I was knocked out by a piece by Brendan O’Neill over at Spiked. What stood out for me was his call for words to be recognised as having power, not in the manner that the censorious left do, which is to see words as ‘violence’, but as having the ability to ‘fuck things up’ when maybe society needs such a thing.
I was also taken by Mr O’Neill’s description of the two different types of free speech advocate, those who know that words have power to ‘unsettle’ and bring about change, sometimes positive change and those who see free speech as more of a societal safety valve who Mr O’Neill said ‘play the same game as their opponents’.
Mr O’Neil said:
Too often today, believers in the liberty to speak baulk at the truth about words: they hurt. No, they are not violence – equating speech with violence is foolish and wrong. But speech is powerful, it can wound, it can induce pain in some of those who hear it. If speech did not have this power – to unsettle, to overthrow, to change minds and worlds radically – what would be the point of defending it? Surely we defend speech precisely because it contains so much extraordinary energy, because it can be a ‘blizzard’, because it does wound.
Thinking about it, he’s got a point there. There would be no point in defending free speech if we only defended the speech that was inoffensive or which was ringed by boundaries.
Mr O’Neill added:
Some defenders of free speech end up, no doubt unwittingly, playing the same game as their opponents, by arguing that the heat and fury does indeed have to be drained from society every now and then. Only they think free speech is a better tool for achieving that draining than censorship. Where the censors insist that social control is necessary to maintain civility and calmness, the more liberal voices say that free civil dialogue makes a better fist of that task.
I must admit that there have been times when I have made the societal safety valve argument regarding free speech and I still believe that this argument has value, but I also agree that there is a power in words, and because that power exists, the right to speak freely for all must be both protected and enhanced. As Mr O’Neill said there is no real point in protecting free speech if that speech isn’t truly free or if that speech is already moderated via self-appointed filters whether they be of a technical, cultural or governmental nature. That’s not free speech, that’s a simulacrum of it. Proper free speech is the right of all of us no matter what we look like or what philosophical or political opinions we hold, to look at any given situation and say ‘that’s a load of bollocks that is and I’ll tell you why’.
Mr O’Neill continued:
As one columnist argues, civility is ‘the biggest weasel word of all’. ‘[W]ords like “respect” and “civility” [are used] to mark the boundaries of free speech’, he says. So on some campuses, free speech is defended, but in the name of civil dialogue, and the consequence is not that different to when free speech is controlled in the name of avoiding harm or offence – that is, colour and daring are discouraged, in preference for the soothing hug of free civility, or therapeutic censure. But freedom of speech is not social work.
I agree here. What goes on in our universities under the label ‘free speech’ is that simulacrum of free speech that I mentioned earlier. It looks like free speech, it may even call itself free speech, but it’s not free unless you have the ability in debates to say ‘that’s bollocks and I can show you why’. We have not got free speech unless all speech, with the reasonable exception of speech that would credibly incite immediate violence as per the US First Amendment rules, that might be good, bad or ugly has a chance to be heard.
Please give Mr O’Neill’s excellent and thoughtful piece a direct read via the link below:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/06/17/the-revolutionary-power-of-heresy/
The defences of freedom of speech and of opinion put forward Centuries ago by people like Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill were pretty much irrefutable.
Just because an opinion is unpopular doesn’t mean that it is wrong. There have been many times when the unpopular opinion turned out to be the correct one. If we are not going to accept that everyone is allowed their opinion be it wise or foolish, who is going to pass judgement over whose opinion is correct and therefore allowed and whose opinion is incorrect and therefore should be silenced? Presumably someone who is omniscient and literally knows everything, rather than someone who only thinks that they do.
Agree there. There have been occasions, such as the campaign for Civil Rights in the USA, when those calling for equal rights were in the minority in their areas but it turned out they were correct. Like you I’d rather have open free speech than some sort of Star Chamber deciding what is right and what is wrong.
Also there is this from the header at the Not A Lot Of People Know That website.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.
Good quote there.