As Europe descends into dark times, it is worth recalling the traditions that once made the continent great.
Guy Standing is FAcSS Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London
In 2025, freedom of speech received a lot of attention, in the UK partly because of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act of 2023, which in amended form came into effect in August, and partly due to the banning of Palestine Action. In the USA, it was mainly due to the contradictory actions and rhetoric of Donald Trump, J.D.Vance and their network, who demanded more free speech for their followers while penalising universities for allowing pro-Palestinian protests and banning access to thousands of books in schools and libraries.
The hypocrisy was taken to extremes in Vance’s strident criticism of Europe at the Munich Security Conference in February, the State Department’s National Security Strategy report of December, which patronisingly criticised Europe for apparently censoring freedom of speech, and then the bizarre expulsion of five Europeans, two for criticising ‘hate speech’.
In the Summer issue of The Author, the magazine of the Society of Authors, a review of issues around freedom of speech claimed that ‘a general right to speak out on matters of public concern only emerged around 1700’, and that free speech’s ‘justification has always been that it advances truth’. The first claim is incorrect; the second may be desirable, but today many public figures deny there is truth while too many abuse the freedom of speech to spread untruths, quite deliberately. To rectify the malaise, we need to go back to wisdom advanced well over 2,000 years ago, by the ancient Athenians.
Start with the malaise. In the four years of his first presidency (2017-21), Trump made over 30,000 false or misleading claims, equivalent to about 20 falsehoods every day. But according to polls during that time, 75% of Republican voters still considered him to be honest. Psychologists call this a triumph of ‘belief-speaking’ over ‘fact-speaking’, in that his supporters believe Trump sincerely believes what he claims.
This chimes with untruths spouted by his spokespeople, such as Kellyanne Conway, who talked of ‘alternative facts’, and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani who insisted in a television interview that ‘truth isn’t truth’. This intensified in 2025, with Trump’s Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, routinely stating untruths and with Elon Musk sitting at a Cabinet meeting wearing a baseball hat on which was written ‘Trump was right about everything’.
Trump, his erstwhile ‘first buddy’ Musk and others also want ‘the freedom to misinform’, weaponised for political ends. This was epitomised by Trump’s demand, backed by a threat of jail if not obeyed, that Mark Zuckerberg drop a fact-checking app on Facebook. The obvious reason was that they wished to use social media to misinform. Zuckerberg rushed to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to express his obedience. Fact checking was stopped.
Disrespect for truth goes with disrespect for scientific and other expertise. This has not just affected the USA. In the UK, the Conservatives’ long-lasting Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, infamously said the public were ‘fed up’ with experts.
This disregard for truth and scientific evidence has coincided with the revival by the political right of what is called ‘soft eugenics’, a belief that civilisation is threatened by allowing the weak and vulnerable to be supported. It is ‘soft’ in that it does not openly propose to kill or expel the vulnerable, merely to make it harder for them to survive. Musk epitomises this, condemning the ethic of empathy, and Boris Johnson came close to it in saying that Covid was nature’s way of culling the aged and infirm, and when he compared society to a box of cornflakes, the clever and strong rising to the top.
The dangers of both widespread lying and eugenics are, or should be, well known. Yet freedom of speech has not prevented their growth. There seems to be a societal retreat of respect for empathy, compassion, and the pursuit of truth.
Why should this be? As elaborated in a new book, part of the answer is a failure of our education system, as it has lurched into being a giant education industry. How is it that vast numbers of people could support habitual liars and those dismissive of empathy? How could millions of formally educated American women vote for a serial liar who had boasted of groping women, had been found to have sexually assaulted women and had disparaged gender equality?
In that context we should reflect on what the ancient Greeks taught us about education. Their perspective was more sophisticated than current discussions of freedom of speech. For them, the objectives of education were to inculcate paideia, the search for truth, and to refine arete, moral excellence. Rather than ‘the authoritarian approach’, whereby an elite of the wise (sophoi) passed on knowledge to students, the Athenians favoured ‘the dialogical approach’, in which truth was advanced through debate. This shaped Plato’s academy, set up outside Athens in 387BC, which survived for 473 years. Its core was the ethedra, a space for freedom of speech and Socratic dialogue.
