Earlier this week, in the FCC v. Fox Television Stations case, the Supreme Court provided some limited legal support to the Federal Communication Commission’s (or FCC’s) policy of penalizing TV networks for “fleeting expletives” – like the one that U2 singer Bono used when he blurted out “this is really, really fucking brilliant” upon winning a Golden Globe award. I say “limited” because the Court may yet strike down the fleeting expletives ban on First Amendment grounds. Its decision yesterday determined only that the FCC’s ban was permissible under the statutes of Congress, and left for a later date the task of deciding whether it was likewise permissible under the limits of the Constitution.

My point in this blog post is not to focus deeply on the Supreme Court’s case or the law behind it. There are other posts in the blogosphere that provide a good summary and analysis of the case. Rather, it’s to ask whether (and how) the Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence on swearing should be informed by the neurobiology and psychology of swearing. This is not a subject I’m an expert on. But it is among the topics that Steven Pinker delves into in his recent book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window on Human Nature. And this makes Pinker’s analysis a potential source of guidance for the Supreme Court to understand how our emotional brains process swearing, just as he has offered some recent guidance (in a NY Times op-ed) on why a grammar-obsessed chief justice might instinctively and unintentionally amend the presidential oath of office, as Chief Justice Roberts did in his first attempt to swear in President Obama.

Pinker’s book provides an illuminating discussion of swearing, and how and why we do it. As he explains, it is not an accident that swear words in English and many other languages deal with aspects of life we prefer not to dwell upon: diseases and the bodily effluvia that carry them, sexual depravity, and fears of threatening supernatural forces. (Stuff of Thought, pp. 339-348). Swear words are meant to create such feelings of unpleasantness. And they are so effective at producing an emotional charge, that people sometimes use them not to evoke images or thoughts of their scatological or sexual meaning (for example) but simply to “ping people’s emotion buttons” and “arouse the listener’s attention” (as Pinker says in this videotaped discussion of his book). Some evidence of this effectiveness can be found not only in how many of us feel upon hearing them, but also in brain scans, which show that when people hear a taboo word, there is an increase in metabolic activity within the amygdala, (p. 332), which – as a set of earlier posts on this blog have noted– is associated with the generation of anxiety, anger, and other emotions.

The effectiveness of swear words is due not only to their emotional power, but to another, more general feature of the way our brain processes language, which is that “understanding the meaning of a word is automatic.” (p. 332) If you’re a “literate adult,” once you’ve become familiar with the meaning of a word, “you can’t will the process ‘off’ even when you’re trying to ignore” words’ meanings in order to pay attention to some characteristic, like the color of the ink they’re written in. (p. 333) For “taboo words,” the effect can be even stronger, because the emotional impact they have is especially hard for a hearer to ignore. “Thanks to the automatic nature of speech perception,” then, “a taboo word kidnaps our attention and forces us to consider its unpleasant connotations. That makes all of us vulnerable to a mental assault whenever we are in earshot of other speakers, as if we are strapped to a chair and could be given a punch or shock at any time.” (p. 339)

Now this description of swearing’s effect on our mental processes might seem – at first glance – like it’s tailor-made for a policy aimed at cleansing this sort of language from the airwaves. After all, the TV shows we watch are supposed to inform and entertain us, not to stretch out electronic tentacles and “kidnap” us or “strap” us to a metaphorical “chair” to inflict very real emotional pain. (TV shows are supposed do such terrible things only in horror and sci-fi stories, like the movie, The Ring , or The X-Files episode, Wetwired). So it’s not surprising that the FCC believed Pinker’s analysis to be useful in defending their ban on fleeting expletives and cited it in the brief it filed in the Supreme Court.

The problem is that the First Amendment and policy implications are not so simple.

First, while some people may wish for a world where they are free from having negative thoughts or emotions inflicted on them by others’ use of language, that’s not the word we live in, especially not in a society that values free expression. And although the home is a sanctuary of sorts where we can find refuge from the offensive speech of peers and strangers, that doesn’t necessarily mean we can use this as an excuse for cleansing all things unpalatable to us from the public airwaves that we share with other TV viewers and radio listeners.

