Forcing Others to Be Like You

I noted this morning that Kamala Harris has urged Twitter to suspend Donald Trump's account, ostensibly because she doesn't like what he says on Twitter about the people who are trying to destroy him. It also came to my notice that New York City has made it "illegal" to use the term "illegal alien."

Attempts to control speech are essentially attempts to control thought and anyone who values the freedom of either speech or thought should be appalled by the measures Harris proposes and New York has adopted.

As it happens I've been re-reading Louis Menand's 2002 best-seller titled The Metaphysical Club, an intellectual history of 19th century America, and an excerpt from the chapter on Civil War veteran and future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is fresh in my mind.

Menand wrote:

The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideologues, dogmatists, and bullies - people who think their rightness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to subscribe to their particular ideology, dogma, or notion of turf.

If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later, by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them.

Those who seek to punish those with whom they disagree, either economically, or through social media or through the courts, are precisely the sort of people Menand has in view in this passage. Later in life Holmes wrote that he detests a man who "knows that he knows," and, Menand continues,

[Holmes] had a knee-jerk suspicion of causes. He regarded them as attempts to compel one group of human beings to conform to some other group's idea of the good, and he could see no authority for such attempts greater than the other group's certainty that it knew what was best. "Some kind of despotism is at the bottom of seeking for change," he wrote in a letter...

By this Holmes meant seeking to compel others to change, to compel others to accept one's own point of view and certainties. Menand quotes Holmes:

I don't care to boss my neighbors and to require them to want something different than what they do - even when, as frequently, I think their wishes more or less suicidal.

There's much here for people like Kamala Harris and the bright lights who govern New York City, as well as others like the folks who run the social media giants Google, Facebook and Twitter - and who censor political figures they dislike and ban political or religious speech and ideas of which they disapprove - to take to heart.