Morning Thoughts on Freedom of Speech

I woke up this morning thinking about freedom of speech, and what it means. Yes, that is kinda weird. But it's a topic that's been on my mind a lot lately, because it seems to me that some folks on both sides of the political spectrum have become alarmingly hostile to freedom of speech and freedom of thought. For some on the left, liberalism now seems to be about policing what people say and think. That doesn't seem very liberal to me. While I think many hateful, racist, and sexist expressions are truly unacceptable, I also think these folks take things too far. This is also the group that is often in the news for shouting down, and occasionally violently disrupting, right wing speakers on campuses. I can't agree with that, either, for reasons I'll get to below.

Lest any conservatives read that paragraph and cheer, well, y'all ain't all innocent, either. Consider the people I ran into this weekend in front of the Colorado state capitol. I happened to see a small gathering of about 40 people as I walked by, so I stopped to hear what they were saying, as I always do if I have time. This was a mixed bag of right-wing groups. There was a group called Bikers Against Radical Islam, several people waving Trump banners, a few camo clad or cowboy-hat-wearing sagebrush militia types, some people from the south waving confederate flags, and even one African-American guy who apparently calls himself "The Black Rebel". Many of the people there were wearing body armor and helmets, and I imagine most of them were armed.

Anyway, one of the neo-confederate types got up and spoke, and he said that his freedom of speech is under attack. But here's the strange thing: almost in the same breath, he went on to say that there's no place in this country for socialists, or for people who disrespect the flag (presumably by sitting during the national anthem). A guy in front of me cheered. His jacket said, "Stomp my flag and I'll stomp your ass".

Clearly, these guys don't believe in freedom for all types of speech or expression. They don't believe socialists should have it, apparently, and they don't believe people who they see as disrespecting the flag should have it. (I can't resist pointing out that they were waving confederate flags, which seems fairly disrespectful of the American flag to me, and they were displaying American flags in ways that violate the flag code in all kinds of ways. I didn't point that out. I didn't have body armor on.)

As the speaker with the microphone attacked socialists and anthem-sitters, the Bikers Against Radical Islam cheered, too. Now, I don't know their exact thoughts, and I'm against radical, violent forms of Islam, too. (I don't like any form of fundamentalism.) But I've heard many people with similar beliefs (often in biker garb, for some reason) say that they think Islam--even moderate Islam--shouldn't get First Amendment protection, because "Islam is an ideology, not a religion". That makes no sense at all, of course, but the point is that if these people believe something like that, then they don't believe in free speech or thought for Muslims, either. Polls also show that many people don't believe in First Amendment protections for atheists, though nobody at this gathering mentioned them.

So these folks don't believe in freedom of speech for others. But that doesn't necessarily mean that their freedom of speech isn't under attack. Is it under attack? I don't want to dismiss the idea without giving it a fair hearing, even if I dislike this guy's worldview. One thing is clear. His First Amendment rights are intact. After all, he made his speech into a microphone on the steps of the state capitol, and the state troopers nearby were keeping the peace, not arresting him.

But the First Amendment only protects you from being punished by the government for what you say. It doesn't protect you from social consequences. It doesn't keep people from disagreeing with you---freedom of speech is a double-edged sword that way. It also doesn't keep people from shunning or ridiculing you.

However. What I woke up realizing this morning is that freedom of speech and the First Amendment aren't identical things. If fear of social consequences keeps you from speaking your mind, even if the First Amendment doesn't, do you really have freedom of speech? I'm not sure you do. The First Amendment (probably) won't protect you from losing your job for what you say. But if you do lose your job, you don't really have freedom of speech, even if you have First Amendment protection from the government. And sometimes that's OK, because freedom of speech isn't an absolute right. I have no problem with somebody who shows up on the news marching with a swastika losing their job. But at the same time, society should be wary of shutting down free speech through social or financial pressure, because the free exchange of ideas is important.

