View from England: We live in an era of fake news and Orwellian speech

This is the frequently noted paradox of cancel culture – few people get upset when their opponents are cancelled, but most are outraged when their allies are, writes David Wootton, an Emeritus Professor at the University of York at The Engelsberg Ideas.

We live in an era of fake news and Orwellian speech, and face new calls for censorship, which is intended to serve a double purpose: to expose selected fake news as a lie, and to uphold approved examples of Orwellian speech as unquestionable.

One of the first acts of the new UK government’s Minister for Education, Bridget Phillipson, was to cancel implementation of a law protecting free speech on university campuses. There have been calls from on high for Britain’s Online Safety Act to be toughened up. Yvette Cooper, the UK’s Home Secretary has promised to crack down on those ‘pushing harmful and hateful beliefs’. (In the UK there is no written constitution, and so no constitutional right to free speech. Speech is protected, within limits, by the European Convention on Human Rights.) Calls for censorship have become respectable. Yet everyone knows that censorship is often stupid and arbitrary.

What might be the response to these new calls for censorship? The standard response is to claim that, in a battle between lies and truth, the truth will win, so censorship is unnecessary.

It is striking that it is not until 1919 that there is talk of a ‘free trade in ideas’ and the seemingly obvious (to us) term ‘the marketplace of ideas’ does not occur until 1953. (Both originate with the US Supreme Court.) It is not a coincidence that talk of a market in ideas postdates the Bolshevik Revolution and crystallises during the Cold War: the concept of a marketplace of ideas served to justify a universal franchise within a market economy.

With hindsight it’s apparent that the confidence that good ideas will drive out bad depended upon a marketplace that was dominated by newspapers, radio stations and publishers owned by people who shared commitments to the market and to democracy. The limits to free speech were thus as much sociological and economic as legal, for only a minority had access to the means of communication. Hence the Bolshevik conviction that you start a revolution by setting up a party newspaper.

There have been three great phases of censorship in the West. First, there was heresy hunting, which became systematic in Europe with the founding of the Dominican order in 1216 and was initially aimed at rooting out the Cathar dualist heresy. Before the printing press, heresy hunting worked: the last French Cathar was burnt in 1321. Then there was state censorship. Licensing of publication began almost as soon as the printing press was invented around 1440. Licensing of plays in England goes back to 1581. Printers and booksellers, theatres and companies of actors are relatively easy to locate and control. In Europe press censorship was pretty effective, until shortly before the French Revolution.

The internet has transformed communication. It creates new opportunities for concealing communications.

Above all, it transforms the dissemination of ideas. The internet is everywhere, unlike theatres and bookshops; it is fast, unlike printing; much of it is free; and almost anyone can use it to communicate ideas and information to other people. Censoring the internet requires, therefore, intensive ‘moderation’ or the blocking of particular sites. Suppose the suggestion that Twitter be banned in the UK was taken up: anybody with a VPN would still be able to access it; only a full Chinese programme of state control could block access to X in the UK.

Just like the printing press, the internet is a force for both good and bad.

But the decentred, democratic character of the internet means that quality controls are much harder to maintain than in a world of print.

‘Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late,’ wrote Swift. ‘A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.’ The sentiment is not new, but the falsehood flies faster than it did and the world has shrunk.

The new information age thus creates new problems both for those advocating free speech (lies really are spreading faster and further) and for those advocating censorship (one can’t burn a meme). Free speech has become harder to defend, but at the same time censorship has become harder to implement.

Moves to censor fake news run into the obvious difficulty that all sides are at it, so they become in effect calls to allow one’s own fake news to be disseminated (‘The President is fit to serve’) while one’s opponent’s (‘The election was stolen’) is censored.

What is to be done? How to respond to performative lying and the deliberate dissemination of false news? How do we respond to the broader crisis whereby the old elites have lost their legitimacy? How do we explain people’s growing willingness to be deceived?

If people want to be deceived it is because they are profoundly dissatisfied with the world as it is, and see no viable route to improvement. It is because they remember what seems (at least with hindsight) a better world, of tight-knit communities and shared values, that they turn to fantasy solutions and welcome performative lying. The great age of rising standards of living was also the age of the marketplace of ideas; truth telling goes hand in hand with optimism. So ideas alone, without growing prosperity and community cohesion, won’t solve the present crisis.

Thus, our society is riven by a fundamental contradiction: it promises the dream of prosperity, and at the same time (to take a small but telling example) the UK government cancels winter fuel payments for pensioners.

That’s the big problem; but within it lies the immediate problem of free speech versus censorship. Those of us who believe that we need more free speech not less need to step away from the casual platitudes (such as ‘the marketplace of ideas’) on which we have relied. The fundamental argument for free speech is simple. Winston Churchill said that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the others. Free speech, given the imperfections of human nature, is the worst way to manage disagreement, except for all the others.

Competition between ideas may be much less efficient than competition between enterprises, and bad ideas may often thrive, but competition makes possible creative destruction, innovation, and, on occasion, progress. It’s easy, of course, to think that competition between ideas will be unaffected by the latest proposals for more censorship – that only hate speech is under threat –but note the UK Home Secretary’s reference to ‘harmful beliefs’

We (in Europe and the United States) are in the early stages of a developing crisis, where immigration is the flash point, and law and order, free speech, and democracy are at risk. Our politicians are not up to scratch. Only practitioners of kayfabe can forget that the principles exposed by Keir Starmer in 2020 or Kamala Harris in 2019 are very different from the principles they espouse, with apparently equal sincerity, now.

We need new intellectual leadership. And less censorship, not more.

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