11

THE ABOLITION OF PUBLIC LANGUAGE

I tell you: if there is no check on the freedom of your words, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions.

—OSAMA BIN LADEN

Would you put an extreme right-wing political leader—a man who once denied the Holocaust and who has a criminal conviction for race hatred—on national TV so he could try to win the watching millions over to his party and its loathsome policies? I did.

In the autumn of 2009, I was told that the BBC’s news division was proposing to invite Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party (BNP), onto Question Time. The panel invariably includes representatives of Britain’s major political parties, but the producers vary the mix from time to time by including a speaker from a minor party—the Greens, say, or the Scottish National Party. Because of the prominence and potential political value of the platform, the BBC includes only parties that have achieved a certain threshold of actual electoral support; notoriety, journalistic currency, even a sudden rise in the polls are not enough. But by late 2009, the BNP had done as well at the ballot box as other smaller parties that had previously been invited onto the program. Accordingly, the editor of Question Time had decided that it was time to offer the BNP a seat on the panel.

Yet to many people—by no means exclusively on the Left—the BNP was a special case. It had been founded in 1982 as a result of a civil war within an earlier British extreme right-wing party, the National Front. Its first leader, John Tyndall, and its initial policies were unashamedly racist. In an effort to widen its electoral appeal and perhaps match the success of far Right parties on the Continent like France’s Front National, Nick Griffin had softened the BNP’s rhetoric on immigration and ethnic minorities, though there was compelling evidence (for instance, in the 2004 BBC undercover documentary The Secret Agent) that the attitudes of the party leadership had changed less than they claimed. Some feared, moreover, that the BNP was beginning to get political traction on issues that were known to be playing on many voters’ minds. Immigration was palpably rising as a concern, especially in the blue-collar and lower-middle-class districts of England that were the natural hunting ground of the BNP. So too was anxiety about Islamist terrorism. And the next general election was only months away.

It’s the director-general’s lot to be the final arbiter of editorial decisions before transmission. Once a story or a program has been transmitted or posted or tweeted, other courts can sit to weigh and pass judgment on the decision: the BBC’s own governing body, the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, external inquiries, even actual courts of law on a few occasions. But until the moment of broadcast, the DG is the last port of call and—although any remotely sane occupier of that seat will seek advice from his or her colleagues—the BBC’s constitution makes it clear that the responsibility rests solely on the DG’s shoulders. It is a single point of accountability or, in the jargon of systems architecture, a single point of failure.

Around half the BBC’s DGs have been dismissed or otherwise forced to leave, and more often than not because they were thought to have failed to discharge this duty adequately. In fact, most major editorial controversies at the BBC involve decisions in which the DG played no part and was not even aware of until after the content was aired. That can still be curtains if the offending output is the latest in a series of alleged mistakes or thought to be evidence of a systemic failure of editorial management, or if the aftermath and handling of the uproar are badly handled. But set-piece judgment calls, where a tricky and high-stakes decision is brought into the DG’s office on a silver platter, as it were, do still happen. The BNP and Question Time was such a one.

At least there was thinking time. I’ve already set out the case in favor of inviting a representative of the party onto the program: the BNP’s status as a legally constituted political party, its electoral success, and the fact that the names of BNP candidates would soon be appearing on ballots. The case against allowing them to appear is summed up in its purest form in the title of a policy that was adopted in the UK by the National Union of Students in the 1980s: “No Platform for Fascists.” Here is the NUS’s Aaron Kiely defending the policy in a blog posted in September 2012:

This policy is rooted in the fact that fascism stands for the annihilation of whole groups of people, the elimination of democracy and all freedoms. Given this, there is no logical debate to be had with fascists. Providing them with a space to air their views strengthens them and in turn endangers many—Black, Jewish, LGBT, disabled people, women and all targeted by fascism across the decades.

We should always remember that the millions of people who died at the hands of Nazis’ slaughter did not die because their debating skills or arguments were not powerful enough. They died because once fascism had abused the democratic system to get its grip on power it soon closed down any freedoms to prevent any resistance. That’s why I have always and will always defend NUS’ No Platform policy.1

Fascism is so intrinsically repressive and antidemocratic, according to this argument, that there is no good reason to include it in conventional democratic debate and every reason to exclude it. The Fascists themselves engage in the democratic process only in order to undermine it and get their “grip on power.” Giving them the space to air their views only “strengthens” them. Quite why this should be so is taken as read, but let’s spell it out: Fascist ideas may be repellent yet opponents can still fear that they will find an audience, especially if the espousers are crafty enough to dress them up in an attractive package. Thus Mussolini and Hitler. Thus—who knows?—the modernizing, apparently moderating Mr. Griffin.

In fact few mainstream politicians believed that the BNP, the English Defence League, and other fringe groups on the extreme Right posed a credible near-term threat to democracy. Despite a handful of victories in European and local council elections, they had never won a single seat in Parliament. They had never been able to sustain the momentum of such victories and, besides, voters who hated the EU and lost sleep over immigration now had a more acceptable alternative in UKIP, which (despite its anti-immigration Little Englander policies and generous complement of cranks) seemed to share little with Hitler’s Brown Shirts beyond an affinity for beer.

Nonetheless, many politicians of the Left—especially those with experience of them on the ground—detested the BNP, and almost all politicians on the Left and Right regarded them with distaste. Even if you rejected “No Platform for Fascists” on libertarian and freedom-of-speech grounds, you might still not wish to appear in a televised debate with them. And you might have had a second reason for being against such an appearance. A Question Time including the BNP was bound to feature policy areas, especially around race, which the British political establishment regarded as intrinsically dangerous. In the past few years, a dam has burst, and under pressure from UKIP and the public, the major parties have begun not just to engage in a debate about immigration but also on occasion to bid against each other. In the 2016 Brexit debate, it burst out into the open. In 2009, however, there was still something of an agreement not to make it a major political battlefield. But with the BNP in the studio and a large cross-section of the public listening in, who could predict where the debate might lead?

I knew that political reaction to a yes decision would be predominantly hostile, but I chose to extend the invitation anyway. My thinking went as follows. Question Time is an integral part of the wider system of democratic debate in the UK. Given the threshold of support the party had demonstrated, one could exclude the BNP from the program only if one held that it should also be excluded from that wider arena of debate. In other words, that its political views should be censored. But by what authority could I or the BBC censor a political party? Because we ourselves disagreed with its policies? That would manifestly breach the BBC’s commitment to political impartiality. Because other political interests told us we should do so? Ditto. I wrote an article for the Guardian at the time arguing that although democracies do occasionally conclude that a given set of political ideas are so likely to lead to violence or communal discord that they should be banned, this is a job not for a broadcaster or any other journalistic body but for those with the democratic mandate to do so:

Democratic societies sometimes do decide that some parties and organisations are beyond the pale. As a result, they proscribe them and/or ban them from the airwaves. The UK government took exactly this step with specific parties and organisations in Northern Ireland in the 1980s.

Many would argue that proscription and censorship can be counter-productive, and that it is usually better to engage and challenge extreme views than to try to eliminate them through suppression. My point is simply that the drastic steps of proscription and censorship can only be taken by government and parliament. Though we argued against it, the BBC abided by the Northern Ireland broadcasting ban in the 1980s, and, if the BNP were proscribed, the BBC would abide by that decision too, and the BNP would not appear on Question Time.

But that hasn’t happened, and until such time as it does it is unreasonable and inconsistent to take the position that a party like the BNP is acceptable enough for the public to vote for, but not acceptable enough to appear on democratic platforms such as Question Time. If there is a case for censorship, it should be debated and decided in parliament. Political censorship cannot be outsourced to the BBC or anyone else.2

The decision to invite the BNP onto Question Time was immediately and widely condemned. Peter Hain, the Labour government’s Welsh secretary and formerly a renowned anti-apartheid campaigner, described it as “abhorrent” and “unreasonable, irrational and unlawful.”3 David Cameron, then leading the Conservatives in opposition, told a journalist from the Times of London that it made him “uneasy.”4 Many politicians claimed that Nick Griffin’s appearance on the program would give his party a new legitimacy and significantly boost its votes in the general election. The main parties deliberated whether to field panelists themselves—Labour had an explicit policy of not appearing on the same platform as the BNP—but ultimately decided to do so. The final panel was a strong one: for Labour, the justice secretary, Jack Straw; for the Tories, Baroness Warsi, a shadow minister of South Asian heritage; for the Lib Dems, Chris Huhne, another front bench spokesperson; and Bonnie Greer, a noted African American writer.

