Why Is the West so Concerned With Free Speech?
The West’s concern with free speech is both the cause of its success for the past 500 years, but also potentially its limiting factor for the next 500. The reason we have become obsessed with free speech has to do with the when and the how of the printing press. Even though the printing press was invented first in Asia, its growth was stifled by the capital investment required to produce 100,000 Chinese blocks. In other words, the smaller character set of the Western alphabet happens to be responsible for the early adoption of the printing press in the West. With the rise of the printed word came a whole host of Western staples, including share corporations, contract law, constitutions, and mass media, all of which have become essential to liberal economies and democracies.
As a result, I’d argue that the success of Western empires (Spanish, French, Dutch, German, British, and American) inherently justified their commitment to not just producing text, but also obeying text.
Every civilization needs a form of control, and the most fundamental lever is religion. The first thing Gutenberg printed in the 1440s were Bibles. But it wasn’t until 1517, that the German priest Martin Luther seized on this invention to become a religious text master:
As the legend goes, Luther nailed his “95 Theses” to the church door in…
