Free speech and the Global Village
Part I
by David de Caires
Editor-in-Chief of the Stabroek News
Stabroek News
March 9, 2003
Today we publish the first part of a lecture in the Chancellor of the University of Guyana’s Distinguished Lecture Series delivered at the Hotel Tower on Thursday February27, 2003 by David de Caires, Editor-in-Chief of the Stabroek News.
“With words it all began, and with words it will all end. And over the time of reality in between - thousands of dead, beaten, wounded and evacuated people, destroyed houses, villages and towns! One day, a steam-roller of words will roll and cover the factual tragedy with concrete, with interpretations - historical, political, military-strategic, cultural and literary-”
The quotation comes from an essay by the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic written in December 1993 reflecting on the destruction of Yugoslavia. It was referred to in a speech by Hugo Butler, the chairman of the International Press Institute, at the annual congress of the institute in 2002 held in Slovenia, one of the successor states of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which sought to discuss what had taken place. Those who spoke included Stjepan Mesic, the President of Croatia who said that the media must inform and not indoctrinate and argued that the media had played a pernicious role in the region in the last decade of the 20th century. Another speaker was Wolfgang Petritsch, then High Representative of the International Community for Bosnia - Herzegovina, who had been Austria’s ambassador to Belgrade and the European Union’s special envoy during the war in Kosovo from 1998-99 and who, referring to the wars that had taken place, said: “Ordinary people were prepared to see the most monstrous acts carried out as they were dressed up in hideous untruths pumped out by broadcasters and newspapers who followed the bidding of a Slobodan Milosevic or Franjo Tudjman with alarming readiness. The drivel I had to read and listen to from the pro-Milosevic media in Belgrade was sickening.”
Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right protected by our constitution. I believe it to be a vital part of the open society we seek to build and I admire enormously the editors and journalists who bravely struggle to report the facts as accurately as they can in areas of the world where their liberty and even their lives may be at stake. I am also a member of international press associations whose efforts are dedicated to supporting these committed fighters for press freedom. But in the past few years it has been impossible for me not to recognise that when this cherished right of free expression is exercised irresponsibly or is driven by ethnic passions or by group interests it can exact a heavy price, as the example of Yugoslavia shows. This is not a Guyanese problem but a global problem. There are numerous examples in the twentieth century, and indeed in the most developed countries, of media driven by narrow nationalisms or with warmongering agendas. Free speech is an essential part of human liberty but like all rights it is not absolute. This is the theme I would like to explore.
There is, and will always be, a tension between ethnic traditions and identities and the Enlightenment ideal that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic and other divisions. It is a sub-theme of the dichotomy between emotion and reason. The ideal of rational public debate outlined by a philosopher like Jurgen Habermas based on a commitment to accuracy and truth conflicts with the realities of men’s passions and private agendas, explicit or unconscious. Indeed, the attempt to have a debate on ethnic insecurities and prejudices in the letter columns of the Stabroek News generated more heat than light and led nowhere. The protagonists found it difficult to overcome their emotions and their prejudices in dealing with what is clearly a delicate and sensitive issue. Even in societies completely committed to free speech ideals like America there are subjects that are taboo, such as racist topics and incest. The American scholar and literary theorist Stanley Fish somewhat provocatively stated that “free speech is what’s left over when you’ve determined which forms of speech cannot be permitted to flourish. The ‘free speech zone’ emerges against the background of what has been excluded.”
Should people be free to make vile statements that cause harm and inspire hatred? Fish has argued that the first amendment to the constitution which protects free speech in America was designed to protect political free speech only and thus to prevent the government from silencing its own critics. He also argued that in American judicial decisions the rights of individuals to free speech used to be balanced against other rights and values. He referred to the test of ‘clear and present danger’ put forward by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes whereby expression was to be allowed in the service of robust and wide open debate in a democratic society up to the point where it seemed that the effect of that expression might constitute a danger to the democratic process that was allowing it. He argues that the second pole of this argument has been dropped and more and more there is a first amendment rhetoric of individual liberty that has the effect of producing heroes who gain that status by uttering the most offensive statements that cause psychological damage to others.
