Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and these days I've become increasingly interested in the idea of democracy.

Democracy? We all know it. Most of us are in favor of it. If you took a poll, most people would say that democracy is a good idea.

Many people would say that it's under threat. There are people who are working to undermine democracy. People might not agree on who those people are, okay?

Here at Mindscape we're less interested in the political moment of the or contemporary time and more interested in the underlying ideas that are used to justify and to push forward or to pull back on an idea like democracy.

What is democracy? How does it work? How should it work? Why is it such a good idea? Is it always such a good idea? These are the kinds of things that I'm interested in thinking about.

Today we're going to be talking about an aspect of democracy or an idea that is very closely intertwined with the idea of democracy, which is the idea of free speech.

Again, if you ask most people they would say yes, free speech. I am in favor of that. It's when the rubber hits the road and when you're getting into individual specific examples that it becomes harder.

And actually I think it should become harder. This is one of the things that I would personally want to emphasize here is that the way to go wrong talking and thinking about free speech is to pretend that it's easy, to pretend that it's absolute and there's a clearly right way to think about it and a clearly wrong way to think about it.

Think about the following two extreme examples, extreme versions of free speech, even if you admit that free speech is good, what do you mean by that?

So one version might be everyone has the freedom to say whatever they want, but literally nobody else will ever hear them.

So that's a kind of free speech. You can say whatever you want, right? But if nobody hears you, what is the point? That's really not quite maybe enough.

Whereas on the other side you might say, okay, to me free speech means not only can you say whatever you want, but everyone has to hear what you say.

And then worse than that, everyone has to agree with me. That's a very extreme form of free speech that probably also nobody would go along with and what we want is somewhere in the middle, but where in the middle.

And both these examples drive home the importance of not only thinking about the person speaking, but of the audience, the people being spoken to.

And that's why I really like the kind of analysis provided by today's guest, Teresa Bejohn, who is a political theorist at the University of Oxford in the UK.

And someone who's thought deeply about free speech, also in a historical context, not only as a political theorist.

So what she points out is that the traditional, if you go all the way back to ancient Athens, there were different Greek words corresponding to different notions of free speech.

There was a notion of Isagoria, which was the right of citizens to participate in public debate, which was much more public facing than this different notion of parisia, which was a license to say what you please, to be frank, to speak your mind, to be politically incorrect, if you want to put it that way.

And we translate both of these the same way, which leads us to confusion sometimes when we think about what free speech should be.

And then she traces it through history and points out the importance in the United States, especially a very interesting case of the early founding of Rhode Island, which was as she points out, one of the most open tolerant societies in the world at the time.

On the importance of civility in the sense of, I should listen to you, not civility in the sense that when I say bad things about you, I should say them in polite terms, but I actually have an obligation as a listener to listen to you.

And that's a really high bar when it comes to free speech.

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