Abstract
Since The Satanic Verses a familiar and now somewhat predictable pattern of events unfolds each time a freedom of speech controversy erupts, which they appear to be doing on a more or less regular basis. First, those who have taken offence will visibly signal their outrage and call for the offending item to be withdrawn/banned/disavowed, call for an apology, and demand the offending parties be disciplined/sacked/prosecuted or otherwise chastised; the offender will either apologize or not, but seldom give ground with respect to the offending item by invoking freedom of speech as a defence; by this time the media and commentariat will be swarming around the incident like flies around a carcass: supporters of the offender(s) will not only invoke the right to freedom of speech but also, for good measure, invoke a right to offend (an entirely fictitious right that is nowhere mentioned in any of the many constitutions, charters and other legal documents where civil, political and human rights have been codified), whilst those speaking for the offended will usually invoke an equally fictitious right not to be offended apparently derived from various other fundamental rights (such as freedom of religion or privacy) that are customarily seen as bulwarks against the unrestricted right to freedom of expression.1 And there the matter will rest, in an impasse as unbreakable as the opposing parties are implacable. Each episode usually remains unresolved, to everyone’s dissatisfaction.
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Notes and References
These are articles 18 and 12, respectively, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The latter states that ‘No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.’ Although related, in the first instance, to libel and personal defamation laws, it is possible to argue that communal libel or group defamation laws can be derived from it. See Tariq Modood, Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005);
Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory 2nd edn. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and
Simon Lee, The Cost of Free Speech (London: Faber, 1990), all of whom advance sensible arguments about this and would not endorse the ‘right to be free from offence’ tout court as a permissible right.
Nick Cohen, You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (London: Fourth Estate, 2012) Kindle edition (all citations will be to this edition);
Brian Winston, A Right to Offend: Free Expression in the Twenty-First Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012).
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., n.d [1859]) Kindle edition, ch. 2, [loc 430] (my emphasis).
See Paul Weller, A Mirror for Our Times: ‘The Rushdie Affair’ and the Future of Multiculturalism (London: Continuum, 2009) p. 61: ‘Rafsanjani told the Majlis or Iranian Parliament that the Ayotollah Khomeini had delivered his fatwa not just because of the book itself but also because it was a focus of what he saw was a plot against Islam.’
Cohen, You Can’t Read This Book, ‘How to Fight Back’, p. 228 [loc 3555]. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991) p. 439.
Alan Haworth, Free Speech (London: Routledge, 1998) p. 27.
See Bernard Williams, ‘Which slopes are slippery?’, Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers 1982–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) pp. 213–23.
Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy (London: Atlantic Books, 2009) p. 155.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 1989) p. 84.
Abigail Levin, The Cost of Free Speech: Pornography, Hate Speech, and their Challenge to Liberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 51.
Susan Mendus, ‘The Tigers of Wrath and the Horses of Instruction’ in Free Speech: Report of a Seminar (London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1990) p. 7.
Kent Greenfield, The Myth of Choice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011) Kindle edition, ch. 3.8 [loc 1015]; 3.5 [loc 904]; 6.5 [loc 2027].
Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and it’s a Good Thing Too (New York: OUP, 1994) p. 16.
Talal Asad, ‘Freedom of Speech and Religious Limitations’ in Crag Calhoun, Mark Jeurgensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds. Rethinking Secularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Kindle edition, ch. 13 [loc 6813]. Asad suggests that this may be one reason why freedom of thought and conscience and the freedom to express oneself, as well as the idea of tolerance to which they are related, have acquired sacred value in the liberal tradition.
This insistence on physical harm (Cohen explicitly rules out ‘mental distress’) would rule out psychological harms such as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, for example. It is curious that the philosophical idealism of liberals like Cohen and Malik should co-exist with the denial of psychological harm as a valid form of injury. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that hate speech does result in forms of physical as well as mental injury. Kevin Saunders cites critical race theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, who have documented the following harms amongst victims of hate-speech: ‘The immediate, short-term harms of hate speech include rapid breathing, headaches, raised blood pressure, dizziness, rapid pulse rate, drug-taking, risk-taking behavior, and even suicide.’ This last claim has been supported by research conducted by psychologists Brian Miller and Joshua Smyth, who conclude their article ‘Hate Speech Predicts Death’ as follows: ‘[e]thnic immigrant groups subjected to more negative eth-nophaulisms, or hate speech, were more likely to commit suicide. This pattern was obtained even after taking into account the previously established association between immigrant suicide rates and the suicide rates for those ethnic immigrant groups in their countries of origin.’ Kevin W. Saunders, Degradation: What the History of Obscenity Tells Us about Hate Speech (New York: New York University Press, 2011), p. 2.
Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Picador, 1983) p. 71.
Jonathan Chaplin, ‘How Much Cultural and Religious Pluralism can Liberalism Tolerate?’ in John Horton, ed. Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Toleration (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1993) pp. 45–6.
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© 2014 Anshuman A. Mondal
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Mondal, A.A. (2014). What is Freedom of Speech For?. In: Islam and Controversy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137466082_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137466082_3
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