Greg Lukianoff: preference

Transcript context

…Can you maybe elaborate where that connection is? Sure. I think that for those of us who really have devoted our lives to freedom of speech, one thing that we are into, whether we know it or not, is epistemology, the study and philosophy of knowledge. Freedom speech has lots of moral and philosophical dimensions. From a pragmatic standpoint, it is necessary because we’re creatures of incredibly limited knowledge. We are incredibly self-deceiving. I always love the fact that you’ve all heard Harari refers to the enlightenment as the discovery of ignorance because that’s exactly what it was. It was suddenly being like, “Wow, hold on a second. All this incredibly interesting folk wisdom we got,” which by the way, can be surprisingly reliable here and there. When you start testing a lot of it is nonsense and it doesn’t hold up. Even our ideas about the way things fall as Galileo established, even our intuitions, they’re just wrong. A lot of the early history of freedom of speech, it was happening at the same time as the scientific revolution. A lot of the early debates about freedom of speech were tied in. Certainly, Galileo, I always point out Kepler was probably the even more radical idea that they weren’t even perfect spheres. At the same time, largely because of the invention of the printing press, you also had all these political developments. I always talk about John Huss from a famous Czech hero who was burned at the stake and I think in 1419. He was basically Luther before the printing press. Before Luther could get his word out, he didn’t stand a chance and that was exactly what John Huss was. A century later, thanks to the printing press, everyone could know what Luther thought, and boy did they. It led to, of course, this completely crazy hyper disrupted period in European history. Well, you mentioned to jump around a little bit, the First Amendment, first of all, what is the First Amendment? What is the connection to you between the First Amendment, the freedom of speech, and cancel culture?…

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