Introduction

In the last few years, researchers in several disciplines have become increasingly interested in the topic of free thought, its status as a human right, and its prospects of survival. Notable among the literature is Susie Alegre’s Freedom to Think: Protecting a Fundamental Human Right in the Digital Age, published in 2022. This was followed in 2023 by The Battle for Thought: Freethinking in the 21st Century, by Simon McCarthy-Jones – who has also given an interview to the Freethinker, to be published shortly.

Susie Alegre is an international human rights lawyer, author and deputy High Court judge. During her career she has worked in many challenging areas of human rights law, including counter-terrorism and extradition, anti-corruption measures in Uganda, and surveillance technology. Her latest book, Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI, will be published on 2 May.

I met Alegre at the café at the back of the British Film Institute, on London’s South Bank. In the interview below, we discuss how she became interested in freedom of thought and why it matters, as well as its legal definition and relationship to freedom of expression. We also examine the problems which modern technology poses to our ability as individuals to resist manipulation, in a digital world which is designed to do just that.

~ Emma Park, Editor

The Freethinker: How did you come to your recent interest in digital technology and human rights?

Susie Alegre: After studying French and Philosophy at university, I came to the law in my late twenties. I spent two years living in Spain, where I first started working on conflict resolution issues in the Basque country. That was my first introduction to human rights law in practice, and showed me how the law can change society, and be used to protect people. After that, I came back to the UK and did my training as a barrister in the European Commission, and also briefly in the Council of Europe, which is where the European Court of Human Rights is, before coming back to practise in crime and extradition. One of the reasons I was attracted to crime was that it is the sharp end of the law, where the decisions being made affect people dramatically.

When I qualified in 1997, the Human Rights Act had not yet been passed, so going into practice as a ‘human rights lawyer’ as such was not a practical option. You could be interested in human rights, but when you were standing up in the Crown Court, you could not cite human rights to your average judge. I pivoted after a couple of years into policy, because policy was where you could really work with human rights law to change the ways our laws apply. By then, the Human Rights Act (1998) was up and running. I went to work for Justice, a UK-based human rights and rule of law organisation, on the Extradition Act 2003. I then worked for Amnesty International and other international organisations, including the UN and EU, and briefly as an ombudsman for the Financial Ombudsman Service.

I had come to work increasingly on issues related to technology, including the development of surveillance technology and the use of technology at international borders. But even though I worked on data protection, I had not really understood its fundamental importance until I first learnt about the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2017.

When I read about how data had been used to profile people, to understand their personalities, and to use that information to target them through social media, in order to change the way they thought or the way they behaved, it struck me that this was not a data protection question – or only in so far as data protection is a gateway to getting inside our minds. That set me off on a one-woman exploration of freedom of thought, as it was back in 2017. It also chimed with my earlier study of philosophy. When I started talking to people about freedom of thought, many were interested in it from a philosophical perspective, but there was almost nothing legal that you could find about it, despite its being included in the Human Rights Act.

Freethinker: Has a lot been written about freedom of thought since 2017 from a legal perspective?

Alegre: Yes. It has become a burgeoning area of interest among academics, including philosophers, psychologists and lawyers, who try to understand how the right can be made real and effective, but also to ask what it should mean, and what its limitations should be in practice. The right to freedom of thought has also appeared in international law instruments. The first example of it in international jurisprudence, I believe, was with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, who wrote a ‘general comment on children’s rights in the digital environment’ in 2021, which talks about children’s right to freedom of thought and how that could be affected by their engagement with technology and the use of algorithms in profiling.

Freethinker: Does Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (on ‘freedom of thought, conscience and religion’) cover freedom of thought in your sense?

Alegre: Yes. The two relevant articles are Article 9 and Article 10 (which covers freedom of opinion and freedom of expression). There has been much academic discussion about the difference between freedom of thought and freedom of opinion or belief. The answer is completely unclear – there is not really any case law. You could argue that it is an academic question; that, ultimately, ‘opinion’ is a slightly more developed or more coherent thought, whereas ‘thought’ is pretty much anything that might be happening in your inner life. The UN Human Rights Committee has said that this inner aspect of thought or belief is protected absolutely in international law.

Freethinker: Whereas as far as freedom of expression goes, there are limitations.

Alegre: Exactly. What you can say or how you manifest your opinions or beliefs can be limited. But in the American Convention on Human Rights, which has been ratified by many Latin American countries (but not the US or Canada), ‘freedom of thought and expression’ are included together in Article 13, while ‘freedom of conscience and religion’ are covered by Article 12. Thus the question whether thought is distinct from opinion is a bit academic.

Freethinker: In your book you mention various historic texts, including John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), which is also a foundational text for the secularist, humanist and freethinking tradition in Britain. Do you think that On Liberty is still important for freedom of thought today?

