French President Emmanuel Macron recently declared that his government is considering tighter speech regulations. According to Newsweek, new speech-restriction laws would be designed to counter “fake news and misinformation.”
Leaning against a new report from a speech-law commission he appointed in October, President Macron set his crosshairs on online news outlets and commentators whose published material could be deemed “misinformation” or even “conspiracy theories.”
In its reporting on the same story, Politico added that Macron viewed the EU, as opposed to national governments, as the appropriate venue for “how to fight fake news.” This is noteworthy, given that France is currently the presiding country of the European Union. There is also precedent for tighter EU speech laws: as we recently reported, the EU is leaning toward new speech bans that would criminalize “misogyny” and negative comments about alternative gender identities.
New speech-restriction laws, whether national or at the EU level, would amplify a disturbing trend underway in Europe, where the right to free expression is gradually being replaced with a new legal default. What speech is not explicitly permitted, is banned.
Europe is not there yet, but wherever there is a modification of speech laws, it introduces more restrictions and government oversight. This trend is so pervasive that it has brought about an entire culture of speech restrictions. We recently exemplified this culture with a story from the United Kingdom, where you don’t even have to break speech-restriction laws to be targeted by the police for what you say.
Speech restrictions large and small
The Swedish government, following the same path as Macron launched a new government agency to target so-called disinformation. There is no mention in any media, English or Swedish, what criteria the agency will use in order to separate information from disinformation. However, the underlying premise is the same as in the French case, namely that government has the ability to separate fact from fiction and must do so for the good of the citizenry.
This type of macro-regulation of speech has a specific, ominous purpose. It aims to change the content and the direction of the public discourse. Its goal is to alter the context of private conversations, and the reference framework within which people form their own opinions. Macro regulations are put in place to carve out the path down which the public political conversation is supposed to travel. These regulations redraw the mental maps that people use to navigate the political landscape. If there are legal incentives needed to bring people onto the right path of public discourse, then government will put those legal incentives in place.
Speech restrictions also come in the form of micro-regulations, which ban certain words or phrases for the express purpose of establishing a moral truth. A case in point is the speech restriction enacted in Belgium in 2014, which outlawed so-called sexist or misogynistic comments about women. It was recently used to send a man to jail for allegedly saying, among other things, that women should submit to an assortment of male needs. While the man claimed to be speaking the truth, the judges in the case found his comments to be hateful and inciting violence against women.
This Belgian man’s comments, which indeed were unworthy of any self-respecting person, demonstrate well why government should not micro-regulate speech. The often-used motivation for such regulations, namely that the speech in question is “hateful,” codifies into law certain moral preferences, even emotional reactions of individuals. A moral truth is established, which means that alternative moral preferences are classified as false.
One of the central tenets of codified laws is that a man can be found guilty or innocent when tried under them. In order for someone to be found innocent, it has to be proven that the charge was false, i.e., that he did not commit the alleged offense. But how does a court prove that the moral preference behind a man’s speech is either true or false?
When government codifies moral truths
This is an important philosophical question, addressed at length by Axel Hägerström in his seminal Inquiry into the Philosophy of Law and Morals, but it is also a practical question that may soon come to bother many a jurist in Europe.
The best way to illustrate the need for free speech is to draw its practice to its most outrageous extension. The aforementioned Belgian man is a case in point: showing no respect whatsoever for women, he goes farther from decency and morality than every self-respecting man would ever wander. Does he have the right to say what he says?
Suppose he moderated his comments somewhat, saying instead that women should be housewives and not pursue professional careers. Does he have the right to free speech now? What if he moderated his comments yet another step and suggested that he wants this for women because, he says, they are better suited for homemakership than a career?
Suppose a man says that a woman should wear a veil to cover her face, and that she should not go out alone. Has he expressed hatred of women, or has he put in words his love for women and a desire to protect them?
