Free Speech E-Book

Timothy Garton Ash

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

WINNER OF THE 2017 AL-RODHAN PRIZE Never in human history was there such a chance for freedom of expression. If we have Internet access, any one of us can publish almost anything we like and potentially reach an audience of millions. Never was there a time when the evils of unlimited speech flowed so easily across frontiers: violent intimidation, gross violations of privacy, tidal waves of abuse. A pastor burns a Koran in Florida and UN officials die in Afghanistan. Drawing on a lifetime of writing about dictatorships and dissidents, Timothy Garton Ash argues that in this connected world that he calls cosmopolis, the way to combine freedom and diversity is to have more but also better Free Speech. Across all cultural divides we must strive to agree on how we disagree. He draws on a thirteen-language global online project - freespeechdebate.com - conducted out of Oxford University and devoted to doing just that. With vivid examples, from his personal experience of China's Orwellian censorship apparatus to the controversy around Charlie Hebdo to a very English court case involving food writer Nigella Lawson, he proposes a framework for civilized conflict in a world where we are all becoming neighbours. Particularly timely. . . Garton Ash argues forcefully that. . . there is an increasing need for freer speech. . . A powerful, comprehensive book - The Economist

Leseprobe

FREE SPEECH

Also by Timothy Garton Ash

Facts Are Subversive

Free World

History of the Present

The File

In Europe’s Name

The Magic Lantern

The Uses of Adversity

The Polish Revolution

FREE SPEECH

Ten Principles for a Connected World

Timothy Garton Ash

ATLANTIC BOOKS

London

First published in hardback in the United States of America in 2016 by Yale University Press.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2016 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Timothy Garton Ash 2016

The moral right of Timothy Garton Ash to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The lyrics for Nina Simone’s song ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free’, Written by Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas, are quoted by permission. The lyrics for Eminem’s song ‘White America’, written by Steven King, Jeffrey Bass, Luis Resto and Marshall Mathers, © published by Eight Mile Style LLC and Martin Affiliated LLC, administered by Kobalt Music Publishing Limited, are also quoted by permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback: 978-1-84887-092-5

E-book: 978-1-78239-031-2

Paperback: 978-1-84887-094-9

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

ToAll contributors to Free Speech Debatefreespeechdebate.com

CONTENTS

Post-Gutenberg

PART I

Cosmopolis

Speech

Cosmopolis

Cyberspace, CA 94305

The Struggle for Word Power

Big Dogs

Big Cats

P2

The Power of the Mouse

‘Innocence of Muslims’ and the Lost Innocence of YouTube

Ideals

Why Should Speech Be Free?

How Free Should Speech Be? How Should Free Speech Be?

Not by Law Alone

Laws and Norms

Offended? What’s the Harm in That?

Reading John Stuart Mill in Beijing

Towards a More Universal Universalism

PART II

User Guide

1. Lifeblood

‘We—all human beings—must be free and able to express ourselves, and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas, regardless of frontiers’.

Free and Able

In Your Own Tongue

Seek, Receive and Impart

Regardless of Frontiers

2. Violence

‘We neither make threats of violence nor accept violent intimidation’.

The Assassin’s Veto

Modernising the Brandenburg Test

Dangerous Speech

Just War?

Confronting the Assassin’s Veto

Cartoons and the Republication Dilemma

Practising Peaceful Conflict

3. Knowledge

‘We allow no taboos against and seize every chance for the spread of knowledge’.

Scientifically Speaking

On Campus

Legislating History

Everything Open to Everyone?

Public Good via Private Power

From Babel to Babble

Homo Zappiens

4. Journalism

‘We require uncensored, diverse, trustworthy media so we can make well-informed decisions and participate fully in political life’.

Media

Uncensored, but Not Without Limits

Diverse: Media Pluralism between Money and Politics

From Daily Me to Daily Kiosk

Trustworthy: Who Is a Journalist? What Is Good Journalism?

Towards a Networked Pnyx

5. Diversity

‘We express ourselves openly and with robust civility about all kinds of human difference’.

Openness and Robust Civility

Enforcing Civility?

Why Mature Democracies Should Move beyond Hate Speech Laws

Creating a Civil Society

Art and Humour

Pornography

Civility and Power

6. Religion

‘We respect the believer but not necessarily the content of the belief’.

The Argument for Special Treatment

But What Is Religion?

