Article 19 is an organization which monitors global free speech, and it issues an annual report which grades countries into five categories of freedom of expression: Open, Less Restricted, Restricted, Highly Restricted, and In Crisis. In its most recent report, the United Kingdom has been demoted from the highest category to the second for the first time since records began. From 2000, the UK’s grading had held steady at 88/100 before dropping to 87 in 2014. The decline accelerated, and Article 19’s latest report rates it at 79. Of the 161 nations for which data are available, Denmark ranks first with 94, and North Korea last with 0. The US, with its famous First Amendment, is in 21st place with 85.
Disparities are not necessarily regional. Nicaragua is at 160, just above North Korea, with a rating of 1, whereas neighboring Costa Rica — in which I am writing this –— comes in level with the US on 85. This means I have more freedom of expression in a Central American country than I would in my native UK. Although Article 19 notes that a downward slide is apparent across Europe, there is something particularly unnerving about the UK’s declining freedom of speech. To attempt to discover why this is so, perhaps it may help us to go back 170 years, from the heart of one declining empire to the center of one long vanished, and revisit a philosopher who has much to say about freedom in general and freedom of expression in particular.
In January of 1855, John Stuart Mill, the English radical philosopher and Member of Parliament, was in Rome. One beautiful morning, he climbed the Capitoline Hill and had an epiphany he noted in his Autobiographical Study. Mill had, the previous year, written a short essay on the subject of liberty. Now, he knew he had not said enough, and that he had to grow this fledgling into a book. He says of the revelation: “[O]pinion tends to encroach more and more on liberty, and almost all the projects of social reformers in these days are really liberticide”.
Friedrich Nietzsche was 15 years old when Mill published On Liberty, but the German would have appreciated both Mill’s epiphany — won by walking, as Nietzsche said his own best ideas were — but also that the line with which liberty bisects free will and determinism is as fine as Penelope’s thread. Indeed, the opening line of Mill’s treatise takes up that very thread: “The subject of this essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity…”
Free will and determinism, that age–old philosophical agon, are present in today’s conflicts over free speech, with Western governments determined to erase the former and replace it with the latter. But this is determinism in what we might call a genetically modified form. Free will — whether it exists or not — is now what it always has been throughout the history of philosophy, that of the individual. Determinism has a mixed provenance. It could be scientistic, religious, or philosophical. Now, the source of the deterministic matrix has changed into something else, something highly temporal and hidden in plain sight; the State. On Liberty is not so much about “freedom to” as it is “freedom from”.
Mill is what we would call a “free speech absolutist”: “If the teachers of mankind are to be cognizant of all that they ought to know, everything must be free to be written and published without restraint”.
I don’t want to give an overall review of On Liberty, but rather a forensic audit of its second chapter, “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion”. This is the key in terms of the modern debate among Mill’s countrymen concerning free speech, and “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” calls directly to the British state as it stands, although possibly doesn’t shout loud enough. But before noting any congruencies between Mill’s account of liberty and our present predicament, a note on the important difference between Mill’s age and our own.
Where Mill, in Chapter 2 and thus talking about freedom of expression, writes “the press”, we must read “everyone online” today. Thus, the American Constitution’s famous protection of freedom of assembly must be similarly extended into the virtual community. Freedom of assembly today does not mean a mob of ranchers gathering at the Union Hall to make their feelings known to the Governor, it means billions of people who don’t even have to leave their homes to assemble freely. On Liberty was written a century and a half before the internet would amplify expression and make information more readily available to both the rulers and the ruled than it could ever have been in his time. This discrepancy is analogous to the argument that America’s Second Amendment is seriously outmoded because it was written in the age of musket and flintlock, not our present era of the AK47.
But, at its core, On Liberty has much to say to us, and has taken on a particular resonance all these years after Mill’s death. Once merely a humdrum, course-work, stock-issue, university–curriculum regular, On Liberty has suddenly come to life. Mill’s country is today under scrutiny because its rulers are blatantly curtailing the freedom of its citizenry, and in particular their freedom of expression. Keir Starmer, who looks permanently startled to begin with, was not expecting Donald Trump and Elon Musk (before he went rogue) to upbraid him over free speech in the Oval Office. “Two men will not be together for half an hour”, writes Dr. Johnson, “but one will try to get the better of the other”. It took Trump around half a minute with Starmer, which is the behavior of a ruler. But what of Mill’s ruler?
