Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?. Mick Hume
stretching from the Pope to the Chinese Communist Party and encompassing much of Western liberalism between. All agreed that the Charlie Hebdo massacre showed the need to restrict ‘hate speech’, ban inflammatory words and images and curtail the right to offend.
Thus after the mass killings committed by Islamist gunmen came the mass free-speech fraud committed by Western elites – making ritualistic gestures of support for free speech ‘in principle’ while hammering it in practice.
That free-speech fraud did not come out of the blue. If there really was such solid support for free speech, it would not have taken the cold-blooded murder of cartoonists to prompt our politicians and public figures to mention it. The sudden loud expressions of support for free speech were so striking because they contrasted with the everyday reality that we in the West now spend far more time discussing how to restrict free speech than how to defend and extend it.
The hard fact is that the Islamic gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo acted not just as the soldiers of an old Eastern religion. They also acted as the armed extremist wing of a thoroughly modern Western culture of enforced conformism, fighting for a highly fashionable belief in your right to suppress whatever you find offensive. The Islamist gunmen simply took that attitude to a murderous extreme.
It was the culmination of a steady loss of faith in freedom of speech and the ability of people to handle uncomfortable words or images. Since the Charlie Hebdo massacre it has become obvious that those who would kill free speech are winning the battle. The motto of our age is not ‘Je Suis Charlie’ but ‘Vous Ne Pouvez Pas Dire Ca!’, which roughly translates as ‘You Can’t Say That!’.
Free speech in Anglo-American society is under siege from three main enemies in the modern age.
First, there are the official censors in government and the courts who want to control offensive and inflammatory speech. In the UK and Europe they are using hate-speech laws to convict thousands every year of speech crimes. Even in the US, where freedom of speech is legally protected by the First Amendment to the constitution, the principle has fallen so far out of favour among the political elite that the New York Times feels free to ask whether it is ‘time to reconsider that constitutional line’.2
Second, there are the increasingly influential unofficial censors, the witch-hunting Twitter mobs and online petitioners pursuing and trying to silence everybody whose views are not to their taste. Often foremost among them have been the student officials and activists seeking to ‘No Platform’ anybody, feminist or funnyman, who might make a student feel ‘uncomfortable’.
The third enemy of free speech today is self-censorship. Under pressure from the first two, and unsure of which opinions are now acceptable or even which words they are permitted to use, many people now fight shy of expressing any strong views that might fall outside the mainstream. Those whose words stray from the straight and increasingly narrow are often quick to withdraw and apologise for any potential offence caused at the first sign of a wagging finger.
This new alliance against free speech is not only active in the traditional political sphere. It is invading areas which might once have been thought of as off-limits for censorship.
The internet ought to be the best thing to happen to freedom of expression since the invention of the printing press. Now free speech online is under attack from Twitter mobs and social media lobbies demanding that something be done to stop them being offended by words. Whatever the pretext, the net effect is always to reduce the scope for unfettered free speech online, and waste the extraordinary opportunities offered by the internet for advancing freedom and open discussion.
For example, nobody seems certain how to define a troll, yet everybody apparently agrees that something must be done about them. This fashion for troll-hunting provides an all-purpose, all-seasons licence to police what is said on the internet. In the UK and Europe the law has joined in the international troll-hunt, and people have been charged and imprisoned for online thought crimes. Even in the US, troll-hunting has become a national blood sport, with Twitter – previously advertised as ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’ – setting up an Orwellian-sounding Trust and Safety Council to police the tweets.
To claim that you have been ‘trolled’ has become a sign of virtue through victimhood. To be outraged by trolls offers those attacked confirmation that they are in the right – and an excuse to attack the right to free speech online. Nobody has to read, listen to or take seriously what some twit tweeting from his mum’s back bedroom has to say. We should be free to ignore them or respond in kind. But nobody should have the right to use the label ‘troll!’ as a gag to silence those opinions they don’t like online.
Universities should be citadels of open-minded inquiry and freedom of speech. Yet, remarkably, the university campus has become a major new front in the war on free speech, on both sides of the Atlantic. What’s remarkable is not that academic freedoms are under assault – they have been threatened by outside forces since the first European universities were established in the Middle Ages. What beggars belief is that it is now students and academics themselves who are joining campus authorities in trying to impose new limits on free speech and free thinking in UK and US universities. Far from being ivory-towered bastions of freedom, our universities have come to see themselves more as a womb-like fortress to protect young people from dangerous words and ideas.
The world has been turned upside down so that those who think of themselves as liberal- or even radical-minded are in the forefront of the attack on free speech in colleges. In the name of making universities ‘safe spaces’, student activists have demanded bans on ‘offensive’ speakers and comedians, books and videos, statues and sombreros. ‘Safe Space’ policies sound like unopposable mom-and-apple-pie policies. Who wants to make anywhere an ‘unsafe space’? The question is, however: safe from what? These policies go far beyond threats of violence or intimidation, to cover any opinion or language that some students may not like.
Apparently students must now ‘feel comfortable’ at all times. But if that was really all young people wanted, they surely could have stayed at home, tucked up safe and warm with their mums and dads. Restricting college life to students’ pre-set, safe comfort zone risks closing the door on the new – and worse, closing young minds.
Those supposed liberals attempting to ban views they find offensive might do well to recognise the historical company they are keeping. Two hundred years ago, fellows and students at Oxford University also took direct action to No Platform offensive opinions. They burned a pamphlet that, says one account, had caused ‘maximum offence’, while the university authorities expelled the author from Oxford. He was the nineteen-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the Romantic poet’s ‘little tract’ that caused such lofty outrage in 1811 was called The Necessity of Atheism. It would surely be better for today’s protesting students to try to follow in the footsteps of the taboo-busting Shelley rather than the Oxford conservatives and censors who banished the offensive student and his opinions from university life.
Entertainment might once have been considered a world where people could crack jokes or sing songs that were outside the rules of ‘respectable’ society and everyday life. No longer. The new free speech wars are being waged in some unlikely places, such as British football and the comedy scene on both sides of the Atlantic.
The campaign to rid football of offensive, improper and abusive language marks an extraordinary turnaround. Football was long ungoverned by the etiquette of everyday life, accepted as the home ground of what Sigmund Freud called ‘the id’, the more emotional, irrational side of the human psyche, where it was accepted that people could let rip and take a break from the rules of polite society.
By contrast the campaign to sanitise football has now reached the point where fans can be afforded even less free speech than they would be elsewhere in life. The Scottish government’s Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act has created an extraordinary situation where a Rangers fans has been jailed for four months for the crime of singing an offensive song in a Glasgow