Moreover, as Pinker points out, swearing – and the emotional power it provides – has a positive side. Writers as he notes, “must sometimes let their characters swear in order to render human passion compellingly.” (p. 370). And he offers numerous examples from novels, poetry, and political speech. Thus, it’s difficult to see why the Supreme Court minimized the value of this component of our expressive power in the 1978 case of FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, when it allowed FCC to penalize a radio station for airing comedian George Carlin’s famous “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine. Swear words, it declared in that case, “surely lie at the periphery of First Amendment concern.” (438 U.S. 726, 743). As Pinker makes clear, this characterization of swearing is mistaken: Swearing is anything but peripheral to the value of communication and other expression. Moreover, the Supreme Court itself made a similar point in the 1971 case of Cohen v. California. “The State,” it said, “has no right to cleanse public debate to the point where it is grammatically palatable to the most squeamish among us” and it emphasized (as Justice Ginsberg noted in her dissent in the fleeting expletives case a couple days ago) that “words are often chosen as much for their emotive as their cognitive force.” (403 U.S. 15, 25-26).

Second, use of expletives – fleeting or sustained – is hardly the only means we are given by our language and other expressive powers to trigger negative emotions in an audience. So, while the law may sometimes be justified in protecting us from the psychological impact of certain words (for example, those in a credible threat of violence), the negative emotions associated with hearing swear words hardly seem to be all that is needed to provide such a warrant for speech restriction. Still less do they justify giving swear words a different status under the First Amendment than the multitude of other verbal expressions, images, and other stimuli that might also “light up” our amygdalas or otherwise ignite our “emotional brains” against our will.

In fact, swear words are sometimes among the least painful parts of a movie or TV show. There are many other forms of television and movie content that will trigger not merely negative emotion but fear or trauma. Consider the case of the film, Saving Private Ryan, which – despite the constant use of profanity by the WWII soldiers portrayed – was exempted from by the FCC from its indecent language ban on the grounds that the expletives were not gratuitous but rather “integral to the film’s objective of conveying the horrors of war through the eyes of these soldiers.” Just as Pinker observes swearing is sometimes needed in art to “render human passion compellingly,” so the FCC observed that “[d]eleting all of such language [from Saving Private Ryan] or inserting milder language or bleeping sounds . . . would have altered the nature of the artistic work and diminished the power, realism, and immediacy of the film experience for viewers.”

I’m a huge fan of the movie, and very much hope my kids do get to watch it some day when they’re older, but I would never let them watch it at their current preschool ages. The frequent swear words play some role in this decision, but they’re by no means the thing that most concerns me as a parent. Much more worrisome is the extraordinary carnage and devastation in the film’s war scenes. That violence is, of course, even more essential to a vividly realistic war film than is the soldiers’ coarse language. But it also seems much more likely to give children terrifying nightmares and unshakeable anxieties.

It’s a little odd, then, for the FCC to fret more about children hearing a fleeting expletive than seeing traumatic images of violence, and a little odd for it allow such expletives to air during prime time (in large part) to give such war-time suffering a greater and more immediate emotional impact. The FCC noted that the horrifying nature of Saving Private Ryan’s battle scenes should hardly surprise anyone who had heard about the film – and that ABC also went to lengths to warn parents before it started that this was not a movie for children. This reasoning is a little strange, however, because such a notice argument didn’t save George Carlin’s monologue in 1978, where the title of his routine “Filthy Words” should have likewise put parents on notice, as did the station’s announcement, just before the broadcast of the monologue, that it included "sensitive language which might be regarded as offensive to some." The primary reason that notice failed to save the George Carlin routine – namely, that a child might hear the swear word before a parent had a chance to change the station – applies just as forcefully to an early evening broadcast of Saving Private Ryan, where a child may turn on the television or change the channel and suddenly see severed body parts before a parent can recognize what’s happening and switch off the TV.

