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October 12, 2006
There is a classic liberal position that states "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" that stands for the classic liberal response to book banning and burning. What lies behind that phrase? How does that right square with race hate speech legislation that stops people from denigrate their fellow citizens in bestial terms.
Jeremy Waldron in a review of John Durham Peters' Courting the Abyss says that one interpretation of the right to free speech is:
A more troubling reading ... is that Nazi speech is worth protecting even if a consequence of that protection is that someone gets hurt or killed. "I will defend your right to say it, even if your saying it makes violence more likely against the people attacked in your pamphlets'" Is that what is meant?
This reading of aphorism accepts that free speech has costs;and that if there are costs, then we are the better for bearing them. As we watch the Nazis march by, we are nauseated, we shake inside with rage and our sleep is troubled for days. But it's like physical exercise: no pain, no gain. We can't build the sort of fearless characters that modern democracy requires, unless we have been through and survived this sort of trauma.
Waldon says that Courting the Abyss is about free speech generally, but it focuses on this suggestion that we all become better people through tolerating the most hateful and diabolical speech, by staring at and listening to the Nazis and the racists in our midst. The free-speech position presupposes the Stoic sense of virtue and self-mastery.
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