Applying Harvey C. Mansfield’s “worthy speech”

Introduction

This is Phil Beaver’s paraphrase and biased interpretation of Mansfield’s essay, “The Value of Free Speech,” National Affairs, No. 37, Fall 2018; https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-value-of-free-speech. My bias promotes the agreement to civic self-discipline that is offered in the U.S. preamble.

Unfortunately, Mansfield uses the term “worthy speech” without relating it to collaboration for the-objective-truth. Instead, he promotes traditional, mysterious political-lordship. His only two uses of “truth” relate to opinion rather than actual reality. The U.S. preamble offers a civic, civil, and legal agreement by which fellow citizens may collaborate to discover civic integrity and manage elected and appointed officials at local, state, and federal levels in order to empower each individual’s responsible happiness.

Worthy speech

            So far, “our liberalism” in the US has valued free speech to the exclusion of understanding worthy speech. But for what function is speech important? I think the worthy speech collaborates for civic integrity.

            Falsely shouting “fire!” is forbidden, because harm may result. But that’s about the extent of judicial interest in anything but permitting speech. But what is “the value of normal, non-obscene speech?

            “Speech consists in giving reasons,” and distinguishes human talk from animal talk. It empowers concern rather than indifference. But it can be used to deceive, to gain power, or to rule. “Even a lie must make sense” in order to empower abuse. Humans do not subjugate themselves to tyrants unless the reasons make sense to the people. Albert Einstein informed us that civic citizens do not lie so as to lessen misery and loss.

Erroneous traditions

            Intellectuals like John Stewart Mill held that individual freedom demands speech for every audience. But false speech and nearly true speech do not help direct civilization. The Supreme Court exacerbated this problem by making speech a subset of expression. For example, not saluting the flag is speech for religious reasons, and there are other examples of word as act. “Freedom of expression” supplanted “freedom of speech.”

            If freedom of expression is absolute, dispute of worthiness has no power. Saluting the flag becomes ceremonial rather than an influence on fellow citizens and has only a religious meaning. And the more speech becomes an art form, the more obscure its message becomes. Civic speech becomes reduced to entertainment, protest, obstruction, profanity, and violence. “Shouting and screaming take precedence over persuasion or threaten to become the normal means of persuasion.”

            Valuing intensity rather than worthiness lessens speech as much as egoism does. Worthiness derives from “a call to justice” rather than personal favor. Whereas Plato writes for statutory justice, Nietzsche merely wants to win the dominant opinion. Socrates perhaps thought he acted nobly to die to uphold the rule of law, even though the jury lied about events and attacked Socrates’ character.

Character assassination is popular in politics, especially when the opposition claims a leader is a demagogue. Political scientists team with social scientists to concoct statistics that support their bid for power, creating subjective opinions that support their interests. Surveys are turned into “objective data.” Manipulation of statistics imposes policy on the people. Thereby, the people never express their preferences: there is no free speech in politics.

Not worthy if not spoken with frank humility

            Worthy speech needs to promote itself against its enemies, artistic self-expression and self-interest, yet preserve the enemies’ freedoms. This challenge can by met by free citizens more than by free humans. That is, civic integrity is possible only within a country rather than for the whole world. Speech that collaborates to discover statutory justice is worthy and other speech is tolerated. Can reason guide statutory justice?

Reason an insufficient human construct

            Statutory justice offers freedom-from oppression so as to have the liberty-to responsibly pursue individual happiness rather than the dictates of another. “By responsibly” means without preventing another’s opportunity. Thus, individuals collaborate for mutual, comprehensive safety and security (scholars might label it “the common good”) or civic discipline. Civic citizens manage their governments, providing political liberty, and electable politicians are first civic citizens.

Civic citizens who pursue the arts, which are human expressions that may or may not represent the-objective-truth, have no monopoly on the discovery of civic integrity. The-objective-truth emerges from physics, the object rather than its study, and physics does not react to reason. Thus, I am disputing the convention that humans subject to reason. The human being is ultimately too powerful to subject to anything but the-objective-truth. The human being accepts that the body, the mind, and the person stop functioning at death. Hope that a soul lives on is a human construct that so far has not been disproven. Therefore, rejecting the construct is unobjectionable.

The mysterious basis of tyranny

Yet, some artistic humans posit that death may be mysteriously defeated. They require the private pursuit of the mystery in addition to collaboration for civic integrity. Thereby, the artist may pursue individual happiness in the metaphysical. However, he or she must accept the economic burden of pursuing the metaphysical, in order to maintain civic integrity. Economic viability is a matter of necessity rather than of consent. Civic citizens who do not believe in souls do not want and should not bear the expense of pursuing rewards for souls.