Alegre: Yes. It is a key milestone in the development of thinking about freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Mill perceived that our freedom of thought can be curtailed by the pressures of society, in some cases more so than by draconian laws. Many European countries have much stronger legal restrictions on freedom of speech than we have in the UK. But even back then, Mill argued that Victorian prudery cast a much deeper pall over freedom of thought than, say, the official laws against criticising the government in France.

Freethinker: Would you agree that George Orwell is another important figure in this tradition?

Alegre: Yes, from a twentieth-century perspective, in terms of literature, George Orwell’s 1984 is important, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Those two books together illustrate different aspects of thought control. Whereas Orwell is concerned with authoritarian state control, Huxley is talking about control through pointless pleasure. Both have relevance for us in the twenty-first century. There is also Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (1956), where inferences are made about people’s thoughts and used to prevent them acting, and The Hood Maker (1955), a short story of his about the importance of being able to effectively put a ring fence around your mind in order to prevent people from reading your thoughts. Ironically, these dystopian twentieth-century works of fiction have almost acted as a template for the ways that technology has been developed and used since then, rather than as a cautionary tale.

Freethinker: Speaking as a lawyer, how would you define freedom of thought and the right to freedom of thought?

Alegre: Freedom of thought has two aspects. The inner aspect, the forum internum, is protected absolutely: you can think whatever you like inside your head. The outer aspect is whether you are manifesting a religion or belief or expressing yourself effectively: expression is the outer aspect of freedom of thought and opinion. The ‘inner’ aspect is a lovely philosophical idea. But in the law, you need to know what exactly it means, how you protect it, and what you need to guarantee it.

The three key elements for the protection of freedom of thought identified by legal academics are: (i) the right to keep our thoughts private; (ii) the right not to have our thoughts manipulated; and (iii) the right not to be penalised for our thoughts alone. That first aspect connects to the other two, because if people know what you are thinking or think they do, they can manipulate you more easily, and take action to penalise you on that basis.

The drafters of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights recognised that inferences about what you are thinking can be as vital to freedom of thought as actually knowing your thoughts. I talk in the book about historical witch trials. If you are sitting in a Scottish village in the seventeenth century, and the Witchfinder General turns up and makes an inference about your being a witch based on the wart on your nose and the fact that you have a black cat, you are probably going to get burned at the stake, because the authorities are making inferences about you based on your personal data, regardless of whether you ever had a witchy thought or did anything that might ever be described as witchcraft in your life.

Similarly, today, our data is being sifted and analysed by companies so as to make inferences about how we think, what kind of people we are, what our interests are, and how we might be manipulated – or indeed, how we might be penalised. In financial services, your data is used to analyse whether you are a risky kind of a person, without necessarily providing any direct evidence to suggest that you are risky.

Freethinker: How far can freedom of thought and freedom of expression be separated?

Alegre: That is an important point. You cannot be penalised for your thoughts alone. It is what you do that matters, in legal terms. Freedom of thought gives you the space to reflect and decide not to do something stupid, illegal or dangerous. That is why, from a legal perspective, it is important that you are judged on what you do or say, not on what people think you might think or believe.

Freethinker: Is it possible to have freedom of thought without a very large degree of freedom of expression, which enables people to exchange ideas, disagree, change their minds?

Alegre: No. That is why the distinction between Articles 9 and 10 is academic. It is artificial. Article 10 includes freedom of opinion, expression and  information. Those three operate together. While you might be able to limit access to information, for example, in the interests of national security, you need a degree of reliable information in order to have freedom of thought. If you cannot access reliable information, then you cannot think freely. That goes back to the manipulation question: whether you are being starved of information or being given a warped version of information that is effectively manipulating your thoughts and not allowing you to think freely.

Freedom of thought also allows you to decide whether it is safe to say what you really think, to whom it is safe to say it, how it is safe to say it, and in what circumstances.

Freethinker: What do you see as the main challenges to freedom of thought today?

Alegre: The reason why there has been a huge development in data protection law and privacy law in the last twenty years is because our data is being used in ways and on a scale that it never was before. Technological innovation is increasingly gathering our data in order to understand who we are, to make inferences about how we are thinking and feeling, and to use that information to change us. They are selling a service that provides insights into our forum internum in order to manipulate it, and so change how we behave. Therefore, freedom from manipulation is crucial, because manipulation can make you do things that you would not have done otherwise.

Freethinker: I suppose that advertising, propaganda, marketing and campaigning are all ways of manipulating your mind. Every organisation of any size these days has a public relations team or press office. Do we ever receive any information that is not manipulated in some way?

Alegre: Well, it is all designed to affect our behaviour. The question is where it crosses the line between legitimate influence and unlawful manipulation.

Freethinker: Where would you draw that line?

Alegre: It depends on the context – it is always fact-specific. It would be a trap to think that there is some magical line that applies in every circumstance.

