Why do free speech debates make us so angry?
In January 2015, two members of al-Qaida gunned down cartoonists at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo in retaliation for their publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. In the following weeks, my Facebook page split in two. Many of my childhood friends (I grew up in France and went to school near Paris) expressed their sadness at the death of artists they had been familiar with for decades, their anger over religious extremism and their fear about the waning of free speech.
Meanwhile, many of my British and American academic colleagues, who were discovering Charlie Hebdo and its garishly offensive cartoons for the first time, worried about the stigmatisation of French Muslims and cast doubt on the wisdom of publishing the images in the first place; one reposted a link to a blog that described the murdered cartoonists as “racist assholes”.
I was glad in a way that there was very little overlap between these two groups of friends. Each would have seen some of the opinions expressed by the other side – and therefore the people expressing them – as deeply unpleasant and morally unconscionable. Two sets of people who, a week earlier, had shared the same sorts of memes and were amused or outraged by similar things, had become two radically different groups with seemingly incompatible values. I spent a long time writing anguished comments on various friends’ posts, trying to set out where I stood on all this – and then deleted them. They didn’t seem to help. Instead, I picked up the phone, which worked a bit better. Soon after that, I left Facebook. And, since I happen to be an anthropologist, I started a research project to figure out what was going on.
Free speech debates seem to be about abstract principles and rules: what should be allowed? When does it cross a line? Do we need more or less regulation? These disagreements are real – but they don’t explain why we get so deeply angry, upset and divided over freedom of speech. In reality, the free speech wars of recent years are not just about rules – they’re about what it means to be a good person. Notice how such debates are rife with caricatures of “types” of people: snowflakes, trolls, cancel-culture warriors, edgelords, bigots, crybullies, incels and so on. What’s really driving these debates is a set of implicit judgments about character: what kind of person wants to regulate another person’s speech? What kind of person doesn’t care about the effects their words have on others?
This is the realm of what philosophers call “virtue ethics”. Arguments about free speech are arguments about a set of virtues – sincerity, courage, resilience, generosity, care – and the character of people who espouse them. This is what those Facebook posts were implicitly asking: are you the kind of person who stands with murdered cartoonists, even when you personally dislike what they drew? Are you the kind of person who braves the crowd to call out social injustice? This is why it all feels so personal – straining relationships, dividing families, leading to blazing rows or sullen silences.
On the European and US scene, almost everyone seems to agree that free speech is broadly a good thing. Yet we find people struggling over different visions of what kind of (good) person a free speaker is. I would argue that three such visions have been particularly prominent: the first casts the free speaker as a rational, measured citizen sharing ideas – perhaps the eloquent contributor on Question Time, the writer on a literary panel, the citizen in a town hall meeting. In the second, the free speaker is a passionate breaker of rules and conventions – think blasphemous artworks such as Piss Christ by Andres Serrano, or the “souping” of the Mona Lisa by climate activists. The third sees the free speaker as a brave and honourable person standing up for the truth – classically, whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden or Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor whose WeChat posts warned the world about Covid-19.
Sometimes a person can be cast as all three at the same time. Consider Salman Rushdie, arguing in measured, nonpartisan tones for freedom of artistic expression, passionately denouncing censorship, and standing up for free speech at the risk of his life. More controversially, this is how supporters of Charlie Hebdo saw the journal in the immediate aftermath of the shootings: Charlie stood for a rational, secular commitment to debating religion and religious extremism in public; its staff poked fun at established figures of religious and secular authority; and they did all this, selflessly and bravely, at the risk of their lives. Critics challenged this casting, of course – for them, Charlie Hebdo was neither reasonable, nor targeting the powerful, nor selfless. In other contexts, the three characters of the free speaker are inherently in tension with each other: the activist shouting passionately from the barricades beyond all reason and measure; the rational citizen calmly picking apart the activist’s most cherished convictions; the brave truth-speaker scandalising and shocking polite citizens.
Once we see free speech debates as debates about ethics and character rather than rules and principles, we can understand why people might argue for free speech one minute, and denounce their opponents for what they say the next. Examples are all around us, including Maga activists engaging in cancel culture after the shooting of Charlie Kirk, or progressives who had previously defended campus speech codes denouncing their use against pro-Palestine protesters. This is often put down to “double standards”, confusion or insincerity. But if you start from character, a different picture emerges. Each of our three “types” genuinely defends freedom of speech, but each also sometimes has good reasons to demand silence. The rational citizen endorses the limitation of speech through law, copyright or civility; the passionate activist might feel the powerful should be silenced to allow the weak to speak; the honourable truth teller demands respect for their values and reparations for insults to them or their friends.
Of course, these archetypal speakers are fictions. But they are already more three-dimensional than the flat caricatures we started with (snowflake, troll, etc). The aim of this anthropological perspective is not to change your mind about free speech or dent your convictions – it is to give a language through which to see more clearly the convictions of the other side, and recognise which premises are, in fact, shared by both.l
There is no single knockdown argument for free speech that will stand the push and pull of our current partisan debates. Instead, we need a commitment to free speech that is less categorical and therefore more robust, like a rope woven of multiple strands; one which has room, each in their turn, for reason and cool logic, fiery passion and courageous integrity.
Matei Candea is a professor at the University of Cambridge and author of Reason, Carnival and Honour: An Anthropology of Free Speech (Pelican).
Further reading
What Is Free Speech? by Fara Dabhoiwala (Penguin, £14.99)
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin, £14.99)
The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (Penguin, £10.99)