Free speech was never free.
It cost us a revolution to establish and centuries of vigilance to maintain. It cost us brave and brazen practitioners to define its parameters. It cost us civil disruption; its misuse on occasion cost lives.
Neither does free mean unconstrained. Free speech is constrained by law, custom, propriety, and if you scribble to amuse, the tastes of your throng. I may tug at the reins of your attention, but your grip is tight, and your judgment swift and severe. Your penalty is likely capital; a single offense and to hell with me, which is death for a writer.
Costs and constraints notwithstanding, free speech differs fundamentally from compulsory. A person speaking freely distinguishes themselves from the mob. A person reciting a prescribed script is a faceless cog. Tyrants resent and prevent free speech for it undermines their authority. Anyone who speaks may speak more intelligently or intelligibly than the Fuhrer. Is the Fuhrer then most fit to rule?
Never in recorded history has speech been freer than in America during my span. Seldom did I feel hindered from saying what I saw. Now and then, as an editor, I withheld the truth to protect our enterprise; suicide is seldom heroic. Twice, all too memorably, I suppressed stories to avoid injuring innocents. Truth while a great goal cannot be the only goal of a conscientious citizen. In print as in person, candor and kindness continually vie. But never once did I feel gagged like Galileo or Shostakovich, risking my life for speaking my mind.
That is changing. For reasons we may never fathom, Americans invited a mob boss to supervise our democracy. (Did I mention that suicide is seldom heroic?) Loudly the word’s gone forth, unpalatable language may entail intolerable penalties. Plutocratic news-purveyors skimp on truth to protect their enterprises, enhance their profits or both. Legions have been fired for speaking out, more each day.
The use of the phrase “chilling effect” to describe conformity by fear is about as old as I am. It entered the language as an abhorrence to be guarded against. It was detected in journalism, scholarly inquiry, moral discourse, replacing earlier, more violent metaphors (gag, suppress, silence), at once less precise and more nefarious. Can we tell when we’re censoring ourselves? Aren’t we more likely to salute our restraint as sensible, even valiant?
Among retirement’s sweetest sweets has been my enlarged freedom of speech, having graduated from podium and pulpit. Old, few care what you babble, because you’re old. I endanger few with my eccentricities or invectives. That too may be changing. I dream of a knock on the door. My opposition to our obnoxious mob boss is, and must remain, absolute and audible, for the threat he poses is existential. Better I should die than he should win. But what might my noisy protestations cost me? I revel in the astonishing growth in my readership, from less than five hundred to more than thirty thousand in eight months – and the pace accelerates – but with increased visibility comes increased risk. The Nameless One could smoosh me like a bug. What then?
Free speech isn’t a pretty gewgaw but the essential guarantor of the dignity of Man. What are we if not individuals? And how can we assert our individuality except by speaking our minds? The future envisioned by our thug-in-chief is gray, grinding, grim; no one who truly lives will want to live there. What brought us to this pass we must leave to future historians, if history survives. Now we must wage war for the human soul. Do or die.