Freedom of speech and from speech

Sometimes different freedoms clash, making one choose one or the other if no compromise is possible.

One’s individual choice is clear enough – and that’s perhaps the most essential freedom, deciding what’s more important to you. When the choice has to be collective, however, a previously clear line of thought begins to meander all over the place.

Thus, if someone says something I find offensive, I can tell him to shut up, imply he has an Oedipal relationship with his mother, or simply walk out. But what happens when a governmental or commercial institution offends me by word or deed?

More to the point, what if I offend it? I have little recourse against such institutions, but they can punish me in all sorts of ways, from legal to economic to social.

These questions have been prompted by the continuing saga of Nigel Farage and Coutts, the latter closing the account of the former.

I wrote a piece about it the other day, saying that banks have a right to close accounts without owing anyone an explanation. Any business, I wrote, can choose whom to serve and whom not to.

Many bars in the US display signs saying, “The management reserves the right to refuse service”. Quite right too: most bars are their owner’s private property, just as my house is mine. As I am within my rights to deny anybody access to my house, so does a bar keeper have a right to decide to let someone in or not.

In other words, his property rights supersede an individual’s right to drink at that bar. Good, now we’ve established some hierarchy of freedoms. More important, we’ve realised that such a hierarchy is essential to resolve inevitable clashes.

(This doesn’t fully apply to Coutts because it isn’t completely private. It belongs to the NatWest Group, almost 40 per cent of which is owned by the public – us. Any shareholder with that kind of stake would demand, and definitely get, an explanation from the management of how the business is run. The explanation Coutts has given since I wrote my piece made me wish we could do to its doors what it did to Farage’s account.)

What about an individual’s right to offend and to be offended? Putting it another way, what if your right to freedom of speech clashes with my right to freedom from speech? If the conflict is strictly private, it can be handled in private ways, from a reasoned argument to the possibilities I mentioned above to perhaps even fisticuffs.

Alas, few conflicts remain private in our politicised times. No one is believed to be strictly an individual – we are all supposed to be members of some community, dread word. Thus, if a homosexual takes exception to my mentioning Leviticus or Romans, I’m deemed to have offended not just him, but the whole community he represents.

Similarly, transsexuals, MeToo feminists, BLM and Just Stop Oil activists, and other such ‘communities’ scream bloody murder whenever they feel their right to freedom from speech has been infringed. Thus they demand that the state infringe my right to freedom of speech.

In those cases, the clash is easy to resolve in a just and sensible manner. This isn’t to say it will be resolved in a just and sensible manner, only that it would be easy to do so, given the will.

Freedom of speech is fundamental to our polity, civility, law, history, our whole way of life. Hence it occupies a higher rung on the hierarchical ladder and should supersede anyone’s right to feel offended, rightly or wrongly.

So far so good. Yet it can’t possibly mean that freedom of speech must not ever be curtailed in any way. In fact, it is, and always has been. Any kind of incitement to violence against any group is against the law in every country I know, for example.

Yet where do we draw the line? Let’s say a homosexual ‘community’ gets offended by something I write about it (not a hypothetical example) and claims that describing their practices as an aberration constitutes inciting violence against them.

Now, I’ve known troglodytes both in Russia and in the US who attacked homosexuals in the street. Some Houstonians I met back in the early 70s turned that into a weekly sporting event, which they called something that sounded like “kicking ice”. (It took me some time in Texas to adjust my ear to the local phonetic peculiarities.)

I considered them savages and didn’t mind letting them know what I thought. Still, I don’t subscribe to the liberal misconception that doing anything consensual is perfectly fine as long as innocent bystanders don’t get hurt. There exist certain absolute and objective moral dicta that can’t be cancelled out by such subjective factors as consent.

However, inasmuch as we no longer criminalise homosexuals, they do nothing illegal. They definitely do something immoral, but none of us is without sin.

Begrudgingly or otherwise, I have to respect their right to do whatever it is they do. But they – and society at large – must reciprocate by respecting my right to freedom of speech. If I find homosexuality wrong and teaching about it at schools abominable, I should be able to say so without risking repercussions.

If homosexuality is some sort of mental aberration, gender dysphoria is a mental illness. If you disagree, you’ll have to explain to me why a man claiming to be King Solomon is mad, and one claiming to be a woman isn’t. That would be a hard sell.

However, while no one insists that I take that putative Solomon at his word and ask him for sage advice, society does insist that I accept transsexuals with readiness and deference. It then denies my freedom of speech by mandating that I use a set of pronouns that violate grammar, taste, common sense and evidence before my eyes.

Again we see that same conflict. Transsexuals and their champions insist that their freedom from hearing the pronouns they find offensive trumps my freedom to use the pronouns I find appropriate.

Now, this is a special and extreme case. If we accept the obvious fact that transsexuals are somewhat insane, then this is a case of the lunatics not only running the asylum but having the license to turn the sane world into one.  

However, some clashes between freedoms are less straightforward than that. The American conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who is a most sensible young man, recently fielded a leftie’s question with his customary rhetorical adroitness. Saying I find homosexuality wrong, he said, doesn’t mean I’m inciting violence against homosexuals unless I explicitly call for it.

As a lawyer himself, he should be familiar with the concept of reasonable inference. If a US presidential candidate (is there no end to that awful Kennedy clan?) says that the Covid virus was specially engineered to spare Jews, some people so disposed are bound to conclude that it was the Jews who engineered it to promote their knavish schemes.

Since the virus ended up killing seven million worldwide, those same people (in the biological sense only, you understand) may seek retaliation – this though Kennedy didn’t explicitly call for it. And if the media picked up his version and peddled it as fact, violence would almost certainly ensue.

So should Kennedy have been denied his freedom of speech? Probably. Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know, really. And I could think of many other situations where the same question and the same answer may arise.

In most cases, a conflict between freedom of speech and from it should be decided in favour of the former. But not in all cases, and the grey area may be rather wide in our relativist world.

Before we decide what kind of action should or shouldn’t be taken either to affirm or curtail freedom of speech, we have to settle the issue of right and wrong. That’s hard to do if it’s not only our genders that are supposed to be fluid, but also our notions of morality.

That issue was indeed settled in Exodus, Matthew and the book that contained them. That established absolute standards with an absolute certainty and authority. Both the certainty and the authority have now been replaced with petty relativities that change from one day to the next.

I maintain that no political virtue, such as freedom of speech, can have absolute value. Hence, in the absence of an authority sitting infinitely higher than any political institution, conflicts between different rights and freedoms will continue. And, if my reading of modernity is accurate, most of them will be resolved in favour of wrong and against right.