TEN PRINCIPLES FOR A CONNECTED WORLD
Timothy Garton Ash
Yale University Press
491 pages; $30
Among our most treasured public values, free speech is indispensable and perplexing. It involves us at once in high principle and shaming triviality, as two otherwise unconnected headline cases nicely attest. In Germany, a comedian who mocked the Turkish president on air may soon stand trial under an antique law against offending foreign dignitaries. In Florida, a jury in March rejected Gawker Media's free-speech defence and ordered it to pay $140 million in damages for posting a tawdry video on its gossip site showing a retired wrestler in bed with another celebrity's wife.
Defending free speech, alas, takes more than standing up for science, sound argument and brave eloquence. It takes standing up as well for the right to say things that are false, hateful, mindless, base, vulgar, stupid or reckless. It is easy to defend what we admire and believe in. To defend free speech, you have to allow for bad speech. Free speech gave us Martin Luther King's "I have a dream." It also gave us Donald Trump.
It would be nice to have one without the other. But that is not what free speech promises. Free speech is complicated and comes at a high price. We pay for it in terms of other things we also need to care about: public order and security, children's needs, private reputations, civic courtesy, cultural worth, the socialdignity of vulnerable minorities. As Timothy Garton Ash makes admirably clear in his wise, up-to-the-minute and wide-ranging new survey, most of the difficult arguments about free speech bear on its price in terms of other things that also ought to matter to us.
The controversies are fierce and familiar. Ought leakers be punished, and how can whistle-blowers be protected? Should pornography be restricted? Do libel laws gag the press? May religion be shielded from mockery? Ought hate speech be criminalised? Mr Garton Ash pursues each in depth. He follows the common practice of taking "free speech" to mean a cluster of freedoms to express yourself and your thoughts as you please: not just voicing words but printing what you want, proclaiming your faith as you wish, campaigning for your chosen causes and making art without interference.
The main arguments now separate laxists from restrictionists. Laxists favour few limits, restrictionists many. The kinds of limits matter. Coercive laws, whether prior censorship or after-the-fact sanctions, provide one kind of limit.
Mr Garton Ash is generally against them. High standards of public argument and common decency are another kind of limit. Mr Garton Ash is broadly for them. You could say he is laxist about law and restrictionist about standards. His approach has the great merit of keeping distinct what is legally permissible and what is or ought to be socially acceptable. Mr Garton Ash treasures the jewel but recognises and regrets the mud. His guiding maxim, never wholly lost amid near encyclopedic detail, is "More free speech but also better speech."
As a scholar-journalist, Mr Garton Ash knows what he is talking about from a career of reading, writing, listening and, more lately, web-clicking. When reporting on the break-up of the Communist world in the 1980s, he befriended East European dissidents, saw how truthful speech could sap the will of wrongful power and collected a private lexicon of sardonic political jokes that here lighten the going. Now a fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, he supervises a 13-language online debating platform - freespeechdebate.com - for promoting free speech and arguing with all sides about its proper limits. His travels and interviews for "Free Speech" spanned the world, or what he calls the "cosmopolis," a global space that is virtual as well as geographic. That range alone will squelch the fantasy that free speech is a purely Western concern.
Law to Mr Garton Ash is a poor tool for civic education. He questions hate-speech laws and Holocaust-denial laws, fearing a "taboo ratchet." Corporations in their turn are after profit, not civic uplift. He distrusts the idea that Google, Amazon and Facebook, for example, serveequally the values of free speech and good speech. His preferred answer to the more flagrant vices of liberty - hate speech, manipulative journalism, coarsened debate and a vast sewer of abuse on social media - is to encourage "shared norms and practices that enable us to make best use of this essential freedom."
In lesser hands, that recommendation might sound overabstract or simply pious. Mr Garton Ash, however, applies and tests it in 10 chapters offering "complex, contextual judgments" that pretty well cover the field of present controversy. He writes with panache and understands the world he works in, especially the virtual world of the Net. Practical answers interest him more than doctrinal purity. His website has adopted a "one-click-away" rule. It screens provocative material - Muhammad cartoons, for example - with a warning that some may take offence, leaving them to see it or not as they choose.
Most of us are somewhat stunned at present by the scale and complexity of the forces in play, be they government surveillance; the "Great Firewall of China" that can censor the national web; the mounting strength of the Internet giants; or the frightening violence of militant Islam. Bewilderment is the easy option. Free Speech encourages us to take a breath, look hard at the facts and see how well-tried liberal principles can be applied and defended in daunting new circumstances.
© The New York Times, 2016
