Leaders' unfree speech

One aspect of the witch-hunt against Rowan Williams hasn't got the attention it deserves. It shows, as Rick points out, that leaders' effective freedom of speech is seriously curtailed. 
Consider just some of the constraints leaders face:
1. The need to maintain the morale of their supporters. Much of the hostility directed at Williams arose from the belief that he should be standing up for Anglicans, not Muslims.
2. The need to smooth over anxieties. As Rick says, a manager who muses, however wisely, about the possibility of selling off part of his business merely imparts fear into his staff and (I'd add) probably increases time wasted in office politics.
3. A fear of avoiding (sometimes wilful) misinterpretation.
4. A need to create an impression of certainty and decisiveness. When leaders talk about "tough decisions" they do so to show how manly they are to take them. They rarely do so in the more proper sense, of drawing attention to tough trade-offs or to undertain pay-offs and the impossibility of gathering sufficient relevant knowledge.
5. A need to identify with the people. A lot of the flak aimed at Dr Williams have been motivated by his apparent academic intellectualism; he's not "one of us."
6.  The need to win marginal supporters. This means pandering to their prejudice.
These constraints can be tightly binding - as Dr Williams discovered when he ignored them. As I've said, power doesn't so much corrupt the powerful as enslave them.
What's worrying about this, though, is the destructive impact it has upon public discourse. One effect it has is to force politicians to speak in a code that is only accessible to media Kremlinologists; think, for example, of all those Blairite speeches about public sector "reform".
But the worse effect is to constrict the range of public debate. Because leaders can't speak freely, and can't discuss the full range of policy options available to them, many reasonable policies - basic income, land taxation, whatever - become marginalized.
And we're left not just with an impoverished discourse, but with a vacuous  politics.

Comments

[reason]

You are correct. That is why I HATE presendential systems in which this tendency is more pronounced than parliamentary systems. But parliamentary systems are (partly through the press but also partly by public demand) tending to turn into quasi-presidential systems. But I'm an optimist, I think democracy is improvable. We need to keep working on it.

[Matt M]

Surely everyone has similar constraints on their speech though? If I want to keep a friend then I can't tell him outright that his new haircut makes him look like a bit of a tw*t.

[ortega]

OK
Let's not critique public figures oppinions, poor souls, so as they can say what they really think. Otherwise, they won´t have other chance that lying to us and it will be our fault.
But, of course, if we do not criticise them, maybe they won't need to talk at all. They will be able to do whatever they want without giving any reason.
Maybe it is not that we criticise them because they talk but that they talk because they have to answer to us. It does not make them less free. It is part of their job.

[jameshigham]

Party politics is all about this, as Jonathan Swift [the original] noted.

[Peter Risdon]

If you read the Archbishop's recent speeches you'll see a consistent and sustained attack against secular and democratic society, the very thing we all rely on for an open public discourse. He even, a couple of weeks ago, called for the criminalising of "cruel" speech on the part of others - he wasn't thinking of evangelical attacks against homosexuals. A month or two before that, in Singapore, he called for unelected religious figures from every religion to have a part in the legislative process.

He, and not his critics, is a danger to free speech. He's also a threat to the rule of law and the equal treatment of everybody before it. If he had his way, your scope as a blogger would be severely reduced. The laws you lived under would be made in part by unelected people motivated by superstitions you don't accept.

[Tenders]

Fully agree with you. I never thought of this before.

[Spongebob]

Eh? How are the powerful enslaved? Public figures need to pay account to what's out there in the political domain: symbols and meanings, their own actions, the reaction to them by others. That's the deal. It's not dishonest, just politics. I don't recall Shakepeare's Mark Anthony telling the mob that Brutus and Cassius were a pair of murdering bastards.

[william]

Chris, this is nonsense. Nowhere in the right to free speech does it say that such speech comes without consequences. There may always be practical reasons why your freedom of speech is self- limited or situation- limited (there are for example some students I'd like to tell to piss off, but I don't) but so long as there aren't legal barriers to it, it's still free.

And Rowan Williams is, after all, proposing legal limits on free speech: insults directed at his warm and fuzzy lord, because it might be 'hurtful'. So don't bother defending him.

[john b]

I love the way people are claiming Williams is "proposing" that being rude about God should be be made illegal and that unelected clergy should be allowed to sit in the legislature.

Similarly, I've just "invented" a magical four-wheeled contraption for getting people around in, powered by burning petroleum. And I "propose" we bring in laws against murder and shoplifting...

[Peter Risdon]

John B, Williams suggested that Sikh, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and other religious leaders have a role in the legislative process. They don't at the moment.

He suggested that "cruel" and "hurtful" speech be prohibited; it isn't at the moment.

[john b]

But C of E ones do, and hurtful speech against the C of E's god is.

It doesn't make a blind bit of difference whether we have laws against insulting one sky-fairy or six - the only relevant difference is any or none...

[Peter Risdon]

Another relevant difference is the scope of such laws. I'd assume we both agree the CofE should not be favoured in this way.

Chris, I hadn't seen your earlier post on this subject: I withdraw my implied criticism of your argument.

[john b]

"I'd assume we both agree the CofE should not be favoured in this way."

agreed. but it's much more defensible for the bish to be saying "religion ought to be protected" than saying "my religion ought to be protected" - even though I disagree with him, it's at least something that he can claim in good faith.