Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?. Mick Hume
of it. Free speech is the potential solution, not the problem.
Despite the initial upsurge of ‘Je Suis Charlie’ sentiments, the Paris massacre has not led to any major new campaign for free speech. Quite the opposite – it has reinforced the fear, reticence and confusion surrounding freedom of expression in the West today. This book aims to put the case for unfettered free speech and the right to be offensive. These are both non-negotiable principles and practical necessities to address the problems we face.
That must involve defending the right of a magazine like Charlie Hebdo to offend who it chooses, without any buts, and whether we like it or not. The truth is you don’t have to be Charlie, read Charlie or chortle at Charlie in order to defend it. Free speech is always primarily about defending what a US Supreme Court justice once famously described as ‘freedom for the thought that we hate’.
In passing we might note that wholeheartedly defending Charlie Hebdo’s right to offend need not necessarily mean reprinting its cartoons, as some insisted it must. Freedom of speech and of the press mean that media outlets must be free to make their own editorial judgements about what they publish – just as others must be free to pass judgement on those decisions.
In the free-speech fraud that followed the Charlie Hebdo massacre, many suddenly started talking about the ‘right to offend’ and the fact that there is ‘no right not to be offended’. Quite so. What most of them appeared to mean, however, is that we must defend the right to offend Islamist extremists. Yet the right to be offensive has to be about much more than Islam. It means the right to question, criticise or ridicule any belief or religion – and the freedom of the religious or anybody else to offend secular sensibilities, too.
In the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo Clare Short, a 34-year-old Catholic mother of three and blogger, wrote of her concerns that a fearful backlash against ‘offensive’ speech might now make it hard for her ‘to express my views without fear of prosecution’. She observed that she had ‘never thought I would be appreciating the “right to offend”, but today it seems I am’. Short concluded that ‘Je Suis Charlie, and I would like to proclaim that Jesus Christ is lord, marriage can only occur between one man and one woman, and that abortion is murder. Or am I not allowed to say that?’ If ‘Je Suis Charlie’ is to mean something more than a slogan on a discarded placard, she surely should be allowed to proclaim her beliefs, however out of step with the times they might seem.29
Any such tolerance of traditional opinion seemed seriously out of vogue just two months after the Paris attacks, however, when Sir Elton John led an international celebrity boycott of Dolce & Gabbana, after the two gay Catholic Italian fashion designers told an interviewer they believed gay adoption of ‘synthetic’ babies to be unnatural. The #BoycottDolceGabbana tag swept across social media as many thousands backed the celebs’ demand to close the designers down, not for exploiting workers, overcharging customers or anything else they might have done, but merely for expressing an unfashionable opinion. ‘Elton John is a Taliban,’ said Italian senator Roberto Formigoni in response to the boycott, ‘and is using with Dolce & Gabbana the same method used by the Taliban against Charlie Hebdo.’ Not quite ‘the same method’ – no gun attacks by gay parents on D&G stores were reported – but perhaps a similar-sounding message.30
Defending the right to be offensive also means recognising that the work of such bold cartoonists, whether one considers it insightful or infantile, is not enough. The right to be offensive means something more than the right to ridicule Islam or any religionists. We should be free to question everything that we are not supposed to question in the suffocating cloud of conformism that hangs over our societies today.
France of course is the land of Voltaire, the eighteenth-century revolutionary writer whose views on tolerance and free speech are famously summarised as: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will fight to the death your right to say it.’ By contrast, as this book examines, we are now living in the age of the reverse-Voltaires, whose slogan is ‘I know I will detest what you say, and I will defend to the end of free speech for my right to stop you saying it.’
It would be a fitting tribute to those killed in Paris and Copenhagen if we were to rekindle the spirit of the free-speech fighters of yesteryear for the twenty-first century. ‘Je Suis Charlie’ is not enough – we need to send out the message loud and clear that ‘Nous Sommes Voltaire’.
SECTION ONE
Compared to many countries elsewhere in the world, the UK and the US look like bastions of freedom of speech, holding the line against censorship and intolerance. The 800th anniversary of England’s Magna Carta in 2015 is understandably being marked with much self-congratulatory talk about our long history of unbroken liberty.
Yet there is little cause for complacency when we come to consider the state of free speech in the Anglo-American world. There is a danger that we underestimate the importance of freedom of expression in creating and advancing our civilisation. There is a danger, too, that we overestimate how secure that liberty really is in Western culture today.
This first section of the book sets out to establish why we need to defend free speech more forthrightly. Against the background of the historic fight for free speech it aims to identify the new threats and challenges from inside the supposed free-speech citadels of Western society.
1
A few things we forgot about free speech
No subject (with the possible exception of football) has been talked about as much yet seriously discussed as little as free speech. Everybody pays lip service to the right to freedom of speech. Few of us appear to give much thought to what that means or why it matters. Sometimes it’s necessary to remind ourselves of the obvious and look again at what we take for granted.
After all, it’s funny how the simple little things can slip your mind. The first thing that seems to have been forgotten about free speech is that it’s supposed to be Free. The second thing that is often forgotten is that it’s simply Speech.
This chapter offers a quick reminder of why these things matter, alongside the third thing we often forget: that, when you put those two words together, you have the most important expression in the English language. Free speech is the single most powerful factor in creating and sustaining a civilised society. Without the advance of free speech, the development of life as we know it in the West is unlikely to have been possible over the past 500 years. There could have been little progress towards democracy in Europe or America without the ability to demand political change and to put forward competing principles about how society should be run. Many of the great scientific breakthroughs would have been unimaginable without winning the freedom to speak out and question the old accepted ‘truths’ about the world.
Few new artistic or cultural advances would have happened unless there was sufficient freedom of expression for writers and artists to go where none had gone before. None of the mass communications on which the interconnected modern world relies could have thrived without the fight for free speech – or if they existed, they would not be worth having. And the other freedoms we take for granted today, from the high principles of sexual and racial equality in law to the low liberty to gossip about the rich and famous online, would have been hard to secure without first demanding the freedom of all to speak out in public.
In short, without the willingness of some to insist on their right to speak what they believed to be true, we might still be living on a flat Earth at the centre of the known Universe, where women were denied the vote but granted the right to be burnt as witches. That is one good reason why it is time to stop kicking and ‘but-ing’ free speech around so casually today and get serious about discussing