Book Review by Clay Calvert, University of Florida

From Journalism Quarterly
September 2014 vol. 91 no. 3   617-619

Book Review: The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation: The Constitutional Foundations of the Aspirational Society, by Narain D. Batra

The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation: The Constitutional Foundations of the Aspirational Society. Narain D. Batra Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. 255 pp. $75 hardback

http://jmq.sagepub.com.library.norwich.edu/content/91/3/617.full

By Clay Calvert
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. USA

Discovering the truth, voting wisely, and realizing one’s identity; it is a trio of well-established justifications for protecting speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, corresponding, respectively, to free-expression theories known as the marketplace of ideas, democratic self-governance, and autonomy/human dignity.

To this list, Narain D. Batra now adds another important free-speech value—innovation—in his timely and example-packed tome, The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation. A professor of communications at Norwich University in Vermont who also writes for media outlets in India, Batra’s thesis in his latest book is clear: The First Amendment provides Americans with the essential cultural environment, the primordial soup or the embryonic conditions, for innovations to develop regardless of the process, whether it is recombinant, serendipitous, or simply someone fiddling and tinkering in the garage or with the iPad.

Citing and channeling Justice Louis Brandeis’ 1927 contention from Whitney v. California that “it is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears,” Batra asserts that the First Amendment “creates spaces for innovative behavior by freeing us from irrational fears (whether it is stem cell research for life enhancement or redefining the idea of marriage by applying the Fourteenth Amendment to gay marriage rights).”

But the First Amendment and the culture of innovation it facilitates are only two of the necessary conditions for making the United States an aspirational society. The other variables, Batra believes, are a steady influx of immigrants that produces “brain flow” and an open economic marketplace (not simply a metaphorical marketplace of ideas). Simply put, it takes free speech, free markets and freed—not free—brains.

One strength of this book is the author’s ability to surf the pop-cultural realm to illustrate larger points about free speech, communication technologies, innovation and aspirational society. On page 22, we find erstwhile California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger landing in hot political and cultural waters for a Saturday Night Live-infused crack about special interests, unions, and trial lawyers being “girlie men.” Exactly sixty pages later, we catch singer-actress Courtney Love diving into a very different cauldron of hot water for tweeting allegedly defamatory remarks about a clothing designer. And then there is Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, characterized as “a most spectacular materialization of the myth of the aspirational society.”

But these references are not to say that the book fails to approach its topics with gravitas. Batra’s chapter on China is excellent and, from an American perspective, almost exceedingly optimistic. He ends it by pondering whether China “has the unique cultural power to challenge the United States and the West.” Batra concludes it does not. “Authoritarian China cannot handle political freedom because it does not have the American cultural capabilities to do so,” Batra writes, adding that “the source of the unique American cultural capabilities is the First Amendment freedoms, which China cannot import without transforming itself into a different society, one that will closely resemble the United States.”

In other places, Batra’s optimism is tempered by realism. While stressing that a free market is necessary for an aspirational society, Batra openly acknowledges and analyzes corporate corruption, observing that, when left unchecked by a vigorous press, free market capitalism “can cause global havoc.”

He laments that “traditional news media organizations are either incapable of understanding the workings of Wall Street firms . . . or are prone to collusion with them through bribery, insider trading, careerism, or intimidation.” But even here there still is some optimism. In this atmosphere, Batra contends, “the public has no choice but to welcome and embrace a free-floating, footloose, beyond national-cyberorganization such as WikiLeaks.” Indeed, it is WikiLeaks that “presents the greatest challenge to traditional media’s investigative role in society.” WikiLeaks enables transparency, which, in turn, allows a check to be placed on government abuses.

And Batra has not given up hope for the news media to play an important role in what he calls “the age of WikiLeaks,” especially if journalists reprioritize their agendas.

If American journalists pay as much attention to Wall Street and global financial institutions as they pay to Hollywood gossip and sex scandals of politicians and sports celebrities, perhaps it would be possible to foresee and prevent the next crisis.

While journalism professors everywhere would surely endorse such a shift, one must wonder whether the audience would even pay attention. And if the audience will not pay attention, then there is little financial incentive for such a change in coverage.

Among his strengths, Batra knows how to turn clever, memorable, and inspiring phrases about the importance of the First Amendment. Free-speech scholars going forward likely will cite and sprinkle some of these chestnuts into their own writing when addressing the power and purposes of the First Amendment. Consider, for instance: “if history has a pattern of decline and fall, then the First Amendment is the monkey wrench that breaks the pattern”; “the First Amendment, one of the greatest human utterances ever uttered, is a great disrupter, and it breaks the deterministic pattern of history”; “the First Amendment . . . has become a kind of evergreen field of dreams”; and “the First Amendment is the enemy of sacred cows.” In brief, the First Amendment is a monkey wrench, great disrupter, field of dreams, and enemy of sacred cows all rolled into one.

Ultimately, Batra makes a valuable contribution not only to the literature on free expression, but also to the workings of modern American society. With time, the innovation value of the First Amendment might well take its place alongside established First Amendment theories.