The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. For the next 12 episodes of the podcast, we'll be looking back at the year 2024. The team at Intelligence Squared has selected 12 standout conversations from the year to share with you.

And what a year it's been. Our very first pick of the year is a debate we staged in October in London to celebrate the publication of our first ever book: Is Free Speech Under Threat? For more than two decades, Intelligence Squared has brought together the most brilliant minds in the world to debate the issues that matter in a respectful and civil manner.

That's why we were thrilled to work with The Bodley Head to bring this mission to the world of print with a new book series called Think Again. The series will address today's most challenging and important questions in a uniquely constructive format. Two expert, contrasting, and equally persuasive views in a single volume. Is Free Speech Under Threat? is our first title in this series.

This is a topic that always generates debate, but perhaps now more than ever, it feels like a particularly heightened conversation and one of huge importance. BBC broadcaster Johnny Diamond hosted a live debate between our two essayists at Conway Hall in London earlier this year.

Those essayists are Suzanne Nossel. She recently served as the CEO of PEN America, the leading human rights and free expression organization. She's the author of Dare to Speak, defending free speech for all. In previous years, she has been a leader in both the corporate and nonprofit sectors, including roles in organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

And she's advocated for human rights and humanitarian issues as part of both the Obama and Clinton administrations. She makes the case that free speech is indeed under threat. Joining her is our co-author, Dr. Charlotte Lydia Riley.

She's Associate Professor at the University of Southampton and specialises in exploring issues such as the British Empire, decolonisation, the British Left and feminist movements. Her books include The Free Speech Wars and Imperial Island, A History of the Empire in Modern Britain. Let's join our host for the evening now with more. BBC News presenter and royal correspondent, Jonny Diamond.

Thank you very much, and welcome to you all, welcome to those of you who are here in the hall, welcome to those of you who are watching online, welcome to the official launch debate for the Intelligence Squared new book series, Think Again. I am Johnny Diamond, and I'm delighted to introduce our speakers tonight, who are also the writers of this book, Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Kemp.

Lydia Riley. Suzanne is a former US State Department official, human rights advocate, an author, and is the CEO of PEN America since 2013. Charlotte Lydia Riley is an historian of 20th century Britain at the University of Southampton, specialising in questions about empire politics, culture, and identity. She's also the editor of the Free Speech

Just a quick word about the format of the evening. Charlotte and Suzanne will each speak for five minutes up at the lectern. They'll then return here. I will talk with them and put points to them for around 40 minutes. We'll see how it goes. And then we're going to open it up to questions later.

from the audience here and also the audience online. I get questions from the audience online on the handy iPad directly in front of me. Please do feel free to send them in. The book...

has these two essays in. Matt's talked about the format. I can tell you about the essays, which are superb, not just because they're very compellingly argued, but because they are beautifully written as well, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. You will get a tiny snatch of it tonight. It is well worth reading, and as I think Matt said, the authors will be signing copies afterwards. We'll be discussing their contrasting views later,

When we hear from you, questions and statements are welcome. I should say statements should probably be something that the authors can respond to rather than be shocked or abused by. But I do look forward to hearing from you when we can open it up. That is enough from me, and let us hear from them. I think you're going to start, aren't you, Suzanne? Suzanne. Good evening. It's a pleasure to be here.

So asking someone in my job running a free speech organization whether free speech is under threat is a little like asking an oncologist if cancer is really deadly. Living and breathing threats to free speech, it's hard for me to conceive of a worldview that thinks open discourse is alive and well. I do come at this debate from a U.S. perspective. My organization, PEN America, has documented more than 10,000 books banned in schoolrooms and libraries over the last year.

We've worked with teachers and librarians who face discipline because people object to books on the shelves. Books including Art Spiegelman's Mouse and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Places where dozens of states have enacted laws restricting what can be taught and studied in schools and universities. These measures ring fence whole topic areas including matters of race and gender identity.

Our college professors are afraid to teach rape law or debate affirmative action for fear of offending someone and facing censure or punishment. We're facing the potential return to office of a president whom we sued for his threats and acts of retaliation against critical journalists and media organizations. He has made threats to loosen libel laws and turn the meaning of fake news on its head.

Gigantic social media companies can disappear entire debates and viewpoints, offering users no recourse. Our information ecosystem is so flooded with disinformation, whether about elections, vaccines, or natural disasters, that citizens don't know what to believe. The spread of falsehoods is jeopardizing the work of election workers, public health officials, and emergency responders readying for Hurricane Milton to bear down on Tampa, Florida.

Now, each of these types of threats is different. They must not be conflated. An autocratic president can throw reporters in prison. A social media company can throw your ideas into online jail and disable your account. An angry online mob sharing a viral video can leave you humiliated, fired from your job, and potentially vulnerable to violence. And of course, there is interplay between all of the above. They do not act in isolation.

