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Freedom

In “Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media” (2022), author Jacob Mchangama traces its roots from ancient Greek Athenian notions of Isegoria, public or civic speech; and Parrhesia, the frank and uninhibited language of everyday interaction. These became the “egalitarian foundations and participatory principles” of democratic systems of government, and from which the ability to criticise one’s own government is still democracy’s key litmus test (2022, p. 13, 14).

Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press that enabled the wide spread of ideas, many of which called into question the very assumptions on which the social order of Europe was founded. Subsequent beheadings, burnings, and hand-lopping resulted from religious crimes of blasphemy and heresy, often seen as “joined at the hip” with political crimes including sedition and treason. Censorship was based on an underlying concept that “words and actions are indistinguishable, and that the former can be every bit as harmful as the latter” (2022, p. 75, 78). Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the practice of censorship passed from church to state, and when Europe’s coffeehouses hosted patrons based not on wallet or bloodline, but on the intellect that was brought to the table, free speech was ultimately declared “the great bulwark of liberty”, only soon to become the rallying cry of revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic (2022, p. 119, 129).

After centuries of absolutism, Europe’s public had little experience with uninhibited discourse outside philosophical circles, whereas America’s “more vibrant public sphere” had early roots. Political tribalism meant a clash between egalitarian and elitist notions of free speech could lead reasonable and well-informed citizens to become rowdy and rebellious, often at alcohol-fuelled gatherings. Division arose between a Federalist desire for more restraints on speech versus a Republican concern over the danger in centralizing power. Thomas Jefferson struck a unifying tone, stating “reason must be left to combat errors of opinion” (2022, p. 202), so that free speech could become a vehicle for cohesion, not strife and treason.

Unfortunately, the US Bill of Rights did not extend to the member states, and thus to the cotton fields, although print enabled many women, including author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher, to join the battle for rights in a war which was normally the preserve of men. Social reformer and escaped slave Frederick Douglass called free speech a “moral renovator”, and later, activist and politician John Lewis acknowledged that without it, the US Civil Rights movement would have been a “bird without wings” (2022, p. 239, 241, 299).

In France, the 1814 press law required publications to obtain royal sanction. In Britain, speech crimes discriminated on the basis of class, with a government increasingly focused on threats to social order as opposed to dangerous ideas, while in the early twentieth-century colonies of Hong Kong, India, and Africa, discrimination was based on language, ethnicity, and race. The totalitarian methods George Orwell warned people about encouraging, as they could eventually be used against themselves, reveals a broader question of free speech’s slippery slope, leading Mchangama to wonder:

“Should open societies be more afraid of totalitarian movements abusing free speech to destroy freedom itself, or of democratic governments abusing the limits on free speech and unwittingly forging the chains with which authoritarians may fetter all speech once in power?” (2022, p. 258).

Hitler’s propaganda tool of the Second World War, found to be most effective on the young and impressionable, was really the gradual erosion of the German language. Mchangama references German-Jewish linguist Victor Klemperer, who stated words can be “tiny doses of arsenic”:

“Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed upon them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously… Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all” (2022, p. 285).

In 1948, following the Second World War and based upon Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, notably: “The First is freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world” (1941, p. 304), then drawing largely from the input of his widow, Eleanor, the newly established United Nations drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 provides that: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” (2022, p. 289). Media law professor Eric Barendt reiterates further this article helps sustain “individual access to uninhibited public debate” and is thus an “integral aspect of each individual’s right to self-development and fulfillment” (2005, p. 2).

Barendt, E. (2005), Freedom of Speech, Second Edition, Oxford University Press, book review in the Integrated Journal of Law and Legal Jurisprudence Studies, (pp. 1 – 8). [PDF document] retrieved July 2022 from http://ijlljs.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/BOOK-REVIEW.pdf

Mchangama, J. (2022) Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. New York, United States: Basic Books – Hachette Book Group.

Roosevelt, F. D. (1941), The Four Freedoms, from his address to Congress, January 6, 1941, reprinted in Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (1946), Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (p. 304). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

United Nations (1948), Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [PDF document] retrieved July 2022 from https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

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Civility

In a paper titled “Civicness and Civility: Their Meanings for Social Sciences” (September 2009), author Adalbert Evers defines civicness as the quality of institutions, organizations, and procedures that enable the cultivation of civility, where society is made up not only of debating citizens, but “third sector organizations” with social and economic purposes. He observes tensions arise between the respecting of individualism, diversity and non-engagement, with “active compliance with rules and norms which are confirmed by public authorities” (p. 242, 243).

In his comprehensive analysis, “Civility: A Cultural History” (2008), author Benet Davetian probes civility’s complex roots, and states we need to “guard against sociology’s tendency to avoid topics that it considers the proper domain of psychology or anthropology” and that civility is instead best understood through a deliberate study of human social psychology (2008, p. 344). An exclusively social-constructivist view, that denies the potential effects of stored bodily emotions which can make people prone to one narrative or moral position over another, produces “a further split between organic and social explanations of society”. Humiliation, anger, and a childhood ‘failure to grieve’ should therefore be viewed as intimately linked in both personal and political acts.