The problem becomes more acute and more dangerous when vile statements are made not about individuals but about groups or collectives to whom unsavoury characteristics are attributed. We can gain some insight into this problem from George Orwell. In Notes on Nationalism written in May 1945 Orwell offers a definition of that word, arbitrarily chosen for his purposes in that essay, which has an ongoing relevance and bears quoting at some length:
“By “nationalism” I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled “good” or “bad.” But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By “patriotism” I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
“So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough. Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside, nearly all of us would say much the same things about it.
But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using the word “nationalism” for lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholi- cism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one’s own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.
“It is also worth emphasising once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the USSR without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations.
He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side.
On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.”
The theme is developed by writers like Michael Ignatieff in The Warrior’s Honour where the myths and atavisms and distortions used by “nationalists” are discussed when he visits what he describes as “the landscapes of modern ethnic war”, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola and Afghanistan. In ‘Belfast Confetti’, a New Yorker article by David Remnick, on the Northern Ireland stalemate, he wrote:
“Not to insult the suffering of those who have to live through sectarian conflicts all over the world, it must be said that for the visitor these conflicts often have about them a depressing sameness, a futility in which history and language are twisted beyond all recognition. Arrive in Armenia, say, and within half an hour you will hear of how the Azeris across the border started the horrific 1988 earthquake with a series of underground nuclear explosions; you will hear about a “secret alliance” of Azeris and Turks; you will hear about who was where first, who is the true owner of this church or that mountain pass. Cross the border and you will hear the same tone of conspiracy, the same warring versions of history.”
Those who live in ethnically divided societies are familiar with the phenomenon whereby educated and normally balanced persons succumb to what one might call the ethnic virus which colours their thinking and leads them to take irrational positions on issues of the day. Yet it would be naive to underestimate or wish away the insecurities that exist in multi-ethnic states and the fear of loss of identity coupled with the desire to identify with a group or collective, a ‘nation’ within the state. Ignatieff urges us to awaken from “lives spent in the twilight of myth and collective illusion” but based on our experience here one suspects that this will require a level of personal and political self-examination that does not now exist.
The ideal of free speech in all nations, and particularly in ethnically divided nations, has to contend with all of these things, quite apart from the factual inaccuracies that are, often in complete good faith, a normal part of public debate. Should a line be drawn and where? That is a question that all democracies have to tackle at some stage. The free speech dilemma, so to speak, arises in a wide variety of contexts which include libel (should the reputations of individuals, including those in public life, be protected against defamation and to what extent?) contempt of court (should citizens be entitled to comment on current proceedings in court, and on judicial decisions, and if so subject to what restrictions?), should obscene or pornographic publications be allowed, what constitutes seditious or treasonable speech, should ethnically inflammatory statements be made a crime? All of these issues require careful and informed public debate. There are no easy answers to any of them. The experience in Guyana has been that when ethnic passions run high the laws become impotent. Indeed a law unanimously passed in parliament making the broadcasting or publishing of ethnically inflammatory statements quite a serious crime was a dead letter from the moment it was passed. The mischief the law was aimed at continued and got worse and no one was ever charged. Public commentators have accused judges of bias and have urged serious action against policemen with impunity. It is a mistake to think that free speech comes neatly packaged like a wonderful gift ready for consumption and does not require the most careful analysis and reflection as to what it entails and whether the negative aspects should be regulated and in what way. It is in fact a part of and fits into a broader democratic framework and must not be idealized as an abstraction with no downside or transaction costs.
What is the role of the intellectual? (We can loosely define this for our present purposes as those who comment with some degree of learning or scholarship on public affairs). The first duty of the intellectual is to recognise that his opinions have consequences in the real world. If, for example, he puts forward the thesis that one group is marginalising the other without doing the detailed hard work and research needed to acquire the facts to establish that proposition he becomes to that extent an ideologue or a propagandist. The thesis can quite obviously lead to the most unpleasant outcome as the group said to be discriminated against will naturally feel a deep resentment. In a famous lecture delivered at Oxford in 1958 entitled “Two concepts of liberty” the scholar Isaiah Berlin noted that the German poet Heine had warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas and that philosophical concepts nurtured in a professor’s study could destroy a civilisation. He described the works of Rousseau as the blood-stained weapon which in the hands of Robespierre had destroyed the old regime and prophesied that the romantic faith of Fichte and Schelling would one day be turned, with terrible effect, against the liberal culture of the west.