Advertising today is very different from that of the last century. Advertising online is based on data about our individual personality, our interests, and on real-time data about how we are feeling. That means that adverts can be tailored and targeted to hit us as individuals in particular emotional states. That is very different from walking past a billboard that is designed to persuade a certain demographic – it is about advertising that is using insight into our forum internum to actually change it.

This approach is similar in a way to subliminal advertising, which is banned in Europe, even though it has not been proved that it works. Clearly, in Europe, they recognise the dangers of manipulation. Having come out of the Second World War and the Nazi propaganda machine, they recognised that this technique could not be acceptable.

Freethinker: Is there a question of consent here? Take advertising on social media. We might tick a box saying we agree to their harvesting our data, but we do not really know what this involves.

Alegre: I do not think that people are consenting in such cases, because nobody really understands what the consequences are. I have written a book about it, but I do not really know where my data is going or how it is being used, either in online advertising or elsewhere. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties issued a report last year, showing that personal data, including location data from US and European judges, the military and politicians, were being sold on the open market to China and Russia. What happens to your data once it has been harvested is unclear, but it is certainly open to exploitation – and not only commercial exploitation.

Freethinker: Given that the internet is now an intrinsic part of our lives, and an enormous amount of data about us is online, what can we do to this to stop this leakage of information?

Alegre: As individuals, it is very hard. You can stop what you post, but recent research shows that just by the passive use of your smartphone, anyone getting hold of it can run analytics to get a profile of what kind of person you are, how you are feeling, what your interests are. All of that information is easily accessible, so you cannot switch it off – unless you go completely cold turkey offline, but frankly, that probably puts you in a particular profile in itself.

Freethinker: Isn’t the reality that most of us can no longer afford to live offline?

Alegre:  Yes – even to get a doctor’s appointment, or access your bank, it is very difficult to operate offline now. That does not mean we should despair. There are things you can do to limit your data trails, like using privacy friendly search engines such as DuckDuckGo. You can avoid having your phone with you all the time – if you are at home, you can switch it off. You can limit how much information is going in. But it will not change the fundamental problem.

However, there are ways that law can change the fundamental problem. There have been cases in Europe that challenge the legality of the whole online advertising business model. The European Data Protection Board found that Meta’s model was unlawful under existing European GDPR laws. The question then is, how do you enforce these laws against powerful tech companies?

Freethinker: Another thing you discuss in your book is technological developments which allow people’s emotions to be monitored through cameras and other devices – for example, the monitoring of children’s emotions in a classroom. How far advanced is that technology, and how much of a threat does it pose to freedom of thought?

Alegre: It is a huge threat. It is called emotion recognition technology, and it is being used in lots of different areas. There are companies in Spain that sell emotion recognition technology for shops. It could also be used in education and in the workplace. It is probably illegal once you apply the Human Rights Act to existing legislation. It needs to be banned because it is a clear use of technology to try to read people’s minds, which violates their ability to keep their thoughts private. Emotion recognition technology in education and the workplace is now prohibited under the EU’s new AI Act.

Freethinker: How effective is the technology at the moment?

Alegre: It is difficult to know how effective it is. It reminds me of Orwell’s ‘telescreen’ in 1984. In that kind of environment, you would learn to keep a bland, contented look on your face regardless of what you were thinking. It would have a chilling effect on what you would want to think, because you would be afraid that your thoughts could be read.

Freethinker: In the literature of the twentieth century, we often see the metaphor of individuals as cogs in a great machine. Today, it seems as though companies which harvest our data view us as little more than collections of data of greater or lesser commercial value. Is this not an inhuman and inhumane way of looking at people? And is social media designed to slot people into these different data sets?

Alegre: Yes. The idea of profiling is to be able to target you with rubbish that will keep you online so that you are easier to sell stuff to, which is why it is so hard to put your phone down. It is not you, it is the design of the phone. The design of social media is there to maximise your data and attention hours.

Coming back to freedom of expression, for me, the question raised by social media is not the content of what is said, it is the manner in which it is distributed. When data on you identifies whether or not you are someone who is susceptible to conspiracy theories, then if you are susceptible, you will be served up more conspiracy theories. It does not matter if the guy in the pub thinks the earth is flat and whispers about it in the corner; but if people are being monetised as vulnerable to specific messages, then the way those messages are delivered to them and the volume of those messages will affect their freedom of thought.

In my view, the arguments about freedom of expression are mostly red herrings. The problem is the use of data and the algorithms which push people in certain directions. The people who are interested in shouting loudly and being controversial are then driven to become even more extreme, because doing so allows them to harness those algorithms.

Freethinker: Would you also say that there is danger in the fact that, say, Google or Twitter can themselves censor things that they do not want to be published?

