In Praise of the First Amendment - The Social Invention That Generates New Social Inventions

The first amendment is among the great inventions of history.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

It has five parts:
1. Freedom of religion or belief
2. Freedom to speak out in defense of or attack on beliefs
3. Freedom of the press to reach a wider audience
4. Freedom to assemble – or organize – around those beliefs
5. Freedom to take your cause to the government in order to effect change, through laws or budget.

It offers freedom of religion and freedom from religion. Just a century before, Europe had been torn apart by religious war and the result was 10 to 30% of folks on the continent killed. Our founding fathers knew the absurdity of legislating religion, whether trying to force someone to not believe something or force them to believe something.

But the first amendment is more important than that. Much more important. And it is brilliantly constructed to result in perpetual progress.

What freedom of religion really means is freedom of belief. The US can’t pass any laws to legislate what you believe. So essentially this is like giving 330 million Americans a license to generate all sorts of wild theories – some folks tales, some religious, some that - if taken seriously - will create great wealth and some that - if taken seriously - will result in death and destruction, some conspiratorial and some downright scientific.

But it doesn’t end there. You can speak about your belief and even go to press with your belief. You can argue for your own belief or against someone with a different belief. The first amendment says that you have a right to believe the earth is flat. It also says that everyone around you – from your neighbor to the nightly newscaster – has the right to tell you how stupid that is. And here is the really amazing thing about you going to press with your belief: it becomes something a little different in the mind of each reader. Your idea becomes the community’s idea. It changes. Your idea becomes bigger than you. In the same way that a gene can be passed on to someone else, an idea, a meme, can be passed on to others and - blended with other ideas - create something new. Someone once wrote, a city is where ideas come to have sex. Once it enters into other people's minds, becomes a part of the community's discussion, your idea will become something different than how it was born in your head.

What’s next? People can organize around this idea, this belief. The most obvious thing is that you can assemble and protest. Less obviously, you can engage in social invention and entrepreneurship to institutionalize your belief. Women organize to become suffragettes, arguing that they have the right to vote. Those groups are the first bit of organizing and then that takes us to the fifth bit of institutionalization.

You can bring your cause – your belief – to the government and work to have it translated into a new bit of legislation. The organized group of suffragettes who argued that women had the right to vote dissolved because they pulled off an even better bit of social invention: they changed the constitution so that women could vote. The reality girls are born into is now different because of their success.

The first amendment traces the trajectory of progress: you have an idea or belief, you talk about it with others, you even publish it, sending it out into the world to become something independent of you, and then people protest the status quo, arguing for this new belief to be made into a new reality and then …. It becomes the status quo for the next generation. It is not enough that Isaac Newton knows the calculus he has invented. What is really powerful is that we teach calculus to teenagers and it simply becomes a common tool for them to model and manipulate reality. At that point – the point at which your idea is institutionalized – the status quo becomes something very different.

This is how progress is made. And that may well be the most beautiful and remarkable thing about the first amendment. It actually traces a thought in your brain into a new, shared reality babies are born into. Each child does not have to start civilization from scratch. We simply don’t have time for that. What we’ve institutionalized becomes the starting platform for the next generation … who begin this process of creating new beliefs that have to go through the stage of challenging and spreading and then becoming the next thing that is institutionalized. The first amendment is so much but to me perhaps the coolest thing is that it is a description of progress.

The first amendment is not about demanding respect for old ideas and traditions. It is about demanding respect for new ideas and innovation. The first amendment is the social invention that itself generates new social inventions. That’s something to shout about. And thanks to the first amendment, you can.

As American As Protesting Protests

Regarding an NFL game last night, a friend wrote,

"Fans began booing when players and coaches stood the length of the field arm-in-arm and the public address announcer called for 'a moment of silence to support racial equality in our country.'"

That is so meta. And so American. People loudly protesting silent protest.

"I'm protesting your protest!"
"Oh. So you are for protests?"
"No! I'm against them!"
"Hmm. Sounds to me like we've got ourselves a protester."
"I am not"!
"To quote Shakespeare, 'The lady doth protest too much, methinks," to actually be anti-protests."
"Now you're just putting words in my mouth!"
"No. You did that yourself. We were silent until you came along."

