Paying for freedom

The freedoms enjoyed by the French — though not all of them and certainly not those out of the French population who are Muslim — come at a price, and not only for the French. It cost Nigerian Christians several of their churches and it cost a veteran anchor at CNN his job. After 34 years Jim Clancy resigned in the last week after a series of tweets that he posted to a Twitter account that was quickly closed — but the damage was done and the tweets had been quoted on websites such as Gawker and Mediaite. They were out in the world and the immortality bestowed on everything by the internet saw Clancy walk away from his job. The Nigerian Christians lost their churches as a part of the global reaction to events in Paris, the reverberations of which are going to be echoing for months and years to come.

The two events are widely separated but linked by the issue of freedom of speech. And the reality is that there is no such thing. Anywhere. We may think that we can say whatever we want and wherever we want to say it, but not so. There are the personal limitations, the handbrakes that we apply ourselves as we choose not to offend friends or relatives or the wider world; then there are the handbrakes applied by organs such as this or any other newspaper anywhere in the world. Those are the limitations of libel, of publishing an untruth about an individual who may then have recourse to law, and sue. Then there are the limitations applied by the state, and here we run up against the buffers of culture and national identity.

Limitations in the freedom of speech at the same time define what can be said as well as what cannot. Thus it is an offence in some countries to deny the Holocaust, but not an offence to satirise any religion. One man’s — or magazines’ — freedom to do just that has become another man’s burning church and unemployment for another.

Enter stage left Sam Huntington and his argument that the world is increasingly polarised, that the Age of Ideology was behind us and that henceforward the world would revert to its “natural state” which was characterised by cultural conflict. Different cultures have different normative values when it comes to freedom of speech, with what is acceptable in one culture being inimical to another, and here we start to discern the clash of civilisations that Huntington spoke of over 30 years ago.

As much as the clash of arms it is the clash of cultural values that is the engine driving real-time armed conflict. Economics and ideology are no longer the primary source of conflict; it is the cultural divisions of humankind characterised by nation-states that occupy opposing cultural positions. That cultural divide is coming to dominate the political narrative around the world, and the political glue that holds nation-states together and provides their ‘voice’ — pours an accelerant on the fires of ‘difference’ and ‘the other’ as it does. As Huntington wrote in 1993 — “The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future.”

Back in Pakistan in 2015, the fault lines are on daily display, as are the tensions caused by an asymmetric aspiration to some of the cultural values and freedoms espoused by — for want of a better term — the West. People do not leave Pakistan to live in other countries because they admire the scenery. They go because they are looking for a better life and indeed many of them find one. Yet not all of them are happy in their country of choice, especially if their cultural sensitivities are at odds with the prevailing culture of their hosts, the asymmetry of their aspirations clashing with their fundamental beliefs. Little surprise then that not everybody is able to contain — control — the emotions that flow from that.

The price of freedom of speech increasingly appears to be paid in units of warfare. Thus far those units have not coalesced, but they are convergent — and converging at an accelerating rate — and Sam Huntington may prove to have been right all along.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 22^nd, 2015.

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