Speaking Freely

“As for the principle of free speech, it’s hard to invoke it with any enthusiasm when the speech that’s being made free with is inane. Of course, the kind of free speech we would all prefer is that with which we concur: “freeish” speech, speech whose freedom is conditional on our approval of it. But failing that, can’t we at least have free speech only on the understanding that it is shapely, evenly considered and well expressed?” Harold Jacobson in The Independent c 2004

Free speech cannot be a free rant

Speech buttressed by fact, reasoned and reasonable argument is worthy of praise and recommendation in private and public fora.

That in no easy way can be curbed because it creates debate and from that stirred soupçon come stirring ideas  bubbling with flavours of dissent and assent.

It need not further agendas , political or social, but can exist independent of them often providing  either an inspired compass for them or simply to hold an honest mirror like the one in Snow White.

Free Speech has become a lightning rod for the proponents of liberalism and  conservative authoritarianism alike.

The former will insist with the flared nostrils of righteousness that free speech must be allowed regardless of whether the opinion springs from fact, the spirit of scientific enquiry  or the lessons of history.  They will argue that no speech is right or wrong, it’s for the listener to make judgment on it.

This view presupposes that the listeners are privy to a higher ability of discrimination than the speakers. In a world where truth is at an unaffordable premium, this seems somewhat naive. However they will say, if you were to filter argument , where would it end?  And the spectre of Censorship, more dreaded than the Grim Reaper,is incanted before your eyes.

The latter will insist, eyes aflame with indignation, that you cannot speak whatever you think, unless it conforms to  beliefs that have been sanctified by higher powers, such as God, or their anointed representatives on earth or the books that purport to be the voice of God, or by ordinary people who have more money than you , more guns than you or very simply more airwaves than you. Free speech is dissent they will say, and that is the enemy of order and also of ordained progress. After all manifest destiny is an idea to be cherished. And that idea  brooks no argument.

In both cases it seems that we tend to forget debate.

If you speak freely, you must be open to dissent. If you are not allowed to speak freely, you must be allowed to question the fatwa against it.

In both cases the idea of dissent or question happens after the fact. And by which time we are all awash in floods of polemic, diatribe and demagoguery.

Struggling for breath ,let alone voice, we can but be taken in the current of affairs, to finally be beached on lonely isles.

And we,wistfully, can only rail against those tides with messages in digital bottles.