THE UNIVERSALITY OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Our understanding of knowledge underpins our attitude to free speech. If we agree that knowledge is composed of our grasping a set of truths that lie outside ourselves, then our main concern will be with how to access this understanding, how to unlock this truth. The role of the authority figure in the delivery of this knowledge is often critical in a culture that takes this approach to knowledge: it may be the priest or other kind of spiritual leader or it might be some Royal personage or other type of ruler with wide acceptability within the relevant community. In none of these situations is knowledge particularly problematic; nor is it generative of politics. In fact where truth is held by authority figures and passed on to a largely passive audience of subjects, ‘free speech’ will often be regarded as subversive rather than facilitative of truth: it will be seen as getting in the way of knowledge rather than as helping the discovery of it. This is why strong religious movements clamp down on speech (heresy) and authoritarian leaders lock people up for expressing their point of view (treason; ‘terrorism’).

The version of knowledge outlined above has not survived the rational scrutiny of the Enlightenment period. Starting with the reformation and moving through the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries into a ‘post-modern’ culture where knowledge is not characterised in absolute terms, we now see knowledge as something that is made not found, that we create out of our intercommunications rather than receive as tablets of stone from some higher authority. In such circumstances the politics of knowledge become key: whose version of truth is to be heard? Who can persuade whom? How do we reach agreement on what truth for now prevails? Here is where the importance of free speech becomes apparent: it is the vital oil in the machine of truth-manufacture that makes every modern society tick.