Free Speech: Threat, or Menace?
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This is more or less an open thread. I solicit your opinions in the comments; don’t disappoint me!
Resolved: There is no general “right” to nonverbal “speech,” and indeed, some should be banned.
Pro
Freedom of speech has always historically meant the freedom to express ideas in words; the modern fancy that any action whatsoever can be considered “speech” if it conveys, however indirectly, a message is unsustainable in logical argument.
Mere outrage is not by itself a message; at best, it’s a medium… and freedom of speech does not imply freedom of every medium of expression. For example, does freedom of speech include the “right” of two high-school students to strip naked in the classroom and have sex? But they may thus be expressing the “message” that they are in love. And does it include “selling” property that doesn’t belong to you, without the real owner’s permission? But that may express your belief that all property should be distributed equally among everyone.
Speech literally means speech — talking, words, sentences — not anything that moves anyone to do or think anything. Granted, some nonverbal communication might be accorded the brevet status of speech; “flipping the bird,” for example, or maybe even something as rude as mooning a speaker you hate. But those are privileges, not rights, and they can be allowed or forbidden on the whim of the authorities… so long as those authorities are even-handed in their judgments and don’t use their power to advance one cause while restricting or retarding another. (But that can be a separate cause of action — you can go to court and argue that the government is abusing its power to suppress nonverbal speech.)
Finally, there are some images and other nonverbal communications that are so vile and degrading that they literally harm people — permanently and irrevocably — either through encouraging horrific and ghastly behavior, or simply via psychological scarring and moral numbing. The victims include children, of course, but often adults as well.
Consider snuff films, even those that do not actually kill or harm any of the actors (adult or child), but create an amazingly realistic depiction of such sexual violence and murder. If we cannot ban a film, for example, that graphically depicts the sodomistic rape of a child (even if faked) — and revels in such behavior, depicting it as normal and pleasurable — then we are no longer a civilization, just a gathering of atavistic voyeurs and beastial bipeds.
At least “mere words” haven’t the power to move people towards the soulless night of absolute amorality, as graphic or other nonverbal communication can. Can we not at least restrict “freedom of speech” to actual speech, words, which can be countered… and allow communities to ban some types of nonverbal “speech” that simply cannot be counterprogrammed, no matter how many wholesome, family-value programs are made available in response?
Con
Sometimes, mere words are not sufficient to express a powerful, important idea in its fullness. For thousands of years, human beings have used nonverbal media — everything from music to art to sculpture to dance to what today we would call protest and passive resistance — to communicate and advance ideas that simply cannot be adequeately conveyed by words… either because the authorities won’t allow the words to be spoken, or because the idea itself is ineffable.
For only one example, can religious experience be reduced to mere words? Suppose some government banned the Catholic mass — but allowed a transcript to be printed and distributed. Freedom of religion aside, would that satisfy the intent of freedom of speech?
Great Britain at one time banned the singing of Irish revolutionary songs in the six counties (Ulster) in northern Ireland. Presumably, one could recite the words, but not sing them. Is that an acceptable limit on freedom of speech? Who, besides the government itself, benefits from such censorship of music?
If Iran bans the act of displaying an American flag on Iranian soil, doesn’t that violate Iranians’ freedom of speech? Could anything, words or actions, be more eloquent in expressing how a Persian might feel about what the mullahs have done to Iran, and the fights they have picked, than hoisting the flag of the freest country on Planet Earth, which is of course Iran’s Great Satan?
Some ideas are ineffable: They cannot be fully described verbally, but only approximated; they cannot be properly argued or advanced with mere words. If we allow governments to ban nonverbal communication, they will inevitably use that authority to suppress those ineffable ideas that threaten their own hegemony or power (such as freedom, liberty, democracy, and disfavored religions), while blithely allowing nonverbal “speech” supporting those ineffable ideas that the government likes (like obedience to authority, or the singular divinity of Allah). That is certainly the pattern in every country that suppresses nonverbal “speech”… suppression is never “even-handed!”
Our only defense to vile and degrading nonverbal speech is to produce moral and uplifting speech (verbal and nonverbal) to combat the former. It can never be right for government to decide what types of speech, verbal or nonverbal, shall be allowed; suppressing the one is no different from suppressing the other: Both boil down to thought control, which is just another word for tyranny.
No matter how irredeemable some communication is, suppressing it comes at too high a moral cost.
Motivation
My thoughts on this topic are driven in part by this story, but also by some of the bizarre and nauseating “installations” and “performance art” that has littered the fine arts for some years now… works that serve as defining examples of charlatanism, such as segmented human corpses, sexual self-mutilation, and the antics of people like, e.g., Lisa Suckdog.
Cross-posted on Hot Air’s rogues’ gallery…