Alegre: Yes. It is about this kind of complete control. There is corporate capture of our information environment – there is no question about that. If you look at it from the freedom of thought perspective, you do not have to get bogged down in whose thoughts are right. It is more about the system and the ability to use our data to get inside individuals’ minds, capture our attention and monetise it.

Freethinker: Artificial intelligence has made rapid strides in recent years. What dangers does it pose to freedom of thought?

Alegre: AI poses lots of dangers. Firstly, AI is already seriously polluting the information environment because it is unreliable – it makes stuff up. It is everywhere on the internet – it is almost as if the internet is eating itself. The use of generative AI for writing, drawing and other types of creation risks curtailing our ability to think for ourselves. There is research about predictive text and how that limits your vocabulary or how you express yourself, because users become lazy.

There is a real danger that if people rely on these kind of tools, we will literally forget how to think for ourselves. That will have consequences not only for our vulnerability to manipulation, but also our sheer ability to survive. What happens if the lights go out and we cannot work anything out? For instance, there is increasing evidence that using GPS leads to reduced spatial awareness and even changes the shape of your brain. If you extrapolate from GPS and imagine what would happen if all of our critical thinking faculties were run using prompts, I think that is a huge danger.

Freethinker: Is there something to be said for detox periods in which you could just switch everything off?

Alegre: Honestly, I’m desperate to do that. It is something that we can learn. I use an app called Freedom, which allows me to effectively switch my phone off for periods of time, so that I can still get texts or receive calls, but everything else is off. When I have to concentrate, I use this app, because otherwise I cannot stop myself reaching for my phone – because that is what it is designed for. But once you click on the app and block everything, then your automatic reflex to reach for your phone gradually goes away, especially if you do it over long periods of time.

Freethinker: So perhaps we just need to change our habits and relearn the idea that being immediately contactable at all times is not absolutely necessary?

Alegre: Exactly.

Freethinker: Speaking as an author and lawyer, do you think it is possible to have a successful career without having a social media presence?

Alegre: I deleted my Twitter account last October. I am still on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. The ideal would be to get to a point where you can function without social media, or outsource that side of marketing. But I think we might be seeing the final days of that kind of social media presence, because what it does is to blur the lines between the personal and professional. If you want to have a great social media presence, you have to be personal.

Then you see people landing up in court because of rubbish they posted on Twitter, thinking that it would have no consequences. Actually, expressing yourself on social media can have serious consequences. But social media makes you feel that you have to be constantly commenting and expressing yourself, even in ways which are ultimately not safe. It blurs the line between the freedom to keep your thoughts private and the right to express yourself freely.  Social media accounts are looked at in all sorts of ways. For example, I went to the US in September, and when you file your visa waiver, you have to give them all your social media accounts. Which they presumably run through an algorithm to see if you are the right kind of person to allow into the country.

Freethinker: Should employers and governments should be allowed to access your social media accounts?

Alegre: Not really. But people should be a bit more sensible about the fact that, if you are publishing stuff to the world, you really are publishing stuff to the world. We should be able to complain about authorities making decisions based on things we said on social media. But it ultimately depends on what was said and the whole context. People need to understand that expression has consequences.

Freethinker: Do you think that, in English law, there is a balance to be struck between freedom of expression and other considerations?

Alegre: Historically, in England and Wales, freedom of expression has been given a wider berth than perhaps it has in other countries. The US is on another level beyond the UK. But in Europe in particular, such as Spain, France or Germany, they are much readier to put legal restrictions on speech.

Freethinker: Historically, Britain was often considered a country of liberty. Was that a good tradition, do you think? And where are we now?

Alegre: It is very difficult to answer that. What we are perhaps going through now is a rebalancing act between freedom of expression and other rights, in particular, the right to a private life. Freedom of expression does not mean you can say anything, anywhere to anyone without consequences.

Freethinker: Finally, how can we as a society strengthen our right to freedom of thought and resist the threats that it faces on all sides?

Alegre: By questioning how we gather information, how we choose the information we get, and how information is gathered about us. In the online environment, we have lost the ability to choose. We are given the impression that we have access to an infinite amount of information – but in fact, we are individually being fed curated information. That is not the same as going into a bookshop and browsing; instead, we are being fed curated selections that will keep us online. Demanding a stop to being force-fed information through recommender algorithms based on ideas about us as individuals is the way that we can reboot.

The post ‘Nobody really understands what the consequences are’: Susie Alegre on how digital technology undermines free thought appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘Would you be an atheist without the Internet?’

This was a question asked by Hemant Mehta in a 2009 post on his Friendly Atheist blog. His own answer was, ‘I don’t think I would be… when the doubt about my religion started to creep into my mind, I found my answers late at night online. It was those crude websites and email newsletters which helped me answer my questions and formed new ones.’

Others shared their reflections in the comments. One wrote, ‘I think I would have become an atheist eventually with or without the Internet, but it certainly hastened the process. I’d certainly be a less happy atheist, at any rate.’

