Academic and Political Freedom, Social Safety, and Frustration Intolerance (with some Spinoza).
Yesterday my home university was a site of vandalism after an initially peaceful ‘walk out’ in which a pro-Palestinian/pro-ceasefire movement was merged with an anti-police violence statement. I missed all of that because I was in London to give a paper at the Aristotelian Society (here). (I did get some ‘told you so’ emails from people still angry about my editorial from last week, although most of these people, including some active police officers, seem to have missed that we were explicitly worried about a radicalizing group of students.)
In Dutch ‘veiligheid’ translates both the English ‘security’ and ‘safety.’ During the past decade, ‘social safety’ (often left untranslated in Dutch, although we also use sociale veiligheid) has become an important concept in work-place relations in an attempt to group together a whole range of undesirable work-place activity. At my university, to employees, ‘social safety’ is often explained in terms of a list of examples (“sexual harassment, aggression, violence, bullying, discrimination”) and re-described as ‘unwanted/undesirable behavior’ from the perspective of an employee, who is given the option to find tools how to end it (or de-escalate it) or file a complaint.
In fact, in my university’s code of conduct the formal definition of ‘undesirable behavior’ is said to occur “as soon as one of those involved can reasonably experience it as such.” This usefully removes ‘safety’ from private psychology, but leaves unclear what the spectator/administration would judge ‘reasonable.’ Even where there is consensus about that, this definition would also include much behavior that falls short of the rather serious list of examples in the previous paragraph. In other words, ‘social safety’ is a container concept that is meant to police or rule out very heterogeneous behavior of very heterogeneous significance and severity.
Before I get to politics: one interesting effect of the focus on social safety is that it also covers behavior known collectively as ‘low frustration tolerance’ or ‘frustration intolerance’ that may be triggered by stress. (My sister informed me of this phrase, but there is a Wikipedia page here.) Conceptually, then, work-place circumstances that themselves systematically generate stress for their employees then also become potential triggers for ‘unsafe’ social workplaces. In practice, of course, organizations prefer to let employees monitor their own behavior than to change work-place circumstances. Of course, lurking here is the risk that work-place disagreements themselves get transformed into matters of social safety.
In the classroom we have seen discussions in terms of ‘safe spaces’ that follow a similar trajectory. All teachers of good-will recognize that something is amiss when instruction deliberately aims at hurting the feelings of students, but simultaneously something has gone off the rails when challenging and expansive thoughts are not welcome in the classroom and disagreement is impossible. Here, too, the penetration of a psychological discourse of ‘discomfort’ under the banner of ‘social safety’ has made it difficult to think about the nature of academic freedom.
Now, it will not have escaped anyone’s notice that the pro-Palestinian responses to October 7 and subsequent protests of Israel’s military engagement were themselves met by frequent media reports of Jewish and/or Israeli students feeling unsafe or insecure on campus or having to hide their Jewish identity. Holland has been no exception. (Stateside there has been some polling to suggest that Muslim students also feel increasingly unsafe; I have not seen equivalent polling in Holland.)
Soon enough, the protests themselves seem to have become sources of un-safety, or threat to some students. Because of the ambiguity in the nature of ‘security’ — is it something merely psychological or is there a ‘reasonable’ spectatorial standard — it’s incredibly difficult to evaluate these claims without seeming heartless or potentially condoning antisemitism. (In the Dutch context there are firm antidiscrimination laws that are far removed from US conceptions of ‘free speech.’) This has become an argument to curtail and even criticize protests in various ways. And so the quite usual propaganda and media war over Israel/Palestine (and the character/definition of antisemitism) has itself now been extended, fairly or not, to weaponizing ‘security’ in these debates. (I return to this below.)