When opinions are outlawed, the premise of the criminalization is that whoever speaks such opinions harbors a false moral preference. Most people would disagree with all the statements above, from the Belgian man’s outrageous extreme to the misguidedly benevolent ambition to protect women behind a veil. However, in order to define speech as criminal, government must axiomatically define it as false. It cannot base the definition on empirical evidence, because if it did, the same statement by two different people could turn out to have two different moral motivations. One man suggesting women should be housewives may do so out of malice and misogyny, while the other does so because he truly believes that women are better suited for that than professional work. Simply put: the law has to detach
The person who expresses an opinion is no longer allowed to define his own intentions when doing so.
Once the speaker has been deprived of the moral jurisdiction of his own speech, someone else claims that jurisdiction. That someone is government. By codifying moral content onto words and phrases, government takes it upon itself to classify some moral opinions as true and others as false.
This has the inevitable consequence of depriving individual citizens of their right to express moral values of their choice. But the consequences of micro-regulated speech are broader than that. Government assumes the role of truth arbiter: a man who claims that he believes, out of love for women, that they should take a submissive role to men, is defined statutorily as a liar. The truth, the law says, is that he does not love women: he hates them.
There is a regulatory backflow from micro-regulations to the macro level. When government writes truth into law, it appropriates truth and enumerates freedom. The former becomes the adversary of the latter, not just in moral terms. The same template is easily transplantable to macro-regulations of information; where moral truths and falsehoods are codified at the micro level, a dichotomy between right and wrong can be applied to information at the macro level.
The modern speech regulator does not use these erstwhile concepts. In today’s totalitarian vernacular, information is replaced with “news:” “right” becomes “true” and “wrong” becomes “fake.”
It is for the purpose of separating “true” from “fake” that the French government is gunning for new laws on what the public may and may not say.
The fallacy of pure reason
It is not difficult to predict that such laws, once in place, will gradually expand government control over the public discourse. History is full of examples of how the pursuit of authoritarianism, once underway, does not end well. Or, in words of wisdom from Paul Coleman, author of Censored, in The Public Discourse:
After it was accepted that criminalizing speech was a desirable way to produce better citizens, finding a stopping point has proven almost impossible and, for those in power, utterly undesirable.
This gradualist expansion of government is rarely intended from the outset. The government powers that constitute its beginning are instead often presented as the only intrusion into freedom needed for a specific purpose. There is an implicit belief that government is able to exercise its powers and restrain their use with equal excellence.
This belief in the abilities of government is founded in a form of arrogant confidence that seems to have become more widespread in our secular times. However, the phenomenon itself is not new; as noted by our own Daria Fedotova, secular arrogance is an old acquaintance:
Starting in the 18th century, a man of faith gave way to a man of reason—or, at least, that was the fashionable maxim. In truth, this turned out to be but a fancy name for a new short-sighted sort of idealism.
Fedotova analyzes how secularized reason led to misperceptions about equality and freedom. However, her point is just as applicable in the context of freedom of speech, where faith and reason meet and compete–an observation also explicated in the insightfully crafted pages of Roger Scruton’s Gentle Regrets. With reference to the author of Brave New World, Scruton points to our ability to reason is limited without God:
The chains of nature are those that God created. They are called reason, freedom, morality and choice. The human chains foretold by Huxley are of a quite different composition: they are made entirely of the flesh and the pleasures of the flesh. They bind so tightly that reason, choice and moral judgment can find no chink in which to grow and corrode them.
The term “flesh” is the segway back to freedom of speech. It refers to the limitations that our human existence places on our intellectual abilities, which are useless without God. It is through Him, and Him alone, that we can extend our reason and our morality to their fullest.
Thus, drawing on Fedotova and Scruton, we are able to make responsible moral choices, e.g., in how we exercise our freedom of speech and what political consequences we draw from its practice. Under the guidance of God we can trust our fellow citizens to exercise a similar level of due diligence, and to trust ourselves and our fellow citizens to address shared problems together.
In lieu of God and faith, as Fedotova notes, we elevate reason in its place, but reason without faith is a failing proposition. The belief that we can institutionalize faithless reason, i.e., give government jurisdiction over it, inevitably leads to the end station that Scruton spotlights: tighter and tighter restrictions on our reason, our morality and our choices.