In 1927 the French writer Julian Benda published “La Trahison des Clercs” (The Treason of the intellectuals) in which he said that intellectuals had betrayed their commitment to philosophical and scholarly ideals. In an article entitled “The treason of the intellectuals and the undoing of thought” Roger Kimball noted Benda’s argument that intellectuals had been a breed apart whose activity was not essentially the pursuit of practical aims but that that was changing. He wrote:
“More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. The attack on the universal went forward in social and political life as well as in the refined precincts of epistemology and metaphysics: “Those who for centuries had exhorted men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon is given, for their ‘fidelity to the French soul,’ ‘the immutability of their German consciousness,’ for the ‘fervor of their Italian hearts’”. In short, intellectuals began to immerse themselves in the unsettlingly practical and material world of political passions: precisely those passions, Benda observed, “owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national passions.” The “rift” into which civilization had been wont to slip narrowed and threatened to close altogether.
“Writing”, Kimball said, “at a moment when ethnic and nationalistic hatreds were again threatening to tear Europe asunder, Benda’s diagnosis assumed the lineaments of a prophecy-one that continues to have deep resonance today. “Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds,” he wrote. “It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity.” There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little more than a decade, Benda’s prediction that, because of the “great betrayal” of the intellectuals, humanity was “heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world,” would achieve a terrifying corroboration.
ôJulien Benda was not so nave as to believe that intellectuals as a class had ever entirely abstained from political involvement, or, indeed, from involvement in the realm of practical affairs. Nor did he believe that intellectuals, as citizens, necessarily should abstain from political commitment or practical affairs. The “treason” or betrayal he sought to publish concerned the way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was “mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers.” The ideal of disinterested judgment and faith in the universality of truth: such traditional guiding principles of intellectual life were more and more contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether. Benda castigated this development as the “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action.”
Can our intellectuals transcend ethnic loyalties and provide disinterested analysis? There is some evidence that this is possible though it is not at all clear that there is a receptive audience when it does occur. But the overwhelming tendency is to take sides. The political situation frames the debate, so to speak. It is difficult to get outside of it as almost every statement is deconstructed in ethnic terms. It is almost as if the ethnic tensions and insecurities make useful speech difficult if not impossible. Professor Fish has noted that one speaks for a reason: “to inform, to command, to acquiesce, to ask a question, to further an agenda, to close an agenda down. Another way to put this is to say that speech and communication are the signs of our distance from the condition we would most like to inhabit.” In other words, as he pointed out, in paradise there would be no reason to say anything to anyone. In a situation in which there are radically different perceptions of the situation and the problems is there language that can be heard or does the possibility of rational speech cease to exist?
At a practical level the task of the newspaper editor or journalist is clearly in principle to report the facts as objectively as possible. But even here the pressures for ethnic contamination of the facts are considerable. To partly illustrate the dilemma let us look briefly at the philosophical underpinnings of the modern concept of free speech. In an article in a booklet published in 1998 by the World Press Freedom Committee to emphasise the enduring importance for a free press of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights W. Michael Riesman, Hohfeld Professor of Jurisprudence of the Yale Law School and Ralph Wilde, a barrister and then visiting scholar at the Yale Law School stated:
“The foundation human rights documents are driven by certain postulates and, as a result, can be called a coherent and organised philosophical system. The fundamental postulate of Article 19 is the Enlightenment notion that the process of finding truth is secular, trans-cultural and dialectical. This cultural perception has roots in the trauma of the Reformation. The break-up of a single Christian dogma in Europe and the fact that there is a single authoritative text, but it is susceptible to many interpretations, each as valid as any other, was an ultimate compromise. It is basic, at a deep cultural level, to the tolerance which underlies freedom of expression, with all of its unruliness, the offensive things that may be said and that may injure egos, personalities and reputations.
The Enlightenment conception holds that there is not a single truth; but social truths emerge from a kind of conflict, an exchange of ideas and (often) exaggerated statements that are corrected by others, followed by new exaggerated statements, new syntheses and so on. All of these become part of our consciousness, reinforcing the idea of the relativity of truth that is basic to a vital system of freedom of expression. The extraordinary difference of world view and inner world of those who are participating in the system is accepted and it is appreciated that what will ultimately be installed as a social truth will be the result of give and take, a process in which many extreme, even preposterous views will be put forward, challenged, adapted, synthesized and then challenged again. In the process, those who participated will be shaped by it, as will their very sense of reality. If one starts with an absolute conception of truth that holds that truth has been given at some point in the past, then one’s job is as its custodian, to make sure that it is in no way tainted. If one starts with the notion that there is some scientific basis to social fact, then the notion of freedom of expression and its dialectical process of social truth will seem absurd. Thus, for Marxists, freedom of expression was simply a bourgeois atavism.”