But why is it important? Some on the right and left may be asking that right now, and it's a fair question. There are a few commonly-cited reasons, but I only want to mention a couple. First is the "marketplace of ideas" argument. The classic early expression of this idea is by Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said, "when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment."

Soaring words, but I don't fully agree with them. I think the marketplace of ideas is important, but for a different reason. Holmes seemed to believe that popular acceptance of an idea is a good test for truth. I don't think it is--lots of terrible ideas are extremely popular. While it seems like hubris for me to question the great Holmes, I think the reason the marketplace of ideas is important is that without it, good ideas will never see the light of day in the first place (whether they win popular acceptance or not). If Galileo had been thrown in a dungeon and his books burned, the truth about the solar system would not have emerged, perhaps for decades. And he was speaking the truth, even if the masses had never accepted it. Even if--God forbid-- today's flat earthers come to dominate popular thought, Galileo was right.

So, the free exchange of ideas is important, even if those ideas don't win popular acceptance. But what about truly awful, hateful ideas? Does hate speech deserve a place in the marketplace of ideas? If bad ideas often gain popular acceptance, isn't that an argument against having ideas like Nazism in the marketplace at all? Should the emerging strands of American Nazism we saw in Charlottesville see the light of day at all? Why not just shut that down, and declare that it's unacceptable in a decent society; that such a poisonous product has no place in the marketplace of ideas? Should it even be cast outside of the protection of the First Amendment, and be declared illegal, as it has been in many other countries?

Maybe. But that makes me nervous, too. For one thing, who gets to say what counts as hate speech? What if we declared hate speech illegal, and then in a few years radical theocratic Christians gained enough political power to start prosecuting people who criticized them, using hate speech laws? Can you imagine that happening? I can. What truly counts as hate is not an easy thing to pin down, and though this may get me in trouble with other liberals, I don't think everything that gets called hate speech really is. Let's go back to that neo-confederate dude speaking on the state capitol steps. He was holding a shield with a confederate flag on it, and he was saying it's a symbol of history, not hate. Then he pointed to the Black Rebel in the audience, and said, "He's here with us. He knows we don't hate him."

And I don't think they do hate him; at least not most of them. I do think the confederate flag is an ugly symbol of a hideous time, and not something to be celebrated. I think waving it is incredibly insensitive, but I think somebody could actually wave it while not hating African-Americans. Does the guy speaking actually have hate in his heart? I don't know. Some people that wave that flag do. I imagine some people in that audience actually do hate blacks (and Muslims, and atheists, and socialists, etc.) and some don't. I didn't see any obvious white supremacists there. I've learned to recognize white supremacist symbols, and I see them fairly regularly--usually as tattoos on ex-convicts--but I didn't spot any there. Maybe I just missed them.

In any case, I think some people truly think that flag is a harmless expression of heritage. I disagree that it's harmless, but I do believe some people who wave it don't actually hate African-Americans. And some wave it who do. It's an ugly symbol, either way, but should it be suppressed? What about when it clearly is a symbol of hate--when it's carried by someone with an SS tattoo on their neck, for example? Should it be illegal then?

Even if it really is hate, and even if it has no place in the marketplace of ideas, there is another argument that it shouldn't be made illegal. That's the "safety valve" idea of freedom of speech. The idea here is that a society needs to give even hateful ideas an expression, so that people don't go underground with them, where they will fester and bubble up and surprise us later.

Recent history shows how this can happen. When you try to suppress an idea, you don't kill it. You'll likely just make the person who holds it believe it even more strongly, and start thinking of themselves as an oppressed martyr. The suppressed idea then gets whispered in living rooms (I've been stuck in those living rooms) and circulated in underground magazines and websites. Then, people who think those ideas have disappeared are in for a very unpleasant surprise when they return later.

