Free Speech And Why It Matters

by Andrew Doyle

Free speech dies when the populace grows complacent and takes its liberties for granted.

History does not look fondly on the hubris of those who, like Galileo’s inquisitors, appoint themselves as arbiters of permissible speech and thought. Their authority is only ever contingent on the wisdom of their time. Today’s free speech sceptics are characterised by a similar tendency to mistake self-satisfaction for infallibility. If nothing else, the story of Galileo is a potent reminder of the importance of freedom of speech, and how none of us can ever be sure which heresies of today will become the certainties of tomorrow.

Moreover, if we permit the worst people in society to take ownership of our most fundamental values, we are gifting them a degree of power they do not deserve. Simply because hate-fuelled demagogues might disingenuously proclaim their fealty to free speech, this does not mean that the principle itself is tainted by association. Good people should not abandon their beliefs when bad people claim them for their own. If they do, such beliefs can only ever be said to have been tenuously held.

As Thomas Hobbes noted, the Greeks had ‘but one word, logos, for both speech and reason; not that they thought there was no speech without reason, but no reasoning without speech’.

Just as freedom of religion incorporates freedom from religion, the right to speak and listen also entails the right not to speak and listen.

On balance, I am persuaded that the dangers of empowering the state to determine the limitations of expression far outweigh the risk of small groups of extremists attempting to proselytise. The cost of freedom is that it is open to abuse by an unconscientious minority but, once liberty is relinquished, it is difficult to recover. To those who would trust the state to monitor our speech, I would remind them of Thomas Paine’s closing remark in his Dissertation on First-Principles of Government (1795): ‘He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.’

Speech is to perjury what fire is to arson. Certainly we can use words to commit crime – the same could be said of almost anything: water, bricks, golf clubs, even stuffed halibuts – but in a murder case we punish the killer, not the weapon.

The saying originated in the 1917 United States Supreme Court ruling against Charles Schenck, a socialist who had issued a broadside calling for young men to refuse military conscription and was convicted under the Espionage Act. It was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who wrote the statement: ‘The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting “Fire!” in a theatre and causing a panic.’

As Gabe Rottman has noted, the ‘crowded theatre’ argument is ‘worse than useless in defining the boundaries of constitutional speech’ because as a metaphor ‘it can be deployed against any unpopular speech’. The incoherence of Holmes’s position is why the decision of the court in Schenck v. United States was overruled in 1969. It is now regarded as an egregious error in judgement, which makes it a somewhat frail basis for advancing the case for censorship.

An argument stands or falls on its own merits.

we degrade ourselves by subordinating our reason to baser instincts.

We are far better placed to know and overcome evil if we are acquainted with its essence, and the best way to achieve this is to listen and to read.

If we grant leeway for bad ideas to go unchallenged, they are able to sustain the illusion of incontrovertibility among their devotees.

if we only ever expose ourselves to the received wisdom of the present, we condemn ourselves to eternal stasis.

Émile Zola’s description of art as ‘life seen through a temperament’.

John Stuart Mill repeatedly emphasises the danger of outsourcing our moral agency to the putative wisdom of the crowd.

Where nobody can agree on definitions, there can be no unanimity on where the limitations of free speech can be drawn. In such circumstances, the safest approach is to defend free speech for all, and that includes those whose views we might find reprehensible.

‘All war represents a failure of diplomacy.’

‘If words can cause stress,’ she writes, ‘and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech – at least certain types of speech – can be a form of violence.’ Yet the logic of this reasoning would see all potential sources of stress as tantamount to violence, which could apply to just about anything. If I become anxious due to financial problems brought about by taxes on my income, and fall ill as a result, has the Government committed an act of violence against my person by means of taxation? Surely even the staunchest libertarian would regard this as wishful thinking.

Socrates’s famous dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living, and it seems to me that we deny ourselves the opportunity for growth when we refuse to interrogate our own certainties. It is intellectual suicide in slow motion.

Marcus Aurelius said it this way: ‘Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been’.

If a man were to punch me, or otherwise inflict harm upon me by physical means, I am in no position to prevent the injury. There is no such loss of liberty in the taking of offence, which has come about as a combination of the words uttered and the interpretation or significance I place upon them. This is why the law is right to prohibit physical assault but permit the casting of insults. In the case of the former, the incursion on my liberties justifies my recourse to see my offender prosecuted; the attack satisfied his will at the expense of mine. The same cannot be said were I to attempt to silence my critic, in which case I would be the one guilty of encroaching on the liberty of another.

Without the threat of punitive repercussions, our agency is not diminished by pressure to conform.

In the end, we have to consider which is more harmful to society: a minority who would seek to incite violence against their fellow citizens, or a state that has been empowered to set the limits of permissible thought and speech.

Three thousand people are arrested each year in the UK for offensive comments posted online, even in cases where a joke had clearly been intended. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 criminalises online speech that can be deemed ‘grossly offensive’ by the courts.

The price we pay for a free society is that bad people will say bad things. We tolerate this, not because we approve of the content of their speech, but because once we have compromised on the principle of free speech we clear the pathway for future tyranny.

‘Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.’ Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people, too.

‘I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it’.