Yet, we may ask, in an ethnically divided society (or in any society) does truth emerge? Suppose a large number of the views expressed are ill-informed, tendentious or biased, will they help to shed light or to spread confusion? How will this synthesis emerge and who will so proclaim it? Clearly knowledge and learning do progress, clearly an exchange of views in public debate can in principle help but how does it work? Does one read some argument that has an effect on one’s views then or later? Is it the quality of the speech that matters or the quality of the comprehension? How can the readers or the audience discriminate between the conflicting statements that are made? Who would be so bold in Guyana today, for example, as to undertake to make five social or political propositions that will be broadly accepted. Perhaps some insights do emerge from time to time but they are always in danger of being swamped by partisan sentiment. Yet perhaps we protest too much. Perhaps the man in the Georgetown minibus, in the midst of the welter of opinions, does have a feel for the truth and an ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, even though he or she may emotionally resist the conclusions. Do people invariably for their own sense of well being recreate the world in their own image?
There are, too, different kinds of truth. Scientific truth is always a provisional, working hypothesis subject to being revised in the light of new evidence. Religious truth is based on faith. But there are also plain facts, such as did this politician say or do this on a particular occasion. That is clearly either true or false, though finding out what actually happened may often require skill, experience and diligence. Journalists deal primarily in that kind of truth though newspapers go beyond that in their editorial columns to engage in public debate.
Where and how does useful public debate take place. Habermas speaks of a public sphere, the sphere of private people who join together to form a public. He says the development of the fully political public sphere first occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century and became institutionalised in the European constitutional states of the nineteenth century where public consensus was enshrined as a way of checking domination. But that debate was conducted by a fairly narrow intellectual elite. Modern politics, by contrast is conducted in a debased public sphere produced by the expansion of the electorate, the operation of mass political parties and political marketing and the manipulation of public opinion and the manufacture of consensus. Cultural context in its broadest sense is in other words vital to useful debate. Free speech without good faith, a respect for the facts and some level of intellectual integrity can become a Tower of Babel where no one listens or learns anything.
Yet with all these qualifications those who have lived in a situation in which there was severely limited freedom of expression will have no doubt that free speech with all the downside and the baggage it brings is infinitely preferable to censorship and repression.
Let us move on to the new electronic interdependence which Marshall Mc Luhan famously said has recreated the world in the image of a global village. We can turn on our television and see the latest news live in all parts of the world on BBC World or CNN. We can use the internet to access thousands of websites with all sorts of information. But of course information is not knowledge, and much of the information we receive has been distorted or is published by others who do not necessarily or always share our perspectives. Moreover, inevitably, many of the programmes we watch come from more economically developed societies with different lifestyles. We are therefore more consumers of those electronic images than participants with all that that entails in terms of rising expectations and illusions. For example, we see the development, the end product but not how the developed countries achieved that standard of living.
The Mc Bride report “Many Voices, One World” subtitled “Towards a new more just and more efficient world information and communication order” is now 23 years old. It was commissioned by UNESCO in response to calls for a more balanced flow of information, both worldwide and within individual societies. The debate and the report were bedevilled by controversy mainly because it was felt, perhaps correctly, that many of the governments involved were more interested in controlling the flow of information than in making it more balanced. Yet there was surely some validity in the claim that the selection and presentation of international news was dominated by the main press agencies (and now as well by the omnipresent television media like CNN and the BBC) which saw the world from their own standpoint. These press agencies are run by media professionals who usually do a very good job but their priorities are often and understandably quite different to ours. For as long as we have to rely primarily or exclusively on those sources we will inevitably be strongly influenced by their world view. The ultimate answer, of course, then and now, was and is for private media in developing countries to unite to provide competing professionally run news agencies with their own global perspectives. This is certainly now an idea whose time has come, given the technical possibilities, but a great deal of organisation will be required to develop the linkages between free private media in Asia, Africa and Latin America to provide the kind of comprehensive news coverage that is now lacking from a developing country standpoint. In this context our own Caribbean News Agency deserves a mention. Started in 1975 by news media in the Caribbean in conjunction with Reuters and with help from the United Nations Development Programme it recently experienced severe financial problems after years of fruitful operation.
