Free speech can't survive as an abstraction

All kinds of people show bravery in a crisis, and perhaps Rushdie would have been saved anywhere. But he was saved last Friday by members of two communities with similar values—one devoted to the open exchange of ideas, the other to freedom from persecution. “This is a very bold attack against the core values of freedom and ways of resolving differences short of violence, with art, literature, journalism,” Reese said. He experienced the assault as an intense embodiment of the kind of persecution that brings writers to City of Asylum. “It’s given a very visceral, momentary connection to me personally, and certainly to Salman, it’s probably never gone away in the back of his mind—but now it’s caught permanently, in a physical way.”

Freedom of expression—“the whole thing, the whole ball game,” Rushdie once called it—is a universal value that has to be enshrined in law to have any force. But it can’t survive as an abstraction. It depends on public opinion. “If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it,” Orwell wrote; “if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.” Free speech needs some ground to stand on. It needs a community with enough tolerance and trust for people to refrain from killing one another over ideas. It needs a people willing to defend the right—the life—of someone who says things that they don’t want to hear.