The new F-word

Shame, blame and cancel culture; why we need to talk about freedom of speech

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned”. - Richard Feynman, physicist

So I feel like I’m stating the obvious here, but apparently this is no longer obvious to many people who share the same cultural origins as me; freedom of speech is fundamental to democracy.

Without the ability (the right) to speak against and challenge leadership and other power structures in society, we do not have a democracy; we have an authoritarian state at best, a totalitarian one at worst.

And I for one, do not want to live in an authoritarian society.

But that’s exactly what’s happening here in the UK, and it’s not only the government who are fostering this narrowing down of what is acceptable, it’s also a segment of the population (not enormous, but loud).

Isn’t that something?

People who have the privilege to live in a liberal (ish), democratic country, choosing to curtail their own rights.

Wild.

I mean, the human psyche is a powerful and paradoxical beast, but nonetheless this blows my mind.

Everyone’s offended

So the argument of the current zeitgeist is that what is deemed offensive must be removed because it’s hurting people’s feelings, and because (far more importantly) it may negatively impact certain minorities’ safety and rights.

This is a tangled and almighty foe to do battle with so please give me some grace in what will most certainly be a fractured and incomplete assessment of the situation (I am not a scholar on all this, just a citizen who is disturbed by some of the current trends).

Not only must offending words be removed (this is one thing) but the person, the human being that uttered them must be shamed and blamed for having uttered them in the first place, even (and this feels important) if they absolutely did not mean any offence when they spoke/wrote them.

Accountability, teachings moments, helping each other be better humans, YES. Shaming, blaming and cancelling, NO.

It is inhumane and dehumanising, and therefore a bloody bad idea all round for everyone involved. And the fact that this kind of behaviour is becoming normalised in the formerly liberal West, is profoundly disturbing to me.

I really wish this was a passing fad, but I’ve been wishing that for a few years now and it’s showing no signs of abating; in the world of academia particularly the flames are licking higher and higher, with some institutions fighting back and others meekly cowering before the amassed demands of their student bodies. More and more journalists are defecting to Substack in order to write the way they want, rather than how a particular audience dictates.

It is the nature of culture to change.

It is the nature of the young to centre and presence things that are no longer deemed acceptable by the new generation. This is good, healthy, cultural evolution.

But as some super wise dude/ette said at some point, it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. And some other dude said, How you do one thing is how you do everything.

And beyond the psychosocial wisdom of those nuggets, here’s what I know about energy:

• What you give out, will come back

• What you do to others, you do to yourself

A zero-sum game?

The vitriol, spite and hatred in the new social justice movement worries me deeply. Surely it’s meant to be about increasing our circle of care, our precision of care and our depth of empathy for all people? How can you stand for that when you are actively celebrating dehumanising behaviour?

If one person rises and another falls, we’re still in the same place. Social justice should not be played as a zero sum game; that seems to me to be the very antithesis of all it should stand for.

Who is the arbiter of who deserves to feel pain and exclusion? Who is the arbiter or what is allowed to be said and what is not?

Book banning and burning (!) is on the rise in the US.

WHAT?! But yes, it really is. And much of it centres around educational venues; places where people go to have their minds opened, to think critically about society and to learn to form their own opinions through consuming diverse material, particularly material that differs from what their family/culture of origin have offered them thus far.

You may know that the Nazi book burning frenzy was started by students;

“The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism.” (Source: Wikipedia)

Sooooo sometimes youth is a little extreme.

And that’s ok; a holistic, healthy, intergenerational culture can absorb a bit of crazy and gently rebuke when necessary with the earned wisdom of a long life lived and the perspective gained therefrom.

The trouble is, a lot of the banning requests are coming from parents. People who grew up in a liberal democracy and are now actively working against those values.

Ok, so some content in some old (or new) book is deemed insalubrious for tender minds. But the implication in simply removing it is that young people have no ability to form their own opinions of things (listen to The Offspring’s response to this form of censorship in this very eloquent clip).

It’s seriously insulting, and if my parents had ever tried to keep me from any information whatsoever you can bet your ass I’d have chased after it to my last breath assuming it must be something absolutely fascinating.

Anyway.

Social censorship

There’s a quote (whose origins are much contested):

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Now, obviously (I hope) overtly offensive speech is not ok (hate speech being defined as “offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics (such as race, religion or gender)”).

But EVERYTHING ELSE must be allowed. Certainly with regard to historical books, their testimony of a time when social norms were what we now consider to be utterly heinous teaches the next generation about what is possible when the human shadow reigns more freely.

This is not education that young people should be missing out on.

The encounter with the individual and collective shadow is something that comes online during adolescence, and if a society is to call itself responsible it must be met, not with bypassing and suppression but with presence, care and competence.

These are powerful teaching moments that allow us to consider, evaluate and reflect on values and ethics and thus difficult material should not be stripped from the curriculum or from public discourse.

Here’s another nice little tidbit from the world of psychology:

What you resist, persists.

And what you suppress will surface eventually and it will likely emerge in a far more dangerous form.

On that premise, I agree with the republication of Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. I haven’t read it (I have no desire to go anywhere near that toxicity) but from what I know of the content there is a lot of deeply sociopathic and indeed psychopathic material.

It’s abhorrent. To anyone with any semblance of humanity, it’s monstrous. And it’s loud and obvious in its monstrousness. There’s nothing subtle or tricksy about what he was saying; he made his feelings about how things should be very clear.

So say you read it - you recoil. Unless of course, you have latent sociopathic tendencies and a metric ton of displaced anger waiting to be projected onto an available scapegoat. And yes, that’s a thing.

But we cannot protect culture from a minority of sociopaths by suppressing our children’s right to think for themselves. What kind of adults will they be if they don’t get to have those conversations about profound wrongs?

There are too many aspects for me to address here but suffice to say I feel that censoring what we can say (outside of the obvious realm of hate speech) is a very slippery slope, and the bottom of that slope is a dung heap of authoritarian dogma.

Let’s not slide down.