In general, some agreed they would never have become atheists without the internet, and others said that while they would probably still be atheists, it would have been slower and more difficult without the internet, and they would have been far less engaged in the atheist community.

We live now in probably the least religious time in human history. And the internet no doubt has played an important role in this transformation, by providing a means for non-religious people to discover new arguments and to connect with others with a similar viewpoint.

With this in mind, in this article I want to think about the history of atheism with reference to three media revolutions: the invention of the printing press in the mid 1400s, the development of steam printing in the nineteenth century, and the arrival of the internet at the end of the twentieth century.

Each of these revolutions gradually allowed for the ever greater exchange of ideas and new possibilities for community. And each was accompanied by a rise in unbelief.

The Printing Press

Before the introduction of the printing press, there were doubters and sceptics among the masses, but their ideas almost always remained confined to them. There existed little way beyond word-of-mouth to spread one’s ideas – not to mention the danger of doing so.

In the medieval period, books were produced in scriptoria, where monks laboriously copied out texts by hand. China had already invented woodblock printing centuries before Europe, and Korea even had moveable-type printing at this time, yet Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of a movable-type printing press in Germany around 1440 sparked the printing revolution in Europe. By the 1500s, print shops had opened in every major European city and would replace time-consuming methods of copying texts by hand.

Books could now be produced far more efficiently, while avoiding problems of inaccuracies that cropped up in the course of the scribing process. Trade networks soon developed across Europe to allow books to be relatively easily bought and sold. This allowed knowledge to spread as it never had before.

The printing press was a boon to those who challenged the established religion. Martin Luther, whose gripes with the Catholic Church kicked off the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century, relied on the printing press to spread his message. Luther’s famous 95 Theses, detailing the Catholic Church’s failings, were originally written in Latin, but they were quickly translated into German and other vernacular languages, and then printed for mass distribution. What was more, Luther and other Protestant propagandists printed cartoons to present simple arguments to those who could not read.

The Reformers wanted people to read the Bible for themselves. New editions were now commissioned and printed in the vernacular languages. Printed versions were not completely free from mistakes: the so-called Wicked Bible of 1631 accidentally omitted a crucial ‘not,’ leaving a verse to command, ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ More importantly, the printing revolution meant people could now read the Bible for themselves, in their own language, and draw their own conclusions. Furthermore, competing translations allowed linguistically sophisticated scholars to compare and contrast Bible texts and their shifting meanings.

The Reformation created a centuries-long conflict between Protestants and Catholics. With each side hammering away at the other’s arguments, this created a fertile soil for people to wonder if both sides were wrong.

As Elizabeth Eisenstein notes, since book printers cared most of all about earning money, this encouraged them to print controversial books. In Protestant areas, works that appeared on the Catholic List of Prohibited Books were of special interest to readers, in a kind of early modern ‘Streisand effect.’ The printers knew that printing these heterodox books would result in an audience eager to purchase – and they were the ones responsible for printing works that have become significant in the history of freethought, by authors such as Giordano Bruno, Machiavelli, and Rabelais.

Ancient and medieval sources were now more accessible, as were newer works. Students no longer were beholden to their professors for learning, but could access books directly. Dictionaries, atlases, and medical and scientific texts likewise made knowledge more accessible than ever, as did the development of weekly and monthly newspapers.

The impact of printing on the spread of actual atheism was not immediately apparent: it took time, even centuries, for the first atheists to emerge from the shadows. But it is nonetheless telling that the modern term ‘atheist’, which derives from ancient Greek, appeared first in Latin and other vernacular languages, including English, in the 1500s. Refutations and condemnations of atheism appeared in theological works, even if atheists themselves could not yet give voice to their views.

At a time when openly stated unbelief was punished with death, it made sense that few dared to express their views in print, even in letters. Those who did tended to meet a sticky end, and their published works usually went with them.

One who did publish was Geoffroy Vallée, a French nobleman who authored a pamphlet in 1573 called La Béatitude des Chrétiens, ou le Fléau de la Foy (The Beatitude of the Christians, or the Scourge of Faith). The short work rejected revelation and miracles, although it did allow for the possibility of a divine creator. Vallée had the work printed and tried his best to spread it, even sending copies out of France.

Under interrogation by civil authorities, Vallée tried everything he could, from denying to justifying to begging forgiveness, but was still hanged and his body burnt, along with almost all copies of his work – save one. When questioned, Vallée did not reveal where he got his ideas, but he claimed to have read somewhere – he would not say where – that Moses was but a magician. This seems to indicate that other heretical works might also have been circulating, even if no trace of them remains.