Whether an idea is truly hateful, or simply conservative and therefore distasteful to liberals, something I think liberals need to consider more is that any attempt to control people usually results in a backlash. Conservatives especially hate being told what to do, and they extra-especially hate being told what to do by liberals. If we liberals think we can tell them what they're allowed to say and think, and they'll say, "Oh, OK", we're delusional. We may succeed in shushing them for a while, but they will resent it, and they will start looking for revenge. The election of Trump can be seen in many ways, but one thing it clearly was is an act of rebellion against "bossy liberal elitists". It was a backlash, and liberals (including me) should have seen it coming.

Don't get me wrong. And if you're a liberal, I'm not saying liberals are responsible for people voting for Trump. We aren't the ones who checked that box on the ballot. But we have to learn that trying to control the way people think and speak usually causes a backlash, and that can contribute to things we really, really don't want happening. Like having a nightmare like Donald Trump as president.

You may say that people shouldn't lash back like that. Maybe they shouldn't, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that they do. We can't control how they react. All we can do is try to engage with them in a way that doesn't make things worse.

And both liberals and conservatives need to be careful that they don't forget the value of freedom of speech and thought. They--or rather, we, as Americans--need to remember that freedom of speech isn't just freedom for people you agree with. As Noam Chomsky once said, "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." We need to remember that freedom of speech is not identical with the First Amendment. It can be suppressed without touching the First Amendment. Does that mean all speech should be socially acceptable? Of course not. But it does mean the free exchange of ideas is a vital part of an open, healthy, democratic society, and whether we are liberals, conservatives, or moderates, we forget that at our peril.

White Privilege and the Weight of History

I love Billie Holiday, but I don't enjoy the song "Strange Fruit". It's the most powerful song I've ever heard, and I think every American should hear it at least once, but to be honest, I turn it off when it comes on. It's just too sad. I made myself listen to it tonight, though. It's on my mind because of a comment I saw on Facebook that I can't stop thinking about. The man who made it was white, and he said this:

We could be lynched today for having been born "privileged" never mind the facts of the hard work and sachrifices [sic] made by our loved ones to put us where we are today. 

Now, despite the title of this post, I don't use the term "white privilege" much, though I think it's a real thing. I lean liberal, but I shy away from recently-popular political terms like that. Saying them makes me feel like I'm jumping on a bandwagon and not thinking for myself. I also figure conservatives will stop listening to me as soon as I say them, and I want them to keep listening. I don't know if that makes sense or not. But I looked at that comment and thought, "If that's not white privilege, I don't know what is."

I hope it's mere ignorance that allows someone to say a thing like that. Surely this man had a faulty education, and he's never seen a photo of a lynching, even though many were taken. He must not realize that not so long ago--within the lifetime of people still living--white people could hang, dismember, and burn black people, with no consequences. He must not know that after many lynchings, those white people were so sure they wouldn't be punished that they would pose for a big group picture next to the broken body, their faces in full view. Only a person who doesn't feel the generational weight of a word like "lynched" could use it so lightly.

The worst such picture I've ever seen is of a black teenager who was castrated, dismembered, and burned to death near Waco, Texas while 10,000 people watched. They made a postcard of it, as was common at the time. One participant in the lynching sent a copy to his father, and wrote:

This is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe

The victim's name was Jesse Washington. I think every white American should force themselves to look at that postcard. I imagine most black Americans have already seen it.

As for that white man who thinks he might meet such a fate because he was born privileged, I agree with him. Not that he's at risk of being lynched, of course--that's outrageous, and truly offensive. I just agree that he was was born privileged. He was born to parents and grandparents who would never have met Jesse Washington's fate, because of the color of their skin. He may even owe his existence to that fact--how many babies were never born because their potential forebears were lynched? I also don't doubt that his parents and grandparents worked hard. But I know they never had to take an impossible-to-pass test before they could vote. I know they never bought a Negro Motorist's Green Book so they could take a trip and still eat in restaurants, stay in motels, and use restrooms. They never had to sit in the back of a bus, be called "boy" into their old age, or wait at a counter until all the white people had been served. They never earned lower wages for their hard work because of the color of their skin. They never listened to Billie Holiday sing "Strange Fruit", and thought, "That could be me."

