MICHAEL MORRIS: Free speech is about keeping on talking about what we may get wrong - Business Day
Michael Morris
My sense of Richard Feynman is that his reputation as a towering scientist of the 20th century rests largely on the fruits of his attachment to uncertainty, and second thoughts. These almost suggest a lack of conviction, though it’s precisely the uncertainty and second thoughts that defined his fertile conviction in scientific enquiry itself.
Recent events brought Feynman to mind, mainly in the form of a slight if persistent peripheral distraction, like someone at the back of the room repeatedly putting up a hand to get a word in.
Chiefly, I thought of Feynman’s tantalising aside of 1963 about why “we cannot teach physics by just giving the basic laws ... and then showing how they work in all possible circumstances”.
He gave two reasons. The second reason had to do with complex mathematics and “some very unfamiliar ideas”. But the first was so plainly and quickly stated you almost overlook the mind-boggling importance of what he was saying. You can’t teach physics “by just giving all the basic laws”, he said, because “we do not yet know all the basic laws: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance”.
That’s an extraordinarily important thing for a scientist to say, but it’s no less of an important thing for the rest of us to try to think about, and incorporate in our sense-making.
It’s not obvious, but what I am thinking of in 2023 is not physics and mathematics but free speech and the public conversation, what it means to utter what we think, and stake a claim to what we take to be true.
Just recently, the University of Cape Town’s Rainbow Society, its LGBTQI+ student organisation, objected to “self-proclaimed homophobe” Patrick Lumumba’s being given a platform on the campus (as a guest of the EFF), saying this was “an implicit way of saying that Lumumba’s actions and words are acceptable”.
And, indeed, there’s an important argument to be had about homophobic laws and actions in Africa.
In Nigeria, Nobel prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka creditably spoke up for Afrobeats star Davido (who incidentally has collaborated with our very own rising star, Focalistic) for sharing a video by another singer signed to his label, reportedly showing men dancing outside a mosque.
Some Muslims were offended, but Soyinka urged Davido not to apologise. “I insist,” the 89-year-old writer said, “on the right of the artiste to deploy dance in a religious setting as a fundamental given.”
Finally, there was Brexit champion and fosterer of immigration anxiety Nigel Farage’s astonishing termination as a banking client by NatWest for holding “publicly stated views [that were] at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”.
Don’t shoot
In each case, outrage obscures an essence, which is not to preserve speech to advance good ideas or charitable thinking, but to preserve conversation about what really matters. Put differently, the ideal is that what matters is made the subject of conversation, and therefore not of conflict.
As colleague Nicholas Lorimer observed drily last week (on a different but not unrelated topic): “I prefer it if my MPs don’t shoot each other.”
Sustaining the argument improves the odds of better ideas prevailing over bad ones. They don’t always, or do not prevail in time to stop awful harm. But the point is, keeping the argument going is already the better idea, channelling our intellectual furies into vocal exchanges that at least have a chance of nudging us towards kindlier ends.
It helps to call to mind the almost unimaginable humility of an intellectual giant conceiving of an “expanding frontier of ignorance”.
Morris is head of media at the Institute of Race Relations