Why is it that, having spent several days somewhat mystified by certain elements of the public debate around recent events in Paris, it was Will Self’s piece on Vice.com – and his subsequent appearance on that bastion of moral confusion, Channel 4 News – that tipped me over into a state of profound irritation?

The main answer is tediously simple: I am something of a fan of Mr. Self. I regard him as a consistently interesting, challenging and imaginative public intellectual, and as such someone to dearly cherish. I recently tweeted my opinion that, with his last two novels Umbrella and Shark, he had gone from being a very good novelist to a genuinely great one, and I meant it.

Fast forward to a few days ago, and the cold sound of gunshots echoing off the stone streets of Paris. Then this: Will Self entering the debate with a piece reflecting on, and questioning, ‘our fetish for free speech’.

I understand his argument. On Channel 4 news Will explained that all rights, including the right to freedom of speech, come with responsibilities, and claimed that in the wake of the Paris attacks, secular democrats are asserting ‘Freedom of Speech’ as an absolute value in a way that has, rather ironically, religious overtones.

I get the argument, but I disagree with him on both counts and here’s why. Yes, all rights do indeed come with responsibilities. But oddly, Will doesn’t go any further towards describing what exactly, in his opinion, the responsibilities might be that are relevant to recent events in Paris. Are we to infer that Will believes that we have the right to freedom of speech, but that this right comes tethered by the responsibility to avoid offending the metaphysical (and therefore unproven and unprovable) beliefs of religious people? Or are we merely constrained by the ‘responsibility’ to not offend pious Muslims, regardless of context?

Let us not forget that part of what drove the specific attack on Charlie Hebdo – as well as the multiple murderous responses to a set of Danish cartoons published several years ago – is a piece of doctrine which states that it is forbidden to publish pictures of – to visually represent in any manner at all – the prophet Mohammed. This prohibition, in and of itself, is antithetical to any notion of free speech that has any meaning at all. If you believe in free speech in any meaningful sense, then you believe in the right, of anyone who wants to, to break that nonsensical prohibition and draw a picture of Mohammed.

Is Will saying that a drawing of the Prophet is wrong, rather than the prohibition itself? I would suggest that making our world a slightly safer and more harmonious place would involve a number of desirable developments, but surely one of those would be a process of moderate reform within Islamic culture itself that would have many results – one of which would be everyone involved ceasing to care in the slightest about someone, anyone, creating a drawing of Mohammed. Another would be, let me think, a complete u-turn on the subject of apostasy, say.

You see, these were cartoons. While no one of any faith should ever be persecuted for their religious beliefs, we also cannot grant a priori respect for a piece of doctrine simply because it is part of a religious faith. And we cannot respect the prohibition against images of the Prophet if we consider ourselves committed to liberalism, pluralism and freedom.

They were cartoons. Drawings. People were murdered for drawing them. So come on Will, tell us: what are the ‘responsibilities’ that constrain the right to draw a picture without threat of violence? I’m struggling to think of them.

Incidentally, I’ve only looked at a small amount of Charlie Hebdo’s output, and in my opinion it’s mostly puerile rubbish. But I’m shocked at the number of people who seem, at the moment, unable to distinguish between not liking a piece of cultural production, and questioning the right of its producers to have made it in the first place. This is a very important – and thankfully very simple – distinction that we should all be able to make without fail. It is in that sense that the #jesuischarlie meme should not be as easily dismissed as Will implies.

I also disagree that people are treating ‘Freedom of Speech’ as an absolute value in a way that, Will argues, echoes the bland certainties of religious belief itself. Fair enough, in the simple and grandiose language of some European politicians, I see the source of his accusation and understand his complaint.

But I don’t think it’s true. Rather, people are rightly intuiting and asserting that freedom of speech, though very messy, and certainly not perfect or utopian in any sense of the word, nonetheless happens to be the foundation, the necessary condition, of the only kind of decent society that we know of – flawed though it is.

Moreover, freedom of speech is the foundation of the only kind of society that has the ability to change itself over time, through debate and argument, through evolutionary, peacefully dialectical processes rather than via the blood-splattered streets and trampled corpses of revolution.

So, no Will, I don’t think our love of freedom of speech can be dismissed as a ‘fetish’, and I don’t think it is, as you’ve argued, being treated as an ‘absolute’ in the religious sense. Rather, we would do well to remember that freedom of speech is, in its very nature, opposed to absolutism. The latter is established though authoritarian control, totalitarian means, and a culture (be it Communist, Christian, Fascist, Islamist or otherwise) that conditions a population to believe, on pain of torture or death, in one set of ideas, one set of books, one point of view, one interpretation of morality, one ideal. One God.

Freedom of speech, flawed and messy though it is, is the thing that defeats – sometimes slowly and sometimes more rapidly – such monomaniacal evils as these. Because when you introduce freedom of speech, what happens? Points of view proliferate; ideas divide and blend and reproduce exponentially; stories multiply; more different kinds of books are written and published; arguments are had and extended and commented upon; and more different types of individuals and identities escape from underneath the yoke of conservative, traditional or normative oppression to claim their agency and rights.

No, freedom of speech is not an absolute. But it is the best thing we have. That’s why we’re right to defend it with passion.