The real threat to free speech? It’s us.
“All censorships exist
to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing
institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and
executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first
condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”
George Bernard Shaw is too seldom referenced in discussions
on free speech. This is a shame, for two good reasons.
Firstly, his statements on
the subject are useful because they highlight the value of criticism. Simply put: “It is necessary for the welfare
of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to
outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize
one's uncles.”
Secondly, his record should
serve to educate one on a dangerous compulsion. Allowing criticism of views and
ideas he disliked, Shaw’s support for Stalin, ‘moderate’ eugenics and the
doctrine of Lysenkoism is a lesson in the uncritical. Partisanship is one
thing; wilful blindness is quite
another.
It is worth remembering that
Shaw was writing at a time when cultural and ideological differences between
East and West could manifest themselves in any place and at any time. Lysenko
was to the East what Mendel was to the West: it was not uncommon to hear or to
meet someone who genuinely believed that there was a difference between Eastern
science and Western science, or communist science and capitalist science. But
whilst Lysenko’s theories were eventually shown to be little more than nonsense
wrapped in a thin layer of plausibility, the years in which it was the
sponsored pseudoscience of the Stalinist state (which imposed its ‘official science’ on large parts of the
Eastern bloc) had already done immeasurable damage to knowledge and to society
in the Soviet Union. Not so much a brain drain as a brain purge, the 1948
declaration that the whole field of genetics was nothing more than “bourgeois pseudoscience” led to the
arrest, imprisonment and even the execution of an astonishingly large number of
once-prominent and celebrated
scientists.
That Shaw expressed much of
his support for Stalinism in the years after Arthur Koestler had stumbled out
of love with the regime, and after Victor Serge had been imprisoned by the
state he once worked for, and after Rosa Luxemburg had penned many vital criticisms of the decline of Leninism,
is something for which the English author deserves to be criticised. Serge, the man who exposed the Tsarist
origins of The Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion and who may well have coined the term ‘totalitarianism’, did
not have the benefit of the same hindsight that could and should have been enjoyed
by Shaw. It makes his criticisms of the secret police and of Stalinism in
general all the more remarkable. And Orwell, who was by no means silent on the
ills of capitalism or the follies of ‘The West’, could never be accused of
having overlooked the equivalent flaws of ‘The East’. Much of what we now know
about Stalinist Russia we owe to those brave individuals who did write, who did
speak up, and who did not censor themselves out of fear for their own safety,
much less of causing offense.
Judgements on the critiques
of the two systems that originated on either side of the iron curtain could only be made after the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the end of the Cold War; only after the communication of ideas ceased
to be counterrevolutionary; only after introspection and self-criticism ceased
to be so wholly un-American. Shaw would have been wise to stay true to his
principle: ‘the first condition of
progress is the removal of censorship.’
If the Cold War was a clash of civilizations, then we are
now living through a clash between civilization and its antithesis. Islamic
State, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, Jabhat al-Nusra: these are not glimpses of a proto-civilization informed by an
alternative ideology. They are the
sworn and self-professed enemies of the very premise of civilization.
When we grant even a modicum
of respect to their nihilistic worldview, we assume that they are an expression
– however vulgar, however loathsome, however perverted - of an idea that is
fundamentally equal to the foundation of any civilization. And in doing so, we
insult the memory of the many peoples, societies and cultures that once occupied and still occupy
what we now misguidedly call ‘the Muslim world’. These, after all, are the
people who destroyed the ancient statues of Buddha at Bamiyan, who bombed the
al-Askari Mosque, who burned museums and their priceless collections and to
whom countless historical documents and artefacts have been lost because their
very existence was deemed to be an implicit criticism of Islam. We see a good
deal of misplaced handwringing after attacks on ‘our own’ culture, but the
masochists – those who prefer to blame Salman Rushdie, Jyllands-Posten, South
Park and Charlie Hebdo than defend them – tend to have very little to say about
the cultural atrocities inflicted on societies ‘over there’, atrocities that are not committed by ‘us’ but by the ‘them’ that
we supposedly oppress and provoke.
