Frederick Douglass and The "Freedom" of Speech

The freedom of speech is questionable when we are not really allowed to say anything we want to in this society. It takes only one slur before political groups are crying foul, protesting, boycotting, etc. I think of it as this: You don't have to watch what you're saying as long as you don't mind that other people are going to say something in response. There are some things I don't care to discuss my views on: race, religion, sexuality, politics, and anything else that is going to get people upset. I choose to keep my preferences to myself in hopes that any audience will have to understand that I don't like drama.


Something that has caught my attention on campus since I've been at Towson is the fliers for the Secular Alliance Club. There are all these quotes on the fliers for this club that appear to promote atheism/secularism, but I think they are actually insulting the intelligence of people who believe in God. I read something like "we don't have to pretend there is someone in the sky to figure out the mysteries of the universe" and variations of this kind of condescension. I don't know what the students of this secular club have experienced at the hand of religious folks, but I find their fliers disturbing.

It's one thing to promote your beliefs or lack thereof; it's another to criticize someone else's, considering a lot of people who have faith in a Higher Power have the intellectual capacity to understand what they believe in. This is the power of free speech. You can say what you want and I don't have to like it. But I can also say I don't like what you're saying and you don't have to like what I said either.

Do you find yourself tiptoeing around your right to speak freely due to the sensitive political climate in our country, or do you speak your mind no matter what popular opinion is?

Jonah Lehrer's "The Truth Wears Off"

"Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe."

Lehrer ends his article in The New Yorker with these words and I couldn't agree with him more. Especially in the age of technology that we are in now. Every day a new product or website is competing for an audience and consumers. They'll tell us anything we want to hear for our money and attention. It's up to me to decide what I want to purchase or spend my time on. First I have to make sure what I'm committing to can withstand the "decline effect," the phenomenon where scientific results diminish over time. In the case of consumerism, I may feel good about buying something that is all the rage right now, but do I really want to keep it after the hype dies down?

For instance, will I be interested in reading this book I bought last week, next year? or even five years from now? If not, is it worth the price? Maybe I should view it as the temporary entertainment that it is. That's the whole point---it is what I think it is. Like what I think of the Kardashians. A lot of people hate them because of their overexposure. I don't. I know how the media works, and I'm not buying any of the stories about them because the media uses them for money just as much as the Kardashians make money from the media. So their presence on all the tabloids tells me they're profitable for that industry.

I'd love to believe I can read a bias-free publication, but it seems that is impossible when we think in terms of postmodernism. Everything has been constructed and we can't even process where it all started. So for me to somehow believe I can get information that doesn't have some kind of agenda, I'm wrong. Because even if the work is objective, that could be precisely what the goal of the writing is, to present objective material, and therefore there is a bias against subjectivity. Things can get complicated if we really have to think about what the purpose of information we're reading is.

So the question is what do you choose to believe in? What you see, what you feel, what you were taught, or what you think you know?