"This Is About Living a Good Life"
Here's a transcript of the dialog between Flemming Rose and Steve Simpson in answer to a question about the role of individual rights in the free speech debate:
Questioner: One of my favorite Ayn Rand quotes is that the smallest minority on Earth is the individual, and that those who will not defend individual rights cannot be considered defenders of minorities. I think that’s sometimes interpreted to be about minorities specifically, whereas I think that’s the secondary piece of that, and what it’s really about is individual rights. I think often when we talk about free speech, we talk around individual rights, and I wonder what your thoughts are about individual rights explicitly — I mean, vis-à-vis free speech — addressing individual rights explicitly when it comes to free speech instead of talking around it, what are your thoughts on that?
Flemming Rose: I think — I agree that the most important minority in any society is individual, and it is individual rights that needs protection, not groups. And I think, you know, when it comes to this issue, it is very important because, if you — for instance, take the Muslim community. People who are talking about Muslims as a group and not as individuals, they provide a tool to the oppressors within that group to say, you know, women, gays, atheists, all kinds of people, that they do not have a right to exercise their individual rights within that group, because there are other norms and rules. So the protection of individual rights in this context is also a protection of the right to dissent within a group. And that’s, I mean, that’s crucial for the fight for freedom, and it’s crucial for the kind of process that a lot of Muslim communities have to go through. For instance, Sweden — that is close to where I live in Denmark — there is a ghetto in Rosengård in Malmö. And some years ago, the ministry of immigration in Sweden, they did an investigation on this ghetto area, and there were women living there who said that they felt that they had less individual rights living in Sweden than they enjoyed in Beirut and Lebanon, because there was a religious police who were telling them that they had to cover themselves, that girls and boys were not allowed to use the same playground, and so on and so forth. And that is exactly because you have these communities, and they believe that they have a right to enforce their own standards on everybody without protecting individual rights.
Steve Simpson: Yeah, I agree completely that this is an issue of individual rights — we definitely have to defend it as an issue of individual rights, that’s absolutely crucial. But I would also say that you have to understand that the whole point of individual rights is to protect our right to live and thrive and pursue happiness. So I would echo the words of the Declaration of Independence — this is a positive value proposition. It’s not enough just to say, “I want to be left alone.” I mean, it’s true strictly speaking as legal matter. But if you really want people to get behind this, you’ve got to teach them that this is a value, this is about living a good life, it’s not just about the right to say any damn thing you want, although that is your right. So, yeah, I agree wholeheartedly that rights have to be part of it, but we have to convince people that rights are good.
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The panelists are Steve Simpson, director of Legal Studies at the Ayn Rand Institute and editor of "Defending Free Speech"; Flemming Rose, author of "Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech," and Dave Rubin, creator and host of the Rubin Report. The event, "Free Speech Under Attack," took place at Objectivist Summer Conference 2017 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, June 13, 2017.
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