Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?. Mick Hume
it would be hard to find serious voices in the Anglo-American world who publicly reject the principle of free speech as a Good Thing. Any takers out there for the opposing principle of ‘enslaved speech’?
Strange, then, that so many now choose to exercise their freedom of speech in order to tell the rest of us what we can’t say.
This is the dirty secret of the great free-speech fraud. Our politicians and public figures stage displays of support for free speech in principle. Yet in practice they will trash it. When they say they support free speech ‘in principle’ they apparently mean on another planet, rather than in the real world.
Back here on Earth meanwhile the fashion is to support something called ‘free speech-but’, as in: ‘I believe in free speech-but there are limits/-but not for hate speech/-but you cannot offend or insult or upset other people.’ And the buts are getting bigger and wider all the time. As one US commentator had it in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, ‘The “but” in the phrase “I believe in free speech but” is bigger than Kim Kardashian’s [and] has more wiggle-room than Jennifer Lopez’s.’1 Those remarks would probably get him banned from speaking on several campuses for offensive ‘fat-shaming’.
To say that you believe in free speech ‘but’ is not simply to qualify your support, but to dissolve it altogether. Free speech is not something you can sort-of believe in on a scale of 1 to 10.
To imagine that you could believe in free speech ‘but’ not for certain opinions is rather like saying ‘I believe in scientific proof, but that’s no reason to rule out Father Christmas and fairies at the bottom of the garden’; or ‘I believe in the equality of the sexes, but equal pay for women is going too far’; or ‘I believe in same-sex marriage, but not for lesbians’. The b-word does not ‘clarify’ your stated belief, but effectively buts it out of existence.
The predominance of the ‘but’ lobby reflects the underlying ambivalent attitude towards free speech in Anglo-American society. The right to free speech is not only written into the First Amendment to the US Constitution and (with more umming and ahhing) the European Convention on Human Rights, but also apparently into the hearts of the people. In 2014, while the UK’s political elites indulged in another round of breast-beating about ‘British values’, ComRes pollsters asked the British public what they thought the most precious of those values might be. The runaway winner of this popularity contest was old-fashioned red-blooded free speech, with 48 per cent of the vote.2
Yet behind the headline support for the principle of free speech, the UK seems not so sure in practice; one major 2007 survey found that a larger section of the British public (64 per cent) supported the right of people ‘not to be exposed to offensive views’ than supported the right for people to ‘say what they think’ (54 per cent).3 Perhaps more surprisingly, polls suggest that many Americans, too, might not be as certain about free speech as they once were. Washington’s prestigious Newseum Institute conducts an annual survey on attitudes to the First Amendment, which alongside other liberties enshrines freedom of speech and of the press in the US Constitution. Asked whether they think the First Amendment goes ‘too far’ in upholding those freedoms, in 2014 38 per cent of Americans answered ‘yes’ – an increase from 34 per cent in 2013, and a big jump from the mere 13 per cent who said yes in 2012.4
Despite enjoying widespread support in principle, in practice free speech is on the endangered list. Freedom of expression today is like one of those exotic animals that everybody says they love, but that still appear to be heading inexorably towards extinction. The difference is that if we continue to lose the habitat where free speech can flourish, the truly endangered species will be humanity as the free and civilised creation we know, love and sometimes hate.
Yes, we all believe in free speech. And yet … everywhere from the internet to the universities, from the sports stadium to the theatrical stage, from out on the streets to inside our own minds, we are allowing the right to freedom of expression to be reined in and undermined. Free speech is seen as a Good Thing gone bad, increasingly regarded with suspicion if not outright hostility. The freedom that, as the next chapter outlines, was so hard won through history is now in danger of being given away without a fight, or even offered up willingly for sacrifice.
Barely a day seems to pass without news of another knock-back for free speech: a proposed British law against the wrong type of political ideas, another US or UK university ban on the wrong types of joke, pop song or speaker on campus, yet another Twitter shitstorm descending on the head of somebody foolish enough to express the wrong 140-character opinion about rape or abortion law, Islam or immigration, Scots or gay adoption.
A steady drip of outrage is eroding the rock of free speech. The response is even worse. On any day when cartoonists are not being murdered in Europe, few voices are raised to speak up for freedom. We seem to spend far more time discussing the problem with free speech and how to curb it than how to defend, never mind extend it. That’s why the ‘Je Suis Charlie’ placards had not even been cleared from the streets before the discussion turned to the importance of avoiding further offence to anybody. And every little extra curb on one sort of speech encourages mission-creep towards censoring another.
The freedom to think what you like and say what you think has become another empty ritual to which we just pay lip service. Even the lip service stops when somebody dares to think it is real and says something beyond the pale or the bland. People might oppose outright censorship, but a self-censoring muted conformism is the order of the day.
What’s going on? There is nothing new about free speech being threatened. The modern right to freedom of speech has been under threat since the moment it was first won. It would always be true to say that ‘free speech is in danger’. But there is something different happening today.
The danger to free speech in the West now comes not only from such traditional enemies as the little Hitlers and aspiring ayatollahs who disdain to conceal their contempt for liberty. More important today is the challenge from those who claim to support that freedom, yet seek to restrict it in practice. This is the new threat: the silent war on free speech.
It is a silent war, but not because its proponents are quiet – they are anything but. This is a silent war because nobody who expects to be taken seriously will admit that they are fundamentally against the right to free speech. To oppose freedom of expression has historically meant being in favour of fascism, totalitarianism and the burning of heretical books if not of actual heretics. Few want to be seen goose-stepping out in such company today.
Instead we have a silent war on free speech; a war that will not speak its name, fought by wannabe censors who claim that they are nothing of the sort. The result is not violent repression and brute censorship, but the demonising of dissident opinions in a crusade for conformism.
The silent war is not ostensibly aimed against free speech at all. It is posed instead as a worthy assault on the evils of hate speech and incitement. It is presented, not as a blow against liberty, but as a defence of rights: the right to protection from offensive and hateful words and images; freedom from media harassment and internet ‘trolling’; the right of students to feel ‘comfortable’ on campus.
In order to confront these new lines of attack on free speech, it is necessary first to crack the code that is being used to infiltrate our lines. You will rarely hear anybody admit that they hate free speech. Instead the crusaders come up with a coded way to get that message across, and their codes can change as fast as if controlled by an Enigma machine (rather than by a student union committee meeting). You might be accused of hate speech, or told to go and ‘check your privilege’ (e.g. make sure you are not a white person talking about racism); or you could be accused of ‘mansplaining’ an issue to women, or of committing ‘micro-aggressions’ in your speech. All very confusing no doubt, and easy for even a sympathetic speaker to get caught out and left behind the fast-changing tide.
But whatever coded form of words they deploy, the