Mill presents the ruler and the ruled already imbued with a mutual tension. His simple analysis of societal dichotomy is anatomically precise:
“It was now perceived that such phrases as ‘self-government’ and ‘the power of the people over themselves’, do not express the true state of the case. The ‘people’ who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised”.
If you are outside the political class in Britain, you will be becoming increasingly aware that they are no longer your peer group. They neither serve the state nor pay it undue respect, because they are the state, supposedly there to protect its citizenry, but increasingly that from which the citizens feel they need protection, as they did for Mill.
But it is not merely the apparatus of the state that citizens need to be shielded from: “Protection… against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling…”
We’ll return to opinion and feeling, but for now the tyranny of the magistrate may be precisely what the British public do need protection from. Legislation is being proposed to abolish jury trials for rape cases in the UK and, if it goes through, there is no reason to think this government will stop at rape. In a jury trial, the judge represents the state, the jury the citizenry. Remove the jury, and a defendant’s guilt or innocence will no longer be decided by a jury of his peers, but directly by the state. How long before “hate speech” cases are tried by a judge alone, with the state deeming “12 good men and true” superfluous to requirements?
Mill’s argument in Chapter 2 revolves around the encroachment of tyranny through the suppression of dissident opinion. But in Mill’s time this suppression was of opinion, often religious, the authorities fervently believed to be false. Now, the tyrant knows perfectly the opinions it suppresses to be true, and the citizenry can go hang, or at least go to jail: “[I]t is not, in constitutional countries, to be apprehended that the government … will often attempt to control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so it makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public”.
Today, the intolerance of the public means nothing. They have no tolerance to spare, in any case, as it has all been requisitioned by the government and expended on foreigners. But governmental control of the expression of opinion has two facets, the actual performative, the expression of opinion by an individual agent, and the meaning and significance of the opinion itself: “First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging”.
The question of authority has today come to the fore. Authority is implicitly bound up with the social contract, which the government honors if authority is used in a representative fashion, and disabuses if it uses its authority merely to instantiate that very mode of domination and keep itself in power. The beginning of tyranny. And authority can even tinker with epistemology, despite Mill’s rather Nietzschean dismissal of this: “There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life”.
Mill is, of course, the great utilitarian. He is not selling his utlilitarianism here, however, merely offering up the idea of utility as a deciding factor in deciding what is true and what isn’t: “This mode of thinking makes the justification of restraints on discussion not a question of the truth of doctrines, but of their usefulness”.
“The truth of an opinion is part of its utility”, he writes. Truth under the auspices of utility does have something of the casino about it. And what happens in a casino is not merely down to the behavior of the gamblers, but also depends on the policy of the management.
This section on truth and certainty is relevant to us moderns, seeing as we do have a ruling class which is attempting to conflate the truth of what it says with mathematical truth: “The peculiarity of the evidence of mathematical truths is, that all the argument is on one side. There are no objections”.
This was exemplified by the command to “follow the science” during Covid.
But Mill is aware of the tyrannical turn, and its roots in the nature of the true. Thus, the ruler may “assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty”. If not, they can manipulate it until it is certain. I believe President Obama was the first to talk of the necessity for “curating the truth”. Such a religious term for such an irreligious act.
Truth should also be communal, Mill believed, and the necessity of sharing it is a social contract broken by interfering with freedom of expression: “But the particular evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it”.
Mill finds a sense of duty in the transmission of improving information, an office each individual owes to a wider humanity: “To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it has been mistaken … is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow-creatures”.
In fact, it is the intellectual wellbeing of his fellow–creatures which completes the objections to the censorship of freedom of expression for Mill: “But it is not the minds of heretics that are deteriorated most, by the ban placed on all inquiry which does not end in the orthodox conclusions. The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy”.
And social relations are the salve for erroneous beliefs: “He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone”.
