tHis book arrives at an interesting moment. Elon Musk declared himself a “free speech absolutist.” JD Vance is worried that European freedom of speech is “retreating.” Donald Trump issues an executive order that “restores freedom of speech and ends federal censorship.” Meanwhile, journalists are routinely abused and threatened by lawsuits and enemy of the brand people. Federal agencies in the United States have distributed lists of red flag words such as “equality,” “gender,” and “disabled,” and reporters have been denied access to the White House to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by their actual name. Free speech is a resilient concept.
In fact, as Farah Dabojwara explains in this meticulous, highly necessary history, it has long been a “weaponized mantra” in the public realm ruled by money and powerful people. Speaking of being under the threat of today, many people who think that freedom of speech is rich and white men, like wealth, don't think that freedom is enough for everyone.
Modern understanding of freedom of speech as a more or less absolute right is a quirk of European and American history in particular. Dabhoiwala traces two important texts: The first is Cato's letter, a collection of anonymous newspaper columns published between 1720 and 1723 by two London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard. Their arguments were rushed to assemble, full of manufacturing and framed to protect the interests of their own mercenaries. However, they were taken up as a great principle cause by North American rebel colonies and were enshrined in the First Amendment. The second text is the bestseller of 1859 by John Stuart Mill. Freedom of speech is theorized only as an individual's right. His argument rested on the unstable premise that thought and expression were essentially the same and could not hurt others. Mill's View Now Rules: Speech is considered harmless. In other words, bad speeches need to be simply countered with more speeches.
Most 19th-century thinkers on freedom of speech, including Mill, supported the selective silencing of non-Europeans. In colonial India, freedom of speech and freedom of the press were seen as tools of enlightenment mercifully conferred by the British when indigenous people proved themselves worthy. Although the Indian press was ostensibly free, a set of laws and practices maintained government control over all printed material. As Indians were considered enthusiastic, there were also certain laws against honour and religious insults that were later inherited by new countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. From its beginning, freedom of speech was a complicated and compromised ideal.
The absoluteism of freedom of speech distinguishes the harmlessness of speech from the meaning of action. Therefore, it agrees with the mantra of childhood. “The sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will not hurt me” – the distance is not true, as the child can tell you. As Dabhoiwala reminds us, throughout history most societies have taken away the power of words as read. They believed that spells, curses, oaths, oaths, prayers, spells would have a real impact in the world. “In many cases, light corn is cut deeper than a sword,” writes John Dong. Several early legal codes allowed men to kill others and revenge serious insults. According to medieval Icelandic law, “If a man calls another man feminine, or says he was stolen or committed… [he] A reasonable person would not want to go back to policing such speeches. But pre-modern people at least realised the truth that the idea of freedom of speech was denial. Speech is a social act. Words bring results to the world.
All speeches are regulated, Dabhoiwala claims, officially or informally. We call this regulation “censorship” when we dislike it, but that is an inevitable fact of the social nature of language. Academic scholarships, for example, have a highly evolved system of quality control maintained by agreed methods and protocols, anonymous peer reviews, and norms of academic and civic representation. This not only guarantees intellectual rigor, but also protects against adhominem attacks and vested interests of debate.
Recently, the absolutism of free speech has influenced us all due to the unparalleled power of US companies controlling access to the online world. Social media sites were heavily involved in Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election. The spread of misinformation about Covid and its vaccines. And the spread of violent propaganda against the Rohingya in Myanmar. However, Facebook is currently tracking X by rolling back content moderation and fact-check operations, with the name of its “censorship.”
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The loose attitudes of American social media companies towards hate speech are no surprise. Their main concern is profit and market share. This supports both a surge in content and an algorithm that leads to the most screaming and most polarized statements. But they can adorn this economic self-interest in America's belief in First Amendment nobility. Doing so may be honest.
Dabhoiwala doesn't need to say anything, but it probably doesn't go against freedom of speech. He is simply asking us to question whether we should praise it for its purpose, even if it is itself the highest ideal of all. He wants us to think about freedom of speech not only about the content of the words, but also about which voice is heard the loudest and which is marginalized. “People barely use freedom of thinking,” Soren Kierkegaard wrote in his magazine. “Instead, they demand freedom of speech as compensation.” As freedom of speech becomes more and more a war zone, there may be a free thought on it. We can start by acknowledging that conflicts against it are inevitable, and we can never separate ourselves from the bigger questions about money and power.
