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Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash, Atlantic Books, £20
Freedom of speech has always been a vexed, even dangerous, business. Socrates questioned the gods and earned himself a swift trip across the Styx. Here we are, 2,400 years later, and western liberal democracies still struggle over how much free speech is healthy, whether there should be any sort of bridle on it and, now, how to deal with the ever-growing electronic media. Is shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre worse than a Daily Mail story blaming working women for the rise in autism, or Fox News insisting that Birmingham has succumbed to radical Islam to the point that non-Muslims don’t dare breach the A4540? Should government suppress “offensive” speech, say, Chris Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary as a black woman with a varnished lump of elephant dung on one breast, David Irving’s Holocaust-denying rants, or Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad? Is the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford a hurtful endorsement of imperialism or merely a historical artefact? And who decides?
The theory and the practice of free speech don’t always join up. In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter: “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Anarchy with a no-holds-barred press may sound entertaining, but if there were no governments, newspapers would have little at which to point the inky finger of outrage. Media and government perform a kind of symbiotic dance, each openly sceptical of the other, each obsessed with the other, each hostile to the other, each adept at using the other when it suits them, perpetually joined at the hip. Jefferson understood this, of course: in the impressively nasty presidential campaign of 1800, his running mate Aaron Burr leaked an unflattering letter criticising their opponent John Adams’s “great and intrinsic” character defects. Jefferson’s party used the popular press to spread a rumour that Adams aimed to marry one of his sons to a daughter of George III in order to create a quasi-monarchial line of presidential succession. Supporters of Adams planted stories of Jefferson’s hostility to traditional religion, accusing him of being “without Sabbaths; without the sanctuary, and without so much as a decent external respect for the faith and worship of Christians,” and outed Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, with whom he had several children.
In the middle of his second term as president, battered by two brutal campaigns, Jefferson’s faith in the free press faltered: “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” Yet he didn’t want the newspapers shut down or even reined in, no matter how much complete rubbish (or uncomfortable truth—take your pick) they printed. Jefferson believed that an unfettered press is the best guarantor of democracy. And while freedom of expression remains inconvenient for the powerful, it’s also a core western value, as Timothy Garton Ash demonstrates in his exhaustive, earnest and learned treatment of the subject, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. From Lady Chatterley’s Lover to the “Pentagon Papers,” from celebrity sex tapes to Islamic State recruitment videos to Edward Snowden, free speech is always contested, always a process, never a finished product, yet as necessary to the fullest expression of our humanity as water and air.
Garton Ash posits that in the 21st century, the population of earth inhabits not a global village—which implies a “homogeneous and conformist place”—but “Cosmopolis,” a global city populated by people of every faith, political creed and way of representing their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, caste and clan. Cosmopolis is rather like London and New York, where roughly 37 per cent of the population is foreign-born, or Toronto which, as Garton Ash points out, is 51 per cent foreign-born. We can either pitch a Donald Trump-ish hissy-fit and threaten to build walls to keep out what we deem undesirable, or accept that old nation-state models are inadequate to account for the movement of people, and that we are all now connected via those gossamer fibre-optic threads of the internet. We are “electronic neighbours,” and as such must find a way to communicate with each other that transcends the absolutes of religion and ideology. It’s better, as in the Winston Churchill phrase Garton Ash quotes, to make “jaw-jaw rather than war-war.”
Garton Ash is a romantic liberal, hoping that if people will only respect one another enough to listen to one another, they will understand that the answer to hatred, lies, calumny, Orwellian doublethink, dogma and other vicious kinds of speech is more speech. Good speech vanquishes bad. He admires the American Constitution’s First Amendment and sees the United States as the most pro-free speech of nations. Yet he also knows that this understanding of free speech has problems. As he wrote in a column for the Guardian last October, “To watch American politics today is to watch money speaking.” The Supreme Court has ruled that campaign contributions are a form of political speech and so must not be restricted. Conservatives agree—as the Republican politician Mitt Romney famously observed, “corporations are people, my friend.” But so does the American Civil Liberties Union, that most progressive of organisations.