There are embryonic attempts by various groups to get new news agencies going. There have been other significant developments such as the starting of the independent Al Jazeera television station, the first of its kind in the Arab world. But at the moment one would have to admit that the global village, partly because of differential levels of economic and technological development, has a predominantly western face. The huge and exciting challenge to redress the balance awaits some energetic media entrepreneurs in developing countries.
Does the University of Guyana have a role to play in helping to develop a professional media culture in Guyana? I am aware that there is a Centre for Communication Studies which offers a four year degree and a two year diploma in public communication. Though the curriculum does include print and broadcast journalism my own experience with graduates is that they lack the kind of focused training in professional reporting which Guyana so badly needs and some media houses are looking for. I recommend that some effort be made to amend the curriculum to include this requirement.
I am also aware that Chancellor Juma has commissioned a report captioned “Higher Education and Economic Renewal” in an effort to develop an operational strategy to transform the institution into a research -led university with the capacity to play a major role in the country’s future development. This is in keeping with trends elsewhere and will surely depend very largely on the human and financial resources that can be mobilised. I have no doubt that the business community will support this endeavour. I would say, however, that while pursuing this entirely understandable desire to make the university more relevant and self-supporting one must be careful not to abandon its transcendent function of inculcating habits of thought in students that enable them to play their roles as citizens. If they graduate with skills only but with no broader view of the world and its problems and of the ultimate questions of life and meaning there will be something basic lacking in their education, and their ability to contribute to the development of our country in the fullest sense of that word will also be lacking.
To conclude, the question we face in a developing country like Guyana, where the rule of law is only weakly established and the public social culture is fragile, is how can we minimise the damage grossly irresponsible free speech has caused in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and elsewhere while preserving our cherished constitutional right of freedom of expression. Are the murderous broadcasts of the genocidaires on Radio Mille Collines in Rwanda a price one has to pay? We will, as a young nation, have at some stage to undertake the onerous task of evolving a modern philosophy of free speech which stresses its crucial importance as a vital and non-negotiable part of our constitutional rights in an open society while at the same time trying to deal sensibly with the damage it can cause if exercised irresponsibly or with malice aforethought. This task will require maturity and reflection. Even in the most stable democracies there is an ongoing debate as to where the line should be drawn on some of these issues.
Part II
The theme [of nationalism] is developed by writers like Michael Ignatieff in "The Warrior's Honour" where the myths and atavisms and distortions used by "nationalists" are discussed when he visits what he describes as "the landscapes of modern ethnic war", Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Burrundi, Angola and Afghanistan. In Belfast Confetti, a New Yorker article by David Ramnick, on the Northern Ireland stalemate, he wrote:
"Not to insult the suffering of those who have to live through sectarian conflicts all over the world, it must be said that for the visitor these conflicts often have about them a depressing sameness, a futility in which history and language are twisted beyond all recognition. Arrive in Armenia, say, and within half an hour you will hear of how the Azeris across the border started the horrific 1988 earthquake with a series of underground nuclear explosions; you will hear about a 'secret alliance' of Azeris and Turks; you will hear about who was where first, who is the true owner of this church or that mountain pass. Cross the border and you will hear the same tone of conspiracy, the same warring versions of history."
Those who live in ethnically divided societies are familiar with the phenomenon whereby educated and normally balanced persons succumb to what one might call the ethnic virus which colours their thinking and leads them to take irrational positions on issues of the day. Yet it would be naive to underestimate or wish away the insecurities that exist in multi-ethnic states and the fear of loss of identity coupled with the desire to identify with a group or collective, a 'nation' within the state. Ignatieff urges us to awaken from 'lives spent in the twilight of myth and collective illusion' but based on our experience here one suspects that this will require a level of personal and political self-examination that does not now exist.
