"A Misuse of Words" - freedom of speech

 

What does it mean to be free in speech? Verbally unrestrained? Saying whatever one wants in whatever way it comes out? Hardly. “The impeded stream is the one that sings,” says Wendell Berry, meaning that without the banks containing and channeling the flow of water, all you would have is a silent, stagnant pool of water. The sound of the stream singing is because the water is forced to move within a restricted space. 

Similarly, “free speech is cultivated speech,” says Northrop Frye. This is so because, if William Zinsser is right that “writing is thinking on paper,” then cultivated speech is the result of cultivated thought - thought that has been trained in clarity and expression through intentional, vigorous exercise. Cultivated thought, and thus cultivated speech, has broken the bonds of thinking and then speaking in clichés and slogans, which are (according to Northrop Frye again) substitutes for actual thought. The truly free thinker and speaker can see the cliché for what it is - a verbal symbol that operates in society as a substitute for any sort of actual thought - and can express himself in language that is surpasses slogans.

I recommend Northrop Frye’s “The Well-Tempered Critic” and “The Educated Imagination” for a more full treatment of this idea. The following is a quote from TWC:

“Except in the nonverbal arts, like mathematics or music, there are no wordless thoughts, nor can any genuine ideas be expressed in undeveloped speech or writing. The undeveloped associative rhythm can only reproduce the associative process: by itself it can never express thought, much less imagination. What it can express, and effectively, is hatred, arrogance, and fear. This makes it a considerable danger at a time when, though some of us are afraid of science, we have so much less to fear from science than from a misuse of words. However uninhibited, it is not free speech, and at a time when most of us feel rather helpless about how much we can do in the world, free speech is the one aspect of a genuine society that we all hold in our hands, or mouths. What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former. If free speech is cultivated speech, we should think of free speech, not merely as an uninhibited reaction to the social order, a release of the querulous ego, but as the verbal response to human situations, a response which establishes a context of freedom. The subliterary associative response is antisocial; the cliche or accepted idea response is a symptom of social stagnation; the free response, when verbal, is one participating in the lucidity of prose and the energy of verse.”