Free Speech's Fits & Starts
by Lindsay Perigo
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
- Amendment 1, Constitution of the United States.
Walking home from the gym the day of the first anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of Iraq, I encountered several hundred smelly Saddamites marching towards Parliament to demand the reinstatement of their toppled idol (I exaggerate the letter, but not the spirit of their protest). The vicious irony of their using their freedom of expression to demand that Iraqis be deprived of it, so soon after acquiring it, was clearly lost on these caterwauling grotesqueries. I alternated between seething disgust at the vermin & curiosity as to whether any of them might be given cause for pause by a moment’s reflection on free speech’s long, tortuous history.
Those magnificent Greeks had more than an inkling of it – yet they infamously put Socrates to death.
The Enlightenment resurrected it after centuries of heresy-hunts & burnings at the stake. John Milton’s celebrated speech to the English Parliament, later published as the Aeropagitica (in deference to the Greeks), was an attack on Imprimatur, the literal stamp of approval one had to obtain from state censors on documents one wished to publish. (One could not obtain Imprimatur on anything attacking the Church of England or the Government.) Censorship of ideas, Milton said, was “the greatest discouragement & affront that can be offered to learning and to learned men.” Unfortunately, Milton made an exception of Catholics, since they were supposedly in thrall to a foreign power (the Pope).
Then came John Locke, who did brilliant, original work in developing the concept of rights, including freedom of expression – except for atheists! Freedom of religion, it seems, did not extend to freedom from religion!
Locke did tumble to a vital distinction underpinning the case for free speech – the distinction between force & persuasion. Force he equated with governments; persuasion he equated with books. Persuasion cannot force, he argued; coercion cannot persuade. “Such is the nature of the understanding that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force.” The use of government force as an instrument of persuasion, he believed, was wrong; for the Government to censor the content of books (except atheist ones) was improper.
One hundred years later, the United States’ first Congress sent off to the states, for ratification, the following Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” What an achievement! From primordial slime through countless millennia of grunting evolution & brute force to such magnificent words as those!
Then came John Stuart Mill, widely regarded as one of free speech’s foremost advocates. Note, though, his over-arching view of when government force is justified: “… the only purpose for which power can be rightly exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will is to prevent harm to others.”
“Harm to others.” What does that cover? It could cover any number of things, speech being just one of them, whose forcible prevention by the state would be profoundly anti-freedom. It could cover, for instance, hurting the feelings of others. It could cover withholding one’s earnings from others (Mill himself said that failure to perform certain charitable “duties” constituted harm). Would the exercise of governmental power then be warranted, to protect people’s feelings by banning certain types of speech, & to force people to perform their charitable duties? The contemporary incarnation of primordial slime – university lecturers in politics, sociology & philosophy – gleefully answer “Yes!” – as they applaud politically correct “speech codes,” demand “hate crime” legislation, urge higher levels of taxation, & so forth. (Thus the grotesquery of these Rawls-worshipping neo-Marxists claiming they are in the “classical liberal tradition.”) And there is nothing in Mill to justify one’s saying, “No!” This is the same Mill, after all, who believed that education should be compulsory.
Clearly, this won’t do. It’s a short, barely discernible step from “harm to others” to “injurious to the public good” – the indefinable notion that in one form or another underlies censorship legislation around the world. The imprecision of Mill’s argument has contributed to the dead-end of post-modernism whose pin-up boys like Stanley Fish write books with titles such as There is no such thing as free speech – and it’s a good thing too. Free speech, says Fish, is a contradiction in terms; all speech is coercive. This is what, three hundred years after Locke, two hundred years after the First Amendment, we have been reduced to – as though Locke’s crucial insight distinguishing force from persuasion had never happened.
But it did happen - & the post-moderns & the femi-nazis & the conservatives & the “liberals” & all the other wannabe censors know it. They also know that if they can sell persuasion as force, they can justify force as persuasion. That is exactly what they want to do. Unfortunately, they are succeeding.
The only free speech the smelly Saddamites are concerned about is their own.
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