A viewer complains that a news host is biased. The president tweets about her. An online swarm doxes and threatens. Students mount a protest on campus, and the university president is called to testify before Congress. The severity of the consequences varies, but the impact is cumulative. All of us are on notice that our words may isolate, stigmatize, or imperil us. Now, of course, that's always been true. Words have consequences.

You cannot falsely shout fire in a crowded theater. A racist or sexist remark at a meeting could get you ousted. In those instances, an institution, the courts or an employer would determine the consequences according to their judgment. Perhaps it's an individual party host whose guests you offend with an off-color joke. They would weigh up the facts and circumstances in deciding whether to ask you to leave. Did you mean it? Are you a repeat offender? Is there any mitigating context?

They would seek to draw a line to protect the space for conversation while policing speech that could endanger, mislead, or debase. They would take into account not just impact, but intent. Some such traditional constraints on speech still operate that way, providing guardrails that may foster civility or even respectful exchange. But in the digital age, the disincentives for saying the wrong thing have grown exponentially. The reasons, I think, are fivefold. One, lowercase d, democracy.

In the online arena, the power to police speech is not confined to those in positions of authority. Anyone who objects can pile on, whether they're genuinely offended or simply want to win attention and followers. Two, boundarylessness. There are virtually no borders online, whereas reading aloud a piece of literature that contains a racial slur might once have sparked rumors across the campus, it can now be uploaded and shared around the world.

Three, memory. The internet does not forget. In the United States, at least, we have no right to be forgotten. We can be living with the ever-Google-able consequences of our errant speech for years to come. Four, virality. The potency of a video or audio that captures the imagination is unmatched and virtually unstoppable. Who doesn't remember the Central Park Birdwatcher or Hillary Clinton's deplorables comment? And five, pluralism.

There is and cannot be one single standard for offense. The U.S. is an increasingly pluralistic society where we will soon have no single dominant racial or ethnic group. Our law posits a reasonable person standard or objectivity in terms of judging what is offensive. That might have worked in the 1950s, but it no longer does. Is from the river to the sea an annihilationist mantra or a metaphoric plea for liberation?

Is a debate over transgender participation in girls' sports a matter of women's equality or an affront to identity? If you dare raise these questions, might you be risked being tagged as Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, or anti-trans? You might get no opportunity to explain yourself. And those labels can stick. In a landscape where the consequences of speech can be fluid, boundaryless, indelible, and shaped by an infinite range of sensibilities,

The rational response is caution. Why take a chance? Is it really worth arguing that point, correcting that fact, running that op-ed, teaching that subject or publishing that book? What about the blowback? Your friendship, sense of safety, economic opportunity and mental health all cut against speaking out. Other than for a special brand of brave truth-tellers and provocateurs, the risk-reward calculus is skewed beyond recognition.

Outright censorship and soft censoriousness coalesce to prompt self-censorship. The reasoned response, the increasingly conditioned internalized instinct, is to err on the side of restraint. Don't write it, post it, or say it. Just don't. And, after a while, if you know you're not going to write, post, or say it, there's little incentive to think it. The self-censorship becomes internalized.

You no longer think thoughts or hold opinions that might land you in hot water. That's why 80% of Russians vote for Vladimir Putin. If we allow intrusive tightening restraints on speech to become routinized, they will narrow not just what we say and write, but what we hope and believe. Acknowledging the blatant threats to free speech does not mean casting blame on those who disagree or call out offense. It does not imply that concerns of free speech must trump those of equity and inclusion.

It does not suggest that speech should be absolutely anything goes. On the contrary, recognizing and reckoning with the threat to free speech is essential to vindicating the rights each of us holds to be and to express ourselves. Thank you. Thank you very much, Suzanne. Charlotte, you're up. Suzanne did have a little more than five minutes there. Feel free to breathe.

As a historian, I am sceptical of counterfactual history, but perhaps you'll join me in a thought experiment. Imagine if Trump had really and truly been cancelled when the American people heard him say that he could grab women by the pussy and because he was a star, they would let him. Imagine if powerful people faced any consequences at all for their speech. Imagine if people who use their speech to whip up hatred for marginalised groups could be held to account for that.

The kind of too-long-didn't-read of my essay in that book is, "Council culture doesn't really exist, but perhaps it should." As a historian, I'm always wary of claims that things are worse than ever.

And the recent panic about cancel culture derives from the fear that certain political or cultural views have been deemed unacceptable by a hypersensitive, self-righteous group that has taken it upon itself to police what people can say, write, or even think. The woke mob.

