So PEN has elevated Charlie Hebdo to the status of poster boy in its campaign to promote freedom of expression around the globe! This is disingenuous at best, dangerous at worst.
It is disingenuous because freedom of expression in Western societies is under a far more powerful threat from well-meaning, but blindly fanatical, home-grown activists who claim to share our values of freedom and the rule of law. The debate over Charlie Hebdo must focus on what limits, if any, we should place on the magazine’s right to be offensive to the many groups it has skewered – quite apart from Islamic fanatics – not infrequently without a discernible objective. If we allow the violence triggered by words and pictures that jihadists consider to be insulting to set our priorities in defending freedom of expression, we have lost the battle, if not the war. We must energetically prosecute the murderers with the full force of the law; but we should be careful about confusing the magazine’s random barrage of mockery and insults with the murderous response to it.
The simple fact is that we have never had unencumbered freedom of expression. The traditions that have taken root in democratic societies – and have come to define it – promise us freedom of action and expression only if it does not harm others. There are many, many examples of these restraints, ranging from rules that a car cannot go through an intersection when a traffic light is red to the criminal offence of murder or incitement to hatred. We also have elaborate defences against outright lies that defame people unfairly (although libel laws are imperfect at best). Somewhere between this minimalist protection against deliberate misrepresentation and state-run censorship, there lies a sweet spot where a line can be drawn separating what is acceptable in a civilized society and what is not – a vast grey area of “fair comment”, which is the idea that people are free to hold opinions that may cast others in a poor light, even do them irretrievable harm, provided they cannot be proved to be untrue. Of course, proving that your words are not untrue is a lot easier than proving they are the truth. Knowing what constitutes the truth is beyond the reach of our puny human minds, since that requires the ability to see the “evidence” from every conceivable perspective.
The trouble is no-one knows where that sweet spot is; a comment that drives one person to distraction elicits only a chuckle from another. Absent any consensus on where the sweet spot lies, Western democracies have defaulted to the minimalist position and have become inured to insulting or misleading diatribes in public discourse. There is a feasible argument that justifies this position. A strong argument can be made that, when people in authority don’t want to listen to complaints, the only way to get their attention is to be outrageously insulting; by that line of reasoning, freedom of speech should embrace the right to offend. The problem with this argument is that it is unlikely to push people with opposing views into some form of accommodation; it is more likely to deepen the divisions and foster defensiveness, anger, violence and destruction. To complicate things still further, Charlie Hebdo has shown that the West cannot tackle this dilemma in isolation. Globalization has ensured that we have to take into account the realities and sensibilities of other cultures and societies, too – not necessarily to bow to them, but to at least govern our societies with them in mind.
If we are to search for the magical sweet spot of free speech, we must begin with an examination of how free we really are to express our opinions – and this is where the shame begins. The past few decades have witnessed an alarming decay in the freedom of expression in the very institution that was designed to protect and guarantee it – our universities. It is now routine for universities throughout the “free world” to censor people (sometimes forcibly) who wish to express viewpoints that do not coincide with the heavily leftist and dirigist views of the majority of the students and their cowardly administrators, who, in a spectacular example of cognitive dissonance, persist in proclaiming they are defending freedom of expression every time they deny it. It is now mercifully common to see the occasional dissenting viewpoint, speaking out against this corruption of the core mandate of universities, but the disease persists.
Although universities are the most extreme example, this cognitive dissonance is widespread throughout democratic societies, most noticeably at the political level but equally in some (but by no means all) big businesses and think tanks. Dissent is not challenged and debated. It is ghettoized. That makes it easier to hold distorted or extreme opinions. This trend has reached the point where it is degrading public discourse. With increasing frequency, we are witnessing overwhelming waves of opprobrium over some aspect of our society that has earned the ire of the self-appointed arbiters of political correctness. As the dominant perspective takes hold, it crushes all dissent and smothers any attempt at providing context or mitigating background. Their unspoken philosophy is that free speech is available only to those who hold views that are acceptable in their eyes. Free speech for some but not for others is not free speech. We do not have meaningful free speech in the Western world today.
This crisis in this essential foundation of a democratic state has been made a lot worse by the decline of large chunks of mainstream media in the face of the Internet Godzilla. The media have always displayed biases, but, until the 1990s, there were usually enough elite publications and broadcasters who were committed to using their curatorial power to give space to contrary viewpoints and to debate their merits. Now, as the Internet and its mobile applications have drawn up to 70% of the advertising away from traditional print and broadcast media, the financial foundations of the fourth estate have been dangerously weakened. Inevitably, editorial quality has suffered as curatorial responsibility has been abandoned in too many arms of the media. With some notable exceptions, the contrary viewpoint seldom appears in the context of the original viewpoint, so most readers and viewers will read or see one side or the other of an issue but almost never both. The prospect of an open society where differences of opinion are hashed out with mutual respect and integrity is shrinking by the minute.
The Pope, among others, has suggested that we need a little more voluntary respect for others – and a majority agrees with him. But there is no groundswell in support of mutual respect and there are still too many people who reject the idea completely. But it is no exaggeration to say that democracy will die if we lose the means of settling our differences with openness, honesty and integrity. So where do we draw the line between hard-edged legal restraints on extreme disrespect and mushy social pressure against abusive behaviour and language?
In the short term, we can hope for the reform or elimination of the dysfunctional institutions and laws that have been established to protect human rights but have succeeded mainly in bullying dissenting opinions and values. At best, this is only a partial solution with limited prospects for achieving the goal of an open society.
In the long term, we must reverse the trend toward intellectual ghettoization, working toward developing a genuine marketplace of ideas and values that will marginalize extremist views and permit a balanced discussion in an open society that allows pro and con to be heard equally by both sides of the great issues that divide us. The Internet cannot yet do this – it only enhances cognitive dissonance. A change as radical as this can be led only by the universities and the mainstream media, without whom the politicos will never abandon their half-truths. These institutions alone offer the hope of finding that sweet spot where opposing ideas are forced to compete and given space to converge.
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