Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?. Mick Hume
offence-takers, whose default emotion (and emotions count more than ideas now) is outrage. Theirs is a free-floating sense of outrage which, while apparently reflecting a deeply held moral conviction about an issue, can quickly detach itself and move on to the next free-speech scandal.
Among the preferred tools of these crusading reverse-Voltaires are the online petition and the twitterstorm, which can create an instant impression of mass outrage with relatively little effort or substance. These unofficial measures are often sufficient to silence the targeted forms of speech. If not, their demands for official censorship will generally find a willing ear among the UK authorities.
So it was that in November 2014 the UK Home Office took the extraordinary step of barring somebody from entering the country solely because of his unpleasant views. Julien Blanc was not an Islamic extremist or a racist demagogue. He was a professional ‘pick-up artist’ who hoped to give young British men the benefit of his dodgy advice on how to seduce women. Stupid and sexist no doubt, but hardly subversive.
Yet for the reverse-Voltaires, this pathetic wordplay was not just objectionable, it was intolerable, and had to be stopped. Having successfully lobbied for Blanc to be denied entry to Australia, they turned their attention to the UK. An online petition demanding that his UK visa be blocked, backed by sound and fury on the twittersphere, effortlessly attracted 160,000 virtual signatures. That is the sort of language that the authorities understand, easily drowning out any talk of Blanc’s right to free speech. The British government duly banned him. But, they insisted, barring somebody from the country on the basis of his idiotic ideas was not about censorship of opinions. It was because, Home Office minister Lynne Featherstone insisted, his advice on how to pick up women ‘could have led to an increase in sexual violence and harassment’. Alternatively of course, it could have led to nothing more than a few embarrassing moments in the singles bars of Britain. But the new rule is that it’s better to be safe than sorry when policing free speech.11
The perma-outraged, professionally offended reverse-Voltaires are relatively few in number. Yet they punch well above their weight in terms of influencing public policy and debate – as symbolised by the disproportionate importance attached to their favourite playground, Twitter. They have helped to create an atmosphere in which standing up for a fundamental right – free speech – can be seen as extremism. It is not that most people are enthusiastic about official censorship, but many have internalised the idea that it is better not to offend than to express a controversial opinion. These are the self-censoring ‘sorry majority’, symbolised by politicians and public figures who will apologise and withdraw their remarks at the first sign of a wagging finger.
The lugubrious England football manager Roy Hodgson encapsulated the spirit of the sorry majority in November 2014, after he was informed that some England supporters at a match against Scotland in Glasgow had been singing anti-IRA songs. Hodgson assured the media that he had not heard the chants in question, but that did not matter: ‘If anyone was offended,’ declared the England manager, ‘I’m sure the FA [English Football Association] would like to apologise to them.’12 Police confirmed there had been no complaints about the chanting from offended members of the IRA or anybody else, but at the merest mention of the possibility that ‘anyone was offended’, a national figure who had heard nothing felt moved to issue an official apology to the imagined victims. Such is the effect of the silent war on free speech in creating the stultifying atmosphere in which we live and try to breathe today.
The reverse-Voltaires are seeking to overturn some long-established principles of free speech. Nadine Strossen, a professor at the New York Law School and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, points out that there are two ‘bedrock’ principles of free-speech law in America. The first of these is ‘content neutrality’ or ‘viewpoint neutrality’: ‘It holds that government may never limit speech just because any listener – or even, indeed, the majority of the community – disagrees with or is offended by its content or the viewpoint it conveys.’ The second bedrock principle of US law holds that ‘a restriction on speech can be justified only when necessary to prevent actual or imminent harm to an interest of “compelling” importance, such as violence or injury to others’.13
Twenty years ago, in a book entitled Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex and the Fight for Women’s Rights, Strossen demonstrated how the radical feminist campaign for legal bans on pornography in America ‘violates both of these principles’, by demanding that a form of expression be restricted because of its offensive content; in order for that campaign to succeed, she wrote, ‘the very foundation of our free speech structure would have to be torn up’.
The Nineties’ would-be feminist censors might largely have failed. Two decades later, however, the reverse-Voltaires have had considerable success in tearing up the principle of ‘content neutrality’ and getting speech restricted on the ground that they find what it says offensive. They have not managed to rewrite the legal principles of the US First Amendment (not yet, anyway). But they have secured countless bans in practice on US and UK campuses, and shaped the British state’s censoriously interventionist attitude towards offensive speech. As the British conservative commentator John O’Sullivan noted in a Wall Street Journal essay reviewing these changes in both the US and the UK, ‘Today, content is increasingly the explicit justification for restricting speech. The argument used, especially in colleges, is that “words hurt” … In the new climate, hurtful speech is much more likely to be political speech than obscene speech.’14 The success of the reverse-Voltaires in chipping away at those bedrock principles is certainly hurting free speech.
The silent war on free speech often appears a remarkably one-sided affair. Where are those voices prepared to speak up for freedom against all the official and unofficial censorship, and wake the sorry majority from their self-censoring slumber? There are relatively few prominent figures today prepared to stand on the shoulders of the heroes of the historic fight for free speech. The Tom Paines, John Wilkeses and J. S. Mills of the twenty-first century are most often noticeable by their absence. The outburst of rhetorical support for free speech immediately after the Charlie Hebdo massacre was striking precisely because it was so out of kilter with what we (don’t) hear the rest of the time.
What has happened to the West’s liberal lobby in defence of free speech? They are still willing to speak up for the rights of repressed dissidents in far-flung places, yet when it comes to battles on the home front, many self-styled liberals have accepted the case for restricting the ‘wrong’ types of speech. It is not just that they are failing to resist the assault. Many have gone over to the other side in the free-speech wars.
This war is not led by the traditional enemies of free speech. It would be easier to defend freedom of expression against old-fashioned bigots and censors. But this silent war is more often prosecuted by liberal politicians, intellectuals, academics, writers, judges and suchlike. And those who might once have been in the front rank of the censorship lobby, from religious conservatives to cranky right-wing politicians, can now find themselves on the receiving end.
This turnaround has even helped to create a situation among progressive-minded students where censorship can appear cool. Once radical youth demanded ‘Ban the Bomb’. Today’s generation of student activists are often more likely to be demanding that the authorities ban the book, the bloke or the boobs.
A refined-looking liberal lobby of cultural high-flyers might seem to make an unlikely mob of book-burners. But consider if you will the strange case of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, and the attempt to sanitise Britain’s unruly press.
The issues of press freedom and regulation have been in the front line of the UK’s free-speech wars in recent times.* In the summer of 2011 a scandal exploded over phone-hacking at Britain’s bestselling Sunday tabloid, the News of the World. Revelations that journalists had been listening to the private voicemail messages of celebrities, public figures and high-profile crime victims caused