Everyday philosophy

Could 2010 be the year of the censor? After collaborating with Chinese censorship for several years, Google is having second thoughts: an admirable move, but one that leaves the way open for even more extensive state control. January also saw Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo begin an 11-year prison sentence. His heinous crime: asking for greater freedom in line with human rights legislation. In Denmark, the attempt on cartoonist Kurt Westergaard’s life resurrected the cartoon controversy while, closer to home, the British government banned the extremist group Muslim4UK. Meanwhile, Ireland brought in new anti-blasphemy laws. Expressing ideas is becoming an increasingly risky business.

John Stuart Mill eloquently defended free expression in his 1859 pocket classic On Liberty. The clash of truth with falsehood in the marketplace of ideas is, he argued, what keeps thought and action vital and vigorous—while the suppression of dissenting views, even absurd ones, harms humanity. For Mill, the limit of free speech was incitement to violence, or causing actual harm; offence was not an adequate ground for censorship. But not all philosophers have argued in favour of free expression.

Plato wanted to censor the arts because, he argued, they misrepresented the nature of reality, something that only philosopher-kings could accurately discern. Two millennia later, in 1965, the Marxist Herbert Marcuse also railed against free expression, asserting that it was of little use when the people in a capitalist democracy were so indoctrinated that they parroted their masters’ thoughts. In place of this “repressive tolerance” he advocated a different kind of “tolerance,” namely the censorship of right-wing positions.

This would all be grist to Mill’s mill. He believed that any idea worth preserving should be strong enough to stand up to public criticism—and that even a crazy line of attack might have within it a tiny kernel of truth that would not otherwise emerge. All of which makes the government’s use of anti-terrorism laws to silence radical Muslim critics worrying. Perhaps it’s not just cheap clothes that we’ll be importing from China this year.