I have the great pleasure to bring before you all an excellent article from Dr. Terri Murray, PhD, Director of Studies at Hampstead College of Fine Arts & Humanities, London, UK. In this piece Dr Murray critiques an article by Marcia Chatelain in the Leftist American magazine ‘Dissent’ on the subject of freedom of speech. The original Dissent piece which this writer is commenting on can be found here, or via the links section at the bottom of this article. I’ll not say much in the way of comment on this piece or the background. as this thought provoking and well written article speaks for itself.
Free speech by Dr Terri Murray PhD
Marcia Chatelain calls free speech a ‘straw man’ in a recent DISSENT MAGAZINE article from April 25, 2016. She erroneously refers to the free speech lobby as “right wing”, which could not be further from the truth. While some right wing speakers have expounded right wing views under the protection of free speech, the principle itself is anything but right wing.The principle requires that the state must remain neutral with respect to content, so that freedom to express ideas applies equally to all speech and all speakers. This neutrality prevents the state from assuming an infallibility that it does not possess. Additionally, it stops the state from dictating ‘morals’ to individuals about matters that are private and not significantly dangerous to others. Many things that people regard as distasteful or even morally repugnant are nevertheless protected behaviour insofar as it does not cause significant harm to others, eg. eating pork, sleeping with people outside of wedlock, using contraceptives, watching porn,or watching FOX News, or wearing a mini-skirt.
Freedom of expression is one of the key pillars of liberal political philosophy. But deception works in mysterious ways and Chatelain’s article is a case in point. She begins by presenting the attacks on freedom of expression at Universities as completely innocuous, describing them variously as a humble request to “celebrate Halloween respectfully” or to consider students’ “fear and anxiety in the face of racist and homophobic threats”. Who could resist such emotionally- charged appeals to cliché taboos like disrespect, intimidation, racism and homophobia. The whole point of defending the freedom to argue is that using emotive buzz words is a propaganda ploy, not an argument. The very brand of prejudicial language Chatelain deploys is a key tool in the propagandist’s armoury, because it’s force can be sufficient to end discussion and silence debate. Chatelain must know this, as she uses loaded terms abundantly to persuade her reader that proponents of free expression must be flogging bad things (racism, homophobia, disrespect) that any reasonable person (like herself) would reject. Interestingly she omits the word ‘sexism’ from the opening of her article – the emotional appeal section — as it does not conjure the ‘right’ kinds of emotions. Feminism is not sexy at the moment as it clashes with religious cultural practices. People feel mixed about attacking sexism, as they are not sure whether or not culturally-backed sexism is really sexist, whereas there is unanimous agreement that racism is wrong because only white people do it. In fact it is so obviously wrong that anyone who would support that kind of free speech must be that kind of person (right wing). ‘Sexist’ doesn’t push the lefty groupthink auto- sympathy button as readily as ‘racist’ and ‘homophobic’ do. So she leaves it aside.
Chatelain returns to her tendentious use of rhetoric to misdescribe offensive language, ideas or rhetoric as “threats” because this word insinuates a direct connection to an act, and violent acts are illegal for good reasons. Liberals draw a line between free speech and the kinds of acts that might be truly harmful to a person, and not just to his or her feelings. Speech is only a threat when someone says they are going to carry out illegal acts against you, in situations where this is a real likelihood. This very seldom happens in university lecture halls and few speakers on campuses would have any incentive to risk the legal consequences of actually assaulting members of the audiences to whom they speak. Then there are more personal and informal interactions. These might hurt the feelings, pride or ‘worldview’ of other students, but only in the same way that being made to take bad tasting medicine or to work out vigorously hurts the body. That is, these views are uncomfortable but enduring them (tolerating them) does no damage to the “victim’s” permanent interests as a progressive being…probably quite the opposite.All ideas, even bad ones, stimulate thought. As a young person at school and even at university, I was subjected to generous helpings of sexism and homophobia. Sometimes it made me resent the people who promoted such backward ideas and I would have preferred that they not express their views in public (some of them were my teachers). But none of their ignorant speech made me less able to think, and I suspect it had the opposite effect. It made me want to expand my exposure to (better) thoughts and ideas, and to hear more views from different thinkers, and better ones. It also made me think about their poor arguments, and I got busy teaching myself how to argue back. That is what university is all about.
There is another important issues raised by the emotional appeal to buzz words like “racist”, “homophobic”, “sexist” or “Islamophobic”. If we have not actually heard an argument it is impossible to assess whether these hot-button terms apply to the ideas expressed. We beg the question if we say that an idea is racist, Islamophobic, or sexist in advance of having listened to the view or explained why. How do you know that argument X is racist? Is it racist because racism is bad and you “just feel” that this argument might also be bad? One has to prove, not just assume, that an argument is an instance of sexism, homophobia or racism. Furthermore, why are we so afraid of homophobic or racist ideas, when these ideas are among the easiest in the world to argue against? Poor arguments ought to give us the least worry, not the most.
