SIIEVII Political Philosophy: Voltaire and Freedom of Speech
One of the foundational principles of a liberal democracy, one that many take for granted, is freedom of speech. The ability to speak your mind, and following from that the ability to believe what you want, to express yourself as you want, and for there to be a fundamental divide between matters of belief and matters of state.
If you want an entertaining biographical read, look up the life story of an 18th century Frenchman who referred to himself by the pen name Voltaire. The first time I heard of this guy I almost couldn’t believe the stories were true. Voltaire was a man and a writer who often purposefully antagonized the christian churches which held enormous political power at the time. He was born to be a debonair-type character, wrote lots of stuff, pissed a lot of people off, was tried as a blasphemer, spent months in the infamous Bastille prison, was exiled from France for years, came back, set up a lottery, got super rich, and basically carried on the same lifestyle his whole life.
Voltaire was one of the most prolific writers of all time. He has thousands and thousands of letters attributed to him, dozens of plays, a good number of pamphlets and other writings. I have not read all of this. In truth I haven’t come close, there’s simply too much volume for the limited time I’ve studied the subject. But I think I can nonetheless speak on one particular idea which Voltaire stood by: freedom of speech. The Treatise on Tolerance was part of his rebuke of fanatic Christianity and its intolerance of different opinions. It came as a response to mob justice antagonized by religious bigotry that befell a man named Jean Calas. Jean was a Protestant that lived in the south of France, a merchant for many years. Despite the area being heavily Catholic, and basically ruled by the Catholic church, he survived alright. He had a son, Marc Antoine, who died tragically by hanging himself. And despite there being no evidence, a rumor sprang up around town that Jean had murdered his own son for wanting to convert to Catholicism. This whipped the townsfolk, the governors and magistrates into a frenzy, and Jean was subsequently executed after they had tried to torture a confession out of him. This was all researched and documented by Voltaire in Treatise on Tolerance, an incredible piece of investigative journalism.
Voltaire’s goal with the piece, besides exoneration of Jean, was to prove that one cannot simply threaten, assault and kill people whose thoughts and words contradict your own. The biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall summed up Voltaire’s thoughts into the formulation, “I don’t agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
“To the death” is not an exaggeration for the time period in which Voltaire lived. Merely standing up for the right of someone like Jean Calas to believe what they want could be incredibly dangerous. And it still is dangerous, in some parts of the world. Societies come up with different answers to this question:
Should people be allowed to say and believe whatever they want?
We’ve seen this question before with the trial and execution of Socrates, detailed by Plato in the Apology, Crito and Phaedo. Socrates was essentially put to death for the things he said and the questions he asked. In his trial Socrates famously referred to himself as a gadfly or horsefly nipping at the dogmatic horse of society, annoying but harmless, and even potentially beneficial.
Socrates represents the good that comes from freedom of speech: the man shaped the course of history with his philosophy. Voltaire came at the problem from a slightly different angle: he saw the incredible harm that can come from not having freedom of speech and belief, from systems of governance with explicit or implicit religious bias and intolerance. Because, Voltaire, like Socrates, understood the human propensity to be wrong about things. Voltaire pointed out that asserting your truth as the truth that everyone else must follow, is an incredible act of conceit and arrogance. Men who would think such things don’t even know that they know nothing.
It should be said that Voltaire was much more robust in his philosophy than in the narrow scope of political implications. It’s not an exaggeration to call him a Renaissance man, and part of his charm was a conception of his ideas as Voltaire’s Enlightenment.
Voltaire’s sharp and witty criticisms were not only leveled at the church, but at dogma and ideology of all kinds. His novel Candide demonstrates this quite well with just tons and tons of lampoons of the ideas of well-known and well-followed philosophers.
