Free Speech in the Modern World

Back in the heady days of the early 1990s, technologists predicted that the internet would herald a new era of free speech. The boundaryless nature of what they were creating would free humankind from the shackles of expression oppression. Or so the story went. For a time, the idealists were right. Then corporations and governments learned how to harness the technology differently. The great Chinese Firewall, internet sovereignty, personal information marketplaces, cyberbullying, hacking, and intelligence monitoring changed all that. Free speech simultaneously exploded and got massively curtailed, all in one fell swoop. In Timothy Garton Ash’s Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, we explore some of the stickiest quandaries of the modern era. Has the internet become a detriment to freedom? Has it merely enabled governments to monitor the population more closely? Have we encountered the death of privacy? Is free speech free anymore?

Timothy Garton Ash is the preeminent author, historian, and political scholar of the modern age on this topic. A weekly contributor to the Guardian since 2004 and author of ten books covering liberty and free speech, he is a staunch defender of the liberal world order. His latest book appears to be the capstone work to his long career and is a work that deserves rumination as we contemplate history’s way forward.

In Free Speech, Ash charts his way in a post-Gutenberg world into a construct that he calls Cosmopolis. The concept that we are no longer separate cities or countries but one giant, virtual city. In this grand Cosmopolis, then we can debate why speech must be free and what are the limits to such a right. Ash establishes that four central pillars establish why speech must be free:

• The realization of self
• The ability to find the truth
• Providing good governance for the populous
• To promote diversity.

Without these core principles, society will fail to progress, and its citizens will be unfulfilled, he asserts.

Having established the history and ideals – Ash closes Part I and embarks on Part II of the book. Here he gets into his ten principles.

• ‘We—all human beings—must be free and able to express ourselves, and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas, regardless of frontiers.’
• ‘We neither make threats of violence nor accept violent intimidation.’
• ‘We allow no taboos against and seize every chance for the spread of knowledge.’
• ‘We require uncensored, diverse, trustworthy media so we can make well-informed decisions and participate fully in political life.’
• ‘We express ourselves openly and with robust civility about all kinds of human difference.’
• ‘We respect the believer <of a religion> but not necessarily the content of the belief.’
• ‘We must be able to protect our privacy and to counter slurs on our reputations, but not prevent scrutiny that is in the public interest.’
• ‘We must be empowered to challenge all limits to freedom of information justified on such grounds as national security.’
• ‘We defend the internet and other systems of communication against illegitimate encroachments by both public and private powers.’
• ‘We decide for ourselves and face the consequences.’

Ash goes into detail on why each principle is vital to a free society — citing various events in the news as illustration. He covers apparent topics such as the Snowden disclosures and WikiLeaks and obscure examples such as Usama Hasan, who received death threats for discussing evolution at a mosque.

In the end, Ash’s arguments are sound, for those believing in the liberal world order and the first amendment. Of course, not all believe that the liberal world order, as established post-World War II, is correct. Indeed in The Jungle Grows Back, published two years after this work, Robert Kagan argues that the liberal world order is contrary to the natural state of the world. He further contends the only reason we have come to accept it as the natural evolution of ideas is America’s pre-dominance for the last 70 years.

Even so, Ash’s assertions on the need to fight for and obtain free speech for all is right and just based on the four pillars. I might not even be able to publish this blog, were it not so. Yet it is complicated. Do I, as a writer, have the right to spout inflammatory and hateful rhetoric that may incite others to violence? Conversely, we have also seen the assassin’s veto, where the threat of violence has squelched opinions.

We have also seen the politically correct movements shut down any discourse that may be offensive. As offensive as some ideas may be if we curtail offensive conversation, who gets to decide what’s offensive? How is this dissimilar from the State determining that any discussion of Tibetan Buddhist beliefs is offensive?

In this day and age of “fake news” and politicization of civil discourse and authoritarian censorship, we owe it to ourselves to revisit this topic. You may put this book down more discouraged about our present state, but you will be wiser.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash, Yale University Press, May 24th, 2016, 504 pages