Freedom of speech is a right, but self-restraint is a virtue

Freedom of speech is a right, but self-restraint is a virtue

>By Martin Wolf
>Published: February 8 2006 02:00 | Last updated: February 8 2006 02:00
>>

Tolerance of the aggressively intolerant must have its limits. Fanatics who threaten those who disagree with them with massacres and beheadings have crossed that line. Yet the British police have failed to act against demonstrators who did just that last weekend. Contemporary Britain swallows camels and strains at gnats: it criminalises the expression of prejudice, but balks at prosecuting incitement.

We are confused, but can afford to be no longer. We must ask ourselves the big questions again: what are the proper limits of free expression? What should be the role of the law in setting the limits on free speech? How should people live alongside those whose beliefs they may abhor?

There are no easy answers to these questions. But we do have some guides in traditional liberal thought. Let us remember the fundamental premise of the Enlightenment, from which all contemporary western societies take their root: ignorance, obscurantism and prejudice enslave us; the truth shall set us free.

The only way to reach truth is through open debate. That is the premise upon which the west's greatest intellectual achievement - contemporary science - is built. It is also the foundation of any workable democracy. If one set of opinions is allowed to suppress others, by force or by fear of force, then the permanent discussion that should permeate any free and democratic society ends. Only the freedom to challenge and debate can overthrow prejudice. Coercion does not secure conviction, but merely suppresses dissent.

Freedom of speech is a way to truth, a bulwark against tyranny and a sign of the value we place on the human capacity to judge. From Socrates onwards, the best of the western moral and political tradition has rested on the right of people to question, however uncomfortable the questions may be. There is no courage and little benefit in telling society what it wants to hear. Courage lies in saying what society wishes to ignore.

Yet there must be limits to such freedom. Those limits lie in incitements to violence or the threat of violence aimed at suppressing the opinions of others. It was not Nazi opinion that should have been outlawed in the 1920s and early 1930s, but rather the political party dedicated to putting them into effect.

This limit is doubly obvious: first, because the state exists to protect its members; and, second, because intimidation is death to freedom of expression. Those who threaten violence put themselves outside the sphere of civilised discourse. There must be no equivocation over this fundamental principle.

Expressions of opinion that some groups regard as intensely offensive are quite a different matter. These may be impolite, even disgracefully so, but that is not sufficient reason to make them illegal. The indiscriminate use of the law against every activity or expression that some group dislikes is a route to the disappearance of freedom of expression altogether.

To understand the absurdities to which such restrictions may lead, one need do no more than consider recent contortions in the UK. The government, to its shame, has been dedicated to passing a bill outlawing "incitement to religious hatred", in order to placate Muslim opinion. Recently, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, one of the UK's leading Muslims, expressed on the radio orthodox Muslim hostility to homosexuality. Thereupon, the police launched an investigation into the hate-crime of homophobia. Thus, the government was determined to use the law to restrain criticism of a religion one of whose tenets may itself be against the law.

The use of the law to protect people from being offended is sure to lead to such absurdities. Moreover, as Anthony Browne, the British journalist, argues in a recent pamphlet, however noble the aims of what its opponents call "political correctness", it can also too easily lead to the suppression of inconvenient truths.* Let a thousand offences bloom, instead, and let people judge freely among them.

I am the child of refugees from Hitler. Yet Holocaust denial should, in my view, be no crime. Nor should the expression of anti-Semitic opinions, provided these do not include incitement to violence. The absurdity of such views - and the prejudice of those who hold them - will be far more readily exposed by open expression and debate than by driving them underground. In debate, the lunacy of those who deny that the Holocaust happened, while wishing that it had, becomes self-evident.

If we agree that almost all expressions of opinion should be permitted, other than those that represent an incitement to violence, what about those notorious cartoons? Were they not also an incitement, albeit indirect, to violence?

The thought behind them - that some adherents are using the Koran to justify terrorism - is correct. It must be possible for western publications to express it. But a drawing of the Prophet is deemed a desecration by the faithful. The right judgment is that these cartoons were not a direct incitement to violence, but a way of making a point. They should not be illegal. Demands to suppress such freedom of expression must be rejected. It is too precious a safeguard against tyranny of all kinds for that to be permitted. Those who enjoy the blessing of living in a free society must accept the occasionally unpalatable consequences.

Yet, in the present fraught state of relations between the west and the Muslim world, their republication proved unwise. What is legally permissible is certainly not mandatory and occasionally not very sensible. Self-restraint in the exercise of one's freedom can often be the wiser course.

This, however, is not the heart of the matter. The west must prepare to defend certain fundamental principles: first and foremost, it must reiterate its belief in freedom of expression as the safeguard of all other freedoms; second, it should state that the only reason to limit such freedom is to prevent direct incitement to violence or intimidation; and, third, it should abandon the strange, even destructive, idea that freedom of expression is to be legally circumscribed by the obligation not to cause offence.

Yet those who enjoy these precious freedoms should remember that what must remain legal is not obligatory. Freedom is our birthright. Self-restraint is a measure of our maturity.

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