Similar stories to Vallée’s can also be told. In the second half of the seventeenth century, however, sceptical arguments were beginning to be found in works by those like Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes, and in the anonymously-written Theophrastus Redivivus. This book collected arguments from ancient Greece and Rome, as well as from contemporaries reputed to be sceptics and atheists, like Machiavelli, Vanini, Pomponazzi, and Montaigne. Even if some authors did not explicitly make atheist arguments, if they were taken together, their ideas could be reassembled to make strong statements of unbelief that questioned the truth of the Bible, the nature of the soul, the creation of the universe, and even God himself.

Aside from these explicitly anti-religious works, Christians themselves might, paradoxically,  have helped to sow the seeds of atheist arguments. One theologian would devise a compelling ways to prove God’s existence, and then another would then come up with the strongest arguments against his opponent’s proofs – ‘steelmanning’ them – in order to construct better arguments for God’s existence. But this paradoxically gave ammunition to those, like the secretly atheist Catholic priest Jean Meslier, who drew upon these very same arguments to make the case against God in the early eighteenth century.

Steam Printing

In the Enlightenment, the criticism of religion flourished among the wealthy and educated. The undercurrent of doubt that ran through the previous centuries found fuller expression in salons like that of Baron d’Holbach in Paris, where, for the first time, atheists could discuss their ideas aloud, even if they still had to be cautious.

But these ideas remained confined mostly to the educated few, and there was little effort to spread these ideas to the masses.

Moreover, books were still prohibitively expensive. Even wealthy people needed to be discerning about which books to buy, given the cost of purchasing one. For working people in the early nineteenth century, the cost of a book might equate to several days’, or even weeks’, wages.

The invention of steam printing, however, is the second milestone in the story. Steam printing allowed books and newspapers to be printed much more cheaply and quickly than with manually operated presses. Whereas the hand-operated printing press could produce about 200 sheets per hour, the mechanised, steam-powered versions could produce 1,000 per hour early in the century – and by the 1870s, over 20,000 per hour.

The first steam-printing machine was used early in the nineteenth century, but the process was slow to be adopted by publishers, who clung to the old-fashioned methods. By the middle of the century, however, steam printing had become dominant. Between 1800 and 1850, the production of books per year had doubled, while the price halved.

Other new technologies further hastened the spread of knowledge. Railway lines criss-crossed Europe; circulating libraries and public reading rooms sprouted up; and electric telegraphy meant news could be transmitted across long distances almost instantly.

The nineteenth century also saw a new focus on education for the masses, and literacy rates rose accordingly. 69.3% of men and 54.8% of women in Britain were literate in 1851; by 1900, these numbers had jumped to 97.2% and 96.8% respectively.

The political context was changing too. The French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century ended in bloodshed and the rise of a new autocrat, but it also demonstrated the power that the people could have to overthrow old political and religious hierarchies.

Even before the advent of steam printing, societies at the end of the eighteenth century sought to spread news to the masses about the French Revolution. In this milieu, political and religious radicalism went hand-in-hand. The London Corresponding Society began reprinting cheap editions of various freethought works, including by Thomas Paine, in the 1790s, before the British government, fearing the spread of revolutionary fervour from France, halted their activities.

Enterprising radical printers, like Richard Carlile, continued this mission in the early nineteenth century. In addition to his own radical newspaper, Carlile reprinted cheap editions of Paine’s works like The Age of Reason and The Rights of Man, as well as other freethought classics such as Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature. When Carlile and his wife and sister were imprisoned for blasphemy, his work was carried on by Susannah Wright, who kept his bookshop open, although she too would land in prison for selling radical books.

The impact of each book sold was multiplied as the book inevitably changed hands. As Carlile himself explained: ‘Just calculate how many persons may read one copy of Age of Reason, if it be taken care of. I know several persons, who have kept copies, which they purchased of me in 1819, in constant use, in the way of lending them up to this time, and instances where a single copy has gone through fifty families, all approving as they read. This is the way to calculate the power of the Printing Press. … From December 1818, to December 1822 nearly twenty thousand copies will have gone into circulation.’

Soon afterwards, societies dedicated to Carlile and Paine’s radical religious and politics ideas sprang up across Britain. These radical groups often worked hand-in-hand with mechanics’ institutes, which had been founded in the late eighteenth century to encourage the education of working-class people.

Yet censorship and prosecution reigned, and those atheists who dared speak up faced time in prison for blasphemy or ‘obscenity’ – or at least the threat of such a punishment. (Though at least they survived with their lives; the last person executed in Britain for blasphemy was Thomas Aikenhead in 1697.)

Practical barriers existed as well that prevented the flow of free arguments. The British government applied various taxes ­– the so-called ‘taxes on knowledge’ – which aimed to stamp out smaller, radical newspapers by making them impossibly expensive. By the mid-century, however, these taxes were repealed after decades of campaigning, opening the way for the further spread of radical ideas.

