Freedom of speech and hate speech

I've been involved in debates, sometimes in comment strings around blogland, on the issue of free speech. These debates generally take the form of someone claiming in absolutist language that freedom of speech can never be abrogated or regulated in even highly qualified ways. The principle itself is sacred. I then make some argument about the limits to freedom of speech in the larger context of social responsibility and moral obligation. My claim is usually that there are situations in which it is perfectly justified to limit free speech, while acknowledging that this is always a political issue and can thus be abused. We have to be careful of the abuse of public speech from all directions, not merely authority. I'm usually accused (by absolutists!) of being "totalitarian." Their counterargument is generally a repeat of the quote attributed inaccurately to Voltaire that, "I may detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." That's not an argument; that's an assertion that appeals to the philosophical authority of Voltaire. Assertions are fine by me, but without any argument to back them up, they fall apart, and thus become a means by which one person imposes his view on another. This is especially the case when the whiff of an argument is basically an appeal to authority, which is precisely what free-speechers supposedly do not want. This, I would think, is also contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of the principle of free speech. It sure makes many civil libertarians look silly.

A fairly orthodox liberal philosopher I like quite a bit, Jeremy Waldron, writing in the London Review of Books, discusses the claims for and against regulating hate speech. We disagree about quite a bit, of course, but I find his discussion of free speech spot on. Take a look.

...I now live in the United States and teach at a law school. My colleagues are appalled when I tell them this story of the English racist sent to prison. This, they say, would never happen in America on account of the First Amendment, and it shouldn’t happen anywhere because free speech is a fundamental right. Recently, I have heard them voice similar views about the jailing in Austria of David Irving – the man who prided himself on having shaken more hands that shook hands with Hitler than anyone else in the world – for Holocaust denial. It seems that racists and Nazis are never far from the centre of concerns about free speech. In the US, First Amendment scholars point proudly to the famous intervention by the American Civil Liberties Union in 1977 to defend the right of National Socialist agitators, under the leadership of a man called Frank Collin, to march – swastikas flying – through a Jewish neighbourhood in Skokie, Illinois (a village just north of Chicago), where many Holocaust survivors lived.

Faced with the prospect of a Nazi march, the Skokie village board had passed ordinances banning parades with military-style uniforms, banning the distribution of pamphlets promoting the hatred of any group in the community, and requiring a $350,000 indemnity bond to be posted in advance of any march. The ACLU challenged these measures on behalf of the Nazis, and the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit declared the ordinances unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. (In the event, the Skokie march did not take place. Collin’s Nazis marched in Marquette Park in Chicago and it was there that they handed out pamphlets saying ‘Death to the Jews’. Collin abandoned National Socialism after spending time in prison in the 1980s for child molesting.)...

To begin with, the language attributed to Voltaire is bewildering. ‘Defend to the death your right to say it?’ Whose death? How would death be involved? I guess its most attractive meaning is something like: ‘I will fight and, if need be, lay down my life for a Bill of Rights that may have this implication.’ A more troubling reading, however, is that Nazi speech is worth protecting even if a consequence of that protection is that someone gets hurt or killed. ‘I will defend your right to say it, even if your saying it makes violence more likely against the people attacked in your pamphlets.’ Is that what is meant? Defenders of free speech squirm on this point. On the one hand, they want to say that we should be willing to brave death for the sake of this important individual right. On the other hand, they assure us dogmatically that there is no clear evidence of any causal connection between, say, racist posters and incidents of racial violence, between pamphlets that say ‘Hitler should have finished the job’ and anti-semitic attacks, or between pornography and violence against women. Indeed, they pretend to have no idea of what such a causal mechanism could possibly be: ‘We are defending only the Nazis’ speech. How on earth could there be any connection between what they say and the things that some violent individuals do?’

It’s a strange dichotomy because, in other contexts, American civil liberties scholars have no difficulty at all in seeing a connection between speech and the possibility of violence. They point to it all the time as a way of justifying restrictions on citizens’ interventions at political gatherings. If Donald Rumsfeld comes to give a speech and someone in the audience shouts out that he is a war criminal, the heckler is quickly and forcibly removed. When I came to America, I was amazed that nobody thought this was a violation of the First Amendment. (Shouting comments at public meetings was another of my favourite pastimes when I was young and irresponsible.) But I was told by my American colleagues that heckling presages disorder, and disorder threatens security. There is a time and place for heckling – usually several blocks away in a pen set up by the police to ‘accommodate’ legitimate protest, which no one except the police and the protestors themselves, certainly not Donald Rumsfeld, has any prospect of hearing. And that’s all the First Amendment requires. So there is an odd combination of tolerance for the most hateful speech imaginable, on the one hand, and obsequious deference, on the other, to the choreography which our rulers judge essential for their occasional public appearances. The Nazis can disrupt the streets of Skokie, but those who disrupt Rumsfeld’s message will be carried away with the hands of secret service agents clamped over their mouths. I have given up trying to make sense of any of this...

...["abyss-redemption"] is the boutique faith of a few liberals who take the resilience of their own voyeurism as a sign that speech is really harmless. If it signifies anything, what it signifies is that the costs of hate speech, such as they are, are not spread evenly across the community that is supposed to tolerate them. The Robert Relfs of the world may not harm the people who call for their toleration, but then few of them are depicted as animals in posters plastered around Leamington Spa. We should speak to those who are depicted in this way, or those whose suffering or whose parents’ suffering is mocked by Frank Collin and his Nazi colleagues, before we conclude that tolerating this sort of speech builds character.