Terrifying. It is spooky season. The spectre of the woke mob is used to invoke the fear that anybody can be cancelled for their views or ideas at any time. That our ability to speak is constantly being policed and controlled by undergraduate students and furious TikTokers. But cancel culture does not represent an overwhelming threat to freedom of speech.

Most people who claim to be cancelled have not meaningfully had their ability to broadcast their views curtailed. They certainly seem to find plenty of venues in which to discuss their cancellation. And many people who rail against cancel culture are concerned less with free speech in the abstract and more with their right to say specific, often offensive and sometimes harmful things without fear of being publicly shamed or experiencing material consequences.

Cancel culture represents a moral reckoning with an inequitable society that far from attacking free speech, actually brings more people into public and political discourse by uplifting the voices and perspectives of a wider range of people.

Many people who argue that freedom of speech is newly under threat in this moment disregard the inequalities of speech. It is far easier to speak your truth if you do not have to worry about what others think, and it is far easier to live without approval if you have the power to resist criticism or the means to go it alone. Historically, it has always been those with power who found it easiest to speak their mind without meaningful opposition. For those people, the problem has been making themselves heard at all.

Social media has changed this significantly in some ways, but only a minority have access to the publishing and broadcasting apparatus that still have the power to lend a speaker serious authority and credibility and influence.

Those who argue that free speech is under threat too often dance around the actual words being said, and they treat speech in the abstract. But speech is an action, it's not an abstraction. And speaking is not something you do, it's something you do to others. A speaker commands, demands, requests, pleads, or asserts. Those who listen will at some point, at some level, be affected for good or ill, whether they like it or not.

The law recognises this, which is why inciting violence is a criminal act, regardless of whether the violence occurs or not. Free speech advocates often defend offensive speech as brave, but there is nothing brave about using your relative power and position to attack, and perhaps endanger, a person or group more vulnerable than yourself.

Even George Orwell, in his very famous and often quoted defense of free speech, qualified this freedom, saying, "...everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some unmistakable way." Instead of reckoning with the ways that speech can hurt and harm, criticism has been mislabeled as silencing or often as cancellation.

Of course, sometimes critique is an attempt to silence people, to neutralize or to rebut someone's views to the point that no one takes them seriously anymore. And sometimes, yes, it takes the form of telling people to shut up. But is this silencing, is this cancellation, or is it simply part of having a conversation? Perhaps those who do not want to be criticized, perhaps those who don't want to be told to shut up, are people who have historically found themselves most easily able to make themselves heard.

When you have always been able to speak without interruption, even the mildest heckle might feel like a dangerous blow. In the end, I think it is profoundly unserious to respond to criticism of your views by claiming that your speech is being threatened or that you are being cancelled. In fact, far from cancel culture meaningfully attacking speech, and often in this scenario conservative speech, the outcry about cancel culture is almost always aimed at shutting down progressive speech and silencing progressive voices.

and we shouldn't let it. Marginalized groups are less likely to be given platforms for their ideas, they're less likely to find support to develop their writing and their advocacy, and they're less likely to be defended against criticism and attack. And yet we are living in a moment where people have more ability to broadcast their ideas globally than ever before. The internet has been enormously democratizing in terms of who gets to speak and who is able to listen.

Some of this democracy to the people who are used to speaking without feedback might feel alarming. But council culture is often simply the anger of the previously unheard being made suddenly visible. The freedom of speech for more people at a higher volume than ever before. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you, both of you. I want to kick off, if I could, without wanting to make things too combative early on, with what is a direct point of disagreement in the essays that you write. And that is about free speech reinforcing, in some people's eyes, those in a position of strength.

and suppressing the disenfranchised, which I think you have suggested that that has been one of its roles in the past at any rate. You disagree. You say history and present-day experience indicate otherwise. It's a direct clash between the two of you about how you interpret free speech. Can you just sort of elaborate how you see it currently, about how you see it has developed over...

over, I don't know, the past few decades because you make a fairly certain point that free speech does not aid those in power. Yeah, look, you have to talk first for a minute about what we mean when we say free speech. And, you know, we both address this in our essays today.

Free speech as codified in law, whether it's domestic or international, is about limitations on government's ability to police speech. So in the United States, we have the First Amendment limiting the government's ability to...

restrict what you can write, say, rights of assembly and protest. But then there's also, to me, importantly, consideration of what are the underlying values that the First Amendment or Article 19 in international law, what does it intend? What's the purpose of it? And to me, it is

enabling a free-flowing environment for ideas, a place where if you look at, you know, going back to Greek philosophy, why is it that free speech is protected? It's not so that you can just shout at the top of your lungs in a forest by yourself. It's so you can engage with others, so that you can persuade, have a give and take as a society and a collective come up with better ideas. And so...

