Freedom of Speech

Well, I am back to the free speech volume, officially entitled "Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea," writing the conclusion. If anyone has bothered to read long-ago posts, you will know that the volume was inspired by the Mohammed cartoons controversy several years ago. At that time, as chair of the Seminar on 18th-Century European Culture at Columbia, I organized a series of talks on the historical origins of free speech, since it struck me that no one was defending this freedom on what seemed to me a self-evident basis: namely, because it is OUR freedom. It's like defending your children, no matter how bad they are. Haven't we all seen a TV news reports of some horrible crime by a hoodlum, and the mother, trotted out for the camera, swears up and down that he is a good boy who could not have done what he is accused of? If only our university professors would defend Western "values" with such vigor. Against all the postmodernists who say that all cultures are equivalent, I counter: "Maybe, but this is the culture that I live in. If it's between me and them, then I want us to win." What also struck me at the time of the cartoons controversy was that postmodernists had such an easy time poking holes in the argument that rights were "universal."

In a sense I would say they are universal, applicable to all peoples at all times, since I believe that most people would prefer to have rights. Look at the Iranian protesters. As they have discovered, however, and despite all the U.N. proclamations, rights don't grow on trees. The rights we enjoy in the West have been historically achieved. But we have forgotten that centuries-long process and succumbed to the belief that there is something inevitable about rights. Thus the series I organized, and the book to be published, which contains essays by different scholars on aspects of the debates concerning speech in the 18th century.

It may be that all great civilizations imagine that their values are universal. Certainly Islam does. So, too, do the Chinese. But both of those civilizations have histories that they draw on to sustain their challenge to universality. Only in the West do we imagine that our history is evil, for instance, the Crusades: I mean, weren't Europeans only trying to reclaim a part of the world that had been Christian until the Muslim armies conquered it? Instead, we like to imagine that there are abstract universal truths. No doubt this belief has much to do with the fact that the scientific revolution began in the West, and science is ahistorical.

But there are precedents in the West itself for a belief in universal values. One element was the Roman empire, which at its height ruled a vast multi-cultured realm on which it stamped the name of Rome. Though Rome was generally content to leave its subjects to their own gods, provided they paid their taxes, there were rewards to Roman citizenship for its far-flung citizens. Certainly the elite classes of the empire, especially those in its outposts, were drawn to Rome's universality. The other element was Christianity. Though few Christian thinkers entertained the notion that men's earthly conditions could be made equal, all men were regarded as equal in the eyes of the Creator. In addition, Rome itself, whether the center of imperial or Christian power, was dependent for its administration and culture on a class of men who saw themselves as inheritors of a unified intellectual and spiritual legacy.

One should not underestimate the impress of this universalist vision on the intellectual life of early modern Europe, especially on the radical philosophes who were products of the institutions created by the earlier empire. As with the ancients, these men were cosmopolitans, "citizens of the world." Thus, their defense of freedom of speech did not appeal to facts on the ground, namely, native traditions or native history. Instead, they rejected this legacy and projected their universalist vision onto the future. For these modern cosmopolitans, history and tradition were reservoirs of bad practices that had to be overcome in the name of progress.

If we are to defend our rights against those who would impose other systems (communism; sharia), it's time to turn away from Kant and return to Herder, to history and culture.

Picture credit: Liberating Wings

Freedom Isn't Free

Goethe's reflections on the Middle East, in the "Noten und Abhandlungen," concern the "conditioning factors" for cultural and historical phenomena. In this focus Goethe tends toward Herder and away from the universalist view of mankind to be found in the works of the radical philosophes of the 18th century. The achievements of the human race do not spring complete from the minds of smart people; they are instead the results of the labor of generations.

This generational achievement was on my mind as I wrote the introduction to the volume on the history of the freedom of speech in the 18th century. Freedom of speech in the West, especially in the U.S., is facing some major challenges. The most visible challenge came in 2005 and 2006, in response to the publication of the so-called Mohammed cartoons in a Danish newspaper. "European" history (as distinct from the individual national histories) might be said to have been founded on the right of individuals to criticize authority, be it religious, civil, or even artistic. When Muslims instead demanded respect for their holy figure, the legitimacy of one of Europe's most ancient privileges -- the right of artists to caricature a sacred cow -- was under attack.

At the time of the controversy proponents of freedom of speech would revert to J.S. Mill's instrumental view, that tolerance of different views would lead to "truth," but this was countered by the relativists among us with the insistence on "competing truths." Likewise, to express a concern for "universal rights" invited the charge of being an "Enlightenment fundamentalist."

Thus, my approach in the free speech volume (tentatively entitled "Free Speech versus Well-Meant Speech") has been to cede the ground to multiculturalists. In a world of multiculturalism, our current liberal freedoms are the product of a distinctive culture, namely, "the West." While these freedoms and rights have been incorporated in law and in international declaration, in truth, even if the matter were not complicated by the different institutional histories of the nations of the West, one could not speak of "universal" rights. They are our rights, and we worked hard to achieve them.

That being said, I do believe that people desire in their heart of hearts to be free. For non-Western nations, however, the problem is the lack of institutional history. The institutions we have here, protecting life, liberty, property, and so on, were not created overnight. Voting is only one step; the freedoms themselves have to be fought for. Men and women in Iran are putting their lives on the line not just for a vision but for a reality. Clearly the woman at the top of this post has a vision of Iranian society that is different from that of the women in hijab waiting their turn to vote. Those differences have to be negotiated, and it will take time to do so. As we have learned, the Western "cultural product" cannot simply be imported beyond its natural constituency. There will be setbacks, as the Chinese learned 20 years ago at Tiananmen Square.

It is not our battle, but at the same time we need to voice our support for the protests in Iran and also to keep alive the memory of Tiananmen. The road is clear, but traveling it will not be easy.

Picture credit: The Big Picture