In this episode, we join up with historian of science Dr. Michael Shermer to investigate the cross-fertilization between science and free speech.

Michael Shermer is a prolific writer on science, philosophy and morality and has appeared in numerous documentaries, talk shows, and TED talks. 

Among the topics discussed are:

• When did scientific freedom make its decisive breakthrough?
• What comes first: Science or free inquiry?
• How did both Islam and Christianity affect science?
• What is the relationship between science and free speech as such?
• Can science be used to suppress free speech?
• How did Benjamin Franklin infuse the Declaration of Independence with Newtonian science?

Dr. Michael Shermer is a Historian of science, Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, founder of Skeptic Society and the Skeptic Magazine and author of Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality & Utopia, Why People Believe Weird Things, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, and The Moral Arc.

You can subscribe and listen to Clear and Present Danger on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, YouTube, TuneIn and Stitcher, or download episodes directly from SoundCloud.

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Email us feedback at [email protected].

Episode 15 returns to Europe and formative events in 17th Century England, where a mostly forgotten group of radicals demanded a written constitution guaranteeing free speech, liberty of conscience, and democracy. But who were the Levellers? What was the historical context of their radical demands and why were they ultimately crushed by former allies?

Listen and find the answers to such questions as:

• Who was the first English author to demand full religious toleration for both heretics and non-Christians?
• Why did Charles I and Archbishop Laud cut off the ears of dissenting Puritans?
• What happens when you try to impose alien religious ceremonies on proud and devout Scots?
• Why was censorship abolished in 1641 and what were the consequences?
• What happened at the Putney Debates?
• How radical were the Levellers’ demands for free speech and liberty of conscience?
• Did John Milton really become a censor himself?
• Why did traditionalists refer to pamphlets and books as “paper-bullets?”

You can subscribe and listen to Clear and Present Danger on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, YouTube, TuneIn, and Stitcher, or download episodes directly from SoundCloud.

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Episode 14 leaves the West and heads to 16th and 17th Century India and the Mughal empire. In particular, the rule of Akbar the Great.

A century before John Locke’s “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” Akbar developed a policy of “Universal Peace” repudiating religious compulsion and embracing ecumenical debate. We’ll also discover why the history of the Mughal empire still tests the limits of free speech and tolerance in modern India. Among the questions tackled are:

• Why, how, and to what extent did Akbar abandon orthodox Islam for religious tolerance?
• How did religious tolerance in the Mughal empire compare to contemporary Europe?
• How did English travelers get away with openly blaspheming Muhammad, the Quran, and Allah?
• Was the emperor Aurangzeb really the uniquely intolerant villain that history has portrayed him as?  
• Why do India’s current laws against religious insults hamper modern historians’ efforts at documenting events during the Mughal empire?

You can subscribe and listen to Clear and Present Danger on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, YouTube, TuneIn, and Stitcher, or download episodes directly from SoundCloud.

Stay up to date with Clear and Present Danger on the show’s Facebook and Twitter pages, or visit the podcast’s website at freespeechhistory.com.

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In this episode, we do a bit of time travel and leave the 17th century for a discussion of free speech on American college and university campuses today.

Our guest is New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, who is a co-author with FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” which is already among Amazon’s top 20 bestselling books.

But in looking at the present challenges to free speech on campus, we do also try to draw parallels with older controversies in order to determine whether the psychological mechanisms at play are similar.  

Among the topics discussed are:

• Is there really a “free speech crisis” among American students?
• The three “Great Untruths” challenging the idea of free speech
• The mental health crisis affecting students’ ability to handle adversity and disagreement
• The role of social media
• Why students’ efforts to shut down speakers at American universities is related to the millennia-old idea of blasphemy
• What drives tribalism old and new?
• Whether we should think of words as a form of violence
• How do we overcome the temptation to reenact the inquisition?

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and the author of the New York Times Bestseller “The Righteous Mind.” Among a dizzying range of activities, Haidt is also the co-founder of Heterodox Academy, a large and growing group of professors and students who disagree on many things but are united in their mission to increase viewpoint diversity at American universities.

You can subscribe and listen to Clear and Present Danger on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, YouTube, TuneIn and Stitcher, or download episodes directly from SoundCloud.

Stay up to date with Clear and Present Danger on the show’s Facebook and Twitter pages, or visit the podcast’s website at freespeechhistory.com.

Email us feedback at [email protected].

We enter the early modern age with an expert opinion featuring Teresa Bejan, associate professor at Oriel College, Oxford University and author of “Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration.” In this episode, Jacob and Teresa will discuss political thought on tolerance and the limits of religious speech in early modern England and colonial America. The episode investigates the writings of intellectual rock stars John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke and the less famous but hugely relevant Roger Williams.  