For me, we've got to think about free speech at those two levels. If you look at the level of government restrictions on speech and the limitations thereupon, I think there's no question that those who are protected by those are...

the dissidents and those who challenge positions, people in positions of authority. And if you look at all the jurisprudence in the United States over the course of the 20th century, when the First Amendment really kind of came into its own is what it's what it's known as today, which is the world's most protective standard for free speech.

It is cases involving war resistors, civil rights advocates, communists who were distributing literature that was and were accused of undermining national security. And their rights were vindicated by our courts saying, no, the government doesn't and shouldn't have the power to suppress these things. Those in positions of authority.

authority would have, if left to their own prerogatives, absolutely punished that speech, throwing those people in jail. They tried to do so. And so it was this notion of free speech protection that constrained their ability to retaliate against those who threatened their power. So my argument is if you curb or curtail the

force of freedom of speech, what that will do is reinforce the ability of those in positions of authority to mete out punishments as they see fit. And they will use that power in self-serving ways to reify their own status, to suppress their critics. So that's my argument about

legal restraints on speech. And I think in the public domain, it's really a similar idea. And we see this today on college campuses. It is students protesting for Palestine who are invoking their rights and arguing that their university should not suppress their voices. And there's a very vigorous debate about that. And I think the power relations in some cases can be turned on their heads.

But there's no question that it is those who feel that their rights and voice are suppressed that are invoking these protections. Okay, thank you very much. Charlotte, you disagree fairly strongly with that. Of course, the legal protections for freedom of speech, such as those that you outline in the American Constitution, in Europe, the ones that we have through the European Court of Human Rights, or the various different ways in which freedom of speech is protected theoretically in Britain, are

protect you from what we understand to be the major threat to freedom of speech, which is that your government might persecute you, right? And in my essay, I talk about this, that there are lots of different ways in which we might consider speech to be threatened. And obviously, like a very important element of this is the idea that you need to have legal protection from your own government or from authorities above you in order to have kind of freedom of speech.

The difference, I think, in our arguments is that most of the time today when we hear people talking about freedom of speech and much of the debate about this is thinking about consequences which are not legal consequences. So much of the time when people are talking about this, what they're talking about is cultural vilification or social shunning or even kind of things like economic consequences such as your employer firing you, which...

you know, are clearly consequences that people face, but they're not consequences which are kind of full within that kind of legal framework. And I think also when we're thinking about this in terms of kind of power and power structures, so much of the time when we're talking about, you know, who gets to kind of speak without censure, we behave as if the person speaking is always the underdog, is always the person whose speech has to be protected.

But a lot of the time when we kind of think about how this works, so much of the time this kind of call for freedom of speech or for speech to be protected is from positions of power aimed at people who are less powerful. And so you have this sort of sense that actually...

whilst, of course, it's very important, these kind of legal frameworks are very important, the discussion is often not... People are kind of invoking those rights to talk about a form of censure or a form of freedom of speech which isn't in the same register, isn't happening in the same space at all. You see...

people being called out or criticised for what they say quite often as being held to account rather than being cancelled or being threatened or anything like that. That's fair to say, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of the time in these dialogues around cancellation, figures who claim that they have been cancelled

A lot of the time what this is is that people want the right to be able to talk however they want without facing consequences. And when they experience pushback or critique... Even the use of the term cancellation, the idea of being cancelled, what does that invoke? The idea of being completely wiped out, of like...

you know, ceasing to exist in a public space, right? But of course that's not what happens to almost everybody who has gone through a kind of cancellation. You know, for most people, this is like a sort of a brief storm of critique and then they kind of find themselves back in public space as able to speak again. And so even the language around it is used to invoke this sense of like, oh, this speaker is being kind of held to account unfairly or this critique is unfair. But of course, actually...

This often isn't the case at all. And this idea about cancellation is often that these people who actually often have very little structural or systemic power are critiquing somebody who's speaking and kind of pushing back on their arguments. The person who's speaking often does have structural and systemic power, but takes even that degree of critique as being unreasonable or unfair.

