Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?. Mick Hume
the majesty of heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.’8
One sure sign of the historic importance of free speech to liberation struggles is the instinctive way that tyrants have understood the need to control it to preserve their power. Thus during the struggle over slavery in America in the nineteenth century, the slave-owning classes did all they could to suppress any public discussion of slavery as a means of keeping control. Southern states outlawed criticism of slavery and used gag rules to prevent the US Congress in Washington even discussing anti-slavery petitions. The Alabama slave code of 1833 decreed that no black person was to ‘preach to, exhort or harangue any slave or slaves or free persons of color, unless in the presence of five respectable slave-holders’. The punishment for speaking publicly without supervision was thirty-nine lashes for a first offence, and fifty lashes for each offence thereafter.9 As the anti-slavery campaigner (and former slave) Frederick Douglass said in ‘A Plea for Free Speech in Boston’, after an 1860 meeting to discuss the abolition of slavery was attacked by supposed gentlemen in that civilised northern city, ‘Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power … Slavery cannot tolerate free speech. Five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South.’10
Those striving for freedom and democracy more than 150 years later still understand the centrality of free speech to their struggles. Charter 08, a modestly framed call for political reform in China signed by more than 300 Chinese intellectuals and ‘prominent citizens’ in 2008, recognises that its proposals for more legislative democracy and greater human rights must rest on ‘Freedom of Expression’: ‘We should make freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and academic freedom universal, thereby guaranteeing that citizens can be informed and can exercise their right of political supervision.’ It calls for the abolition of ‘political restrictions on the press’ (shades of the Levellers) and of ‘the crime of incitement to subvert state power’ and concludes: ‘We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes.’11 In recognition of the Charter having hit an authoritarian sore spot, the Chinese authorities duly locked up its author.
All of these and many more history-making movements and individuals have demonstrated that if not for the fight for free speech, other freedoms would not be possible. Without the ability to argue your cause there would be no way to clarify your aspirations, make clear your demands, or debate how best to strive for them.
More recent struggles for freedom and equality in Western societies were just as intimately bound up with freedom of speech. The demand for free speech, for the right for their voices to be heard, has proved central to the struggles for women’s emancipation, gay liberation and racial equality in the UK and US. There is a grim irony in the fashion, examined in the next chapter, for feminist, trans or anti-racist activists today to demand restrictions on free speech as a means of protecting the rights of the identity groups they claim to represent. Without the efforts of those who fought for more free speech in the past, these illiberal activists would not be free to stand up and call for less of it in the present.
We should remind ourselves, not only of why free speech has been so important to humanity, but of what it has meant in practice. Free speech at its best has involved the freedom to challenge the most ardent orthodox beliefs of the day, regardless of whose toes that might tread on. That is why the essence of free speech is always the right to be offensive. Those who would deny the right of others to break taboos, offend against the consensus and go against the grain of accepted opinion would do well to remember where we might be without it.
Look at how the likes of Bruno and Galileo were persecuted by the Inquisition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for offering and endorsing scientific insights that we take for granted today. Anybody suggesting now that the Sun circles the Earth would be accused of insulting our intelligence. Yet even four centuries ago, the notion of God’s Earth orbiting the Sun as a mere satellite and acolyte was among the most offensive ideas possible to Europe’s ruling religious and political powers, and they condemned those who suggested it as heretics. It would be hard to imagine anything more offensive in twenty-first-century Western society than trying to deny votes to women or demanding the reintroduction of legalised slavery. Yet not so very long ago those who opposed such oppression were being arrested and worse for offending against the state or nature in our Anglo-American civilisation.
Let’s be clear on what we are talking about here. The right to be offensive is not about the freedom to fart in a restaurant, or to yell drunken abuse in the street, or to direct personal insults at the Pope’s or anybody else’s mother. We should be wary of self-centred souls who wish to turn petty matters of personal interaction into major issues of political debate. They bring to mind the exchange in The Big Lebowski, where serial offender Walter Sobchak, having been asked to be quiet at the coffee house, responds in high dudgeon: ‘Excuse me, dear? The Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint!’ However, Walter’s companion The Dude puts him straight: ‘This isn’t a First Amendment issue, man.’12 Good manners generally cost nothing in terms of free speech either – although we should resist demands to tone down an argument in the name of civility. Heat and passion are important. Being honest and above all clear in what you say, however, is usually more important than just being loud or lairy. Being passionate about your argument need not necessarily involve being profanely rude to the other side (although it might).
But the right to be offensive is really about what you say rather than the way you say it. It is about having the liberty to question everything; to accept no conventional wisdom at face value; to challenge, criticise, rubbish or ridicule anybody else’s opinion or beliefs (in the certain knowledge that they have the right to return the compliment to you).
This is what makes the right to be offensive so invaluable. It is why it has been key to human progress and the advance of our collective culture and society through modern history. We would do well to remember that it is the cutting edge, the beating heart, of freedom of speech and of the press. What, after all, would be the point of those freedoms if you were only at liberty to say what somebody else might like? How could it be a right if it was withdrawn the moment you choose to use it to say what others consider wrong?
Thus has free speech become the voice of individual choice, scientific truth, and political progress. If we forget why free speech matters so much to our society, and allow its standing to be sunk in a deluge of ifs and buts and not-too-fars, we risk undermining those foundations of civilisation and ruining any prospects of building on them further.
Remembering why free speech matters so much should lead us to demand more of it rather than less. Even before concerns about free speech were brought to a head by the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the Copenhagen shooting, the truth is that there was not enough freedom of speech in the UK, US or Europe. And things have been getting worse.
In recent years it has been easy for civil liberties lobbyists in the UK and Europe to appear rather smug about free speech on the home front. They could go about banging the drum on behalf of free-speech martyrs in China or Iran, whilst pointing out that, in our societies, freedom of expression had been made safe by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), incorporated into UK law under Tony Blair’s New Labour government by the 1998 Human Rights Act, which enshrines the right to freedom of expression.
In fact the ECHR and the Human Rights Act embody the attitude of ‘free speech, but …’. As the leading UK textbook on civil liberties and human rights says, the legal conventions ‘recognise that the exercise of these freedoms comes with special responsibilities, and so may be subject to restriction for specified purposes’.13 As soon as you attach legal responsibilities, never mind special ones, a freedom ceases to be a right.
That problem is spelt out by a glance down the list of the ‘specified purposes’ for which the ECHR, supposed