Sociologist Norbert Elias suggests society’s pleasure component is being suppressed in favour of the arousal of anxiety, that itself causes the suppression of emotions but which can then spring forth as displeasure, revulsion, and distaste, as customary feelings. Individuals locate within dynamic networks of “mutual relationism” that are continually shifting and being renegotiated, subject to patterns they are part of but do not control:

“People stand before the outcome of their own actions like an apprentice magician before the spirits he has conjured up and which, once at large, are no longer is his power. They look with astonishment at the convolutions and formations of the historical flow which they themselves contribute but do not control” (2008, p. 347).

Davetian states that inter-civilizational conflict can arise when communal and individualistic societies meet. Seeking to find causes for their differences, people from different cultures may resort to demonizing the other’s customs and social values, and when détente is not achieved through conventional values-oriented avenues, common ground can often be found in their technical cultures, however such narratives rarely lead to authentic intercultural understanding. Displays of courtesy and discourtesy are often affected not only by the emotions of guilt, embarrassment, shame, and pride, “but also by the extent to which a culture allows forthright demonstrations of emotions” (2008, p. 369). In a system built from aristocracy or a national heritage, a certain role is played by a “cultural narcissism that tempers the need for private and isolated presentations of the self”, but rather confirms one’s membership in an accomplished culture. (2008, p. 376, 421).

Traditions of incivility may be bound up with peculiar forms of egalitarianism, according to lawyer James Whitman in his paper titled “Enforcing Civility and Respect: Three Societies” (2000). He observes that free speech on continental Europe is tuned to notions of honour and respect that have deep aristocratic roots, whereas incivility is “woven into the cloth of the America egalitarian tradition”, in which speech is not merely about the expression of opinion, but also about “the free and aggressive display of disrespect”. Studying different cultures in this context can provide a richer sense of what is at stake, including the prevalence of, or the potential for violence (2000, p. 1396, 1397).

Davetian, B. (2008) Civility: A Cultural History. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

Evers, A. (September 2009), Civicness and Civility: Their Meanings for Social Services, in Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, Issue 20, (pp. 239 – 259). Baltimore, United States: International Society for Third Sector Research and The John’s Hopkins University.

Whitman, J. Q. (2000), Enforcing Civility and Respect: Three Societies, in The Yale Law Journal, Volume 109, (pp. 1279 – 1398). [PDF document] retrieved June 2022 from https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/5035. New Haven, United States: The Yale Law Journal Company, Inc.

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Truth

Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality (Wikipedia, retrieved January 2021). It can often be difficult to separate truth from fiction, for a variety of reasons. How might we approach such a challenge? In one of a series of discourses titled “The Idea of a University delivered to the Catholics of Dublin” in 1852, English theologian and priest Cardinal John Henry Newman recognized an appropriate tool in the form of a healthy intellect,

“which has been disciplined to the perfection of its powers, which knows, and thinks while it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass of facts and events with the elastic force of reason, such an intellect cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected, and majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in every end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each delay; because it ever knows where it stands, and how its path lies from one point to another.”

while

“Those, on the other hand, who have no object or principle whatever to hold by, lose their way, every step they take. They are thrown out, and do not know what to think or say, at every fresh juncture; they have no view of persons, occurrences, or facts, which come suddenly upon them, and they hang upon the opinion of others, for want of internal resources” (1852, p. 165).

Does our current socio-technological landscape tend to favour this latter demographic? Are recent chaotic effects indicative of the nature of a new evolutionary trajectory brought on by our technological extensions? If so, how might we proceed? Should we all not want to be stakeholders in this, our own evolution, if that is what it is, rather than completely hand it off to those who have no interest but in our wallets, in keeping us glued to our screens, or monitored in some Orwellian nightmare come to life? As Ron Deibert wonders in his comprehensive, revealing book “Reset“ (2020): “What harbinger is it for the future when one of the principal means we have to communicate with each other is so heavily distorted in ways that propel confusion and chaos?” (2020, p. 89).

In the public sphere, complementary to any notion of truth are the issue of freedom of speech and the important question of how to approach it in our new and ever-evolving media ecosystems. How might action be taken, or regulation shaped, so we can still reap tech’s abundant benefits, and move towards a more sustainable ideal? Moreover, can we reach a point so as to be assured, as American newspaper editor William Allen White asserted in 1924, that so long as there is freedom, folly will die on its own:

“You tell me that law is above freedom of utterance. And I reply you can have no wise laws nor free enforcement of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people – and, alas, their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and wisdom will survive” (1924, p. 349).

A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions | Baháʼí Faith:
“If thou lookest toward justice, choose thou for others what thou choosest for thyself. Blessed is he who prefers his brother before himself” (1946, p. 310).

Deibert, R. J. (2020) Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press

Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (1946) A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions, in Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp. 309-310). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

Newman, J. H. (1852) The Delights of Knowledge, in The Idea of a University, Discourse 6, Section 6, (pp. 164–166) [PDF document]. New York, United States: Longmans, Green and Co. (1902 ed.)

White, W. A. (1924) The Importance of Free Speech, in The Editor and His People: Editorials by William Allen White, selected by Helen Ogden Mahim (pp. 348-349). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company