Why this author says free speech is needed now more than ever

From efforts to ban books to demands for increased monitoring of social media platforms, free speech is under scrutiny. Instead of joining the calls to limit speech, Jacob Mchangama, a lawyer and the executive director of the Danish think tank Justitia, takes the opposite approach. In his book “Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media,” he calls on history’s greatest philosophers and activists – from John Stuart Mill to Ida B. Wells to Mahatma Gandhi – to serve as chief witnesses in his defense of free speech today. He recently spoke with the Monitor. 

What first ignited your passion for free speech?

I was born in secular, liberal Denmark where ... I took free speech for granted. It was like breathing air. Then the cartoon affair – when a Danish newspaper published cartoons depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad – made Denmark the epicenter of a global battle of values over the relationship between free speech and religion, and also forced a lot of people in Denmark to rethink, what does free speech mean? Is it just an empty, abstract principle that we can use in a tribalist manner? Or, does it really matter? And that’s why I wanted to look at contemporary-era [free speech] issues through the prism of history because that allows you to get a more detached view of current affairs than if you are caught in the Twitter narrative. 

What new challenges has social media presented?

We’re in a process of migrating from the analog city to the digital city. That means the institutions we built, which sustained us for a long time, are not necessarily as relevant and legitimate in our minds as they used to be. We’ve seen a plummeting of trust in traditional media, institutions, and politicians. And I think social media has contributed to that. But I think it would be dangerously misguided to say we need to then abolish or roll back free speech. 

What lessons can we take from history on how, and how not, to counteract disinformation and hate speech?

First of all, we have to be aware that what counts as disinformation, hate speech, or other types of harmful speech is likely to change. If you were living in the 17th century, you would look upon deists or atheists as [advocating] the worst kind of disinformation. Many people would think that it was perfectly legitimate to persecute such ideas because no society could stand that allowed such attacks on its foundation. Today, we look at such ideas as pretty uncontroversial. Open democracies have to be very, very careful about limiting free speech. [It can be] intuitively attractive to want to limit free speech because you say, “Well, if free speech facilitates concrete harms against our democracies, against minorities, against our institutions, against truth itself, we should limit it.” But [even though] free speech may sometimes facilitate harms, [it] does not necessarily follow that restrictions on free speech are an efficient method of countering [them] or that the benefits of limiting certain kinds of speech will outweigh the harms. 

What values help a society to prioritize a free speech culture?

I think we have to look back at what went before, and how hard it was for free speech to become a fundamental value. We need a culture of free speech, which ultimately means that we have to be tolerant as human beings. Not that we should enforce tolerance by limiting speech, but we have to accept that in diverse societies, people are going to have diverse opinions and that’s not necessarily a threat. In many ways, it’s a bonus. But sometimes people will have diverse opinions that you really, really disagree with. That’s a cost of living in a free and equal society, and it’s a cost that is worth bearing.