In what world are we living in a society where the bounds around acceptable opinions are *wider* today!?!?

This seems pretty demonstrably false. https://twitter.com/willwilkinson/status/1281265232636252163

The speech of politicians today is not more racist than in e.g. the 1980s. The idea that we have seen an explosion in racist speech is eye-rolly. What we've seen is an explosion in *public opposition to* racist speech and *attention given to* racist speech.

Pick your hate speech and the Google Search trend on its frequency is probably gonna look something like this, the trend for a very common racial epithet I decline to type here:

Public opinion polls show rising support for immigrants, increasingly anti-racist public opinion, and large databases of speech show declining uses of racial slurs in particular. I suspect a database of political speeches would show the same!

And that's good! It's wonderful! Racism is awful and we should celebrate that it is declining!

I mean folks here's church burnings in America:

So the argument that we are living through some period of massive resurgence in racist speech/actions seems.... wrong. We might be hitting like a speedbump on the way down.

There are of course some places where the space for acceptable opinion has widened: you can publicly be communist now. And there are places where the space has narrowed: good luck arguing against same sex marriage.

Here's hate crimes per capita with a racial or anti-black motivation. They remain WAY lower than in the mid-1990s. Seems extremely likely they were even higher in the 1980s and earlier.

That bump recently BTW is NOT a Trump-bump. It's due to the FBI expanding their racial/ethnic codes in 2015 vs. 2014 to include a bunch of new categories. Here it is broken down a bit more.

This academic paper finds no increase in racist attitudes in recent years either. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji/research/publications/articles/2019_Charlesworth_PS.pdf

Rising racism is a rhetorical illusion created by increased access to information about the beliefs and speech of others, i.e. social media, causing *perceived* racism to rise even as *actual* racism is not.

Important speech boundaries, such as around racism, are in fact getting *stronger*, not weaker!

And new speech boundaries are clearly being set up (I think @willwilkinson agrees that at least some new boundaries are going up?).

Now, as a conservative Christian, I take the question of speech boundaries further than @willwilkinson 's liberalism-rooted approach. Much speech is indeed immoral and should be condemned. You SHOULD rein in your tongue!

Having stricter speech boundaries is good. People should swear less. They should not take the Lord's name in vain. They should not insult others, gossip, speak ill of others, speak falsely, engage in course joking, etc.

The injunction against course and unclean speech certainly covers racist speech. And the advice to "do no wrong in the eyes of anyone" certainly militates in favor of policing one's speech by standards erected by more sensitive others.

At the same time, I would never try to get a person fired for being a foul-mouthed gossip. That's not my place. God will judge them, or not, as is fitting.

Which is to say, I agree with @willwilkinson that speech boundaries are good and important. I appreciate him laying out the gray-ness of the case.

But I think he woefully misreads the situation as gray-all-over when in fact there is some black and white.

A growing number of conscientious people who intentionally try to avoid using obscene, unkind, or insulting speech, who seek to care for others in their manner of communication, nonetheless face a climate of fear for good-faith engagement.

And this is the thing.

I don't agree with @willwilkinson that there's a debate to be had about impermissible opinions. There may be a few truly impermissible opinions, but they are quite rare. We should be *extremely* parsimonious in forbidding speech based on content.

The issue is a lot of historic speech-policing was *process* focused not *content* focused. This is what made Mcarthyism so upsetting: no matter how decent, thoughtful, caring, and humane a person was, if the *content* of their speech was too lefty, they faced real risks.

Provided that a person engages in good faith and abides by appropriate process-oriented rules about how they speak and engage with others, I simply don't accept the idea that we should have a very long list of unutterable ideas.

*In practice*, some opinions are extremely difficult to utter without violating process norms. For example, there aren't many ways to claim that another group is inherently inferior without violating a process norm around epistemic charity to others.

I'm not claiming I have this "all thought out." These are thorny areas with a lot of complexity. But I pretty strenuously object to the idea that we are living through a huge spike in racism which has led to a breaking down of speech limitations and ultimately fewer boundaries.