Our belief in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression – the liberty to express our concerns, the freedom to worship who we want, or not to worship at all – go right to the heart of western democratic values and civilisation.
It is difficult, therefore, to express the sense of violation felt by reasonable men and women the world over after the barbaric attacks by Islamic militants on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. That a handful of home-grown jihadists felt the personal harm done them by lampooning the prophet Mohammed should be countered by executing the satirists in cold blood provides a grisly twist on the human capacity for evil.
In response, we are right to allow our sense of moral outrage free rein. The attack should prompt a redoubling of efforts to define and defend free expression in Malta. It should galvanise our independent media and political leaders – both lay and religious – into protecting the most basic rights of freedom of expression.
It should also provoke some reasoned discussion of the notions of harm, injury or offence – vilification, to use the legal term – that in Malta and elsewhere are often used to erode the presumption of free speech.
Freedom of expression is a western democratic ideal, which flowered relatively late. From the 17th century in England (poet John Milton’s tirade against censorship: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties”), and from the 18th century in France and the US. In Malta, it did not arrive until the late 19th century.
The standard philosophical authority for free speech is the Victorian Englishman, John Stuart Mill, who warned of the dangers of intellectual repression, in which questioning and criticism of received opinion is discouraged. It was Mill who coined what has become known as the “negative harm principle”. This maintained that a society may coerce some individuals or restrict their freedoms, including freedom of expression, only to prevent harm to others.
But Mill had in mind extreme cases of harm. He did not consider abuse, offence, insult or humiliation at all harmful. He was in tune with other philosophers of his age, who believed unreservedly in the importance of vigorous criticism and the clash of ideas. He advocated near complete freedom of speech.
Freedom of expression insists that uncomfortable, painful, even offensive utterances fall within the bounds of liberty. That tradition is best expressed in the recently much-invoked maxim – which I need not repeat here – attributed to Voltaire, who was exiled and jailed and had his books burnt for his views.
Although freedom of expression is a much cherished principle of western liberalism, it is not an absolute in western liberal democracies. Matters of national security, commercial and libel law and the prevention of disorder in society inhibit its force. It carries rights as well as responsibilities. For most of western history it has been a principle which has struggled for oxygen in the face of our theocratic institutions.
In Malta, the 1933 laws on blasphemy and ‘vilification of religion’ exist to this day and, indeed, continue to lead to scores of convictions annually in Maltese courts. With its archaic laws on blasphemy and vilification and draconian criminal libel laws, free speech here is honoured more in the breach than the observance.
From Paris to London to San Francisco, and all points in between, in the immediate wake of the cartoonists killed in the brutal assault in Paris, thousands of people gathered holding up pens. These symbolised the freedom to write, to draw, to express in print what lies in one’s mind.
These people were inspired by a deep feeling of human solidarity. But in reality the ideal of freedom of speech has been under assault in the west for years, battered by over-restrictive laws and super-sensitive lobbies of offence-takers everywhere.
If freedom of expression is to mean anything, we must defend the right to shock
Many have forgotten the importance of free speech. Across Europe over the past 30 years offensiveness has been turned into a crime. Most European countries have introduced hate speech laws to control and punish the expression of certain beliefs. In France, the former actress Brigitte Bardot has been arrested five times for ridiculing the way Muslims prepare their meat.
It is not only the law that is used to reprimand offensiveness. A growing culture of political correctness, “you can’t say that”, creates an informal but nonetheless stifling climate of self-censorship. Across Europe, PC campaigners have in recent months quashed art exhibitions, university debates and newspaper articles on the basis that they were offensive to a particular group or religion.
While, clearly, using PC lobbying campaigns to silence someone you disagree with is not the same as using a Kalashnikov to murder those who offend you, the aim of both is strikingly similar: to punish the offensive offender, to ‘cleanse’ society of blasphemy, whether against a religion or an idea or group.
From the Danish cartoons controversy to the Pope’s views on Charlie Hebdo’s re-publication of its “survival” newspaper with another cartoon of the Prophet Mohamed (“You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others”), many in the West have responded to threats to free speech by saying “maybe you shouldn’t have said or written that offensive thing”.
China’s State-controlled news agency was quick to agree. It argued that the tragedy showed there should be limits placed on freedom of the press. Only authoritarian regimes embrace Lenin’s view that “freedom is so precious it should be rationed”.
Surely, if freedom of expression is to mean anything, we must defend the right to shock. Freedom of speech does not mean a thing if we don’t also defend it for those who offend, rile and outrage. Everyone must have free speech, otherwise it’s not free speech at all. It is privileged speech.
The instinct to shock and upset society is often a positive one. Offensiveness can be a good thing. Whether it was Galileo outraging mainstream (clerical) thought by insisting the earth orbited the sun, or Thomas Paine earning himself a death sentence for saying people should choose their political rulers, a willingness to offend deeply entrenched ways of thinking helped to deliver mankind from the dark ages into the relative enlightenment of today. Some of mankind’s greatest intellectual leaps forward are a result of people having the courage to say things that would have sounded deeply offensive in their day.
We need more provocation, not less. We must criticise fearlessly those who behave badly, who seek to impose their will by coercion or violence. To draw the line at preventing the incitement of violence as many, including the Pope, have implied, would make those who are so incensed by a person’s opinion that they react violently the final arbiters on free speech.
Other factors being equal, freedom of speech should be paramount. The case was put most succinctly by George Orwell who defined liberty as “the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”. Free speech means being prepared to have your beliefs ridiculed and your sensibilities offended. Can we in Malta confront that reality in the name of freedom, or are we forever to defer to those placed in power over us?