The artist uses Chapter XI Machiavellianism to persuade the many to expect economic viability. Metaphysically, the abuses of the political artist are intended by the people’s gods, but the mystery of their god’s justice will emerge in the (evidently distant) future. In other words, the politician is exempt from blame for partnering with the clergy, because the believers are “establishing” the rewards for their souls. A minority of citizens resist the tyranny, but believers, in the majority, impose on non-believers anyway. The Chapter XI Machiavellians nominate candidates for office that participate in the tyranny, keeping the non-metaphysical minority from effectiveness. ”Liberty for the few can be available if exercised with care so that it does not reach the attention of the public authority.” I did not discern Mansfield’s definition of “public authority,” but I think the-objective-truth is the public authority.

Many people want to live without self-discipline rather than govern fellow citizens

Politicians recognize that the people do not want to take charge of civic integrity beyond disciplining their own behavior. The church-state partnership offers to lead for a price: freedom of the masses. And voluntary slavery has no corrective power. Yielding to government seems a necessity for self-preservation. Also, many people are bemused by banal appetites and never develop personal integrity much less civic integrity. Yielding to pleasure and pain becomes habitual, and worthy speech has no appeal. Only the end of economic viability, either by war or by depletion of resources, could motivate change. Fidelity to the-objective-truth offers relief.

Humor may offer temporary relief, but wit is another art form that can obscure the worthy expression. For example, Nicolo Machiavelli wrote in irony to warn us of various political powers yet save his own life. Scholars debate his message 505 years later. “We also need . . . economic liberty to make us prosperous, artistic liberty to make our lives beautiful — but these are not as serious as political liberty.” Worthy expression is essential for developing civic integrity rather than establishing the dominant opinion or the allowable preference. However, some fellow citizens receive Machiavelli’s warnings as support for their individual judgment and preferences.

Civic integrity a worthy common good

Both worthy speech and political power struggle for civic integrity. The “common good” is mutual, comprehensive safety and security, and individual happiness may conform to civic integrity. That is, every citizen’s individual happiness must either accommodate the other citizen’s responsible pursuits or suffer constraint. The elites among the people, for example, the philosophers, have had ample time to discover the-objective-truth and promote personal discipline and fidelity by elected and appointed officials. Only when the philosophers are listening to and comporting to the people’s worthy speech can civic integrity be developed. With worthy speech derived from self-discipline, fellow citizens may influence their elected representatives to maintain and improve civic integrity.

A traditional division of the political artists

Despite 230 years or 12 generations with the U.S. preamble’s agreement offered to fellow citizens, allegiance is divided not between citizens who want to collaborate for civic integrity and dissidents, but by party: the party of the many and the party of the few. Within each party there is an oligarchy, and it may but may not vie for civic integrity, whether influencing the whole party or not. Regardless of intentions, the oligarchy knows that Chapter XI Machiavellianism influences the people to favor the policy that claims to comport to the will of the believer’s personal god. In theory, without a personal god, a human is no better than biology’s other placental mammals.

Both Aristotle and James Madison erroneously viewed government as a whole comprised of the few who managed the necessary many. However, the few is not above the agreement that is stated in the U.S. preamble. There are no lords of the U.S. preamble’s agreement. Election entails the commitment to fulfill the office that is authorized by fellow citizens, but does not qualify the elected official to arbitrary lordship of any kind.

But Madison infamously said, “Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe.” I doubt Madison liked the U.S. preamble. Aristotle and Madison seemed to think, “Democracy speaks for mankind as one individual human to another; oligarchy speaks for humanity as a whole vis-à-vis the rest of the world or the universe.” The U.S. preamble indeed addresses a universal purpose and human goals, but the agreement applies only to fellow citizens.

The U.S. preamble offers responsible, individual happiness

Every human being may develop the individual power, the individual energy, and the individual authority (IPEA) to develop civic integrity or not. When most of the citizens in a country develop IPEA, the country may develop civic integrity, electing officials who comport to civic integrity. Fidelity to the-objective-truth is essential rather than noble.

The nation struggles for psychological independence

Mansfield erroneously extols the Declaration of Independence’s signers’ tacit claims that the King of England is just a man and that Congress serves better than Parliament for the states. And, as Mansfield has pointed out earlier, a pledge is merely a symbol.

America’s physical independence was won under the military strategy and might of France, especially in the deciding victory at Yorktown, VA (1781) leading to the Treaty of Paris (1783) Why Paris? Further, Mansfield seems ignorant of the liberation of Worcester, MA in September 1774, by the hands of thousands of Massachusetts farmers. I suspect scholarly support of Mansfield opinion more than ignorance. However, America’s psychological independence is yet to be established.

An elected official is not a quality citizen if he or she does not develop the-objective-truth as the basis for achieving the goals that are stated in the U.S. preamble. If the official promotes elected officials or the clergy rather than fellow citizens, he or she ought to lose the next election. Yet Mansfield attempts to prove that elected citizens are more equal than voting citizens: quality above quantity. Mansfield may not have admitted he may use IPEA.