There were hundreds of angry protesters outside Television Centre when the program was finally recorded and broadcast. Inside the studio, Nick Griffin did indeed get his chance to speak, though he spent most of the evening under ferocious attack from his fellow panelists and from many members of the invited audience. Greer described sitting next to Griffin as “probably the weirdest and most creepy experience of my life” (but then, rather magnificently, went on to write an opera about it).5 After the program, she declared that Griffin had been “trounced” and most observers agreed with her, though there was a minority that argued that the questions and audience had been stacked against him. Given the breadth and depth of revulsion against him and his party, however, it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. Virtually no one claimed that it had been a good night for the BNP. A few brave souls even went so far as to suggest that the BBC might have made the right decision.

In any case, the party failed to reap any political benefit. Despite promising a political “earthquake” and putting up a record number of candidates, the BNP was once again unable to win a single seat in the 2010 general election. Popular support for the party dwindled, and in the 2014 elections for the European Parliament it lost its two seats, one of which had been occupied by Nick Griffin. Shortly thereafter, Griffin was replaced as party leader.

It’s impossible to know how significant his appearance on Question Time was in his and the BNP’s subsequent eclipse; other factors, particularly the rise of UKIP, were also at work. But we can be sure in retrospect that the dire warnings of what would happen if Nick Griffin appeared on national TV were groundless. Some eight million people watched the program and the vast majority of British voters would have seen, heard, or read coverage of it both before and afterward. Far from increasing as a result of that, the BNP’s political support collapsed.

Freedom of expression is often discussed as if it were a right conferred solely on the speakers to say or depict whatever they want. Defined like this, it can sound like a gift bestowed by a generous and tolerant society on individuals—political agitators, say, or avant-garde artists—to allow them to achieve their personal goals, whether ideological or aesthetic, through the expression of countercultural or “offensive” views or art. And so it is, but it is also and more importantly a right of the audience to hear and see whatever they want to, and to form their own judgment about it. Freedom of expression is also the freedom of impression, and it is a right that is to be enjoyed not just by those with something public to say but by everyone. By contrast, the compulsion to censor is rooted in the fear that the public cannot be trusted to reach sensible views about anything and that if they are exposed to unwholesome political ideas or erotic art or whatever it is that the censor has latched on to, they will be seduced and corrupted. Those who call for censorship place little faith in the strength of their fellow citizens’ phronesis, that innate faculty of prudence which we discussed in chapter 8.

We put Nick Griffin on Question Time because the public had the right to see him and listen to him responding to questions from a studio audience itself made up of people like them. They did so and drew their own conclusions.

Pain Points

Except in cases that involve outright criminality (child pornography or incitement to violence, for instance), there is no evidence that suppressing ideas or cultural works of which one disapproves is a better way of defeating them in a democracy than confronting and debating them in public.

Those in favor of silencing fringe political views often cite fascism in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s to illustrate the damage that can be done when extremists are allowed to exploit the privileges of democratic debate, but the circumstances were very different from our own. Civic structures were fragile, the political center discredited, street violence and the prospect of outright revolution never far away.

And yet Mussolini’s and Hitler’s rise to power were marked not by a surfeit of open political debate and challenge but by a deficit of it, and by the failure of other political forces—in particular those parties which were genuinely committed to democracy—to unite against them. It’s impossible to disprove the counterfactual proposition that censorship alone, or censorship and outright proscription, would have stopped them. When the government of Engelbert Dollfuss introduced these measures in Austria in the early 1930s, they failed to eradicate National Socialism in that country, just as they failed to contain many other radical and antidemocratic movements across Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. Even in countries that have been wracked by war and economic crisis, and that lack a strong democratic tradition, it is not clear that silencing extreme political views ever makes them go away.

Attempts at official suppression of free speech in our own societies look universally malign or misguided in retrospect, from the clearing of library shelves in McCarthy-era America to the Thatcher government’s prohibition on interviews with members of the IRA and other republican terror organizations, to which I alluded above. Centuries-long censorship of the arts in Britain and the United States persisted into the 1960s but was then largely laughed out of the statute books by the Lady Chatterley and Tropic of Cancer trials and others like them. Few now regret its passing, or seriously claim that the world would be a better place if we were still prevented from reading the works of D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller.

And yet, despite this history and the protection that freedom of expression enjoys under the law in all Western democracies, would-be censors are growing in confidence and ambition, nowhere more so than on American and British university campuses. A characteristic example is the case of Erika Christakis, a specialist in early childhood education, who until December 2015 was also associate master of Silliman College, one of the residence halls at Yale University. A few weeks earlier, Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Council had issued guidance to students warning them of the offense that could be caused to minorities by the wearing of inappropriate Halloween costumes. Ms. Christakis had the temerity to respond with an email of her own in which she asked whether there was still room for “a child or young person” to be “a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?”

The answer from some members of Yale’s student body was an emphatic no. There were angry protests, and in early December, Erika Christakis decided to stop teaching classes at Yale. She said her decision was a response to a climate there that was “not conducive to the civil dialogue and open dialogue required to solve our urgent societal problems.” Her husband, Nicholas Christakis, who is master of Silliman College, also got embroiled in the controversy. On November 6, 2015, one Silliman student posted an article about an encounter between the master and a group of protesters:

Today, when a group of us, organized originally by the Black Student Alliance at Yale, spoke with Christakis in the Silliman Courtyard, his response once again disappointed many of us. When students tried to tell him about their painful personal experiences as students of color on campus, he responded by making more arguments for free speech. It’s unacceptable when the Master of your college is dismissive of your experiences … He seems to lack the ability, quite frankly, to put aside his opinions long enough to listen to the very real hurt that the community feels. He doesn’t get it. And I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.6

The last two striking sentences (“I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain”) sum up an uncomfortable conflict about free speech and cultural sensitivity—and between two forms of discourse, the dialectical and the empathetic—that is playing out on campuses on both sides of the Atlantic. Earlier in 2015, students at Cardiff University had mounted a fierce campaign to stop the noted feminist writer Germaine Greer from giving a lecture there, Ms. Greer’s crime being that of “misgendering,” which in her case meant expressing doubt that transsexuals who identified themselves as female should be treated as if they had been born women.

Ms. Greer has fought many of her own battles against the establishment. She not only turned up and gave her lecture, she also used it as a platform to defend her and everyone else’s right to state their opinions. “I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock,” she said with textbook clarity, though perhaps with a fraction less cultural sensitivity than the student protestors had in mind. “You can beat me over the head with a baseball bat. It still won’t make me change my mind.”7

On campus after campus, visiting speakers and senior academics are challenged either because their stated opinions are considered politically or culturally unacceptable, or because some students associate them with “micro-aggression,” a freshly minted term for veiled racist behavior. Racism and other forms of prejudice persist and still blight lives. Nonetheless, one can acknowledge the persistence of overt and covert racism and its terrible human cost and still be struck by the irony that the response to micro-aggression by the angry young people who say they are victims of it should itself involve so much intimidation.

Many public figures now refuse invitations from universities or, if the announcement that they are coming triggers a hostile campaign, cancel their appearance. In 2014, for instance, the former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice pulled out of the commencement speech at Rutgers University, while IMF managing director Christine Lagarde turned down an invitation from Smith College. The objection to Dr. Rice was her involvement, as a member of George W. Bush’s cabinet, in the Iraq War. Students objected to Ms. Lagarde because she is managing director of the IMF, which they held responsible for “the failed developmental policies implanted in some of the world’s poorest countries.”8

That same season, Brandeis University took the even more drastic step of revoking its offer of an honorary degree—and the opportunity to address students that went with it—to the Somali Dutch women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali because her “past statements” about Islam were “inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values,” as the official news release put it. Objections from a minority of students had frightened an American university into gagging a black woman human rights activist in the name of sensitivity to minorities. Aware that the university would be accused of limiting freedom of expression, Brandeis said Ayaan Hirsi Ali would be “welcome to join us on campus in the future to engage in a dialogue,” but no one expects her to take up that invitation anytime soon. At Brandeis and many other universities, the intimidation is working, and the range of opinions that students are permitted to hear has shrunk.

