Free Speech and 'Extremism'

On Wednesday, the foreign ministers of the European Union’s 25 member countries issued a statement arguing that free speech ‘is a fundamental right and an essential element of a democratic discourse.’ Making the cartoons a foreign policy issue gave the statement a crude, chauvinistic cast. It was hard to see this as anything other than European posturing, presenting the EU as a civilized defender of freedom and democracy against the illiberal tendencies of Muslims abroad and at home. Alongside the recent ports issue in the US, one might imagine that Western governments are driven by a broad antipathy towards Muslims and Arabs. However, while some argue the real issue here is racism, that misses the deeper point. More troubling is the way political elites have turned free speech into an instrument of social control, and betray a profoundly undemocratic suspicion of the public.

It is indisputable that Europe has been selective in its defense of free speech. As we have noted before, when it comes to Muslim clerics and expressions of ‘racial hatred’, political leaders have been quick to invoke security and clamp down on speech. A number of recent cases suggest the West has not been willing to extend the same rights to all. As the recent conviction of the Austrian historian, David Irving, for denying the Holocaust reveals, it is not merely certain Muslims, but anybody who expresses extreme views who loses his rights to free speech. We have suggested before that this selectivity is an expression of the West’s lukewarm appreciation of the value of free speech, but it is in fact much more. Once free speech is extended to some and not others, freedom of expression becomes not so much a right as a privilege. It goes from a claim individuals make against the state to something the state extends on condition of good behavior. Free speech is transformed into a lever of social control wielded by some and denied to others.

This transformation of free speech inverts its purpose. Free speech should be a means for challenging ideas, bringing to light good arguments, or allowing bad arguments to be decisively refuted in the public sphere. This allows dissent of all forms to be expressed, and fosters a generally active and original state of mind amongst the public. Now, however, free speech has turned into a means of preventing bad arguments even from coming to light, and of suppressing debate and expression. The thought police wish to impose conformity and passive acceptance of the middle ground, rather than diversity of opinion and active contestation of ideas.

The problem for democracy is not merely that the political class is unwilling to support the principle of free speech and uses it as a form of social control. In attempting to suppress extremist speech, they betray a lack of confidence in their own ideas and a deep distrust of the general public. If they truly believed in the power of their own ideas, then our governments would not seek to suppress crazy or radical ideas, so much as attempt to refute them with solid arguments. Their lack of faith in their own arguments may in part reflect the fact that they have become too used to using the coercive power of the state, and can’t even summon good arguments against their putative enemies. One suspects, however, that they are motivated at the same time by an even more undemocratic impulse: they simply don’t trust the public to hear bad arguments. To them, the public is composed of children, too easily swayed by crazy or scurrilous ideas to allow extremists their airtime. That is why they rush to the defense of free speech when it reinforces the status-quo, ‘anti-fundamentalist’ consensus.