A final reflection before hopefully moving on next week, on freedom of expression. Ive had some back and forths on that front - opposing Nick Griffins visit to Trinity in 2010 and being threatened with a lawsuit by David Quinn in 2012, among others. But my most important formative experience in unravelling the controversy has been travelling in authoritarian states. Its only when you do that you realise where the distinctions lie. Of course people in Iran, in Russia, in Kazakhstan express themselves. And not only in copybooks at home in dark corners but out with friends, in cafés, on social media sites, at political meetings, and sometimes even to clueless western journalists just off an airplane. If youve had any experience travelling beyond western Europes borders - or even if you just *thought* about things for a minute - youd know that. What is really at stake, in my view, in the freedom of expression debate is the ability for people to participate in the public sphere without hindrance. Expression occurs at an individual level but it is a social affair - people want to transmit what theyre thinking and feeling to others, in the hope, usually, of forming some kind of mutual understanding. This is an important definition because this kind of free expression - participation in public - is not merely blocked by laws. It is obstructed when, for instance, I am told, quite regularly, that expression of my political views in the public sphere will cost me jobs. And it has - thats not a lie. It is obstructed when an elderly woman living in rural Ireland has her telephone allowance cut and cant make contact with the outside world. It is obstructed when the mass media comes to dominate the public sphere and systematically omits vast swathes of people because they have no democratic say in their public broadcaster, dont have journalism skills or arent from a social class journalists are interested in covering. It is obstructed when people are robbed of the ability to express themselves authentically, when they are denied the ability to *become* themselves, by living lives of poverty or experiencing abuse or lacking access to developmental tools like education. And - perhaps crucially here - it is obstructed when communities are marginalised by systemic discrimination in such a way as their voices are silenced in the public sphere, either because they are afraid to speak or unable to speak the language or not heard when they do speak. I think there is a real conversation to be had about freedom of expression in our societies, but what weve seen recently isnt it. And not just because of the hypocrites at the front of todays march in Paris. But because of the whole way liberal ideology has bastardised the idea of free expression since the Enlightenment - elevating it, ironically, to a sphere of quasi-religious tenet which is an absolute and must be defended as such, rather than something that is contested and concretised within the real world we all live in on a daily basis. If free expression was supposed to lead us to greater knowledge, and we were looking for a metric of how free our expression is, maybe wed ask how that absolutist notion has endured despite so much evidence of its falsity. Or maybe why the kind of freedom of expression we enjoy prefers three-word slogans to the rigour of complexity.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 21:37:40 +0000