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Jacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media" (Basic Books, 2022)
00:35:47
An interview with Jacob Mchangama
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- [00:02]
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- [00:35]
Ian Drake
Hello, my name is Ian Drake, and this is the New Books Network. We are joined today by Jacob Mshangama. He is the author of a history of free speech. It's entitled Free Speech A History From Socrates to Social Media. Jacob is the founder and executive director of the Danish think tank Justicia and and he is the host of a podcast himself called Clear and Present A History of Free Speech. His writing on free speech has appeared in several languages and outlets across the globe, including the Economist, the Washington Post, and Foreign Policy. He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark, and that is where he joins us from today. Jacob, thank you so much for joining us on the New Books Network.
- [01:18]
Jacob Mshangama
Thank you, Ian. I really have been looking forward to this.
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Ian Drake
So this is a history that covers everything from the ancient world, starting as we always do when we cover the ancient world in ancient classical Athens, and it goes all the way up through the travails of Donald Trump in the 21st century. I think our listeners are probably very familiar with a lot of the debates regarding free speech on campus and in social media. And although extremely important for our world today, I thought that since this is a history that ranges so far back, we might dwell on some of the early years, as it were, for the conceptions of free speech. You note that there is a kind of running theme, no matter what period of time it is, even starting as early as 4th century BC Athens with the famous orator Demosthenes. There is this concern with the role that speech can play or freedom of thought can play, even absent larger infrastructure of something like individual liberty, which is very familiar to us in the modern period. So how did people in the ancient world conceive of freedom of thought and what was it good for?
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Jacob Mshangama
That's a very good question. I don't think there's a lot of evidence that people in the ancient world, prior really to the Athenian democracy, had sort of concepts, had conceptualized the idea of free speech, and certainly had not sort of integrated them into a political and civic culture the way the Athenians did. So you could say sort of to generalize when you look at surviving law codes from around the ancient world, regulation of speech tended to protect the ruler from the ruled rather than, you know, our modern conception where, where, where the ruled are protected from, from their rulers. And then you, you could say that, that, that Athens stands out in the sense that you had two different but overlapping concepts of free speech. One of them was ise goria or equality of speech, which was the political component in that all free born male citizens could participate directly in democracy in discussing and voting on the laws in the assembly. And then you had the concept of paresia, meaning something like uninhibited speech, which was more like a cultural trade, which allowed, which was based on sort of civic tolerance and which allowed people to.
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Interjecting Commentator
Discuss philosophy and politics and you know, have drama and comedy, have the agora.
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Jacob Mshangama
As a place where discussion was relatively open.
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Interjecting Commentator
And that set the Athenians aside, especially from their Spartan rivals. As Demosthenes put it, you know, in Athens you could criticize the Athenian constitution and praise the Spartan one, but in the much more sort of oligarchic and non democratic Spartan constitution, you were not allowed to praise the Athenian constitution and criticize the Spartan one. And in that sense you could say there's a clear continuation between Athenian and modern versions of free speech in that the litmus test is whether you're really able to criticize the political system under which you live.
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Jacob Mshangama
Right.
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Ian Drake
And so for the ancient world there really isn't a foundation conceptually that defends any role for the individual in the broader society. But on the other hand, there does seem to be these distinctions that you just noted in Athens. There does seem to be this concern for the health of the state or the populace overall.
- [05:17]
Jacob Mshangama
Yeah, but you're right in pointing out that I guess some ancient historians of ancient Greece disagree a little bit. But I would say the consensus is probably that they didn't have anything resembling our modern conception of individual rights. And that is a theme in the famous trial of Socrates. Because had Socrates been living in a modern liberal democracy, he would have been protected by an individual constitutional right to free speech. He would have been tried by an independent court and not sort of a jury court made up of any number of his co citizens and that there would have been a rule of law, independent institutions and so on that would probably have given him a better chance of winning. So in that sense the conception of free speech in ancient Greek, Greece, in ancient Athens is quite different from the modern one.
