Being offended is no excuse for censorship
On the whole, I don’t consider myself an absolutist. When it comes to most concepts, from morality to the correct way to prepare tea, there is always room for doubt.
The only worthwhile enterprises are those that keep a close eye on all assumptions and continue to check and re-check previous conclusions. Science could not exist without doubt. (Neither could true faith, for that matter.)
If you don’t have a healthy sense of doubt, you leave yourself open to an extremism and certitude that can lead to horrible consequences. (Would anyone, for example, sign up for suicide bombing if they weren’t absolutely certain that they would go on to their reward?)
When it comes to free speech, however, I’m as absolute as any garden-variety fanatic.
Here’s why: I wouldn’t be able to write the words you’re reading if we were living under the censor. Even if very little was changed, everything I wrote from here on out would not be my words, but the words allowed by authority.
In essence, it would be the authority speaking, and not me.
With free speech, there can be no totalitarianism. One of the reasons the United States is so secure in its democratic and pluralistic aims is the First Amendment: a bedrock principle which enshrines the freedom to speak above all else.
It is an irony that the most sacred of the enlightenment ideals is that, when it comes to speech, nothing is sacred.
And when I say, “nothing is sacred,” I mean it. In 1989, an Iranian religious fanatic sentenced Salman Rushdie, a British novelist, to death for the crime of writing a novel. His book, “The Satanic Verses,” was burned across the world for its blasphemous depiction of revered Islamic figures. People associated with the book were murdered by fanatical mobs.
What was the world’s reaction? That Rushdie shouldn’t have written the book in the first place. It didn’t particularly matter that the passages involved were taking place in the mind of a madman (or, for that matter, that the people burning the book never got around to reading it.)
What all of this means is this: The freedom of speech means that one has the right to offend and be offended. As of now, the most dangerous threat to free speech is the person who claims his or her own hurt feelings as a right to censor or do violence to someone.
This brings up one additional point: Just as I have the right to speak, you have the right to listen. In the free exchange of ideas, it is a disservice to all if one side of the argument is removed from play.
When all arguments become one-sided, those who believe one idea are allowed to believe it uncritically, without the possibility of self-reflection.
It is for this reason that the unpopular or dissenting voice is also the most important; it gives us the tools to examine our own beliefs more seriously.
In 1919, the U.S. Supreme Court sentenced Charles Schenck, a Yiddish-speaking socialist, to six months in prison for publishing flyers (in Yiddish) against American involvement in World War I. Oliver Wendell Holmes called his actions comparable to “shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater.”
What no one seems to remember (as Christopher Hitchens once pointed out) is that during that awful, needless war, there was an actual fire in that proverbial theater, and it consumed the lives of millions of young men before it was put out.
The difference is that the only man who dared shout was sent to prison, and the fire would continue to burn for many years afterward.