One of the most frequent—and most abject—justifications universities use to exclude unpopular speakers is the safety of the student body. It’s as if free speech were a dangerous indulgence which, like smoking, could have deleterious effects on passive bystanders. In fact, free speech is a fundamental human right that needs to be defended, not just in theory but in practice, if necessary with the police in attendance in riot gear. People have the right to protest against everything, including freedom of expression, but universities should take such protests in their stride. Caving in because somebody threatens violence speaks not of responsibility but of cowardice.

This is how the former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, who had himself survived a student-led campaign to disinvite him, characterized the situation when I heard him speaking to the graduating class at Harvard on May 29, 2014:

This spring, it has been disturbing to see a number of college commencement speakers withdraw—or have their invitations rescinded—after protests from students and—to me, shockingly—from senior faculty and administrators who should know better … In each case, liberals silenced a voice—and denied an honorary degree—to individuals they deemed politically objectionable. That is an outrage and we must not let it continue. If a university thinks twice before inviting a commencement speaker because of his or her politics, censorship and conformity—the mortal enemies of freedom—win out.9

As Michael Bloomberg noted in his remarks, the recent spate of formal and informal acts of censorship on American campuses are invariably the result of campaigns by left-wing students—and subsequent cave-ins by predominantly liberal faculties—against speakers of the Right, or those associated with institutions that the Left claim are part of the power structures of the political and economic establishment.

Most attempts to silence opponents in the political realm are also associated with the radical Left, but it’s a different story when it comes to arts and culture. After it was announced that the New York Metropolitan Opera was proposing to stage John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, which depicts the murder of the disabled American tourist Leon Klinghoffer during the 1985 Palestine Liberation Front hijacking of the liner Achille Lauro, there were vociferous calls from some generally conservative Jewish groups for the production to be abandoned, Morton Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America, describing the piece with glorious hyperbole as “an operatic Kristallnacht.” The Met agreed to call off an international simulcast of the opera but otherwise held its nerve. Attendees of the premiere (including myself and one of my sons) were greeted by angry but peaceful crowds shouting “Nazi-lovers! You’ll be in the water next!”

In the UK, as we shall see, conservative religious groups have done their best, sometimes successful, to prevent the public from making up their own minds about other artistic works that the protesters deem offensive, while elsewhere the self-proclaimed defenders of the Prophet Muhammad have resorted to outright murder to silence some “blasphemers” and terrify the rest.

The urge to shout down or silence those whose creative work or opinions you hate transcends Left and Right. Its wellspring is an overpowering sense of victimhood (or victimhood by proxy), which convinces those in its grip that conventional public discourse and traditional notions about open debate and free speech have failed them utterly, and that they can achieve understanding and justice only by taking extraordinary measures. This is how the oppressed become would-be oppressors.

*   *   *

But if you want to encounter the most pervasive use of intimidation to discourage contrary opinions and drown out reasonable debate, you need look no farther than your smartphone. Idealists had hoped that in addition to offering users limitless information and valuable services, the Internet would nurture a new kind of participative debate in which ideas and opinions could be freely exchanged and discussed by people who had lacked any real voice in the analog age. Such sites and discussion groups exist, but those who moderate chat rooms or comments about the news know that, for every poster and tweeter who wants to participate in a courteous dialogue, there is another—sometimes a multitude—with something darker in mind.

Hatred and rage take many forms on the Web but all share a contempt for traditional dialectical argument and a desire, where possible, to disrupt and supplant it with insult and categorical assertion. Extreme groups, from anti-Western terrorists to white supremacists, now have an almost entirely unregulated and free form of global distribution, which they have embraced with enthusiasm and, in some cases, sophistication, especially in the use of social media. The impact on mainstream debate is no doubt less dangerous, but still deeply depressing. Arguments which were once conducted with a reasonable level of mutually accepted courtesy now often quickly descend to the crude, the personal, and the downright ugly.

Women are a particular target. In 2013, Caroline Criado-Perez and other campaigners convinced the Bank of England to put Jane Austen on a £10 note. That was enough to provoke a storm of social media abuse and threats of rape, violence, and murder. Mary Beard, the classics professor and broadcaster, often speaks publicly on TV and radio about the issues of the day. Like prominent women in many Western countries, she too has found herself pursued by trolls and, to use her phrase, “generic, violent misogyny” on Twitter and other supposedly social platforms. Beard has treated the trolls to some of their medicine, naming and shaming them—though, astonishingly, also helping a few of them out on occasion with advice and job references.

Quite understandably, few women want anything to do with the male (and sometimes female) digital Calibans who try so relentlessly to intimidate and humiliate them. In April 2016 at the Women in the World conference in New York, I heard the actress Ashley Judd and the feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian talk with courage and emotion about what it feels like to be on the receiving end of all that hate.

But the demonic anomie which the facelessness of the digital conversation has unleashed knows no bounds of gender, class, or topic. Celebrities and the new stars of social media are probably most vulnerable, but the ugliness has crept into the discussion of politics, culture, ideas, and social science, and can be directed at almost anyone. To pick one example from a sea of possibilities, for several years the Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman and the historian Niall Ferguson have maintained a lively argument about a number of economic questions, much of which has played out in the blogosphere. Both of these academic silverbacks are tough customers, and the language which has flown between them has often been sharp to say the least. Their argument has nonetheless been one of intellectual substance.

Now brace yourself and listen to some of the voices of the digital crowd following this heavyweight fight:

Fuck Paul Krugman and the liberals that love citing this douche bag but can’t seem to provide any rebuttal when I answer his talking points they throw at me. Utter hypocritical douche.

He should be pinned down and shaved like a shiny baby’s butt. It would be easier to see the shit coming out of his mouth.

 … the manky scottish cunt ferguson is a rothschild stooge and eyes wide shut rape party guest. a masonic of the scottish rite so this shit is just war between jewish families or silly in house acting.

So one piece of shit calls out another piece of shit for not being “civil”—and this is Internet Epic?10

Poisonous, infantile, dehumanized, and dehumanizing: the tone of these comments is not exceptional by the standards that now obtain in the no-man’s-land of digital debate. This is an assembly of rage that all are welcome to join—Left and Right, rich and poor, pro-lifers and pro-choicers, Islamophiles and Islamophobes, Zionists and anti-Zionists. The only qualification necessary for admission is unreasonable fury.

The Rhetoric of Conscience

A critical indicator that our public language is in crisis is the fact that so many people have in so many different ways given up listening to those they disagree with, preferring instead to prevent them from speaking or, if that’s not possible, to put their fingers in their ears or abuse or intimidate them.

The thought process is clear: there comes a point when someone’s values are so contrary to mine that further discussion is futile and I should treat him not as an interlocutor worthy of hearing out, or even as an intellectual adversary to be overcome through argument, but as a moral outcast who, if possible, should be prevented from speaking at all. It’s easy to see how a democrat in 1930s Germany might have reached exactly that conclusion about Adolf Hitler. The question that should concern us is how a measure that might be justified in such a political and moral extremity could possibly seem appropriate for something as arguable as a claim about “failed developmental policies.”

As a first step toward answering this question, I want to explore what it is that makes debates that involve disagreements about values more fraught and seemingly irresolvable, despite the fact that we are sometimes told that we live in the most tolerant and broad-minded cultures in human history. In his book After Virtue, the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has this to say about today’s arguments about moral questions:

The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on—although they do—but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.11

MacIntyre suggests three characteristics of these debates that might explain why this should be so. The first is that the different views are incommensurable. The arguments of those in favor of and those against abortion rights may each flow logically and consistently from a coherent moral worldview, but the worldviews represented on the one hand by the unborn child’s right to life and on the other by a woman’s right to choose start from such radically different premises that neither can be satisfactorily adjudicated from the perspective of the other. Each party can argue back to its own premises, but when they do, argument gives way to pure assertion and counterassertion. As we saw with the death panels and other examples in this book, this clash of perspectives can make resolution impossible not just in strict “values” debates, like that about abortion, but in any argument that one or both of the parties view through an absolutist lens. Today that can include almost any political, social, or cultural question.

