In response to the case of an article by an evolutionary biologist that referenced the difference in strength levels between the men and women being censored by Instagram as “hate speech”.

People should never have generated the category of “hate speech”. It’s such a weird concept.

Hate is an emotion, and we aren’t generally well equipped to make firm judgements about or decisions based on the alleged subjective emotional states of other people. It’s a very slippery and vague thing to hang so much significance on. And yet we find it everywhere. It is a cultural phenomenon. It’s very hard to pin down all the meanings it has; legal, cultural, moral, and psychological.

I don’t think it’s even possible at the moment to chase down all those questions of what hate (speech) really means, not here at least. The more pertinent question is, what is its function in our society? Simple. It’s a tool. What is it a tool for? How do people use it? Like all language, it has a conventional social significance based I what we use it for. So what do we use it for?

I would answer, based on my closest and most practical reading, that it is a tool for creating exceptions to limitations on the regulation of speech so it can be safely made the subject of moral, legal, social, and psychological force and control. It’s a means for creating a special class of acts that you’re able to break the usual restrictions and limitations of regulation on, because it has been classified as a special kind of act that justifies it. It’s “hate”. It allows you to being force to bear that you otherwise could not.

Hate is a term we use for opinions, positions, attitudes, and actions that would normally be within the scope of your own personal discretion, but that have because of their special status been excepted from those freedoms and protections. And in the case of actions that would in themselves be criminal in an ordinary way, it overlays a separate, secondary level of legal, moral, and psychological significance and censure. That is my functional definition, or rather diagnosis, of hate.

Moreover, because hate is a subjective psychological state, it allows us to bring to bear the forces of moral, social, and legal censure against people purely on the basis of their subjectivity, on the basis of who they are, or who we impute them to be, people possessing a “hateful” internal state. It allows certain ways of being, and any expressions that might indicate them, to be expressly forbidden from the outset. And because it is such an inherently subjective designation, it has enormous flexibility in its potential use.
The fact that this article I mentioned was classified as “hate speech”, to the point that it fell afoul of systemic regulation and actual censure, shows just how much force the term “hate” allows you to bring to bear. The use of the term is far more revealing of its nature than anything else about it. It’s so powerful that it’s kind of amazing, and it can be wielded with remarkably arbitrary and unquestionable power. Just like that, you can get a scientific article, one containing virtually no emotion, whose claims are perfectly verifiable, pulled off a public platform as “hate speech”. The whole concept is a social and legal doomsday weapon. And we are only just now starting to take it seriously when we see (the beginnings of) just what can be done with it. Because the answer is, as this should demonstrate, almost anything.

A better functional definition for hate speech would be “speech that I hate, that I can therefore bring social, legal, and moral force against, specifically on that basis”. Because its central concept is subjective, its application is fundamentally subjective. That isn’t a moral argument, it’s a technical fact. Hate is in the eye of the beholder, and the only real limit on diagnosis is how easily some determinative quorum are moved to feel it. The central irony of hate speech is that it tells you far more about the emotions of the accuser than the accused. And that, I deem, has always been its nature, for better or worse. We don’t condemn hate speech because it is hateful, but because we hate it.

P.S. It is easy to suppose that when we imagine the potential consequences of such cases, that we overstate their practical potential. It seems really awful from an ideological standpoint, but less so from a practical one. It’s not really a big deal, just a silly little paper being censored. As if ideology and what we do in public society had no impact on the actual behaviors we will eventually exhibit.

People don’t just talk or think in a purely idle manner, they are generating simulations. They are playing mental games as practice for real ones. But mental games are often limited by their real-world applicability. You may have ideas that are very hard to implement, or that few others share. But when enough people share an idea, and it takes fewer than you would think, ideas begin to spill over into practice. A culture develops new rules of what’s possible.

In countries with fewer protections, such as China or Singapore, you can have the police show up at your door for a comment you make on social media. But the same holds true now for countries like Scotland and Australia and Canada. You need to be careful what you say, because you might run afoul of the law. And I don’t mean for bomb threats, I mean for unacceptable speech that violates hate crime standards, speech like that in this article. People can and do lose their jobs and see their lives and careers assaulted and censured and punished. This isn’t hyperbole, it’s already happening.

The leap from social censure to outright legal punishment is one that is becoming easier and easier to make. Already in England, Canada, Scotland, and Australia it is being made. Cases have already begun to trickle in, precedents are being set. Far from being subject to mere social censure, failing to use preferred pronouns in Canada has now, in an actual court case, been declared a legal violation of human rights and subject to legal consequences and enforcement. In fact it has been deemed a crime against humanity.