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Suzanne, can I pick you up on one point that you made that really surprised me? I mean, it wasn't a point you were making. It was almost in passing. You write in the book, we protect free speech not as an end in itself.

that you don't see this as some kind of great absolute principle that needs to be protected. You see it rather as a means to an end. Can you just open up a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. I think it's important to consider why it is that we protect free speech. You know, like, you know, we can't just posit it as an absolute. It is, you know, in my mind, it's a pretty absolute principle, but there's a reason for it. It's because of what it fosters in society. And

I lay out all sorts of kind of public goods that are associated with the protection of free speech. It has to do with our relationships with one another and feeling like we can have a rich exchange with the opportunity to surface the best ideas through an interchange and debate and contestation, the ability to drive forward a democracy and evaluate issues

potential leaders and examine what they might do and what that might mean for the future of society, a catalyst for artistic creation and scientific innovation. And, you know, we see this very clearly in authoritarian societies. They're just simply not as good at inventing new things and driving forward the cutting edge. It also has to do with identity and self-expression, our freedom to be who we are in the world without being

constraint or fear that that identity is going to be a cause or a basis for persecution. And so I think when you remember and keep in mind those underlying purposes of free speech, it's important in terms of how we

assess these questions? It's not just, is free speech under threat, but is there something in society, something valuable that is at risk here, that is worth preserving and trying to safeguard here? And I think it's sort of those underlying purposes explain why there is. I'd love to respond to a couple of things. Can I just... I mean, here's the thing I would say

about cancel culture. I feel like, you know, this was sort of the debate of, at least in the U.S., of sort of several years ago, maybe four or five years ago, and there were kind of this whole series of very high-profile incidents. You know, one of the most prominent was the op-ed editor of the New York Times being pushed out after they, during the George Floyd summer, they published an op-ed by a senator that was seen as, you know,

it was an argument that perhaps the National Guard should be called in to quell these protests that were by and large peaceful. And that was seen as almost an invitation to violence. And the staff in the New York Times said,

rose up in protest and said they were being endangered and carrying out their work. And first the leadership of the paper stood by him and then they pushed him out quickly. And it was an instance, I think you have to remember about that instance. First of all, it has a real effect on that person's life. But more than that,

Everyone else is watching and seeing, you know, this happened. My gosh, he made this kind of edgy decision, but it wasn't that edgy because it was a sitting U.S. senator, and it was actually an argument, you know, the National Guard had been called in, you know, in the civil rights era and in other periods. It wasn't

totally out of bounds of consideration, and look at the consequences he faced. And so for any editor going forward, aren't you going to have in the back of your mind that this could happen if you make that wrong decision, if you take this risk, if you platform this person, here are the perils that you might encounter. And you might feel, well, it's great because he never should have punished it, he never should have published it, and if everybody else knows they're operating within that box,

That's a terrific thing. But here's the thing, and I'll try to be brief. In the U.S., we've seen kind of a fascinating natural experiment where these arguments of hurt and harm coming from essentially the left, you know,

were invoked to constrain speech and to try to protect people and safeguard minorities and elevate alternative voices. And we've seen them completely turned on their head in the last couple of years where the argument, the prime argument in favor of book banning is, you know, these books are going to hurt and harm our children because they have alternative perspectives on gender identity or they talk about racial equality

in a way that the community doesn't agree with, or they, you know, make...

LGBTQ lifestyles to inviting. And that is cited as a source of hurt and harm and risk and being used as a basis to shut down and censor. And so what you see there is just the malleability of those ideas. And yes, in an ideal world, if you could safeguard exactly that speech

we could all agree deserves to be protected. That might be one thing. That's never going to happen. And so when you create the precedent, you empower those who want to shut down speech from the other side. I mean...

Can I just pick up on that point? Because the person involved, the New York Times op-ed editor involved, went off to The Economist. Eventually. Eventually, yeah, sure. But, I mean, in your eyes, is that kind of, well, you see? He's still there publishing. He's still there influencing. He didn't get cancelled. Nothing, no harm done. Well, I think, and there's a couple of things I'll respond to there, but I'll start with this one. I think, ultimately, like,

I don't personally have a problem with someone facing career consequences for publishing Tom Cotton saying that the National Guard should be used to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. And some people obviously, you know, of course, some people do have a problem with that. I think it's okay to face consequences for professional choices that you make. And I mean, actually, certainly in the States, there are lots of at-will states, right, where people can be fired for all sorts of things. He was fired for doing something that, I mean, ultimately...

brought the paper into disrepute, caused kind of anxiety and tension among his workforce, put a huge amount of tension actually on the commissioning process at that newspaper rather than the news that was being published. There were all sorts of reasons why actually his position became untenable. And I guess I just don't think it's a bad thing for people to face consequences for doing bad things. I know that sounds very simplistic.

I think going back to this point of freedom of speech being important because it enables people to sort of express their identity or this idea that it's important for like the development of sort of social ideas about identity and for people to kind of in different groups. I think, you know, part of what I talk about in my essay is often where the tension comes in questions around freedom of speech are around people's rights to assert their identity against people who want to shut that down or want to critique that, right? And that...

when you're talking about freedom of speech and as freedom of speech is something that needs to be protected as far as possible at all costs because it's something that enables people to sort of, you know, have the fullest expression of their personal identity. I mean, that language of protecting free speech at all costs is also the language that people use when they want to

attack people for their identity, right? So, like, the idea that freedom of speech is something which enables as diverse a society to flourish as possible is quite difficult to square with the harms that trans people feel like they're facing today in public discourse, for example, where they feel like their identity is constantly under threat because of the proliferation of hate speech.

