Reasons for the irrational

Last night’s television threw up a thoughtful challenge to free speech advocates. The program I refer to was the latest documentary from Louis Theroux. In it, he spends a few weeks embedded with the Phelps family, who call themselves the Most Hated Family in America. This moniker is quite possibly true: the extended Phelps family, which together with a few other friends and converts comprise the Westboro Baptist Church, are notorious for picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq with gaudy yellow signs that scream pleasantries such ‘God Hates Fags’ and ‘Thank God for IEDs’ (Improvised Explosive Devices, as used by Iraqi insurgents). The reason they do so, naturally, is that America is doomed to hell as a result of its tolerance of homosexuality, and therefore any soldiers that die in its name are worthy of the most vicious censure. Significantly, Congress has passed a number of laws specifically to limit the activities of the family, including making them stage their demonstrations a good distance from the funerals themselves.

It is not hard to condemn the repellent doctrine of the Phelps. But what makes their case relevant to the defence of free speech doesn't lie in finding strong arguments with which to confront this kind of doctrine, but in the difficulty their critics have in meaningfully engaging with them at all. They resisted every argument put forward by Theroux, both theological and humanistic, without even the merest hint that they might waver from their church’s orthodoxy. This is not to say that a professor of theology would have succeeded where Theroux failed, as his engagements with them hardly turned on the finer points of biblical doctrine, and in any case the lanky journalist is a master at probing the weaknesses of any rigid standpoint. The reason why his discussions with the family were entirely fruitless was not that he lacked the necessary theological understanding, but rather because the ideology of the Westboro Baptist Church is impervious to reason. This then raises the interesting questions: what is the relationship between reason and free speech, and to what extent is the former a constitutive ingredient of the latter? Certainly reason is an indispensible building block in the construction of a robust discursive culture, for in the absence of reasoned arguments real debate is effectively impossible. So is free speech concerned only with an engagement that carries the possibility of a constructive, or meaningful outcome?

The danger lying in wait for this line of argument can easily be anticipated. Once an opinion is deemed irrational it is a small step to say that it doesn’t deserve public expression, or even that it should be legislated against, particularly if it is pernicious and driven by hate. The problem clearly concerns who is to make such judgments. Reason, just as much as dogma, can easily become a powerful tool for oppression. Further, it should be noted that part of what it means to debate is concerned with smoothing out the irrational in any given perspective, and about having the weaknesses or unsubstantiated elements of an argument tested against the minds of other people. It is therefore very difficult to divide the rational and irrational into clear-cut categories in this context. A tentative answer might then be that while reason is necessary to a constructive debate, the right to free speech goes further than this, and must embrace speech that is not sustainable (by most people's standards) by reasoned argument. Indeed, there does seem to be some merit in even the most unconstructive discussions, if they are open and frank, even if such merit lies only in the very fact of their taking place as opposed to their suppression. This question must be explored further, but for the time being we can thank the Phelps for highlighting the contentious importance of pointlessness.

Beau Hopkins