IIn January 2015, two al-Qaeda members shot dead cartoonists at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo in retaliation for the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Over the following weeks, my Facebook page split into two. Many of my childhood friends (I grew up in France and went to school near Paris) expressed their sadness at the deaths of artists they had known for decades, their anger at religious extremism, and their fear about the loss of freedom of expression.
Meanwhile, many of my British and American academic colleagues, who were discovering Charlie Hebdo and its extremely offensive cartoons for the first time, were concerned about the stigmatization of French Muslims and doubted the wisdom of publishing the images in the first place; One reposted a link to a blog that described the murdered cartoonists as “racist idiots.”
I was kind of glad that there was so little overlap between these two groups of friends. Each may have viewed certain opinions expressed by the other side – and therefore the people expressing them – as extremely unpleasant and morally unconscionable. Two groups of people who, a week earlier, had shared the same types of memes and were happy or angry about the same things, turned out to be two completely different groups with incompatible values. I spent a lot of time writing anguished comments on various friends’ posts, trying to figure out where I stood on all this – and then deleted them. They didn’t seem to be helping. Instead, I picked up the phone, which worked a little better. Soon after, I left Facebook. And, since I am an anthropologist, I started a research project to find out what was happening.
The free speech debate seems to be about abstract principles and rules: What should be allowed? When does it cross a line? Do we need more or less regulation? These disagreements are real – but they don’t explain why we become so angry, upset, and divided over freedom of speech. In fact, the free speech wars of recent years aren’t just about rules — they’re about what it means to be a good human being. Notice how such debates are filled with caricatures of “types” of people: snowflakes, trolls, cancel-culture warriors, edgelords, bigots, crybullies, incels, etc. What really drives these debates is a set of implicit judgments about character: What kind of person wants to control another person’s speech? What kind of person doesn’t care about the impact his words will have on others?
This is the area that philosophers call “virtue ethics.” Arguments about free speech are arguments about a set of virtues – honesty, courage, flexibility, generosity, caring – and the character of those who espouse them. This is what those Facebook posts were apparently asking: Are you the kind of person who stands with murdered cartoonists, even when you personally dislike the cartoonists they created? Are you the kind of person who dares the crowd to raise your voice against social injustice? That’s why it all feels so personal – strained relationships, divided families, heated arguments or sad silences.
On the European and American scene, almost everyone seems to agree that free speech is largely a good thing. Yet we find that people are struggling with different views of what kind of (good) person a free speaker is. I would argue that three such approaches have been particularly prominent: the first shares the view of the independent speaker as a rational, measured citizen – perhaps the eloquent contributor at Question Time, the writer on a literary panel, the citizen at a town hall meeting. In the other, the free speaker is an obsessive breaker of rules and conventions – think of scandalous artworks like the Pissed Christ by Andres Serrano, or the “souping” of the Mona Lisa by climate activists. A third sees the independent speaker as a brave and honorable person standing up for the truth – classically, whistleblowers like Edward Snowden or Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor whose WeChat post warned the world about Covid-19.
Sometimes a person may be selected as all three at the same time. Consider Salman Rushdie, who is arguing in a measured, non-partisan tone for freedom of artistic expression, passionately denouncing censorship, and standing up for free speech at the risk of his life. More controversially, supporters of Charlie Hebdo saw the magazine this way immediately after the shooting: Charlie stood for a rational, secular commitment to publicly debating religion and religious extremism; Its staff mocked established figures of religious and secular authority; And they did all this selflessly and bravely, risking their lives. Of course, critics challenged this casting – for them, Charlie Hebdo was neither fair, targeting the powerful, nor selfless. In other contexts, the three characters of the free speaker are naturally in tension with each other: the worker shouting passionately from the barricades beyond all reason and measure; The rational citizen is setting aside the worker’s most cherished commitments from peace; Brave truth-tellers scandalize and shock polite citizens.
Once we see the free speech debate as a debate about morality and character rather than rules and principles, we can understand why people can argue for free speech one minute, and condemn their opponents for what they say the next. Examples are all around us, including MAGA activists engaging in cancel culture after the Charlie Kirk shooting, or progressives who previously defended campus speech codes while condemning their use against pro-Palestine protesters. This is often considered a cause of “double standards”, confusion or stubbornness. But if you start with the character, a different picture emerges. Each of our three “types” genuinely defends freedom of speech, but each also sometimes has good reasons to demand silence. The rational citizen supports limits on speech through law, copyright, or decency; The passionate activist may feel that the powerful must be silenced to allow the weak to speak; The honorable truth-teller demands respect for his or her values and compensation for the insults caused to him or his friends.
Of course, these ideal speakers are imaginary. But they are already more three-dimensional than the flat caricatures we started with (snowflake, troll, etc.). The purpose of this anthropological perspective is not to change your mind about free speech or harm your beliefs – it is to provide a language through which to see the other side’s beliefs more clearly, and to identify what grounds are actually shared by both.
There is no single argument for free speech that can withstand the push and pull of our current partisan debates. Instead, we need a commitment to free speech that is less obvious and therefore stronger, like a rope woven from many threads; In which each in his turn has room for reason and calm reason, fierce passion and courageous loyalty.
Matei Candia Professor and author at the University of Cambridge Reason, Carnival and Honor: an anthropology of free speech (Pelican).
Further reading
What is free speech? By Fara Dabhoiwala (Penguin, £14.99)
righteous mind By Jonathan Haidt (Penguin, £14.99)
logic puzzle By Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (Penguin, £10.99)
