By Olakunle Abimbola
The anti-hate speech bill, and the rich lather of passion it has elicited, shows the strong pull, between security and liberty, that shapes the modern state. Sabi Abdullahi, senator of the Federal Republic, virtually went for the jugular, when he proposed, in his bill, the death penalty for whoever let go deliberate fake news or noxious information that led to the death of another, or others.
Blessed with a third eye or a deep ear, you could have glimpsed or heard the state give a repressed whoop! The state’s basic business is security; and “law and order” is the euphemism for getting that done, in the most formidable and swashbuckling of ways.
Besides, it’s only when the state is secure that it can develop the capacity to ensure citizen welfare — what Jeremy Bentham dubbed the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
By its basic security bent, the state does nothing unusual: neither malevolent nor benevolent. Just clinically dutiful. It is citizen security, stupid!
But the Liberty ensemble, the no less swashbuckling army of citizen freedom and liberty, even in its most extreme and irrational form, would have nothing of that crap!
Countering the state’s silent whoop of victory is their own bedlam of dissent: it is total, unrestrained freedom, or nothing!
What is democracy, or any modern state for that matter, they gush, if you must punish “free speech”, with such a dire proposition — death and long jail terms?
Throw in a scare crow, about Nigeria’s nasty experience with military rule, and it’s all legit tactics, all in the hallowed territory of democratic hysteria.
But again, by waxing hysterical over what would amount to expressive anarchy, they too are neither malevolent nor benevolent. They just are driven — and passionately too — by the other extreme of the state continuum: freedom.
Still, between the creative pull of security and liberty, straddles the modern democratic state. For it, extreme security or extreme liberty is great peril.
Extreme security turns citizens into glorified zombies, scared of their wits, cowered before the all-mighty Leviathan; born free, but in perpetual chains, as French Philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), once quipped.
It could well be neo-Animal Farm, George Orwell’s 20th century famous satire, with the state (read a few power hustlers), manifesting all those brutish, animalistic domination, but insisting it is for citizens’ good! Talk of the government as neo-state of nature!
But that is only one part.
Extreme freedom, the other part, turns citizens into a reckless band, bristling with mischief; driven by a self-assumed democratic conceit to think anything, say anything and do anything, including gaming the system for personal good — but collective ruin.
That much is clear from the rash of blatant lies in the social media: total fabrications, ethnic demonization, goading the naive to mischief and even violence, misleading captions to import false motives to true events, just to send skewed messages, to inflame passion.
Now, if that is not arrested — and fast — it could well be back to Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature yet again, with the people preying upon one another; private will trumping the public weal; and life generally becoming brutish, nasty and short.
Should that happen, it would be back to Hobbes’s fear, the very fear that made government all so compelling. At that terrible juncture, it is the same state that the people, with zero tolerance for pain and stress, would blame, in condemnatory wailing and screeches.
Even then, only those alive can wail. Those consumed, by the madness of hate, just sleep in pieces, hardly in any peace — their blasted memory, a shaft stabbing the heart, of the troubled living.
That could be so reminiscent of the famous Chinua Achebe quip, in his works, quoting a famous Igbo proverb: if you fled from a particular death, and yet came back to die that same death, then you had lost your care.
If, in the pursuit of unbridled freedom anarchy crept in, and the innocent majority the state was structured to protect came to harm, what was the need of the state in the first instance?
Perhaps this analysis is deliberately over-simplified. But the motive should be clear: both excessive restraint (to secure the people) and excessive liberty (to press their freedom) have dire consequences. It is to strategically meet — and avert — these exigencies that the state passes laws.
This would appear the conceptual framework for the anti-hate speech bill. Those who insist the bill, passed into law, could duplicate other felonies, already captured by existing laws, completely miss the point: the law must be dynamic. That is the only way it could keep pace with societal development.
Hate speech flies wildest on the social media, with its all-comer access; and infamous lack of quality control. The social media is the latest addition to the communication mix.
The conventional media — newspapers and news magazines, radio and television — on the other hand do, other things still equal, have strict quality control with structured gatekeepers, to edit off or tone down combustible and reckless stuff.
So, with the social media — tweeter and Facebook, mainly — oozing reckless and noxious stuff, with hardly any institutional cover to curtail abuse, the state would be stupid not to aim at some form of regulation. Indeed, the society would be much the riskier for it.
Still, there is something grand and noble about the liberal take of Nobel winner, Professor Wole Soyinka, in the debate. Now, Soyinka is no fair-weather hustler in human rights racketeering.
Virtually from the cradle, he has pushed the frontiers of citizen freedom, even walking his talk with virtually his life, when he pushed for a Third Force, neither Nigerian nor Biafran, to fend off the Civil War (1967-1970).
For that chutzpah, he ended up in incarceration, the prisons notes of which birthed his work, The Man Died. So, when the professor speaks on citizen rights, he compels attention.
Soyinka declared that though he had been victim of hate speech; and that the social media had put fake speech on his lips; and hanged fake news on his neck, he would rather let the social media be, just to push his personal ideology of free speech and unfettered expression. That was noble, liberal and magnanimous!
But the state can ill afford such magnanimity, given its own tough mandate, of imposing basic order.
The state executes equal opportunity regulation, even control: to protect the weak against the strong; or even, in the social media pestilence, the strong against the weak. Either way, should that protection fail, the society risks a rupture, with peril staring everyone in the face.
So, shorn of logic and sentiments, across the security-liberty divide, hate speech is no “free speech”, as the liberty ensemble love to crow.
Rather, no thanks to the loose social media, it could well be the latest vista of speech-induced crime and punishment, to parody that Russian classic by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
It is true the freedom army would screech and bawl, claiming it is undemocratic to “criminalize free speech”. But beyond the ideological lather, of total freedom or nothing, it is clear that is a contradiction in terms: speech, like any action, is free, to the extent that it doesn’t breach any law. When it does, it isn’t free again. It becomes a crime, which the state punishes; or a tort, for which the state midwifes fines, for the injured party.
Thus, misusing the social media is deliberate action, which has consequences. Those who act that way must take responsibility. That is logical — and equitable. If that prompts moderation, and scales down the anti-social component of the social media, the society is richer; and free speech is much better for it.
The good thing, though, is that the senator’s bill is already going through the restraint-liberty trade-off. Hostile public opinion has already junked its death penalty provision — and just as well: the opening goal, for the freedom party.
But as the bill gets further moderated, the liberty ensemble would be living in a fool’s paradise to think something too won’t give, on the freedom end of the continuum. That would be libertarianism, bordering on licentiousness.
So, let both camps go to party and chisel out a social media regulatory law, neither extremely repressive nor extremely libertarian.
Such an enlightened middle point, points to a new balance, in a polity where the social media has come to stay.
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