Free Speech

I wanted to quickly examine a statement I read this morning from an article on an increase in legislation banning begging in many American cities. 

"Michigan’s attorney general, Bill Schuette, has appealed, arguing that begging is not protected speech."

How is asking people for help not free speech?  And how can you even begin to quantify and codify any act of asking for anything in a way that is anything but grossly subjective and completely up for individual interpretation?  The article continues to discuss that a major issue of it is the manner of asking, that people are being very "aggressive".  As if asking for help in the form of begging is anything short of an act of desperation.  The act of a person that has lost a sense of humility, and is beyond worrying about society's general concepts of dignity and what others think of them.  To a place were they are simply begging for help (listen to the first ten minutes of this radio spot).  If pan handlers are aggressive its because they are hungry and desperate.  Its the same as a person standing on top of a cliff and shouting at the top of their lungs that they can be anything if someone, anyone, will just give them a chance.  How is it possible that a desperate person asking for help is not free speech?

Lets also examine this from another stand point.  Many from the right wing and conservative establishments, and increasing amount now from the American left, are pushing for decreases on state aid and dependence on the social safety net.  They want individuals to be able to reach out to private means for help:  friends, family, random others/institutions, what have you.  They want the needy off the state roles, yet with this stance on begging they are taking a major avenue away from people in need.  This brings us to the paramount issue of and with homelessness; politicians and the public don't want solve the issue.  They want to ignore it, sweep it under the rug, and pretend that it is solely the individual's own fault rather than a structural issue that they and their lives are a part of.     

The fact of the matter is that we as people seem to feel awkward when someone we don't know asks us for something.  Skeptical, mistrusting, defensive.  Especially when that is a beggar on the streets.  They need something, and I think most people feel a slight tugging at their hearts and emotions.  We want to help a human in need.  And this to me is the core of this problem, we can't look individual people in the eye and abandon them.  So we as a society try to marginalize the homeless and keep them away from the areas that "we" and tourists traverse.  We push them out of sight, so we don't feel bad that we are doing nothing to solve a problem that is endemic within the way our society is constructed.

But more importantly to my point is that to say that asking for something, anything, is not covered as free speech is to say that questions themselves are not free speech.  It is to say that social engagement involving speaking to another person, interacting with them verbally, is somehow allowed to be judged as to the merits of what you are or are not saying to that other person.  It is in fact to be saying we are going to assess and regulate what we the people can and are allowed to say to other people and even how we express our speech.  This to me is so fundamentally the heart and soul of what free speech is.  If I can't ask you or anyone else for anything - especially help - then I don't live in a society, I live in a vacuum.  Just as language without an outlet is communication with myself and a question without a questioned is unanswerable, I need to be able to freely express myself to be considered to have freedom of speech.  If I want all my questions to remain in my head, all my solutions to come from within, and all my speech to go unheard, then I don't want to live in a society with others but rather I want to live in my own world, my own vacuum.  This is not the world we live in.  We live together with others and can't act alone without affecting others.  If I live with you and can not ask you question, I am not free to speak as I please.           

Is Freedom Truly Possible?

So I just picked up and skimmed through an old book of mine, F.A. Hayek's classic Road to Serfdom, and came to an interesting thought that I'd been meaning to write about for a while.  There is a section about freedom v. organization.  It says basically that they are contradictory, that you can't have organization and freedom together, that organization is the culprit.  I see where he is going, he is saying if you want to organize things then whoever is doing the organizing is collectivizing objectives and outcomes.  This in turn would inherently mean that individual freedom was infringed upon.  Ok, fair enough, if you think about everyone, how can you not alienate someone as we are all different individual people.

But what about freedom, the other way around?  If one person has the freedom to do whatever they want, doesn't that automatically impinge upon everyone else's freedom?  Inherently, if I do something, that effects another person.  If I stand on a spot, you can't stand there.  If I have the freedom to do as I wish, that means you can't do something, it takes away your freedom.  I have the freedom to yell as loud as I want, but doesn't that take away your freedom to live in peace and quite?

The bottom line to me is that freedom can not exist for all but one individual or entity.  There can obviously be varying degrees of freedom from there, but one person's freedom is another person's infringement.  There is no way around this.  We live in a social world and could only be 'free' in a vacuum devoid of anyone else.

So then what does this mean for us today?  It means that our whole political debate on civil liberties and 'freedom' is completely off base.  We talk of all the freedoms we have, how this is our ultimate goal/achievement.  But again, one person's freedom can very easily take another person's away.  Not always, but if they are contradictory actions, such as the noise example above, one person has freedom and another doesn't.  Then once you add social or judicial laws in, we actually only have the freedom to do as we're told, and as we are allowed to by law and/or society.  Doesn't sound like freedom to me.        

So why do we keep babbling on about freedom like it is attainable?  Hayek babble's on about community and organizing like it is unobtainable, that it is a great ideal, but that there is no possible pathway to it.  In fact, organization and cooperation is actually the only obtainable outcome available to us as social beings that must share our worlds with others.  We must compromise our surroundings in order to find a balance that is acceptable to all.  If we all had freedom to do as we pleased (which is logically unobtainable), the world would be chaos .  Why strive for this?  Why act as if it is the ultimate achievement?

In fact, compromise and cooperation amongst people, and the world they live in, is the actually the only possible endeavor and really the ultimate achievement.  Living with people and working together, not as individuals privately working for their own means...  Cooperation.  This is what society need to be based upon, not freedom.