Free Speech: Protecting the ugly side of religious and other beliefs

Because it is so important for any strong democracy, and so lacking in many countries, I generally read articles on free speech, and two reports on court cases that neatly reflect the differing approaches in the UK and the US were recently published in Britain's Guardian newspaper and the US's New York Times respectively. What "Burning Poppies is a Lesser Evil" and "Freedom's Price" have in common is that both favour strong protection for speech.

In "Freedom's Price", Nadine Strossen (2011) argues that the US Supreme Court has made another right decision in holding that the US Constitution protects the right of groups such as the extremely offensive Christian group the Westboro Baptist Church to turn up at funerals and blame the death of soldiers who died fighting for their country on US society's tolerance of homosexuality and other unbiblical social trends. As Strossen argues, "even when expression stirs emotions that are overwhelmingly negative ... that cannot justify suppressing it" (2011, ¶ 1). Strossen goes on to remind us that even highly negative emotions can lead to change for the better, so that banning anything simply because it is offensive, even deeply offensive to most people, cannot be good for a society that pretends to be democratic and accept differences of opinion.

Charlotte Gore, on the other hand, argues that the UK Court that found Emdadur Choudhury, who was inspired by his Moslem beliefs, guilty and fined him for burning poppies and chanting equally offensive slogans as the American Christians was wrong because it stopped the sort of free speech that is essential for a healthy democracy (2011). She reminds readers of the situation in Pakistan where free speech is severely limited so that, for example, any negative comment about Islam or Mohammad is illegal and severely punished, which means that social and political progress is impossible to correct that immoral situation because there can be no legal discussion on the topic. She concludes that it is better for the UK to follow the just US example, not the oppressive Pakistan example of religiously inspired suppression.

I liked both articles because they also acknowledge the serious opposing arguments: the very popular idea that people should not be allowed to do things like burn national flags, insult religions or religious leaders and the like. And they then explain why these reasons are very bad reasons to legally limit free speech. I agree with them. If causing offence were a sufficient reason to ban a comment or action intended to make a statement, such as burning a flag, a bible or a Koran, then almost everything would have to be banned - atheists find most religious claims to be offensive in their intolerance, their falseness and their immoral desire to control other people, and it's hard to think of anything that many would not find offensive.

But I think there is a much stronger reason why free speech must be strongly protected: it is as essential for knowledge as it is for the social, political and moral progress that are the reasons Strossen and Gore assert in its favour. Knowledge requires that an opinion or belief about something be well founded, and that means that opposing views must be heard and addressed. If it is legally impossible to state an opinion about a topic, then people's beliefs and opinions on that topic become detached from reality so that even if they are right, it is impossible to know that they are right. For example, if it is illegal to say or suggest that there is corruption in Thailand, then there will be no evidence of any corruption because presenting it would be illegal. As a result, most people are likely to believe that there is no corruption, and if the government claims there is no corruption, it will be legally impossible to contradict that claim. Most seriously, it is irrelevant what the facts are. If there really is corruption, but no one can say that, then obviously the common belief is false and not knowledge; however, the problem is much more serious: even if it were true that there was no corruption, that opinion of belief could never be knowledge because it could not have the right sort of support. It would in fact be a true belief, but only true by accident, and accidentally true beliefs cannot be knowledge. Even if it were false, the belief would have to be the same because the restriction of free speech makes any other belief impossible. This is why laws that censor a topic by making negative comments illegal necessarily result in ignorance on that topic. Knowledge on that topic becomes impossible. And in a democracy, that is not usually a good thing. In most cases, knowledge is better than ignorance.

There are of course some situations where ignorance is actually preferable to knowledge. We do not, for example, want people knowing how to make nuclear weapons or where to steal them, so there are good grounds to making it illegal to freely state that sort of idea. The reason for those sort of restrictions on free speech is that ignorance really is better than knowledge on those topics. However, for any topic where knowledge is better than ignorance, laws banning free speech unjustly and immorally enforce ignorance and should be opposed as both Strossen and Gore argue in their articles.

And this is why free speech is so important in academic work: if people cannot explore possibilities and look at competing ideas, they cannot acquire any knowledge about a topic. If you have strong opinions on a topic, you surely prefer the possibility of knowledge to the certain ignorance that comes from laws making free speech illegal and enforcing censorship. I can understand why religious and political fanatics oppose free speech to protect their cherished beliefs, but what they prove is that they prefer ignorance about their most important beliefs to even the possibility of well-founded knowledge about them, and that seems weird to me. If they respected their religious or political ideas, they would surely think that those beliefs could withstand opposing arguments and some mockery, but apparently they think that their most important ideas are too weak to stand up to any negative comments, and that suggests to me that they have no faith in their own beliefs. That sounds like a very weak and worthless sort of respect for a supposedly important belief.

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References

Gore, C. (2011, March 8). Burning poppies is a lesser evil. The Guardian. Retrieved March 13, 2011 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/08/burning-poppies-extremist-50?INTCMP=SRCH

Strossen, N. (2011, March 4). Freedom's price. The New York Times. Retrieved March 13, 2011 from http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/03/picketing-funerals-when-free-speech-feels-wrong/the-price-of-freedom