My parents and grandparents never had to face those things, either. Yes, they worked hard too, and that's one reason I'm privileged. Another reason is that they were white, and so am I. Yes, things are better than they used to be. But I've never once been pulled over by the police and wondered if I would live through it. Yes, I think most cops are good, but I've never looked in the rear-view mirror and thought, "Is this one of the bad ones? One who hates me before he even knows my name?" If I were black--right now in 2017--I would know what that's like. I think that's something white people need to realize. Whether they agree with black athletes kneeling for the national anthem or not, they need to realize that they do so knowing what it's like to worry about running into that bad cop. They do so knowing what the word "lynched" really means. They feel the true weight of that word.

And I don't--not the way they do. Yet here I sit pounding angrily on a keyboard, even though none of this has ever affected me personally. And that's another kind of privilege. I'm sitting here livid about things I was never subjected to; things my parents and grandparents were never subjected to. I wonder how upset I would be if I were black, and saw that white man's breezy comment about a horror he can't begin to understand? I know I wouldn't handle it with the grace most African-Americans show in those circumstances. Maybe that's because I haven't had a lifetime of practice dealing with things like that. Like they have.

From the Gangplank to the Big Hole: Deep History in the High Plains

If you drive west along Interstate 80 from Cheyenne, Wyoming, you'll soon begin to cross the Rocky Mountains. But the strange thing is, you might not realize it. In this part of Wyoming, the high plains are really, really high. They form a great ramp that goes up to 7,000 feet--almost to the top of this section of the Laramie Range, which is low by Rocky Mountain standards. When you get to the place where the plains touch the granite of the mountains, you're higher than any point in the eastern United States, but it's mostly a big flat place. The only clue at first that you're crossing a mountain range are a few low granite hills that poke up through the plains.

This highest section of the high plains is called the Gangplank, and it played a key role in American history. When the Union Pacific railroad was looking for a way across the Rockies, they weren't interested in the soaring, craggy peaks to the north and south. That's much grander scenery, but you don't want to build a railroad through it. What they needed was a smooth climb to a gentle mountain pass, and this is where they found it. The trains still go this way today, sharing the Gangplank with Interstate 80.

The Gangplank isn't the most scenic entrance to the Rockies, but it's an fascinating place--once you know what what you're looking at. This is a landscape with a story to tell, and that story is much, much older than the Transcontinental Railroad. If you could go back in time about 30 million years, most of the Rocky Mountain region looked a lot like this stretch of I-80 today. The mountains were already millions of years old, and they had eroded until they were almost buried in their own debris, which formed sloping plains like the Gangplank. Only the tops of the mountains protruded, as the granite hills still do here. The Gangplank region is a fossil landscape; a window into a mostly-vanished world.

This world began to change a few million years ago, when rivers began to eat away at the plains and uncover the mountains. Geologists aren't sure if this happened because the whole region was lifted, making the rivers steeper, or because the climate grew wetter, making the rivers more powerful. Perhaps it was a bit of both. In any case, the mountains were uncovered, in an event known as the Exhumation of the Rockies. Because the Gangplank is between two rivers, it was left behind as one of the only places where the plains still rise to the mountaintops. The rocks here preserve an unusually complete record of the rise, burial, and resurrection of the Rocky Mountains.

It's an epic tale, and to understand it, a good place to start is to leave the interstate at Exit 345, and pull into a parking lot full of big rigs. At the east end of the lot is a sign about the Gangplank and its geologic history, with a nice (though slightly outdated) diagram, shown to the right.

As the image shows, three very different geologic structures come together here. The "You are here" marker is at the edge of the Gangplank, which is made of almost-horizontal layers of rock. At 5 to 37 million years old, these rocks are youngsters. But just a couple miles west, you enter a far more ancient landscape. Here the granite and metamorphic rocks are between 1.4 and 1.7 billion years old. Hard, ancient rocks like this are called basement rocks, because they form the foundation for most of North America (though they're often deeply buried below younger layers of sedimentary rock).