The ideal of free speech in all nations, and particularly in ethnically divided nations, has to contend with all of these things, quite apart from the factual inaccuracies that are, often in complete good faith, a normal part of public debate. Should a line be drawn and where? That is a question that all democracies have to tackle at some stage. The free speech dilemma, so to speak, arises in a wide variety of contexts which include libel (should the reputations of individuals, including those in public life, be protected against defamation and to what extent), contempt of court (should citizens be entitled to comment on current proceedings in court, and on judicial decisions, and if so subject to what restrictions?), should obscene or pornographic publications be allowed, what constitutes seditious or treasonable speech, should ethnically inflammatory statements be made a crime? All of these issues require careful and informed public debate. There are no easy answers to any of them. The experience in Guyana has been that when ethnic passions run high the laws become impotent. Indeed a law unanimously passed in parliament making the broadcasting or publishing of ethnically inflammatory statements quite a serious crime was a dead letter from the moment it was passed. The mischief the law was aimed at continued and got worse and no one was ever charged. Public commentators have accused judges of bias and have urged serious action against policemen with impunity. It is a mistake to think that free speech comes neatly packaged like a wonderful gift ready for consumption and does not require the most careful analysis and reflection as to what it entails and whether the negative aspects should be regulated and in what way. It is in fact a part of and fits into a broader democratic framework and must not be idealized as an abstraction with no downside or transaction costs.
What is the role of the intellectual? (We can loosely define this for our present purposes as those who comment with some degree of learning or scholarship on public affairs). The first duty of the intellectual is to recognise that his opinions have consequences in the real world. If, for example, he puts forward the thesis that one group is marginalising the other without doing the detailed hard work and research needed to acquire the facts to establish that proposition he becomes to that extent an ideologue or a propagandist. The thesis can quite obviously lead to the most unpleasant outcome as the group said to be discriminated against will naturally feel a deep resentment. In a famous lecture delivered at Oxford in 1958 entitled "Two concepts of liberty" the scholar Isaiah Berlin noted that the German poet Heine had warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas and that philosophical concepts nurtured in a professor's study could destroy a civilisation. He described the works of Rousseau as the blood-stained weapon which in the hands of Robespierre had destroyed the old regime and prophesied that the romantic faith of Fichte and Schelling would one day be turned, with terrible effect, against the liberal culture of the west.
In 1927 the French writer Julian Benda published "La Trahison des Clercs" (The Treason of the intellectuals) in which he said that intellectuals had betrayed their commitment to philosophical and scholarly ideals. In an article entitled "The treason of the intellectuals and the undoing of thought" Roger Kimball noted Benda's argument that intellectuals had been a breed apart whose activity was not essentially the pursuit of practical aims but that that was changing. He wrote:
"More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. The attack on the universal went forward in social and political life as well as in the refined precincts of epistemology and metaphysics: "Those who for centuries had exhorted men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon is given, for their 'fidelity to the French soul,' 'the immutability of their German consciousness,' for the 'fervor of their Italian hearts'". In short, intellectuals began to immerse themselves in the unsettlingly practical and material world of political passions: precisely those passions, Benda observed, "owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national passions." The "rift" into which civilization had been wont to slip narrowed and threatened to close altogether."
"Writing", Kimball said, "at a moment when ethnic and nationalistic hatreds were again threatening to tear Europe asunder, Benda's diagnosis assumed the lineaments of a prophecy-one that continues to have deep resonance today. "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds," he wrote. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration.
"Julien Benda was not so naive as to believe that intellectuals as a class had ever entirely abstained from political involvement, or, indeed, from involvement in the realm of practical affairs. Nor did he believe that intellectuals, as citizens, necessarily should abstain from political commitment or practical affairs. The "treason" or betrayal he sought to publish concerned the way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was "mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers." The ideal of disinterested judgment and faith in the universality of truth: such traditional guiding principles of intellectual life were more and more contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether. Benda castigated this development as the "desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action."
Can our intellectuals transcend ethnic loyalties and provide disinterested analysis? There is some evidence that this is possible though it is not at all clear that there is a receptive audience when it does occur. But the overwhelming tendency is to take sides. The political situation frames the debate, so to speak. It is difficult to get outside of it as almost every statement is deconstructed in ethnic terms. It is almost as if the ethnic tensions and insecurities make useful speech difficult if not impossible. Professor Fish has noted that one speaks for a reason: "to inform, to command, to acquiesce, to ask a question, to further an agenda, to close an agenda down. Another way to put this is to say that speech and communication are the signs of our distance from the condition we would most like to inhabit." In other words, as he pointed out, in paradise there would be no reason to say anything to anyone. In a situation in which there are radically different perceptions of the situation and the problems is there language that can be heard or does the possibility of rational speech cease to exist?
