February 06, 2006

Free Speech

The chorus, in the aftermath of vociferous and even violent protests by Muslims across the Western and near-Eastern world in the last few days, is that free speech must have our support, but that it also must have its limits. No one has yet said what those limits are, but it seems safe to assume they fall in the vicinity of religious figures. Maybe people envision a summit meeting between international potentates in which one side offers Jesus for the other side's Muhammad, and so on. Freedom of speech, they all seem to agree, is not absolute. Joe Citizen feels compelled to disagree. Joe Citizens says it is either absolute or it is nothing. It is absolute, or it is an oxymoron.

Free speech, as Joe Citizen understands it, means precisely that the government — which is to say the law — cannot decide what is permitted to be said, particularly on such hot topics as politics or religion. Here's a woman in Denmark, a Muslim Dane, quoted on the subject in Sunday's Times: "'You cannot make a fool of someone who means so much to so many people around the world.'" It's a sentiment easy to sympathize with. Yet at the same time it is precisely the sentiment that was, and still is, used to isolate political figures — presidents, prime ministers, kings and dictators — from editorial comment and critique. Who is to say what "means so much" and "so many people" might refer to? Does that describe George Bush? If you ask Scott McClellan, perhaps it does. If you ask Karl Rove, perhaps it does. If you ask Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, it surely does. These are men who refused to let nonsupporters attend the president's campaign speeches during the 2004 election, you may remember — dissent, disagreement literally not countenanced. And how about the Pope: is he not tremendously meaningful to tremendous numbers of people around the world? And is he therefore to be off-limits to editorialists worldwide? Who else? Kofi Anan? Tony Blair? Madonna? And what is to be the penalty for breach?

It is an age-old argument, used by the worst public figures in history, still used by petty tyrants everywhere, every day. Mao and Stalin, Hitler, Amin: each claimed the special significance of his person to the history or imaginations of his nation's people, and used that claim to outlaw any but flattering address. No jokes, no insults, no calls for serious thought. And jail time — or the firing squad — for those who disobey.

The principle of free speech is the most democratic of principles, the most fundamental of rights, precisely because its presumption is that no man of any station is greater than another. No leader of any sort should ever be above question or criticism or, yes, pointed satire. A man in the street may say what he likes, regardless of how sacred the passing dignitary is held to be. Thus a frustrated resident of New Orleans, during one of Cheney's visits, as the latter gave an interview on the street: "Fuck you, Cheney. Fuck you." Elsewhere, in other times, a man of Cheney's temperament and in Cheney's position could have had this fellow shot. As it was, he could do nothing but laugh. (And in the end, isn't that the only appropriate response? This administration has survived far worse than coarse heckling. It has survived its own gross incompetence, and what, really, can it have to fear after that?)

Free speech is also a sign of health, of confidence. It fosters and demonstrates stability, and behind that stability a rational rather than whimsical approach to public discourse and to law. Perhaps this is the more difficult and telling aspect to its character, and the one most applicable to the current controversy. To a Western rationalist like myself, or I'd venture to guess many Europeans, Gaza residents claiming to be diminished by a few square inches in a Danish newspaper is a little like Christians in Idaho claiming their marriages suffer when a gay man in New York is able to stay overnight in his lover's hospital room. I suppose the analogy to anti-semitism is easier to grasp (though i've personally never heard Jews try to prohibit caricatures of Moses, nor to call for the heads of those who drew them), but it's also instructive, perhaps: because there's nothing unlawful about an antisemitic cartoon, at least in America. And yet you'd never see one in a mainstream daily, because the social costs would be devastating. This too is free speech: no editor is above a reader's reproach. No paper is beyond a boycott. Discontent can and will be voiced. This is the strength of free speech, and its own government, and why it only functions in the absolute: any opinion will not — cannot — be voiced in a vacuum, without competition, contradiction, dissent. Stupidity and bigotry will be named and decried when they out, because they have no lock on the public ear. Jail, even death, will never moderate a dialogue so well.

Protesters, then, proclaiming their disgust over a tasteless or denigrating opinion are not just within the spirit of free speech: they are the spirit of free speech, even when they're calling for heads, as ridiculous as some of us may find it. The minute they move to take a head, though — as they have in the last twelve hours or so, by negligence or design — they are its worst enemy. Because the boundary of free speech, if we're looking for one, lies at its frontier with action.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Eloquent as ever, Joe C. Interesting to learn, as NPR reported this a.m., that the engine for the Feb ’06 protests stemming from the Sept ’05 cartoons was the widespread dissemination of the cartoons by various Muslim clerics. Clearly, there's a photocopier somewhere that's guilty of gross and manifold acts of graven-image-making. Or maybe it's just a martyr for the cause....

Meanwhile, this from the BlogSpot TOS, which I had to agree to in order to start an account and post this comment: "You agree to not use the Service to: (a) upload, post or otherwise transmit any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable."

Given that freedom of speech grants the right to the editorial function in one's own publication/web server/whatever, I'm fine with most of the above (though I admit I at first confused "tortious" with "tortuous"—a quality that Blogger would forbid at its own peril). But that concluding "otherwise objectionable" goes right to the heart of this issue. Any position on any topic will be objectionable to someone out there. But this objection should mark the beginning of a dialogue, not the banning of it—talk about tortious!