Free Speech, Again

(or, "You hurt my feelings! Go to jail!")

My attitudes on freedom of expression have spun like a top over the past few years. For most of my adult life, I felt that short of inciting a riot, freedom of speech ought to be as close to absolute as possible--the better to expose the idiots. A sign like "STICK NAILS IN THE EYES OF ALL FAGGOTS (FOR GOD!) says a lot more about the signholder's so-called religion--none of it complimentary--than it does about faggots (or God). The thing to do with a Holocaust denier, I thought, was to let him jabber away: every syllable would brand him a fool.
Then I got to noticing just how gullible the human race has become in the Age of the Internet. Oh, there's always been gullibility about: "I saw it on TV! It must be true!" But it's beyond endemic now.
Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher and communications theorist, wrote in 1961 about what he called "the global village". This phrase is generally seen as a positive: one people, one world. That's not how McLuhan meant it:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.
The Gutenberg Galaxy, page 62

Remarkably prescient, that. The world has fragmented into an infinitude of little tribes with competing ideologies, the Internet ensuring each one gets play. For many people, the availability of all sides of any given issue is irrelevant: we seek out what we agree with, shunning and heaping scorn on the rest. In such a world, it is pathetically easy to lie and have your lie believed by millions. Even if you're the sort who feels compelled to check the truth of any piece of information before you accept it--and few are--the 'Net is deliberately designed to make fact-checking nearly impossible.
Free speech in the global village can thus be a potent weapon. You can spout off any old mahooha and if you make it sound authoritative...and if people want to believe you...you'll be believed. Maybe there is a gay agenda at work. Maybe Barack Obama really is a Muslim. Maybe Stephen Harper really does want to sell off Canada to the highest American bidder. Of course it's true! I knew it all along!
So for a while there I was all for putting reasonable limits on people's freedom of expression. I mean, what does STICK NAILS IN THE EYES OF ALL FAGGOTS (FOR GOD!) really contribute to the world, anyway? Do we really need such maliciousness and stupidity out there on display? Especially since those people who feel vaguely threatened by homosexuality might conceivably be swayed into going out and buying some nails? You laugh; you'd never do such a thing. But that's just it: you're smart. Not everyone is, and it seems like the world's getting dumber all the time...thanks in no small part to all this crap free-floating around.
I must be Canadian or something. That's our approach to anything we don't like: ban it, ban it, ban it. Pit bull attacks? Don't punish the owner, ban the breed outright. Little Johnny gets hurt in the schoolyard? Presto: zero tolerance. Shootings on the streets of Toronto? Let's ban guns. They're banned already? Okay, let's ban 'em again. Maybe if the damned shooting keep up we can triple-ban the nasty things.
Oh, and God forbid your precious self-esteem should take a beating. If somebody says something that offends you, well, it stands to reason there should be a law, and they should be punished to its fullest extent. Right?

That's what's happening in these human rights complaints against Mark Steyn and Macleans magazine. This is the sort of story that could only happen in Canada...okay, maybe some places in Europe, but--well, it was bound to happen here sooner or later, now that we seem to have enshrined the right not to be offended into our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Lost in all the hubbub is the original article. I'd urge you to read it and judge for yourself whether it justifies this level of lawyerly interest.

I for one found Steyn's demographic take enlightening. You can quibble with his numbers, I think, but his basic point stands: we're not having enough babies to replace ourselves; they are, and then some. The increasing Islamicization of Europe (Steyn is far from the only pundit who calls it "Eurabia") is also hard to refute. I recall reading myself about one of the things Steyn cites in his article: in Linz, Austria, Muslims are demanding that all teachers, regardless of religion, wear headscarves. Hell, here in Ontario, our erstwhile Premier had contemplated bringing sharia law in. Had that passed, I would have been on the first plane out of this province.

Here, incidentally, is one of the flashpoints of the whole human rights complaint:

"We're the ones who will change you," the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children." As he summed it up: "Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours."

Oooh, nasty, comparing Muslims to mosquitoes. Bad Steyn for writing such tripe. What's that, you say? Steyn didn't actually write that, he was quoting somebody...a man named Krekar who's, uh, Muslim? An imam, no less? Uh...um...

I've read that article several times now, and I keep missing where Steyn says that all Muslims are Islamists bent on world domination. The real irony here is that the moderate Muslims so concerned for their "human rights" will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. If there's anything a follower of radical Islam hates worse than an infidel, it's a purported member of his own faith who doesn't live up to his exacting standards.

So, like Steyn, I hope he and Macleans lose this case, so that it can skip into a real court system. And when it does, I hope the judge has the cojones to laugh it right out of court. In the meantime, these human rights tribunals--if they have to exist at all, that is--can concern themselves with real offenses to human dignity.