Mansfield’s ad hominem, Trump attack

At last, Mansfield gets to his point: given “two great parties, one that wishes to extend and another that wishes to restrict the power of the people . . . the Democrats and the Republicans, who seem as liberals vs. conservatives (the left and the right) to fit this general description.” Even under the non-Republican President Trump, “our two parties are locked in competition between a more quantitative ideal of inclusion and a more qualitative ideal of distinction.” The party oligarchies compete over opinion without appreciating fellow citizens. “Democrats want virtue but in pursuit of equality; Republicans want popularity but from a virtuous people. Democrats imply a whole that is inclusive of all, when each is understood as equal to everyone else; Republicans imply a whole with hierarchy and ranking of those who are better or best at the top.”

Both parties mimic British classism and fail to encourage and coach the power of the individual human being to establish civic integrity. “The standard of the best human is too strict to include all humans, and the class of all humans is too loose to do justice to the best.”

An agreement that offers achievable public goals for worthy choice

Regarding the U.S., Nietzsche erred “to say that man has a thousand and one goals.” The U.S. preamble offers about seven goals and the freedom to either adopt them or not. Independence does not imply dissent, but often, rejection of the U.S. preamble’s agreement is due to the desire to practice some form of dissidence: pretense, classism, crime, evil and other alienations of fellow citizens.

The choice of being a civic citizen who trusts-in and commits-to the purpose and goals of the U.S. preamble is the classical liberalism that conservatives struggle to defend but fail to do so because they do not admit to the-objective-truth. Instead, conservative scholars cite millennia-old thought to propose exclusivism of the few despite the obvious: Elitism is not worthy speech.

Conclusion

There remains the question of how to end a travesty first recorded by Plato, imposed on this continent by the British empire, and maintained these 229 years by the U.S. Congress. Most of the fellow citizens, perhaps 2/3, may adopt the civic agreement that is offered in the U.S. preamble and may collaborate to discover the-objective-truth. It is a commitment-to personal self-discipline and statutory justice so as to hold local, state, and federal officials to the U.S. preamble’s agreement. Together, the U.S. preamble and the-objective-truth offer individual happiness.

Worthy speech promotes mutual, comprehensive safety and security according to the-objective-truth. Forgetting “our liberalism,” only conservatives who collaborate for civic integrity may claim they propose responsible individual happiness.

I am grateful to Harvey C. Mansfield for laying out the background on which I could make my case for the U.S. preamble’s tacit offering: individual happiness with civic integrity.

Postscript (11/24-25/18)

            The vision that may emerge from my interpretation of Mansfield’s article on “worthy speech” is that elites, in order to act under the civic, civil, and legal agreement offered to fellow citizens by the U.S. preamble dedicate themselves to maintaining both the actuality and the journal of progress so as to gradually approach perfection in civic integrity. This view has continuity over the past 2400 years. By extension, a better future seems possible.

            Agathon, in Plato’s “Symposium” said, in my interpretation, that appreciation’s greatest strength is that it neither perpetrates nor tolerates harm to or from any person or god. The elite person who appreciates his or her gifts uses them to develop civic integrity.

            General and fellow citizen George Washington, in his farewell to the Continental Army, June 8, 1781, said, “. . . essential to . . . the existence of the United States as an Independent Power . . . friendly Disposition, among the People of the United States, which will induce them to . . . sacrifice their individual advantages to the interest of the Community.”

            Gouverneur Morris perhaps wrote the U.S. preamble to reflect the civic, civil, and legal intentions that developed during the constitutional convention. James Madison was a member of Morris’s committee, but I doubt he liked that the preamble left the pursuit of a god or none to the individual fellow citizen. Before long, the U.S. preamble was falsely labeled “secular” whereas it is neutral to religion as well as to gender, to race, to national origins, and to economic class.

Abraham Lincoln, opposing the civil war in his first inaugural address said,

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? In our present differences, is either party without faith of being in the right? If the Almighty Ruler of Nations, with His eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth and that justice will surely prevail by the judgment of this great tribunal of the American people.

I detect neither classism nor religious preference in Lincoln’s “tribunal of the American people.”

      Albert Einstein, in 1941, said, “[Not lying answers] the demands: ‘Human life shall be preserved’ and ‘Pain and sorrow shall be lessened as much as possible.’” Einstein's message is: Human behavior is informed by physics (the object of discovery) rather than metaphysics or reason.

      Speech that attempts to establish classism and elitism as civic justice may be freely extended. However, people who accept IPEA (individual power, individual energy, and individual authority) demand worthy speech---speech that at least strives to establish mutual, comprehensive safety and security, with each fellow citizen in full appreciation of his or her opportunity to help develop civic integrity.

Copyright©2018 by Phillip R. Beaver. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the publication of all or portions of this paper as long as this complete copyright notice is included.