Absolute Freedom of Speech

Dangerous Roads

Absolute freedom of speech is an oxymoron. Even the most free civil societies restrain public speech and discourse in some way, shape, or form. The only constructive debate is not whether speech should be restrained but what speech must be interdicted and punished.

Those societies that are more free are those which have a very clear notion of what kinds of speech and thought and action are destructive of the fundamentals of the society itself. All other speech, however irksome, is tolerated. Less free societies care not about distinguishing sharply between the vitals and fundamentals of a society, on the one hand, and everything else, on the other--and under the rubric of free speech work aggressively to restrict the free speech of citizens. Either restricted speech is limited and clearly proscribed, or the restrictions expand like a cancer.

In the West restrictions upon speech are expanding rapidly, as the freedoms of classic liberalism die. This is not surprising. Every society built upon the sovereignty of man becomes first authoritarian, then totalitarian, in the end. Man is a mere creature. His shoulders are simply not broad enough to bear the thick complexity of the created world. As he arrogates power and the garb of deity, he inevitably tries to reduce the complexity of the world down to more manageable nostrums--which means more and more restrictions upon human activity, including speech.

Therefore it is not surprising that freedoms of speech are being aggressively attacked in the West--particularly in those segments of society which are more "liberal" and and "progressive". Brendan O'Neill catalogues the rise of book burning in the United States as a new illiberal fundamentalism arises--and we are not talking of the Tea Party!

Students are supposed to read books, not burn them
 
A leading US defender of free speech on campus says things are so bad that some students are now destroying words that offend them.
 
Brendan O’Neill


If you thought it was only uneducated Muslims in dusty towns ‘over there’ who burnt things that upset them, think again.

In 2006, The Dartmouth, the student newspaper of Dartmouth College, a liberal arts college in New Hampshire, published a cartoon showing Nietzsche conversing with a male student. The student was with a very drunk girl after a night of boozing and schmoozing and was wondering whether or not he should have sex with her. ‘Will to power’, Nietzsche tells him. The cartoonist said it was intended as a pisstake of Nietzsche, and more broadly of his rehabilitation in liberal academic circles, but some Dartmouth students saw things differently – in their eyes the cartoon was effectively okaying date rape. So they did what any well-educated, privileged students at a liberal arts college would do – gathered outside the offices of The Dartmouth and publicly burned copies of the offending newspaper. Like fascists.

Greg Lukianoff’s mouth is agape as he recounts the incident four years on, clearly still shocked by the demented censoriousness and humourlessness of the Dartmouth book-burners. Lukianoff is president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE, ironically), which was founded in 1999 to defend ‘freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty and sanctity of conscience’ on American campuses, those ‘essential qualities of liberty and dignity’. ‘There was a time when people believed free speech on campus should be as wild and freewheeling as possible’, he tells me in his garden in the Italian part of Brooklyn, New York City. ‘Not anymore. Today students are apparently too sensitive to be able to deal with hard ideas or outrageous humour.’

Students and their university administrations are now at the forefront of an expanding move to restrict speech and deny freedom of thought--on campuses all over the US.  

FIRE’s president, Greg Lukianoff,
in his garden in Brooklyn

At Brown University in Rhode Island a mob of students stormed the offices of the student newspaper, The Brown Daily Herald, and seized and ran off with its entire print run. Why? Because the Herald ran an advert paid for by a right-wing politician who denounced the idea of reparations for slavery. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst a group of students stole copies of the conservative campus newspaper The Minuteman after it published an article mocking one of Amherst’s student union officials. The student union demanded that the The Minuteman publicly apologise to the student official or else face ‘loss of recognition’, which would have meant the Minuteman group being shut down and its newspaper being consigned to Torquemada’s dustbin of history. The Minutemen refused and called FIRE instead, the Ghostbusters of campus free-speech controversies.

The article goes on to describe why these liberal, progressive universities are at the forefront of restricting speech.  Students have rights, don't you know.  They have a right not to be discriminated against--which rapidly extends to a right not to be offended by the actions and speech of others.  In other words, the necessarily attendant by-product of free speech--that of others being irked--has been exalted into an uber-restrictor of free speech.  

 Lukianoff says it is a consequence of the broader academic culture that students find themselves in today – an academic culture which instead of highly prizing combative debate and the unfettered freedom to scuffle over ideas and knowledge increasingly demonises such things as potentially hurtful and damaging. An academic culture, in short, which is destroying its own raison d’être – to foster thought, discussion, enlightenment – through its acceptance of the idea that actually, after all, words and ideas can be quite dangerous and thus should be subject to policing.