The second characteristic MacIntyre notes is that these rival moral worldviews are usually presented not as if they were merely a matter of personal preference, but rather as impersonal and, in some sense, objective frameworks of values and standards, each of the antagonists claiming of course that his or her framework is the truth. Furthermore, we tend to want to eat our cake and have it: we treat our moral utterances as both fully personal to us and as independently grounded—or, to put it in terms we have already discussed, to believe that they exhibit both authenticity and objective rationality.

MacIntyre claims that the language in which these worldviews are expressed is itself in a state of disorder because of the immense cultural and social change that has taken place in recent centuries. Looking back, we realize that critical terms like virtue or justice “were originally at home in larger totalities of theory and practice in which they enjoyed a role and function supplied by contexts of which they have now been deprived.”12

Divorced from the structures of moral thought and behavior that originally shaped them, the meaning of these words is no longer secure. Our debaters may discover not only that they cannot agree with each other what the word justice means, but—and despite the apparent simplicity of the word—that they do not have a coherent definition of it themselves and thus no certainty that the way they use it is consistent with their other ideas about morality.

Taken together, MacIntyre’s observations help explain why arguments that touch on values and ethics can prove so intractable and why the participants so often conclude that further dialogue is pointless and that they should resort instead to shouting louder or refusing to listen, to anonymous abuse on the Internet or, in some cases, to violence.

It’s worth spending a little more time examining MacIntyre’s second characteristic, the tendency to believe that what feels true and right to me is also necessarily what is true and right for everyone. One of the oldest ways of understanding this instinct was to interpret it as the voice of revelation and conscience: directly or indirectly, God has revealed to me the truth that I am now imparting to you. The name for the special kind of public language that results is prophecy. To state the obvious, the Bible and Qur’an are full of it. If you believe that God has spoken to you in this way, you are more or less compelled to believe that the message is categorical and universally applicable. So what happens when others disagree?

*   *   *

London, 1642. England is more than a century into the Reformation, and after decades of heroic efforts to control the centrifugal religious and political forces, the center can no longer hold. Having failed to find and arrest five radical members of Parliament, King Charles I decides personally to confront the Corporation of London. But a young ironmonger called Henry Walker has decided to do some confronting of his own—not with a sword or pistol but with the help of a friend’s printing press:

Walker’s invention being mounted on the Altitude of mischiefe, he plotted and contrived with a Printer, the said night before to write and print a perillous Petition to his Majesty, and borrowed the Printers wives Bible, out of which he took his Theame out of Kings, Chap.12, vers.16 part of the verse; To Your Tents O Israel. There was writing and printing all night, and all the next day those Libels were scattered, and when his Majesty had dined, and had taken Coach to returne to White-Hall, Walker stood watching the Kings comming by amongst the Drapers in Pauls church-yard, and having one of his pamphlets in his hand meaning to have it delivered it to his Majesty, but could not come at him by reason of the presse of People, insomuch as Walker (most impudently sawcy) threw it over the folkes heads into his Majesties Coach.13

King Charles is an absolute monarch, Henry Walker a twenty-nine-year-old London tradesman, but the combination of Walker’s religio-political confidence, new media technology (a pamphlet written and printed in a night and distributed the following morning), and the already tumultuous atmosphere in the capital lend the ironmonger and Charles a new equality of expression and give Walker the chutzpah literally to throw his argument at the king’s head. Civil war wasn’t far away.

Many of those who lived through it, including the political theorist Thomas Hobbes, came to believe that a significant cause of that war was the way Puritan dissent, preached from the pulpit by Protestant radicals and spread far and wide in pamphlets and tracts, undermined the authority on which the social order depended. The consequence was effectively a regression to the terrible natural condition of mankind that Hobbes famously described in Leviathan as a war “of every man against every man.”

The religious extremism of the time, and the terrifying certainty that the public statements you make are underwritten by God himself, was not of course restricted to radical English Protestants, or to the Protestant side in the Reformation alone. Catholic zealots across Europe played their own part in stirring up rebellion and civil war, and at the start of the seventeenth century famously attempted, in the words of the ringleader, Robert Catesby, to blow up “the Parliament howse with Gunpowder … in that place have they done us all the mischiefe, and perchance God hath designed that place for their punishment.”14 Hobbes’s argument with the Protestant dissenters is one instance in the much wider early modern struggle between the forces of religious absolutism and those of secular pragmatism.

Hobbes’s own pragmatism had a steely edge. In his magisterial defense of rhetoric, Saving Persuasion, Bryan Garsten notes that by the time he wrote Behemoth, his idiosyncratic history of the Civil War, Hobbes had come to wonder, “Had it not been much better that those seditious ministers, which were not perhaps 1000, had been all killed before they had preached?”15 Some of the uses of public language are so pernicious, Hobbes suggested, that it may be better to suppress them and their authors altogether than to allow them to tear the state limb from limb.

Hobbes was skeptical about the value of all rhetorical dialectic, observing that debaters seldom win arguments as such and warning that without some absolute authority to arbitrate between them, all debates must “either come to blowes, or be undecided.”16 But he had a central fear of what Garsten calls “the dogmatism of conscience” and the claim by the radicals that their arguments had a special and irrefutable status because of their divine inspiration. He argued instead that in their private lives, everyone is entitled to believe whatever they want about conscience and prophesy but, when it comes to public argument, the statements of would-be prophets should be regarded as opinions like any other and should not enjoy any special privilege. He argued further that like all other private opinions, they should be subordinated to the judgment of a sovereign, whose “publique reason” becomes in effect the collective conscience. It is the sovereign’s job to decide, then, not just who has made a good argument but also who has heard the authentic word of God. Only thus can anarchy be avoided.

By “sovereign,” Hobbes meant either an absolute monarch or an institution. Over the centuries that followed, the institution that the public would recognize as sovereign was liberal democracy, which especially in Britain, France, and America had a strongly secular flavor. In an open society, where anyone can say anything and public norms are too diffuse to form easy targets, prophets can find themselves struggling for an audience and for relevance: tolerance is a gracious but unrelenting leveler.

The case against the special privilege of prophecy was won so comprehensively that the argument itself was largely forgotten. By the late twentieth century, Hobbes’s warning about the political danger of public language inspired by religious enthusiasm would have felt to most people like a transmission from a distant planet, a message from some long-dead world with no possible meaning for the enlightened inhabitants of modern-day Earth. But appearances can be deceptive.

Should I Be Charlie?

On February 14, 1989, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, calling for the death of the novelist Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s “crime” was having written The Satanic Verses, an exploration of identity and exile that drew in part on the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims had come to believe—in a few cases because they had read it, in most no doubt because they had been told—that the novel was an assault on the honor of the Prophet and was blasphemous in its treatment of Islam.

The story didn’t come out of nowhere. By the time the ayatollah promulgated his fatwa, The Satanic Verses was already a cause célèbre, and demonstrations and book burnings had taken place in several countries. A familiar limits-of-free-expression debate had also already broken out in the UK—the rights of the artist versus the rights of a minority not to have its religion denigrated.

But the fatwa changed everything. And today, more than a generation later, everything remains changed. The moment lacked the horror and drama of 9/11 or the high emotion of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but in my years in journalism it stands as the third genuine world-historical inflection point, the third of the days I have lived through when the world looked like this when I walked into the newsroom but irrevocably like that by the time the late shift went home.

Not that we understood at the time quite what that was. For me and my team—I was editor of The Nine O’Clock News—it was initially a breaking story that needed to be teased out into its constituent strands. First, there was Salman Rushdie’s safety. Would the British authorities protect him, and how? Where was he? Would he speak? Then there was the domestic and worldwide political reaction—a British author and a British book were now a global story, and the debate about the rights and wrongs of the matter would become an international talking point. And what about the reaction of British and other Muslims? Would they back the fatwa? Would any of them support Rushdie? Finally, what was the ayatollah’s true intent? Was this really just a theological matter or, as some had already begun to suggest, an essentially political attempt by the most important Shi’i leader to assert wider moral leadership in the Muslim world?

