The column below was adapted from John Robson’s testimony before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on June 4.
It’s a pleasure and privilege to appear before you in defence of the fundamental human right of free speech. I know you’re very concerned about hatred and intolerance, and about how the internet too often seems to encourage our worst passions. But censorship is not the answer.
The state rightly restricts speech to protect us from force and fraud, prohibiting conspiracy to commit crimes, libel and slander, incitement to violence, or material misrepresentation. But government should not suppress any communication that does anything else, including insult individuals or groups.
Censorship might not sound to you like what you’re considering because it’s an ugly word and your motives are pure. But it’s the right word for any government effort to restrict freedom of speech except on the narrowest of grounds. And it’s an ugly word because it’s an ugly thing.
Censorship is an ugly word because it’s an ugly thing
It is obvious that censorship in tyrannies is wrong because it represses the truth. But censorship in open societies does great harm because it famously cuts the rattle off the snake without removing the fangs.
The argument against censorship, even when labelled a hate speech ban, is not that its targets are always noble sentiments that only upset idiots and the hypersensitive. It is that in the battle of ideas truth will prevail, and that preventing the airing of ideas undermines truth and decency.
Here I’m profoundly indebted to John Stuart Mill’s 1859 On Liberty, which lays out three compelling arguments for permitting unpopular speech. Which is the issue here because freely elected governments almost never try to silence popular opinions.
Preventing the airing of ideas undermines truth and decency
People are free not to listen, of course, as part of freedom of association. But politicians are not free to shut anyone up. And here’s why.
First, a strange or uncomfortable idea might turn out to be true. Naturally when you look at online hate you’re not worried about that possibility. But the most fundamental reason for allowing dissent is that we might be wrong. We’ve been surprised before. And once we start suppressing opinions, how shall we ensure that we only suppress errors? We are, after all, fallible humans.
Still, surely there are views on whose odious error we will stake our souls, if any. Like that Hitler should have finished the job or blacks are inferior. But the obligation tirelessly to confront and denounce such opinions brings me to Mill’s second ground for defending even the most obviously odious speech: the “Dracula effect.”
He didn’t call it that, writing 38 years before Stoker’s classic. But open societies are a gigantic wager that sunlight destroys evil, that truth has nothing to fear in a contest of ideas. The great danger of censorship in tyrannies is that it drives truth underground. But its great danger in democracies is that it drives nasty ideas underground, into dank basements and ugly chat rooms where they breed and multiply unchecked. It even allows haters to appropriate the mantle of martyrdom. So censorship is not effective in practice against bad ideas, though it can harm good ones.
Which brings me to Mill’s third point. If we accept orthodox opinions without ever hearing them challenged, even when they are correct we tend to accept them as stale dogmas not living truths. But when we hear them defended, or defend them ourselves, we develop a deeper and more lively appreciation of their meaning which then informs and enlarges our lives as well as preparing us better to refute them when we do hear them.
Censorship is not effective in practice against bad ideas, though it can harm good ones
If you censor speech, you break faith with Canadians because you say we are not to be trusted with dangerous ideas and your job is to save us from ourselves. In which case it is impossible to understand why we should be trusted with ballots.
It is a perilous thing to arrogate to yourself the power to silence ideas you find disagreeable. And the appetite grows with the eating.
We already have too many restrictions on free speech in this country, including the outrageous rule that during elections a free people may not communicate freely with their fellows about issues under debate. And to say that certain kinds of speech are so hurtful as to constitute assault is to infantilize us, saying we can neither tell right from wrong nor withstand an insult.
We already have too many restrictions on free speech in this country
If taken seriously it means forbidding all but the narrowest of currently fashionable orthodoxies. If you call any criticism of homosexuality hate speech, you run the real risk of making Catholic doctrine illegal, and taking your stand with Nero and Stalin.
When you forbid speech, even with the purest of motives and the vilest of targets, you undermine the search for truth, encourage errors and lies, and dull your own wits. And you break faith with the citizens who entrusted you with political power.
Do not go there.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/john-robson-censoring-free-speech-breaks-faith-with-canadians-dont-go-there
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