Two Types of Free Speech

I. Isegorians and Parrhesians

Freedom of speech seems to have got into a tangle. There are two obvious extreme positions:

Free Speech Absolutism: which seems to mean “the freedom to speak, no matter what the subject or what the opinion, as long as it is not against the law”.
Cancel Culture: which seems to mean “the freedom to speak on certain subjects and with certain opinions, as long as these subjects and opinions satisfy the canons of political correctness”.

The word ‘absolutism’ in the phrase ‘free speech absolutism’ sounds grandiose and imperial: as if we are talking about absolute truths; but, of course, opponents of this sort of freedom of speech point out, reasonably enough, that many of the opinions expressed by free speech absolutists are simply impolite, obscene, offensive, incorrect, misleading, or conspiratorial. I think a bit of clarification of the issues involved here would not come amiss. And with that in mind I have raided those perennial contemporaries of ours, the ancient Greeks.

There were two words for ‘free speech’ in ancient Greece. One was isegoria; the other was parrhesia. The distinction between the two is, even taken by itself, quite instructive. For isegoria was political, ‘of the polis’; whereas parrhesia was not only extra-political but potentially subversive of the polis. This distinction is highly relevant to our situation.

The best discussion of the distinction can be found on p. 129 of Paul Cartledge’s book, Democracy: A Life (2016), where he writes:

The Athenians had two words both of which we might translate as ‘freedom of speech’: isegoria and parrhesia. Their semantic space overlapped, but their core meanings were significantly different. Whereas isegoria, exact equality of public political speech, had a particular application to speech made in a political assembly, and could indeed serve as a synecdoche for democratic equality and democracy as such, parrhesia had a broader scope and reference. This was just the kind of free speech that the theatrical comedy could have been invented to exploit.

Cartledge goes on to say that no one believed in absolute freedom of speech. Even the dramatists were careful to avoid abusing democracy. And of course Socrates was put on trial. But he leaves the subject there. We need to think about it a bit further.

Isegoria is literally “equal speech in the agora”: derived from agoreuein, to speak, and agora, the public space in the centre of the city. So we should call this sort of freedom of speech a PUBLIC FREEDOM OF SPEECH. It belongs to rulers and citizens in so far as they are engaging in responsible speech: so it is speech which works within the established standards and assumptions of the time. In effect, isegoria is the sort of freedom of speech which the cancel culturalists want. It is exactly what ‘politically correct’ means: it means placing a limit on what can be said. Anything else is subversive.

Now, there is obviously nothing wrong with this politically. It is a political necessity. Every political system has its own standards, its own correctness. But it is only our civilisation which after a long history of liberty and liberalism has gone so far in assuming the opposite – has come so much to believe that liberty should extend as far as parrhesia – that we have given the name ‘political correctness’ to the current censorious form of isegoria. Ironically, this isegoria is threatening the existence of the very parrhesia which spawned it in the first place.

Parrhesia is what we could call PRIVATE FREEDOM OF SPEECH. It is the freedom of speech one expects to have with friends. But it is, interestingly, a private freedom of speech brought into the public sphere. It is, as Cartledge pointed out, the freedom associated with the subversions of the theatre; and it is also the freedom associated with philosophers. It has the atmosphere or carnival or symposium about it. If isegoria is the freedom of the politicians, then parrhesia is, at its best, the freedom of the philosophers. And in this sense parrhesia is even more important than isegoria: for it is the freedom which enables us to criticise the current regime. It is just as responsible as isegoria, but more profound.

A regime which allows both isegoria and parrhesia is a regime which has two circles. The first circle is an inner circle, within the framework of established assumptions and political correctness, within which the established elites operate. This is where we find the language of published and broadcast media, and of politicians in their public speeches. But there is also an outer circle, from which we may scrutinise or subvert or support the framework of established assumptions. Here it is by standing outside the order that we can put the order to the question.

The point is that there is no point thoughtlessly using the phrase ‘free speech’ as if it means something simple. For there are two types of free speech. One is political: it is the free speech of the court party. It is conducted in the established language, and with established limits. The other is in a sense outside politics: but of course in our current politics of government-and-opposition it is also within politics, though it is always found on the margins of politics and carries echoes of a reality far away from politics: it is the free speech of the country party, the excluded, the eccentric – the sceptical.

But, alas, this does not exhaust the subject. For it is not only that we have the isegorian and the parrhesian. We also have two types of parrhesian.

II. Two types of Parrhesian

The ‘free speech absolutists’ may sometimes suppose that everything has become simple: that the battle lines are clear, now that the isegorians have become hysterical and paranoid and tyrannical. But there is a difficulty. One reason why the isegorians have lost their minds is because they are objecting to something which is objectionable. (Another reason is, of course, that they think their beliefs are wholly justified.) Both ‘free speech absolutists’ and ‘cancel culturalists’ may tend to assume that there is only the figure of the parrhesian heroically or unheroically opposing the isegorian. But this is not so. There are two types of parrhesian. Let me go step by step:

Isegorians, first of all, include everyone established, from Monarch down through Prime Minister, counsellors and advisors, ministers, civil servants, academics, and almost all journalists. They are the crew responsible for the politics we keep writing about here, the politics of COVID-19, Climate Crisis and Wokery.

They are not against freedom of speech, but like to assume the existence of limits of propriety: and, in the face of the threat from parrhesians, they became strident and punitive defenders of moral order, and proponents of ‘cancel culture’.

