Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Entwicklung und Humanitäre Hilfe
Outside view (EN)
The ability to speak out is a treasure – a pillar of democracy. The old Greeks had a word for it, parrhesia, and they felt like slaves when they were deprived of it. Parrhesia is under threat. But particularly at this time humanitarian actors and we all need to abide by this moral imperative.
Outside view by Harry Eyres
In his inaugural address at the University of St Andrews in 1867, the philosopher John Stuart Mill ruled out the option, for a moral individual, of forming no opinion and taking no side. “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” It’s interesting that Mill writes “do nothing” rather than “say nothing”; he is no doubt correct that actions speak louder than words. But speaking, or not speaking, also constitute a kind of action. Right action needs to be accompanied by and articulated in right speaking, which gives the reasons for it. All of this implies that being outspoken, in certain situations, is a moral imperative.
That certainly was the view of many ancient Greek thinkers and writers. The Greeks had a special word for outspokenness: parrhesia. Meaning literally to speak everything, parrhesia has a rich and fascinating history in Greek thought, politics and literature. Parrhesia was a central feature of Athenian democracy, defined, according to Michel Foucault, as a constitution (politeia) in which people enjoyed demokratia, isegoria (the equal right of speech), isonomia (the equal participation of all citizens in the exercise of power), and parrhesia. A democracy without parrhesia would not be a democracy at all. And parrhesia occurs both when individuals speak to each other privately and when citizens address the democratic assembly.
The word parrhesia occurs for the first time in Greek literature in the plays of Euripides. There’s a striking exchange in his play The Phoenician Women in which Polyneices, returning to Thebes from exile, speaks to his mother Jocasta about the travails of an exile’s life:
JOCASTA: … What chiefly galls an exile’s heart?POLYNEICES: The worst is this: right of free speech does not exist.JOCASTA: That’s a slave’s life — to be forbidden to speak one’s mind.
This points to the centrality of parrhesia in the conception of a free life in ancient Athens. And it may remind us of the opening of an even more famous Greek tragedy, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, where the watchman alludes to the secret which cannot be spoken: “a great ox stands on my tongue”. The whole atmosphere in the house of Atreus, as the family and community await the return of King Agamemnon, more in dread than anticipation, is poisoned by the fact that it’s impossible to speak out.
And just one more ancient Greek reference, before we get back to the present. The classic exponent of parrhesia in ancient Athens was Socrates, who went around the city asking the most awkward questions, acting, as he himself said, like a gadfly on the flank of a noble but rather dull horse. His role was “to sting people and to whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth.” As we know, this would ultimately cost him his life.
As I write, not just the humanitarian community but the wider progressive community is reeling from a series of brutal and destabilising decisions and actions by Donald Trump’s US administration. From the promises of mass deportations of migrants to the ambush of President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office to the cutting of 80% of USAID programmes (lamentably echoed by Keir Starmer’s decision to cut the UK overseas aid budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of GDP) these actions seem to represent the overturning of a whole post-war order, set of values and security architecture, the abandoning, with extreme prejudice, of what were thought to be enduring alliances and commitments, the sudden alignment of the USA, one-time guarantor of the rules-based order, with strongman, might-is-right brutality. More generally, not just in US, they represent the rise of the populist right, which among other things sanctions a gleeful disavowal of obligations to others.
There is surely much to be outspoken about here, but generally the reaction from opinion leaders and the wider community has been muted. There has been a reluctance to use parrhesia. No doubt many people, especially in Trump’s America, are afraid to speak out for fear of losing their job, if not, for the moment at least, their freedom or their life. The Greeks made plain that exercising parrhesia always carries some risk. What is at stake, however, in their stark terms, is the choice between a free moral life and a secure existence without honour.
It’s particularly incumbent on artists, writers and thinkers to speak out, in times when fears and insecurities are being weaponised and directed against the vulnerable by unscrupulous or disingenuous politicians, for ulterior motives. Parrhesia may be a central right of all free citizens, but for artists, writers and thinkers it is their “job”. Artists, said Ezra Pound, are the antennae of the race. That implies a special kind of sensitivity, being alert to the first faint signs of what may become a terrible “normality.” Posterity (if we still believe in such a thing) will not look kindly on the thinkers, writers and artists who dulled or betrayed their own sensitivity and did not speak out. We honour the writers and artists of the 1930s who warned of the rise of Fascism.
Of course artists have their own ways of using parrhesia, which will be different from those used by journalists, humanitarian spokespeople and others. Artists work with metaphor and images, often indirectly, but no less powerfully for that. As fascism closed in on Spain in the 1930s, Lorca expressed his horror of bleak authoritarian repression in a play ostensibly about a tyrannical matriarch, ruining the lives of her daughters – The House of Bernarda Alba.
Others will need to speak more directly. I was lucky enough to know the former Irish Attorney-General and head of the WTO, Peter Sutherland, in his last years when he was UN Special Representative on Migration. He argued eloquently and passionately for a humane and holistic approach to migration, stressing the benefits as well as the challenges, and never forgetting the humanity and vulnerability of the migrant. He chastised those governments, including that of the UK, which failed to address the problem honestly, making it either taboo or worse, a badge of political “toughness”. “The scale of migration should be a matter of enlightened public debate”, he wrote, “one that balances economic, humanitarian, and social considerations. Politicians who have the courage to lead such a conversation in a constructive manner might be surprised by the public’s response.” Or when good people fail to speak out, to adapt Mill’s words, ill-intentioned people will take control of the narrative.
One of the frightening things is how quickly the narrative tends to shift, or how quickly the unthinkable becomes thinkable. How quickly, for example, the narrative about the Palestinians shifted from discussion of a two-state solution, and the right of return, to overt calls, from sections of the Israeli right, backed it seems (at least sometimes) by President Trump, for ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. All of us who value our own freedom should have the courage to speak out about such projected or actually occurring atrocities, while we still can.
Harry Eyres is a journalist, poet, passionate European, hispanophile, birdwatcher, tennis nut, amateur pianist. Author of The Beginner’s Guide to Plato’s The Republic, Horace and Me, Seeing Our Planet Whole: A Cultural and Ethical View of Earth Observation, contributor to „New Statesman“ and „The World of Fine Wine“. For more than 11 years he wrote the „Financial Times“ SLOW LANE column. In the turbulences of today his blog harryeyres.wordpress.com (X: @sloweyres) offers the reader an opportunity to take a step back and open him/herself to new insights.
Inspired by Tom Fletcher’s statement of commitment to the humanitarian community when he resumed his position as Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator (OCHA) in November 2024, this channel provides expert views and impulses that highlight the current importance of listening, efficiency, outspokenness, and innovation in humanitarian assistance.
