Jad Abumrad

And what Holmes could have possibly meant by that.

And he's come to the view that Oliver Wendell Holmes was probably acutely aware through all of his experiences that reckoning with free speech...

when you're trying to build a democracy.

And so to Holmes, the point wasn't to get to some definitive moment of triumph.

It was just to keep the experiment itself going for as long as possible.

When the experiment doesn't go the way that you expect, when your initial ideas are challenged, you adapt.

You come up with new ideas.

even new metaphors.

That we constantly have to be rethinking what we even mean by free speech.

It's a constantly tweaking thing.

Like it's a thing that we, it's never set, but it's something we need to kind of keep tweaking as we're going and keep refining.

So what's the better theory?

I mean, now is the time for you to kind of lay down this bombshell of this new theory.

What is it?

Speaking of which, what is a better metaphor?

What is a better way to think about free speech in a modern society?

Email us at radiolab at wnyc.org.

Yeah.

Email us.

Tweet at us.