Free speech is invariably discussed in moral, political or philosophical terms, but today an intriguing new scientific angle on the issue has emerged. It can be summarised this way: that it is not so much an issue of free speech as one of free thought. Indeed, insights into how we think suggest that the tension between free expression and repression is not so much Freudian as genetic, neuro-anatomical and developmental. We’ll look at each in turn.
The first, genetic, originates in insights into autism. Autism is an early-onset cognitive disorder which features impairments in what you might call mentalistic cognition: social and inter-personal responses, abstract thinking and imagination. This goes with narrowing of interests often focused on what you could correspondingly call mechanistic cognition: fascination with gadgets, machines and mechanisms of all kinds, along with a tendency to literal, logical thinking and an obsessive focus on detail.
A classic test of autistic cognition is the pencil-in-the-sweet-tube test. The child is shown a tube of sweets and asked what he (and it is more likely to be a he by at least four to one) thinks is inside. He’s disappointed to discover that rather than the sweets he expected, the tube contains pencils. But now he is asked what another child who had not been shown the contents would think and typically replies, “Pencils!” Normal children can pass this test from about age four and realise that another child would think as they did that the tube contained sweets. One of my own sons, aged about three, had been cautioned by me not to tell his mother that he had bought her a present the day before her birthday. But the moment he heard her coming into the house, he rushed up to her and exclaimed, “Mummy, I mustn’t tell you that I have bought you a present!” Typically for his age and for autistics much older, he had failed what is known as a test of false belief: the ability to realise that others may not know what you know — or in this case, need to be kept in ignorance of it.
If you think about it, thought-policing — and indeed all dogmatic intolerance of differing points of view — amounts to an autistic-like denial of what the agent regards as others’ false beliefs. Indeed, leading authorities on Asperger’s syndrome comment that some high-functioning autistics go into so-called “God mode” and become “an omnipotent person who never makes a mistake, cannot be wrong and whose intelligence must be worshipped” (see T. Attwood, The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome). Clearly though, this cuts both ways, and people who routinely are in ‘God mode’ where others’ speech and beliefs are concerned could be seen as acting like autistics, with thought-policing as an institutionalised deficit in appreciation of false belief.
A second insight comes from the discovery of an antagonistic relationship between two large-scale cortical networks in the brain — the task-positive network (TPN) and the default mode network (DMN). Neural activity in the TPN tends to inhibit activity in the DMN, and vice versa. The TPN is important for problem solving, focusing of attention, making decisions and control of action. The DMN plays a central role in emotional self-awareness, social cognition and ethical decision-making. Because activation of the TPN tends to suppress activity in the DMN, an over-emphasis on task-focused leadership may prove deleterious to social and emotional aspects of leadership. Similarly, an overemphasis on the DMN would result in difficulty focusing attention, making decisions and solving known problems (see A.I. Jack, A scientific case for conceptual dualism: The problem of consciousness and the opposing domains hypothesis). Indeed, it has been proposed that “hyperconnectivity within the DMN appears to be associated with the delusional paranoid phenomenology of a sense of self under attack” (P. McNamara, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience).
Even more worryingly where free speech is concerned, a sense of “self under attack” is institutionalised and confirmed in the official definition of non-crime hate speech, where only the perceived offence felt by the accuser is relevant and the task of positively evaluating its reality is repressed. Elsewhere I have used the same finding to suggest that often our leaders may only be using the ‘default mode’ half of their brains, and you could certainly argue that the same is true of non-crime hate incident recording.
Finally, insights from what the New York Times described as “perhaps psychiatry’s grandest working theory since Freud, and one that is founded in work at the forefront of science”, the imprinted brain theoryco-authored by Bernard Crespi and myself, suggests that an adversarial mode of thought is built into the brain before birth by conflicting sets of genes: notably those from the father favouring more growth and a more masculine mindset as opposed to those from the mother wanting fewer demands of her resources for growing the baby and a more maternal mindset after it is born (given that the mother, unlike the father, will always be related to all her children).
Differential expression of parental genes is indeed built into the brain and suggests that the self is both genetically and behaviourally complex, with conflicting interests arising from what has been called a “parliament” of genes—and “a rowdy one at that” (W. D. Hamilton, Narrow roads of gene land). Parliaments classically are adversarial, with government and opposition benches facing one another, and so it seems is human nature, with a similarly adversarial style of cognition built into it from the beginning.
Dictatorial government or inquisitorial courts of law might be defensible if there was indeed one truth, a single brain system to discover it, and people you could trust to know what it was. But how much more natural do adversarial, government-versus-opposition, or prosecution-versus-defence institutions seem by comparison if we accept this model of the mind? Indeed, could this be the fundamental reason why such adversarial systems of law and government have proved so successful for those fortunate enough to live under them? Could it be that truth and freedom are the products of not simply human dispute, but of a profoundly natural adversarial cognitive system, built into the brain?
At the very least, the latest insights from genetics and neuroscience suggest that there is more to free speech than politics or philosophy and that those who oppose it are in fact going against the grain of human nature, regressing to an infantile, autistic cognitive configuration, and denying the subtlety and complexity of human intelligence.
Dr. Christopher Badcock is Emeritus Reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics.
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This piece was first published in The Daily Sceptic, and is reproduced by kind permission.