Two Kinds of Respect

By Law or Custom?

The Trouble with Islam

Tolerance

7. Privacy

‘We must be able to protect our privacy and to counter slurs on our reputations, but not prevent scrutiny that is in the public interest’.

Are You Ever Alone?

Privacy, Reputation and the Public Interest

Battlefields of the Powerful

Trial by Twitter

Defending Your Reputation

A ‘Right to Be Forgotten’?

Don’t Be Zuckered

Janus Anonymous

8. Secrecy

‘We must be empowered to challenge all limits to freedom of information justified on such grounds as national security’.

Security and the Challenge Principle

The Price of Secrecy

Here We Need Laws

Who Will Guard the Guardians?

Whistleblowers and Leakers: An Essential Backstop

The Trouble with ‘Well-Placed Sources’

The Importance of Not Being Anonymous

9. Icebergs

‘We defend the internet and other systems of communication against illegitimate encroachments by both public and private powers’.

Icebergs

One Internet, under Whom?

Net Neutrality

Privatising and Exporting Censorship

Ethical Algorithms?

Money Speaks (Too Loudly)

10. Courage

‘We decide for ourselves and face the consequences’.

Courage

Two Spirits of Liberty

Challenge

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

FREE SPEECH

POST-GUTENBERG

We are all neighbours now. There are more phones than there are human beings and close to half of humankind has access to the internet.1 In our cities, we rub shoulders with strangers from every country, culture and faith. The world is not a global village but a global city, a virtual cosmopolis. Most of us can also be publishers now. We can post our thoughts and photos online, where in theory any one of billions of other people might encounter them. Never in human history was there such a chance for freedom of expression as this. And never have the evils of unlimited free expression—death threats, paedophile images, sewage-tides of abuse—flowed so easily across frontiers.

This unprecedented world-as-city has been shaped by the United States, that liberal leviathan, and to a lesser extent by other countries of the historic West. Today, however, both the right and the power of the West to set the terms for cosmopolis are being fiercely contested—by China above all, but also by rising powers such as India and Brazil. Each new-old power brings to the discussion of free speech its own cultural heritage and historical experience, the lessons from which are themselves hotly contested inside each of those countries.

When it comes to enabling or restricting global freedom of expression, some corporations have more power than most states. Were each user of Facebook to be counted as an inhabitant, Facebook would have a larger population than China.2 What Facebook does has a wider impact than anything France does, and Google than Germany. These are private superpowers. Yet, like the giant figure of the sovereign in the frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, they are composed of countless individual people.3 Without their users—us—these giants would be nothing.

This book lays out an argument for, and invites a conversation about, free speech in our new cosmopolis. I start from the history of dramatic transformations—technological, commercial, cultural and political—that have occurred since the mid-twentieth century, and with particular intensity since 1989. That year saw no less than four developments that would prove seminal for free speech in the twenty-first century: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invention of the World Wide Web, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie and the strange survival of Communist Party rule in China. History’s horse has not stopped galloping since, and I am always conscious of Walter Raleigh’s injunction that ‘who-so-euer in writing a modern Historie, shall follow truth too neare the heeles, it may happily strike out his teeth’.4 Nonetheless, I maintain that the basic character of the challenges we face in this world of neighbours is now clear.

What is more, this transformation of communication itself offers new possibilities for addressing changes as they happen. When I started writing this book, I thought I was just going to write a book. Some nine months after I delivered it to my publishers—‘delivery’ has traditionally been to typescripts what conception is to babies—a pleasing little object, wrapped in swaddling cloth, would plop through the letterbox. What Johann Gutenberg called ‘the work of books’ would carry on as it had for centuries.5 But as I pursued my research at Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley, I asked myself: If your subject is the post-Gutenberg world, how can you rest content with writing about it only in the old Gutenberg way? If the internet gives unprecedented opportunities for people across the world to speak freely, and to debate free speech, why not explore those opportunities as an integral part of writing this book?

