Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?. Mick Hume
eye of the you-can’t-say-that culture. Good jokes are often in bad taste, mocking the respectable rules and morals of society, pushing at the limits of what passes for taste and decency in any era. There have long been attempts to control what is deemed ‘acceptable’ humour and to censor what is not.
However, as with other issues in the Anglo-American free-speech wars, the terrain has shifted. Once the complaints were about blasphemous and indecent comedy. Now the protests are more often against comedians accused of breaking the new taboos – racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and the other usual suspects.
Comedy is a messy business, and people can laugh at the most outrageous things. The wish to dictate not just what jokes a comedian should tell, but also what we should laugh at, is the clearest conceivable attempt at thought control. What could be more intrusive than trying to police something as reflexive as a snort of laughter? The trends towards more conformist comedy put at risk one of the most important forms of release we have left in a dour world. This is no laughing matter. If comedians are not allowed to upset and offend, what chance have the rest of us got?
One other phenomenon which captures the mind-narrowing trends of our times is the onward march of the Trigger Warning, from which this book takes its title.
A Trigger Warning is an advisory label stuck at the front of a book, article, film or whatever to warn students that this work involves words or images that may traumatise them in some way. They have spread from US colleges across the Atlantic and the internet. Defenders of Trigger Warnings will argue that they amount to little more than a few words to help preserve the vulnerable from harm. But the truth is that those few words speak volumes about the parlous state of freedom.
Trigger Warnings were initially conceived as an online therapeutic tool to help victims in discussion forums for sufferers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). If somebody posted about a particularly violent or distressing experience, others could be forewarned that reading such a post might ‘trigger’ a traumatic memory and reaction in them.
Even conceived in these narrow terms, experts tell us, the concept of Trigger Warnings appears unconvincing. Extend the Trigger Warnings away from PTSD sufferers to books read by university students or films watched online, however, and the whole thing becomes a dangerous nonsense. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was developed as a category to describe the psychological effects suffered by those exposed to the horrors of war, violence or other extreme experiences. What has that to do with students or others being made to feel uncomfortable by some ‘naughty’ references in literature?
But while the causes might be slight, the consequences could be more serious in terms of the future of free speech and open discussion. Once the notion of trauma is reduced to ‘feeling uncomfortable’, the sky is surely the limit for Trigger Warnings. Today we are advised that students should be allowed to opt out of some classes and warned about reading classics from The Great Gatsby to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Tomorrow the demand might be to stop teaching such ‘triggering’ texts altogether – and that list could stretch from Shakespeare to Game of Thrones, with much in between. As wags have observed, why not put TWs on Trigger Warnings, to warn that they are about to mention sex or violence?
Trigger Warnings are a model of how all the talk about harm and vulnerability and comfort can become a coded way of undermining both sides of free expression – the freedom to speak or write what you like, and the equally important freedom to read or listen and judge for yourself. That should be the most serious warning of all to anybody who feels ‘uncomfortable’ at the undermining of freedom of speech.
In response to all this we need to take an uncompromising stand for unfettered free speech with no buts, bans, prison sentences or guns to the head. That must mean defending it as an indivisible liberty, for all or none at all. Free speech is always primarily about defending what a US Supreme Court justice once described as ‘freedom for the thought that we hate’.
Those who campaign on free-speech issues often see them as rights to be defended for high-minded dissidents in faraway places. The notion of demanding free speech closer to home for, say, tabloid hacks, vulgar internet ‘trolls’ or uncouth sports fans would horrify many a British civil liberties lobbyist (emphasis on ‘civil’, as in well-mannered, rather than liberties, as in free-for-all).
Yet there are important reasons in principle and practice why we need to defend free speech for all. A universal liberty cannot be divided. Once we allow free speech to be questioned for some then what should be right instead becomes a privilege, to be doled out from above like charity to those deemed deserving. And when it comes to ‘selective’ censorship, one thing always leads to another.
‘Hate speech’ just means moral views you object to, and one person’s hate speech is another’s passionate belief. As some university campaigners have discovered to their consternation, if you seek to No Platform those you find offensive, don’t be surprised if somebody does the same thing to you. Those who live by the ban can perish by it, too.
It might be tempting to imagine going along with attempts to crack down on ‘radicalisation’ and censor Islamist or Islamophobic extremists. But in practice, such simple authoritarian solutions won’t work. Trying to defend freedom by banning its enemies, to uphold our belief in free speech by censoring those who disagree, is worse than useless and can only add credence to their cause. What we need to do is to fight them on the intellectual and political beaches, not try to bury the issues in the sand. Free speech is the potential solution, not the problem.
I first wrote in defence of ‘the Right to be Offensive’ more than twenty-five years ago, when I was the editor of long-deceased Living Marxism magazine. Our slogan then – ‘Ban Nothing – Question Everything’ – has informed my attitude ever since. In the intervening years, free speech has fallen further from favour. The first edition of Trigger Warning was published shortly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, to highlight the pressing need to defend free speech. That has become a more urgent problem since. We have also, however, witnessed the prospects of turning the tide and winning more vocal support for free speech, especially on campus.
So this is a call-to-arms to fight for free speech before it’s too late. It might seem hard to make a stand when unfettered free speech is so out of fashion. It often means having to stand up for the rights of some unattractive types whose views we don’t want to hear. But that is what makes it so important today.
The fact that many feel there are now few principles worth fighting for in political life makes it all the more imperative that we should stand for free speech for all. Because free speech is the indispensible midwife of new ideas. If our society is ever to find a way out of its current malaise, we need an open, no-holds-barred debate about everything. We need, in short, more free speech rather than less. Including, like Socrates, the right to say the ‘wrong’ thing.
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A few things we forgot about free speech
No subject (with the possible exception of football) has been talked about as much yet seriously discussed as little as free speech. Everybody pays lip service to the right to freedom of speech. Few of us appear to give much thought to what that means or why it matters. Sometimes it’s necessary to remind ourselves of the obvious and look again at what we take for granted.
After all, it’s funny how the simple little things can slip your mind. The first thing that seems to have been forgotten about free speech is that it’s supposed to be Free. The second thing that is often forgotten is that it’s simply Speech.
The third thing we often forget is that, when you put those two words together, you have the most important expression in the English language. Free speech is the single most powerful factor in creating and sustaining a civilised society. Without the advance of free speech, the development of life as we know it in the West is unlikely to have been possible over the past 500 years.
In short, without the willingness of some to insist on their right to question everything and to speak what