Free Speech’s Double-Edged Champions and Other Challenges
Tolerance for dissent has a long history of overcoming censorship, hypocrisy, and a never-ending fight for the freedom to describe the world as one sees it.
For many people, it’s easier to say they defend free speech than it is for them to exercise or defend it. Online spaces discourage the kind of productive disagreement that sharpens ideas and wears away the worst ideas. It’s easy to find like-minded people to radicalize each other, but algorithms push the most aggressive over-the-top responses, not the most thoughtful answers to hot takes or hard questions.
Free Speech is a history of an elusive and hard-won right. Jacob Mchangama, the executive director of Justitia, a judicial think tank in Denmark, traces the evolution of free speech from ancient Athens through the Baghdad Translation Movement, the Enlightenment, and modern times.
The details of some of these periods include rich depictions of what it was really like to live in different democratic societies. Athens was an early democracy, but the slaves never had a public square to even temporarily practice free speech in. However, even Athens had early free speech lessons to impart for modern democracies:
“Democracies may be as oppressive as oligarchies if the right of the individual to challenge the prevailing ideas and morals of the majority is set aside…Once the civic commitment to parrhesia [free speech used at personal risk] broke down, the fine line between egalitarian democracy and revanchist mob rule was blurred, and those who, like Socrates, offended the deepest convictions of their fellow citizens were at the mercy of popular opinion.”
It’s not enough to have the right free speech laws on the books, though they’re crucial. A civic commitment to free speech must accompany powerful legal protections.
Free Speech Champions Often Betray the Cause
In 1643, John Milton published a poem, Areopagitica, a call for free speech and a plea against censorship. Seven years later, he would support an anti-Catholic blasphemy law, a complete reversal of his professed opposition to censorship.
Martin Luther argued for the right to interpret Scripture for oneself rather than have its meaning be handed down from the Catholic Church. However, Luther also expected other Protestants to follow God’s word to his beliefs instead of novel interpretations. Luther supported the persecution of Anabaptists and would go on to “[encourage] his readers to ‘set fire to their [Jews’] synagogues and schools.’”
These contradictions are all too familiar. Mchangama explains:
“That Milton—the scourge of censors—would become a licensor himself is indeed one of the great ironies of the history of free speech. ‘Milton’s curse’—the selective and unprincipled defense of free speech—would afflict many other great champions of free speech in the centuries to come, and remains a recurrent theme today.”
It’s easy to fight for free speech when one’s own speech is censored. Tolerating it from others is a different and equally important task, though few who rise to power seem capable of both.
The Founding Fathers Didn’t Get Everything They Wanted
James Madison proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would require states to protect “the equal rights of conscience” or “the freedom of the press.” It failed to pass, leaving many abolitionist newspapers unprotected in states like Kansas and Illinois, which were dangerous even for states not technically part of the South. Mchangama writes of Madison’s proposed amendment:
“This mirrored Madison’s fear that state governments woul dbe the worst offenders against free speech, given that these—not the federal government—would be those whose laws and authority Americans were most frequenlty subjected to. In fact, Madison believed this to be ‘the most valuable amendment on the whole list.’”
Americans have come around to Madison’s way of seeing things, even if they don’t realize it. After COVID, Americans moved to communities that were politically similar to them. We chose to move to people who think as we do instead of engage in the kind of dialogue that supports great political decision-making.
Mchangama’s history of free speech is a great reminder of how valuable it is to not only protect it, but also find the best ways to use it.