In the early 20th century, American anthropologist Franz Boas argued that being free just means being fully in harmony with your culture. The Inuit with whom he had done fieldwork saw themselves as incomparably free, even though he saw them as constrained by traditional rules.

But the opposite was also true: they saw his (freely chosen) decision to live among them as a strange cultural compulsion. For Boas, there is no absolute freedom: “We are free in so far as the limitations of our culture do not oppress us; we are unfree when we become conscious of these limitations and are no longer willing to submit to them.”

This idea sheds light on a puzzling aspect of free speech debates. Speech is never truly free: we are limited by grammar, context, politeness, style and genre. Controversies arise not because there are limits to what you can say, but because limits feel wrong. Limitations that follow your own inclinations feel sensible and natural – merely a question of hitting the right tone, avoiding some words in order to be convincing, impressive, civil or reasonable. Even free speech absolutists are polite to their mothers.

Cultures of free speech

This vision of free speech is disturbing, though. As Boas’s contemporary Bronislaw Malinowski pointed out – if freedom is just alignment on your culture, then a fully indoctrinated citizen of a totalitarian state would be entirely free.

But none........

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