- [06:23]
Ian Drake
So let's fast forward a little bit into the Middle ages and one aspect of your book That I greatly enjoyed was introductions to people that we don't necessarily in the west have a great deal of familiarity with. For example, in the Muslim world during the height of its power in the Middle ages, in the 9th century, for example, you refer to Al Rawandi and several other scholars and thinkers who develop their own conceptions of free speech that are very remarkably familiar to us in the modern world today.
- [06:59]
Jacob Mshangama
Right, Yeah, I don't know that they would. Well, Rawandi is a very particular free thinker, medieval Muslim, three thinker, even though he probably towards the end was not a Muslim. So in the sense that he basically was sort of like a medieval champagne, who took delight in the shock and outrage that sort of followed in the wake of his one man demolition show of revealed religion. Although we have to be a little bit careful because his works do not survive as such. So it's mostly sort of his enemies who sort of relay what he thought. But I don't think there's any doubt that he was at the very least an extremely unorthodox thinker when it came to. Came to, when it came to religion. So he was one of at least sort of two radical free thinkers, the other being Al Razi, who was sort of a Persian physician and philosopher and polymath, and who said that reason was the ultimate authority which should govern and not be governed, should control and not be controlled, should lead and not be led. And who was also very, very crit about religious orthodoxy and religious fundamentalism. And so these were sort of 9th and 10th century free thinkers in the Islamic world who were much more radical than any medieval thinkers, contemporary medieval thinkers in Christendom in the west, and probably also any later medieval thinkers in the West.
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Ian Drake
Of course, in Christendom we're familiar with the concept of heresy and the concerns for the broader structure of religion and how it defends itself as an institution and the ability to strike back against dissent, which of course was seen as threatening in the sense of the Antichrist and the role that the devil might play in weakening the Church. So this is something that is very familiar to us in terms of Western history. Eventually. This is one of the keys, or I should say common recurrent themes, which is that religion in the defense of it really needs to quash freedom of thought.
- [09:32]
Jacob Mshangama
Yeah. But then again, the medieval period in Christendom is also sort of more complex than sort of the trope of the Dark Ages that was frequently used suggests. So on the one hand you do have, have what is sort of called the medieval Inquisition, which arises and tries to sort of streamline orthodoxy and quash heretical movements around Europe with a number of different punishments and shaming, which could ultimately, though it was certainly not the standard punishment, but could result in executions. At the same time. You also have the emergence of universities where, for instance, Paike philosophy, Greek philosophy, and most consequential of all, Aristotelian philosophy sort of becomes a game changer and reason is unleashed. And initially there's a great pushback from universities and from the church. But ultimately, you know, these insatiable scholars at universities in Europe simply cannot be stopped from. From creating this culture of poking around, which will ultimately contribute to what we later call the scientific revolution and great philosophical development. So I think the medieval period is more complex. There's certainly no. Again, there's no conception of free speech in the way that the Athenians had it. But on the other hand, there are certainly very important developments that point towards intellectual freedom and curiosity and inquiry that will be institutionalized later on.
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Ian Drake
I'm glad you used that phrase poking around. I noted that. Is that a phrase in translation? That is in the original sources, because you use that in quotes.
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Jacob Mshangama
It's one that I have. I actually forget the author, but sort of a classical work on universities.
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Interjecting Commentator
And.
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Jacob Mshangama
Medieval scholars were a scholar, and I forget the name, sort of created this meme of a culture of poking around that becomes extremely consequential for what you might call Europe's collective brain, sort of connecting the neural circuitry in Europe's collective brain that really sets Europe on a path of these later incredible scientific and intellectual achievements.
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Ian Drake
You also mentioned the role a moment ago of universities, and I was struck by what appears to be a kind of competition for scholars among universities. You had noted that there were some that had feared the effects of reading, for example, Aristotle, and it was effectively forbidden or banned at some universities. But then others were trying to lure scholars away, as universities are wont to do even today, by promising them the freedom to engage in inquiry with Aristot.