Now, if you look north or south, you may see layers of red and tan rock that poke up through the plains at a steep angle. These range from about 300 million to 65 million years old. They're mostly buried here, but in other parts of the Rockies they're exposed and and breathtaking. At places like Red Rocks near Denver, or the Flatirons near Boulder, you can see that they lean against the ancient basement rocks like a stack of plywood against a wall.

But they weren't always tilted like this. Before the Rockies began to rise around 70 million years ago, they were flat. Then the basement rocks rose from deep underground and tilted them upward; pushing them aside like a man coming up through a trap door. But what about the near-horizontal rocks of the Gangplank? Why weren't they shoved sideways? Because they weren't there yet. They formed as the mountains began to wear down, and that's why they're still relatively flat.

That's the basic story you get as you stand on the high, flat expanse of the Gangplank and read the sign above. But standing by the interstate looking at a sign isn't that satisfying. What we need is a place where we can descend down into the the rocks sketched on the sign, and see them in real life. Luckily, there's just such a place a few miles to the south, just across the Colorado border.

To get there, take the I-80 service road a couple miles west and head south on Harriman Road. It's a dirt road, but a relatively civilized one. To your left, you'll soon get a good look at the tilted sedimentary rocks that lean against the ancient granite. After driving among stubby granite hills for a few miles, you'll emerge into a sweeping landscape of red mesas and the high, snow-capped peaks of the Colorado Front Range. It's big, beautiful country.

Our destination is Red Mountain Open Space, a public park managed by the city of Fort Collins, Colorado. The park is in a valley the ranchers here call the Big Hole. As holes go, it is quite large, especially if you look into it from the edge of the Gangplank. To get a basic sense of the geology of the Big Hole, take a look back at the sign from I-80. South of the Gangplank is an eroded region of older, tilted sedimentary rocks. That's the landscape we're in now, but with one wrinkle.

No, seriously--there's an actual wrinkle in the rocks here, and it's a big one, called the Sand Creek Anticline. To see it, head east from the open space parking lot on Bent Rock trail, following Sand Creek. Soon you'll enter a canyon that cuts straight through a hill of red and salmon-colored rock. We'll call this Red Mountain. The rocks here rise and then fall again in a big arch, or anticline. The picture above shows the curve in the rocks inside the canyon. When you leave the canyon and look back to the south at Red Mountain, as in the picture below, you get an even better view of the anticline. The yellow lines show how the rock layers bend inside the canyon, while the steep layers in the foreground have eroded into formations called flatirons. This anticline is an asymmetrical one--the layers on one side are much steeper than the other. There's a reason for that, as we'll see.

If you turn around here and look north, you'll see that the Sand Creek Anticline runs for several miles through the Big Hole. The hill in the next picture doesn't have a name that I can find, so I'll call it Swoop Mountain, because the rocks here take a big swooping path across it. On the left side of Swoop Mountain, you can see the same red rocks that form Red Mountain, but there are several younger layers lying on top (these layers once covered Red Mountain, too, but have eroded away.) As the yellow lines show, all the layers across Swoop Mountain drop down from the west (slanting down off the Rocky Mountain front) and suddenly rise again steeply, like the rocks in Red Mountain (visible on the far right). Then they slope gradually to the east. Some of the yellow lines go through empty space, because some of the rocks have eroded away. The lines show how the rocks would bend if they were all still there. Swoop Mountain shows that surface landforms don't necessarily mirror the shape of the rocks below. Here the rocks bend downward right where the surface bends upward as a hill.

From down here in the Big Hole, we see that the sign on I-80 is basically correct, but simplified. The layers here do slope down to the east, but they have a sharp bend in the middle that doesn't appear on the sign. The reason for the bend, most likely, is that the basement rocks below the surface have a fault in them--they've broken into two blocks here. The block on the east side of the valley has lifted and rotated, leaving the sedimentary rocks draped over the fault like carpet over a cracked concrete floor.

