BECOMING MORE GROWNUP ABOUT FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Drawing on a lifetime of writing about dictatorships and dissidents, Timothy Garner Ash argues that in this connected world that he calls cosmopolis, the way to combine freedom and diversity is to have more but also better free speech. Across all cultural divides, we must strive to agree on how we disagree. He draws on a thirteen-language global online project--freespeechdebate.com--conducted out of Oxford University and devoted to doing just that. With vivid examples . . . he proposes a framework for civilized conflict in a world where we are all  becoming neighbors." From the text: "Today's veto statements come most often in the form of claimed offense to a group identity. . . . The logic is the same: the legitimation, with negative consequences for others, of a purely subjective act of taking offence. Thus, for example, an every longer list of terms and images may be ruled off limits because they might just be offensive to someone. . . . " "There are at least two mutually reinforcing reasons for refusing to limit freedom of expression on ground of such purely subjective offensiveness. The first is a matter of, so to speak, moral psychology: Do we want to be the kind of human beings who are habitually at the ready to take offence and our children to reeducated and socialized that way? Do we wish out children to learn to be adults or our adults to be treated like children? Should our role model be the thin-skinned identity activist who is constantly crying, 'I am offended'? Or should it rather be the Mandela, Baldwin or Gandhi who says, in effect, 'although what I see written or depicted is grossly offensive, I hold it beneath my dignity to take offence. It is those who abuse me who are are demeaning themselves'. 'Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me' then becomes not a patently false description of reality by a precept for fortitude." Id. at 90-91.).