The indispensable freedom to disagree
That is not to say we cannot reason our way to solutions to complex political and societal problems. We can, we should, and we must. But even as reason is guided by faith—not government—we need a method where our rational abilities are allowed to thrive and reach the height of their potential.
Government, constructed by people and run by people, is no more able to reason than its functionaries. When those functionaries leave God behind, as inevitably happens when government seeks to usurp the role of arbiter of truth, government is just as inept as the individual at exercising pure reason.
To separate right from wrong, truth from falsehood, we need to stretch our God-guided reasoning to its full potential. Our public discourse must rely on the very opposite of what speech-regulating governments will allow: it becomes critical to exercise, not curtail, free speech.
In short, freedom of speech is the quintessential political method in a free society. Few have explained this better than the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper. A herald of the falsifiability principle and the author of The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper explains why unquestioned authority is directly contrary to human progress.
At the heart of his argument is the concept of scientific facts, commonly considered to be the highest form of facts that we know. They play an indispensable role in the scientific method: it is the duty of the scientist to find facts that can refute existing theory. Doing so is a scientific virtue.
Translated into politics, this means that we all have a duty to try to refute established political notions and conventional wisdom. To take one example, if it is the prevailing opinion in our political discourse that large immigration is good, then it becomes virtuous to find facts that inform arguments against large immigration. If those new arguments more accurately explain current events in our society, then the challenge to conventional wisdom has prevailed. Policies are changed and society is better as a result. By contrast, if the challenge fails, its facts have been falsified in favor of the better policy.
The key point is that the falsification process in politics, just as in science, must run through a free and open debate of facts and their consequences, not through the grinds of some government bureaucracy. Freedom of speech is the only way we can overcome the limitations on our ability to reason. We can stretch those abilities to their fullest by placing our faith in God, but we can never break the boundaries of our own imperfection.
As Popper so skillfully explains, “all scientific descriptions of facts are highly selective” and based on preconceived notions or theories. Ideologies play the same role in politics. Only free speech can expose our limitations and bring us to the highest point possible in our pursuit of scientific and political progress.
If instead we renounce God as the guiding star for our morality and reason; if we trust government with taking reason beyond human boundaries; we fall for the old temptation that man can play God. We know that as the original sin.
A Government Monopoly on Truth
French President Emmanuel Macron recently declared that his government is considering tighter speech regulations. According to Newsweek, new speech-restriction laws would be designed to counter “fake news and misinformation.”
Leaning against a new report from a speech-law commission he appointed in October, President Macron set his crosshairs on online news outlets and commentators whose published material could be deemed “misinformation” or even “conspiracy theories.”
In its reporting on the same story, Politico added that Macron viewed the EU, as opposed to national governments, as the appropriate venue for “how to fight fake news.” This is noteworthy, given that France is currently the presiding country of the European Union. There is also precedent for tighter EU speech laws: as we recently reported, the EU is leaning toward new speech bans that would criminalize “misogyny” and negative comments about alternative gender identities.
New speech-restriction laws, whether national or at the EU level, would amplify a disturbing trend underway in Europe, where the right to free expression is gradually being replaced with a new legal default. What speech is not explicitly permitted, is banned.
Europe is not there yet, but wherever there is a modification of speech laws, it introduces more restrictions and government oversight. This trend is so pervasive that it has brought about an entire culture of speech restrictions. We recently exemplified this culture with a story from the United Kingdom, where you don’t even have to break speech-restriction laws to be targeted by the police for what you say.
Speech restrictions large and small
The Swedish government, following the same path as Macron launched a new government agency to target so-called disinformation. There is no mention in any media, English or Swedish, what criteria the agency will use in order to separate information from disinformation. However, the underlying premise is the same as in the French case, namely that government has the ability to separate fact from fiction and must do so for the good of the citizenry.