This reflexive slicing and dicing is what reporters and editors do, so much so that the process can feel strangely dissociated from the story in question. Harder to express, let alone report, was the collective incredulity. Could the ayatollah actually mean it? Could a world leader in 1989 really be calling for the murder (for that in secular terms was what it would be) of someone for writing a novel, and offering a cash reward into the bargain? It was tempting to interpret the fatwa principally as a piece of empty rhetoric, something said to achieve a certain effect but not to be taken any more seriously than most of the dire warnings routinely made by Western politicians, words that might sound important when first said, but that soon fade into obscurity.

But the ayatollah meant exactly what he said. And murder duly followed—not of Salman Rushdie himself (he was spirited into hiding) but, because the ayatollah had also called for the killing of “all those involved in its publication,” of Hitoshi Igarashi, his translator in Japan, with further failed assassination attempts on his Italian translator and the publisher of The Satanic Verses in Norway. In 1993, after Friday prayers in the city of Sivas in central Turkey, a crowd of Sunni Muslims attacked a hotel that was hosting a cultural festival to which the writer Aziz Nesin, who had translated and published extracts of The Satanic Verses, had been invited. The crowd set fire to the hotel, killing thirty-five people in the blaze. Perhaps two hundred people died overall in protests and other incidents connected with the outcry about the novel.

There were some who knew exactly where they stood on the very day that the fatwa was issued. One was Rushdie’s close friend Christopher Hitchens:

I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.

Hitchens recognized at once that the fatwa represented a fundamental assault on Western values: “No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment of the Constitution, could be imagined.”17

The British authorities spoke out against the fatwa and pledged to protect Rushdie, but with far less enthusiasm. Ministers emphasized their distaste for the offense that the novelist had caused, and one of them, Norman Tebbit, went farther: Salman Rushdie was a man, he said, whose “public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality.” The sense of irritation that a novelist who had not even been born in the UK could have had the effrontery to stir up so much trouble was widespread among politicians, religious leaders, and others at the time. I remember the novelist P. D. James, who was then a BBC governor, relishing the image of Rushdie the great provocateur reduced to playing canasta night after night with members of the Special Branch.

For the critic John Berger, writing in the Guardian shortly after the fatwa was issued, there was an equivalence between Salman Rushdie and what Berger took him to stand for—unbridled freedom of expression—and his Islamic opponents. Unless there was some restraint, he warned, “a unique 20th-century holy war, with its terrifying righteousness on both sides, may be on the point of breaking out sporadically but repeatedly—in airports, shopping streets, suburbs, city centers, wherever the unprotected live.”

Here the exercise of free speech has become a matter of “terrifying righteousness” and Salman Rushdie is a soldier in a war that risks bringing death or injury to “the unprotected.” Berger’s appeal for the safety of the “unprotected”—for which we can read “innocent noncombatants”—implicitly identifies Rushdie as someone who is not innocent but is rather one of the perpetrators of the war.

The former US president Jimmy Carter took much the same line, though his context is not the immediate threat of terrorist reprisal but of the amity between nations and cultures:

Ayatollah Khomeini’s offer of paradise to Rushdie’s assassin has caused writers and public officials in Western nations to become almost exclusively preoccupied with the author’s rights. While Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms are important, we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah’s irresponsibility. This is the kind of intercultural wound that is difficult to heal. Western leaders should make it clear that in protecting Rushdie’s life and civil rights, there is no endorsement of an insult to the sacred beliefs of our Moslem friends.18

Jimmy Carter’s claim that the “writers and public officials” in Western nations had been “almost exclusively preoccupied with the author’s rights” may have been true of some of the writers, but it was patently untrue of most of the “public officials.” And by no stretch of the imagination was The Satanic Verses a direct insult to anyone; it was a novel, after all—a work of literature with imaginary characters set in an imaginary world. Jimmy Carter calls Ayatollah Khomeini’s call to murder an “added embarrassment” as if the imam were guilty of nothing more than a minor social faux pas, and as if his crime—solicitation to murder—was somehow equivalent to Salman Rushdie’s. It’s hard not to conclude that the embarrassment President Carter feels most acutely and is most anxious to expunge relates to those lamentably unfettered “First Amendment freedoms.”

We can think of freedom of expression as an absolute right and defend it stalwartly as such, offering like Voltaire to lay down our lives to defend the right of people to say and do things that we ourselves regard as hateful and false. Or we can think of it as something relative, a right that needs to be balanced with other duties and obligations if our societies are to remain tranquil. To propose, as President Carter and many other politicians implicitly did at the time of the Satanic Verses controversy, that we can magically do both—doff our caps to the absolute freedom envisaged in the First Amendment and the UN Declaration of Human Rights, but simultaneously tell everyone that the moral thing to do is to behave as if it were relative—is an uncomfortable middle position that is ultimately unlikely to satisfy anyone. Indeed, a secure and settled answer to the dilemma has eluded Western societies ever since: it remains an unresolved dissonance at the core of the modern liberal project.

But let’s now fly twenty-six years forward to the day in early 2015 when a pair of heavily armed Islamist extremists stormed into the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and murdered eleven people, including those who had drawn and published a series of provocative (and often obscene) cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad. There had been other outrages in the years between. In Amsterdam in 2004, a Dutch Moroccan man stabbed to death the author and director Theo van Gogh, who had collaborated with Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a controversial film about the oppression of women in many Muslim countries. The following year, death threats and violent protests greeted the publication of an earlier set of cartoons depicting the Prophet in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Nonetheless, the murders of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and their colleagues (six more people would die in related incidents) came as an electrifying shock beyond France and across the Western world—and the unfinished argument about the proper limits of freedom of speech returned with a vengeance.

On the night of the murders, the BBC’s evening radio news program, The World Tonight, asked Arzu Merali, who is the director of research at the Islamic Human Rights Commission, to take part in a discussion about the attack. This is how she characterized the wider debate:

You know there’s been an awful lot of clamour and upset and this trope that’s been going on for nigh on thirty years now about religious people, particularly Muslims, feeling offended and how this is an unacceptable affront to free speech, which for many of us coming from the human rights community is really a distraction from what really affects people, when this term is used as a stick to beat them as it often is with the Muslim community … Where things have been going wrong and people have been protesting and things like this it’s tended to point to areas where the discourse itself is very demonised, it’s very disempowering, it’s marginalising, and it works within the framework of structural racism, so what we have with the idea of free speech is it would be a fantastic idea if there was equality of access to all the forums where we can speak. But marginalised communities, of which Muslims in European and westernised settings are certainly one, don’t have that access.19

This statement reduced the other party to the discussion, the muscular journalist and free speech advocate David Aaronovitch, to something near spluttering speechlessness: “I have absolutely no idea what the last speaker was talking about,” he said. “As soon as someone uses the word ‘discourse,’ it’s a bad sign because it means is that you’ll find yourself dealing with something other than the subject.”20

In fact, Arzu Merali’s remarks are not hard to understand. Like Jimmy Carter, she refuses to consider freedom of speech in the abstract and casts it instead in a political and cultural context in which Muslims can feature first and foremost as victims. Unlike him, though, she offers a coherent theory about why the case for regarding freedom of expression as an absolute right is wrong.

Unpacked and elaborated, it goes like this. There is a “framework of structural racism” in Western societies that intentionally disadvantages ethnic minorities. Attitudes to minority religions are part of this framework and are exacerbated by the fact that secularization has left the controlling elite with little religious belief or knowledge of their own. As a result, they treat Islam and the beliefs of other minorities with a contempt that alienates and separates them farther. Within the vicious circle of this “demonized” discourse, you shouldn’t be surprised if words or images that are taken to be notably provocative trigger an extreme response. You can think of the response as a “last straw” reaction by groups that already suffer immense social and economic inequality. The debate about free speech is a distraction. It is specious to talk about it as a universal right because it is not distributed fairly across society. It is a luxury enjoyed by the rich and powerful, who then have the nerve to use it as a stick to beat those who have no voice at all. The argument for treating freedom of expression as sacrosanct is thus not a valid argument at all but a “trope,” a convenient rhetorical artifact that needs to be deconstructed (like this) if it is to be correctly understood.

If we politely ignore the looming shades of Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida, et al., Arzu Merali’s central point is a simple one. Don’t take freedom of expression too seriously. In the pantheon of human rights, it matters far less than essential economic, social, and cultural needs that are currently denied to minorities. To endlessly emphasize it serves only to widen the gap between those minorities and the majority. She takes a harder line than Jimmy Carter. She pays almost no lip service to the First Amendment and its equivalents; she makes no attempt to have it both ways. Her fundamental case is the same.

