Speaking in Whispers

In his 1941 State of the Union Address, President Franklin Roosevelt imagined “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms” which he identified as freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. This has come to be called the four freedoms speech, and was the inspiration for last year’s BBC Reith Lectures.

In a typical year, the BBC selects one person to give a sequence of talks on a given topic. The inaugural Reith lectures were delivered by Bertrand Russell in 1948, on the theme of Authority and the Individual, and he has been followed by a procession of extraordinary public intellectuals. It is among the most prestigious lecture series in the world.

Rather than honor a single person in 2022, the BBC chose four different individuals, each of whom addressed one of the four freedoms. The task of delivering the first lecture—on freedom of speech—fell to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Adichie’s lecture is as powerful and eloquent a defense of free expression as I have heard in recent years. I’ll go over the gist of the argument in this post but it’s worth listening to the whole thing in her own voice, including the question-and-answer session at the end.

She begins with a beautiful tale of childhood eavesdropping:

When I was growing up in the 1980s on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, I was a very curious child keen to hear every story, especially those that were no business of mine. And so, as a result, I sharpened very early on in life the skill of eavesdropping, a pastime at which I am still quite adept. 

I noticed that each time my parents’ friends visited, they would sit in the living room talking loudly, except for when they criticized the military government. Then, they spoke in whispers. That whispering, apart from testing my eavesdropping capabilities, was striking. Why speak in such hushed tones when in the privacy of our living room, drinking brandy, no less? Well, because they were so attuned to a punitive authoritarian government that they instinctively lowered their voices, saying words they dared not say in public. 

This reflex to speak in hushed tones when one fears reproach will be familiar to most of us, and an authoritarian government is reason enough to fear. However, argues Adichie, trepidation can also arise from other quite different sources:

We would not expect this whispering in a democracy. Freedom of expression is after all, the bedrock of open societies. But there are many people in Western democracies today who will not speak loudly about issues they care about because they are afraid of what I will call social censure—vicious retaliation, not from the government, but from other citizens.

Here Adichie distinguishes between valid social criticism and “ugly personal insults, putting addresses of homes and children’s schools online, trying to make people lose their jobs.” The former is essential, the latter inexcusable:

To anyone who thinks, “Well, some people who have said terrible things, deserve it,” no. Nobody deserves it. It is unconscionable barbarism. It is a virtual vigilante action whose aim is not just to silence the person who has spoken but to create a vengeful atmosphere that deters others from speaking. There is something honest about an authoritarianism that recognizes itself to be what it is. Such a system is easier to challenge because the battle lines are clear. But this new social censure demands consensus while being willfully blind to its own tyranny. I think it portends the death of curiosity, the death of learning and the death of creativity… If nothing changes, the next generation will read us and wonder, how did they manage to stop being human? How were they so lacking in contradiction and complexity? How did they banish all their shadows? 

Adichie then goes on to recount the stabbing of Salman Rushdie a couple of months earlier, and the chilling effect on artistic freedom that the threat of such acts can have. Social censure cannot be morally equated with physical violence of this kind, of course, but the effects on creative expression are much the same:

There are writers like Rushdie who want to write novels about sensitive subjects, but are held back by the specter of social censure. Publishers are wary of committing secular blasphemy. Literature is increasingly viewed through ideological rather than artistic lenses… This, in my mind, negates the very idea of literature. We cannot tell stories that are only light when life itself is light and darkness.

In an earlier post I discussed an essay by Rushdie in which he contemplates (but eventually retreats from) that idea that artistic freedom should itself be sacralized. Adichie is not interested in such grandiose notions; her defense of free expression is much more pragmatic. She fears that “the weapon I advocate to be used against someone else might one day be used against me. What today is considered benign could very well become offensive tomorrow, because the suppression of speech is not so much about the speech itself, as it is the person who censors.” 

What makes her argument so compelling is that Adichie squarely confronts two possible objections to it: the idea that words themselves can be a form of violence, and that asymmetries of power and wealth imply that the speech of some is amplified while that of others remains muted. On the former point:

While I insist that violence is never an acceptable response to speech, I do not deny the power of words to wound. Words can break the human spirit. Some of the deepest pain I have experienced in my life have come from words… and some of the most beautiful gifts I have received have also been words. It is precisely because of this power of words that freedom of speech matters… In this age of mounting disinformation all over the world, when it is easy to dress up a lie so nicely that it starts to take on the glow of truth, the solution is not to hide the lie but to expose it, and scrub from it, its false glow. When we censor the purveyors of bad ideas, we risk making them martyrs, and the battle with a martyr can never be won.

And on the idea that free speech primarily benefits those with wealth and power:

There are those who think that, because of these sorts of power limitations, we should robustly censor speech in order to create tolerance. A well-intentioned idea, no doubt… For all the nobility in the idea of censorship for the sake of tolerance, it is also a kind of capitulation, an acceptance that the wounded cannot fight back... Free speech is indeed a tool of the powerful, but it is also crucially the language of the powerless.

This is a very interesting thought. The opportunity to speak is unevenly distributed, to be sure, but this inequality is less extreme than that of wealth and power. Thus freedom of speech is equalizing on balance. This is an empirical claim, the verification of which would require some way of measuring expressive inequality precisely. We do not have such measures, but the idea is certainly worth exploring.

Adichie concludes by arguing for moral courage, a presumption of good faith in public discourse, and an effort to “wean ourselves of the addiction to comfort.”

While the speech itself is beautifully crafted and delivered, the question and answer session following it is spontaneously insightful. Here she expands on the idea that we tend to interpret the opinions of others in the most uncharitable ways. The example she uses (in response to a question from the floor) has to do with allegations of transphobia that are leveled as those who argue for sex-based rather than gender identity-based criteria for access to certain spaces, such as sporting competitions. But the point about ascribing malicious motives too readily in the face of disagreement applies more broadly.

The issue here is what Glenn Loury, in a brilliant paper, called the ad hominem inference:

Ad hominem inference, though denigrated by the high-minded, is a vitally important defensive tactic in the forum... If we know a speaker shares our values, we more readily accept observations from him contrary to our initial sense of things. We are less eager to dismiss his rebuttal of our arguments, and more willing to believe facts reported by him with unpleasant implications... Conversely, speakers with values very different from ours are probably seeking ends at odds with those that we would choose, if we had the same information... Thus, whenever political discourse takes place under conditions of uncertainty about the values of participants, a certain vetting process occurs, in which we cautiously try to learn more about the larger commitments of those advocating a particular course of action.

Loury’s analysis of this process of disclosure and interpretation is based on Bayesian reasoning and a notion of equilibrium that leaves no room for error. But what Adichie appears to be arguing is that errors are commonplace, and that we jump to conclusions about the values and commitments of others that are disconnected from underlying realities and the intentions of speakers. In her conception, we are free to choose more tolerant inferences about the character of others, and that doing so would lead to more vibrant discourse, more fulfilling social life, and better informed decisions. I believe she is entirely correct in this assessment.