This is Socratic, and Mill devotes a page or so of On Liberty to Socrates rather than Plato. And the transmission of opinion is also one of the checks and balances democracy requires: “If any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility”.
What of those most affected by the suppression of free expression, those ultimately imprisoned for it? And what is the nature of their crime? “To calumny of this sort, those who hold any unpopular opinion are peculiarly exposed, because they are in general few and uninfluential, and nobody but themselves feel much interest in seeing justice done them”.
This is increasingly becoming the case in the UK, where the appellation “far Right” has been mobilized to segregate the patriotic who are prepared to voice their opinions. Thus, truth is molded via social engineering creating an ideologically atomized populace: “[T]here is never any fair and thorough discussion of heretical opinions... [and this leads to] the dread of heterodox speculation.”
This leads, in turn, to “The deep slumber of a decided opinion”. Public opinion, acceptable public opinion, has now been formed by social coercion.
But Mill also discusses the giving of offence, perhaps the element today which has taken on supreme importance. “Our merely social intolerance kills no one,” Mill writes, and the litmus test of opinion versus offence is made clear: “[I]f the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful…”
It is worth noting that when “freedom of speech” is discussed, what is generally meant today is freedom of writing. Unless speech is recorded, each speech act is discrete and non-scriptive. Litera scripta manet, as John Dewey noted. “That which is written down remains”. That which is spoken and unrecorded is not. Recording it turns it into a type of writing, a type of inscription. Without straying too far into Jacques Derrida territory, speech and writing are intertwined, but freedom of speech itself appears to remain untouchable in the absence, for example, of witnesses. Now, the British government is seeking to change that with its Employment Rights Bill.
This is one of those legislative instruments which hides behind an apparently beneficent title. Who could argue against the rights of employees, particularly the right not to be harassed in the workplace? But in practice the bill has no interest in physical or sexual harassment, but rather that of overhearing speech which may offend the hearer and thus count as harassment. And the punishment for heresy is not just reactive, but also proscriptive.
An English YouTuber by the name of Andre Walker told a very indicative story in a recent episode. Talking to his friend’s teenage boy and his friends about their experience in school, the boy told him of a lesson they had on slavery. The teacher sternly informed them that if anyone even mentioned the fact that Britain was instrumental in dismantling the slave trade, they would be dismissed from the class.
For Mill, the price society must pay for the suppression of opinion is high: “But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind”.
And if what is required seemed unattainable to Mill then, what prospect does it have now? We would have to reach “a stage of intellectual advancement which at present seems at an incalculable distance”.
We have the intellectual advancement, but the political class are concerned that it is being shared around and democratized. A technocratic elite operating the machinery of state has no need of a populace keen and able to use its collective intellect.
Some politicians are not even attempting to hide the suppression of free expression. The new Mayor of New South Wales in Australia informed his citizens that they did not have the same freedom of speech as America. That was it; that’s how policy gets made in the area of freedom of expression.
Mill was areligious, if anything. But On Liberty often displays a Biblical framework. There is a lot of “Do unto others” in there. Civic Christianity can set good laws, so there is nothing wrong with that, but for a man so seemingly uninterested in the religious impulse, his own is analogous: Doing unto others certainly adequately describes the current British government, just not in the traditional, Biblical sense.
But there was enough cynicism in Mill to span the ages: “But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes”.
On Liberty is a work of limits and boundaries, transgressed and untransgressed, and, although it speaks again from the past to the UK’s present predicament, Mill perhaps did not go far enough, and could not see, could not have seen, what might happen with the return of tyranny to the country of his birth. He did not see just how far power was prepared to go: “In England, from the peculiar circumstances of our political history, though the yoke of opinion is perhaps heavier, that of law is lighter, than in most other countries of Europe; and there is considerable jealousy of direct interference, by the legislative or executive power, with private conduct”.
The yoke of law is not so light now, 170 years after Mill walked the Capitoline Hill. And it is weighing heavier on the shoulders of the British people week by week, month by month, as more of them are arrested for social media posts than in Russia. There is still a long way down from Mill’s country’s position in Article 19’s league table, but that just means there is further to fall.
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