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How are we meant to respond when the people who wish to deprive us of our rights sincerely believe that they are doing so for our own good?
George Orwell looms large in current debates about freedom of expression. He joins a long line of thinkers who have explored what John Stuart Mill described in 1859 as the ‘struggle between Liberty and Authority’
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.
In my view, free speech is a principle that transcends notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ because all forms of political discourse depend upon its existence.
They understood, in other words, that free speech for all is the best defence against totalitarianism. It is the means by which we assert our self-determination in the face of those who might seek to control our behaviour, which is why dictators are quick to impose regulations on the press
Even leaders with good intentions are prone to corruption when shielded from public scrutiny.
Historically, censorship has been enacted by the state, but with the rise of social media as the de facto public square, big tech corporations now have dominion over the acceptable limits of popular discourse. We are rapidly moving into an age in which unelected plutocrats hold more collective power and influence than any national government, only without any of the democratic accountability.
Irrespective of where you might stand on how best to address these problems, we can surely all agree that the global community is not best served by the cultivation of increasingly hermetic online ‘echo chambers’. The last thing we need is for powerful corporations with an oligopoly on public forums to do our thinking for us.
When we stand up for the speech rights of repellent figures, we inevitably leave ourselves open to the accusation of complicity. To assume that defending another’s right to speech is a form of approval of its substance is a grave error that discourages many of us from upholding the principle.
The majority of those who oppose the criminalisation of racist speech do so precisely because they abhor racism. They would prefer such individuals to be challenged and, if possible, shown how their prejudice is fundamentally irrational.
While it is true that most of us, myself included, lack the patience and the ability to talk anyone out of his or her racist delusions, the likes of Daryl Davis – a musician who has successfully deradicalised numerous members of the Ku Klux Klan – prove that it is possible.
Have seen video of him speaking of his experiences and encoraging others to dialogue. It was very impressive!
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.’
Standing up for the rights of the worst people in society comes at a great personal cost. The task is less onerous if we are able to communicate the message that we do not protect controversial speech for its content, but rather the principle it represents.
The practitioners of cancel culture habitually engage in what is known as ‘gaslighting’, a term which denotes the act of flatly contradicting observable reality. They smear their targets as ‘bullies’ as a means to bully them, or cast themselves in the role of victim while they victimise others.
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’.
When people are expected to behave like robots, who will never misspeak or inadvertently cause offence, the business of living is reduced to drudgery.
To set limits on speech in order to improve tolerance is like attempting to extinguish a fire with gasoline. It infantilises those who are singled out as requiring insulation from distressing ideas, undermines the principle of equality under the law, and frustrates the means by which injustices in society can be effectively overcome. Moreover, tolerance is a virtue that requires an acknowledgement of disapproval. It means that we are able to support the rights of others to hold opinions we cannot respect.
We should be wary of short-term remedies which may provide the ready-made tools for state-imposed censorship.
Quite apart from the fallacy of assuming bad faith, a condition of open and productive dialogue is that the thoughts expressed are evaluated independently of their proponents. Ideas cannot be ‘owned’ by any individual, merely articulated with greater or lesser degrees of success. An argument stands or falls on its own merits.
Every human interaction carries the potential to cause offence. There are almost no words that are bereft of connotations, and even silence can be a source of discomfort. We can all therefore agree that to insulate ourselves from the possibility of feeling offended is to withdraw from society altogether.
In most cases, it is safest to assume that those who commit acts of which we disapprove must believe them to be good. Similarly, opinions that we find repellent often originate from the best of intentions. Once we understand this, we unlock the potential for meaningful dialogue.
To feel upset is not an aberration; it is a sign that we are alive.
nobody has ever been persuaded out of a deeply held conviction by force.
we must also be able to recognise that we would not be so damning in our judgement had we been born into his time and circumstances. It is only by contextualising the failures of the past that we are able to learn from them.
‘Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?’
Thanks to years of concept creep, whenever I come across any of these terms on social media, in mainstream news outlets, or in the language of politicians, my initial instinct is to assume that the epithet has been misused. The boy has cried ‘fascist’ once too often, and is now being ignored.
