Freedom of Speech-Acts Roger A. Shiner

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ROGER A. SHINER 45 {cf. pp. 25-26) suggests this. This is misleading, because the meaoiog of a locution is presupposed even in the constitutive use of language. If we did not understand what a person was saying, we could not very reEably estimate of what character his speech-acts were constitutive.® Except, of course, that Eoglishman know that all other Europeans are excitable! 2.1) I have not so far touched on the humanly important issue of freedom of speech. If what Sesonske says about the constitutive use of language is correct, aod I think that there is excellent reason to think that it is, then I would oflFer the following important consequence. Certain wishy-washy forms of liberaEsm, in which we condescendingly ignore what a man is, his whole persooality and beiog, providing he gratefully accepts our letting him say what he likes ("I don't Eke what you say, my man, but I'll bally well defend your right to say it"), this sort of thing is not on. Sesonske's remarks about closed societies (p. 36) draw our attention to the fact they have faced the consequences brought about by the evanescent character of the distinction betweeo sayiog and being. The eveots of August 1968 lo Czechoslovakia are a case in point. The Russian leaders seemed well aware that permitting certain sorts of things to be said and pubEshed is indistinguishable from labelEng as . acceptable certain kinds of persons aod certain ways of life. Hooest liberalism aod democracy wiE have to atteod to the same poiot, although the steps to be takeo lead in the reverse direction. If it is true that there is ao inconsistency in treating people like dirt while ooe oooetheless lets them, in the name of freedom of speech, souod ofF vocaUy and io priot, then the inconsistency can be removed either by permitting neither the speech nor the being, or by graotiog a full acceptance ofboth. Someooe might be tempted to thiok it was a commeodable sigo of a great liberal and democratic society that national poEtical parties had to have by law equal broadcasting time before elections. Thus, for example, Abemathy and Wallace could in prindple have had equal time for counter-argument, if they had been political opponents. But such a thought overlooks the enormous social and economic block to the former ever being in a position to head an organised national poEtical force, and therein Ees the real problem. Certainly a society in which ooe does not have to buy freedom of speech is preferable to ooe where one does. But a moraEy aod poEtically acceptable position will only be reached when all peoples
46 FREEDOM OF SPEECH-ACTS in a complex and diverse society are accepted as what they are and for what they are. This is not a matter of the freedom to say what one Ekes, but the freedom to be what one is, and what one wants to be. The meretricious attraction of freedom of speech over freedom of being is, of course, that it involves far less of a straio on the moral and economic resources of both a society as a collective body and the individuals withio it. Cootemporary Americao society is particularly consdous at present ofthis fact because of the Vietnam War, another heavy draw oo all of these resources. I have no wish to deny that these problems of national priorities are vast and complex, nor am I suggesting any solutioo, I am concerned with identifying the problems, and identifying them as essentially involving freedom of beiog and oot freedom of speech. Even though correct ideotificatioo is oever a sufficient cooditioo for the solutioo of aoy problem, I venture to suggest that It may be a necessary one, and therein Ees the significance of my remarks. By way of concluding this sectioo, I might add two further thoughts to the above. Firstly, one must be careful not to suggest that the "equal time" ploy is ultimately inadequate because it leaves things in the reaJm of "mere words, and what we waot is action." Such a suggestion embodies the sort of 'saying'/'doing' distinction which I have been questioning. What is wrong with the ploy is that the actions it engenders are ones whose practical consequences seem to be of somewhat minimal utiEty, given the nature and extent of the situatioo it is desigoed to ameEorate. The "mere words" locution I would Eke to ioterpret as a paradoxical but atteotion-getting description of the case. Secondly, I would like to emphasise one aspect of the freedom to be which was caUed to my mind by a newspaper article which I recently read, by a leading member of the immigrant Pakistani amd Indian community in Britain. The author was at pains to describe the considerable and deep-rooted cultural, espedally religious, pressures on them to prevent them from wanting to integrate themselves ioto British sodety — reEgious bars, for example, against marrying outside ooe's faith. The moral he wished to draw was that the iotroversioo of this community should be accepted and respected as what that community desired to display, and not viewed as a sodal wart to be 'cured' by repatriation or integration, according to one's predilections. One hears similar caveats about integration from Canadian Indians too, prompted more by distaste
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