What is the price of free speech?
The myth of freedom of speech as a conservative ideal.
“Truth and understanding are not such wares to be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards.”
John Milton, Aeropagitica
Fire! Fire!
I’ll admit, crying out “fire” in a Medium publication is a whole lot less dramatic than doing so in a crowded theater. Never mind my cheap opener, however, you must have heard about Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter. The platform, being the flaming theater that it is, has been fanned into a tiresome but necessary dialectic about the merit and value of freedom of speech. Mr. Musk is not someone who I am very familiar with, except, perhaps, as much as anyone would know him from their digital periphery. It turns out, however, that he is a mildly interesting, if only rather slimy, individual. Mr. Musk is a so called free speech advocate. And, despite the fact that he seems to invite disagreement online, but has been found to be rather petty and thin-skinned when it comes to critiques of himself, his buyout of Twitter has been subject to an incredible amount of moist, undignified, and rather shameful whining that can hardly be classified as criticism.
Amid the tapestry of online grumble, people have forgotten the value of free-speech. Today, freedom of speech advocates are associated with conservative and center right to far-right political actors and movements. To “tolerate the intolerant”– a paradox handed down through the intellectual weight of Dr. Karl Popper– is seen as dangerous. The argument follows that if we allow, say, Nazi speech to persist, then through our inaction and unwillingness to censor it we are inadvertently supporting Nazism and the harm its rhetoric may do to actual people. Of course, Nazi rhetoric is harmful. However, it is not insular. People say that the holocaust was the product of decades of noxious Nazi rhetoric. Decades? You must be kidding, Hitchens would say, it is a product of two thousand years of antisemitic rhetoric based on the fact that Jews had the good sense to reject not one, but two charlatans in a row. The Catholic church took two whole decades after the end of the second world war before it clarified that there was no inter-generational Jewish sin– how is that for a hate speech scandal?
Nazi rhetoric can not be downplayed as the main perpetrator of the mutilation of the Jewish community in the last century. However, can we get rid of Nazism without getting rid of the Gospel of St. Matthew? Perhaps it is the case that we can not get rid of one without the other. Perhaps it is the case that we can not get rid of both at all. However, it is foolish to think that censorship will do any good– which begs the question, have we really learnt nothing? Could someone please tell me one instance in which censorship was effective at excising an idea from society in any meaningful and lasting way? How have we handed out martyrdom, powerful of a political tool as it is, so freely? Why are we bent on vindicating those who we hate, dislike, or find distasteful?
Persecution only emboldens the persecuted. If you put someone on a corner then they will be bent into radicalism. If you wish to kill an idea, then do so in the public square. Give yourself a chance to dispute, and humiliate, and discredit whatever it is that you disagree with. Or, do you really have such little confidence in your values that you would shy away from a fight against ‘unsubstantiated’ and ‘uneducated’ opinions? Some people say that public discourse is a lost cause and that people are too stupid or too suggestible to have a civil conversation with. And, yet, what alternative is there? Are we to hand down the proper kind of knowledge from the ivory halls of academia? Do we realize how condescending we have become? How arrogant and despotic? Public discourse is, of course, not the Platonic ideal of a philosophical dialogue. However, it is the only hope we have, and it is the only stage we share.
No, if Nazism or fascism or racism are really as existentially dangerous as we so often claim they are, then we must be certain of their destruction. An execution is overdue– pens are pikes, and paper, battle plans. Kill fascism yourself, damn it. After all, we can censor people, but ideas are far more resilient to cells, chains, walls, and for that matter, firewalls. The truth is that people who would support censorship, such as hate speech laws, are either really ignorant to the history that they are so keen to rely on, or they are malicious or unserious about their crusade against real harm. If the public square is too ‘tough to crack’ and you have given up on real conversation– which is gritty, and unfair, and unruly– then, give up on the social projects of government and democracy altogether.
The substance of my argument, which I hope you take away, dear reader, is that the defense of freedom of speech is not inherently right-wing or conservative. It is those whose freedom of speech is threatened who will fight to defend it. It is conservatives and right-wing types now, but it was civil rights activists in the 60’s. Of course, not all censorship challenges the legal protection afforded to us by our respective constitutions. To compare the censorship that some social media companies dispense on fringe or radical right wing groups to the state censorship that has been historically suffered mainly by progressives would be facetious and in poor taste. I do not think that Twitter banning Donald Trump was a threat to democracy or an infringement on his legal right to free expression. However, even though Twitter is a private company, that we utilize under consent and willingly, and which is not bound by the legal protections of freedom of speech, it worries me that our first instinct is always censorious.
I am not sympathetic towards Elon Musk’s whiny and self-pitying purchase. However, I would have thought that people would be more worried about a single man owning a significant portion of our digital space, rather than the fact that he may be lax about expression online.
