Responses to the assault on Salman Rushdie have combined personal sympathy with a general defence of free speech. Sympathy should come first. The second remains controversial. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but what of “words can never hurt you”? Witness the Iranian government’s blaming of Rushdie himself and his supporters. It is he, not Iran, that lies hurt.
Freedom of speech is one of the most slippery concepts in political philosophy. John Stuart Mill pronounced it absolute but qualified it, as he did all liberties, where it causes “harm” to others. On that tenuous footing has grown an edifice of laws on slander, libel, incitement and, more recently, the causing of offence.
The grim reality is that too many appeared to support the fatwa on Rushdie, whether out of personal affront at his writings or out of loyalty to their religion and its leaders. Two dozen countries banned Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses. Collective anger at a probably unread novel was then elevated into extremist violence – a situation not dissimilar to the 2015 Paris killings associated with the Charlie Hebdo cartoon.
When offence passes beyond its individual victim to their identity group, it moves from the realm of personal grievance to that of collective revenge. Under the Blair and Cameron governments, ideas of offence, bullying and hatred were elevated to the status of crimes. Now, any chance remark by an offender might be broadcast to the world, often generating a synthetic sense of group affront and possible litigation, if not direct action. Its ultimate absurdity was the inaccurate warning on a Merseyside police advertisement that, “Being offensive is an offence”.
The latest venture by the state into this morass is the Johnson government’s online safety bill, with its bizarre concept of “legal but harmful”. However well-intentioned, it seeks to monitor an astonishing range of evils and indisciplines, from online stalking to incitement to riot, from phoney medicine to fake Russian news. How it will work has yet to be stated. It is a censor’s charter – or nightmare.
Regulating the internet has become a major political challenge. Europe faced a similar crisis with the advent of printing, and evolved licensing and copyright laws to handle it. The key then lay in identifying the author and the publisher. There had to be some accountability for the words. In contrast, the internet has led to an anarchy of dissemination. While Rushdie has authored a book and is accountable for it, many of his critics are part of that familiar social media feature: an anonymous mob howling after its victim across the ether.
Those worried by a lack of online accountability are convinced the only solution lies in somehow ending anonymity in that domain. Some claim anonymity helps whistleblowers and others – but such benefits are massively outweighed by the harm done by the unruly and unknown mob. The very fact that social media companies enjoy global accessibility should impose an added obligation on corporations to accept they are “publishers not just platforms”. Great as the technical problems may be, they must be held to account for the harm they can cause to others.
This is the debate now thundering into view. The correct response to the Rushdie outrage is not just to plead for freedom of speech, but to ask what it really means and how it is to be sustained – and regulated. That is not done through silence.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
