Freedom of speech
Oct. 1st, 2012 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Somebody on Twitter linked to a really pointed Al Jazeera article: The freedom to criticise free speech. It concisely articulates something I've thought for a long time, but haven't quite been able to state without waffling a lot. tl;dr version: freedom of speech – Muslims have it too.
This is my big bone of contention with large swathes of the New Atheist / Skeptic / Rational movement(s): they seem to be very shouty about the right, mostly exercised by people who are (entirely coincidentally I don't think) white, middle-class men living in powerful, rich countries, to publish utterly vile, ignorant, hateful stuff about Muslims and Islam. But as soon as any Muslim raises the slightest objection to this, it's an attack on free speech and the very foundations of democracy. Yes, it's important to protect freedom of speech you don't agree with, but I don't see much knee-jerk Voltaire quoting when it's Muslims exercising that right.
Even in the most repressive regimes, powerful, influential, well-connected people can pretty much say what they like, there's nothing especially notable about that. The point of enshrining freedom of speech as a right is that it applies to people of subaltern status. Immigrants, members of minority religions or ethnic groups, these days people living formerly colonized countries. If it's important to you to have or protect the right to express prejudices, then you should care at least equally much about the right of oppressed or relatively less powerful to point out that bigotry is bigotry. They also have the right to refuse to give money or attention to people publishing bigoted stuff, that's not an attack on free speech, that's exercising their democratic, free market right to give their business to people whose views they agree with. And yes, some of them are wrong, they see things as offensive or attacking when they're actually true and harmless. So? They still have the right to hold and express their opinions, that's the whole point about freedom of speech.
This is my big bone of contention with large swathes of the New Atheist / Skeptic / Rational movement(s): they seem to be very shouty about the right, mostly exercised by people who are (entirely coincidentally I don't think) white, middle-class men living in powerful, rich countries, to publish utterly vile, ignorant, hateful stuff about Muslims and Islam. But as soon as any Muslim raises the slightest objection to this, it's an attack on free speech and the very foundations of democracy. Yes, it's important to protect freedom of speech you don't agree with, but I don't see much knee-jerk Voltaire quoting when it's Muslims exercising that right.
Even in the most repressive regimes, powerful, influential, well-connected people can pretty much say what they like, there's nothing especially notable about that. The point of enshrining freedom of speech as a right is that it applies to people of subaltern status. Immigrants, members of minority religions or ethnic groups, these days people living formerly colonized countries. If it's important to you to have or protect the right to express prejudices, then you should care at least equally much about the right of oppressed or relatively less powerful to point out that bigotry is bigotry. They also have the right to refuse to give money or attention to people publishing bigoted stuff, that's not an attack on free speech, that's exercising their democratic, free market right to give their business to people whose views they agree with. And yes, some of them are wrong, they see things as offensive or attacking when they're actually true and harmless. So? They still have the right to hold and express their opinions, that's the whole point about freedom of speech.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-01 08:58 pm (UTC)Person A does something unpleasant/bigoted/discriminatory.
Person B tries to get them to stop.
Person A says "you're treading all over my right to free speech!"
See also efforts of parts of the US white Christian right to convince people that white Christian right-wingers are a beleagured minority.
I am seriously confused as to why you think this is something the "New Atheist / Skeptic / Rational movement(s)" are doing; I've only seen them being Person B over arguments like whether evolution should be taught in schools. Am I missing something?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-01 09:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-01 09:30 pm (UTC)Don't have links to hand, but the thing that started me off thinking about this was the controversy about the Danish cartoons. I've seen those cartoons (in a Dutch news magazine), and they are really, really disgusting and hateful, they would pretty much fit into Der Stürmer and I'm not just saying that for Godwin points. I am generally sympathetic to the idea that part of free speech means that people should not face legal sanction for drawing or publishing such cartoons, vile though they are. But a lot of the reaction from prominent Atheists / Skeptics was moral panic about the reaction from the Muslim community, including boycotting the magazines that printed the cartoons and in some cases boycotting Danish goods altogether. If racists have the right to publish graphic pictures of the Prophet Mohammed raping children, surely Muslims have the right to condemn those images, and they have the right to use strong language, they don't have to be measured and polite in their reactions to protect the freedom of speech of the racists.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-01 09:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-01 10:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-01 10:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-01 10:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-01 11:02 pm (UTC)Harris is much more strident (you missed "shrill", "fundamentalist" and "militant": see the fake convert Harris) about the right of people to make bad art because it's that right that's under threat.
and they have the right to use strong language, they don't have to be measured and polite in their reactions to protect the freedom of speech of the racists.