At a practical level the task of the newspaper editor or journalist is clearly in principle to report the facts as objectively as possible. But even here the pressures for ethnic contamination of the facts are considerable. To partly illustrate the dilemma let us look briefly at the philosophical underpinnings of the modern concept of free speech. In an article in a booklet published in 1998 by the World Press Freedom Committee to emphasise the enduring importance for a free press of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights W. Michael Riesman, Hohfeld Professor of Jurisprudence of the Yale Law School and Ralph Wilde, a barrister and then visiting scholar at the Yale Law School stated:
"The foundation human rights documents are driven by certain postulates and, as a result, can be called a coherent and organised philosophical system. The fundamental postulate of Article 19 is the Enlightenment notion that the process of finding truth is secular, trans-cultural and dialectical. This cultural perception has roots in the trauma of the Reformation. The break-up of a single Christian dogma in Europe and the fact that there is a single authoritative text, but it is susceptible to many interpretations, each as valid as any other, was an ultimate compromise. It is basic, at a deep cultural level, to the tolerance which underlies freedom of expression, with all of its unruliness, the offensive things that may be said and that may injure egos, personalities and reputations.
"The Enlightenment conception holds that there is not a single truth; but social truths emerge from a kind of conflict, an exchange of ideas and (often) exaggerated statements that are corrected by others, followed by new exaggerated statements, new syntheses and so on. All of these become part of our consciousness, reinforcing the idea of the relativity of truth that is basic to a vital system of freedom of expression. The extraordinary difference of world view and inner world of those who are participating in the system is accepted and it is appreciated that what will ultimately be installed as a social truth will be the result of give and take, a process in which many extreme, even preposterous views will be put forward, challenged, adapted, synthesized and then challenged again. In the process, those who participated will be shaped by it, as will their very sense of reality. If one starts with an absolute conception of truth that holds that truth has been given at some point in the past, then one's job is as its custodian, to make sure that it is in no way tainted. If one starts with the notion that there is some scientific basis to social fact, then the notion of freedom of expression and its dialectical process of social truth will seem absurd. Thus, for Marxists, freedom of expression was simply a bourgeois atavism."
Yet, we may ask, in an ethnically divided society (or in any society) does truth emerge? Suppose a large number of the views expressed are ill-informed, tendentious or biased, will they help to shed light or to spread confusion? How will this synthesis emerge and who will so proclaim it? Clearly knowledge and learning do progress, clearly an exchange of views in public debate can in principle help but how does it work? Does one read some argument that has an effect on one's views then or later? Is it the quality of the speech that matters or the quality of the comprehension? How can the readers or the audience discriminate between the conflicting statements that are made? Who would be so bold in Guyana today, for example, as to undertake to make five social or political propositions that will be broadly accepted. Perhaps some insights do emerge from time to time but they are always in danger of being swamped by partisan sentiment. Yet perhaps we protest too much. Perhaps the man in the Georgetown minibus, in the midst of the welter of opinions, does have a feel for the truth and an ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, even though he or she may emotionally resist the conclusions. Do people invariably for their own sense of well being recreate the world in their own image?
There are, too, different kinds of truth. Scientific truth is always a provisional, working hypothesis subject to being revised in the light of new evidence. Religious truth is based on faith. But there are also plain facts, such as did this politician say or do this on a particular occasion. That is clearly either true or false, though finding out what actually happened may often require skill, experience and diligence. Journalists deal primarily in that kind of truth though newspapers go beyond that in their editorial columns to engage in public debate.
Where and how does useful public debate take place. Habermas speaks of a public sphere, the sphere of private people who join together to form a public. He says the development of the fully political public sphere first occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century and became institutionalised in the European constitutional states of the nineteenth century where public consensus was enshrined as a way of checking domination. But that debate was conducted by a fairly narrow intellectual elite. Modern politics, by contrast is conducted in a debased public sphere produced by the expansion of the electorate, the operation of mass political parties and political marketing and the manipulation of public opinion and the manufacture of consensus. Cultural context in its broadest sense is in other words vital to useful debate. Free speech without good faith, a respect for the facts and some level of intellectual integrity can become a Tower of Babel where no one listens or learns anything.
