Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?. Mick Hume
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William Collins
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This abridged eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016
Copyright © Mick Hume 2015
Mick Hume asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008126407
Ebook Edition © May 2016 ISBN: 9780008204389
Version: 2016-04-26
For Stella and Isabel, may they always think what they like and say what they think
Contents
Introduction to the concise edition
1 A few things we forgot about free speech
2 The age of the reverse-Voltaires
3 A short history of free-speech heretics
Five good excuses for restricting free speech – and why they’re all wrong
4 ‘… but words will always hurt me’
5 ‘There is no right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre’
6 ‘Mind your Ps, Qs, Ns and Ys’
7 ‘Free speech is just a licence for the mass media to brainwash the public’
8 ‘Liars and Holocaust deniers do not deserve to be heard’
Appendix: The Trigger Warnings we need
Trigger Warning (noun): a statement at the start of any piece of writing, video, etc, alerting the reader or viewer to the fact that it contains material they might find upsetting or offensive.
Introduction to the concise edition
Free speech is under threat in the West. But then, what else is new? Freedom of expression has never been assured, even in its heartlands, ever since the ancient Athenians took a democratic vote to put to death their greatest philosopher, Socrates, for talking out of turn.
But the threats to free speech are always changing. The UK parliament has not yet voted to make anybody drink poisoned hemlock, like Socrates, for saying the wrong thing.
This short book is intended to highlight the new challenges to our most precious liberty in the twenty-first century. It aims to provide some ammunition for fighting the new free-speech wars.
In our Anglo-American culture today free speech is not threatened by jackbooted state censorship. The more insidious threat comes from a creeping crusade for conformism in thought and speech. The slogan emblazoned on the crusaders’ banner is ‘You Can’t Say That!’.
It has become the fashion not only to declare yourself offended by what somebody else says, but also to use the ‘offence card’ to demand that they be prevented from – and possibly punished for – saying it.
The most dramatic attack on ‘offensive’ freedom of speech in modern times was the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015. Islamist gunmen murdered eight cartoonists and journalists and four others at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine, supposedly to ‘avenge the prophet’ after Charlie published cartoons mocking Muhammad.
The massive ‘Je Suis Charlie’ demonstrations that followed the massacre and the connected murders at a Jewish supermarket were uplifting displays of human solidarity that made an impression on us all. They also, however, gave a misleading impression of the state of play with free speech in Europe and America.
Here, it might have appeared, was a clear cultural divide: on one side, a free world united in support of freedom of expression; on the other, a handful of extremists opposed to liberty. Behind those solidarity banners, however, Western opinion was far less solidly for free speech.
Many public figures could hardly wait to stop paying lip service to liberty and start adding the inevitable qualifications, obfuscations and, above all, ‘buts’ to their supposed support for free speech. To quote the American writer Andrew Klavan, it looked like ‘The Attack of the But-Heads’.1
It quickly became clear that the threat to freedom came not just from a few barbarians at the gate. Free speech faces more powerful enemies within the supposed citadel of civilisation itself.