This type of macro-regulation of speech has a specific, ominous purpose. It aims to change the content and the direction of the public discourse. Its goal is to alter the context of private conversations, and the reference framework within which people form their own opinions. Macro regulations are put in place to carve out the path down which the public political conversation is supposed to travel. These regulations redraw the mental maps that people use to navigate the political landscape. If there are legal incentives needed to bring people onto the right path of public discourse, then government will put those legal incentives in place.
Speech restrictions also come in the form of micro-regulations, which ban certain words or phrases for the express purpose of establishing a moral truth. A case in point is the speech restriction enacted in Belgium in 2014, which outlawed so-called sexist or misogynistic comments about women. It was recently used to send a man to jail for allegedly saying, among other things, that women should submit to an assortment of male needs. While the man claimed to be speaking the truth, the judges in the case found his comments to be hateful and inciting violence against women.
This Belgian man’s comments, which indeed were unworthy of any self-respecting person, demonstrate well why government should not micro-regulate speech. The often-used motivation for such regulations, namely that the speech in question is “hateful,” codifies into law certain moral preferences, even emotional reactions of individuals. A moral truth is established, which means that alternative moral preferences are classified as false.
One of the central tenets of codified laws is that a man can be found guilty or innocent when tried under them. In order for someone to be found innocent, it has to be proven that the charge was false, i.e., that he did not commit the alleged offense. But how does a court prove that the moral preference behind a man’s speech is either true or false?
When government codifies moral truths
This is an important philosophical question, addressed at length by Axel Hägerström in his seminal Inquiry into the Philosophy of Law and Morals, but it is also a practical question that may soon come to bother many a jurist in Europe.
The best way to illustrate the need for free speech is to draw its practice to its most outrageous extension. The aforementioned Belgian man is a case in point: showing no respect whatsoever for women, he goes farther from decency and morality than every self-respecting man would ever wander. Does he have the right to say what he says?
Suppose he moderated his comments somewhat, saying instead that women should be housewives and not pursue professional careers. Does he have the right to free speech now? What if he moderated his comments yet another step and suggested that he wants this for women because, he says, they are better suited for homemakership than a career?
Suppose a man says that a woman should wear a veil to cover her face, and that she should not go out alone. Has he expressed hatred of women, or has he put in words his love for women and a desire to protect them?
When opinions are outlawed, the premise of the criminalization is that whoever speaks such opinions harbors a false moral preference. Most people would disagree with all the statements above, from the Belgian man’s outrageous extreme to the misguidedly benevolent ambition to protect women behind a veil. However, in order to define speech as criminal, government must axiomatically define it as false. It cannot base the definition on empirical evidence, because if it did, the same statement by two different people could turn out to have two different moral motivations. One man suggesting women should be housewives may do so out of malice and misogyny, while the other does so because he truly believes that women are better suited for that than professional work. Simply put: the law has to detach
The person who expresses an opinion is no longer allowed to define his own intentions when doing so.
Once the speaker has been deprived of the moral jurisdiction of his own speech, someone else claims that jurisdiction. That someone is government. By codifying moral content onto words and phrases, government takes it upon itself to classify some moral opinions as true and others as false.
This has the inevitable consequence of depriving individual citizens of their right to express moral values of their choice. But the consequences of micro-regulated speech are broader than that. Government assumes the role of truth arbiter: a man who claims that he believes, out of love for women, that they should take a submissive role to men, is defined statutorily as a liar. The truth, the law says, is that he does not love women: he hates them.
There is a regulatory backflow from micro-regulations to the macro level. When government writes truth into law, it appropriates truth and enumerates freedom. The former becomes the adversary of the latter, not just in moral terms. The same template is easily transplantable to macro-regulations of information; where moral truths and falsehoods are codified at the micro level, a dichotomy between right and wrong can be applied to information at the macro level.
The modern speech regulator does not use these erstwhile concepts. In today’s totalitarian vernacular, information is replaced with “news:” “right” becomes “true” and “wrong” becomes “fake.”
It is for the purpose of separating “true” from “fake” that the French government is gunning for new laws on what the public may and may not say.