There’s much that could be said about Arzu Merali’s comments on The World Tonight. Is it really adequate to refer to the events at Charlie Hebdo as “things like this” (as in “when things have been going wrong and people have been protesting and things like this”), as if mass murder is just another kind of protest and really only to be expected given the provocation? Isn’t religiously inspired hostility to freedom of expression a feature not only of the cultures of Muslim minorities in the West but also of countries in which Muslims have enjoyed powerful majorities for decades or longer? To put it more plainly, can the hostility be explained in its entirety as a response to modern-day “structural racism”? Does it not in fact predate and, to a significant degree, exist independently of it? And does Arzu Merali truly believe that free speech is a “fantastic idea,” even in principle? She sounds less than enthusiastic.

But the essential challenge still hangs in the air, as it has since the ayatollah’s fatwa: that, abstracted from cultural and social realities, a blind insistence on freedom of expression is self-indulgent and, because of the way it can reinforce alienation and inequality, potentially divisive and hegemonic. So how should we think about this right in relation to other desiderata like intercommunal respect and harmony?

Let’s begin with the question of restraint. The Enlightenment understanding of free expression has always included a right to offend, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has a mission to offend, or a moral obligation to publish everything. It is perfectly reasonable for a given media organization to take care not to unnecessarily offend people, particularly when those people are members of an ethnic group that already feels isolated and vulnerable. Even with the majority population, there is a strong case for proportionality when it comes to offensive material—Is the editorial or creative benefit of inclusion likely to outweigh the offense caused?—and for restraint if the answer to that question is no.

But a free society necessarily contains a plurality of audiences and editorial opinions, and different editors will make different judgment calls about the weight to give to different considerations and about the boundaries of acceptability for their audience. It is the right to make these independent editorial judgments that sits above any one individual’s or group’s assessment of the considerations. It cannot be relativized. It should never be undermined. To attempt to impose, or even to argue for some kind of normative “restraint,” to fail full-bloodedly to support the legitimacy of editorial choices that differ from those you would have made yourself, is to call into question that diversity of voices and opinions. It can be made to sound statesmanlike and evenhanded. But it is in fact a betrayal of one of the foundations on which democracy and freedom stand.

Next, those who like Arzu Merali think that outrage at murderous attacks on freedom of expression is nothing more than a “trope” and a “distraction” from what really affects people, are missing a fundamental truth about this right. History shows us that it is invariably the state and the powerful in society (including religious elites) who suppress it and minorities who often suffer as a result. In the real world, freedom of speech—and the freedom to report oppression and victimization—is one of the few protections minorities have. Arzu Merali says she comes “from the human rights community,” and proposes a tension between freedom of expression and other supposedly more important rights, those that she claims “really affect people.” On the contrary, the almost universal experience in both Western and developing world societies is that this human right goes with all the others. In countries where it is recognized, it helps sustain other freedoms, promotes good government, discourages state violence and other abuse. Where it is denied—as it is in many countries including more or less all with a Muslim majority—other fundamental human rights suffer too.

Sensitivity about other people’s beliefs is often both prudent and admirable. But nobody has the right not to be offended, or to retaliate with violence if they feel offended. Freedom of religion is the right to follow your faith without molestation or persecution; in a free society it cannot extend to the right not to have your religion criticized or mocked. If you fear that you or your family may find a book or movie offensive, don’t look at it and tell your children to ignore it too. This was precisely the advice given to Sunni Muslims with regard to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, in the aftermath of the Paris attack, by Al-Azhar University, one of the leading centers of Islamic theological scholarship in the world: “Ignore this unpleasant trifle, because the Prophet of mercy and humanity (peace be upon him) is on too great and high a level to be affected by drawings that lack ethics.”21

That judicious piece of advice should be the end of the matter. But Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa had made a far more radical demand: not only should Muslims not read The Satanic Verses, no one should, and its author should cease to exist.

It’s a demand that once again brings us face-to-face with the rhetoric of conscience and the dilemma that Thomas Hobbes identified in seventeenth-century England: how can the state and society deal with the injunctions of the divinely inspired? There’s nothing to be gained by trying to argue the point, because the counterparty doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of anything other than the truths that they believe have been disclosed to them. Triangulation—the plague-on-both-your-houses approach that John Berger, Jimmy Carter, and many others adopted during the Salman Rushdie affair—doesn’t resolve anything. You have to decide. Either you must (explicitly or implicitly) accept the special claim of the voice of prophecy, or you must reject it.

To accept it—to concede that The Satanic Verses should never have been written and all future editions of Charlie Hebdo should be removed from every newsstand and that legislation should be passed to prohibit all future such occurrences—is impossible. Our publique reason, to put it in Hobbes’s terms, is plurality and tolerance, and paradoxical as this may sound, it must be enforced. This is not because Western liberal values are self-evidently superior to others. It is because reasonable as well as unreasonable people can disagree on what constitutes the good life or a good society, and it is only through the exercise of free speech that their proposed answers can be weighed against each other and choices made and, if circumstances change, revoked. This is the right which makes the debate about all the other rights possible. It should be limited only in an immediate and absolute emergency. We must reject the ayatollah’s demand not just in part but in its entirety.

*   *   *

Inevitably other religious groups in Britain and elsewhere sought (albeit in less violent ways) to ape the tactics used to attack Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses, or to argue that they too should enjoy the same deference that they claimed Islam now enjoyed because of the violent reaction to the novel.

In late 2004, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre canceled its run of the play Behzti (or Dishonour). The play, which was written by the British Sikh playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, included the depiction of rape and murder in a Sikh temple and provoked an outcry in the Sikh community. On opening night, there was a violent demonstration outside the theater in which several police officers were hurt and a number of arrests made. Attempts were made to find a compromise—could the scene in which the rape and murder occurred be moved from the (imaginary) temple to some other location?—but a couple of days later, after advice from the police and the Commission for Racial Equality, the theater decided to abandon the production altogether.

At more or less the same time, I found myself in the middle of a similar controversy involving Christianity. The controller of BBC 2, Roly Keating, had decided to televise the stage production of Jerry Springer: The Opera, a rambunctious piece of satirical musical theater written by Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee. Jerry Springer is a fantastical account of the life and imagined death of the well-known US TV talk show host. The first half of the show is a comically exaggerated version of the talk show complete with a series of bizarre and sexually deviant “guests.” At the end of this first half, “Jerry Springer” is shot by one of the other characters and the rest of the performance is set in the afterlife with Satan and God battling over his soul—and hoping to use his unique talents to solve their own problems. In this second half, the guests from the opening reappear as divine figures: a pervert in a diaper, for instance, now playing the role of Jesus.

Jerry Springer had been extensively performed on stage before the decision was made to televise it, and it had attracted little attention for its content. But news of the planned broadcast was greeted with fury by several Christian groups, and particularly by some Protestant evangelicals. The BBC received around fifty thousand communications, most of them emails, demanding that the satire not be shown, and there were demonstrations outside Television Centre and other BBC facilities. The addresses of several BBC executives were published and anonymous threats made against them. Stephen Green, whose Christian Voice was the most active and vociferous of the protesting groups, got hold of my phone number and rang several times to lobby me personally. He was angry and persistent but, it must be said, courteous throughout.

I am a Christian myself and am sensitive to extreme or grotesque depictions of the central religious figures of my faith. Absurd though it will seem to some, I have never watched The Last Temptation of Christ, The Life of Brian, or The Passion of the Christ as a result, though I would have had the professional need arisen, and I certainly do not believe that anyone who does not share my beliefs should be prevented from seeing them. In a free society, we can all make our own choices in such matters.

In fact, and without having registered in advance that it included depictions of Christian religious figures, I had attended the opening night of Jerry Springer in the West End some months before the controversy erupted, and hadn’t been upset or offended in the slightest. It was obvious to me that the piece was a satire not about Christianity but about the shallowness and insincerity of a certain kind of television. The figures who appeared in the second half of the piece were clearly intended to be seen not as actual portraits of God the Father, Jesus, and Mary but, within the overarching conceit, as the characters who had already appeared in the earlier Jerry Springer “show.”