Kaepernick, Nike, Police, and a Protest of a Protest of a Protest

I have this thing about institutions. When they use people, they're oppressive. When people use them, they're enabling.  Free people get to use their institutions - from church and state to bank and corporation - rather than be used by them. In oppressive communities, people are tools of their institutions; in free societies, institutions are the tools of people.

I say all that to opine about Kaepernick, Nike, and the The National Association of Police Organizations.

In response to Nike's new ad featuring Kaepernick, the National Association of Police Organizations has protested Nike's campaign and any NFL player who takes a knee during the national anthem. They argue that Kaepernick's protest suggest that the police are systematically racist and so they are protesting his protest.

I'm protesting their protest of his protest.

A police organization ought to focus on the work of making police better, in the same way that NFL teams should focus on making their teams better. Period. That is the purpose of the organization and that should be their focus.

Meanwhile, we live in a country with a first amendment. I know that some of you will say that an employer has the right to dictate what its employees - whether police or football players - should do. I think you're wrong.

If all of the football players want to protest, let them. If only two do, let them. If all of the police officers want to protest that protest, let them. If only two do, let them. Be clear that they are exercising these first amendment rights as individuals though. At the moment of protesting police brutality or protesting people who protest in front of the flag, the people protesting are doing this as citizens, not football players or police officers. No matter what percentage of them do it, they do it as individuals, not as that institution. At that moment they are not a 49er or a police officer. They are Americans.

First amendment rights are not subject to democratic vote or group norms. You have the right to believe whatever religion you want, express whatever opinion you have, assemble freely with whoever you want. The institutions you're a part of don't have the right to dictate any of that - or co-opt your first amendment rights to express those on your behalf.

That concludes my protest of a protest of a protest.

What a great country.

The Silly Debate About Bannon and Free Speech and the Two Reasons That the First Amendment is So Vital

As I write this there is a bit of a furor over the fact that Steve Bannon was invited to an ideas festival hosted by the New Yorker and then disinvited, prompting a flurry of pieces like this one in the New York Times by Bret Stephens.

"The only security of all is in a free press."
- Thomas Jefferson

Steve Bannon is a white nationalist. He believes that white superiority and national economies are nonfiction. There are people who think that he deserves an audience for his tried - and spectacularly disproven - ideas. Some of these people argue that this is a free speech issue.

At some point in the evolution of science, astronomers presumably stopped inviting "scientists" who argued that the earth was at the center of the universe. Like white nationalists, geocentrists had been proven wrong and no longer deserved a hearing.

Free speech doesn't mean that any curator of content like the New Yorker owes you their audience. I wish that were the case because I would sue every major news outlet and conference host (as would every person with a set of ideas they were trying to get out into the world).

There are two reasons for the first amendment that guarantees the right to free speech, assembly, religion, and press, what is essentially freedom of thought and expression.

The first is simply because it is such a vital part of the human experience to hold beliefs and to express those. This is reason enough for the first amendment but there is more.

The second is that a community with freedom of thought and expression will make more progress. If you espouse a really dumb idea, I can refute it with a better idea. As I stand there smug and proud, another person can come along with an idea even better than mine. And as they accept their accolades for such insight and intelligence, another person comes along with an idea that refutes theirs. And so it goes in a parade of progress that all depends on people freely having ideas, sharing ideas, and refuting or refining ideas to evolve a worldview that lets them better deal with reality. The ultimate test of their ideas is whether these ideas enable them to travel across the ocean or sky or space, conquer diseases that once conquered them, feel happy and know how to make others happy, and do other things like create energy or knowledge. The first amendment is not meant as a tool for protecting old ideas but as a tool for creating new ideas that we can act on in new ways.

The real power of the first amendment is that the evolution of ideas drives progress. This evolution is driven by the free expression and exchange of ideas and animated by beliefs we're passionate about.

Old ideas like white nationalism that destroyed a country as great as Germany and resulted in 100 million deaths do not deserve a second chance or a new audience. We already know it doesn't work. The first amendment doesn't mean that it has a right to an audience. Properly understood, the first amendment means that it deserves to be discarded as we move on to something more practical and intelligent.