by Jacob Mchangama
It’s a great privilege to be able to share the ideas behind my podcast “Clear and Present Danger: A History of Free Speech” with the readers of the APA blog. Though as a lawyer I’m slightly intimidated by contributing to a philosophy blog!
Free speech and its limits is almost an obsession in many Western democracies, and new debates arise all the time. Philosophers should have a strong interest in this topic. Not only is freedom of thought and speech a necessary condition for philosophical debate – just ask Socrates- philosophers also have much to contribute in terms of articulating why we need free speech and where to draw the line. And, no, the debate over the proper role of free speech did not end with Mill and chapter 2 of “On Liberty” (however brilliant a contribution).
Being born in one of the freest and open democracies in the world, I was not personally concerned with free speech until cosy liberal Denmark became the epicenter of a global battle of values over the limits of free speech. In 2005 Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammed. A crisis erupted, setting in motion a chain of explosive events whose aftershocks still rock the world from time to time.
What surprised me most about the whole affair was not the violent reactions from fundamentalists and illiberal regimes, but the reaction of leading intellectuals, journalists and politicians who had grown up in secular democracies where religion had long been fair game for artists, satirists and writers. Many of these people, who relied on free speech for a living, now suddenly insisted that free speech should not be “abused” to offend religious feelings of minorities.
But as controversies over immigration, terrorism and radicalization continued in the following decade I noticed another pattern. Many of those who had been loudly in favour of almost limitless free speech during the cartoon crisis now rushed to advocate limits on speech that offended their core beliefs. Such as religious speech seen as veering too far from secular democratic ideals or too close to sympathy for terrorism. This pattern of selective outrage and free speech “butism” repeated itself whenever new battlegrounds sprung up over free speech — on universities, hate speech, social media, and fake news, to name but a few current controversies. Few seemed willing to defend free speech on principle preferring to advance this freedom mostly when it supported their underlying sympathies only to BUT out, when used by their ideological opponents. So I started being interested in where the idea and practice of free speech had originated, how it had evolved, what had been its consequences and whether my own assumptions about the supreme importance of a strong and principled defense of free speech stood up to scrutiny (so far my confirmation bias still holds the upper hand).
My approach to recounting the history of free speech is more practical than theoretical. Philosophers, political theorists and theologians will no doubt find my treatment of some of the great thinkers and ideas that have been crucial for the battles over and development of free speech frustratingly superficial. Nonetheless, ideas and philosophy are obviously hugely important for free speech which, stripped bare, is but an idea itself, but which might be justified very differently depending on religious, ideological or political outlook. Which is where philosophy comes in handy. And of course, the practical limits of free speech have also been extremely important in terms of drawing the red lines of permissible philosophical inquiry and debate with many thinkers paying a steep price for expressing their convictions or ideas about the nature of the universe, God, justice, and politics. For those who are interested in free speech from a more philosophical point of view I would recommend a number of episodes as particularly relevant.
Episode 1 explores the origins of free speech in ancient Athens, the birthplace of equal and uninhibited speech. Or Isegoria and parrhesia to the Athenians. The orator Demosthenes laid out the stark difference between democratic Athens and its oligarchic enemies in Sparta. In Athens, you were free to criticize the Athenian constitution and praise the Spartan alternative. But in Sparta, praising any other constitution than the Spartan was prohibited. Without Athenian parrhesia it is difficult to imagine Plato and Aristotle being able to set up academies and writing with their respectively hostile and skeptical attitudes to the very democracy in which they lived. The trial of Socrates has given the Athenian democracy a bad name, but the old gadfly had a good long run of subjecting his fellow citizens to intellectual striptease before they had enough of being publicly humiliated. But there were also very special circumstances that may help explain why Socrates was convicted and sentenced to death, and which raise the question of whether Socrates was a martyr for free speech or an impious and seditious enemy of democracy.
In episode 2 we turn to ancient Rome with a particular emphasis on the late Roman republic and the dramatic events leading up to its fall and with Cicero as the main character of the narrative. But there is also a brief mention of Lucretius and his long poem De Rerum Natura and the story of how three Athenian philosophers – including Carneades from Plato’s Academy and Diogenes the Stoic – were expelled from Rome after Carneades held two equally convincing speeches for and against justice. According to Plutarch, Carneades’ performance “had impressed so strange a love upon the young men, that quitting all their pleasures and pastimes, they ran mad, as it were, after philosophy”, which did not please the conservative Cato the Elder.
In episode 5 we travel to the Abbasid Caliphate where in medieval times almost all secular works of Greek philosophy and science were translated into Arabic by the Caliphs Al-Mansur and Al-Mamun who were inspired by rationalist ideas that clashed with more orthodox interpretations of Islam. This contributed to an explosion of science and philosophy and an impressive cast of polymaths including great philosophers like Al Kindi, Farabi and Ibn Sina, and even radical thinkers who seemed to reject prophecy and revealed religion for reason and inquiry like Al-Razi and Al-Rawandi. The ideas and works of this period would help inspire the rediscovery of Greek thought in medieval Europe and combined with the emergence of universities set in motion an intellectual revolution and impressive scientific achievements, even as philosophers and theologians battled fiercely over the limits of philosophical inquiry as detailed in episode 6 on the “not-so-dark-ages”. And for philosophy buffs, professor of philosophy and host of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast, Peter Adamson, ties these developments together in episode 7, where I also force him to give a top 3 of his favorite European Medieval philosophers.
As for the early modern period I recommend episode 12 featuring the expertise of Oxford scholar and author of the highly recommended book “Mere Civility” Teresa Bejan. Bejan discusses the attitudes of Milton, Hobbes, Locke and Roger Williams towards tolerance and free speech. Content warning: If you’re a hardcore Lockean, Bejan’s assessment of John Locke’s ideas and influence might cause offense!
In the latest episode professor Steven Nadler discusses the perhaps most daring and controversial thinker of the 17th century: Baruch Spinoza, whose given name might mean “blessed” but whose Theological-Political Treatise from 1670 was condemned as “A Book Forged in Hell by the Devil Himself”. Nadler helps explore why Spinoza’s one-substance theory so shocked and outraged even the liberal and tolerant Dutch that his treatise and subsequent works were banned. And how Spinoza’s insistence that “In a free state every man may think what he likes, and say what he thinks” should be reconciled with Spinoza’s warning against “sedition”.
The ambition of the podcast is to tell the story of free speech up to and including our own time, which means that there are plenty of great thinkers left whose contributions to freedom of thought and expression are yet to be discussed. I hope you’ll join me on the rest of the journey!