Perhaps even more forcefully: as Pinker notes, the automatic understanding of swear words’ meaning occurs reliably in “literate adults” who have learned that meaning. For many young children, by contrast, I would think that a swear word they’ve never heard before will be as mysterious, and as devoid of particular emotional significance, as other undefined words they hear. They may, perhaps, repeat these words inappropriately, disturbing others who do know the meaning. But it’s hard to see why this should be of more concern than a channel-surfing child coming across an image that is likely to have a more immediate emotional impact, like the violence depicted in a war movie, or a James Bond film, a John Wayne or Clint Eastwood Western, or a production of Sweeney Todd or West Side Story.

In exempting Saving Private Ryan from its indecency proscriptions, FCC Chairman Michael Powell also took note of the fact that film is a “critically acclaimed artwork” and noted that the swearing was not gratuitous, but rather an integral part of the film. But again, it’s hard to see why Carlin’s comedy routine shouldn’t be saved by the same considerations. His “Filthy Words” routine was not intended merely to shock; it was intended as social commentary and observation, an illustration of how irrational he thought society was in its horrified reaction to swearing. And, of course, the swearing was absolutely integral to the routine. In fact, Carlin’s social commentary anticipated by many years an observation in Justice Steven’s dissent a couple days ago. In footnote 4 of his dissent, Justice Stevens noted the irony of the FCC barring fleeting expletives – with only a “tenuous relation to sex or excrement” – in the middle of daytime shows that often cut to commercials asking viewers “if they too are battling erectile dysfunction or are having trouble going to the bathroom.” Years before this, Carlin noted (in a sequel to his “Filthy Words” routine) the strangeness of a television regime where you can’t say the F-word on the air, but where so many shows in the line-up of daytime soap operas and evening sitcoms have plots that center around sexual relationships and their consequences (To be sure, some of that strangeness might be explained by Pinker’s intriguing account of why sexual innuendo is often OK in social interactions where a direct reference to sex is not (in Ch. 8). Or of why we often find it acceptable to use euphemisms for sexual or scatological concepts, but not swear words. (pp. 350-51). But those possible explanations don’t drain Carlin’s comedy and social commentary of its ingenuity or artistic merit).

All of this leads me to suspect that swear words are singled out for harsh treatment by the FCC and Congress not because there’s anything uniquely worrisome about their psychological effects, but rather because they’re an easy target. It’s far easier for an agency to determine when a TV show or movie has used profanity than it is to decide whether a particular set of car crashes, war battles, or crime scenes are too much for a child to take. I suspect that, although V-chips and other technologies are far from perfect (and the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups emphasized that in a recent brief for the Court’s fleeting expletives case), it is ultimately technologies like this – and not across-the-board proscriptions on particular words or phrases – that will lay the framework for the most sensible child protection regime. A lot of the most important judgments that parents make in monitoring their children’s TV consumption will be based not on words that are easily classifiable or definable ahead of time, but on more subtle judgments about which channels and particular shows have imagery that is suitable for children – and, more specifically, for their children. After all, what is traumatic or otherwise emotionally painful may at least in some respects be different for different children, depending on their individual characters and life experiences.

I’m not suggesting that any of these law and policy views (or doubts about the law and policies proposed by others) follow automatically from a particular understanding of how swearing works and how it affects our brains. It’s clear there can be disagreement here, and Pinker seems to disagree with the FCC about the proper response to fleeting expletives (as he made clear in a piece in The Atlantic, responding to the FCC’s citation of his book). But I do think that when the government does something as extreme as barring us from hearing certain very common forms of everyday speech in a medium as pervasive as television and radio, it owes us a better explanation than it has given so far of why it is singling out for banishment certain words that seem no more likely to cause deep trauma or emotional pain than much of the imagery and story lines it feels compelled (and probably should feel compelled) to leave free from government restriction.