The middle of the century saw a corresponding overflow of freethought literature with dozens of weekly freethought newspapers and periodicals published in a given year. The biggest were newspapers like George Holyoake’s The Reasoner, Charles Bradlaugh’s The National Reformer, and, indeed, G.W. Foote’s The Freethinker, which, aside from its writing, gained popularity in some quarters and dislike in others for its risqué cartoons.

In the United States, meanwhile, freethought newspapers, such as The Truth Seeker, appeared across the country, in big cities and small towns. These allowed atheists and freethinkers to know they were not alone, even if within their own town they were ‘village atheists’.

As the working classes mingled political radicalism and religious criticism, new organisations were formed. The National Secular Society, for example, was founded in 1866. Local secular societies across Britain likewise flourished.

While the new possibilities of printing were important, meetings in person and open-air lectures and debates were still big draws. However, the ability to print the details of these debates enabled their organisers to reach an even bigger audience.

While the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century did not give obvious evidence for God’s non-existence, the development of science in the nineteenth century more directly undermined the case for believing in God and the authority of the Bible. This can be seen, for example, in new geological findings in the first half of the century which caused geologists to re-estimate the Earth to be first hundreds of thousands and then millions of years old. Even if they did not fully comprehend the vast antiquity of the Earth, the new findings seriously challenged the traditional, Biblically derived idea that it was but a few thousand years old.

Traditional ideas about humanity’s place in the universe were thrown into even greater confusion with the emergence of evolutionary theory. The great nineteenth-century best-seller in evolution was actually Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, anonymously written by the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers. This work set forth a naturalistic account of the evolution of the universe and all species, including humanity. Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) was the stronger book scientifically, with a clearer mechanism for how evolution took place, yet its implications for humanity were confined to a single sentence: ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.’ Vestiges continued to outsell Origin for the remainder of the century, but both books forced many people to fundamentally rethink humanity’s place in the cosmos.

The new Biblical criticism, emerging primarily from Germany, also undermined religious faith. These new ideas challenged the authorship of the Bible and its accuracy, even though its main proponents were trying to salvage Christianity, not destroy it. Key works in this movement, like David Strauss’s Life of Jesus, translated into English by George Eliot, argued that the miracles recounted in the New Testament were mythical and had no basis in reality.

While Christians undertook such work to strengthen and refine their faith, freethinkers used similar techniques to capitalise on the new challenges to the Bible. One such popular work, called A Few Hundred Biblical Contradictions, pseudonymously written by Peter Lecount, ran to 1,180 pages. Other hostile dissections of the Bible included Robert Cooper’s Infidel’s Text-Book and Charles Bradlaugh’s The Bible: What It Is!

Cheap printing meant that all of these new ideas could find a much wider readership than ever before. Atheists and freethinkers would now know they were not alone. Even if the ultimate numbers of atheists remained small – Edward Royle, for example, estimated that at most 100,000 Britons would have supported the aims of the freethought movement – nevertheless, it seems to have been the first time in history that atheists began to publicly identify as such, at least in significant numbers, and to join with others with similar views.

The Internet

The twentieth century saw the arrival of new media like radio and television, which allowed for the proliferation of atheist and secular viewpoints to a wider audience. In 1955, Margaret Knight presented a radio broadcast on the BBC Home Service called ‘Morals Without Religion,’ while in 1970, the president of American Atheists, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, debated a Christian preacher on the Phil Donahue Show.

But the arrival of the internet afforded far more opportunities for atheists than ever before. As Teemu Taira writes, ‘it is perhaps not a serious exaggeration’ to use the word ‘revolution’ to talk about ‘the role of the Internet and social media for the increased visibility, interest in, and awareness of the atheism in the first decades of the twenty-first century.’

With the internet, information, reliable or otherwise, could be accessed without the need for a physical book or newspaper. In an isolated community, the religious sceptic could now participate in a community of other atheists. Whether in the United States, Egypt, or Indonesia, the sceptic was no longer alone.

In the early 2000s, the internet was a major factor in explaining the success of New Atheism. Even if New Atheists like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens published in traditional print mediums, their debates with Christians, and other religious people, received millions of views on YouTube.

Likewise, the internet made it easier for sceptics in religiously intolerant countries to covertly access their works. For example, as of 2016, the unofficial Arabic translation of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion had reportedly been downloaded over 10 million times.

But the internet did much more than merely spread the work of ‘celebrity atheists’. It also enabled individuals to express themselves and communicate with other like-minded people from across the world much more easily.

In an article on the Slate Star Codex blog, Scott Alexander gives a number of examples of influential websites from the early 2000s atheist scene. The Talk.Origins group carefully catalogued Christian arguments against evolution and their rebuttals, with examples including CA114. Many famous scientists were creationists, or CD610. The erosion rate of Niagara Falls’ rim indicates a young earth.

A similar group, the Skeptics’ Annotated Bible, catalogued every absurdity in the Bible. Another site compiled and ranked the top 15,000 (and counting) atheist quotations. The website of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, first created in 2005, received tens of millions of hits and quickly became an internet phenomenon.