If we cease to care what words like ‘racism’ actually mean, and instead just want to apply them as blanket dismissals of all controversial speech, then we have lost the plot. We are no different from Bible-toting fundamentalists who need not explain anything since the mere fact that it is in the Holy Book means that it is infallible. Anti-racism should be a vivid, living ethic, not a dead dogma that we unthinkingly apply more promiscuously than a two-peckered Billy goat.
Chatelain also uses misleading language when describing censorship on campus rhetoricalKy as mere “calls to improve campus diversity and equity”. This is a huge inversion of the situation since censorship would do the exact opposite: it would limit diversity of viewpoints and ideas on campus to those we already “just know” are acceptable. This is really just a recommendation to short circuit discussion of alternative views and challenging opinions.
Next she pulls rank. We, she asserts (in her role as a campus academic), are the ones who do the hard work of trying to maintain “maintain our communities in the face of ideological and social discord.” Yes, that is exactly what her article aims to do – to maintain a community of like-minded people and to protect it from ‘ discord’ that might disrupt the harmony of ideas within its borders. A university should be a place where ‘discord,’ albeit not violence, can flourish, and that is why freedom of speech is appropriate there more than anywhere.
“Our ideas”, says Chatelain, are only effective when they emerge from substance, not straw.” What substance? Surely what makes an idea substantial is that it has withstood the testing that comes from a healthy clash with other viewpoints. Untested ideas can have no substance, which is why she has to appeal instead to emotional rhetoric.Next she says college campuses are exceptional places, unique and “unlike other public and private spaces” because ideas that circulate there infuse (infect?) all of the university and are like a beacon to the rest of the world. But if there is any way in which universities really are exceptional to the rest of the spaces and places on the plant, then it is because they are supposed to be places where people can be exposed to new and different ideas — other than the ones in which they have been nurtured from birth. Yet the lofty ideal of higher education, says Chatelain, rapidly disintegrate along “fault lines of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability and citizenship”. Wow – those ideas again: the ones that are supposed to be so sacred that any rational being would automatically kowtow before them. Where’s the actual argument? There isn’t one. So instead she waxes into a quasi-religious incantation, urging her reader to take heed since the “words we utter on campus”….carry the weight of a mutual agreement we share to enrich and illuminate the mind and the self.” What does this even mean? It appeals to a sense of community bond that no one has actually contracted to, despite her insinuation. And worse, it transforms anyone who dares to dissent into some sort of infidel. The word ‘unsafe’’and phrases like ‘culture of hostility’ surface again soon after this to remind the reader what is at stake. Any failure to obey will result in dire consequences. The aim of the ‘victims’ then is the reasonable, innocuous one of “asking for civility”. But this misrepresents speech as violence, as harmful acts. Speech is not tantamount to assault or battery, but the metaphors here imply it over and over again. When speech does feel most harmful and most like it has the force of a blunt instrument it is because there is no possibility of dissenting from it. Where speech is repressed, and dissent forbidden,, and where violence or the coercive force of the law are used to suppress unorthodox ideas, they become truly harmful. Any genuine examples of ideas actually injuring people always involve this combination of violent coercion and the suppression of dissenting views.
Maybe sensing how badly her arguments are failing so far, she tries a new tack: agreeing with her opponent, whom she calls “Mr. Free Speech”. She remarks how the possession of a right to free speech does not entail a right to protection from scrutiny, a view to which Mr. Free Speech would wholeheartedly agree! In fact, I think “he” said it first, and she just finished arguing the opposite. Implicitly such ideas as she espouses ARE exempt from scrutiny. This is why free speech is so important: even ideas that we take for granted are eternally right need to be tested so that we know why we hold them, and so that we do not apply them unscrupulously in contexts where they may not really apply. Chatelain reminds us that disagreement, refusal to listen, and protest are all acceptable. Yet this is exactly what her opponents (defenders of free speech) have always said, so why is it better now that she has hijacked it as ammunition against them? Maybe since her arguments don’t work, she’s borrowing from the opponent? The “straw man” is her own if she is pretending that Mr. Free Speech would not agree with that point – HE is the one who invented it!
Having been forced to resort to Mr. Free Speech’s own ideas to “defeat” him, Ms. Chatelain finally goes for another target, “Mr. Other Side”. This fellow is deceptive, she claims, because all too often he is called upon to step in as a panacea when critical thinking starts to get too painful. He is Mr. Nice Guy, the one who can always be a diplomat and dissuade us from our hard won convictions, even when we have legitimately challenged bad ideas. He sounds an awful lot like the type who would bring the sort of “civility” on campus that Chatelain suggests we ought to promote. Now she’s not so sure. Somehow Chatelain stumbles to the conclusion that the defence of free speech is so “empty” that the universities must resist the pressure to give into it. One could say the same of her reasons for doing so.
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Dr. Terri Murray, PhD. is Director of Studies at Hampstead College of Fine Arts & Humanities, London, UK. She is a regular contributor to Philosophy Now magazine and The New Humanist.
Links
Original article from Dissent magazine
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/free-speech-campus-straw-man
