Joni Mitchell and Neil Young Fight against Freedom of Speech

 

Sadly, Joni Mitchell has now joined Neil Young in pulling her music off Spotify in protest against their hosting of Joe Rogan’s podcast.  Specifically, this is because Rogan has expressed doubts about the safety of vaccines, and has had on his show a prominent doctor, Robert Malone, who questioned government vaccine policy.

Both Mitchell and Young accuse Spotify of spreading “misinformation” about COVID, and thereby causing deaths.

A left-leaning friend has also since announced on Facebook that he is terminating his subscription to Spotify, and is urging everyone else he knows to do the same.

They all seem bizarrely certain that Malone and Rogan are spreading falsehoods.

An obvious question: how do they know? Obviously, they are not medical doctors. Malone is an expert. How do they know that one expert is right, and the other one wrong?

Especially, how do they know without hearing both sides? For the logic of their demand to censor is that they and everyone else should not even listen to Rogan or Malone. How does only know without listening that someone will say or has said something false? How do you know before you listen that what someone is going to say will be the truth?

They might argue that most doctors disagree with Malone. But science does not work by popular vote. When Einstein published his Theory of Relativity, most physicists would have said he was wrong—and did at the time. By Young’s or Mitchell’s metric, Einstein’s paper—any groundbreaking scientific paper—would not have been published in the first place. Or the publication boycotted. Their position is profoundly anti-science.

And even if science did work by popular vote, neither Young nor Mitchell nor we know what that vote would be. There is no mechanism in place to take a poll of relevant scientists, or even to determine who counts as a relevant scientist. A petition was floated signed by 270 people claiming the relevant expertise; but such a petition has no evidentiary value, as any scientist could explain, since the survey sample was self-selected.

Science, and human progress, works by a free and open exchange of ideas, allowing for free and open debate, after which, everyone has the right to decide for themselves, barring some pressing social need to infringe that freedom. Mitchell, Young, and my friend are short-circuiting that necessary process. They are claiming the right to decide what is right and wrong not only for themselves, but for others. That is a profoundly egotistic and totalitarian impulse.

I am inclined to give creative artists wide leeway on politics. For some reason, the sort of mind that is good at the arts is rarely competent in political matters. Artists are naifs, and easily swayed emotionally by the last person they have talked to. This is what Keats called "negative capability." Similarly, Plato or Lao-Tzu are greatly insightful on individual spiritual matters, but their political thinking is horrifying. I am sad that Mitchell and Young are so badly tarnishing their legacy and reputation, and quite likely wrecking their income in retirement.

And, of course, some people may be influenced by them.

More generally, we are desperately ill-served that all high school students are not taught John Stuart Mill’s explanation of the need for freedom of speech.

“To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its condemnation may be allowed to rest on this common argument, not the worse for being common.”

“To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.”

A free society cannot exist with censorship.