I think Harris is right to criticise people who hold signs threatening other people with beheading, personally.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-01 11:06 pm (UTC)Most people I know don't have any connection to the Muslims-are-evil meme, whether tied to religion or not, but I've heard "Islam is an especially bad example of religion" ideas from a couple of places in the atheist blogosphere. I don't know how widespread the idea is.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-01 11:09 pm (UTC)Actually, I agree with Blackford more: http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=5969 for that.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-01 11:19 pm (UTC)Personally, I wouldn't draw Mohammed but I support the right of others to do so if they wish. I believe that as a matter of harm reduction, such pictures should have trigger warnings. That'd be my Schelling point (if that's an accurate use of the term): people get to make the pictures, but they shouldn't make other people look at them. If the mere existence of such things is too much for some Muslims, that's tough. If the people making the pictures insist on their right to draw them in chalk on pavements, they're being pretty rude.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-01 11:58 pm (UTC)1 != 2
Date: 2012-10-02 02:18 am (UTC)From the article: "In America, a nation was divided by a sandwich. Across the world, people are dying because of a Z-grade film trailer."
Shooting people is not free speech. The correct analogue to what happened in Benghazi wasn't gay people boycotting chicken sandwiches, it was Salvi hosing my gynecologist's office with automatic weapons fire and Tiller being killed by a sniper for the Christian god.
I am 100% in favor of offended people expressing their severe displeasure. With words. Pictures are also okay. No bullets. No nooses. No fires. Allow me to suggest boycots and marches.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-02 08:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-02 08:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-02 09:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-02 09:23 am (UTC)I am not entirely surprised that you perceive this right to be threatened, because you consume a lot of media that is pushing this line. I just think it's really barely reality based. The murder of Theo van Gogh was, yes, a threat to free speech (as well as being an actual murder which just about nobody is in favour of). The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a serious threat to free speech. Muslims protesting against Mohammed cartoons and bad anti-Muslim propaganda films, not so much.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-02 09:46 am (UTC)But there isn't any (meaningful) encroachment on free speech. Atheists have the right to draw pictures of Mohammed, and Muslims have the right to call for the blaspheming infidels who do that to be beheaded. Both sides in that case are exercising their rights in an unpleasant way, but we all agree that freedom of speech includes unpleasant speech.
I can pretty much bet that you, and the people who draw Mohammed cartoons of various levels of offensiveness, and Harris and Blackford and all the rest, are never going to be arrested for exercising your freedom of speech. You're never going to be held without charge for weeks under the Terrorism Act for exercising your freedom of speech. You're never going to be extradited to a country that routinely tortures political dissidents for exercising your freedom of speech, or kept in isolation in an offshore prison camp for having visited an area of the world that contains training camps and madrassas promoting political ideas the Western establishment doesn't like. You're never going to make an intemperate remark in an online forum and find that the places you attend regularly come under heavy police surveillance or your friends' homes get searched for pamphlets and books critical of democracy and western values.
If you want to protest about freedom of speech, why not address some of those issues, which right now, not in some hypothetical slippery slope future, affect many Muslims? And yes, some of the speech that triggers these significant human rights violations is downright vile and offensive, but we all agree that freedom of speech includes freedom to say unpalatable things, right?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-02 09:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-02 09:59 am (UTC)Yes, I think this is very true. I don't know whether bad-things-more-common-in-some-segments-of-Islam are better or worse than bad-things-more-common-in-some-segments-of-Atheism, or bad-things-more-common-in-some-segments-of-Christianity, but whether they are or not, I think people seize on objections to them because they're unfamiliar. (To be fair, many people also do the complete opposite and spend all their effort objecting to the dominant religion where they are, but that doesn't make either ok.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-02 09:59 am (UTC)It's quite amazing how many people will pull out the "OMG FREE SPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH" crap whenever anyone tells them their speech is nasty and hurtful.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-02 10:02 am (UTC)The problem for me is that a certain proportion of atheists are calling the words, boycotts and marches an attack on their freedom of speech, I suppose because some of the protesters share the same religion as some violent extremists.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-02 10:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-02 10:10 am (UTC)There might be a solidarity argument - no, Harris won't be arrested for drawing Mohammed; but there are countries where doing so is illegal and might well lead to imprisonment or death. However this "campaign" doesn't really seem to be helping any! Just... being really annoying.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-02 10:13 am (UTC)The worst things perpetuated in the name of Christianity and Islam (and many other religions too) go all the way up to genocide. So obviously no aspect of atheism is as bad as that. One might possibly expect a morally committed religious person to leave their religion if their religion is promoting mass-murder. Still not just to carry out collective punishment of everybody who shares a religion with anyone who does awful things, though.