What happened to absolute value of free speech?

I’ve been a free speech absolutist all my writing life. Friends wondered why I was so American, versus Canadian, on the matter. I’ve never denied free speech can lead to serious damage to people’s feelings and society generally. But I felt the harm was justified by the good done through letting disagreements rip. I was with Voltaire and Chomsky: I may hate what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right.

In recent years, I’ve grown uneasier, perhaps as the far right took over as free speech’s defenders and the left largely withdrew. Was I missing something? The issue’s become less self-evident than it once seemed to me.

When a University of Ottawa prof. voiced a racist term in class, she was criticized by students and apologized — quite genuinely — since, she said, she could’ve avoided hurting students. A vast free speech debate ensued.

The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald recently weighed in yet again, this time in relation to U.S. civil rights guru Ira Glasser, who advocated the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Il. Greenwald noted that Glasser, a Jewish leftist, felt protecting views he found “repugnant was not just ethically right but a matter of self-interest.” That fits me like a glove. I was censored, explicitly, and cut off from regular mainstream media work during my early writing years.

There’s the recent case of Samuel Paty, French high school teacher, beheaded by Islamist extremists after using cartoons of Muhammad in a lesson. Emmanuel Macron leapt in as defender of France’s free speech tradition. Yet France criminalizes Holocaust denial. What does this show? That issues around free speech, always thorny, are growing even moreso.

I used to feel clear as a bell on this. Now, I feel muddled. Since I lack the clear “line” I once had, I’d like to offer a perspective that might help at least show why the subject has become more murky than it was.

It’s possible we’re at a transitional moment in what Harold Innis called “communications technologies.” He thought in broad terms: The oral tradition, the written tradition, and print were all “technologies” for him. I don’t want to be glib. It’s way too easy to float puffy generalizations about eras. And yet.

The oral tradition reigned for millennia. The print age has dominated for about five centuries. It seemed as if it’d last forever. Yet it’s been shaken by the Internet, whatever that means or comes to mean; it’s still too early to say. However free speech as a hallowed value arose in the print age, not before.

When Socrates was executed in ancient, oral Athens, it wasn’t for speaking the forbidden — it was for corrupting the minds of the young. No one defended him on free speech grounds. What Athens valued wasn’t speech, it was truth.

Free speech rose with the printing press, which gave those who could afford one the ability to contest the “truth” of those with power, like state and church. Free speech was identical to a free press. Monarchs fought to suppress this “freedom” of journalists and pamphleteers. Free Speech was a weapon in their war. As late as 1826 in Ontario, anti-reformers of the landowning class heaved the print of “rebel” editor William Lyon Mackenzie, into Toronto Bay.

Print became a means to challenge — and also eventually buttress — power. It was confined to small numbers with access to it, who had to earn admission to be published. It also had a mystique that persists among writers and readers.

Now think about the Internet. Much less mystique there; anyone can be an influencer. It’s more democratic, in good and scary ways. Myriad views get out. Free speech was never about people nattering privately, as they do on social media. And it gets more personal, it stings; it’s far more like the oral than print ever was. Print was so august, relatively. (For Innis, TV, radio, film and so on counted as versions of print. They were “once-and-done” and exclusionary.)

So of course the rules — i.e., the reigning values — have changed or been challenged. But even if true, this hardly settles the issue. It may however illuminate why the issue is now so hard to settle, compared to earlier times.