But countries and regions and
the legacy of the people who did so much to preserve the relics of ancient
Greece and Persia, whilst the forces of Christendom were doing their best to
wipe all traces of pre-Christian art and culture from the world, are not and will
never be represented by the bin-Ladenists, by the Salafists and the Wahhabis,
or by the followers of Khomenei or Zarqawi or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And if we
want, as we should, and as our friends in Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan certainly
do, to be allowed to enjoy the art and the writing and the music and the poetry
of the region – whether that be the old, like Rumi and Tabrizi, or the new,
like Khaled Hosseini and Kanan Makiya – then it is vital that we do not lessen
our own commitment to freedom of speech and expression in some stupid attempt
to appease the fanatics. Instead, we should hold to it and fight for it all the
more, not just for us but for those who
lack those rights.
Yet in Europe and the United
Kingdom we are increasingly being told that we have a duty to be silent. That we
have a responsibility not to offend. That we are morally obliged to keep our
criticisms, thoughts, jokes and ideas to ourselves. As though the other side
would simply disarm and go away if we only stopped publishing cartoons!
Specifically cartoons depicting a certain illiterate peasant who lied about a
revelation that never took place, and who built on that lie a military campaign
with the aim of creating an empire. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “ridicule is
the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions,” and
there are few propositions more unintelligible than the premise of religion.
The trend is particularly worrying on this side of the
Atlantic. Our lack of a written constitution
and a codified bill of rights, coupled with and partly caused by the position
of the monarchy and its relationship with government, and exacerbated by our
continuing involvement with a European Union that has no interest in protecting
free speech and no constitution of its own that protects it, leaves us in a uniquely
vulnerable situation. It adds significant and unnecessary weight to a burden we
seem reluctant to bear. It requires us
to stand as the sole protectors of our most important right, and the only
defense against ourselves.
This is an exceptionally dangerous state of affairs. George
Orwell’s essay, The Freedom of the Park,
makes the point that the real threat to free speech in this country comes not
from a capricious and totalitarian government but from a capricious and tyrannical
compulsion toward self-censorship.
“The relative
freedom which we enjoy depends on public opinion. The law is no protection.
Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police
behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of
people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech... if
public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if
laws exist to protect them. The notion that certain opinions cannot safely be
allowed a hearing is growing.”
This can be allied with another
of Thomas Jefferson’s statements—“the
only security of all is in a free
press”—to make, in summary, the case: If we are truly concerned with free and
equal rights, not just for white middle-class men on this island but for
everyone, then it is vitally important that we do not allow the censorship, by ourselves or by anyone else, of
thoughts and ideas that offend a minority, and especially not the majority. Noam
Chomsky is right when he points out
that “Goebbels was in favour of free speech for views he liked. So
was Stalin. If you’re really in favour of free speech, then you’re in favour of
freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in
favour of free speech.”
This is an effective summary
of Milton, of Mill, of Paine, of Voltaire, of Jefferson, and of the many others
besides, whose work forms the scaffold on which the principle of free speech
and a free press has been erected.
To adopt anything less than
complete adherence to what those in the United States call First Amendment absolutism is to pre-emptively condemn the very
people you think you are trying to protect. (The irony of that title is that,
as Christopher Hitchens so eloquently put it, “It commits us to an unshakable principle while it obliquely
reminds us that absolutism is what the freedom of speech actually makes
impossible.”) The
point is well made in the dialogue between Roper and Thomas More in Robert
Bolt’s A Man for All seasons. When
Roper tells More that he would happily cut down every law in England to get
after the devil, More issues the following response.
“And when the last law
was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the
laws all being flat? ...Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own
safety's sake!”
For the avoidance of doubt, I am fully
aware of the logical consequences of this position. And I’ll make it very
clear: I have no time for hate speech laws of any kind. The Austrian government
might have congratulated itself for arresting the historian and holocaust
denier David Irving for thought crime, but I would defend his right to hold,
speak and publish his views even if he had no redeeming features whatever.
Nor do I have time for nonsense non-words
like ‘Islamophobia’, the wilful
conflation of race (which doesn’t exist) and religion, which is designed with
the express purpose of silencing criticism of the latter. The reader is welcome
to attack me with speech or in writing and on any topic they choose. It takes a
lot to make me cry. But I reserve the right to reply in kind and I reserve the
right to attack any person, any idea, any religion, any ideology, at any place
and at any time.
Again, and whether it is an expression of
self-flagellation or an imposition from outside: “The first condition of progress
is the removal of censorship.” We may hope that this condition is reasserted
and enforced by the governments – our own amongst them – that seem to be
denying its proud entailments. But we must first recognise and acknowledge its
value ourselves.