Or, for example, Haitian people living in Springfield who feel that the fact that Jodie Vance can talk about the idea that this migrant group are killing and eating pets, that speech is putting their identity directly under attack and under a spotlight. I don't think we can say that freedom of speech is something which always has these kind of positives for people being able to live and be happy in society. And I think ultimately...

The kind of last point, the idea that these arguments around some speech being acceptable are malleable and therefore we shouldn't use them. I mean, firstly, everywhere has a degree of limitation on free speech. We all agree, actually, that there is a spectrum.

to different extents but in different places. In America, you know, actually, like, commercial speech isn't protected under the First Amendment, right? Like, there are things you can't say, you can't fraudulently advertise. You know, admittedly, it's a kind of capitalist framework, but there is speech you can't use.

In the UK, we have hate speech legislation which sets a limit on what you can and cannot say. And so the argument is actually about where that limit should lie, not on whether that limit should exist. In lots of European countries, Holocaust denial is illegal. So we actually have accepted that some speech is unacceptable and that

We have to work out where the limits of that are. And I guess part of the argument I make in the essay is perhaps the limits of that should be constructed around people's moral ideas and cultural ideas. But the fact that you could use these arguments to make a... Oh, well, you can use the idea about harm to groups to shut down books about gay families, for example...

Those arguments are being made in bad faith and you can only use them if you're willing to accept that the arguments are detached from the actual argument at the centre of it, that the words aren't important. Like,

Yeah, of course you can use language around harm to argue that being positive around gay families harms me, so I want to burn books about gay families. But it's not a meaningful argument. You can say those words, but it's not meaningful. The content of the argument matters as well as the structure of it, right? Yes.

one of the cause of Charlotte's argument in her book, in the book, is that the limits on free speech or the debate around free speech...

is an expression of contemporary social, political, moral mores. You say it's a spectrum. We acknowledge that there are restrictions on free speech. We acknowledge that they change as time goes on. And they are effectively an expression of what we are as a society. How do you respond to that in your...

in your defense of free speech and your concern that it is under threat? Yeah, look, I fully acknowledge free speech is not without any boundaries. I think those boundaries are actually very important to the protection of free speech because I think people...

have an easier time accepting a freewheeling environment for ideas when they know that there are some outer boundaries, there are some things that are off limits. In the United States, it's quite a narrow set of things, things like incitement to imminent violence or true threats that are consensual.

considered out of bounds that can be banned or punished notwithstanding the First Amendment. I think knowing that those boundaries are out there, or defamation, for example, and we've had some high-profile defamation cases, for example, the voting machine company that sued a

Fox News because of the claims that were made on air about the vote having been corrupted, and they achieved a huge settlement. I think that's sort of a positive thing in that people realize, look, there are some outer boundaries. There are consequences. This is not just a complete free-for-all. But that doesn't mean free speech is not under threat. The fact that it's

always had limitations doesn't mean that we don't need to carefully examine what the environment is for free speech today and consider the question of whether it's overly constricted. Look, to argue in favor of free speech is not an argument that all speech is virtuous or worthy, that J.D. Vance is saying something sensible. That's not the case that I'm making. If all speech were worthy and virtuous, we wouldn't

need free speech protections because we'd all be so happy about what everybody else was saying. That would be sort of a heavenly environment. I think where we probably differ really goes to sort of the fifth point that I was making about the pluralistic society. I think your notion, at least as I hear it, Charlotte, is that

you know, we, whoever exactly the we is, ought to be able to agree that there are certain things that are, you know, as you put it, you know, that kind of defy people's moral and cultural ideas that we should legitimately put out of bounds in the interest of sort of fostering a diverse and welcoming and inclusive society and addressing legacies of exclusion. And

Your premise that sort of the perversion, what you see as the perversion of those ideas, say to...

banning a book about gay families, that can simply be sort of called out as illegitimate and exposed as an inversion and a baseless argument. At least living in the United States, it just doesn't work that way. There are profoundly different value systems that are contesting in our society, and there are people who believe that

passionately that, you know, for example, critical race theory, like the idea that sort of all, you know, or one notion how someone might describe is that kind of all of American history should be looked at through the lens of race and racial exclusion and kind of the original sin of slavery and

And that, you know, that people, some people believe that's really damaging. That could undermine our national identity. That's causing school children to turn against the United States and to hate our country and to support, you know, nefarious forces. And, you know, that's a very genuinely...

held belief. I don't think, you know, there is no consensus on these questions. I don't think one can expect it in a pluralistic society. And in that setting and in light of that, I think the far better approach is to be

very leery of using these notions of hurt and harm as a basis to restrict speech, even if you can support it in one instance and you think it was perfectly appropriate for the op-ed editor to be pushed out, what about the next time? What about when someone publishes an op-ed about transgender youth that you profoundly agree with and they bear the consequences because their readership or their editors don't? Do you want to come back quickly on that?

