To name the unnameable

Kenan Malik adds to the debate surrounding the cancellation of Salman Rushdie's appearance at the Jaipur literary festival:

Mayer and Nygaard belonged to a world in which the defence of free speech was seen as an irrevocable duty. The organizers of the Jaipur festival belong to a different world, one in which the idea that a poet's work is "To name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep" is seen not as self-evident but as shockingly offensive. Over the past two decades, the very landscape of free speech and censorship has been transformed, as has the meaning of literature. The response of the Jaipur organizers gave expression to this transformation.

"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties", wrote John Milton in Areopagitica, his famous 1644 "speech for the liberty of unlicenc'd printing", adding that "He who destroys a good book destroys reason itself". For the next three centuries all progressive political strands were wedded to the principle of free speech as the necessary condition for social and political advance.

Of course, the liberal defence of free speech was shot through with hypocrisy. Milton himself opposed the extension of free speech to Catholics on the grounds that the Catholic Church was undeserving of freedom and liberty. John Locke, too, fêted as the founder of the liberal tradition of tolerance, held deeply bigoted views about Catholics. A whole host of harms – from the incitement to hatred to threats to national security, from the promotion of blasphemy to the spread of slander – have been cited as reasons to curtail speech. Yet, however hypocritical liberal arguments may sometimes have seemed, and notwithstanding the fact that most free speech advocates accepted that the line had to be drawn somewhere, there was nevertheless an acknowledgement that speech was an inherent good, the fullest extension of which was a necessary condition for the elucidation of truth, the expression of moral autonomy, the maintenance of social progress and the development of other liberties. Restrictions on free speech were seen as the exception rather than as the norm. Radicals recognized that the way to challenge the hypocrisy was not by restricting free speech further but by extending it to all.