Earlier this week the government announced plans to introduce hate speech legislation. Such legislation has not always proven successful, as Danish lawyer Jacob Mchangama shows in his book Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media.
The book traces the legal, political, and cultural history of the idea of free speech; from the ancient Athenian orator Demosthenes and the ninth-century freethinker al-Rāzī, to the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and modern-day digital activists.
Mchangama is the founder and executive director of the Danish think tank Justitia and host of the podcast Clear and Present Danger: A History of Free Speech.
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Free speech brings with it harm and costs but restricting it is dangerous, Mchangama tells Kim Hill.
“The problem though is restrictions on free speech is that part of the problem, or is the cure worse than the disease?”
He believes the defence of free speech in the US has been a powerful force for change.
“One of the reasons why Americans have developed a very robust protection of free speech is because if you, for instance, were to go back 100 years, you could be sent to prison for 10 or 20 years if you opposed American involvement in World War I.
“So, it's not this abstract principle that has been taken to the extremes. It's based on real concrete examples of government overreach. When facing real and imagined crises this tendency of what I call elite panic of governments to say, Oh, we're faced with a crisis, we have to crack down on speech.”
Free speech serves as one of the “most powerful engines of human equality and dignity that human beings have ever stumbled upon," he says.
A collective response to hateful speech is more powerful than any government-mandated crackdown, he says.
“It is certainly true that it [free speech] also allows and amplifies in an age of social media those with hateful voices, but we can also mobilise and use free speech to counter those movements.
“And I believe that a much stronger signal to counter hatred and racism by civil society coming together mobilising, rather than entrusting the state with the power to punish certain views.”
The turmoil and disruption in societies now is part of a process of change when traditional gate-keepers lose power, he says.
“What we're going through now is nothing compared to what followed when the printing press arrived, luckily, because otherwise, we'd be involved in religious wars with millions of people being killed.
“That's not where we are. But it is certainly true that when you have disruptions that does away or erodes traditional authority, and erodes the roles of traditional gatekeepers, there will be furious discussions.
“And I think we have yet to adjust to that. But I don't believe that laws are likely to settle it. As I mentioned, I think design and architecture is one model. I think that future generations might also develop more sceptical skills about social media and maybe have a more detached attitude towards social media, than my generation.”
A militant intolerance of intolerance, he believes, is intellectually flawed. Restrictions on free speech in The Weimar Republic failed to supress Nazism and the Nazis used those very laws to destroy free speech all together, he says.
“A fatal flaw in the argument that we need a more militant democracy, we need to be intolerant of intolerance in order to protect free speech, the historical experience based on European fascism, to me does not seem to support that case.
“And of course there's a certain paradox involved in that, we have to be intolerant of the intolerant, but when does intolerance of intolerance amount to such a degree of intolerance that it itself should be met with intolerance?”
Free speech should be a cause which unites left and right, he says.
“You don't surrender an emancipatory cause, like free speech, that has been absolutely instrumental in providing a voice to the voiceless, giving rights to the poor and property-less to marginalized minorities and so on.
“Why would you give that up, just because people you disagree with are also calling for free speech, that seems to me to be a really counterproductive strategy.”
Jacob Mchangama is in New Zealand as a guest of the Free Speech Union.
