In Praise of Dissenters

Lesen Sie die deutsche Version hier.

«It is strange that people who admit the validity of the arguments for freedom of opinion should nevertheless object to their application being pushed ‘to the extreme’, without realizing that if the arguments do not hold in extreme cases, they do not hold at all.»

Starting from this insight, the philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill, together with his wife Harriet Taylor, formulated several fundamental principles in their work On Liberty (1859). This key text in the intellectual history of liberalism has lost none of its relevance. They experienced first hand the narrow mindedness and puritanism of the Victorian age. They loved each other even though Harriet was still married, they worked together and wrote jointly about freedom and women’s rights, and they debated freedom of speech and inherited moral conventions with courage in their salons.

Even without state coercion, social tyranny applied to anyone who deviated from what was customary and accepted. Political correctness as a term did not yet exist, but the underlying social mechanisms and dynamics were already very much at work.

According to their principles, the proper domain of human freedom therefore includes «the inward domain of consciousness, demanding liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense, liberty of thought and feeling, absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects practical or speculative, scientific, moral or theological. The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost as important as the liberty of thought itself and resting in great part on the same reasons, it is practically inseparable from it.»

Caution around sensitive topics

Freedom of speech, a right fought for over centuries, remains one of the non-negotiable core elements of a liberal democracy. It can be harsh, offensive, blunt or exaggerated, yet an open society must be able to tolerate this. Its limits are defined only by law. Or so one might think.

Why then do surveys by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research show that almost half of Germans believe one must be careful when expressing political opinions in public, especially on so called sensitive topics? Despite legal guarantees, freedom of speech has evidently come under increasing pressure in recent years. This applies above all to debates about migration, Islam and gender language.

At the height of the «woke» wave, for example, a new term from university seminar rooms made its way into the newsroom of ARD’s Tagesthemen. In a news report, the word «mothers» was replaced by «birthing persons». «Menstruating persons» likewise appeared in literary circles instead of the supposedly outdated word «woman».

Should this transformation simply be subsumed under freedom of opinion? Is it merely an example of left-leaning «advocacy journalism»? Or perhaps a necessary process of linguistic progress? Is it an expression of pluralism when concepts from the contested field of Critical Social Justice theories, ranging from gender studies to postcolonial studies, enter everyday and journalistic language? Even the term «anti-Muslim racism», shaped by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, has found its way into the statements of many city governments and state educational programs. These developments have caused considerable irritation among large parts of the population. Hostility toward political correctness and wokeness has intensified.

A similar dynamic can be observed in debates about government measures against hate speech. Who defines, and according to which moral or political criteria, what counts as hate speech? Who determines the so called limits of what may be said? Such boundaries are always shaped by the spirit of the time, and they are rarely decided by a majority of the population.

Even small minorities that propagate their demands loudly can create the impression that they represent the majority, even when they do not. This dynamic is especially visible in controversial and emotionally charged debates. The spiral of silence begins when loud expressions of opinion meet widespread silence.

The structural and cultural transformation of the public sphere in the course of the digital revolution has massively amplified these mechanisms. Accordingly, the atmosphere of public debate has fundamentally changed over the past twenty years.

On the one hand, we observe the rise of a culture of «safe spaces», initially cultivated mainly at universities but long since diffused throughout society and the wider public sphere. In this environment, wounded feelings often count for far more than arguments or factual reasoning. Traumatic experiences are frequently invoked, whether they occurred recently or centuries ago. Trigger warnings are increasingly used to shield individuals from the supposed harshness of the world and of other people. This development has gone hand in hand with a process of moralization that constantly divides society into perpetrators and victims, keeping an implicit ledger of guilt. In such a climate, new taboos are quickly erected by a wide range of actors.

On the other hand, communication on social media has simultaneously become more brutal and coarse. One online outrage follows another. Individuals or groups are publicly shamed, relentlessly exposed, ostracized or harassed. Fake news and deepfakes undermine the enormous gains in information and knowledge once promised by the world wide web. Debates about how to respond intelligently to these problems without resorting to censorship have become increasingly intense. What powers should tech giants have? What powers should the state have? What about the EU, what about the United States?

With the «TikTokization» of public communication, the formation of echo chambers has accelerated. Bloggers, their fans and followers create ever more self confirming online milieus that seal themselves off, become more uniform, intensify polarization and contribute to the formation of political camps. These processes of collective alignment gradually shrink the diversity of political views within each group. The resulting communities of shared convictions become increasingly anti pluralist internally.

The right adopts the left’s recipes

The struggle over freedom of speech itself is now fiercely contested. It has become an ideological sword wielded alternately by the left and the right. The political left, confronted with the electoral successes of conservatives and right-wing parties, increasingly sees the limits of acceptable speech shifting and constantly mobilizes in the «fight against the right», where «right» often begins just beyond one’s own political camp. The political center, conservatives and the right, for their part, long felt dominated by public broadcasting institutions and a media mainstream whose own ideological leanings they scarcely perceived.

Today we can observe a vibe shift. The pendulum is swinging, starting in the United States but also visible in Europe, from the left toward the center and further toward the right. Initially in the United States the aim was to challenge the left’s dominance in universities and cultural institutions. In the spirit of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, the left had succeeded for many years. The right has now adopted the same strategy. Donald Trump and his associates such as J. D. Vance and Peter Thiel are waging a fierce propaganda war against both real and imagined political opponents.

Europe and the European Union are being reframed as enemies by former allies, accused of having lost freedom of speech. This narrative is applauded by European right-wing populists as well as by voices in Moscow. Large American technology companies, for their part, thank their president for his coercive lobbying against potential EU regulation of their activities. Yet Trump is not only attacking academic freedom in his own country, but increasingly also press and speech freedoms.

In liberal democracies conflicts will always exist. Their best solutions must be debated openly and vigorously across the full plural spectrum of opinions, without taboos or moralizing, limited only by the law, even when those opinions offend or disturb us. The world is neither a nursery nor a petting zoo. The competition of ideas has a civilizing effect. Yet it must be learned, in schools, training institutions and universities.

Freedom of speech must therefore constantly be defended and protected, both against attacks by the state and against abuse by private actors. It flourishes only in a culture of debate that does not demonize opponents but allows the clash and competition of ideas and arguments without political or moral preconditions. Freedom of speech is a prerequisite for intellectual progress and the search for truth. Only in a liberal culture that values every individual, and in which independent judgment, self thinking, tolerance for ambiguity and civil courage can develop, can it truly be safeguarded and realized.

The risk of receiving applause from the wrong side can never be entirely excluded. Social pressure toward conformity, however, which restricts the plurality of opinions, succeeds only where it encounters timidity and cowardice. The only remedy is frank resistance, in the spirit of John Stuart Mill:

«If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labour for ourselves.»