Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?

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Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?
Mick Hume

Concise and Abridged EditionIn this blistering polemic, veteran journalist Mick Hume presents an uncompromising defence of freedom of expression, which he argues is threatened in the West, not by jackbooted censorship but by a creeping culture of conformism and You-Can’t-Say-That.In a fierce defence of free speech – in all its forms – Mick Hume’s blistering polemic exposes the new threats facing us today in the historic fight for freedom of expression. In 2015, the cold-blooded attacks in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists united the free-thinking world in proclaiming ‘Je suis Charlie’. But it wasn’t long before many were arguing that the massacres showed the need to restrict the right to be offensive. Meanwhile sensitive students are sheltered from potentially offensive material and Twitter vigilantes police those expressing the ‘wrong’ opinion. But the basic right being supressed – to be offensive, despite the problems it creates – is not only acceptable but vital to society. Without a total freedom of expression, other liberties will not be possible.

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Copyright (#uc8c4c337-a155-58ba-bef1-cdfae73df041)

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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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

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008126407

Ebook Edition © May 2016 ISBN: 9780008204389

Version: 2016-04-26

Dedication (#uc8c4c337-a155-58ba-bef1-cdfae73df041)

For Stella and Isabel, may they always think what they like and say what they think

Contents

Cover (#u5f021170-18a4-592d-a1c3-cf1cc22ad9ae)

Title Page (#ulink_faafe3ea-9c8e-5981-a6a6-5bb1117326f0)

Copyright (#ulink_c6b19a09-a4ae-5907-8502-0cca87a0f72c)

Dedication (#ulink_71c72213-ef64-53c0-83d2-df623d14ee16)

Epigraph (#ulink_faf01ff6-2ab6-5d4a-bdc3-32d88769e86f)

Introduction to the concise edition (#ulink_2fb91bdf-1a8e-5fd2-9ed3-7bfe19d1cf98)

1 A few things we forgot about free speech (#ulink_60132cef-079c-5128-ab4a-55273ba6a78b)

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’

The fear of free speech (#ulink_7de22710-0652-5842-a635-71f5728025b1)

Appendix: The Trigger Warnings we need

Notes (#ulink_9a62c1b3-d83d-5238-abd9-90e5b3f1e238)

About the Publisher (#ud2894d49-523b-5f24-a11b-d155f27fbd02)

Epigraph (#uc8c4c337-a155-58ba-bef1-cdfae73df041)

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 (#uc8c4c337-a155-58ba-bef1-cdfae73df041)

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 (#u75b82c41-3a6d-500f-b862-ac3e024a9b26)

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. Those ‘Je Suis Charlie’ placards had hardly been cleared from the streets before another international consensus emerged, 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 street.

Comedy too has come under the watchful 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.