In Candide, the title character Candide grows up under the tutelage of a philosopher called Pangloss. Pangloss, following the arguments of Leibniz and friends, teaches that this world is the quote “best of all possible worlds”. I won’t spoil the plot, but a lot of stuff happens to the characters that seems pretty counter to the idea that this is the best possible world. The characters argue amongst themselves and with themselves, it’s a fairly well-put-together novel.
And the points Voltaire brought up were important. There are certain criticisms that must be levelled at otherwise unchallenged ideas. It’s how those ideas advance, become stronger through being tempered as it were.
Contrast this freedom, this liberal or libertarian point of view, with its opposite: authoritarianism, restriction, nonfreedom, such as can be found in the Mainland Communist China of today, or the Soviet Union of yesteryear. If the government doesn’t like what you say, you could be imprisoned or worse. Propaganda, lies, misinformation: these are the name of the game in a country without freedom of speech. There is typically an element of protectionism that goes along with it. The country needs to protect its citizens against bad or dangerous ideas, or the people in power need to protect themselves against ideas that could harm them. It doesn’t essentially matter what is true. All that matters is power.
Take the situation in Hong Kong: the Mainland Chinese government has cracked down hard on basic freedoms that were supposed to be guaranteed to the people of Hong Kong, per the 50-year transition period from British rule to Chinese rule. Freedom of speech, press, assembly; all these are being stripped away. Why? The Chinese Communist Party will tell you, it’s for their own good, their own protection. I’m not making this up, you can read all about what Mainland China is saying and how they’re justifying breaking their agreement. They need to protect the citizens from “dangerous ideas”, they need to protect the citizens from themselves. In actuality the Chinese government really wants to stop people speaking out against the Communist Doctrine. China has the “four cardinal principles”, as they’re known, implemented into the Chinese constitution in the 1980s. We won’t get into detail on them, but debate on the four principles is not allowed. You cannot criticize for example Mao ZeDong, one of the biggest mass murderers in history. The transition period for Hong Kong was supposed to protect freedom of speech, but with its new security law for the region China has proven they don’t care.
Because the truth is, you can’t say the truth if you don’t have freedom of speech. You can’t point out that Mao was dangerously wrong on many topics, even though that’s absolutely true. Even myself, as relatively unknown as I am, could be in danger of arrest if I were to travel to China after making these remarks. That’s the price I pay, I suppose, for speaking my mind.
Mao Zedong once ordered all the sparrows in China dead because he thought they were eating all the crops. This upset the natural ecosystem, and before they knew it a literal plague of locusts ravaged Chinese crops. Millions starved to death. China had to import sparrows from the Soviets to try to deal with the bug pestilence.
No one stepped in to tell Mao that, maybe interfering with nature on so large a scale wasn’t such a good idea. Disagreement with the supreme commander is not allowed. The religious intolerance Voltaire despised, the intolerance of other ideas and beliefs, can be found in many forms. In authoritarian countries, it seems the state itself becomes a sort of religious icon, unquestionable and untouchable. I have a feeling Voltaire would have hated it just as much.
This should surprise no one familiar with my point of view, but I am one hundred percent on Voltaire’s side in this debate. There is no alternative for me. I am a practitioner, student and devotee of philosophy. There is no advancement in philosophy without debate. The freedom to offend common sensibilities is the freedom to be an idiot and a jerk, true, but also the freedom to philosophize, to challenge norms and the status quo.
The argument goes even deeper than that. To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher of the 20th century, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world”. It’s still debated today exactly how correct that statement from Wittgenstein is. The psychological debate often revolves around a theory called the Whorf Hypothesis. Psychology rarely makes such grand claims as philosophers like Wittgenstein. The Whorf Hypothesis, named after the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, asserts that language influences thought. Notice it doesn’t necessarily say “language controls thought”, though of course some have taken that stance. Regardless, lots of experiments have been done on the subject, and while I won’t go into detail there I do think the science backs the idea that our language is tied to our thoughts in a nontrivial way.