Well, I mean, I think a lot of the time in these arguments we end up talking these hypotheticals, but what happened is a specific thing, which is that somebody published a specific op-ed about the fact that the National Guard should have been called into Farmer Blackleaf Matter. That's a protest, and they were fired, right? Yes, in this theoretical instance you are proposing to me, I would, of course, oppose that, but that's not something that... I mean, that's not something that has happened, so it's not something that, like...

I guess I think that the argument that, you know, we can't kind of call out this behaviour, the idea that if this language can be marshalled so dangerously and there is no ability to respond to it, like in the example of the book burning, either cancel culture is powerful or it isn't. If it's not powerful enough for love to push against that, and I agree it probably isn't, then surely it's not a problem generally. Like, I don't...

I don't see this scenario where cancel culture is powerful enough to be worried about where it's targeting some people, but it's not powerful enough to bring down these other forces. Okay, let's move on from that. Let's talk about debate and the nature of debate, since we are having a debate. The argument has been made that bad ideas...

can only be defeated with exposure, argument and persuasion, continually so.

Do you agree, because you make the point, you said in fact debate assumes that both sides of an argument are worth listening to and you cite various examples like evolution which clearly you're not going to have a debate over whether evolution is real or not. Now, do you agree that debate is critical and must be open at all times or not?

I think I'm very ambivalent about debate as a structure generally. I think actually there are lots of ways in which politics, certainly in Britain, possibly in America as well, are really shaped by a kind of debating culture in particular elite schools and elite universities, which really prioritise the idea of being able to vocalise arguments and actually to be able to switch sides in an argument. So the premise of debating is that you can argue either side of an argument,

And that you can do that as eloquently as you want and debate competitions you're told which side to argue for. I actually think that's quite dangerous. I don't think that's a great

way of thinking about the world because I think principles are important and I think it's important not just to be able to make a case for any position but be able to make a case for something that you think is true and that kind of holds with your principles so that's my kind of first ambivalence with debate notwithstanding the debate that we are currently having I'd accept it um

I also think the problem with, and yeah, you kind of, I use the example of evolution in the book. And this is something, right, that has been the case in moments in Britain.

Where debates become the kind of target of activism or of an attempted kind of cancellation because of a kind of anxiety about the topic that's being debated or perhaps the viewpoints that are being platformed on one side of it. I think what debate does as a structure is posits that either side could be valuable because that is the premise, right, of debate, that either side could win.

And I think the problem with that, and we've seen this, for example, in the very famous example of the Oxford University platforming, Nick Griffin, for example. The former leader of the British National Party. The former leader of the British National Party, for example. What you are saying is that the topic under debate, the sort of winner just comes down to who argues most persuasively. And what that debate structure is doing is saying...

Either of these positions could be correct. And the problem with that, or one of the problems that I set out in the book, is firstly that often that's not true.

And that's why I use the example of evolution. We would never think, oh yeah, it's a really productive debate to have people who think evolution is real and people who think evolution isn't real and we'll have this debate about it and we'll see the people who argue most persuasively, that's the side that's won. It's a settled argument. Quite often when people are unwilling to debate ideas, it's because it's a settled argument. We don't need to debate whether women are critical thinkers anymore. It's a settled argument. We know this stuff.

But also for some people, there might be debate questions which seem to really kind of

attack their identity or their existence or their personal experience. The stakes in debate can be very kind of academic, but they can also be very personal. And there's a difference between someone making a very kind of academic debate argument about something and somebody making a debate which kind of comes from their lived experience. And there are quite a lot of examples of debates around topics that might, for some people, feel like a kind of fun exercise and for some people feel like something which is...

really not up for debate. And I think that's, you know, I make arguments similar to that in the book. Yeah, I mean, I look at it very differently. I'll tell you something I observed in practice, which is about debate. My children were like youth debaters, and it was exactly as you described, where they had to prepare on a topic, like say...

remilitarization or adolescent sway over medical decisions and they had to be prepared to argue either side or the Confederate flag should you be allowed to display a Confederate flag