Yet with all these qualifications those who have lived in a situation in which there was severely limited freedom of expression will have no doubt that free speech with all the downside and the baggage it brings is infinitely preferable to censorship and repression. To be continued
Part III
Let us move on to the new electronic interdependence which Marshall Mc Luhan famously said has recreated the world in the image of a global village. We can turn on our television and see the latest news live in all parts of the world on BBC World or CNN. We can use the internet to access thousands of websites with all sorts of information. But of course information is not knowledge, and much of the information we receive has been distorted or is published by others who do not necessarily or always share our perspectives. Moreover, inevitably, many of the programmes we watch come from more economically developed societies with different lifestyles. We are therefore more consumers of those electronic images than participants with all that that entails in terms of rising expectations and illusions. For example, we see the development, the end product but not how the developed countries achieved that standard of living.
The Mc Bride report “Many Voices, One World” subtitled “Towards a new more just and more efficient world information and communication order” is now 23 years old. It was commissioned by UNESCO in response to calls for a more balanced flow of information, both worldwide and within individual societies.
The debate and the report were bedevilled by controversy mainly because it was felt, perhaps correctly, that many of the governments involved were more interested in controlling the flow of information than in making it more balanced. Yet there was surely some validity in the claim that the selection and presentation of international news was dominated by the main press agencies (and now as well by the omnipresent television media like CNN and the BBC) which saw the world from their own standpoint. These press agencies are run by media professionals who usually do a very good job but their priorities are often and understandably quite different to ours.
For as long as we have to rely primarily or exclusively on those sources we will inevitably be strongly influenced by their world view.
The ultimate answer, of course, then and now, was and is for private media in developing countries to unite to provide competing professionally run news agencies with their own global perspectives.
This is certainly now an idea whose time has come, given the technical possibilities, but a great deal of organisation will be required to develop the linkages between free private media in Asia, Africa and Latin America to provide the kind of comprehensive news coverage that is now lacking from a developing country standpoint. In this context our own Caribbean News Agency deserves a mention. Started in 1975 by news media in the Caribbean in conjunction with Reuters and with help from the United Nations Development Programme it recently experienced severe financial problems after years of fruitful operation.
There are embryonic attempts by various groups to get new news agencies going.
There have been other significant developments such as the starting of the independent Al Jazeera television station, the first of its kind in the Arab world. But at the moment one would have to admit that the global village, partly because of differential levels of economic and technological development, has a predominantly western face. The huge and exciting challenge to redress the balance awaits some energetic media entrepreneurs in developing countries.
Does the University of Guyana have a role to play in helping to develop a professional media culture in Guyana? I am aware that there is a Centre for Communication Studies which offers a four year degree and a two year diploma in public communication. Though the curriculum does include print and broadcast journalism my own experience with graduates is that they lack the kind of focused training in professional reporting which Guyana so badly needs and some media houses are looking for. I recommend that some effort be made to amend the curriculum to include this requirement.
I am also aware that Chancellor Juma has commissioned a report captioned “Higher Education and Economic Renewal” in an effort to develop an operational strategy to transform the institution into a research -led university with the capacity to play a major role in the country’s future development.
This is in keeping with trends elsewhere and will surely depend very largely on the human and financial resources that can be mobilised. I have no doubt that the business community will support this endeavour. I would say, however, that while pursuing this entirely understandable desire to make the university more relevant and self-supporting one must be careful not to abandon its transcendent function of inculcating habits of thought in students that enable them to play their roles as citizens.
If they graduate with skills only but with no broader view of the world and its problems and of the ultimate questions of life and meaning there will be something basic lacking in their education, and their ability to contribute to the development of our country in the fullest sense of that word will also be lacking.
To conclude, the question we face in a developing country like Guyana, where the rule of law is only weakly established and the public social culture is fragile, is how can we minimise the damage grossly irresponsible free speech has caused in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and elsewhere while preserving our cherished constitutional right of freedom of expression.
Are the murderous broadcasts of the genocidaires on Radio Mille Collines in Rwanda a price one has to pay? We will, as a young nation, have at some stage to undertake the onerous task of evolving a modern philosophy of free speech which stresses its crucial importance as a vital and non-negotiable part of our constitutional rights in an open society while at the same time trying to deal sensibly with the damage it can cause if exercised irresponsibly or with malice aforethought.
This task will require maturity and reflection. Even in the most stable democracies there is an ongoing debate as to where the line should be drawn on some of these issues.