"No one's wholeheartedly in favour of censorship or violence. But things get complicated down on the ground where free speech happens"Free speech is complicated. Messy, even. Garton Ash takes a shot at clarifying the issues, offering 10 “principles,” not really “prescriptions for laws,” but “distilled formulations of a modern liberal position on free speech, intended for Cosmopolis.” They are the necessity of freedom “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas, regardless of frontiers”; the rejection of violence; the sanctity of knowledge and its propagation; an “uncensored, diverse, trustworthy media”; openness to human difference; the ability to question religion, even while respecting religious people; a right to individual privacy—as long as it doesn’t impede “scrutiny that is in the public interest”; the ability to “challenge all limits to freedom of information justified on such grounds as national security”; defending the internet in the face of corporate and governmental attempts to contain or regulate it; and finally, the courage and liberty for each person to decide for her or himself what constitutes the truth. These principles did not just spring forth from Garton Ash’s brain like Athena from the head of Zeus, but were, apparently, workshopped by free speech experts from all over the world and worded to be translated effectively into 12 other languages. Readers are invited to join in the debate on the website www.freespeechdebate.com. But Garton Ash is confident he’s on to something with his principles: “It seems to me that if everyone everywhere followed them, everyone everywhere would be better off.”
Well, yes. Especially if you take the macro view. No one’s wholeheartedly in favour of censorship, violence, or corrupt media bosses; everybody’s keen on education and personal integrity. The trouble is things get complicated once you’re off the mountaintop, down on the ground where free speech happens—or doesn’t. It’s against the law to deny the Holocaust in Germany, France, Austria and other European countries, but not in the UK or the US. As Garton Ash reminds us, Muslims wonder why they must accept protection of the memory of the Holocaust, yet tolerate caricatures of Muhammad. Why is one form of hurtful speech assumed to be more hurtful than another? In France, commitment to the old revolutionary value of laïcité means no overt religious expression in schools: no hijabs, no crucifixes, no stars of David. The French, who shrug at the kind of sexual expressiveness on television their Anglo-Saxon cousins don’t allow (at least before the watershed), feel the need to regulate baby names. In France, you cannot call your child “Nutella” or “ Fraise” (strawberry).
Meanwhile, in the US, you’re free to deny the Holocaust all day long, sport a cross the size of a tyre iron, and christen your kid “Phelony” or “Hashtag.” Yet when little Phelony goes to school, he or she may be denied the chance to read the Harry Potter series, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or The Catcher in the Rye, to name but a few banned books in America, because parents and school boards have decided that they promote paganism, racism and a lack of respect for authority. He or she may also be deprived of essential education. In 2008, the Louisiana legislature passed a law placing creationism on a level with evolution in state schools. The bill’s sponsors claimed it would foster “critical thinking” and allow other “points of view” to be considered. Horrified biologists countered that creationism is religion, not science. Fundamentalist Christians charged that scientists were trying to censor their point of view.
It’s not easy to get even western liberal nations to agree on free expression, much less bring along countries where power depends on misinformation, a tame press, and the threat of imprisonment, torture or death for those who step out of line. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Garton Ash’s book serves as a sort of manifesto for civil libertarians, a call to intellectual arms with the scholarly heft of a PhD thesis. There’s a bit of information overkill—graphs demonstrating the rise in transistors you can fit on a microchip, charts on world literacy, maps of which European countries have signed up to which treaties—but then, information is the point here. Free Speech is a resource, a weapon, an encyclopedia of anecdote, example and exemplum that reaches toward battling restrictions on expression with mountains of data, new ideas, liberating ideas. Garton Ash acknowledges that “the evils of unlimited free expression—death threats, paedophile images, sewage-tides of abuse” sometimes seem overwhelming. But the promise of knowledge, the truth that sets people free, is like a mighty ocean. We must “learn to navigate by speech” or drown in error and excess. As Jefferson wrote in 1823: “The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.”
