The recent attack on Salman Rushdie has reminded us of a simple yet gargantuan topic. One that is of utmost importance not only to the future of the West, but to humanity at large: the protection of free expression.
“In February 1989,” wrote Jonathan Rauch in Kindly Inquisitors, “fundamentalist Muslims rose up against the British writer Salman Rushdie, who had written a novel which they regarded as deeply, shockingly, offensive to Islam’s holy truths and to the Muslim community.” (pg. 20) Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran responded to Rushdie’s fictional book by saying it was the duty of all good Muslims to kill Rushdie, to “send him to hell.”
But what if, as billions of individuals living together in a world of just as many unique perspectives, we should be able to be as insulting as we want, toward whomever we want—not because there is anything desirable about vulgar abuse, but because the alternative—silencing dissent—could be far worse?
Are you Muslim and feel that nobody should be allowed to mock the Quran? A Christian who feels the same about the Bible? What about a medical expert who wants certain Covid-19 related views to be censored? Or a trans activist looking to silence people who consider biological sex to be binary? Or someone who feels that pro-Russian content shouldn’t be allowed to be shared online? Or an anti-racist activist seeking to shut down criticisms of the Black Lives Matter organization and movement?
If the answer was ‘yes’ to any of these questions, there is a very straightforward mental exercise that you, as a supporter of censorship, may need to grapple with:
Take whatever sorts of restrictions on speech you wish to impose on others, and then imagine those same powers in the hands of whoever scares you the most.
Those who support censorship by the current holders of informational control—in both governance and Big Tech—should consider what might happen if the legal or structural means of controlling human expression and inquiry were in the hands of truly malevolent or utterly incompetent actors. To assume that the powerful will always favour the interests of your group, after all, is entirely naïve.
Article 48 of Germany’s 1919 Weimar Constitution states that:
“If public security and order are seriously disturbed or endangered within the German Reich, the President of the Reich may take measures necessary for their restoration, intervening if need be with the assistance of the armed forces.”
This constitutional article was written under the misguided assumption that pro-democracy leaders would always be in power. Yet, as historian Benjamin Carter Hett has described in The Death of Democracy, such provisos allowed for the establishment of military rule and the article therefore provided “a kind of trapdoor through which Germany could fall into dictatorship” under the Nazis (pg. 84). We cannot design systems with naïve assumptions at their foundation. This especially applies to the control of human expression.
Evidence of free speech centrality in the struggle against oppression is to be found nowhere more clearly than the opinions of those who have lived under genuine tyranny. In a brilliant essay for Foreign Affairs from earlier this year, Jacob Mchangama used direct quotations to illustrate the importance of free speech to major pro-democracy leaders of the 20th century: Mahatma Gandhi of India, Nelson Mandela of South Africa, Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia, and Lech Walesa of Poland. Free speech is also, of course, absolutely fundamental for people living under the boots of tyrannical regimes currently:
“The importance of free speech in the digital space is clear to embattled pro-democracy activists in places such as Belarus, Egypt, Hong Kong, Myanmar, Russia, and Venezuela, where they depend on the ability to communicate and organize—and to the regimes of these countries, which view such activities as an existential threat.”
Should the fact that authoritarian regimes require censorship and suppression of heterodox viewpoints not incentivize us toward doing the exact opposite? In theory, yes. In practice, not so much. Mchangama goes on to describe how the censorial actions of the informational gatekeepers in our own “liberal democracies” are making things worse for pro-democracy activists elsewhere:
“And when liberal democracies pass censorship laws or when Big Tech platforms prohibit certain kinds of speech or bar certain users, they make it easier for authoritarian regimes to justify their repression of dissent. In this way, democracies and the companies that thrive in them sometimes unwittingly help entrench regimes that fuel propaganda and disinformation in those very same democracies.”
A great worry of mine is that civil strife is going to increase greatly in Europe for multiple reasons over the coming year or so. These reasons include mismanaged economic hardship, famine driven migrant crises, the possible spilling of war from Ukraine to surrounding countries, and an all too likely increase in terrorist and gang violence being amplified in its intensity by weapons of war from Ukraine finding their way to black markets in the West. These incidents may then, in turn, lead to supposedly temporary emergency clampdowns on freedom of expression and inquiry on the grounds of ‘public safety’ or ‘national security.’ Mchangama addressed this category of concern quite sharply:
“It is true that freedom of speech can be exploited to amplify division, sow distrust, and inflict serious harm. And the right to free expression is not absolute; laws properly prohibit threats and incitement to violence, for example. But the view that today’s fierce challenges to democratic institutions and values can be overcome by rolling back free speech is deeply misguided. Laws and norms protecting free speech still constitute “the great bulwark of liberty,” as the British essayist Thomas Gordon wrote in 1721. If not maintained, however, a bulwark can break, and without free speech, the future will be less free, democratic, and equal—and more ignorant, autocratic, and oppressive. Rather than abandon this most essential right, democracies should renew their commitment to free speech and use it to further liberal democratic ideals and counter authoritarian advances.”
The 75 year old Rushdie is still alive and seems to be making a recovery. This is testament to his physical resilience. What is testament to his moral resilience though, is his steadfast commitment to the principle of free expression. Jonathan Rauch wrote: “On the first anniversary of the death sentence, Rushdie, from his hiding place, published an article in which he said that without the freedom to offend, freedom of expression ceases to exist.” (pg. 22)
Rushdie even extended this commitment to those who made art that promoted his murder. A 1990 Pakistani film called International Gorillay was initially banned in Britain as it showed Rushdie being killed as divine punishment for his writing. This ban was, however, later overturned due to an appeal by Rushdie himself. Perhaps this should come as no surprise because, to Rushdie: “Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”
Throughout the history of civilization, tyrannical control of body and mind has been the rule rather than the exception. And if we hope to guard against it, we see that freedom of expression, while admittedly costly, is irreplaceably central. Rushdie’s resilience has not been in vain.