Parrhesians come in two types:

Vulgar parrhesians include anyone who assumes that ‘freedom of speech’ licenses every form of utterance. This is about opinion rather than truth. Here we find all manner of unconscientious utterance reaching down to defamation and even threat: it is here we find a Bosch’s hell of twitter trolls belching out opinions far below the rainbow bridge of respectability.
Elite parrhesians include anyone who believes that ‘freedom of speech’ is only necessary when it is the truth that is stake. Opinion is here at most a side concern. The truth which is most relevant here is the sort of truth which is excluded or ignored by the isegorians.

Almost everyone – both ‘free speech absolutists’ and ‘cancel culturalists’ – tend to assume that there is only one type of parrhesian: except they disagree about what sort of creature he is. Free speech absolutists assimilate the vulgar category into the elite category (and die defending everyone’s right to say everything), while the cancel culturalists do the reverse: they assimilate the elite category into the vulgar category (and try to get everyone beyond the pale cancelled). So where the free speech absolutists justify their freedom by appealing to the rare occasions when ‘opinion’ coincides with ‘truth’, the cancel culturalists justify their censorship and cancellation with words like ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, ‘abuse’, ‘harassment’, ‘hate speech’, etc.

Shortly before his death, Michel Foucault – who, despite the dismissals of Roger Scruton and Jordan Peterson was more friend than enemy – gave some lectures on parrhesia which were later collected in a book entitled Fearless Speech (2001). Oddly, Foucault ignored isegoria completely. But he obviously saw parrhesia as something extremely important. He characterised it as the phenomenon whereby someone says everything in his mind; says it because it is the truth; says it because he has courage; and says it because he is less powerful than those to whom he says it. “The problem,” he says on p.73, “is one of recognising who is capable of speaking the truth.” In effect, though Foucault did not quite say this, the point about the parrhesian is that though he may have less power than the isegorian, he has more authority, the authority which comes from possessing the truth.

Parrhesia, I have said, is private freedom of speech: but it is private freedom of speech brought into the public sphere – where most people only usually employ a public freedom of speech, the politically correct isegoria. But parrhesia is not politically correct. It is therefore a threat. It may be an empty threat (empty of truth): but, if so, then it is vulgar parrhesia, full of fury, signifying nothing much. I would not say I am a ‘free speech absolutist’, because I don’t care very much about the parrhesia of opinion. (I do not believe in suppressing opinion. But we should probably ignore quite a lot of opinion: there is far too much opinion, too much noise, nowadays; and too much opinion gets in the way of any serious attempt to establish the truth.) But I do care about the other sort of parrhesia, which has something to do with the truth.

This raises an obvious question.

III. What is Truth?

In one of the most famous exchanges recorded in human history, Jesus, when explaining to Pilate that he was not a king, that is, not a ruler of the earth (“My kingdom is not of this earth”), said: “I was born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” To this, Pilate offered the immortal response: “What is truth?”

Usually, the fact that Pilate leaves the room is taken to be significant: the ancient equivalent of a ‘mic drop’. But what we have here is two different versions of what truth is. There is a truth of the inner circle, of the Establishment, of the earthly king, of law, compliance and mandation: this is the ‘truth’, in our time, of Climate Change, COVID-19, and Wokery). It is the sort of truth Pilate could have understood. It is the sort of truth which is now hijacked by radicals, by the young, by bureaucrats and by translogicians. But then there is a truth of the outer circle, or the great beyond, ‘not of this earth’: a truth which though ultimate cannot be acknowledged within the law or logic of the established, limited, drawn system.

The first truth, the truth of ‘this earth’, is the truth of the isegorians. It is political truth.

The second truth, the truth ‘not of this earth’, is the truth of the parrhesians. It is absolute truth.

I think that the combination of these two rival forms of truth gives us something like a paradoxical system. It resembles Gödel’s theory about mathematics. For those who cannot remember it, Gödel found that a complete mathematical system would always depend on postulates that were not part of that system: if it lacked those postulates, which we could say were ‘not of this earth’, it could never be complete. So let us define truth, or higher truth, or absolute truth, as the truth of a system which cannot be demonstrated from within that system. Isegoria is the gate-kept truth of the system: the truth which has power at its service. Parrhesia, or, at least, elite parrhesia, is the truth that the system cannot admit. The problem is that modern scientists and moralists are trying to deny that such truth exists.

George Orwell understood the dangers of modern politics when he wrote about a ‘Ministry of Truth’ in his novel 1984. For, of course, the whole point about political orders is that their truths are instrumental, not intrinsic: that is, their truths are not actually true, except in so far as they serve the purpose of the rulers and their supporters to say so. What a totalitarian regime is, in short, is a regime in which the only truth is the truth within the regime, within the system, within the inner circle. If all our institutions are now captured, if elite parrhesia is dying of EU funding and HR edicts, then it is no wonder that our culture is coming more and more to depend on the belches and head-buttings of the vulgar parrhesians, who, in their noisy, quarrelsome way, are keeping English liberty alive. (Someone should commission Bob Moran to draw a cartoon of Toby Young as Don Quixote in knight’s armour, defending the medieval trolls from the wind turbines of a faceless state.)

Be that as it may, I think it is essential to think about freedom of speech not simply, in terms of ‘freedom of speech’ versus ‘cancel culture’: but, instead, in terms of two circles. What we have is, in effect, at any point, battles between two types of truth, and, on the greatest possible scale, a war between these two types of truth, in which the grave danger facing us is that the BBC, WHO, PRC, WEF, FBI and similar entities might manage to destroy the truth of the parrhesians once and for all: eliminate the mere possibility of it: and thus leave behind only the political truths of the isegorians.

Dr. James Alexander is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.