Two toads, who had just returned from traveling the world, were talking about their experiences. One of them said, 'I met a Russian, he told me this, 'In America you have freedom of speech. You can stand in front of the White House and say, 'American President Sucks.' Well, in the past, when Russia was still in the form of the Soviet Union, you also had freedom of speech. You can stand in front of the Kremlin and say, 'American President Sucks.' The other frog, replied, 'I've heard about it. It was heard like this, 'A Russian diplomat and an American diplomat are discussing the differences between their two systems. The American tries to make it easy for the Russian to understand the concept of free speech.
'Anytime I want', says the Yank, 'I can walk right up to the top of the steps at Capital Hill and yell, 'The President of America is a crook and a liar!' and no one will try to stop me.'
'Hah!, you are naive, my American friend! I,' says the Russian, 'can climb the steps to the very doors of the Kremlin, pound on the doors, allow the Red Guards to surround me, and yell as loud as I can, 'The President of America is a crook and a liar!' and no one will try to stop me,'
The last toad added, 'Unlike in America and Russia, in China, it was happenned that A liberal Western bourgeois bohemian met with a capitalist Chinese Maoist Communist in a bar. The Western liberal bragged to the Chinese communist that in her country, she had so much free speech that she could stream videos to millions of people on Twitter and Facebook of her denouncing her Western government as corrupt and evil.
The Chinese communist shook his head and retorted, 'That’s nothing. We have even more free speech in China than your decadent democracies. I can stream videos to hundreds of millions of people on Weibo and Tencent showing myself denouncing Western governments as corrupt and evil!!'" said Wulandari, after her light shone on a list of names, who were less on work, but wanted to get a public office.
"As ideals," Wulandari carried on, "free thought and free speech have roots in accounts by the historians Herodotus and Thucydides explaining the distinctiveness of fifth-century Athens, in the Socratic search for philosophic clarity and appreciation of the limits of understanding, in Euripides’ celebration of political participation and Aristotle’s recognition of the power of public opinion, in the efforts of Renaissance humanists such as Petrarch and Erasmus to liberate moral reasoning from scholastic formalism, in Machiavelli’s counsels of prudential rule, in notions of free conscience and inquisitive duty introduced by the Protestant Reformation, and in the scientific method’s systematization of open-ended knowledge seeking. However, for conceiving of the freedoms of speech and press as fundamental limiting principles of governance, the earliest argument that continues to be read today is John Milton’s Areopagitica of 1644.
Concerned about royalist propaganda and religious radicalism during the English Civil War, parliament instituted a requirement that all writings be approved before publication. This mimicking of the Crown censorship regime that had been in place for over a century-and-a-half distressed Milton, despite his otherwise strong support for the parliamentary side. He took up his pen and published a signed protest without getting approval, in proud defiance of the licensing requirement. He named it after an essay by an ancient Athenian critic of government.
Freedom of speech is a central commitment of political liberalism, a principle of positive constitutional law in virtually all modern constitutions and a principle of international human rights law. Although among the most widely agreed upon and celebrated legal and constitutional principles of modern times, it is also the source of enduring and intense disagreement. Chapter two of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty—‘On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion’—is the best-known defence of free speech in the philosophical canon, says Christopher Macleod.
Mill’s argument for freedom of discussion draws on his conception of human beings and their place in the world. Human beings are, Mill claims, wholly part of the natural order—as such, the human mind, as well as body, is entirely governed according to the laws uncovered by scientific investigation. This vision of the mind as operating according to natural laws leads to a view under which our only means of interaction with the world is causal interaction. Insofar as we are able to come to know the world, Mill claims, we can do so only by being receptive to the world causally. As such, the possibility of substantive a priori knowledge is precluded, for all receptivity to the world takes place via the senses.
Our engagement with the world, to put this another way, is sensible. We can perhaps imagine beings capable of knowing elements of the world by direct and unmediated insight. Such creatures would know how things are without being affected. But we are not them. We could know the world by acts of pure reflection only ‘if we could know apriori that we must have been created capable of conceiving whatever is capable of existing: that the universe of thought and that of reality, the Microcosm and the Macrocosm (as they once were called) must have been framed in complete correspondence’. An assumption more destitute of evidence could scarcely be made, however. There is, for us, no knowledge cognizable by the mind’s inward light. As natural beings, our knowledge of how things are has at its foundation modes of interaction with the world which are themselves wholly natural.
As well as being sensible, our engagement with the world is also discursive. Thinking is conducted, Mill is clear, through and by the application of concepts—or, in terminology he prefers, ‘general names’. Our knowledge takes the form of understanding that things are in a certain way. A manner of engaging with the world which did not enable us to think of objects as possessing qualities ‘would not enable us to make a single assertion respecting them’. The claim that an object has a quality, however, is a relational claim: that this object is similar in some way to other objects. The only meaning of predicating a quality at all, is to affirm a resemblance. For us, such resemblances are not themselves sensed between objects, but involve thinking about what is delivered by sensation. Knowledge of the world, that is to say, involves sensation, but also interpretation. It is in this context that we must understand Mill’s claim that ‘all silencing of opinion is an assumption of infallibility’.
