Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?. Mick Hume
campuses, for example.
Those who imagine the US safe from all this behind the all-important First Amendment forget that, even in America, the cultural tide appears to be turning against free speech. We might all do well to recall the words of the US judge Learned Hand who, speaking in 1944 at a wartime rally for liberty in New York’s Central Park, warned against investing ‘false hopes’ in the paper constitution and the courts to protect freedom: ‘Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.’10
Free speech may not have died in the hearts of the men and women of the West, but it is ailing badly. Free speech is left looking like that ‘free-range’ chicken, fenced in and approaching its use-by date. If we want to live in a truly tolerant world we should reject every demand to cage, censor, parole or punish speech. No matter how sympathetic a case the censors make, and however much you might abhor the words others use.
Behind the universal lip service paid to the principle, if we forget the true meaning of free speech the losers will not only be those relatively few who find themselves banned or prosecuted for ‘speech crimes’. We will all be the poorer for allowing the creation of a culture in which people become scared to say what they mean, development of knowledge is stifled, political debates effectively suspended, and where from the university campus to the internet we are living with a bland, ‘safe’ environment in which anodyne becomes the new normal.
To turn things around means dealing with new opponents of free speech today and confronting the creeping problem of the silent war on free speech – a war fought by those who claim to support free speech, but … The battlegrounds are many in this war. It is primarily a fight, not just against censorship, but conformism; not just to end restrictive laws, but to free the mind of society.
As the Victorian genius J. S. Mill says, in his landmark essay On Liberty, ‘Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them’.11 The consequence of what we have forgotten about free speech has been to give a free hand to those who wish to impose conformist ideas as ‘rules of conduct on those who dissent from them’.
No doubt a world in which we enjoy free speech will contain ugly, difficult and hurtful ideas as well as good and inspiring ones. But the alternative to free speech is inevitably worse. That is why free speech is always a price worth paying, and much too important to pay mere lip service to.
2
The age of the reverse-Voltaires
I believe in free speech. You believe in free speech. Everybody with more than two free brain cells to rub together in the free world believes in freedom of speech. Or so they say.
‘Blasphemers’ can be sentenced to death in Islamist states. The internet might be censored to near-death in Communist China. In our civilised Western universe, however, we still enjoy freedom of expression. Or think we do.
Strange, then, that so many now choose to exercise their freedom of speech in order to tell the rest of us what we can’t say. When they say they support free speech ‘in principle’ they apparently mean on another planet, rather than in the real world.
Back here on Earth, meanwhile, the fashion is to support something called ‘free speech-but’, as in: ‘I believe in free speech-but there are limits/-but not for hate speech/-but you cannot offend or insult or upset other people.’ And the buts are getting bigger and wider all the time. As one US commentator had it in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, ‘The “but” in the phrase “I believe in free speech but” is bigger than Kim Kardashian’s [and] has more wiggle-room than Jennifer Lopez’s.’1 Those remarks would probably get him banned from speaking on several campuses for offensive ‘fat-shaming’.
To imagine that you could believe in free speech ‘but’ not for certain opinions is rather like saying ‘I believe in scientific proof, but that’s no reason to rule out Father Christmas and fairies at the bottom of the garden’; or ‘I believe in the equality of the sexes, but equal pay for women is going too far’. The b-word does not ‘clarify’ your stated belief, but effectively buts it out of existence.
Behind the headline support for the principle of free speech, the UK seems not so sure in practice; one major survey found that a larger section of the British public (64 per cent) supported the right of people ‘not to be exposed to offensive views’ than supported the right for people to ‘say what they think’ (54 per cent).2 Perhaps more surprisingly, polls suggest that many Americans, too, might not be as certain about free speech as they once were. Washington’s prestigious Newseum Institute conducts an annual survey on attitudes to the First Amendment, which alongside other liberties enshrines freedom of speech and of the press in the US Constitution. Asked whether they think the First Amendment goes ‘too far’ in upholding those freedoms, in 2014 38 per cent of Americans answered ‘yes’ – an increase from 34 per cent in 2013, and a big jump from the mere 13 per cent who said yes in 2012.3
A steady drip of outrage is eroding the rock of free speech. The response is even worse. On any day when cartoonists are not being murdered in Europe, few voices are raised to speak up for freedom. We seem to spend far more time discussing the problem with free speech and how to curb it than how to defend, never mind extend it. And every little extra curb on one sort of speech encourages mission-creep towards censoring another.
The freedom to think what you like and say what you think has become another empty ritual to which we just pay lip service. Even the lip service stops when somebody dares to think it is real and says something beyond the pale or the bland. People might oppose outright censorship, but a self-censoring muted conformism is the order of the day.
What’s going on? There is nothing new about free speech being threatened. The modern right to freedom of speech has been under threat since the moment it was first won. It would always be true to say that ‘free speech is in danger’. But there is something different happening today.
The danger to free speech in the West now comes not only from such traditional enemies as the little Hitlers and aspiring ayatollahs who disdain to conceal their contempt for liberty. More important today is the challenge from those who claim to support that freedom, yet seek to restrict it in practice. This is the new threat: the silent war on free speech.
It is a silent war, but not because its proponents are quiet – they are anything but. This is a silent war because nobody who expects to be taken seriously will admit that they are fundamentally against the right to free speech. To oppose freedom of expression has historically meant being in favour of fascism, totalitarianism and the burning of heretical books – if not of actual heretics. Few want to be seen goose-stepping out in such company today.
Instead we have a silent war on free speech; a war that will not speak its name, fought by wannabe censors who claim that they are nothing of the sort. The result is not violent repression and brute censorship, but the demonising of dissident opinions in a crusade for conformism.
The silent war is not ostensibly aimed against free speech at all. It is presented, not as a blow against liberty, but as a defence of rights: the right to protection from offensive and hateful words and images; freedom from media harassment and internet ‘trolling’; the right of students to feel ‘comfortable’ on campus.
You will rarely hear anybody admit that they hate free speech. Instead the crusaders come up with a coded way to get that message across, and their codes can change as fast as if controlled by an Enigma machine (rather than by a student union committee