And what I observed was that experience for them of having to inhabit both sides of the debate, like say on the Confederate flag, having to stand up there and make the argument in favor of the Confederate flag, knowing you're sitting in front of a judge and that a racist argument is not going to pass muster. The judge was usually sort of an Upper West Side parent from Manhattan who was not going to embrace a racist argument. And so you had to come up

with sort of the best case that you could make about history, identity, or fostering discussion. And for these young people inhabiting both sides of the argument,

profoundly accelerated their ability to discern their own values because they really understood what was at issue and they had to put themselves into the shoes of the person who would take an opposing position and really struggle and wrestle with the competing equities. I think for me that's a very powerful process that I think can be an impetus to shaping your own values as opposed to something that undercuts

one's own sort of moral sense. And, you know, that's why I think, you know, your argument in the book about colonialism and, you know, and these books that sort of valorize colonialism and, you know, should they be

off limits, you know, it made me think about, I'm on the Meta Oversight Board, and we just took a case about actually the display of the old South African flag and whether, you know, that's kind of a hateful act. And, you know, this case hasn't been heard yet or decided, but it made me think I was back in, I lived and worked in South Africa, and I was back there a year ago, and

with some colleagues and there was one woman who was a long time ANC activist who we were sitting with at dinner and I hadn't been there in almost 30 years and I was, you know, we were sort of talking about everything that had happened and she said, look, in some ways things were better under apartheid. She's a black woman who's, you know, lived her whole life as an activist but it's because of, you know, the electricity and the corruption and, you know, all the kind of struggles that

with the economy. And, you know, she made that point. Like, should that point be off limits? Well, you think, well, as a black woman, she should be able to say that. But then, you know, are we going to make distinctions on the basis of race? Who can make these arguments? I think what's crucial is how the argument is made. And I don't know the scholars of, you know, trying to sort of have this twist on colonialism, you know, whether they're dismissive of counter arguments, whether they

brush aside all the negatives of colonialism, or do they perhaps reckon with the complexity and acknowledge the suppression and the hardship and the enduring damaging legacies while also perhaps elevating some aspects that haven't been as well understood that they think merit attention. So my notion is that

It's just better to err on the side

of openness and letting that room for debate exist and allow those ideas to be aired and to have a give and take. I should say, questions are rolling in online, but I'm very keen that those who have made the effort to come out here tonight should also have their say. So we're going to come to audience questions in a couple of minutes. You'll be delighted to hear that I'll stop asking questions and you can ask them instead.

Before we do that, just briefly, if you could, your greatest hope and your greatest fear about free speech, if you could. I don't know if it's too reductivist for you, but do you feel positive about free speech at the moment, for both of you at the moment? First of all, if you would. Look, I have great faith in free speech. That's why I think it's so important to defend it.

I do think our landscape for speech is changing so quickly and in some ways that are alarming. I worry about... I'm a techno-optimist. I think AI has enormous potential to advance society in so many ways and diagnostics and making many research so much easier. But I also worry about...

the authenticity of our public debate. Are we going to have any idea of who is really talking to us when we receive an email or we see a post online? And what will it mean for our psyches and our relationships when, you know, we lose the ability to discern where a real human being is or isn't

I listened to an AI-generated podcast yesterday that took Meta's privacy policies and turned it into a podcast that was like this witty discussion between two people who don't exist. And, you know, it was great because you could learn about the privacy policy in this engaging way. And yet, you know, at some point, I really worry that something very elemental about

human interaction might be at risk here. So that's in the back of my mind. Your hopes and fears? I mean, I'm not sure historians are really given to optimism, but... LAUGHTER

I think, yeah, from an optimistic perspective and not to fully respond to the points about colonial history, but I think academia, speaking as an academic working in Britain, academia is becoming more open and the number of voices we have in academia are much wider than they were previously. And that's what's driving things like this re-evaluation of colonial history, right? That we actually have much more of a reckoning with the past. And what that's doing, I think, is challenging a lot of the assumptions that people make about

things like British history and opening the range of things that we can say about who we are and there's always going to be pushback to that but I think that's a I think you know I say in the book I think actually you know we're at a time of mass democracy in speech and we're at a time when academia is more open to people than ever before and people are able to speak more I think you know from a

from a kind of negative point of that is obviously that you're always going to have this sense of speech being kind of challenging or frightening to be like these kind of questionings of norms right it is challenging and frightening and if if what free speech is doing in in academia and particularly in history is kind of opening up the

stories we can tell about people, there's inevitably a backlash to that. And I think there's this kind of part of what we're often seeing in the field I work in, in imperial history, is this backlash at the moment. And I think these kind of waves of opening up and then backlash is something that's very common and predictable, but it doesn't make it any less alarming to be in that point in the cycle.

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts. Make sure to stay tuned for the next episode as we look back on 2024 and select our 12 books of Christmas. Experience holiday cheer at Tengger Outlets with savings up to 70% off your favorite brands. From fragrances to accessories and the latest styles.

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