But what about the Gangplank? How does it fit into all this? You can see it on the horizon in the picture above, but to get a better look, we need to hike to the other side of Swoop Mountain. From there, you see the view below. The cliffs on the right are the Chalk Bluffs; the escarpment formed by the southern edge of the Gangplank. The picture shows that these rock layers are basically flat. They weren't tilted and warped by the rising Rockies, because they formed afterward--from the eroding Rockies. The red layers on the left are tilted, though you can't see it very well in the picture.

The contact between these two rock layers is an example of an angular unconformity--a place where rocks of different ages and angles meet. There's no physical gap between the two layers, but over 150 million years is missing from the rock record. The deep red rocks are about 245 to 285 million years--older than the dinosaurs. The white rocks sitting on top of them here--more visible in the picture below--are called the White River Formation. They formed in a time when the dinosaurs were long extinct and strange prehistoric mammals roamed the West. But 150 million years is is just a minor gap. Further east, the White River Formation lies directly on top of basement rocks that are at least 1,400 million years old. That's a lot of missing history. Luckily, much of it can be found in other places.

I should mention one more feature, because if you take this hike, you'll notice it. Walking back toward the parking lot, on the east side of Swoop and Red Mountains, you'll see the weird crest of white rocks in the image below. Those are layers of gypsum from the Permian Period, when this part of the country was a shallow, salty lagoon near a hot desert--similar to the salt flats of today's Persian Gulf. Water evaporated rapidly in these conditions, leaving behind deposits of gypsum (or alabaster, if you want it to sound fancy). These layers erode and dissolve faster than most other rocks, often leaving cavities that can cave in as sinkholes. Rattlesnakes like to gather in one of the sinkholes near here to spend the winter in cozy heaps, so watch your step in these parts.

We've covered a lot of ground here, and an enormous amount of time, so maybe it would be good to step back and look at the big picture. That would be the image below. This is an aerial view of the whole region, copied from Google Earth and labeled by me. Now, I'm librarian, not a geologist, so take it with a grain of salt--the lines and boundaries are far from exact, and will likely make real geologists cringe.

Satellite Image from Google Maps. Amateur annotations by the author.

Here we see the Big Hole in the right foreground, the basement rocks of the Laramie Range to the left, and the Gangplank to the northeast. Interstate 80 is a few miles past the top of the image. In the Big Hole, you can see how the sedimentary rocks tilt to the east, pop up again at the Sand Creek Anticline, and then tilt eastward again. To the northeast, the Gangplank is much less tilted, but it also slopes gradually eastward to form the the western Nebraska plains. The caprock of the gangplank is a coarse sandstone called the Ogallala Formation. It's very porous, and it gets waterlogged below the ground to the east, where it forms the famous Ogalalla Aquifer.

This is vast, impressive country, spanning big distances and stupendous amounts of time. It's a whole series of ancient worlds, stacked one on top of the other. That's true in many places, of course, but here you can descend into the remnants of those former worlds, and think about how they rose and fell. It's a wondrous landscape that can tell many stories, and the more stories you learn, the more wondrous it becomes.

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To Explore Further:

Geology Underfoot Along the Front Range. Lon Abbot and Terri Cook

Roadside Geology of Wyoming. David Lageson and Darwin Spearing

Roadside Geology of Colorado. Felicie Williams and Halka Chronic

Geologic map of the Table Mountain quadrangle and adjacent parts of the Round Butte and Buckeye quadrangles, Larimer County, Colorado, and Laramie County, Wyoming. Courtright, T.R., and Braddock, W.A.

Geologic map of the Laramie 30' x 60' quadrangle, Albany and Laramie Counties, Wyoming: Wyoming. Ver Ploeg, A.J., and Boyd, C.S.

Stratigraphic Chart of Colorado.