198. The violation of free speech

 Free speech is needed for the open debate that I advocate on this blog, to assess ‘warranted assertibility’ (see item 104 in this blog) and to practise ‘debatable ethics’ (item 115). We should allow young Muslims to utter radical criticism of Western society, short of incitement to violence or hatred, and listen to them. However, free speech is not without limit. It is in fact outlawed when it incites to physical violence. But speech itself can constitute a form of violence.

According to the theory of speech acts, initiated by Austin[i], people use language not only to refer to things but also ‘to do things to each other’ (item 25). Expressions can be illocutionary, i.e. directed at an addressee to create an effect in him or her: to attract attention, influence an opinion, coach into action, with suggestions, directions, warnings, orders, threats, accusations, complaints, etc.

‘That is a chair’ mother shouts as her tomboy daughter climbs and capers on it. That expression does refer, to that particular chair, but its portent is illocutionary: don’t climb on it.

So, though different from ‘sticks and stones’, language can hurt.

The upheaval caused by the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, in Paris, was uplifting, in its outcry of solidarity against terrorist attacks on free speech. It evoked a sense of unity, to protect values achieved in the Enlightenment.

It was also somewhat hypocritical. What if Jesus were depicted as a dissolute vagrant? In the Netherlands it is forbidden by law to insult the royal family. Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ is prohibited in Germany. Anti-semitic depiction of Jews as greedy or as perverts causes an outcry. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of the French Front National, was convicted for denying the importance of the holocaust. Some forms of advertising are forbidden.

So, what justification is there to condemn and ridicule Muslims when they are affronted by insulting images of their prophet? How can we look down on their sensibility as primitive? How can one ridicule their sensibility while celebrating and codifying one’s own?

And what about the waves of insults, invective and innuendo that arise, swell and  reverberate on social media, which can erroneously but irreparably damage reputations?

I am reminded of Foucault’s analysis of how in growing up and being socialized in the time and place of a culture one assimilates its tacit assumptions, predilections and prejudice. Free speech then in fact entails a demand for the freedom to profess what is congenial to what we have learned to cherish, to ridicule or insult what is foreign to it, and to demand that others tolerate it.

Of course, none of this entails the tolerance of terrorism against free speech. But it does entail willingness not to ridicule or condemn but to listen to complaints against the free speech one employs.

Elsewhere in this blog (item 46) I argued that in evolution humans have developed both an instinct for self-interest and an instinct for altruism within the group one identifies with, at the price of suspicion and discrimination regarding outsiders. That out-group aversion may wield free speech as a weapon, hurting outsiders in the protection of our prejudice. The motives for defending free speech are one-sided and suspect, in part.  

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[i] John L. Austin, 1975, How to do things with words, Oxford:  Oxford University Press.