You Can't Read This Book by Nick Cohen

Author:Nick Cohen [Nick Cohen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

RULES FOR CENSORS (5):

People Don’t Want to Know

For the last time, I will ask you whether you believe in freedom of speech. If you say that you do, you are in a distinct minority. In most cultures for most of history, speech has not been free. Criticise the state, and the state punished you. Break with the religion or defy the taboos of the tribe, and the tribe punished you. The powerful cannot afford to lose face, because as soon as they do, the authority of the state and the tribe begins to drain away.

The democrats of ancient Athens John Milton admired were among the few to escape from hierarchical control. Citizens exercised parrhesia, which translates as ‘all speech’, or sometimes ‘true speech’. They had the right to say anything to anyone: to speak truth to power. Aristophanes mocked the city’s generals and demagogic politicians. They responded with lawsuits alleging that he was slandering the polis. Their threats did not silence Aristophanes, but provoked him into producing more satires. It sounds stirring, until you remember that women and slaves did not enjoy the freedom allowed to male citizens, and liberty in Athens as elsewhere broke down in moments of crisis. Frightened after their defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Athenian citizens sentenced Socrates to death for corrupting the minds of the young and – inevitably, given the persistent link between religion and censorship – for refusing to honour the city’s gods. For Xenophon and Plato, Socrates’ nobility lay in his refusa toflee from prison when the opportunity presented itself. He preferred accepting his punishment to showing a fear of death, and died a free man.

By drinking the hemlock, Socrates was truer to the Athenian ideal than were his persecutors. ‘To be happy means to be free and to be free means to be brave,’ Pericles said in his oration for the Athenian war dead, as he emphasised that ancient ideas of free speech have a notion of courage behind them. Citizens of modern democracies, who are at liberty to talk about politics in whatever manner they please, may find the insistence on bravery puzzling, but if they think about how careful they are to ‘respect’ employers and religious militants they will understand the link.

Michel Foucault believed that speech was truly free only when the weak took a risk and used it against the strong: ‘In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.’

On Foucault’s reading, the worker who criticises his boss uses parrhesia. The boss who shouts down his worker does not. The woman who challenges religious notions of her subordination is a parrhesiastes. The priest and her relatives who threaten her with ostracism or worse are not. In the ancient Chinese story, the mandarin who knows he must tell the emperor that his policies are foolish orders carpenters to build him a coffin and takes it with him to court.

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