When the protests began, the largest Christian denominations—Anglican, Catholic, and Methodist—all had to decide where they stood on Jerry Springer. They contacted the BBC and we arranged for their representatives to discreetly attend the stage production so they could decide for themselves whether or not it was likely to give grave offense to Christians. They saw it and had much the same reaction as I did. For understandable reasons, the major churches did not express any enthusiasm for the broadcast, but they didn’t publicly oppose it either.

As I’ve already said, publishers don’t have a duty to publish everything and have the right to take the sensitivity of their audience and other factors into account before deciding whether or not to publish. A few months before Jerry Springer came up, I’d made the decision that the BBC should not broadcast Popetown, a satirical adult cartoon series set in the Vatican, because I did not consider it creatively strong enough, or indeed funny enough, to justify the offense it was likely to cause. The program was subsequently released on DVD in the UK and shown in many other countries. A few years after Jerry Springer, I decided not to air a charity appeal aimed at helping the (overwhelmingly Palestinian) victims of an intense period of conflict in Gaza, lest it lead some viewers to doubt the BBC’s commitment to impartiality in the coverage of that war. The BBC’s policy was to decline such requests when the subject of the appeal is a news story that is both ongoing and contentious. Another British broadcaster (BSkyB) took the same view, but others disagreed and the appeal was widely seen.

Each case has to be judged on its merits and different editors will no doubt come to different conclusions. This is what pluralism of expression looks like in reality. The multiplicity of outcomes, and the debate before and after publication about who is right and who wrong, are not evidence of a contradiction in the Western conception of pluralism. They are its essence and its virtue.

Jerry Springer: The Opera had received a number of awards, and the creative significance of the piece was not really in question. We planned to air the program late at night when children would be unlikely to watch it, and to place explicit warnings at the beginning of it to alert everyone else to its content. I felt confident that we could keep the viewers who might stumble upon it to a small number and thus reduce the direct offense that the program would cause to a minimum.

But this calculation (artistic merit versus likely offense) was of no interest to the protesters. Like the ayatollah, their argument was an absolute one: even if every Christian avoided the transmission and no direct offense resulted, they believed that the national broadcaster should still not broadcast Jerry Springer because of its blasphemous nature. Some of them argued moreover that it was a matter of fairness. The BBC, they claimed, would never broadcast such a program if it featured similar treatment of Islam or the Sikh religion (Bezhti had recently been in the news). Why should Christians not be treated with equivalent respect?

In fact, the BBC had broadcast programs that both Muslims and Sikhs had found offensive—for instance, the television comedy Good Gracious Me, which I commissioned in the mid-1990s. But even if one accepts the underlying premise, that the BBC was likely to treat minority religions with more sensitivity than Christianity, I did not find the argument persuasive. As I have said, no one has the right not to be offended, and there is therefore no right to which different religions are entitled to demand equal access. Differential sensitivity—greater to religions associated with ethnic minorities, less to the established and fully socialized religion of the land—is not a moral requirement, but given the wider sense of isolation and prejudice that such minorities often feel, it is certainly a reasonable position for an editor to adopt.

For all these reasons, I decided that the broadcast should go ahead and Jerry Springer: The Opera was duly shown on BBC 2 on January 8, 2005. And with that, the controversy promptly vaporized. The public watched the program and formed their own view about it. The caravan of protest broke camp and moved off in search of the next enormity. The security guards departed and the rest of us got back to life as normal.

But Jerry Springer did leave me two personal legacies. The first was an attempt by Stephen Green and Christian Voice to prosecute me and Jon Thoday, the producer of the piece, for the crime of blasphemous libel. In the event, magistrates refused to allow the private prosecution to go ahead, and the High Court confirmed that decision on appeal in 2007. The common law offense of blasphemous libel (which extended “protection” only to Christianity) was centuries old, but the judgment in the High Court about Jerry Springer: The Opera effectively abolished it in the context of plays, films, and television in England and Wales. The abolition was extended to all other forms of expression in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act of 2008. Not much more than a legal footnote—the last person actually to be sent to prison for blasphemy was John William Gott in 1921—but a small victory all the same for freedom of expression. In many other countries, blasphemy laws are being extended, not repealed.

The second legacy is the elegant iron railings and electric gate that were put up outside my home in the aftermath of the Jerry Springer controversy, and that still stand there today. Jerry Springer was no Satanic Verses or Charlie Hebdo, and none of the handful of threats I have received over the years has ever seemed remotely as serious as those I have recounted in this chapter. But the security people recommended them all the same. After all, if you’re pursuing almost any kind of free expression in the early twenty-first century, you never know when things may take a personal turn.

The Enemies of Free Speech

As we saw, Hobbes’s reaction to the radical threat was to argue for a sovereign to whose publique reason individual citizens could submit themselves, restricting their own private reasons to purely personal affairs. He also came to believe that some forms of dissent were so dangerous that they should be prohibited altogether.

In fact, British history took a different course. Over the next century or so, the country moved not toward absolutism but to a constitutional monarchy with a strong emphasis on parliamentary and public debate and a remarkably free press. The result was not anarchy and civil war but a more cohesive and successful society. During Hobbes’s lifetime, other philosophers (notably John Locke) began to develop the ideas on which modern principles of human rights—including the right to free expression—are based. In what became the United Kingdom, in other Northern European countries, and in the colonies in America, radicals began to use the growing freedom of political debate and of the press to argue for the practical implementation of those rights: for the right to self-determination, the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of minority religions and women, and so on. Disputed, delayed, incomplete, and, as the twentieth century and our present tribulations demonstrate, no guarantee that human societies necessarily always move from lower to higher levels of openness and respect for rights—but a vindication over hundreds of years of the ability of democratic institutions, public debate, and the practical judgment of individual citizens to advance policy and drive progress.

Hobbes’s pessimism was misplaced, in other words. A way was found not merely to accommodate dissent without political violence but also to harness its power to stimulate reform. Alas, in the early part of twenty-first century, many sovereign governments are proceeding on the basis not that Thomas Hobbes was wrong but that he was fundamentally correct: freedom of expression is a threat to effective government and destructive of social harmony, and those “seditious ministers” should indeed be silenced or killed.

Many Westerners harbor a naïve assumption about the manifest destiny of freedom of expression, believing that due to some combination of modernity, capitalism, and the apparently unstoppable momentum of the Internet, the barriers to the free exchange of ideas must inevitably collapse everywhere, and soon. It was widely hoped, for instance, that when the younger generation of Chinese leaders led by President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, they would liberalize the controls on free speech. Exactly the opposite happened. President Xi’s government has proved to be even more repressive than its recent predecessors. The Chinese authorities have arrested dissidents, blocked foreign news sites, harassed both foreign and domestic journalists, and now explicitly seek what they call (using an appropriately Hobbesian term) cyberspace sovereignty, by which they mean complete control over what the Chinese public can see and do in the digital realm. Perhaps theories about the ineluctability of freedom of expression will turn out to be right. Beijing is having none of it.

In Russia, a very brief period of relative press freedom in the 1990s has been largely eroded by a combination of intimidation, violence (including the murder of some notable journalists), and the progressive purchase or expropriation of that nation’s media organizations by interests aligned with the Kremlin. The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is using harassment, arrests, and repressive new laws to stifle dissent in Turkey while, in their 2016 report Freedom in the World, Freedom House reports issues in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and in several Balkan countries. Classic state repression is the story in Iran and in much of Central Asia. Other than in Israel, freedom of speech and debate is more or less unknown in the Middle East and uncertain in much of Africa and Asia. Journalists are being killed, injured, and imprisoned in unprecedented numbers in numerous countries, from the monstrous on-camera beheadings of Western journalists by Islamic State to the less reported but extensive slaughter of local journalists and stringers in conflicts and failing states around the world. Wherever freedom of the press is denied, political dissidents are persecuted and minorities put at risk.

Can we comfort ourselves with the thought that it’s different in the West? The response by European and American leaders to the Charlie Hebdo massacre was far more robust than that to The Satanic Verses had been twenty-six years earlier. By the time of the attack, almost all mainstream politicians could see the extremist Islamist threat to freedom of expression for what it was and were prepared to speak out clearly against it. Yet here too there is cause for concern.