Why? Because legal structures were put into place making it possible a few years ago. Social structures against hate speech were given legal powers. Matters of personal speech are now governed by legal force and criminal punishment. And once that door is open, it’s open. Speech itself has become a legitimate matter for government regulatory control.

The problem we often encounter, when we create and take hold of such novel structures and powers, is that we don’t really have a clear idea what it is that we have just made possible. We imagine the potential uses of our inventions through very limited and rosy glasses, and we neglect their real potential, as well as what a difference a little time will make. These things always take time.

The fact that this particular scientific article could be classified as “hate speech” and censored from public viewing is a warning that we’ve unleashed powers that have already evolved beyond our control or expectations. And the leap from social punishment to legal punishment is only a matter of adding a few legal structures and removing a few legal limitations. A leap that is already being taken all over the western world.

It may be alarmist to point all this out, but if I am alarmist it is only because what we see happening is alarming. And the barriers holding things back from becoming even more consequential are far less substantial than we imagine. In fact they are already growing so thin that they are being pierced in a dozen places.

Afterward: In response to some objections someone raised to the preceding article.

As someone who spent years taking quite a bit of verbal and physical abuse, I can guarantee that they’re both unpleasant. But there is a massive difference in how we treat them legally. Even with my kids, there’s a big difference between calling someone names and physically hitting your sibling. No one denies that subjective states matter, and words matter. There are just some things that are much easier to regulate legally, and some things you should take the greatest pains not to regulate, not with legal punitive force, except in the most extreme and limited of circumstances. And speech is one of those things.

– She then raised the example of how you aren’t allowed to shout “fire” in a crowded theater as an example of a precedent for the regulation of speech.-

Yes, the fire example just goes to show how careful we have been historically about any restriction of speech. We restrict speech in that case because it could directly result in an immediate panic, causing dozens of people to be trampled to death. That’s a pretty extreme case, for which we make a little exception, and it’s really more of a joke now than a real thing anyone is worried about. It’s not like there are any pending cases.

Even to get some minor restrictions placed on what people can say about health products on their packaging required a bunch of children to be poisoned first (read about how the FDA first came to be). And even now we make tons of exceptions with lots of loopholes and even create complete exemptions for some products (like herbs and supplements), so they can be free to lie to and endanger you.
And, having been on the receiving end of a lot of poor treatment, I have a real sense of the value of these freedoms. Some freedoms just can’t be safely curtailed, at least not by the government. Some things should be left in the hands of people. Some forms of agency, and yes, consequence, are too important to give up.

Given the option, I wouldn’t wish things to be different for my own sake. I don’t want more things criminalized, especially essentially human subjective and interpersonal experiences, even if it means I had some bad ones. Often, when I was being physically mistreated, the one freedom I still had, literally, was speech. And I used it as a way to fight back. Because although I couldn’t stop what was happening to me physically, that didn’t mean they could make me feel bad about it (Socratic reserve), and they couldn’t stop me from telling them what I thought about it, including the fact that I wasn’t very impressed.

That probably bought me even more punishment, because people don’t like sass when they’re trying to break you; they expect you to grovel, or at least act distressed. The fact that I never gave my persecutors satisfaction made me a perpetual challenge.

Having been subject to regular verbal abuse during that same period of around eight years, I also can say that that’s part of why I’m against bringing the law into such things. It’s just not the right domain for those powers and solutions.

Some things have to be left in human hands to figure out and struggle through. You can’t legally compel people to respect or like or be kind to one another. And if you try to force them by law it doesn’t work, you create a sort of bizzare, fearful, performative mechanism, a facsimile, pharisaism. And it becomes terribly hard to control. It runs away with itself. It precludes real human interaction in an area that is just too precious to mess with. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because it matters too much.

It’s not easy to describe how and why controlling speech doesn’t work. It’s worth learning about countries that have gone down the road of policing language. Not just in a personal, human, or social sense, but legally. It all sounds good, it’s sold as a good thing, as an act of kindness and safety and protection. But it always goes terribly, terribly wrong. It’s a classic pitfall. Some powers are just to extreme for us to wield responsibly. And there’s something particularly wonderful about the freedom we all gain from having speech be free of government control. As Americans it’s easy to take it for granted, who have never missed it. But by the time you get into a situation where you do, you’ve already let things go too far to object.