An Unwieldy Narrative

#50—Does free speech need to be tamed or set free?

Welcome to Mind Flexing, your fortnightly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.

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As dusk fell yesterday, shading the day’s colours in dark greys and blues and pockets of black, I heard the familiar howls of dingoes cry out across the creek and I went outside to listen to them sing. It was a very lively song as our resident kookaburras decided to join in, as did the neighbour’s cows and his dog. This cacophony grew comically loud until one of the dingoes barked—not as a dog barks, but similar, like it was barking in a foreign accent—a bark that concluded the grand symphony like powerful beats on the timpani, causing everything, all at once, to fall silent.

I often look out to those wild hills and take comfort in them. No one ventures there except us and the hunters, and in what might seem odd, but isn’t really, that’s soothing. If the world ever goes to pot, who would ever come for us out in these mountains? with their fresh spring waters, fertile soils and very edible overpopulation of feral deer.

The world is a very noisy place right now. I’d be tempted to say it’s lost the plot, but that metaphor isn’t quite right. I’m not sure the world has ever had a plot that we’re fully conscious of. Rather, it’s a narrative gone wild.

Long gone are the days where an entire country of people watched Hey Hey It’s Saturday on TV, read one of two Sunday newspapers, but never the other, or collectively tuned into Love Song Dedications with radio’s ‘Love God’ Richard Mercer, just in case. The narrative back then was easy to grasp. It was easier to manipulate, but at the same time, in democratic countries at least, more cohesive because it was filtered, for the most part by highly skilled journalists that placed ethics at the core of their work. Perhaps we felt like we had free speech, but in hindsight, it wasn’t. Not really. It was close, it felt like it was working, but it was filtered all the same.

The Narrative Arc

Last week I listened to ‘The Ezra Klein Show’ podcast on The New York Times in which Klein discussed the world’s chaotic narrative with former CIA media analyst Martin Gurri. Gurri said something jarring, a change that we’ve all noticed, but is still as unsettling as a tuna fish left to rot in the fridge.

He said “free speech has become a Right-wing cause”, and he’s right, to some extent. The Far Right has championed the freedom to spew hate speech, safe-guard misogynistic egomaniacs like Andrew Tate, and allow the spread of misinformation; and yet, in the same breath, banned books about diversity and children with freckles or prevented the entire Associated Press from attending news briefings at the White House. Clearly, it’s a farce, but one that has ricocheted into the faces of Moderates and the Left, which it can be argued, kept extreme views suppressed to fashion public unity.

I personally consider hate speech to be abominable, I don’t want to see it trumpeted on public platforms; but if we’re to take a purists view of free speech, any attempt to suppress it or controversial opinion requires others to determine what is and isn’t allowed to be said, which isn’t free at all. Free speech, as far as large societies go, is a myth. What everyone really wants is to control the narrative, and in the digitized world of the 21^st Century, the narrative has gone wild, as if James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom has walked right into a scene from Sharknado, but starring Kim Kardashian, Vladimir Putin and Cristiano Ronaldo’s cousin, then messaged his wife over Truth Social to tell her he won’t be home for dinner because he’s been captured by Communists who were masquerading as dolphins, and it’s absolutely true; you’re hearing it first, from yours truly, right here on Substack. And by the way, have you seen the price of chocolate? No wonder we’re all going mad.

In the internet age, anyone can be the narrator, and humans have never had to deal with such a torrential downpour of information. It’s impossible to keep up with, and yet, learning to live with this unwieldy narrative is crucial to creating stable global societies that can coexist without blowing each other up, better still, societies that actually want to invite each other over for a chardonnay and 1970s-style hors d'oeuvres in the sunken lounge. Gurri believes that our information structure, our narrative, is one of the most determinative structures in any society. “It’s an ecological force,” he says; and while I disagree with him on some ideological points, I do agree with him on that.

So where does that leave us, lost in the wilds of a never-ending story we cannot for the life of us grasp? A story that is everything, everywhere all at once? A story in which, like a pendulum swinging back and forth, opposing forces of the Left and Right, good and bad (or bad and good, depending on your view), swing punches in a tussle to control the narrative? Will we ever find balance?

The other night, after the children finally fell asleep, I made myself a cup of tea and sat down to read on the couch. My husband had started watching the 1984 film Amadeus and a line from it caused me to look up from my words. In it, Mozart pleaded to the King to allow him to stage his opera The Marriage Of Figaro, which the King was staunchly against having disliked the play (he didn’t like the narrative!). Mozart argues in favour of many narratives (and here, the scriptwriters took creative licence, but a brilliant one at that), saying:

"In a play if more than one person speaks at the same time, it's just noise, no one can understand a word. But with opera, with music... with music you can have twenty individuals all talking at the same time, and it's not noise, it's a perfect harmony!"

Perhaps, in time, our many voices will reach such harmony.

And I hear the dingoes howling, and the kookaburras laughing and the cows mooing and the dog barking and remember how it was sparked by a note in the breeze, grew in crescendo, then ceased in a final grand bark to leave the night to settle and lull us into contented dreams.

It may take a while for us to learn how to harmonise our many voices in this unwieldy narrative; Mozart was a genius, after all. But humans are good learners, albeit with a tendency to learn the hard way. Maybe our descendants will remember how to listen to opinions, debate without name calling, and grow weary of arguments of duplicity, maybe they’ll adjust to the digital world, learn to understand the narrative. Maybe they’ll regret the Trump experiment. Or maybe they won’t. And maybe we’ll watch the pendulum swing yet again. Maybe the tussle to control the narrative—this ecological force—is something that has always been inside us, gnawing away, telling us that we must be the authors of our own stories. And who wouldn’t want that?

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Etymology Monday

For those who missed it on Substack Notes, this week’s word is something that’s lost its specificity over time…

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