stability—a foundation on which to build a life. But the costs of that certainty can be enormous and difficult to identify. Ultimately, the same quality that makes Westboro so easy to dismiss—its extremism—is also what helps highlight the destructive nature of viewing the world in black and white, the danger of becoming calcified in a position and impervious to change.
Though their ideologies manifested in vastly different ways, it was fundamentalist religious groups, from Jehovah’s Witnesses to members of the Islamic State, that first permitted me to recognize the patterns of my upbringing. But as I watch the human tribal instinct play out in the era of Donald Trump, the echoes of Westboro are undeniable: the division of the world into Us and Them; the vilification of compromise; the knee-jerk expulsion of insiders who violate group orthodoxy; and the demonization of outsiders and the inability to substantively engage with their ideas, because we simply cannot step outside of our own. In this environment, there is a growing insistence that opposing views must be silenced, whether by the powers of government, the self-regulation of social media companies, or the self-censorship of individuals. At the heart of this insistence lie several false assumptions, including a sentiment that Westboro members would readily recognize: We have nothing to learn from these people. This sentiment was troubling to witness even among our tiny fringe movement, and I was relieved to abandon it when I left the church—but watching it spread among a vast and growing populace has been altogether more alarming, filling me with a growing sense of unease.
Another assumption gaining particular traction is that refusing to grant mainstream platforms to hated ideas will halt their spread. While the desire to shield people from these ideas is well-intentioned and completely understandable, I can’t help but see it as a fundamentally flawed strategy, one that ignores the practicalities of human nature. The fact is that people come to embrace these ideas in a multitude of ways: some argue themselves into destructive beliefs; others come to them as I did, taught by parents and loved ones; still others find them in books, films, and the annals of history. Especially in the age of the Internet, it seems clear that we cannot reasonably expect to permanently halt the spread of an idea, whether good or bad. What we can do, however, is foster a culture in which we have the language to articulate and defend sound arguments as to why certain ideas are harmful, the precise ways in which they’re flawed, and the suffering they have caused in the past.
Although private companies like Twitter and Facebook are clearly free to set the terms of use for their platforms, the principles enshrined in the First Amendment are no less relevant to social media than they are in public spaces: that open discourse and dialectic is the most effective enabler of the evolution of individuals and societies. That the answer to bad ideas is to publicly reason against them, to advocate for and propagate better ones. And that it is dangerous to vest any central authority with broad powers to limit the bounds of acceptable discussion—because these powers lend themselves to authoritarian abuse, the creation of echo chambers, and the marginalization of ideas that are true but unpopular. In short, the principles underlying the freedom of speech recognize that all of us are susceptible to cognitive deficiencies and groupthink, and that an open marketplace of ideas is our best defense against them. And though my life’s trajectory has led me to strongly believe in these principles, I continue to actively seek out, examine, and seriously consider the arguments of those who oppose them. To my mind, this is the essence of epistemological humility—not a lack of belief or principle or faith, not the refusal to take a position or the abdication of responsibility to stand against injustice, but a constant examination of one’s worldview, a commitment to honestly grappling with criticisms of it.
Along with so many others, I now watch the increasing hostility and hysteria of our modern political discourse and wonder how we, as a society, might change course. I consider the impending arrival of the baby girl I will shortly bring into the world with Chad—now, impossibly, my husband—and wonder how we’ll teach her to avoid falling into these destructive patterns in her own life. And though my experiences at Westboro would have been sufficient on their own to fix these questions in my mind, nothing has made me