The fallacy of pure reason
It is not difficult to predict that such laws, once in place, will gradually expand government control over the public discourse. History is full of examples of how the pursuit of authoritarianism, once underway, does not end well. Or, in words of wisdom from Paul Coleman, author of Censored, in The Public Discourse:
This gradualist expansion of government is rarely intended from the outset. The government powers that constitute its beginning are instead often presented as the only intrusion into freedom needed for a specific purpose. There is an implicit belief that government is able to exercise its powers and restrain their use with equal excellence.
This belief in the abilities of government is founded in a form of arrogant confidence that seems to have become more widespread in our secular times. However, the phenomenon itself is not new; as noted by our own Daria Fedotova, secular arrogance is an old acquaintance:
Fedotova analyzes how secularized reason led to misperceptions about equality and freedom. However, her point is just as applicable in the context of freedom of speech, where faith and reason meet and compete–an observation also explicated in the insightfully crafted pages of Roger Scruton’s Gentle Regrets. With reference to the author of Brave New World, Scruton points to our ability to reason is limited without God:
The term “flesh” is the segway back to freedom of speech. It refers to the limitations that our human existence places on our intellectual abilities, which are useless without God. It is through Him, and Him alone, that we can extend our reason and our morality to their fullest.
Thus, drawing on Fedotova and Scruton, we are able to make responsible moral choices, e.g., in how we exercise our freedom of speech and what political consequences we draw from its practice. Under the guidance of God we can trust our fellow citizens to exercise a similar level of due diligence, and to trust ourselves and our fellow citizens to address shared problems together.
In lieu of God and faith, as Fedotova notes, we elevate reason in its place, but reason without faith is a failing proposition. The belief that we can institutionalize faithless reason, i.e., give government jurisdiction over it, inevitably leads to the end station that Scruton spotlights: tighter and tighter restrictions on our reason, our morality and our choices.
The indispensable freedom to disagree
That is not to say we cannot reason our way to solutions to complex political and societal problems. We can, we should, and we must. But even as reason is guided by faith—not government—we need a method where our rational abilities are allowed to thrive and reach the height of their potential.
Government, constructed by people and run by people, is no more able to reason than its functionaries. When those functionaries leave God behind, as inevitably happens when government seeks to usurp the role of arbiter of truth, government is just as inept as the individual at exercising pure reason.
To separate right from wrong, truth from falsehood, we need to stretch our God-guided reasoning to its full potential. Our public discourse must rely on the very opposite of what speech-regulating governments will allow: it becomes critical to exercise, not curtail, free speech.
In short, freedom of speech is the quintessential political method in a free society. Few have explained this better than the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper. A herald of the falsifiability principle and the author of The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper explains why unquestioned authority is directly contrary to human progress.
At the heart of his argument is the concept of scientific facts, commonly considered to be the highest form of facts that we know. They play an indispensable role in the scientific method: it is the duty of the scientist to find facts that can refute existing theory. Doing so is a scientific virtue.
Translated into politics, this means that we all have a duty to try to refute established political notions and conventional wisdom. To take one example, if it is the prevailing opinion in our political discourse that large immigration is good, then it becomes virtuous to find facts that inform arguments against large immigration. If those new arguments more accurately explain current events in our society, then the challenge to conventional wisdom has prevailed. Policies are changed and society is better as a result. By contrast, if the challenge fails, its facts have been falsified in favor of the better policy.
The key point is that the falsification process in politics, just as in science, must run through a free and open debate of facts and their consequences, not through the grinds of some government bureaucracy. Freedom of speech is the only way we can overcome the limitations on our ability to reason. We can stretch those abilities to their fullest by placing our faith in God, but we can never break the boundaries of our own imperfection.
As Popper so skillfully explains, “all scientific descriptions of facts are highly selective” and based on preconceived notions or theories. Ideologies play the same role in politics. Only free speech can expose our limitations and bring us to the highest point possible in our pursuit of scientific and political progress.
If instead we renounce God as the guiding star for our morality and reason; if we trust government with taking reason beyond human boundaries; we fall for the old temptation that man can play God. We know that as the original sin.
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