Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

“I Find That Offensive!”
CLAIRE FOX

Timothy Garton Ash makes no small claim for the 10 principles of free speech around which he builds his book: “If everyone everywhere followed them, everyone everywhere would be better off.” The principles cover things like diversity, privacy and, lastly, courage (“We decide for ourselves and face the consequences”). Not that the author thinks free speech an unlimited good like wisdom or even apple pie. Among evils, he counts “paedophile images and sewage-tides of abuse”.

This is, he stresses, no book in the ordinary sense. It is constructed on a “click-through model”: instead of merely borrowing or buying books mentioned in the text, the reader can click on links at Dr Ash’s project site freespeechdebate.com and soak up extra information. Such research is not something that even the author always thinks worth doing, however. On the very next page he quotes Michel Foucault saying that Zeno of Sidon argued that free speech should be taught as a skill, like navigation. “I don’t know how much of that is Zeno,” he confesses, “and how much Foucault.” There is a limit in this brief life even to clicking-through.
One of the 10 principles of particular interest (to me and many Tablet readers) concerns religion: “We respect the believer but not ­necessarily the content of the belief.” For a start, Ash distinguishes between “recognition respect” (as for every human being) and “appraisal respect” (as for the talent of a pianist). For him, as “an atheist and a liberal secularist”, there can be “no appraisal respect for the content of the belief” of a theist such as a Muslim. Love the Muslim, or at least respect him, the distinction dictates, but hate Islam if you think it false.

 “But what is religion?” he asks, without giving a clear answer. He quotes something from L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, and calls it “infantile poppycock”, which it may well be. But soon he himself invokes supposed evidence from “evolutionary psychology to indicate that some kind of religious impulse or inclination is quite deep in our brains”. I’d attribute any such impulse to an apprehension of reality and the sharing of culture. Digging deep into the brain to find it is not exactly poppycock, but it seems futile.

For all his liberalism, Ash can sound oppressively dirigiste. He contemplates “means, ranging from penal servitude to individual courtesy” to implement his 10 principles. He wonders whether a religion might not have a duty “to put its more esoteric sacred texts online”. Pity the poor Yazedis or Mandaeans with their closely guarded holy secrets. He thinks perhaps the European Court of Human Rights ought to tidy up the “vague and archaic” blasphemy laws of 47 European countries, and he cannot see how God, even if there were a God, could be offended by blasphemy.

This is one reason that Islam tests his preference for tolerance. He heads one section “The trouble with Islam”. Can Muslim “reformers”, he asks, sway fellow believers towards “accepting the basic terms of coexistence in a liberal society and secular state”? For “all democrats should” believe in “the separation of church and state”, he approvingly quotes the writer Ian Buruma declaring. Ash acknowledges that Britain is not a secular state (since the head of state also heads the Established Church), but he likes the US model of “a public sphere organised on the principle of freedom for religion”. I’d say that America excludes religion from the public square, admitting it only as a hobbyist pastime. That is less than the last Pope called for in his address in Westminster Hall, which was met by wide approval.

Bad as it is, I’d prefer the status quo in Britain to the brave new religious principle as envisaged by Timothy Garton Ash. A sharp sketch of how bad things for free speech can be now in Britain is given by Claire Fox in “I Find That Offensive!”. Her target is the “generational fragility” behind such things as a suggestion at an NUS Women’s Conference to “move to jazz hands rather than clapping, as it’s triggering anxiety”.

Fox, educated at a Catholic school, later a supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Party and best known from BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze, asks why the young in particular have developed an “insidious deference to offence”. She does not discuss the “main ­explanation, which is undoubtedly the decline of a liberal commitment to free speech” (see above), but focuses on social policies which have formed the new generation.

If I were 19, I’d find myself blushing with anger and shame at this lively polemic against the narcissistic “Generation Snowflake”. But her assault on presumptuous theories (micro-aggressions, “safe places”, trigger warnings, no-platforming, child protection and self-esteem) carried me along and left its mark.