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Jacob Mshangama
Yes, indeed. So at the University of Paris, on a number of occasions, there were these bans, what we today might call speech codes, trying to sort of ban Aristotelian philosophy. And then, you know, you had, for instance, the University of Toulouse, which sort of said, hey, Parisian scholars, if you're banned from studying Aristotle, why not come down to Toulouse, lose, and you can read all the Aristotle you want. And Henry III did the same, inviting scholars to Oxford and Cambridge. So in that sense, you could say that academic freedom in its earliest versions became an incentive and a competitive advantage in Christendom and then which also forced the church to sort of relax its grip on pagan philosophy and sort of see, you know, there's no way we can sort of restrict these scholars from these game changing ideas.
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Ian Drake
That's another aspect of the universities is this theme that it seems to me that I drew out of the book, which is that freedom of thought tends to flourish when there's a decentralization of authority. Is that right?
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Jacob Mshangama
I think very much. That's a sort of a meta narrative of the book in the sense that, you know, in the Athenian democracy you didn't have, you know, you didn't have any inquisition, you didn't have any sort of central authority that policed speech the same way. One of the reasons why the Abbasid caliphate and adjacent territories in the Islamic world from sort of the 8th to the 10th centuries was, was less beholden to religious orthodoxy was because the caliphs had sort of only loose centralized authority. And as you rightly mentioned, you know, you can see that with the universities and you see it later on with the Dutch Republic, which in early modern Europe becomes sort of the printing, the printing press of Europe and where even though there's no constitutional legal protection of freedom of speec and thought becomes much more tolerant both when it comes to religion and when it comes to what can be printed and read, even though it's certainly not free speech absolutism and there are restrictions, but it's much more permissive environment than many other places in Europe due to, you have these provinces, the United Provinces with very loose central authority. And again, you could point to the, to the American colonies in the 18th century where you also have loosened centralized authority and that helps along. And of course, you know, all the way up to our digital age, where the early stages of the Internet, you had a very decentralized Internet, very horizontal Internet without these huge centralized platform platforms that we have today, which also encourage much more online free speech.
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Ian Drake
And so in the book you mentioned the role of technology, certainly the printing press is probably even more important, I would imagine, and in many ways more proportionately extensive in its effect than even the Internet today. Because it seems that it really revolutionizes the ability of people to communicate to large numbers of people that they simply could not reach prior to this technological development.
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Jacob Mshangama
Development, yeah. You know, whether it will prove to be more consequential than the Internet, you know, who knows, maybe that, that history that, that is yet to be seen, perhaps will, in, in 200 years from now people will say, well The Internet was created, you know, something that we can't imagine. But, but, you know, from looking at my position in 2022, I would argue that the printing press is, is more consequential than the Internet. So in 1462, there were four printing presses, and that had grown to 1700 by 15, by the year 1500. And so an explosion of books and other printing materials. So production increased to around, for instance, 18 million books from 1501 to 1550, and then to 138 million from 1551 to 1600. So, so those are staggering, staggering numbers. And at the same time, prices of books dropped exponentially. And, and, and then you had the, the printing press mixed with the Reformation, Martin Luther's Reformation, and, and Martin Luther, who, in order to challenge the authority of the Church and spread the truth as he saw it, actively encouraged ordinary people to be taught to read and write, translated the New Testament into German and himself wrote treatise after treatise that was spread and went viral through the printing press and sort of revolutionized what we might call religious populism, sort of, of writing, in short, punchy German rather than dry theological treatises in Latin.
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Interjecting Commentator
And I think the unintended consequences of.
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Jacob Mshangama
That was that it provided ordinary Europeans access to read and write themselves.
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Interjecting Commentator
So suddenly they had access to the.
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Jacob Mshangama
Bible and then they got their own.
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Interjecting Commentator
Ideas about what the Bible said.
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Jacob Mshangama
They didn't necessarily follow the ideas of Martin Luther, and that created a lot of, of religious competition, of religious heterodoxy. And although the initial consequences for a long time were sort of a lot of upheaval and violence and wars and so on, that ultimately led to Europeans being more accustomed to differences and sort of being skeptical of orthodoxy. So I think the printing press and the Reformation are absolutely crucial to later developments, but in large sense due to unintended consequences, because Martin Luther himself was certainly no proponent of universal toleration or free speech. In fact, he argued for the death penalty of blasphemers.