I therefore turned aside to develop, with a team at Oxford University, an experimental website called freespeechdebate.com. It presents case studies, video interviews, analyses and personal commentaries from around the world, and invites online debate. Much of its content is translated into thirteen languages, which makes it linguistically accessible to some two thirds of the world’s internet users.6 It has been made possible by an inspiring group of graduate students, native speakers of those languages, all fizzing with ideas, examples and objections. Along the way, I have travelled to speak about the project and to listen carefully to the views of others, from Cairo to Berlin, Beijing to Delhi, New York to Yangon. That experience has both informed and transformed this book. As a result of those debates, both live and online, the ten principles originally suggested on the site have been reworded and reordered.7 Quite a few of the illustrative stories I tell, especially those from countries beyond the West, were thrown up in the course of this experiment.

If you are reading these words in the traditional Gutenberg form, printed on paper, then endnotes point you to material on the site, amongst many other sources. If you are reading them on a connected device, then what you have in your hands is a post-Gutenberg book. Future post-Gutenberg books will doubtless take many forms, but I visualise this one as an electronic pyramid (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. A post-Gutenberg book

Thus, for example, clicking at this point in the online text will take you to an essay on freespeechdebate.com which notes that in 1995 a French court convicted the American historian Bernard Lewis of violating a French memory law because he had questioned, in an interview with Le Monde, whether what happened to the Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman Empire was, strictly speaking, genocide. Click on a further link in that essay and you can read the original French court verdict.8 For other subjects, the process may require another click or two, depending how many levels or hidden chambers inside the pyramid you wish to explore. The click-through model is entirely familiar in online journalism but has yet to become the norm for e-books, so embedding links in the main text is itself an exploration of the possibilities of a connected world.

I contend that the way to live together well in this world-as-city is to have more and better free speech. Since free speech has never meant unlimited speech—everyone spouting whatever comes into his or her head, global logorrhea—that entails discussing where the limits to freedom of expression and information should lie in important areas such as privacy, religion, national security and the ways we talk about human difference. As important, it means identifying positive methods and styles that will enable us to use this defining gift of humankind to best advantage, in these conditions of unprecedented opportunity and risk.

The philosopher Michel Foucault tells us that the Epicurean thinker Philodemus (himself reporting the lectures of Zeno of Sidon) argued that the use of free speech should be taught as a skill, like medicine or navigation. I don’t know how much of that is Zeno or Philodemus, and how much Foucault, but it seems to me a vital thought for our time.9 In this crowded world, we must learn to navigate by speech, as ancient mariners taught themselves to sail across the Aegean Sea. We can never learn if we are not allowed to take the boat out.

The goal of this journey is not to eliminate conflict between human aspirations, values and ideologies. That is not just unachievable but also undesirable, for it would result in a sterile world, monotonous, uncreative and unfree. Rather, we should work towards a framework of civilised and peaceful conflict, suited to and sustainable in this world of neighbours.

I do not pretend to offer some kind of detached, universal view from nowhere—or everywhere. I have a firm standpoint, one that I am proud to call liberal, and I argue for it. That strong individual standpoint is entirely compatible with a commitment to go beyond the confines of a purely intra-Western debate. I can discern no better way to proceed towards a more universal universalism—essential if we are to live together well in this twenty-first century world-as-city—than to spell out what we believe are the standards that, were they applied by all, would be best for all. Then let others dispute our claims and advance their own.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously insisted that there is a plurality of values and these cannot all be fully realised at the same time. Personally, Berlin was always fascinated by the differences between thinkers and cultures. Yet towards the end of his long life he observed that ‘more people in more countries at more times accept more common values than is often believed’.10 Maybe he was right: that is certainly my own conclusion from travels to many countries over many years. When you first arrive in another place, you are struck by everything that is different and strange. Stay a little longer, and you discover the all-human under the skin. Or maybe he was wrong, and what has been called ‘moral globalisation’ is a naïve liberal pipe dream. One thing is certain: we will never know unless we try to find out.

Part I

COSMOPOLIS

SPEECH

Something like human speech probably emerged at least 100,000 years ago, as a result of evolutionary developments in the brain, chest and vocal tract.1 To speak, in this most elemental meaning, is to modulate the airflow from our lungs by movements of the chest, jaw, tongue and lips, producing sequences of distinct sounds with recognisable meanings. When we say of a toddler ‘she’s talking now’, that is what she has learned to do.