When European interior ministers met to discuss the Charlie Hebdo incident, they issued a joint communiqué expressing their disgust and the determination to bolster the principle of free speech. But they also added this paragraph:

We are concerned at the increasingly frequent use of the Internet to fuel hatred and violence and signal our determination to ensure that the Internet is not abused to this end, while safeguarding that it remains, in scrupulous observance of fundamental freedoms, a forum for free expression, in full respect of the law. With this in mind, the partnership of the major Internet providers is essential to create the conditions of a swift reporting of material that aims to incite hatred and terror and the condition of its removing, where appropriate/possible.22

In France, the controversial comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala was arrested soon after the attack and charged with condoning terrorism by saying on Facebook that he felt like Charlie Coulibaly. The phrase cleverly blends the widespread slogan Je Suis Charlie, which had appeared on thousands of posters and T-shirts to show support for the murdered cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, with the surname of one of the killers, Amédy Coulibaly. I won’t join your pious marches and vigils, he seems to say, I have more sympathy with the other side. Dieudonné M’bala M’bala was one of more than seventy people arrested in France in the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack for “hate speech.”23

In the UK, the home secretary, Theresa May, was already attempting to pass legislation to make it illegal for extremists to speak at British universities. Who would decide who was an extremist and who wasn’t? “The organizations subject to the duty will have to take into account guidance issued by the Home Secretary,” Mrs. May announced.24 Even democratic and broadly benign sovereigns can find themselves giving in to the temptation to police public language: to gag the Islamic firebrand, to take a heavy hand to the peaceful protester, to prosecute the troll.

It’s absurd to believe that you can defend freedom of expression by suppressing it. And to try to pick and choose, to declare (in retrospect) that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are heroes of free expression who must be celebrated while Dieudonné M’bala M’bala is a villain who must be silenced, smacks of favoritism. If it is permissible to make fun of the Prophet Muhammad, then why not the dead cartoonists? If we deny the second on the grounds of taste, or even of national security—on the basis that Dieudonné M’bala M’bala is a recruiting sergeant for the terrorists rather than the attention-seeking prankster he so patently is—we risk making a mockery of our own claims about tolerance and turning an unjustified claim of unequal treatment into a justified one. If Western governments underreacted to The Satanic Verses and sent mixed signals about free expression by relativizing the issue, their successors risk making the opposite mistake, by overreacting and denying free expression to one group in the name of protecting it for another.

Or perhaps you believe that Internet courtesy can be made compulsory? In the UK, the legislation that enables prosecutions against the cyberbullies makes it a crime to “send by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.” Indeed, it is an offense to send any message that you know is false “for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another.”25 No one can be in favor of “false” statements, but it’s hard to imagine a lower bar than “inconvenience” as an excuse for limiting free speech. Using the police and the courts to stop people lying on the Internet is the kind of policy normally pursued by dictators, but in Britain it has led to many convictions. Some other European countries have similar legislation. Even if the routine vitriol of the Web fills you with foreboding, this cure is worse than the disease.

One of the things that link the sovereign threat to freedom of expression in the West with many of the nonsovereign threats we have explored in this chapter is that potent term hate speech, another miniature gem of contemporary rhetorical compression. We hear it in the news so frequently that we may never ask ourselves exactly what it means—assuming that it has an exact meaning.

We know what a hate crime is. It is a crime—an assault, say, or a murder—that is carried out because of the perpetrator’s hatred for the group represented by the victim: someone lynched because of the color of her skin, a gay man beaten up simply for being gay. Our courts quite reasonably regard it as an aggravating factor in a given crime. But the crime itself would still be a crime even if it were proved in court that racial or antigay hate was not the motive.

Hate speech is a more diffuse term. It includes speech acts that have always been considered criminal—direct and personal threats of murder, rape, or other violence, for example. If such threats are made in the context of racist, sexist, antigay, or some other form of prejudice, they too can be considered hate crimes. Hate speech also sometimes refers to kinds of speech that have been made criminal in some Western countries relatively recently in order to prevent incitement to racial hatred and other kinds of hostility toward minorities.

But the use of the term hate speech extends far beyond these laws. It can refer to genuinely vicious and prejudicial language used against an individual or a group, or it can be nothing more than a playground insult thrown by one side in a given argument into the face of the other. Often false syllogisms are at work: if any criticism of the state of Israel is anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism is hate speech, then anyone who criticizes Israel is guilty of hate speech; or by the same token, if any criticism of Islam or a Muslim society is Islamophobia, and Islamophobia is hate speech, then anyone who criticizes either is guilty of hate speech. Used like this, hate speech is, to borrow Arzu Merali’s word, a “trope”—a rhetorical device employed to isolate and shame an opponent—and it often has a contemptuous, bullying quality itself. Many of the groups we have discussed in this chapter use it in precisely this way.

Because of its imprecision and the cavalier way it is often used, hate speech is a slippery and dangerous concept. Dangerous in the hands of both the agents of the sovereign—the police, the prosecutors, the judges—and the self-appointed vigilantes who seek to banish their particular bête noire from their chosen domain or from society as a whole.

The right to free speech includes the right to say hateful things. Those who want to say them should be allowed to say them and be protected by the state when they do so. Trying to discriminate between different kinds of hate—to outlaw anti-Semitic remarks but to overlook anti-Islamic ones or vice versa, for instance—is no more coherent or defensible than deciding that alone among all political parties, the BNP should not appear on Question Time. And where do we stop? If we want to criminalize all hate, we might just well make it a crime to be a human being.

If modern governments, both repressive and liberal, are tempted to play the Hobbesian sovereign, the part that secretly appeals to many of the groups we have studied in this chapter is that of the Puritan radicals. Even those who claim to be secular still tend to adopt the rhetoric of conscience and to divide the world into a right-thinking elect (themselves), and opponents whose arguments have already been revealed to be false and who therefore need not and should not be heard. Like those seventeenth-century radicals, they are prone to factionalism and atomization, turning the rhetoric that was once aimed at an external enemy on each other—thus the no-platforming of former comrades and ideological friends. These groups share the importunate certainty of the prophet, the same lack of empathy with the other. But they can have an effect disproportionate to their numbers. Weak leaders, whether in the faculty club or the halls of power, are particularly vulnerable to them, some entranced by their evangelical singleness of purpose, others simply cowed.

The way to defeat them and the real extremists is not to gag but to outargue them. Let the mullahs sermonize. Let the cartoonists and the comedians do their worst. Let more or less anyone come to the universities. Let the hard Right march. If you disagree with them, get out there and march too. Expose the fanatics to the light and laugh at them. Abolish those well-meaning laws that seek to suppress some kinds of antisocial speech but not others. Use the law to gag only speech that meets the American legal definition of fighting words—words that are intended to provoke immediate actual violence or directly intimidate, or to recruit violent extremists. Use it more broadly and you won’t starve the fanatics, you’ll feed them.

History or specific cultural challenges can understandably lead some countries to take special measures—the banning in Germany of the swastika and other symbols associated with Nazism is an example—though such bans should be limited in both time and scope. As for individuals, they should have legal redress in the case of malicious defamation and should also be protected from the kind of Internet trolling that adds up to personal bullying and intimidation. But the law should always err on the side of free expression. Living in an open society means taking the rough with the smooth up to the point where, if it was a face-to-face encounter, a court would judge the troll’s abuse to add up to threatening behavior.

Free speech isn’t a panacea. Protecting it has resulted in a world full of hateful words and ideas, though there’s no need to add to them or to fight fire with fire. Nor is free speech a guarantee that bad things won’t happen—that extremist rhetoric won’t seduce some credulous young people, or even that another Adolf Hitler won’t emerge in one of our liberal democracies. Cultures and societies can go wrong for many reasons, and free speech won’t stop all of them. But don’t let that fact persuade you that the suppression of free speech is any kind of an answer. It seldom achieves anything. In the end, it poisons everything.

The enemies of free speech are gathering. From politically correct students to cabinet ministers, from the darker denizens of the Twittersphere to the Chinese Politburo, they are an ill-sorted crew but they have more in common than it first appears. All are sure they are right. All harbor Hobbesian doubts about untrammeled public language. None of them trust the rest of us. The many good reasons they give for gagging their opponents are bogus and should be dismissed out of hand. But against the tide of expectation, they are gaining ground. We are living through a long war for the freedom of expression, and it is going badly.