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Ian Drake
Well, that's another point you make in regard to Martin Luther, but also perhaps some of the traditional early thinkers that we often hold up as exemplars of pathfinders in free speech lore are not necessarily the ideals that we would like them to be in terms of heroes. So, for example, John Milton, who at one point in the 1640s is publishing something outside of Britain's licensing act, at the same time will later himself join the censors and engage in his own enforcement of censoring authors, or at least licensing their thought. So there's a complexity there in regard to the justifications for free speech and the justification for restricting it that are not entirely in line even in the early modern period with our conceptions for the reasons for free speech.
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Jacob Mshangama
Yeah, you're absolutely right. In fact, I term it, or dub it the Milton's curse, sort of the unprincipled and selective defense of free speech. Though to John Milton's defense, it's something that we very still see to this day. It'll be very familiar to those who are observers of American culture wars over free speech that liberals and conservatives will complain about restrictions on free speech on the other side, but then be completely comfortable with their own restrictions on free speech, which they will insist somehow actually do not violate free speech. But John Milton in 1644, pens the Areopagitica, which, as you said, is a plea for press freedom, for unlicensed press freedom. And he writes, beautiful language, sort of saying, give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties. But at the same time, Milton then says that with press freedom, he means not tolerated popery and open superstition, because that would extirpate all religion and civil supremacies and therefore should be banned. And he didn't want to provide shelter to ideas that were impious or evil or against faith or manners, and that such books should actually be burned by the hangman. And as you rightly mentioned, he ends up serving as a censor under Cromwell and his sort of quasi military dictatorship. So I would argue that Milton's contemporaries, the levelers, who sort of argue for.
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Interjecting Commentator
A much more radical conception of free.
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Jacob Mshangama
Speech at the time, are more worthy.
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Interjecting Commentator
Champions of free speech, although they have largely been forgotten.
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Jacob Mshangama
But when you look at what people like John Lilburn, William Walwin and Richard.
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Interjecting Commentator
Overton write, they resemble a lot of the arguments that someone like James Madison would later advance in favor of free speech and go much further than John Milton's idea of free speech.
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Ian Drake
So one very modern term that you use that also applies to earlier periods before it historically occurred, is what you refer to as the Weimar fallacy. Explain what that is and how it can help us understand both the ancient world and today.
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Jacob Mshangama
Yeah, so the Weimar fallacy is this. Well, in Europe, all European democracies have restrictions on free speech, for instance, when it comes to hate speech. And many also sort of towards totalitarian ideologies. It could be ban against Holocaust denial in Germany or Nazi symbols and so on. And that is based on the idea of never again, of course, never again a Totalitarian regime like the Nazis never again Holocaust. And which of course is a very worthy ambition. And if it could be shown that free speech had been furthering, had been instrumental for that, and that lack of censorship had been instrumental in that cataclysm, then I think most free speech champions would be in favor of restrictions on free speech. But in the book I show that that in the Weimar Republic, even though it was quite liberal compared to what went before it in Germany, there were actually quite draconian restrictions on free speech that grew ever more intense as the Weimar Republic hurled towards its own destruction. So, for instance, the radio was heavily censored. Communists, the Nazis could not get on air. There were these emergency laws which allowed German states to ban newspapers for several weeks, sort of administratively, if they spread false news or attack government institutions or government officials. And actually the Nazis were often affected by those, even though the courts and institutions were more hostile to left wing organizations than right wing organizations. Someone like Goebbels, who would later become propaganda minister, bragged about how his newspaper, the Ankrieff, was the most frequently banned newspaper in Germany. So he used it to paint himself as a martyr. Julius Streicher, who was the editor of the anti Semitic Nazi rag Das Sturmer, was sentenced for religious offense due to these anti Semitic blood libels, was sentenced two months in prison, again used it as a propaganda vehicle. And damningly, in Nuremberg, where Streicher was convicted less than a year later, the Nazis increased their share of votes there, which suggested that perhaps these methods were not effective. And most damning of all, I think, is the fact that once the Nazis were in power, they used the emergency provisions in the Weimar constitution, in the democratic Weimar constitutions that were supposed to protect democracy, they used those provisions to abolish democracy. So when the Reichstag, the German federal parliament, was burned down by what we think was a communist, some speculate that the Nazis were responsible. Then Hitler convinced the German president to use that provision, Article 48 in the Constitution to suspend civil liberties, including freedom of speech and association. And that paved the way for the Nazis to ban communists and Social Democrats and socialists, put them in concentration camps, shut down their newspapers, and then within six months they had created a totalitarian one party state state. And so my argument is not that censorship and lack of free speech can explain the rise of Nazism, but I argue that those who want to introduce restrictions on free speech and democracy should have the burden of proof that such policies are actually effective and likely to serve that purpose. And I don't think the Weimar, Weimar, the Weimar period supports the argument that free speech is. Restricting free speech is an efficient and necessary instrument to limit totalitarian and hateful movements.
