Hate is the reminder that free speech is good for society only if taken in terms relative to other social interests
Whenever a ruling-party politician announceds a ban on Cord members from from Nakuru, does he know how foolish he sounds in the ears of thinking people? In the first place, doesn’t such a ban allege that the Rift Valley town is devoid of all Cord sympathisers?.
But, secondly – and much more importantly – by slapping such a ban, isn’t the URP official telling us that he has taken over from the provincial administration?. But even an administration official – if he or she is dutiful – would feel constrained to give a solid reason for his action.How can any Kenyan be banned from visiting any part of his/her own country?
Indeed, the constitution is not supposed to know that all our parties are tribal. Thus a party’s can operate in and deploy all its officials to all parts of Kenya.That is why all parties take studious care not to give themselves tribal names. The only saving grace is this freedom to move and operate nationwide.
To rule otherwise is to say that individuals from different ethnic areas cannot think alike; that, therefore, all parties are associations of mutually exclusive of ideas that cannot be embraced across ethnic borders. To rule so is to put paid to all our efforts to convince Kenyans to embrace one another nationwide.
Yet the difference between political parties and the gregariousness of certain species is clear. The one implies free choice: the other is ineluctable. Even among humans – the most self-conscious of all species – absolute individual freedom is as dangerous as absolute collective control.
That is the answer to those who argue that you cannot ban any kind of speech – not even “hate speech” – without flouting the constitutional right to “freedom of speech”. But, aware of the perils of all forms of absolutism, the constitution Constitution immediately tempers down every freedom with at least one a “provided that…” Only the dyed-in-the-wool liberal – an anarchist at heart – can disagree. But it is self-evident, freedom without bounds is anarchy. All licentiousness inexorably degenerates into that Hobbesian “war of all against all” in which “life is nasty, brutish and short”.
But the antithesis is equally dangerous. Absolute control by the collective is tyranny more crushing than Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. The ideal is for every society to strike a fair balance between individual freedom and collective control.., Natural selection builds just such a balance into all individual members of every social species. We call it instinct
Humanity is the only exception.It has dropped almost all instinctive impulses in favour of a kind of intelligence which promotes post-natal learning by individuals. Kenya’s ban on “hate speech” is a good example of a non-instinctive human step to limit certain individual freedoms in order to promote objective collective interests.
Only a liberal can complain whenever a collective curtails the freedoms of individual murderers, , rapists, thieves,, tribalists, sexists, racists, whatnot. Hate is the reminder that free speech is good for society only if taken in terms relative to other social interests.
But nature is a tireless balancer. Every one of its specific gifts is double-edged. It imposes a particularly perilous second edge on social species. Before a species can become social, nature will impose on it a set of elaborate rules which individuals must observe in all their interactions with one another.
Anybody who thinks knows that rule at the opposite of freedom. All our laws aim at limiting the freedoms of individual to do things that can hurt the collective. This is why the belief that freedom is licence to every individual to do whatever he or she likes is so nonsensical. Living together necessarily causes friction between individuals.
To minimise such friction, every social species needs governance. Government is the rod by which the human society bludgeons individuals to behave in a certain manner to maximise the benefits of collective living. Al Shabaab’s activities are a good example of why a society cannot allow free movement in any absolute form.
Individual freedom – whether of movement, speech, association, choice or worship – must be measured against the objective interests of the collective to prevent individuals, while pursuing their freedoms, from stepping on the toes of other individuals as they puruse their own. That is the answer to the Nakuru worthy who slapped a ban on Cord members.
–By PHILIP OCHIENG
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