Let’s speak up for the freedom of speech
EVELYN Beatrice Hall is not a writer whose name is well known today. But the biographer of the French philospher Voltaire – who wrote under the pseudonym SG Tallentyre – is responsible for giving us one of the most powerful sentences in the English language: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” It was her way, in her major work Voltaire, of summing up the views of the pre-eminent Frenchman of letters, who died in Paris in 1778 and is widely credited with waking up the world to the importance of freedom of speech.
When I was growing up and going to school that phrase and the principles behind it held real resonance. Not that I can remembering studying the work of Ms Hall – or even Voltaire. But there was still a strong feeling, even at a slightly shabby provincal grammar school in 1970s Britain, that freedom of expression; the right to hold and express a view and to debate it with others, was the bedrock of our education.
As our teachers launched us into a western world that was, we all fondly believed, free and democratic, I am certain that most of them were keen to instill into all of us the principle that it was important to be able to speak up without fear or favour
I’m not at all sure that today’s schoolchildren and students are being given anything like the same confidence that we had in that regard. There are some good reasons for this, perhaps. We are all much more aware today of the potential for causing harm to others through the expression of words that they consider to be hateful. When I was at school we knew about hate and we knew about crime but I cannot remember the two words being put together.
Nowadays hate crime is an offence punishable by a jail term. While children of my generation were taught to tell the verbal abusers that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,’ we knew then that wasn’t really true. It was right to tighten the law.
But the Voltaire principle, so neatly summed up by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, still holds good. And the tendency, magnified by social media, for even very intelligent people to now live their intellectual lives in an echo chamber, blocking out, literally, any views that seem a little off-colour or which they fear their friends wouldn’t approve of, undermines that principle in a dangerous way.
George Orwell, who we definitely did study in school, is celebrated on a statue outside the BBC in London. On it are inscribed his words: “If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” That must include allowing those who go against the grain; who fail to follow the currently fashionable views on a whole range of modern obsessions, from Black Lives Matter to veganism, to have their say.
Often it is not even those with the out-of-kilter views that are suffering as a result of this pressure to silence any opinions that fail to match the woke norms. It is reported that in the US, an editor who published contrary views on the alleged murder by police of George Floyd was hounded by colleagues and eventually sacked.
In other cases, the pressure is more insidious and stops people, who fear for their jobs or worry about being trolled and attacked on social media, from stepping out of line to express or just repeat a contrary view.
Of course there have to be limits on what can and cannot be said publicly. There is no question that minorities of all kinds have been made to suffer over many years, not just through hateful actions but hateful words. That there are laws in place to stop that happening and punish offenders is a credit to the distance we have come in the past half century and more. And taking responsibility for what is published – something the social media platforms often fail to do – is also vital. We need to know what’s being said and also who is saying it, to decide what weight to give it, if any.
But our first response to hearing a challenge to whatever current group think is doing the rounds shouldn’t be “shut up, or I’ll report you” as, depressingly, it now often seems to be in certain circles.
Some fear that what they see as a liberal elite have already won, that politicians and lawyers have been forced to fall in behind those with a world view that seeks to silence any debate on issues that it has deemed ‘settled’. Resistance, they say, is futile. I disagree. Ordinary people still hold a huge range of complicated, contradicatory and sometimes unpalatable views. Just look at social media. The rest of us must not just look away.
We have to defend their rights to say them – and then engage.
Our teachers instilled in
us the importance of being able to speak up without fear or favour