For an example from fiction, if you know 1984 by George Orwell, you’ll doubtless be familiar with newspeak. In the dystopia Orwell dreamed, the English language was being replaced with a new, artificially created language, called newspeak. In the story, the main character of the book runs into one of the designers of this new language. They explain that the goal of the newspeak project is to make it literally impossible to rebel, simply by eliminating the concept from language. It’s not quite as simple as deleting words from a dictionary. They had to make it grammatically impossible to talk of rebellion. Would one still be able to think of it if one cannot formulate it into words? Of course anyone who already spoke English or another language was hopeless to ever becoming this “ideal citizen”. But a new generation, raised solely on newspeak?
Who knows, exactly, how that scenario would play out in real life. The point of all these examples I’ve drawn is that, essentially, speech control, language control, is thought control. And if someone else can tell you what to think, my friend you are not free.
You can say I’m being dramatic, and maybe I am. The counterargument would go something like, it’s not thought control to tell people they can’t say racist, inflammatory things in public, especially in places where genocide and racial pogroms have a history.
Karl Popper had a famous example of this counterargument with his Paradox of Tolerance. He observed that if societies tolerate intolerance under any circumstance, they will eventually become intolerant. Therefore, societies must be prepared to be intolerant of intolerance should the need arise.
In the same vein, we don’t generally allow people to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded building. This is the ‘reasonable restrictions’ argument on freedom of speech, which attempts to strike a balance between maintaining individual freedom versus the health and safety of the public at large. And I’ll admit, it’s a very reasonable argument. In the United States at least we don’t shield the public from racist rhetoric, that speech falls under the protection of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Other countries that would be considered liberal democracies like Germany, outlaw any hint of antisemitic National Socialist type speech. Which approach is truly the better? Certainly, the Holocaust was one of the worst tragedies in history. But does outlawing racist, offensive, perhaps even evil speech prevent things like that from happening?
My approach, my argument, is from the viewpoint of philosophy, of free and open debate. I challenge any argument or idea I want to in the debate ring. And I trust that truth wins. Right, I have faith that bad ideas when put to the fire will shrivel and burn. And that opportunity to destroy them only happens because they were allowed to be said in the first place.
There is a legitimate danger of so-called “populist” movements that can often be characterized by a cult of personality and distinct lack of critical thinking applied to their chosen ideology. Hitler’s rise to power was a complicated thing. His ideas resonated with certain people, and those people amplified his ideas right back to him. It created a feedback loop. Challenges to his ideas were silenced or killed off. I don’t think Nazi Germany is exactly an example of free speech gone wrong, I think it’s an example of what happens when authoritarians crack down and openly massacre their enemies. If the Nazis were prevented from murdering their opponents, who knows what would have happened. Perhaps reason would have prevailed.
And I think this is still largely in line with Karl Popper and his Paradox of Tolerance. So long as the intolerant aren’t actually violating anyone’s rights, they can be met with reason and debate.
This is why I have for years now thought philosophy and critical thinking needs to be taught to everyone as early as they can read. Learn your ABCs with Plato, or Greek ABCs even. Why do we have public schools if not to teach children how to think for themselves, how to survive in this vastly complicated society we’ve built? And built on the shoulders of philosophy, might I add. Just think how much better society could be if every person you pass on the street had a deep understanding of ethics and a well-informed opinion on their own morality and politics and all the rest?
Look, I know that sounds idealistic. I can hear myself recording this. Is it really such a pipe dream though? It wasn’t that long ago the clash between Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre was common dinner table talk in France. Philosophy encompasses literally the most interesting questions in the universe. If we can’t nudge the innate curiosity of children in that direction, I honestly see little hope for our species.
Alright, stepping off the soapbox now. Hope you enjoyed my thoughts. I know it wasn’t as focused on Voltaire as you probably expected, but free speech is messy. I do very much like the points I made, and I’d love to hear your own thoughts on the subject.
Until next time, I’m Tony Remis. Thanks for listening.