It's Not Free Speech When Someone Pays

A couple of days ago, completely consumed by the recent string of stomach-turning attacks by Muslim fundamentalists in Pakistan, Nigeria and France (not to mention the savage beheadings by ISIS which preceded them), I decided that I wanted to write a piece exploring how I truly felt about the horrific reality of insane Islamic terrorists, versus the equally horrific reality of incessant and rapidly spreading Islamophobia. After the Paris shootings, however, I came to realize that there was an entirely different issue also at the fore – that of the concept of free speech. It soon became clear to me that that was a piece entirely on its own. I will tackle talking about terrorists vs innocents another day.

In the wake of the Paris massacre, the question now is NOT – and never will be – whether the shootings were justified or whether the victims invited their fates on themselves. The answer to that will always be an obvious and unequivocal NO; anyone suggesting that people deserved to be slaughtered isn't someone I wish to know or ever engage with. The question I am now turning over in my head is that of whether free speech should be an inalienable right, and what the consequences of that are to us as a species. I don't mean visible, dramatic consequences like bloodbaths inside magazine offices. I mean consequences like the quiet destruction of people's spirits. So for those who only wish to discuss the concrete things – legal rights, physical violence, words – this post probably won't be of interest to you. Yes I am sure I will touch on those things, but I am focusing more on the unseen – moral conscience, psychological violence, feelings.

Yesterday I was in a meeting about an upcoming play, in which a character is publicly degraded, and the issue of shame came up. Not the shame experienced by the victim of the degradation, but the lack of shame experienced by those inflicting the pain. We spoke about the importance of a modicum of shame in each of us – that internal barometer of our own conduct – and how some people need to experience more of it in order to reflect fully on the impact of their behaviour. It felt so appropriate for that to come up. I had repeatedly found myself asking two questions over the last few days, the first being “Don't people have any shame at how self-centered, thoughtless and mean they can be?” Of course, the answer to that question lies therein. The pondering of the question would require thoughtfulness; something which by definition cannot co-exist alongside thoughtlessness.

So I moved to the second question: When did the defense of free speech become the defense of hate speech? 

You may or may not consider Charlie Hebdo's cartoons hate speech. You may consider them innocuous. That isn't the point. The point is that if you substitute Muslims for almost any other group ridiculed on that cover, this entire scenario is different. Why is imagery deriding Judaism considered anti-Semitism – which is viewed as hate speech -- but imagery deriding Islam is defended as free speech? Why would imagery making a joke of Asians or gays be met with derision, but imagery making a joke of Muslims is defended as free speech? For the last week it has been deeply troubling to see and hear Islamophobic words and images repeatedly provided cover under the umbrella of free speech. The repeated lampooning of a religion's sacred prophet is not a commentary solely on the extremists. It is a ridiculing of the religion of a billion people, including a percentage of your nation's citizens. Why do so many who claim to be empathetic human beings not think that laughing at people's faith falls under the umbrella of "unkind"? And in this particular instance they are treated as “the other” – as if there are no Muslims who are also patriotic French. 

These leads me to another question. One which, if people took the time to ask it from a truly compassionate standpoint, could change so very much.

How much is a person's religion a part of his or her identity? 

I have contemplated this question deeply over the years. Infants are usually born into the religion of their parents, and “formally” welcomed into those faiths through various rituals at incredibly young ages. Christian children are taught prayers and know about baby Jesus before kindergarten; many children of various faiths are going to weekly services before they have reached the age of reason. The religion is part of the family, as much as other deeply entrenched parts of it are. For how many Israelis do you think being Israeli is a greater part of their identity than being Jewish? For how many Iranians do you think that their nationality far outweighs their religion, in terms of their own self-definition? I have come to realize that although is not my life, it is many people's lives. Many good, well-meaning people. They are as much Hindu as they are Indian or female. It lives in the core of them. 

My personal belief is that organized religion can be and has been an incredibly destructive force. I also think it has at times been an incredibly humanitarian and loving force. The ways in which it is the latter pairing do not make the news. There is abundant justification for criticism. No one can regulate what another person feels, thinks or says around one's dining room table, and unless harmful thoughts are going to manifest into harmful action, no one should be able to. We need to exercise autonomy over our minds. But I fundamentally reject the notion that we have no obligation to social responsibility with our written and verbal expression. The most empty and infuriating defense I have heard is that the magazine makes fun of other religions too. “They make fun of the Pope.” Oh do they really? I'm sure that makes life excruciating for seventy percent of French people. What a completely porous argument. The impact is always magnified when the subject of the mockery is an already marginalized or oppressed minority. Why the willingness to protest for a guaranteed, even louder voice for the widely heard, while the subjugated have almost no voice at all and theirs is not fought for? It is a ridiculous, ridiculous argument to compare the belitting of French Catholics -- the nation's largest denomination and holders of an enormous amount of its political and financial power -- to that of French Muslims.