The argument from human fallibility is self-standing, and suffices on its own to establish what we might term the Freedom of Discussion Principle: that there should be no interference with the discussion of any opinion. For without unrestricted discussion, we cannot be confident that we have considered all of the available evidence or that our interpretation of the evidence is sound—and hence, we cannot take our beliefs to be justified. This argument, is bolstered by two further arguments. That an opinion should not be suppressed because it may be true, and that even if an opinion is false, or even if it is merely part of the truth, it should still be heard. Mill’s argument that even beliefs which are false should be heard draws on a quite specific conception of knowledge, based on observations about ‘the way in which truth ought to be held by human beings’.
So, why protect freedom of speech? Some contend that freedom of speech is essential to self-government, says William P Marshall. The citizenry must have access to information in order to exercise the franchise intelligently and hold their elected representatives accountable. Others argue that freedom of speech must be defended because it is a central aspect of personal autonomy and self-realization. Some, particularly in the international community, defend freedom of speech as an essential aspect of individual dignity. The oldest rationale offered in support of freedom of speech, however, is the ‘search for truth’ justification. According to this rationale, protecting freedom of speech creates a marketplace of ideas in which truth ultimately prevails over falsity. Speech therefore must not be restricted, because to do so would inhibit this search for truth.
Despite its long-standing pedigree, however, the truth justification has been under sustained attack from a number of directions, so much so that at least one commentator has described it as being ‘on the wane’. Further, and perhaps relatedly, the idea of truth itself also seems to have become a concept with less and less currency in an increasingly polarized world. That some would still consider the search for truth to be a primary justification for freedom of expression might be considered by others as hopelessly misguided and naïve.
The truth justification, however, has its defenders. The concept of truth has long held sway over the human imagination, and the explanatory power of truth as a guide for human conduct continues to resonate. The question of whether the truth justification remains a valid rationale for supporting freedom of speech is, therefore, an open inquiry.
The term ‘freedom of expression’ can be include free speech, freedom of the press, the right to petition government, and freedom of political association. There is relationship between freedom of expression and democracy from both a historical and a theoretical perspective.
Even before democratic forms of government took root in the modern world in the late eighteenth century, proponents of popular government had long offered democratic justifications for freedom of expression, according to Ashutosh Bhagwat and James Weinstein. During the English Civil War in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Levellers, a group of Puritans who advocated expansive manhood suffrage, invoked popular sovereignty as a reason for freedom of expression on public matters. In 1670, the Jewish-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza reasoned that because in a ‘democratic state’ every collective decision is open to revision in case the people ‘should find a better course’, it follows that everyone should be ‘allowed to think what they wish and to say what they think’. In the 1720s, reflecting the Radical English Whig argument in favour of popular rather than parliamentary sovereignty, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, writing as Cato, defended a robust right to criticize public officials. Cato’s essays were enormously influential in the American colonies when first published. They continued to be widely read in America when, at the end of the eighteenth century, Americans adopted a constitution whose opening words, ‘We the People’, established a government based on popular sovereignty, and which shortly thereafter was amended to protect freedom of expression.
Democracy literally means ‘rule by the people’, combining the Greek words demos (‘the people’) and kratein (‘to rule’). Contemporary democracies come in many varieties, each coloured by its particular culture and history. Despite these differences, a common denominator of all contemporary democracies is a practical, if not always formal, commitment to popular sovereignty—a state of affairs in which the people exercise ultimate control over their government. Another basic precept of every contemporary democracy is formal political equality of every citizen. A necessary component of each of these two basic democratic norms is freedom of political expression.
Popular sovereignty requires that ‘ultimate political power resides in the population at large, that the people as a body are sovereign, and that they, either directly or through their elected representatives in a significant sense actually control the operation of government’. The most obvious and direct way that the people exercise control over their government is through voting, either by electing representatives, or by directly voting on laws or policies through ballot measures such as referenda, initiatives, and recall. Because the right to vote is so crucial to popular control of government, a society entirely lacking the franchise is plainly not a democracy. The directness of this control, however, tends to obscure a less direct, yet equally essential, prerequisite of modern democracy: the right of the people to speak freely about collective decisions within the purview of the people’s ultimate sovereignty, that is, on matters of public concern.
The primary mechanism through which freedom of expression in a democracy controls government is public opinion. The right of the people to speak freely on matters of public concern is, in turn, essential to the formation of the public opinion by which the people control the government. This is because government propaganda and statements by government officials also affect public opinion. If the people cannot freely express their views on public matters, then public opinion will largely reflect the views of government officials and thus be an ineffective means of popular control of government.
Freedom of speech has been part of modern constitutionalism since its beginnings in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Some authors assume that every fundamental right has a dignity core so that also freedom of speech might be regarded as a concretization of dignity.
Human dignity as a constitutional guarantee is new. It is a post–World War II element of constitutionalism. Apparently, it needed the atrocities of totalitarian systems like Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union and the tremendous human costs of World War II to create the feeling that something more than a number of individual rights was necessary to protect the human being, a foundational norm on which the various rights could be grounded and from which they derived their meaning.
In the next session, we'll talk about 'Human Dignity', bi 'idhnillah."
