What a week for free speech: Three cheers for Adichie and Schama
On a turbulent week, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Simon Schama gave us important resources for defending freedom
From the momentous to the trivial, what a week it has been for freedom of speech. From the protests in China where brave citizens risk their lives to demonstrate against the state’s repressive zero-COVID policies, to the absurdity of politically-motivated curators closing quaint medical exhibitions. From the thousands of Iranian women who continue to demand an end to brutal theocracy to the Oxford student atoning for the tragic injustice of thinking the word “woman” means female-bodied people. But, a glimmer of hope appeared in the midst of the censoriousness this week as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Simon Schama both delivered passionate defences of freedom of expression on the BBC.
I must say, it almost feels wrong to mention the above examples in the same sentences, even when admitting the stark differences in nature and severity. However, it is the clear threats to freedom of expression that hold these disparate scenarios together.
On Wednesday morning, BBC Radio 4 aired this year’s inaugural Reith Lecture on freedom of speech, given by best-selling Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This rousing yet composed defence of free speech showed exactly why the supposed trivial matters — like a silly museum closure or apologising for saying an uncontroversial thing — are anything but. In her lecture, the writer speaks of an encounter with an American student. The student questioned Adichie on something she said that didn’t fit nicely into the orthodoxy but admittedly wasn’t false: “But why say it even if it is true?” asked the student. Adichie says this “exquisite kind of self-censorship” is the result of what the playwright Ayad Akhtar calls “punitive moral stridency”.
But what is this moral stridency and what threat does it pose to free speech? Adichie was highlighting the dangers of moral certainty in the face of unlimited complexity; an authoritarian forcefulness that crushes uncomfortable truths, the wrong kind of truth, you might say. This is perfectly illustrated by the painfully predictable apology of the Oxford student union VP Ellie Greaves. She opposed the abolition of the women’s officer role in exchange for the broader “Liberation and Equality” officer as she worried the change would further marginalise women's health issues – a fair stance. Unfortunately, she capitulated to the moral stridency of a small number of activists in the union. These students, claiming to speak on behalf of all transgender people, denounced her as “bio-essentialist” and “transphobic”. She swiftly responded with a grovelling apology and rescinded her previous concerns.
The erasure of a language to describe the specificity of the experiences and interests of women looks even more absurd when contrasted with the situation in Iran where women, yes women, are so clearly the subject of such flagrant and targeted brutality. Following the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the Iranian police for supposedly not wearing her hijab properly, months of protests against the patriarchal theocracy ensued, leading to the arrest of over 15,000 protesters and the deaths of over 200 by Iranian forces. This is not to invoke a slippery slope argument and say that Britain is on its way to becoming an Iranian hellscape, but it is instead to throw our privilege and progress into sharp relief. It is to implore us to value and appreciate the fundamental principle of freedom of speech and not wait until it’s gone to know how essential to basic human dignity and autonomy it is.
Last Sunday, on the same day the Wellcome Trust closed its Medicine Man exhibition for apparently being “racist, sexist and ableist”, Simon Schama’s History of Now aired on BBC Two. The documentary explores the importance of art and free expression in the fight for truth and democracy over the past century. Despite accusations of over-simplification and bumbling nostalgia, the historian presents a view of history that quite rightly places freedom of expression at the base of all moral progress.
Unlike the curators at the Wellcome Collection who make spurious claims about the purported systemic evil of Western progress, Schama shows us the real face of evil: the bloody history of the past century, from Franco to Stalin, and the bodies that lie in their wake. This should (but unlikely will) give some perspective to our cultural custodians. So what if Henry Wellcome was an entrepreneurial tycoon with massive wealth and privilege? At the very least we should be able to make our own minds up about him without the Wellcome Collection deciding for us. It is the modus operandi of every authoritarian regime to remove individual autonomy, to make moral decisions on behalf of every citizen; and in this respect, the moral stridency of the Wellcome Trust curators is no different. Someone ought to tell them to back off.
But Adichie and Schama have shown us that if you give up on freedom of expression, you can kiss goodbye to freedom as a whole. Whether dealing with petty trifles or toppling regimes, freedom of speech is our most powerful weapon against tyranny.