For freedom of speech to be meaningful, the Athenians realised that the exchange of ideas had to be between equals. This was enshrined in two principles. The first was isogoria, derived from iso (equal) and agora (public space). It meant the equal ability to speak and equal ability to be heard. There may be formal freedom of speech, but if one side has a foghorn, the other a muffler, it is a deceit. As Shakespeare put it, ‘The empty vessel makes the most sound.’ But today the sound of the wise is being muffled. Increasingly, opinion is shaped by brash social media and ubiquitous ‘influencers’. Although the Greeks emphasised the equal freedom to be heard, today’s discussions of freedom of speech neglect it.
The Greeks’ second fundamental principle was parrhesia, the freedom to speak frankly without fear of retribution. Voltaire was to capture a key point in parrhesia when he said, ‘If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticise.’
Loss of parrhesia by European leaders can be illustrated by their feeble reaction to the genocidal atrocities by Israel in Gaza. For instance, the Labour Government, clumsily, has tried to prevent criticism of Israel, notably by proscribing the direct action group Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist group’, although they were not threatening anybody with harm, a ban to placate important donors and supporters.
Peaceful protesters against the ban have been imprisoned for many months while awaiting trial, inducing them to go on hunger strike. The incarceration was contrary to due process and was intended to intimidate so that others did not dare to speak. Yet many accused of serious crimes are routinely let out on bail while awaiting trial.
The Labour Party also blocked 30 critical motions of its support of Israel at its Party Conference in September. This offended the right to be heard. It was also support of a government committing atrocities, aided by British armaments.
Similarly, it is a matter of national shame that the Prime Minister could not criticise Trump for his illegal murderous bombing of Venezuelan and Colombian boats in their national waters and illegally seizing Venezuelan oil tankers. Had the Russians or Chinese done something equivalent, one could confidently expect him to speak up in protest.
Nor did he defend the BBC against Trump’s threat of legal action. A strong leader could have pointed out that the BBC’s splicing of genuine texts was less of a misbehaviour than Trump dubbing past Presidents and opposition politicians ‘criminals’ and ‘Marxist lunatics’ when that was evidently untrue. Most who watched the events in Washington DC on January 6, 2021 were in no doubt that Trump was inciting insurrection and did nothing to stop the attack on the Capital. But Starmer did not dare speak up in defence of the BBC. That reflects loss of parrhesia.
The Athenians understood that for democracy to function well every citizen had to have the ability to hear all points of view and the freedom to express theirs. They understood something that most writers throughout history have understood, that the pursuit of truth, and respect for it, must be based on equal access to all relevant information and knowledge, along with the ability to reason and exercise logic.
This was extended to the concept of schole, roughly translated as leisure, but actually a combination of education and participation in the life of the polis, using time to be an active citizen. This involved a duty to speak and to listen, setting aside time for critical discourse.
Although Athens was not a literary society, in that most could not read or write, it had a literary core. The great tragedies and comedies were seen as teaching people the values of empathy and deliberation. It led to an invention attributed to Pericles. To enable them to be able to exercise freedom of speech and freedom to hear, the poor were paid to enable them to attend performances of the dramas, while charging the rich to do so.
We have come a long way since then. Sadly, the education system has become an education factory, geared to producing ‘human capital’, intent on gaining more money and being more successful in the labour market or as ‘entrepreneurs’. More people believe they do not have the time to focus on creative reading and writing, with a loss of ‘deep reading’. A majority are not being educated to respect paideia or arete, merely to learn what is relevant and needed for material success.
Perhaps the greatest crisis lies in a dystopian paradox. People have nominal freedom of speech, but are afraid to use it. Words said or written now may be legal, but could be used against you for ever afterwards. This encourages self-censorship, if not dishonesty. There is a growing threat to the freedom to think, ‘the forgotten freedom’.
In a speech in March 1922, the great liberal philosopher Bertrand Russell opined, ‘Thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.’ He had personal experience of literary oppression. He had been barred from becoming a Fellow at the University of Cambridge, because he was a Free Thinker (an agnostic or atheist), and had been fired as a lecturer for being a conscientious objector during the First World War.
