“Making” democracy

THE CLAIM that free expression is not absolute falls regularly from the lips of people who’re basically hostile to it, among them certain members of the 15^th Congress who were prepared to swear on a stack of Bibles their allegiance to free expression, access to information and press freedom, but who nevertheless passed the Cybercrime Prevention Act and refused to act on the Freedom Of Information bill.

Whether these advocates of “yes to free expression, but…” and their brothers and sisters under the skin in  Malacañang, the Armed Forces and certain Church groups have something to hide, or resent challenges to the ideas and beliefs they hold dearly, they’re right: free expression does have limits.  But because free expression is so important a right, only the violation of the rights of others and putting them in disrepute, exposing them to danger, compromising national security, and contributing to lawlessness and public disorder are universally recognized as legitimate limitations.

While Philippine law penalizes with excessive penalties libel and slander, obscenity, and inciting to sedition and rebellion, there are limits to free expression not only in law. There are echoes of these limits in media and press ethics, but as responsibilities.

To the already extensive legal limits to free expression, some groups would add the censorship of forms of expression offensive to religious sensibilities, or which advance ideas with which they don’t agree, or even behavior that conflicts with their own —or, as the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 would have it, statements that the government, through the Department of Justice, would consider libelous even without the benefit of hearing or trial.

Behind the fear of free expression evident in such initiatives is the often unacknowledged power of free expression to provide information and analysis through the news media, or through cartoons, paintings, poetry , a manifesto,  a demonstration, a picket,  or the burning of an effigy relevant enough to move people not only to form opinions on public issues but also to act on them.

The exercise of free expression, among the major manifestations of which are a free press and the right to assemble—“peaceably,” says the Constitution– to express grievances or demand restitution, justice or government action,  is vital  not only to the sustenance and enhancement of democracy; it is equally crucial to the making of democracy itself.   During the martial law period, resistance to the dictatorship took, among others, such forms of free expression as lightning rallies and demonstrations that helped lead to the civilian-military mutiny at EDSA, in addition to the daily defiance of the Marcos tyranny by the alternative press.

The democratizing power of free expression explains why its curtailment is as much the target of would-be dictators and those who have something to hide as they’re among the first casualties of authoritarian regimes.

Granted that free expression is open to abuse, however.  Obscenity; slander and libel; public endangerment; stereotyping on the basis of gender, ethnic origin, political beliefs and religious affiliation; plain name-calling and others have often been cited in attempts to curtail free expression through censorship, fines and imprisonment.

Indeed the possibilities for even greater abuse have multiplied in the age of the Internet, the regulation of which has been proposed in many countries including the Philippines, and implemented in others as if it were the means of transmission rather than content that mattered most in human to human communication.

The new media do have characteristics distinct from the old, among them their immediacy, and, in most cases, the absence of the gate-keeping that for all its flaws has imposed some discipline no matter how erratic in the old media of print and broadcasting.  These characteristics endow the new media, not necessarily with superior power, but with power of a different sort: i.e.  power in terms of  their global reach and in enhancing the capacity of human beings for expression whether  meaningful, pointless, or malicious.

New media interactivity and accessibility relative to the old media provide citizens the unprecedented capacity to engage others in meaningful discourse about the society and the world they live in. For all the senseless uses to which social media sites and blogs are being  put– among them indulging such impulses as insulting and humiliating others before the entire planet,  bullying the vulnerable and the weak, or seeking via games and  the cyber illusion of  community  escape and diversion from the world’s woes–  the new media,  like the old,  are at their core vehicles for the realization and expansion of  the human need for  expression and connection.

This need is driven by the yearning for knowledge and understanding of the time and place, the very world itself, that men and women inhabit—not only to make sense of it, but also, once armed with the knowledge of how the world works, to change and shape it.

The limited perceptions of those whose perspectives are rooted only in the here and now proclaim that free expression via the Internet is subject to abuse.  Indeed every freedom is– but the only way to prevent it is to surrender freedom itself, and that simply won’t do.

For all their failings, the old media have helped meet, if somewhat erratically, the human yearning for the knowledge and understanding that can change the world through engagement with others.  The new media have the potential to multiply that engagement a hundred-fold.  It is from this perspective that any attempt at the suppression of free expression through whatever medium should be resisted.  Free expression is too important a part of the human enterprise to be left to the clueless and the unimaginative, otherwise known as politicians, to curtail.

###