Free Speech And Why It Matters

by Andrew Doyle

Much of this can be explained by a sea change in the public’s attitude to free expression and its key function in a liberal society. A new identity-based conceptualisation of ‘social justice’ has brought with it a mistrust of unfettered speech and appeals for greater intervention from the state. We are left facing that confusing and rare phenomenon: the well-intentioned authoritarian.

When those who long for a fairer society are also calling for censorship, we find ourselves stranded on unfamiliar terrain. 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?

Defenders of free speech are often confronted with the accusation that we are indulging in the ‘slippery slope’ fallacy. The occasional instance of state overreach, we are told, is hardly cause for alarm. Yet the idea that citizens of the United Kingdom might be invest...

He joins a long line of thinkers who have explored what John Stuart Mill described in 1859 as the ‘struggle between Liberty and Authority

Opposition to free speech never goes away, which is why it must be defended anew in each successive generation.

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

I start from the proposition that free speech is nothing less than the keystone of our civilisation. You may have reservations about this view. You may believe that unlimited speech enables the worst elements among us to commit harm. There is much to be said in favour of this perspective, although I hope to show you that a society that abandons freedom of expression risks exacerbating the very problems about which you are rightly concerned.

Free speech is the marrow of democracy. Without it, no other liberties exist. It is detested by tyrants because it empowers their captive subjects. It is mistrusted by puritans because it is the wellspring of subversion. Unless we are able to speak our minds, we cannot innovate, or even begin to make sense of the world. 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’.

If we complain that our opponent’s defence of free speech is some kind of subterfuge in order to advance a nefarious agenda, have we not already made a judgement about the validity of the position he or she intends to take? If our fear of free speech is that it facilitates the dissemination of bad ideas, then we have pre-emptively decided which ideas are beyond the pale. By doing so, we limit our own capacity to be challenged, and inadvertently reveal our existing prejudices.

Whether this is tactical or not, there is a clear tendency among those who oppose unlimited speech to misrepresent what others have said in order to denounce them.

For instance, after what become known as the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ on 4 October 1936 – where Oswald Mosley’s ‘blackshirts’ were intercepted by anti-fascist demonstrators as they attempted to march through the East End of London – the Labour party was instrumental in urging parliament to rush through Public Order legislation to stop further uprisings by the far right. Yet since their inception, these measures have mostly been used to clamp down on left-wing activism, and formed the basis of the Government’s justification to arrest striking miners in the mid-1980s. By granting the state the legal powers to ban fascist marches, the left had inadvertently stymied its own cause.

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. This is the liberal ideal.

Those who demand respect are, in effect, insisting on deference. The idea that certain beliefs ought to be ring-fenced from criticism and ridicule is the very antithesis of liberalism.

In an age when ‘lived experience’ is often valued more than objective truth, the core tenets of liberalism – due process and free speech – are bound to be at risk. ‘Lived experience’ is what we used to call ‘anecdotal evidence’, a fallacious form of reasoning that has misled many into believing that ours is an essentially oppressive society, overrun by fascists and undergirded by white supremacy. Needless to say, those whose ‘lived experience’ tells them that this worldview bears little resemblance to reality are quickly discounted. It would seem that ‘lived experience’ only matters if it is of the approved kind.

Those who insist that fascism has become normalised have a tendency to discard, or entirely misrepresent, statistics that do not reflect their pessimistic view.

They embodied the memorable words of Benjamin Cardozo, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1932–38, who described freedom of expression as ‘the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom’.

With contemporary politics now dominated by issues of identity, it is sometimes difficult to detach the arguments for and against freedom of speech from the person who is making them. Too often, opinions are dismissed through various forms of ad hominem assessments. Some people believe that if hateful speech has a disproportionate impact on minority groups, then those with perceived ‘privilege’ are less entitled to opine on the subject. This is why a defence of free speech by a straight, white male is likely to be met with the objection that he is unqualified to apprehend the potential harm of words. But when the same arguments are advanced by a black lesbian, as they so often have been, there is nowhere left for the identity-fixated critic to retreat. Put simply, if you frame your counter-arguments in terms of the immutable characteristics of the person you oppose, you are setting yourself up for failure. At the same time, you obfuscate the actual issue in question.