I don’t think any of this is an accident. Security and safety are central to Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke in shaping the legitimacy of political authority. When during the seventeenth century Spinoza defended ‘freedom to philosophize’ he ruled out seditious speech and he allowed this freedom to be constrained by considerations of public order or ‘the peace of the republic.’ Unfortunately, the situation becomes even more complicated in imperfect (he calls them ‘corrupted’) polities. I quote an important passage from the Theological Political Treatise (chapter 20)
Other opinions, which don’t involve an act such as breaking the contract, taking vengeance, venting one’s anger, etc., aren’t seditious—except perhaps in a Republic somehow corrupted, e.g., where superstitious and ambitious men, who can’t endure people who think in a manner worthy of a free man, achieve such a great reputation that ordinary people value their authority more than that of the supreme 'powers.—Translated by Curley.
So, rather than offering us a fixed standard, Spinoza recognizes that social context will matter greatly to the width of freedom in light of the interest in securing public order and this itself can be the effect of strategic political agents. When I taught Spinoza regularly, students were often made uneasy by Spinoza’s position because they quickly recognize the scope for abuse to clamp down on dissent.
Via Bayle and Rousseau, we find a similar way of conceptualizing things in Rawls, who writes “Liberty of conscience is limited, everyone agrees, by the common interest in public order and security” (Theory of Justice, 1999 ([1971]), 186; emphasis added). Even J.S Mill uses a framework like this in On Liberty. For example, when complaining about public drunkenness, he writes, “It destroys my primary right of security, by constantly creating and stimulating social disorder.”* This balancing of security with freedom is quite characteristic of republicanism (and so the republican strain that has also shaped liberalism), and its strong sense of a common good of which public order is constitutive.
Seventeenth century republicanism need not have developed in this way. Early in the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli explains how social disturbances, including originating in rather tumultuous and scary protests, can be conducive to the growth of liberty. (I sometimes teach this as a principle of ‘creative social turbulence’ analogous to Schumpeter’s creative destruction.) This idea that social disturbances, when ritualized in the right sort of way, can unintentionally be fortuitous even creative to social growth is central to liberalism’s self-conception of freedom. The growth of this idea is rather opaque to me, but eventually gets domesticated in terms of ‘social experiments in living’ (familiar from Mill, Dewey and Anderson).
However, I am pretty confident Machiavelli’s insight (indirectly perhaps) shaped some of America’s founders because it is quite notable that in the first amendment of the US constitution ‘security’ is wholly absent. It’s only indirectly implied by the clause that allows people ‘peaceably to assemble.’ In the twentieth century the first amendment gave rise to a much more liberal speech regime that was rather permissive of social turbulence in increasingly pluralist societies. That more turbulent (first amendment) free speech regime has a firm grip on the imagination and self-understanding of people even those who live under very different kind of constitutions. (In Europe there is nothing like the first amendment.) A somewhat cynical version of this view was expressed by then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld when he suggested that looting (during a transition stage) was itself the ‘price of freedom.’
Let me wrap up. I have suggested that ‘security’ (and its cognates) is, even in administrative parlance, a very diffuse concept ranging from freedom of physical violence to freedom from emotional disturbance. And while there are attempts to make the latter not wholly subjective (as I noted), in practice, it’s not surprising that people try to use this ambiguity to advance causes they care about (including their own well-being). To what degree this is itself treated as licit or not undoubtedly tends to reflects one’s sympathies about the underlying cause being served and/or one’s receptivity to seeing social turbulence as the price of freedom and the discovery of its fruits.
So, in virtue of the centrality of security in thinking about the nature of speech (political, academic, and in the workplace) as something that enters the scales as a rather significant weight in its own right, it seems to be inevitable that debates over the scope of academic and political freedoms will be infected by a kind of ambiguity that is inherent in our conceptualization of security. Now, I usually don’t like mixing academic freedom with freedom of speech. But here I have done so in order to call attention to the ambiguity of ‘security.’ In political contexts where the absolutist conception of free speech — and also the context of protests subject to academic freedom — are weak or absent this inevitably means that there will be reference to either purported social norms or to reported subjective states to constrain speech.
*In fact, government compulsion as such is permissible only to achieve security: “But as soon as mankind have attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion (a period long since reached in all nations with whom we need here concern ourselves), compulsion, either in the direct form or in that of pains and penalties for non-compliance, is no longer admissible as a means to their own good, and justifiable only for the security of others.”