What Eleanor might have said

Eleanor Roosevelt said you can't be humiliated without your consent.

At least I thought she did until I tried to track the quote down. I couldn't find it. I don't think I conjured this memory out of the blue, but pending positive evidence I'm treating it as something she could have said. It sounds like her common sense.*

The point of the adage, as I read it, is that humiliation requires acceptance of a judgment rendered by someone else. If I'm criticized, I have a choice. I can accept the criticism or reject it. If it’s false, rejection is in order. I might be annoyed or angry, but I won’t be humiliated. It's only when I accept the accusation as true that I become humiliated. Humiliation is my emotional acknowledgment that I’m at fault.

To be sure, humiliation isn't all that's involved when people say bad things about us. In Salem in the 1690s women and men were accused of being witches. They might or might not have been humiliated. But nineteen of them were definitely executed.

Yet this example makes stark the difference between words and actions. The fault of the Salem court was not that it heard the testimony of the accusers but that it wrongfully executed the accused.

The distinction might be worth considering at a moment when speech is being legally weaponized again. The House of Representatives approved the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would impose federal sanctions on colleges that permit certain speech said to be critical of Jews. The Senate has yet to consider the measure. If it approves and the president doesn't veto, the courts will determine constitutionality.

While this is pending, a reasonable question to ask is whether such an approach is beneficial to those the bill’s sponsors are trying to protect. House speaker Mike Johnson thinks so. “Antisemitism is a virus and it will spread if it's not stamped out," he said. "We have to act.”

Viruses are notoriously hard to stamp out, especially by law. Can anyone name a single idea that has been legislated into extinction? For centuries Rome tried to crush Christianity, only for it to take over the empire. Various states tried to ban evolution from school curricula. We’re still evolving.

Johnson proposes a zero-transmission model for viruses. The model’s historical record isn’t promising. Perhaps we should try something else. How about herd immunity?

Let people say what they want. Let bad ideas face the test of good ideas. Don’t outlaw opinions. People can’t develop resistance to bad ideas they’ve never heard. Soviet communism didn’t collapse because the House Un-American Activities Committee hounded communists out of Hollywood. It collapsed when it was tested in the real world and failed. 

The biggest drawback of efforts to outlaw hateful speech is that they leave the objects of the speech at the mercy of the hatemongers. If your child gets taunted at school, you can go to the school and try to have the taunters silenced. It won’t work. They’ll just speak in whispers. More perniciously, you’ll signal to your kid that he or she is peculiarly vulnerable. Alternatively, you can teach your kid that the taunters are the ones with the problem. They should be ignored, pitied or told to eff off. It’s not easy. There will be tears. But your kid will be stronger for it, empowered rather than fearful. 

Viruses thrive in close quarters. Open the windows, let the sun in. Let the idiots rage. Don’t take them as seriously as they take themselves. 

But what about bystanders, who can't tell truth from falsehood? Won't they be led astray by lies? If people are allowed to deny the Holocaust, won't the deniers win?

The first part of an answer is that outlawing an idea makes it more appealing, rather than less, to precisely the people most prone to absurd theories. If Big Brother won’t let us think it, it must be true.

Second, do we really want government to decide which views are acceptable and which not? Government these days is widely distrusted, with reason. Shall we subcontract our consciences to it?

Third, democracy depends on a willingness to let people make up their own minds. If we can't muster that willingness, we might as well forget about this whole self-government thing.

Which is what we’ll have done if we abdicate our responsibility to think for ourselves.

*Reader Kindler found the quote I was looking for and kindly shared it: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Whether this was exactly what ER said, and where she said it, remain murky. See https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/30/no-one-inferior/.