While it is true that there are invaluable insights to be gained from personal experience, this approach makes all kinds of assumptions. The first is that any one form of privilege – most commonly racial, sexual or gendered – should be deemed more advantageous than another, a proposition that is only possible to support in the most abstract terms. The notion that an individual’s privilege can be reasonably quantified and allotted into some kind of hierarchy is essentially unsound. There are too many variables to take on board, many of which cannot possibly be known without a comprehensive understanding of each person’s background and circumstances.

Even if such a feat were possible, would there be any merit in dismissing an argument on the basis of the person who made it? 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 articul...

An important aspect of freedom of speech is the right not to listen. To claim that using the block function on social media is a form of censorship is akin to saying that one violates Stephen King’s free speech by not reading his novels.

As Greg Lukianoff argues, ‘People all over the globe are coming to expect emotional and intellectual comfort as though it were a right. This is precisely what you would expect when you train a generation to believe that they have a right not to be offended. Eventually, they stop demanding freedom of speech and start demanding freedom from speech’. An overdiagnostic culture has reframed distress and emotional pain as forms of mental illness, rather than aspects of a healthy human existence. To feel upset is not an aberration; it is a sign that we are alive.

There is nothing wrong with being offended, and it can often spur us into action when it comes to redressing injustice as we see it. That said, if the source of our offence is a general discomfort that others do not behave or speak in accordance with our own specific values, we are engaging in a kind of solipsism that is best avoided, not least because there is no end to the endeavour. This is the kind of mentality that sees people take umbrage on behalf of others, an increasingly common phenomenon by which speech is judged to be ‘offensive’ even when there is no evidence of any offence being caused.

A compulsion to change the world around us to suit our personal sensibilities is evinced by the tabloid columnist who calls for a film to be banned, the heckler at the comedy club who is outraged at the topic of the joke, the member of staff at a publishing firm who threatens to strike over a ‘problematic’ author, the student activist who sets off fire alarms to prevent a visiting speaker from upsetting his peers. We understand the impulse because we all feel it from time to time. However, to make the leap from the natural revulsion we experience at certain alternative worldviews to actively silencing them is to surrender to the authoritarian tendency. By doing so, we degrade ourselves by subordinating our reason to baser instincts.

Stéphane Charbonnier (known as ‘Charb’), cartoonist and editor-in-chief of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, was once asked whether he feared reprisals after he published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. In his answer, he paraphrased the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata: ‘I would rather die standing than live on my knees.’ A little over two years later, he was killed along with eleven others in the Islamist terror attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices.

In October 2020, schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded by a terrorist in Paris for showing images from Charlie Hebdo in a lesson about free speech. There followed a series of murders by Islamic fundamentalists,

Like the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, condolences in the aftermath were tainted by a lingering sense that the victims were to blame, and that by expressing themselves a little too freely they had forfeited their freedom to exist.

For the atheist satirists of Charlie Hebdo, religion is an ideology like any other and has no right to be cushioned from derision. As Charb put it: ‘While, unlike the existence of God, it is difficult to deny the existence of Marx, Lenin or Georges Marchais, it is neither blasphemous, racist nor communistophobic to cast doubt on the validity of their writings or their speech. In France, a religion is nothing more than a collection of texts, traditions and customs that it is perfectly legitimate to criticise. Sticking a clown nose on Marx is no more offensive or scandalous than popping the same schnoz on Muhammad.’

The implications for self-censorship are as troubling for the general population as they are for artists. 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.

More often than not, preference falsification is the symptom of the desire for an easy life. 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.

