The Elegant Variation: STOPPARD ON FREE SPEECH

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March 28, 2006

STOPPARD ON FREE SPEECH

We're great admirers of Tom Stoppard - he's sort of our Banville of playwrights. We can be counted on to eagerly lap up nearly everything he does (excluding his film work, that is), so imagine our surprise at this rather limp, unsatisfying argument that free speech is not an inalienable human right.

Freedom of speech, far from being an absolute, a given, seems to have less to do with rights than with rules. But that's the good news. Now we can avoid the clash of absolutes, the endless, enervating, futile confrontation of irresistible forces and immovable objects. How did the concept of free speech as an inherent human right get into such a mess? It did so because we persist in the notion of a "right" as something to be claimed rather than accorded. While claim and counter-claim are presented as absolutes, this is a debate that not only will have no resolution but cannot have a resolution.

Yeah. OK. We get the whole "whose rights" question but that kind of reasoning can be extended to argue that not even life (and certainly not liberty) is an inalienable human right - rather, we merely all agree (most of the time) to live and let live, that it's generally preferable to be alive.

It's a worthy goal Stoppard is striving for - to remove intractable absolutes from the equation and turn it into a more reasoned negotiation. And it's argued in its usual witty - albeit mushily circular - fashion. And from a purely objective, scientific and rational stance (Stoppard's preferred pose), it's hard to argue with.

And yet it feels wrong. And this coming from an atheist who takes no solace in the notion of divinely bestowed rights. Perhaps it's merely that one doesn't want Stoppard to be right. One wants to believe that we're destined for better things ... Either way, it's hard to imagine the colonists getting sufficiently worked up over the "proposed rule of free speech," don't you think? The downside is that intractable absolutes can cause people to fight. The upside is that they occasionally cause the same.

Posted at 12:30 AM in Litlinks | Permalink

Comments

In any case, Stoppard's point dovetails neatly with the Irving 'controversy'...and goes right to the heart of the question of who 'we' are. Even the 'right' to bear arms wouldn't be problematic if 'we' were all the kind of people who could be trusted with guns...but we're clearly not all up to it (the paradox being that if we were, guns would be wonderfully pointless and vanish with a 'poof' from the face of the earth...same with the concept 'Free' Speech?). Stoppard isn't arguing to rescind the 'right'...I think he's being the Playfully Serious Rhetorician that he is and calling into question the unexamined default nobility of the phrase 'Free Speech,' ...the fuzzy thinking...pointing out that it's a morally neutral concept which is only as noble as the people practising it. Free Speech in the mouth of, say, Joan Didion becomes a Hate Crime in the mouth of David Irving...two demonstrably different things. Maybe 'we' need as many inflected forms for 'Free Speech' as the mythical number of Inuit forms for 'snow'.

Posted by: Steven Augustine | March 28, 2006 at 03:39 AM

PS even 'liberty'...even 'life' itself...are provisional rights on this planet.

Posted by: Steven Augustine | March 28, 2006 at 03:43 AM

Thanks for the link. Actually, I liked Stoppard's take on this issue a lot. At first I thought he was going to take a squishy point of view, as many liberals have done in the face of the Muslim cartoon protests. The Muslim protesters irritate me precisely because they (those in Denmark or elsewhere in Europe) want to enjoy the privileges of Western society but otherwise believe the "rules" of Western society shouldn't apply to them. That said, I have for a long time been weary of the invocation of "rights." For another interesting take on the issue, you might look at an essay by the Goethe scholar Nicholas Boyle in the March 18 issue of the English Catholic magazine The Tablet. (Don't worry, it's a "liberal" Catholic magazine, practically undistinguishable from the New York Times in its pieties.) The essay is called "Human Rights and Our God," and he gives a good overview of the development of ideas of rights: www. thetablet.co.uk. Enjoy.

Posted by: goethe girl | March 28, 2006 at 05:04 PM

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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The Elegant Variation

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March 28, 2006

STOPPARD ON FREE SPEECH

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MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

March 28, 2006

STOPPARD ON FREE SPEECH

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism