Recent news events have highlighted the contentious issue of free speech and raised challenging questions about its legitimate limits. In Munich a few weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance criticized European nations for censoring certain kinds of speech. He referred specifically to the arrest of a man in England merely for praying outside an abortion facility.
Subsequently, the respective detention and deportation of two foreign nationals have tested the limits of free speech here on this side of the Atlantic. Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist studying at Columbia University on a green card, has been arrested for organizing pro-Hamas protests at the university. And Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese national on the faculty of Brown University, was refused re-entry into the country and then deported after she celebrated the life and legacy of notorious Hezbollah terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah at his funeral in Lebanon. The attorneys for both Khalil and Alawieh are arguing that their free speech rights have been violated.
In his Munich lecture, Vance called free speech one of the “basic liberties” shared by the U.S. and its Western allies. He asserted that the assault on free speech in Europe is a greater threat to its vitality and security than external enemies. “I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people,” declared Vance. An article in the online magazine Politico called Vance’s position “an absolutist view of free speech.” But while his speech may have sounded absolutist, the U.S. policy that he assists in executing clearly is not.
Free speech is a myth
The tension between the Munich speech, on the one hand, and the arrest and deportation of foreign nationals on the other, raises the perennial problem of identifying legitimate boundaries of speech. And it demonstrates that the libertarian philosophy of free speech in the U.S. is neither practical nor desirable.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution declares in part that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” This certainly is an “absolutist” assertion, providing for no qualifications or limits in the text itself. But, of course, Congress routinely makes laws that both abridge and compel speech. The U.S. Code criminalizes speech that merely “threatens” to assault, kidnap or murder federal officials, for example. The cereal and yogurt you enjoyed for breakfast have compelled speech on the labels of their containers, as does the sun visor of your car. These limitations and regulations of speech illustrate that the language of the First Amendment is the expression of a pernicious myth.
There’s no such thing as free speech. An absolutist defense of free speech is contrary both to Christian theology and the common good. Humans alone of God’s creatures enjoy the gift of highly articulated speech. But neither the ability to speak nor its political protection should be seen as ends in themselves. Rather, speech should serve the purpose of communicating truth for the creation and sustenance of peaceable human communities, rooted in the truth about God and man. Thus, we Catholics have no interest in defending speech, per se. Rather, we have an interest in defending truth. Free speech is at the service of discovering and articulating truth. Free speech is qualified by how and to what extent it serves this purpose.
Free speech is not an absolute end
Free speech absolutism is not ordered toward a desire to discover and articulate transcendent moral and political truth. Rather it is an expression of the libertarian philosophy that there is no such truth to discover. Absolutist free speech does not serve the sustenance of the common good, but rather erodes the very notion that there is such a good. Rooted in the myth of moral and political neutrality, a libertarian doctrine of free speech offers no rational way to adjudicate speech that serves the good from that which does not. This is why, in both the U.S. and Europe, restricted or compelled speech becomes nothing but arbitrary assertions by those who hold power.
If we Catholics have already committed ourselves to the liberal political philosophy in which “free speech” is grounded, we have no intelligible response to its restrictions. This might sound paradoxical, or even contradictory. The response to my assertion might be, “We complain about restricted or compelled speech because we believe in free speech.” But there’s no such thing as free speech, as your yogurt container and sun visor demonstrate. Some speech will always be restricted, and other speech will always be compelled. So the question is not whether speech will be controlled; the question is what speech will be regulated and who decides. The answer is always something and someone. If we have nurtured a libertarian philosophy of speech, we have abandoned the position that speech is at the service of truth. We have subscribed to a vacuous political theory, and we cannot respond when the vacuum is filled with aggressive secular regulation, including regulation detrimental to our own speech at the service of truth.
In his 1994 book “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too,” literary and political theorist Stanley Fish explained that “every right and freedom” granted by liberal constitutions and statutes “can be trumped if its exercise is found to be in conflict with the principles that underwrite the society.” This is one of the reasons Pope St. John Paul II declared that “authentic democracy is possible only … on the basis of a correct conception of the human person.” In the U.S., we — Catholics included — have abandoned the truth about the human person for the false individualism of secular liberalism, using free speech as its proxy. Thus we have no coherent response when we assert principles that are in conflict with those liberal principles. Free speech as a good in itself is not morally defensible. Our attempts to defend it will always allow falsehood to trump truth.
