A Note on the Heckler’s Veto

By now, we’re all familiar with the Heckler’s Veto, the idea that an audience can shout down or otherwise disrupt a public speaker to the extent they cannot carry on with their remarks. There has been a dramatic uptick in such events in the past decade, and while incidents seem to be tapering off, they have not ceased.

Just yesterday, protesters at Washington College successfully shouted down Robert P. George, Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. George, a political conservative, was slated to discuss the ideals for which all liberal arts institutions should stand:  

As George began his talk, a group of students entered the room, protesting that “his ideas were dangerous to the transgender community.” Ultimately, the students successfully stopped his talk, and he was escorted out of the room by the professor who invited him.

The heckler’s veto has been discussed ad nauseam over the past few years. Still, when events like the one at Washington College occur, it is essential for us to remind ourselves why this is such a poor strategy for combating bad ideas. (I am not making a claim about the merits of Dr. George’s ideas one way or the other. I’m simply saying that when we encounter ideas we don’t like, nobody benefits from silencing them.) Shouting down a speaker is not protected speech, despite recent arguments to the contrary. It is simply censorship.

Those who prefer to shout down and intimidate rather than thoughtfully argue their positions are assuming a level of infallibility that no human has. Epistemologically, we don’t have the intellectual resources to know if what we believe is objectively true or false. We can be reasonably sure about and find evidence for our beliefs and defend them forcefully (through argumentation, not actual force). Nevertheless, we should always leave open the possibility that we are wrong. John Stuart Mill, one of the great defenders and articulators of free speech ideas, argued in chapter two of On Liberty that 

Restricting free speech limits our ability to discover truth by prohibiting the contestation of ideas. That isn’t to say that free speech guarantees the discovery of truth, but it’s the best of bad systems we have for doing so, given the limits of our ability to obtain absolute knowledge.

While not an action of the state, the Heckler’s Veto constituted a type of anti-free speech behavior that was especially concerning to Mill. As Southern Methodist University Professor of Law Lackland H. Bloom, Jr. has discussed, Mill’s worry regarding social intolerance was about people voluntarily self-censoring or avoiding controversial topics for fear of inciting a censorious reaction from those they might offend. Such behaviors, according to Bloom, “simply preserve the status quo in matters of opinion,” thereby abandoning the search for truth in favor of shallow social harmony. But this harmony can never be found or sustained because handing power to the social censor only encourages their anti-liberal behavior.

When the heckler is given a veto on behalf of all of humanity, everyone loses. Not only are we losing out on hearing different—or even offensive—ideas, but we are also losing our right to simply hear ideas. Silencing speakers is not a strategy one employs when they are serious about protecting or advancing ideas they care about. If they were confident in the ultimate truth of their position, they would not fear the airing of opposing ideas. Instead, their strategy is meant to secure a specific status quo through intimidation and fear. We are not infallible, and what we are certain about today can easily be shown to be illusory tomorrow. Ultimately, the Heckler’s Veto is an anti-intellectual and anti-liberal practice that impoverishes us all in the long run; it only guarantees that the culture it infects will whither and die on the vine of absolutism.