How widespread is the problem.  Seventy-one percent of American universities, we are told, now have speech codes--that's right, speech codes!

Lukianoff points out that the idea of ‘hate speech’ – the notion that thoughts and words are too potentially toxic and harmful to others to be allowed to exist independently of official monitoring – was supported as much by so-called liberals, ‘by feminists like Catharine MacKinnon’, as it was by traditionally censorious Victorian-style prudes. The end result is that 71 per cent of American universities now have speech codes governing what their students can say and even what they can think. Lukianoff says the culture of word-watching and thought-monitoring has two depressing consequences: first, it makes students more likely to play the ‘offence card’ if anyone upsets them; and second, it ‘really has a hobbling effect on the rigour of the academy, affecting what people learn and what people teach’.

The next step will be public criticism sessions--as occurred during the Cultural Revolution in China--where infractors are publicly named, shamed, humiliated, then "re-trained" and indoctrinated more perfectly.  Oh, it's already happening.

Lukianoff tells me about one of the more extreme examples of the speech-code ethos, ‘probably the best and most nightmarish example of what we call “thought reform”’. The University of Delaware had a mandatory programme for all 7,000 of its students who lived in dorms, which it actually explicitly referred to as a ‘treatment’. The students were expected to attend floor meetings so that they could be told what was acceptable speech on campus and what was not, where the idea, says Lukianoff, ‘was effectively to cure them of any obvious racist, sexist or homophobic beliefs’.

In an exercise at one of these institutionalised meetings, students were told to stand by a certain wall depending on where they stood on matters such as gay marriage, affirmative action, welfare and other hot-button issues in the US. And if they had the ‘wrong’ views on these issues, then they were seen as potentially intolerant and in need of being reminded about the university’s speech and ethics codes. ‘It was flatly political’, says Lukianoff. ‘It was actually a public shaming, really going back to our Puritan roots. This kind of thing treats young people as socially unenlightened and in need of a kind of indoctrination.’

Of course this is a generation of students who have been schooled from infancy in the notion that education is a process of exploration, discovery, self-affirmation.  Correcting, challenging, debating, refuting, rejecting--these activities are all harmful to the being of the student.  As such students move on to adult educational institutions they are taking what they have learned and, like adults, insisting upon it for themselves.  "Don't you dare criticise or offend or challenge me."

In such an academic climate, or fundamentally anti-academic climate, it is not surprising, says Lukianoff, that some students feel empowered to demand the squishing and even burning of words and images they don’t like – after all, they have been educated from day one to believe that their self-esteem is sacrosanct and must be defended from other people’s brute thoughts and speech. ‘There’s a very predictable result, which is that if you allow the ultimate trump card against free speech to be a claim that “I’m offended”, then people learn very quickly to say they are offended.’

O'Neill focuses upon the "shrinking violet" driver of this aggressive censoriousness.

The new censoriousness on campus – which, for the record, is as profound a problem in Britain as it is in the US – highlights some worrying new trends in today’s war on freedom of thought and speech. It shows that it is not only the state or even sections of the authorities that demand censorship today – all sorts of advocacy groups, educators and youthful organisations now crusade like modern-day Torquemadas for the silencing of their opponents. And it demonstrates the extent to which censorship today both springs from and reinforces a new degraded view of human subjectivity, a view of individuals as fundamentally psychologically fragile and thus in need of protection from allegedly dangerous ideas. In such circumstances, censorship can even be re-presented as a public good, designed not necessarily to police morality in any old-fashioned way but rather to manage relations between the various fragile sections of society.

But is is more serious than that.  It has long ago moved out of the realms of educational theory and practice to the realms of law, justice, and constitutional imperatives.  And at that point, it transforms into force, oppression, and repression.  To be discriminated against is a violation of rights--we are told.  It is fundamentally unjust.  To be criticised for one's beliefs is tantamount to being discriminated against for one's race or gender.  In each case, one's personhood is under attack.  One's rights are being truncated.  Thus, a truly just society will move aggressively to restrain and restrict speech. 

As the West moves from soft-despotism to increasingly hard-despotism, let us not forget that it was the strong preference of communist totalitarian states in the previous century to call themselves democratic.  As the state oppressed, spied upon, imprisoned, and tortured people it remained democratic oppression, democratic imprisonment, and democratic torture--the people's totalitarianism from beginning to end.  The West is now well along that dangerous road. 

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Read his personal website here.