THE PARADOXES OF FREE SPEECH

 

The clash of the “information age” and tribal politics has produced many interesting social dynamics. One of the most significant has been the effect of free speech in both democratic and authoritarian societies.  A timely, new historical treatise titled Free Speech: A History From Socrates To Social Media, (Basic Books, February 8, 2022) by Jacob Mchangama traces the history of free expression over the past 25 centuries. The study ends by focusing on the critical question, under what circumstances can unbridled speech be tolerated in our modern world. The answer to this question raises several paradoxes that are not easy to resolve.

The roots of free speech are ancient. The earliest examples of open debate and tolerance of social dissent were discussed by Pericles in 431 BC Athens.  Over the course of time, free speech would never have been considered a fundamental right but for the works of heretical trailblazers like Milton, Spinoza, the English Levellers, the French feminist, Olympe de Gouges and Frederick Douglas (among many others). The good news according to historian Jacob Mchangama is that today, “The principle of free speech has been transformed into an international human rights norm aided by advances in communications technology, unimaginable to the early modern mind.”

However, in today’s troubled political times Mchangama also believes we are witnessing “the dawn of a free-speech recession.”  I will consider this retrenchment of free speech through a series of paradoxes that capture the essence of where global thinking stands today.

Free Speech Is Only For Those Who Agree.  As an intellectual principle, most Americans support the concept of free speech. However, out in the political trenches this support collapses along ruthless identity and tribalistic lines. Constitutional free speech in America was intended to protect minorities against intolerance. Some of today’s progressive thinkers seek to undermine this ideal by working to purge from public discourse those views that are deemed racist, sexist or anti-LGBTQ.  Conversely, some conservatives have attacked the media, proposed illiberal laws that prohibit discussion of theories about race, gender and even history and have supported libel laws to punish unwanted free speech. Rather than a democratic staging area for rational engagement and debate, free speech has become weaponized.

Political Actors Use Free Speech To Gain Power and Then Seek To Suppress It.  Political actors seeking power are often the most egalitarian when it comes to free speech. They want to include as many like-minded voices as possible to amplify their positions against the elite in power. Paradoxically, as soon as those out of power assume leadership all bets are off. The egalitarian calls for a vocal opposition and free press are replaced by policies that suppress free speech. Among many examples, authoritarian regimes are adept at managing the internet so that only the “party line” is communicated to the public.

The Use of Militant Democracy to Suppress Free Speech. The phrase  “militant democracy” became the term for a modern position on free speech that developed in the United Kingdom and throughout the EU. The paradox of the policy is that democratic governments seek to deny basic free speech to those citizens who reject certain democratic values.  In recent years, militant democracy has been employed: to prohibit the manipulation of election information; ban right wing anti-immigrant and antidiscrimination organizations; arrest citizens for hateful posts on the internet; institute a ban on wearing veils; and to expand the laws against hate speech. The problem is that authoritarian regimes have quickly latched onto these bans and prohibitions in democratic Europe to justify their own draconian policies against free speech.

The Promise and Negative Effects of New Information Technologies. New inventions that spread information in unexpected ways have always started with the promise of advancing free speech before causing unintended disruptions. This was true of the printing press, which encouraged the illiterate to learn to read, which led to the reformation, which led to a century of violent repression and sectarian warfare. The proliferation of untrue but convincing political pamphlets helped stoke the French Revolution, which quickly turned from unfettered free speech to a repressive affair.

The World Wide Web was first heralded as positive free speech for the masses. This egalitarian goal has morphed into a discussion of how to promote safety and prevent harm by limiting internet based speech. We are in the early days of the digital age with further disruptions to free speech (beyond limitations on Facebook, Google and Twitter) yet to come. The paradox is that it is difficult to shield the masses from hateful content and disinformation without sacrificing the liberal values of free speech.

I will end with some encouraging words from Jacob Mchangama, who summarized portions of his important new book in an article in the March/April 2022 addition of Foreign Affairs Magazine, The War on Free Speech, Censorship’s Global Rise, as follows.

“The free-speech recession must be resisted by people around the world who have benefited from the revolutionary acts and sacrifices of the millions who came before them and fought for the cherished right to speak one’s mind. It is up to those who already enjoy that right to defend the tolerance of heretical ideas, limit the reach of disinformation, agree to disagree without resorting to harassment or hate, and treat free speech as a principle to be upheld universally rather than a prop to be selectively invoked for narrow, tribalistic point-scoring.”