I think I knew that I was going to engage in much debate in my life when I sat in a class at university – I don't recall which – and was the sole person to raise my hand at the question “Who here believes in censorship?” I don't know if I was actually the only person to feel that way, or if saying yes was just too insane to do publicly, but I did it. I went on to qualify my answer, of course. My feeling then, as is my feeling now, is that in order to live in a civil society, there MUST exist a line. I am not saying that everyone who ever says something controversial should be shut down. Clearly not. There needs to exist space for unpopular views and there certainly needs to be room for political dissent. But could that line that I speak of be the constant public disparaging of a particular group? Where lies the boundary? Where does the government say “Okay, this is a weekly or biweekly published bashing of a segment of our population, and it's not going to fly.” We live within lines all the time, and without being conscious of them, we are grateful for their existence. One such line is the Criminal Code, a set of boundaries that regulate our conduct and make it very clear where our freedoms end. But why? Shouldn't we be totally free? Of course not, and we know that.  For some reason it seems perfectly logical to us that we enforce laws that prohibit the infliction of physical injury – because you're not allowed to actually hurt me. Yet somehow, the license to promote words and images that inflict psychological injury on a group of people, day in and day out, needs “protection”. I want to share a little bit about who I feel needs protection.

In my life, I have been blessed to work with many young people between the ages of 2 (as a preschool teacher) and 19 (as a director/mentor). I have become intimately aware of the damage caused by bigoted expression on the lives of young people. Everyone I have heard speak of the right to freedom of speech -- apparently at all costs -- seems to live in a world inhabited only by adults, all of whom should be able to take a joke. No children exist in this world or if they do, clearly they are unseen. Because if you SEE children, if you HEAR what they internalize and carry, your world view changes. Young people, whose parents are attempting to raise them with faith, must constantly see that faith mocked and insulted in the public sphere. What are they to feel about themselves as Muslims when they are the butt of every punchline? Or do people just not give a crap? Make no mistake – there are 8-year-olds in France who bear the pain every moment of their religion being portrayed as a joke. Make no mistake about this either – there are 8-year-olds in France who are watching their parents' scornful laughter and learning that the religion of their peers is a joke.

Some people will wonder how an artist could possibly advocate censoring anyone's expression. I was once called a traitor for it. But art, at least to me, should be a tool for the examination of our society. Artists – if we wish them to be mirrors with honest reflections – must not be prevented from probing societal truths. Truth is power, and truth requires exposing the ugliness. Give me theatre that does that, give me film and paintings and sculpture and music and cartoons that do that. Give me raw, unapologetic, complex and visceral storytelling, an illumination of an existing condition taking place within a framework of respect for the subject. Do not give me the demeaning of an entire faith group for laughs on the local magazine stand. The intention of the artist or the social commentator should never be to cause the scars, but to illuminate the scars in order to explore and reveal the depth of the wounds.

Then there is the “P” word. The word that has been inherent to so many of the prominent news stories of the last year. Privilege. It can't seem to help but rear its head, because people can't seem to realize when it is intricately tied to their positions. One thing that used to confound me as a teenager was that it often seemed that the people with the hardest lives – the most shunned, the poorest, the most forgotten, the most long-suffering – were the most religious. I didn't understand it. Why the unbreakable faith in a higher power who has given you so little and has allowed your life to be so hard? I then realized that it was those very circumstances that necessitated faith. It was faith that could make them believe they had not been abandoned, faith that got them out of bed in the morning -- against all odds, faith that navigated them through the tragedies, faith that gave them breath. I saw that it was routinely the privileged who rolled their eyes at religion and could not understand this, because it was the privileged who – despite their own challenges -- had comfortable enough lives that an unwavering reliance on a deity to give them strength was unnecessary. I realized that while some had societal standing, security, the right to speak and the assurance that that speech was heard, there were other people who only have their God. 

In the moment that I came to understand what someone's faith might mean to him or her, that it could be the very thing that sustains life and hope, I understood the paralyzing pain of its constant ridicule and denigration.

I am profoundly aware of the power of expression. I am deeply grateful for the value of free speech, especially speech that people want suppressed. I believe in making people uncomfortable and shaking up the status quo.  I belong to a race that would still be sitting at the back of buses had people not put the ideal of liberty above the “comfort” of society (those who were actually considered part of society). There were a few centuries there in which the notion of blacks being free, blacks owning property, blacks entering through the front door, blacks swimming in the pool, blacks voting, blacks sitting with whites, and blacks doing about a thousand other things was considered “offensive” to the masses. We have moved forward as a planet because people fought for the right to speak and express opposing opinions. I know this. But there is speech that seeks to affirm human dignity, and speech that seeks to erode it.  As we fight for the right to speak, let us be mindful of what it is that we so wish to say. This week I have found myself staring out of bus windows, asking myself what it is that accounts for some people's desperate need to cling to the right to diminish people. One can disagree with certain aspects of a religion, but needn't go out of the way to intentionally and publicly disparage it. It is hurtful and there is a cost. Free speech isn't free when someone pays.

As some continue to plaster “Je suis Charlie” all over Instagram, Facebook or Twitter – or simply feel solidarity with the victims in their hearts – I would ask they think about another group of human beings as well. Not the disturbed men who committed the unthinkable executions of 12 citizens, but the millions of people – particular the young struggling to take pride in their identities – whose spirits are riddled with a different kind of bullet daily. Then consider why a tiny percent of these children, told their whole lives that they are a blight and a joke, grow up to wreak such unspeakable vengeance.

- T.T.