Free Speech And Why It Matters

by Andrew Doyle

Inevitably, the phrase ‘Orwellian’ has become something of a cliché and subject to derision by free speech sceptics, but it is predictable only because it is so pertinent. When Christopher Hitchens visited Prague in 1988 to report on the Communist regime, he was determined to be ‘the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka’. During one of Václav Havel’s ‘Charter 77’ committee meetings, police burst into the property with dogs and searchlights, threw Hitchens against a wall, and arrested him. When he asked for the details of the charge, he was told that he ‘had no need to know the reason’. For all Hitchens’s best intentions, the Kafka cliché was forced upon him. As he later observed, ‘They make you do it.’

Our civilisation is abnormal, almost miraculous, in its dedication to this most estimable of principles. Free speech dies when the populace grows complacent and takes its liberties for granted.

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.

‘Cancel culture’ is a shorthand metaphor for a retributive method of public shaming and boycotting, often for relatively minor mistakes or unfashionable opinions, which is typically driven by social media. Those who support the tactics of cancel culture have been known to deny its existence, claiming instead that they are merely holding the powerful to account. However, the key difference is that when it comes to cancel culture, targets are denounced rather than criticised, and the consequences are hugely disproportionate to the perceived slight.

themselves in the role of victim while they victimise others. Often, this is achieved by claiming that they have been made to feel ‘unsafe’ or that ‘violence’ has been inflicted, which is usually enough to ensure that the target will lose his or her job.

Cancel culture does not seek to criticise, but to punish, and leaves little scope for redemption. This is why the singer Nick Cave has described it as ‘mercy’s antithesis’.

Rather than disproving the reality of cancel culture, Rowling’s circumstances demonstrate that it is the least powerful who are the most vulnerable to its effects.

The range of opinions that are deemed societally acceptable at any given moment is known as the ‘Overton Window’, and its tendency to shift according to time and location should tell us something about the cultural specificity of ethical norms.

Now that racist and fascist groups are universally despised in civilised society, the prohibition only makes sense if we artificially expand the definitions of these terms to incorporate anyone whose ideas fail to live up to contemporary values, particularly in relation to modern-day ‘social justice’. This is known as ‘concept creep’, and it explains why words such as ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’ are now so promiscuously applied.

A misleading narrative has dominated discussions of the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, one that is largely based on the false impression that the magazine routinely ‘punches down’ at minority ethnic groups. As Robert McLiam Wilson has pointed out, the majority of Charlie Hebdo’s critics have a number of shared qualities: they are not regular readers of the magazine; they live outside of France; and they don’t speak French. This explains why the depiction of justice minister Christiane Taubira as a monkey was so widely interpreted as racist, even though the target was the racist nationalists who had made such appalling comparisons in the first place. There is a very good reason why this left-wing magazine has been lauded as ‘the greatest anti-racist weekly’ by SOS Racisme, a group well known for its campaigns against racial discrimination.

Charlie Hebdo’s depictions of Mohammed – like its cartoon of the Holy Trinity, in which the Son, the Father and the Holy Spirit are seen engaged in a three-way sexual encounter – are not ‘punching down’ at ordinary Muslims, but ‘punching up’ at the icons of powerful global religions. After all, you can’t punch much higher than God.

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.

combination of state censorship, hostility to press freedom, cancel culture, big tech interference, media complacency, and a substantial proportion of the public that

The warnings of history are there should we wish to heed them. Our liberties have been hard won, and those who attack them now are only able to do because of the privileges they afford. There is no edifice sufficiently robust that it will not eventually yield to sustained pressure. We are right to distrust those who assume their own infallibility and moral superiority over the past, who consider their small pocket of existence to be a kind of Year Zero in the grand narrative of humanity.