Today, we quickly experience how censorship anywhere becomes censorship everywhere. In late October, after the New York Times featured an article on the vast wealth amassed by the family of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, the Chinese government blocked access to the newspaper's websites. The Times joined Bloomberg, whose investigation into the wealth of Xi Jinping, the man expected to become China's president, on the wrong side of the Great Firewall. At the same time, offensive speech anywhere can now be expected to have repercussions everywhere -- a new reality never more devastatingly apparent than in the furor following the video insulting the Prophet Mohammed. Taken together, these products of globalization and transformed communications technology are diminishing national power and leaving heads of state less secure in their ability to control the future, which in turn often leads to reinvigorated nationalism and bouts of serious censorship.
Advances in technology offer as well the promise of unprecedented human progress. The rise of a decentralized, atomistic, and truly global communications system has for the first time put within our reach an effective global marketplace of ideas that will be able to generate answers to urgent problems that one country acting alone cannot hope to solve. Those solutions, however, will not emerge unless there is a new global compact to ensure that censorship is defeated wherever it is found and that free speech is widely embraced by international bodies and the world's countries. Because protections for speech must be enforced across borders, it has become increasingly apparent that bilateral trade agreements, once serving as meaningful vehicles for advancing human rights and free expression, have lost much of their usefulness in this arena. Recent U.S. trade agreements with Panama, Guatemala, and South Korea, in fact, were notably silent on these matters. Yet none of this alters the reality that the importance of global free speech -- the benefits of achieving it and the cost of undervaluing it -- has never been greater.
Second, the very essence of modern life is the opportunity for people everywhere to speak, hear, persuade, change their minds, know what others are thinking, and think for themselves. Our great institutions of higher education, including the one I lead, bear a special social responsibility for educating people to possess a nimble cast of mind, able to grasp multiple perspectives and the full complexity of a subject. And for centuries, great societies of all types have understood that this kind of intellectual capacity is essential to progress. But never have critical thinking and tolerance been more important for individual well-being and for our collective prosperity.
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