A
reminder in today’s New York Times about
the challenges posed by freedom of speech:
I was
surprised to read in Bill Keller’s column this morning that the author
Salman Rushdie chose to live in America over other democratic countries because he “reveres … the freedom, not so protected in other Western democracies,
to say hateful, racist, blasphemous things.”
He reveres the freedom to say hateful and racist things? “Blasphemous” makes sense, but at first the other two adjectives confused me. I understood the protection of bigoted speech to be an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of speech being free. But Rushdie’s well-worded explanation settled some questions about freedom of speech that I’ve had for a while:
“Terrible
ideas, reprehensible ideas, do not disappear if you ban them. They acquire a
kind of glamour of taboo. In the harsh light of day, they are out there and,
like vampires, they die in the sunlight.”
The
American experiment, often not engaged in wholeheartedly, includes a fair
amount of Thoreau-style self-government: rather than policing speech, the U.S.
system expects an active, conscientious public to decry bad ideas and words.
The ideal is a meritocracy of words, of orators. If evil words persist in floating
to the top of the public consciousness, seeming to work some mysterious power
over people, the only failure is on the part of the citizenry.