In the above-mentioned article, Scott Alexander recalls

‘…just how intellectual the Internet was around the turn of the millennium. You would go to bulletin boards, have long and acrimonious debates over whether or not the Gospels were based on pagan myths. Then someone would check Vast Apologetics Library tektonics.org and repost every one of their twenty-eight different articles about all the pagan myths the Gospels weren’t based on, from Adonis (‘yet another unprofitable proposition for the copycat theorist’) to Zalmoxis (‘there is no comparison, other than by illicit collapsing of terminology and by unsubstantiated speculation’). Both sides had these vast pre-built armories full of facts and arguments to go to.’

The internet allowed atheists the chance to subject religion to criticism on a collective scale. But it also provided a possibility for anonymity and a supportive community as they encountered these kinds of arguments for the first time. Consider the case of the Clergy Project, set up for clergy members who were doubters or full-blown non-believers to be able to talk about the issues they faced, anonymously. The Richard Dawkins Foundation site likewise gave people the chance to tell their own stories, including on its Converts’ Corner.

Blogging sites, such as PZ Myers’s Pharyngula blog, Rebecca Watson’s SkepChick blog, and Hemant Mehta’s Friendly Atheist blog, likewise became a huge medium for atheists, while atheist YouTubers could create their own content and connect with others. Most importantly, perhaps, the Reddit subforum r/atheism, created in 2008, was at the time one of the most popular subreddits and now has 2.7 million members. This allowed people to share stories of their own experiences as atheists and have discussions, as well as to share memes and the like mocking religion.  

These developments also created the unfortunate stereotype of the ‘internet atheist’. According to the Urban Dictionary, this is ‘typically an angry teenager or other power inhibited individual who thinks that all religion across the globe is either Islamic Terrorist or American Christian Fundamentalist and that their arguments are sound because they have watched a Dawkins video online.’

More generally, there came a frustration with the trolling, mocking nature of online atheism and the ways in which online atheist spaces seemed to be dominated by white men. This led to the creation of the site Atheism+, active from 2012 to 2016, which aimed to discuss other issues like sexism, racism, and social justice from an atheist perspective.

Even with these flaws and imbalances, the internet offered a much more democratic and much less hierarchical space than any of the preceding mediums. But it is also true that the internet was not the sole factor that accounts for the increasing number of atheists. For most, online engagement was part of a larger puzzle that involved books, discussions with family and friends, and real-life encounters with other atheists. The website, meetup.com, allowed atheists who wouldn’t otherwise have met in person to do so. In this way, the internet did not replace physical interactions and the forming of communities – but it did sometimes facilitate them.

Conclusion

It would be too simplistic to say that more media means more atheists. Why some ideas gain traction at some times and not others concerns political, social, and economic factors that I have not been able to discuss in detail here. The industrialisation and urbanisation of the nineteenth century, as people relocated to cities and away from traditional rural communities, could well be equally important in explaining the growth of irreligion.

Moreover, the impact of communication revolutions might not always lead to the loss of religion in straightforward ways. New mediums also provide new diversions. Whether it be nineteenth-century novels, or social media and streaming in the twenty-first century, the expansion of options for entertainment, and the creation of new imaginary worlds, might have led people simply to have less time for engaging with religion, along with other, more traditional forms of civil society.

Another corollary is that while media revolutions have the power to disrupt societies, this disruption can also produce religious revivals. We have already seen how Martin Luther and the reformers used print to propagate a new form of Christianity; this may have been radical, but it was not friendly to atheism. The same was true in the nineteenth century, with the Religious Tract Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society using print to spread their message. Groups like these were sometimes much more effective, thanks to the much greater wealth at their disposal than was available to their comparatively impoverished freethought opponents. The internet has also helped to connect religious communities in new ways; for example, church services were streamed on Zoom during the pandemic.

Furthermore, just because new media allows for the spread of information, that does not by any means guarantee the accuracy of such information. If anything, in recent years, especially since 2016, we have seen how the internet allows for the spread of all kinds of misinformation, fake news, quackery, and conspiracy theories, at a scale not possible before.

It seems that opening possibilities for spreading information will inevitably also mean a spread of disinformation. Yet it is hard to think of an alternative. One must simply have confidence that over time, through the messy process of debate and discussion, truth will prevail. There are, again inevitably, issues of power (economic, institutional, and so forth) that will hinder and distort our collective search for truth, but if there is indeed a truth out there that can be obtained, as free as possible a flow of information seems the preferable – and perhaps only – option we can choose to get there.

As far as religious beliefs specifically are concerned, what the history of these media revolutions shows, above all, is that the more freedom there is to discuss and investigate them, the more they are found wanting.

The post How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism appeared first on The Freethinker.