Freedom of Speech

Freedom becomes strangely visible on the days somebody tries to punish its use with violence. #

Freedom of speech sounds clean when it is written as a principle and much less clean when actual people use it, because actual people are irritating, offensive, funny, wrong, clever, tasteless, brave, cruel, brilliant, stupid, serious, unserious, contradictory and occasionally all of those things before lunch. That mess is exactly why the principle matters to me. A freedom that survives only polite expression is not much of a freedom. At the same time, freedom of expression does not mean freedom from criticism, and I don’t want to flatten those two things into one because they are not the same. People can condemn a drawing. They can refuse to buy a publication. They can write an answer, protest, argue, parody the parody, call something offensive, call it irresponsible, call it brilliant, call it rubbish. All of those responses remain inside society. Murder does not. Tonight that boundary feels almost painfully clear. I am not writing this because I suddenly believe every complicated argument about expression has become simple. It hasn’t. Societies negotiate limits through laws, institutions, culture and constant disagreement, and different people experience the same expression differently. None of that requires pretending violence is another contribution to the debate. It destroys the person who could have continued speaking. I spent years online before social networks made everyone visible to everyone, years writing things strangers liked and things strangers thought were idiotic, years discovering that putting words on a public page means surrendering control over how they are received. I have been criticised. I have criticised. I have closed browser windows furious. I have typed replies and deleted them. I have laughed at things I probably should not have laughed at. I have been offended and somehow survived without believing the offending person should cease to exist. The internet can make disagreement feel enormous, but tonight the ordinary ugliness of an argument seems almost beautiful because an argument means both people are still there. I am writing freely from a warm room in Amsterdam. That fact usually feels so normal I do not touch it. Tonight I can feel its shape.

Remember me, Eclipse.