Among the topics discussed are:

• Milton’s “Areopagitica”
• Early colonial religious “hate speech” laws
• Why Hobbes found “the mere fact of disagreement offensive”  
• The origin, development, and limits of Lockean tolerance
• Williams’s combination of fundamentalist evangelical intolerance and free speech fundamentalism
• Why political theory and practice of the 17th century is relevant to modern day controversies on free speech

Bejan is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Oriel College. She is the author of Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration.

You can subscribe and listen to Clear and Present Danger on iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, TuneIn and Stitcher, or download episodes directly from SoundCloud.

Stay up to date with Clear and Present Danger on the show’s Facebook and Twitter pages, or visit the podcast’s website at freespeechhistory.com.

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In episode 11 we continue to survey the wreckage after hurricane Luther was unleashed on Europe with the Reformation. When the Reformation mutated and spread across the continent a burning question arose: Can people of different faiths live together in the same state? Should social peace be based on tolerance or intolerance? We look into questions such as

• How did other Protestant reformers like Calvin and Zwingli react to religious dissent?
• In what manner did English and continental censorship laws differ?
• How did the Catholic Church react to the Reformation?
• Which states were the first state to formalize religious tolerance?
• How did the scientific and philosophical ideas of Galileo and Giordano Bruno conflict with the religious monopoly on truth and what were the repercussions?

You can subscribe and listen to Clear and Present Danger on iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, TuneIn, and Stitcher, or download episodes directly from SoundCloud.

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The disruptive effects of the internet and social media on the spread of information are unprecedented. Or are they?  

In episode 10 of Clear and Present Danger, we cover the invention, spread, and effects of the Gutenberg printing press:

• What significance did this new technology have for the dissemination of knowledge and ideas?
• Why was the printing press instrumental in helping a German monk and scholar break the religious unity of Europe?
• What happened when new religious ideas raged through Europe like wildfire?
• And did Martin Luther’s Reformation lead to religious tolerance and freedom, or persecution and censorship?

You can subscribe and listen to Clear and Present Danger on iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, TuneIn and Stitcher, or download episodes directly from SoundCloud.

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Our last stop in the Middle Ages is an interview with professor Christine Caldwell Ames, who is an expert on medieval heresy and inquisition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The discussion highlights the similarities and differences between Christianity, Catholic and Orthodox, Judaism, and Islam when it comes to defining and policing orthodoxy.

Among the topics discussed are:

• Was the Medieval Inquisition motivated by worldly power or religious zeal?
• What effect did the Medieval Inquisition have on ordinary people and local communities?
• Why has the Spanish Inquisition become so infamous?
• Was Islamic Spain a haven of religious tolerance compared to the Latin West?  
• Are inquisitions a thing of the past or still relevant in the 21st century?

And much, much more.

Professor Ames is a department chair at the University of South Carolina, as well as the author of “Medieval Heresies: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam” and “Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages.” Ames has an MA in Church History from Yale Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Medieval History from the University of Notre Dame.

You can subscribe and listen to Clear and Present Danger on iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, TuneIn and Stitcher, or download episodes directly from SoundCloud.

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From the High Middle Ages, Europe developed into a “persecuting society,” obsessed with stamping out the “cancer” of heresy. But questions about how this was accomplished — and the consequences of these developments — abound:

• Why did popes and secular rulers shift from persuasion to persecution of heretics?
• Why was human choice in matters of religious belief considered a mortal threat to Christendom itself?
• Why did bookish inquisitors armed with legal procedure, interrogation manuals, data and archives succeed where bloody crusades and mass slaughter failed?
• How did the “machinery of persecution” developed in the Late Middle Ages affect other minority groups such as Jews?
• Are inquisitions a thing of a past and dark hyper-religious age, or a timeless instrument with appeal to the “righteous mind” whether secular or religious?
• What are the similarities between medieval laws against heresy and modern laws against hate speech?

We try to answer these questions — and more — in the latest episode of our Clear and Present Danger podcast.

You can subscribe and listen to Clear and Present Danger on iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, TuneIn and Stitcher, or download episodes directly from SoundCloud.

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In our second expert opinion episode, Jacob Mchangama talks with Peter Adamson, who is a professor of philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and host of the podcast “History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.”

We’ll discuss medieval freethinking and freethinkers from both the Islamic world and the Latin West. Where was the soil most fertile for medieval freethinking? What was the impact of Muslim philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes on European thought? And finally, who makes Peter’s list of the top three boldest European medieval freethinkers?

Professor Peter Adamson has released over 300 podcast episodes on the history of philosophy, written several books, and published numerous papers on medieval and ancient philosophy. He holds a joint appointment with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and King’s College London.

You can subscribe and listen to Clear and Present Danger on iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, TuneIn and Stitcher, or download episodes directly from SoundCloud.

Stay up to date with Clear and Present Danger on the show’s Facebook and Twitter pages, or visit the podcast’s website at freespeechhistory.com.

Email us feedback at [email protected].