A highly developed ability to communicate, involving the use of language and abstract thought, is what distinguishes human beings from our nearest relatives, such as the chimpanzee and the bonobo. The more we learn about the animal world, the more we appreciate the level of communication between dolphins or chimps. Online, you can watch videos showing the understanding of human speech achieved by the world’s most language-proficient bonobo, Kanzi, and his ability to ‘speak’ back by tapping lexigrams on a computer screen. Kanzi has reportedly learned to ‘say’ some 500 words and understand as many as 3,000. Yet, even leaving aside the fact that his chest and vocal tract do not allow him to produce sustained sequences of recognisable sounds as humans do, there is still a qualitative gulf between what Kanzi has achieved and what most human beings can express.2

Towards the end of a lifetime spent studying the animal kingdom, the broadcaster David Attenborough was asked what he found the most astonishing creature on earth. He replied: ‘The only creature that really makes my jaw sag so much that I find it hard to stop looking is a nine-month-old human baby. The rate at which it grows. The rate at which it learns. The rate at which it acquires nerves. It is the most complex and the most extraordinary of all creatures. Nothing compares to it’.3 Amongst the things it learns, like no other animal, is language. The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar notes that by age 3 an average child can use about 1,000 words (double Kanzi’s bonobo world record); by age 6, around 13,000; and by age 18, some 60,000: ‘that means it has been learning an average of 10 new words a day since its first birthday, the equivalent of a new word every 90 minutes of its waking life’.4

Speech is not just one among many human attributes; it is a defining attribute of the human. When motor neurone disease was slowly robbing the historian Tony Judt of the power of intelligible communication, he unforgettably told me, through breaths artificially induced by a breathing machine strapped into his nostrils: ‘So long as I can communicate, I am still alive’. Pause for machine-induced breath. ‘When I can no longer communicate’—pause for machine-induced breath—‘I will no longer be alive’.5 I communicate, therefore I am.

Human communication has never been confined to speech. Physical contact, hand gestures and facial expressions must have played an important role even before chest, tongue and brain got their act together. In a sketch of what he calls Universal People, summarising what he considers anthropologically established human universals, Donald Brown dwells at length on speech and language, but includes physical gestures and the range of messages that we convey through the expressions on our faces.6

From the earliest times, we have also reached beyond our own bodies in the effort to communicate. The oldest known cave paintings have been dated to some 40,000 years ago. There is evidence of musical instruments that are probably as old and jewellery that is much older.7 These are distant predecessors of the artworks, cartoons, YouTube clips, demo placards, flag burnings, theatrical performances, songs, tattoos, forms of dress, dietary choices, Instagram and GIF pictures, Second Life avatars, emojis and myriad other contemporary forms of expression that are all embraced in the English-language phrase ‘free speech’. As the poet John Milton says in Areopagitica, his appeal for freedom from censorship in mid-seventeenth-century England, ‘what ever thing we hear or see, sitting, walking, travelling or conversing may be fitly call’d our book’.8

The transformed context in which the question of free speech is posed today is, however, the result of more recent developments in communication. The acceleration of communication can be tracked along two main vectors: the physical and the virtual.9 A highly selective timeline of the means human beings have found to transport themselves into physical proximity with each other could go: walk, run, swim, dugout canoe, ride on other animals, wheels, river boat, ocean-going ship, train, motor car, airplane, jet. For now, the technological advance of mass transport has paused with the jet airplane, but, as Figure 2shows, ever more people are jetting around. In 1970, just over 300 million air passenger flights were recorded. Today, it is more than 3 billion a year, or nearly one flight for every two people on earth.10

Figure 2. Growth in air passenger flights

Source: World Development Indicators, 2014.

Most of those who fly are visitors, but some go to stay. A UN estimate of ‘world migrant stock’ suggests that roughly one in every 30 people has moved to a new country of residence within a single lifetime.11 A Vatican document describes this as ‘the vastest movement of people of all times’.12 Ours is now a city planet. In 2014, more than half the world’s population already lived in cities, and UN projections suggest that the world’s cities will add another 2.5 billion people by 2020.13 These will be men, women and children from everywhere, especially in the ‘megacities’ with more than 10 million inhabitants. There are already at least 25 world cities where more than one out of every four residents was born abroad, and the 2011 Canadian census revealed that an astonishing 51 percent of the population of Toronto was foreign-born. This is before you even get to ‘postmigrants’, the children and grandchildren of migrants. In such cities, you routinely rub shoulders with men and women from every country, culture, faith and ethnicity. shows the hyperdiversity of Toronto. Step into the métro, tube, U-Bahn or subway: all humankind is there.