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Ian Drake
Well, it seems to me also that you're making a larger point, which is the Weimar example, historically may be one example of how efforts on the part of public authorities to quash speech, the very thing that they fear, ultimately has this unintended consequence of multiplying the very speech that they fear because of the proponents of whatever the ideas are, they go underground, they redouble their efforts. They ultimately may not succeed quite in the way that they had anticipated, but nevertheless, they still succeed in propagating whatever speech the authorities want to quash.
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Jacob Mshangama
Yeah, and that's exactly what we saw with someone like Julius Steichen and, and Goebbels, in that they got extra attention. It's also something that you will see today, very often in the digital age. Someone being purged of social media platforms can often lead to extra attention to that person, but something that you see all the way back to ancient times. So the Roman historian Tacitus had describes this case under the Emperor Tiberius, who became sort of more and more authoritarian. And Tiberius, under his administration, this historian, this Roman historian, is being convicted for treason because he has written a history which pains those engaged in the coup against Julius Caesar as sort of true Roman. So it's sort of a veiled praise of Roman republicanism. And then Tacitus has this formulation where he writes something along the lines that only fools think that by banning such works they will be forgotten. Instead, they will be remembered by prosperity and their fame will only grow. So he describes what we might today call the Streisand effect, which has very ancient roots indeed.
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Ian Drake
So there may be a lot of lessons in history for both the proponents and the opponents of freedom of thought and expression in regard to today's world. In 2022, when this interview is taking place, what do you think history can do for us in terms of understanding the prospects for the flourishing of thought and freedom of expression?
- [30:21]
Jacob Mshangama
I think that many of the debates that we have today are really recurrent themes. So one of them I describe is that of an elite versus an egalitarian conception of free speech, with the egalitarian one having its roots in the Athenian democracy and the elitist one in the Roman Republic. And I think we see that today in the age of social media, sort of should we have a public sphere where everyone has the ability to speak directly, even the uneducated and the credulous? And so on, or should we have a more top down regulated sphere where you have institutional gatekeepers that can filter information down to the masses with minimum participation of the masses? And we've seen that play out again and again. Every time there's a new technological development or political developments that have expanded speech rights to new groups, whether racial minorities or women or the poor and the property less. And very often when we look back in time, we tend to think of those who were there, the proponents of the elitist conceptions as being reactionary and defending deeply unjust versions of free speech. And so I think those who sort of favor more regulation of free speech today should think about whether they might not end up being viewed in the same way 50 or 100 years years from now. Another important lesson, I think is there's a tendency in many democracies of viewing free speech as entrenching, unequal power relations and being a threat to minorities. But I argue in the book that in fact, the values of free speech inequality are mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive, and that every single oppressed group and minority has relied on the practice and principle of free speech to better.
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Interjecting Commentator
The lot, to argue for justice, racial justice or equality of the sexes, and so on. And that in fact, free speech might be the most powerful engine of human equality that we've ever stumbled upon as a species. So that is something that I would hope we become increasingly aware of and that in fact, in fact, adopting restrictions on free speech might very well end up hurting those minorities and oppressed groups that they were supposed to protect.
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Ian Drake
Well put. Well, the book is entitled Free Speech A History from Socrates to Social Media. And we've been joined today by its author, Jacob M. Shungamma. Jacob, thank you so much for joining us on the New Books Network.
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Jacob Mshangama
Thank you so much, Ian. It was a pleasure.
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Interjecting Commentator
Sa.