I will defend your right to free speech to the death - what Volltaire didn't say.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,”

 countless civil libertarians afterwards – who made the mistake of attributing the saying to Voltaire himself.Whoever said it.

But what  might lie behind that smug liberal proclamation?
. To begin with, the language attributed to Voltaire is bewildering. ‘Defend to the death your right to say it?’ Whose death? How would death be involved? I guess its most attractive meaning is something like: ‘I will fight and, if need be, lay down my life for your right to say something,

would death be involved? I guess its most attractive meaning is something like: ‘I will fight and, if need be, lay down my life for a Bill of Rights that may have this implication.’ A more troubling reading, however, is that illiberal  speech is worth protecting even if a consequence of that protection is that someone gets hurt or killed. ‘I will defend your right to say it, even if your saying it makes violence more likely against the people attacked in your pamphlets.’ Is that what is meant?
Defenders of free speech squirm on this point.

On the one hand, they want to say that we should be willing to brave death for the sake of this important individual right. On the other hand, they assure us dogmatically that there is no clear evidence of any causal connection between, say, racist posters and incidents of racial violence, between pamphlets that say ‘Hitler should have finished the job’ and anti-semitic attacks, or between pornography and violence against women. Indeed, they pretend to have no idea of what such a causal mechanism could possibly be:

‘We are defending only illiberal  speech. How on earth could there be any connection between what they say and the things that some violent individuals do?’It’s a strange dichotomy because, in other contexts, American civil liberties scholars have no difficulty at all in seeing a connection between speech and the possibility of violence. They point to it all the time as a way of justifying restrictions on citizens’ interventions at political gatherings.

If Donald Rumsfeld comes to give a speech and someone in the audience shouts out that he is a war criminal, the heckler is quickly and forcibly removed. When I came to America, I was amazed that nobody thought this was a violation of the First Amendment. (Shouting comments at public meetings was another of my favourite pastimes when I was young and irresponsible.) But I was told by my American colleagues that heckling presages disorder.

Do the liberal bien pensants  look askance at the illiberal mouthings and find a kind of secular relligisosity that in peering into the abyss of illiberal thought

Truth will out in the competition of the marketplace, however the universalism of the bien pensants
the wear your heart on your sleeve, the moral  high ground speechifiers,
has long since lost it innocence.
Those liberal thinkers, boutique liberals, feeling that the can make virtue out of their unsteadying gaze on the abyss of illiberal thought has longs since lost its innocence, the liberal belief that one can make virtue out of and that one can derive a kind of moral alchemy our of illiberalism has long since lost its innocence.

 At best, it is the boutique faith of a few liberals who take the resilience of their own voyeurism as a sign that speech is really harmless