There’s No Heat in “Fire!”

Of all the freedom writers, it so happens that your author is probably the only one with two actual experiences of fires in movie theaters.

The first was at Star Wars episode One. About halfway in, I went to the lobby, and found the popcorn machine’s butter reservoir had caught fire. In an impressive minute, it spread into the oily popcorn chamber, and then the whole thing was in flames. I went down to my seat and told my friends, who were unconcerned. Soon the smoke smell was undeniable, the alarms came on, and the ushers threw open the emergency exits. Hardly anybody left their seats.

The second time was on 86th Street in NYCity, where there was a building under construction and their woodpile caught fire. The street was smoked out to the point where the streetlights came on. Five doors down from the smokey spectacle there is a movie theater, where there was a line of people buying tickets to get in.

The takeaway? People simply will not stampede themselves to death on someone else’s say-so, thank God. The notion they might is ridiculously paternalistic. If anything, by my experience, people don’t run away often enough.

For some history, and legal analysis on this, the most-used, yet most misunderstood, of all lazy arguments against free speech here is the indispensable Ken White of Popehat.

It should be scary how lazy and completely wrong the “Fire!” trope is, scary because of how quickly it can be dashed, but more scarily, how rare is the dashing (Popehat, and me, by my count.) Scary, considering freedom of speech is the keystone, first-condition freedom: without the ability to define, discuss, argue, no planned adaptation from any status quo can ever take place. And the status quo always suits those that profit by it just fine. Notice how all of the insistence on restricting speech world-wide comes form status quo powers. To out-evolve an entrenched, evolutionary stable status quo, the challenge must have an advantage, and that is usually agility, and the most agile tool for challenge is information. It’s even in the Bible: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” To balance my Bible: Richard Dawkins holds that the entire point of us is to transmit our DNA, the information that is us, onwards. This information transfer is everything, and cultures are simply delivery systems for packets of information that are important to that culture. The free flow of information is everything to the human Universe.

Against that everything, when we look at the panorama of history, we find that there is no down side to freedom of speech that is not covered by an additional rational law, like conspiring to steal.

Against the free flow of information, if we leave out arguments about the Supreme Being, we find only the thin-soup “Fire!” meme (and a modern sense of hyper-insult, more on that later). Across the length and breadth of accumulated societal knowledge since the Renaissance, we can find no examples of societies panicking themselves to death with their new access to free information. We can find downsides to every other human upside, (cornucopia/obesity) except free speech. When the Communist propaganda scales fell from the eyes of those in the information prison that was the Soviet block, we found zero harm, except maybe trips to the optometrist for glasses to can catch up on their forbidden books. Without “The Word,” societies are lost to modern progress, like Afghanistan with below 50% literacy, mired, seemingly permanently, in the Dark Ages (described as such by the darkness of the Age of Ignorance). There is a reason every totalitarian will storm into the slightest chink in this, the principal armor of humanism, but it is a historical truism that the more storming the more backward.

Against our tidal wave of informational progress, the arguments against it are the thimbles of campus and social media virtue-signaling, and the exalting of professional witchy race-parsers (witchy for what amounts to divination in trying to rake into a person’s inner race-consciousness. Think of the presumptuousness of it: without even a psychiatrists’ preliminary exam, think how hard it would be even with one). The thimble of safe-at-home media crisis bias, and jobber interpreters of thought-fashion which change faster than French chapeaus styles, all demanded in the comfortable prosperity made possible by our first condition: freedom of speech; the free flow of information; the mandate of our instincts to nurture our genes, our words, our story, into the future.

Take us home Mr. Kipling:

They unwound and flung from them, as a rag that defiled them, the imperial gains of the age, which their forefathers had piled them/they ran panting in haste to lay waste to and embitter forever, the wellsprings of wisdom and strength which are faith and endeavor .

• About the Author

About Eugene Darden Nicholas

Eugene Darden (Ed) Nicholas is from Flushing Queens, where he grew up sheltered from the hard world, learning the true things after graduating college and becoming a paramedic in Harlem. School continues to inform and entertain in all its true, Shakespearean glory. It's a lot of fun, really. In that career, dozens of people walk the earth now who would not be otherwise. (The number depends on how literally or figuratively you choose to add). He added a beloved wife to his little family, which is healthy. He is also well blessed in friends and colleagues.