shock or something um if if if that's the case that that's just an unreasonable expectation that we would have to silence ourselves because there are some members in the society who experience some kind of bizarre reaction to the word of a magic word that makes them raises their blood pressure so um let's let's work with an uh explicit example um a lot of you may be you were just talking about the holocaust a lot of you may be where germany has outlawed certain speech about you know the holocaust and certain speech like holocaust denial for example um and this is not something that is in any way scientific mainstream it's something that you know many people at least in europe believe there is really no no good reason to say right and let's just suppose that there was research i don't know if there is there might be um saying that saying that hearing this speech for a certain group of people has the exact same violence has the exact same effect as actual physiological violence yeah with that if that research existed would that compel you to go just a little bit further here no because um because the so christopher hitchens argued very eloquently against this and um so so one of the reasons i think so first of all let me just state the obvious that you have to take every one of these conversations of course the holocaust happened of course millions of people were murdered by the nazis okay so that's the given so the question then becomes should we allow people speech to deny that that happened my answer is yes and i'll give you a simple example of this so there are many holocaust deniers like david irving who have given specific examples of things of why he did not believe uh holocaust exists so for example he said that if the holocaust happened i think you have to hold a little closer here no no that you're the boss now if the holocaust happened then why are the the locks on treblinka which was a concentration camp why do the doors not close now my friend michael sherman from the skeptic society actually flew down to treblinka and he exi he didn't he did i mean he wrote about it in the skeptic magazine the skeptic magazine you can read those claims if we don't allow people to make those claims nobody will rebut they won't go away they're going to fester they're going to build they're going to gain traction and audience so banning that speech is simply not going to do what people think it's going to do which is make the thing make so now we know so now if someone says well why are there no doors why are there no the lock center blinker why don't they work well now you can read sherman's article i won't give away the show but you can read it but does that happen in europe and what does that happen in europe that where such speech where such speech is actually outlawed i mean it sounds like you're you're coming up with a lot of theories here but i i don't see a bunch of people in i mean maybe i just don't know well enough but i don't see a bunch of people in mainstream european political uh uh newspapers claiming these things well that's cause it's illegal true but then it worked right n no because you don't know what the you don't know what the sentiment underlying if you have a society that's not free and open when you there's no way to collect the data so when you ask the people if they believe something if it's illegal you're never really you're never really going to know what you what people believe because you don't have society in which people speak openly and also it's actually you know what it's like it's like the contemporary university system we've created a culture of pretending where everybody's lying about stuff well okay well but europe isn't soviet russia you can do opinion polls and it's not illegal to say these things in opinion polls for example and opinion polls do do not show that people believe that the holocaust didn't happen right so i guess maybe now is what would it take me to move i'm gonna he'll help you a little bit what would would it take me to move to disagree yeah i can ask myself of course you're not gonna get the mic back but you can ask it we're taking the move to disagree um the best argument i heard here that would cause me to move would be there would have to be a cultural context an overwhelming cultural context which we do not have in which there was an actual system in place that legally and cult legally discriminated against people and there was a um an overt sentiment such that you know people were called it doesn't have to be race but you know height or hair color or something some kind of a slur to people that caused a kind of trauma in those people that affected them affected their flourishing profoundly and that that doing so would reinforce the culture thomas sewell talks about that a little bit but that would be the general that would that's what it would take to move me to disagree okay interesting thanks for that discussion um i think i'm way above my pay grade here so i'm gonna oh audience questions oh of course jordan come [Laughter] on so let's let's is this on okay let's make the devil's um you know take the devil's argument here um people can spew out disinformation you know a thousand articles a day and and a lot of people argue this and to debunk them you know even michael sherman writes it required him to fly over all the way to treblinka um so is it perhaps um and i don't know believe this necessarily but is it perhaps not better to sort of stigmatize some of these issues societally to keep society healthy rather than having to spend a lot of society's resources debunking articles that are unfounded when those debunkings require a lot of mental effort uh one no and and the reason is because the arguments are still there but far more importantly the only reason you'll know what to stigmatize is through free speech you could be stigmatizing the wrong thing and the only way you can figure that out is through dialectic and disputation my question to you is much the same to the question of the other three people here who were uh debating this topic the the core of this question because again this phrase it really should be can be because speech no one argues in every case when someone speaks it is inherently violent but uh to say can't speak can speech be violent uh would really be asking is the term violence just about physical action or does it also does it do we use violence to mean physical harm or just harm and i think the argument that you were arguing against kind of in saying that people you hear this argument all the time that uh speech is violence and therefore we have to stop really what they're saying is certain kinds of speech can be in categorically harmful like holocaust and that question or sorry uh that certain yeah can be categorically incorrect and that that is what and because that speech is harmful it is violent because that's what we mean by that's the question so the question is what is the definition of violence that you provide the right definition and why is it um yeah i don't i'm not um my i i tend to take the the same position that that james took uh but i would use i i would be completely open to revise the definition but that that would be a different question though um that's how i took the question if somebody else offered a definition that you know i i tried to try to think of a way a non-sneaky way to say this i tried to like convince him that we can stretch the term and he was like no i'm not stretching the term um i would i would have to have a really good argument to stretch the term because the word violence to me means a very specific thing and see you know even to the extent of um and you can talk about those nuances like is an mma fight violence i mean i'm not i'm not close to talking about those terms but in the way it is defined i agree with james i don't see there'd have to be an utterly extraordinary historical circumstance in which i which which could exist but i don't think exists that would cause me to move okay last question from my side um you're saying that's your definition of violence and so you're saying that's your definition of violence and he's saying that's that's his do you think it's legitimate for him to have that definition or do you think there's something wrong with it no i think any anybody can have any definition of and he could call it a pastrami sandwich the key thing there is that we have to be open to have a conversation about even rudimentary things which i don't see happening in the society today and the way to adjudicate those questions is to sit down and say okay so let's talk about this and you know maybe maybe we make another maybe we change the phrasing of the question you know maybe we make something different maybe we say okay it's not violence but it's something else you know violence you know what are those letters right in physics you know like sub two or something you know maybe it's another term that we that we create but the most important thing is in order for that to be operative in the first place we have to have a precondition of speech and open inquiry and discourse okay all right thank you thank you all right uh thanks everybody i i appreciate coming down hopefully it was fun you learned something and you can use it you can do it in your classes you can do it in your student groups and i hope that folks enjoyed that and took something from it thank you you

Channel: Peter Boghossian

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Length: 31min 55sec (1915 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022