The Right to be Crazy
I am writing directly in response to the situation with professor Paul Mirecki at Kansas University, and to this diary, which claims that he was a bigot for remarks identifying creationism as a mythology and chiding fundamentalists. Mirecki's remarks about fundamentalists were perhaps over the top, but I think some of the offense likely came from the idea that creationism is a myth.
I think most of the regular posters on Daily Kos would agree with the principle of freedom of speech and would further agree that this is a principle of high importance. Freedom of speech, however, can only be built on freedom of belief.
Freedom to express your beliefs doesn't mean a whole lot without freedom of belief itself - this would be like saying, "you can say what you believe, so long as you believe X." Most of us also believe in freedom of religion. Most religions have at least some beliefs that must seem at best eccentric to nonbelievers. Should religion be treated as a special protected class of beliefs, or should we embrace a more general freedom of belief that extends into all sorts of eccentric beliefs, whether religious in nature or not?
I believe that to truly embrace freedom of belief, we must take the latter approach, namely to embrace eccentric (or even flat out crazy) beliefs of all sorts, to the extent that people do not act on these beliefs in a way that interferes with the rights of others. For instance, if it is ok to believe in the Bible, it should be equally ok to believe in Star Wars or the Great Pumpkin. The alternative is to give religion special treatment, holding that one must hold rational beliefs UNLESS THOSE BELIEFS ARE GUIDED BY RELIGIOUS FAITH. This approach is not just patently silly, it is also dangerous. It is not a long leap from saying that anyone who is crazy (even if in a completely harmless way) should be locked up to locking up all dissidents on the grounds that they are crazy.
One common standard of insanity is that the person poses a danger to him/herself or others. The latter part seems obvious enough - nearly everyone agrees that it is ok to restrain the freedom of those who are a danger to others (provided of course that we give people the benefit of the doubt in determining whether they are in fact dangerous). The argument that we must protect people from themselves (paternalism) is far less obvious, however. There are plenty of cases, in fact, where we allow people (adults at least) to do things that are clearly dangerous, such as smoking, mountain climbing and skydiving. There are three clear factors motivating this. First, all activities entail risk, so we cannot simply ban any activity which entails risk to oneself (in fact, we cannot eliminate all activities that involve risk to others for the same reason). Of course, most of us will draw the line somewhere (probably short of, say, allowing duels), so this argument only goes so far. Second, we have a general sense of freedom. I think most people would agree that eliminating all but the most trivial risks would curtail freedom so much that life would not be very fulfilling. Third is enforcement. Any restrictions on our activities, whether motivated by paternalism or other factors, must be enforced, and will be violated by some. Unsuccessful attempts at enforcement can prove to be worse than simply allowing the activity unrestricted, or under looser restrictions. The prohibition of alcohol by the Eighteenth Amendment is a well known example of this. I believe that society will eventually conclude that the war on drugs has failed for the same reason prohibition failed. Drawing the line on which activities should be restricted, and how tightly, however, is difficult because of conflicting values and incomplete information (there is much dispute, for instance, on just how dangerous illegal drugs are, and how much that danger can be reduced through regulation instead of prohibition). However, I would urge caution whenever anyone suggests that an activity should be outlawed simply because it is wrong, without arguing about how it is harmful or acknowledging how that harm might be affected by changing the law.
I will now return to the point about mental illness. I hope it is clear from the above discussion that automatically locking up those with mental illnesses is not an acceptable solution. Mental illness exists on a continuum, and none of us are perfectly sane or perfectly insane. I admit that I am not an expert in this area, and of course I do not subscribe to the theory proposed by some that mental illness is simply a social construct designed to control social outliers. However, there have been serious disputes about whether certain conditions are in fact mental illnesses. I believe that such disputes should not be political. If we accept that some mentally ill people can nevertheless function in society, and should be let alone, it will matter less whether, for instance, psychologists consider certain sexual desires as normal or deviant. I believe that this is the true road to freedom, rather than dismissing mental illness or defining it in extremely narrow terms. In short, if we all accepted the right to be crazy, the label wouldn't matter as much, and people could decide for themselves, with professional guidance if so desired, what if any treatment they would receive. It would not entail, of course, the right to have your arguments taken seriously, let alone to be shielded from criticism of those arguments.