Today, freedom of thought is endangered more than in 1922, as information technology strengthens the panopticon state. Four decades after George Orwell’s 1984, a prophetic book he wrote in 1948, people fear they are being watched and monitored, constantly, everywhere. Many respond by self-censoring or by halting searches for certain types of knowledge, for fear of giving their views away. This is an invisible way by which AI activates biases rather than strengthens reasoning. It is also an erosion of parrhesia.
Freedom of thought has been divided by the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Ahmed Shaheed, into four issues. They are:
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Mental privacy – people should not be forced to reveal their thoughts.
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Mental immunity – people should not be punished for their thoughts.
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Mental integrity – people should not have their thoughts altered without permission.
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Mental fertility – people should be enabled to possess freedom of thought.
All are jeopardised by AI and the ability of the state and corporations to make use of it. For example, going to a website in order to inform oneself could be construed as supporting that website’s view. Yet dialoguing from positions of ignorance is often necessary to stumble on rationality. It is the essence of education. This is why some believe ‘thought-speech’ should become a protective legal concept. Since AI can identify what we think by our online activity, ‘thoughtcrime’ (Orwell’s brilliant term) could be on the horizon.
Sam Altman, inventor of ChatGPT, has painted a dystopian future of political manipulation: ‘What if an AI reads everything you have ever written online – every tweet, every article, every everything – then right at the exact moment, sends you one message, customised just for you, that really changes how you think about the world?’ He went on, illogically, to say that AI could ‘empower everyone on earth’ and that this would increase the search for high-quality information from trusted people and institutions. But how do we know whom to trust? The education system has failed to develop the capacity to trust or distrust others based on evidence and the information with which we are bombarded.
Freedom of thought is also imperilled by ‘identarian’ politics that has spawned ‘cancel culture’ and what might be called ‘illiberal liberalism’. This stems from a laudable objective, a desire to correct for injustices done to identifiable groups, such as racial minorities, religious minorities, women, LGBTQ+ people, and those with disabilities. It includes a belief that culture has been ‘colonised’ by ‘whites’, especially men.
Thinking along those lines has led to arguing for positive discrimination in college admissions and in hiring decisions for teaching and academic positions, and to clearing libraries of literature deemed offensive. But this is illiberal and paternalistic, presuming students and library users are incapable of making judgements for themselves. The censorship tends to ‘infantilise readers’. Curbing the freedom to think, speak, write or read is no better on the political left than on the right. But under Trump the illiberalism has become toxic.
The real problem is lack of education to reason properly. In an echo of a phase immortalised by Hannah Arendt, ‘the banality of evil’, each step in the evolution of what has become a giant education industry may seem insignificant. But the process has become existentially threatening.
Thus, politicians in Republican-controlled states have banned books from classrooms and libraries as part of an ‘anti-woke’ campaign designed to stifle the expression of views they oppose, denying access to literature that might lead the young to think for themselves. Education has become a vehicle for reproducing an ideology, extending religious evangelism and fanaticism, and repressing freedom of speech.
Most people familiar with English literature believe Shakespeare to be the greatest playwright in English. Yet Americans on the political right claim he is ‘obscene’. Schools in Florida have abridged some of his plays because of their ‘raunchiness’, and only a few American universities still require literature students to take a module on Shakespeare.
In the UK, in a harbinger of a threat to freedom of thought, in 2024 a professor of philosophy at Oxford University was forced to resign because he had made what could be interpreted as an antisemitic remark decades earlier. This was despite the fact that he had denounced the remark and did not believe the implication that he was antisemitic.
Are we not allowed to learn and retreat from mistaken views? What if we have to learn what is socially acceptable before we know what will be acceptable in the future? The new trend is algorithmic profiling, based on correlations and statistical probabilities. Discrimination will soon be based on ‘categorisation’, instead of race, gender, age or amount of schooling. But one form of statistical discrimination is no better than another. This new form is opening up a dystopian future.
In sum, if we are to have real freedom of speech, we must protect the freedom to think, and revive the ancient Greeks’ respect for parrhesia and isogoria
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