The defense of unpopular and even offensive speech is a difficult task. This is so because people who defend such speech are accused of agreeing with offensive statements and stupid ideas, when, in fact, they are doing nothing of the sort.

The defense of free speech is never about the substance of what is said. Rather, it is about the right to say it. In the imprecision and fury of modern political debate, these two items, substance and rights, are often and willfully confused. Once the discussion of free speech becomes an argument about what has been said, it is no longer a defense of the right to speak freely but a sort of upside down censorship, since if you have to defend the substance of hateful remarks, you have long since abandoned the right to say them.

I’d like to think that the value to speak freely is obvious, but in the current age, when so much of the political debate is about symbols rather than substance, freedom of speech needs to be invoked not only as a traditional and obvious good, but a practical one, too. For instance, in the Soviet era, writers were required to produce what is known as socialist realism, that is their work was supposed to enhance the glories of the communist state. Other notions were thoroughly if not violently suppressed (just think, for an instant, of the Gulag).

Writers do many things, but one of them is to act as the eyes of a society, and when they are forbidden to say what they see and what they feel, the society in which they live flies blind. Under these circumstances, it is only a matter of time until that mountain, concealed in the dark, gives the passengers in the plane a very nasty surprise. The collapse of the Soviet Union is Exhibit A in this example.

Or, as Ortega Y Gasset once said, “Reality has its own structure.”

You can’t change it by telling people they can’t mention it. And, it doesn’t do anyone any good if people are forbidden to try to describe it, even when they are patently wrong. In the fury of the moment, accuracy may seem inflammatory, and if the recent past is any indication, the possibility of confusing what is true with what is simply disliked is pretty good. The only solution is to let everyone speak.

And then there is another practical effect of the suppression of speech. Most writers will tell you, if they are honest, that when they sit down to write, they are exceedingly careful about what they say. For instance, a novelist will think twice about the gender and race of his characters, and if, for instance, he has the impulse to describe a character who is a member of group that has been the object of discrimination, and this character is in some ways flawed, the novelist knows he will be suspected of ugly thoughts and dubious motives. It may be, however, that his experience has been that a particular member of a group, someone he was close to, behaved in an unseemly way, and since this is the source of inspiration, he will want to use it. But the voice there in the isolation of the room where he works will say, “Are you sure you want to say that? Just think of the trouble you are letting yourself in for.”

The chilling effect of this is obvious. Orwell once observed that there was no good Soviet literature after the revolution because no one felt free to write what he really thought. This chilling effect simply makes the ability to write a good book dry up.

And, of course, the greatest danger of all is that people feel that, in the face of stupid remarks or hateful speech, they are “doing something” and that they are “taking action,” when they try to get someone fired after having said something hateful, but, in fact, repression of ideas you don’t like is not an expression of the beauty of your beliefs, but ugliness disguised as indignation. Ugliness, of course, is action separated from principle. If you believe that freedom of speech only applies to the ideas that you like, you are setting your self up for a nasty surprise. If you abandon the principle that people should be able to speak, even stupidly, one day you may find that the political landscape has changed, and that, after having abandoned the principle of the right to speak, you won’t have it to defend yourself when sometimes tries to silence what you have to say. And so, as a practical matter, freedom of speech is the most self serving of all political rights.

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