Even the allegation is sufficient to make the accused unemployable. In other words, the charge that ours is an endemically racist culture is fatally undermined by the very tactics that its proponents deploy. They prove that our society is committed to expelling the very racism they claim defines it.
‘If liberty means anything at all’, wrote Orwell, ‘it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’
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.
Yet the fact that so many believe that the state should constrain the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo reveals the danger of the very concept of hate speech laws. That is to say, if a substantial number of intelligent people can become convinced that a left-wing anti-racist publication is waging a war against minority ethnic groups, then it is surely inevitable that legislation against ‘hate’ will be enforced on the basis of similar misconceptions.
But in order to criticise Charlie Hebdo, as is anyone’s right, one must first understand the subject of one’s criticism. To excoriate these cartoonists for racism is to lock horns with a phantom enemy. If satirists are to self-censor due to the possibility of misinterpretation, we may as well abandon the genre altogether.
It goes without saying that total objectivity is neither possible nor desirable when it comes to professional criticism, but it would appear that a significant proportion now see their role as censuring art that they perceive to be ‘problematic’.
We can all agree that the censorship of artists by tyrannous regimes is an abomination, and yet there is something even more dispiriting about an artist who surrenders his or her freedom of expression voluntarily. In its most extreme form, self-censorship occurs because of the prospect of violent repercussions. For most artists, however, the threat they face is that of limited career prospects in a risk-averse climate.
Of course, it is not in the nature of artists to admit that they are curtailing their own manner of expression in the face of external influences, which means that the problem is likely to be more widespread than we imagine. The best artists are nonconformists, and the worst artists like to be seen as the best artists. We should do all we can to cultivate a world in which creative risks are worth taking, and in which eccentricity and missteps will not be punished in the kangaroo courts of social media.
When George Orwell wrote his essay on ‘The English People’ in 1944, he was able to assert that extremely few ‘are afraid to utter their political opinions in public, and there are not even very many who want to silence the opinions of others’. This sentence could not be written with any confidence today.
2020, is an example of what the economist Timur Kuran has called ‘preference falsification’, whereby one’s true opinions are withheld in favour of more socially acceptable alternatives.
preference falsification
As social creatures, our fear of unpopularity is innate, yet to repress the truth is to leave unchecked a parasite gnawing at the soul. We make ourselves vulnerable because we are colluding with those we have deceived in what amounts to an artificial reality. The pressure to lie corrals us into a morally compromising position where, for the sake of our sanity, we learn to believe our own fictions, condemned to live as actors who have forgotten we are playing a role.
Conflict is hard. The appeal of ideologies is that they absolve us of the obligation to think for ourselves. Many, if not most, are willing to sacrifice their freedom of speech and independent thought for the consolations of certitude. It is in the interests of the powerful to encourage this kind of docility and thereby beget a flock of industrious sheep.
In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill repeatedly emphasises the danger of outsourcing our moral agency to the putative wisdom of the crowd.
Largely, this is down to lack of viewpoint diversity among teaching staff; according to one study, less than 12 per cent of academic staff are right-leaning, as compared to roughly half of the national population. The expectation to conform to a particular political and ideological worldview has encouraged many academics to self-censor and circumscribed the career prospects of those who do not. A 2020 report found that one in three conservative scholars claim to self-censor ‘for fear of consequences to [their] career’.
Even if you maintain that occasional abuses of state power are a small price to pay for healthy public discourse, I would ask you to consider the inherent dangers of this precedent. Milton offers the example of the Spanish Inquisition, and how their acts of censorship, although ostensibly intended to purge the world of heresy, soon came to include ‘any subject that was not to their palate’. When it comes to defining what constitutes unacceptable speech, the notion of true objectivity is a mirage.
even terms such as ‘fascist’ have become unmoored from their original definitions.
Freedom of speech does not guarantee that violent people will be redeemed, but it does at least mean that the possibility is not precluded.
what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have described as a new culture of ‘Safetyism’,
However justifiable or rational our objectives might be, recourse to violence has a delegitimising effect, and
Yet taking offence is a matter of choice. 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’
