To divorce speech from truth and justice is to relegate this distinctively human faculty to a mere instrument of self-aggrandizement and to deny man’s creation in the image of God.
Bruegel‘s “The Tower of Babel” (1563)
Freedom of speech is a fundamental human value. This value has its home in libertarian democracy. Indeed, libertarian democracy might more accurately be called “normless” democracy in contradistinction to normative democracy. Normless democracy—and this is the nature of post-modern or contemporary democracy—exalts freedom of speech over all other values.
The exaltation of this freedom has led to its degradation. Today freedom of speech lacks rational and ethical constraints. Divorced from truth, freedom of speech has become a license to lie. And it’s quite evident that mendacity—otherwise known as “spin”—is the staple of contemporary public discourse. To redeem and elevate freedom of speech, let us explore its pristine origin, the Bible of Israel.
Recall Abraham’s questioning the justice of God’s decision to destroy Sodom: “Peradventure there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt Thou indeed sweep away and not forgive the place for the fifty righteous that are therein? That be far from Thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked, that so the righteous should be as the wicked; that be far from Thee; shall not the Judge of all earth do justly?”
God permits Abraham to question Him. By so doing, the King of Kings affirms freedom of speech as a fundamental human right, and the freedom extends to questioning the decisions and policies of government. But clearly this right, from a Judaic perspective, can only be derived from man’s creation in the image of God. Only because man is endowed with reason and free will does he possess a right to freedom of speech. This right, however, must be understood in terms of the purpose or function of speech.
Speech is not an end-in-itself or a mere exercise in self-expression. Properly understood, speech is a manifestation of reason, the quintessential function of which is to communicate ideas, to inquire into their truth or falsity, their justice or injustice. Speech is therefore an intellectual-moral phenomenon. To divorce speech from truth and justice is to relegate this distinctively human faculty to a mere instrument of self-aggrandizement and to deny man’s creation in the image of God. This is the tendency of normless or contemporary as opposed to normative or classical democracy, a tendency that degrades man and makes a mockery of his right to freedom of speech.
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It cannot be said too often—it is hardly said at all—that if freedom of speech is divorced from truth and justice, democracy (of whatever type) is no more justifiable than tyranny. Stated another way, if there are no universally valid or objective standards as to how man should live, then there are no rational grounds for preferring democracy to tyranny.
Hence it should be emphasized that the denial of objective standards of good and bad conduct does not logically justify the toleration of all lifestyles. Subjectivism, or moral relativism, undermines any objective grounds for preferring tolerance to intolerance, or freedom of speech to censorship.
It has been said that the only rational defense of freedom of speech or of intellectual freedom is that it can facilitate the quest for truth, including the truth about how man should live. But no such quest can even begin unless we already know, in some general and authoritative way, what is right and wrong. Clearly the claim to academic freedom can have no justification unless it is commonly understood that it is wrong to cheat or deceive, to plagiarize or steal, to defame or murder. This suggests that moral relativists, who very much dominate the academic world, take civilization for granted.
The true father of civilization is none other than Abraham who, by discovering the Creator of man, discovered the only solid basis for moral unity of human nature. Only because man is created in the image of God can one logically affirm the rule of reason over self-regarding passions, of moral suasion over mere force or arbitrariness. It is in this light that we are to understand Abraham’s dialogue with God and the destruction of Sodom. Abraham can question God’s justice because the father of the Jewish people was not a moral relativist. The compassion of which he is the exemplar is informed by knowledge of right and wrong, the same knowledge that enabled the prophets of Israel to admonish kings.
Apart from such knowledge freedom of speech is noise or nonsense.
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