Free speech must be curated with balance and civility
The moral responsibilities associated with freedom of expression become even more pressing when government sponsorship is involved, as is the case with Adelaide Writers Week.
It is certainly possible to be critical of particular Israeli policies without being anti-Semitic. But that hardly means that criticism of Israel is never anti-Semitic. And while there are inevitably questions about precisely where one draws the line, it is impossible not to be concerned about a speaker who, even if in verse, resurrects the notorious blood libel against Jews by claiming that Israelis, who have “an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood”, “harvest the organs of martyred (Palestinians)” and “feed (them to) their warriors”.
To believe that freedom of expression demands giving a platform to such views is simply confused. On the contrary, freedom of expression has always meant that each platform – including Writers Week – has both a right and the moral, as well as legal, responsibility to curate the views that it is used to propound.
Indeed, as at least Adler must know, the relationship between freedom of expression and that right and responsibility was at the heart of the great defences of freedom of expression that were first penned during the Reformation and then reached their intellectual culmination in the work of Benjamin Constant and John Stuart Mill. That relationship has two central components.
The first is that careful curation, rather than breaching freedom of expression, has an important role to play in ensuring that its benefits are fully realised. The sciences, broadly defined, are an obvious example. If the freedom of expression from which they benefit in democracies has led to such enormous progress, it is at least partly because learned societies and scientific journals have, virtually from their inception at the start of the Enlightenment, carefully screened the claims they diffuse, filtering out the wrongheaded, the cranks and the fanatics.
In exactly the same way, when Mill edited the Westminster Review, he subjected contributions to what later became known as fact checking, as well as rigorously assessing the ethical implications of their contentions. The claim that his unquestioned commitment to free speech put him under an obligation to publish views he regarded as abhorrent would have struck him as an egregious misunderstanding.
Rather, as he repeatedly argued, the freedom to publish must be accompanied by the exercise of moral responsibility, which is not just a virtue but a duty.
No doubt, gatekeepers can abuse their power or make mistakes. But – and this is the second crucial aspect of the relationship between free speech and curation – an advantage of freedom of expression is that it provides an error correction mechanism: the excluded have the right to express themselves elsewhere. That mechanism is certainly far from perfect and won’t work where a platform has a monopoly, but in normal situations, where there are other channels through which voices can be heard, it is difficult to see why refusing to be complicit in spreading views that might well be considered anti-Semitic would, as Mainland and Adler contend, offend the fundamental principles of free speech.
Moreover, even if freedom of expression did require the festival to air those views, no matter how repugnant they might be, then it would surely also require providing their contradictors with an equal right to make their voices heard. Instead, Mainland and Adler use the mantle of untrammelled free speech as an invisibility cloak behind which they can bestow that freedom on some while denying it to others.
The moral responsibilities associated with freedom of expression become even more pressing when government sponsorship is involved, as is the case with the festival. Once public resources are committed to a venture, individual taxpayers have no way of opting out; regardless of their beliefs, they are forced to underwrite it.
That shouldn’t stop governments from supporting the expression of what may be controversial views. However, they need to be very careful when they do so – and ensure that they are, and are seen to be, scrupulously even-handed, both in who they support and who they don’t.
Yet it is absolutely inconceivable that the South Australian government would underwrite views similar to those the festival intends to air targeted at other religious, ethnic or racial minorities. Jews could therefore hardly be blamed for concluding from the government’s decision not to withdraw its sponsorship that it regards them, and seemingly them alone, as fair game.
However, it is not only in that respect that the state government is abjuring its responsibilities. It is also ignoring governments’ obligation to protect and promote the respectful dialogue without which democracies cannot survive. Oxford philosopher RG Collingwood put it well when he said the first constituent of civilisation is the process of bringing members of the community to behave “civilly” to each other – that is, of ensuring that they relate not as warring militaries but as people whose differing pasts enrich, rather than preclude, a shared and peaceful future.
It is, however, difficult to see how a speaker who has replied to his Jewish critics by advising them to “SHUT THE F..K UP”, and warning them that “if you heckle me, you will get shot”, will advance civil discussion, much less make South Australia a state in which all races, creeds and ethnicities feel at home.
In the end, freedom of expression gives everyone the right to swim against the current. It gives no one an entitlement to be sped across the oceans in the luxury of a government-supported yacht. Least of all does it allow anyone, when faced with calumnies, to wipe their hands of moral responsibility, saying, like that well-known philosopher Pontius Pilate (John 18.37-8), what is Truth, and is not Beauty in the eye of the beholder?
Rather, like all freedoms, it comes accompanied by a heavy burden of duty, which in cases such as these entails attention to truthfulness, balance and civility.
Adler and Mainland must know that. So must the South Australian government. That they refuse to act on it epitomises the sad state we’re in.
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Responding to criticisms of the line-up for Adelaide Writers Week, which forms part of the Adelaide Festival, Kath Mainland, the festival’s chief executive, and Louise Adler, AWW’s director, have claimed that they are merely defending freedom of expression. Additionally, Adler has argued that objections to her choice of speakers conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.