It is to the advantage of those who wish to deny cancel culture to conflate the political correctness movement of the late twentieth century with the problems we face today. It enables them to caricature the debate in tabloid terms – ‘PC’ versus ‘non-PC’ or ‘snowflake’ versus ‘anti-snowflake’ – whereas, in reality, it is closer to Mill’s conception of the ‘struggle between Liberty and Authority’. These are the two narratives of what has become known as today’s ‘culture war’, one a cartoonish misrepresentation, the other a sincere effort to uphold the lynchpins of democracy. We should be wary, then, of those who dismiss legitimate criticisms of cancel culture and state overreach as the paranoid wittering of the ‘PC-gone-mad brigade’. This is merely a form of tactical prestidigitation which undermines the serious business of defending our freedoms.

Ultimately, however, self-censorship is a choice, even at a time when speaking out can have ruinous personal consequences. Conformity and dishonesty for the sake of self-preservation are understandable, but are an affront to our conscience and dignity. We might avoid the ire of the bullies in the short term, but the eventual impact of our collective silence will be an enervated and infantile culture.

It is somewhat inevitable that language and, by extension, freedom of speech, should come to be mistrusted given that most of these recent developments are connected to the rise of an identity-orientated social justice ideology which is largely post-modernist in origin. In particular, contemporary activists have retained the postmodernist notion that reality, or at least our perception of it, is constructed predominantly through language. Michel Foucault’s belief in the interconnectivity of power and knowledge is often seen as the basis for current discourses of the ‘power structures’ that dominate society. In this model, language is not only a means of communication, but a weapon of the powerful to maintain their hegemony. This is why those who support censorship often claim that unfettered speech has the effect of ‘normalising’ or ‘legitimising’ hateful and violent views. As I have outlined, this does not merely apply to insulting or offensive sentiments, but also transgressive opinions.

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

The Rwandan genocide of 1994 is frequently cited in order to demonstrate a causal relationship between speech and violence. The RTLM radio broadcasts that called on Hutus to ‘cut down the tall trees’ and described the Tutsi minority as ‘cockroaches’ and ‘snakes’ – dehumanising language reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda that depicted Jews as rats – are said to be culpable in the stirring up of a maelstrom of hatred that resulted in the murder of almost a million people.

Many of us saw the televised images of protesters burning copies of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses on the streets of Bolton and Bradford after its publication in 1988. The protests were peaceful, but there is something about the destruction of books that has a visceral and chilling effect. It isn’t only that such imagery is redolent of Pathé newsreels of Joseph Goebbels addressing students in Berlin’s Opernplatz, while brownshirts casually toss books into the flames like mere kindling. Nor is it simply the nagging sense that, had the author been present, the crowd would not have hesitated to see him suffer the same fate as his work. Above all else, the burning of books feels like a symbolic repudiation of all that our civilisation has achieved.

always be those whose instinct inclines towards submission to authority, who are happy to shift beliefs in accordance with the fashion or decrees from above. Orwell called this the ‘gramophone mind’, content to play the record of the moment whether or not one is in agreement. It is an enervated and dehumanised public that acquiesces to the paternalism of their leaders. By contrast, to resist state censorship is to take a wrecking ball to the panopticon. As Eduard Bernstein so succinctly put it, ‘men have heads’, and we only enfeeble ourselves if we neglect to use them.

It may be that in another thirty years we will have resigned ourselves to self-censorship and conformity to the status quo. Perhaps all art will be a form of ideological reinforcement, with eccentricity and free-thinking seen as quirks of a half-forgotten time. Perhaps we will learn to live under the continual supervision of the state, tempering our every utterance in accordance with the accepted script. Such a scenario seems inconceivable to those who have not learned the lessons of the past. For the rest of us, it is surely worth stemming the momentum of this new illiberalism. While we should celebrate progress, we need to be able to recognise the forces of regression that usurp its name. Even if we fail, at least we can say we tried.