Don't Divide Us

cancel culture

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On Freedom Of Speech and The Culture Of Offence

Like others before him, in France and elsewhere, Samuel Paty was murdered because he offended. Nico McDonald at medium.com argues we need to be free to offend and that well-intentioned attempts to protect certain ethnic or religious groups from the feeling of being offended, results in an infantilisation that can be profoundly destructive for everyone:

The inability of some, particularly former liberals, to criticise behaviour by people from particular religious or cultural groupings — and to claim offence on their behalf — may seem like a modern expression of anti-racism and an attempt not to ‘fuel the racists’ fire’. But the reality is that their attitude infantilises the people in their groupings. It imagines they are not capable of achieving the moral standards of our society, in the same way that Europeans regarded ‘the native’ during periods of their colonisations. It is ‘othering’. You cannot defeat racism by racialising society.

 

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On The Importance Of The Right To Offend

Kenan Malik at the New Humanist argues that the right to offend is necessary for social progress and that those lacking power need freedom of speech more than the powerful themselves. Written in 2014, in the wake of last week’s murder of teacher, Samuel Paty, for having given offence, Malik’s words are more important than ever:

 

The notion of giving offence suggests that certain beliefs are so important or valuable to certain people that they should be put beyond the possibility of being insulted, or caricatured or even questioned. The importance of the principle of free speech is precisely that it provides a permanent challenge to the idea that some questions are beyond contention, and hence acts as a permanent challenge to authority. This is why free speech is essential not simply to the practice of democracy, but to the aspirations of those groups who may have been failed by the formal democratic processes; to those whose voices may have been silenced by racism, for instance. The real value of free speech, in other words, is not to those who possess power, but to those who want to challenge them. And the real value of censorship is to those who do not wish their authority to be challenged. Once we give up on the right to offend in the name of ‘tolerance’ or ‘respect’, we constrain our ability to challenge those in power, and therefore to challenge injustice.

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John McWhorter on why academics fear for their freedom

A national reckoning on race, John McWorther writes, has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials.

This episode represents a pattern in the letters, wherein it is white students who are “woker” than their Black classmates, neatly demonstrating the degree to which this new religion is more about virtue signaling than social justice. From the same well is this same professor finding that the gay men in his class had no problem with his assigning a book with a gay slur in its title, a layered, ironic title for a book taking issue with traditional concepts of masculinity—but that a group of straight white women did, and reported him to his superiors.

Overall I found it alarming how many of the letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China. A history professor reports that at his school, the administration is seriously considering setting up an anonymous reporting system for students and professors to report “bias” that they have perceived. One professor committed the sin of “privileging the white male perspective” in giving a lecture on the philosophy of one of the Founding Fathers, even though Frederick Douglass sang that Founder’s praises. The administration tried to make him sit in a “listening circle,” in which his job was to stay silent while students explained how he had hurt them—in other words, a 21st-century-American version of a struggle session straight out of the Cultural Revolution.

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The University of Edinburgh’s crusade against the Enlightenment

Edinburgh University takes yet another step to distance itself from its most important intellectual legacy – the Scottish Enlightenment – as it has decided to rename its David Hume Tower after some students claim that the 18th-century philosopher’s views on race cause them distress.

There is little that is exceptional about Hume’s views on race. Like the vast majority of people living in the 18th century, he interpreted human and social differences through the prism of race. But the fact that Hume had racist views is one of the least interesting and least important things about him. He was an energetic foe of the dogmas and conventions of his era. His philosophical scepticism and atheism were frequently denounced by those who upheld the prevailing moral order.

It is unlikely that those who claim to be ‘distressed’ by Hume have actually bothered to study his work. If they had, they would realise that the writings of this remarkably sceptical philosopher are an important intellectual resource that those opposed to prejudice can draw upon. He may have been a prejudiced man, but his writings were animated by a critical spirit that challenged prevailing dogmas. That is why those of us who are committed to free thinking continue to regard him as an intellectual giant.

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Kirsty Miller on her now cancelled resignation letter to the British Psychology Society

Psychologist Kirsty Miller found the organisation’s behaviour deeply concerning, and after deliberating for a substantial amount of time, decided to resign. She also wrote a letter explaining her decision to leave — feeling it may be useful for ‘the powers that be’ in the BPS to understand why a member of several decades felt she could no longer face being associated with the organisation. The letter was published, the editor then added an addendum, and then it was removed.

Read the full letter here
 

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The Tyranny of Groupthink

“Call it ‘Wokeness’ or ‘Groupthink'”, what we are seeing the spread of a “virus of ideological conformity”, says Josef Joffe.

“Goodthink,” to recall Orwell, is the project of a passionate minority privileged not by birth and station, but by achievement, acquired status, and job security afforded by their place in the knowledge economy and the public sector. The task of “Goodthink,” Orwell explained, was “to make all other modes of thought impossible.”

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Why Black Lives Matter are so dangerous

Nick Buckley wrote a blog post criticising Black Lives Matter, and found himself targeted by an online petition to have him removed as CEO of the youth charity he founded. Here’s his account of what happened and how he fought back.

I wrote the blog not to express a personal opinion, but because I have dedicated the last two decades to improving the lives of working class young people. I set up a charity using my own redundancy money and savings. I could not stand by and watch the next generation of young people be brainwashed into thinking that their country is inherently racist, that systems are constructed to make them fail, and that the police are out to kill them. This goes against everything the charity stands for, and more importantly, goes against everything that we know to be true. A positive attitude, hard work and personal responsibility is the key to success in the UK today. Guaranteed. I see it every day while supporting young people to succeed.

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The problem with identity politics

In this Q&A interview, Asad Haider, author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, reflects on the contemporary meanings of ‘identity politics’:

Too many irreconcilable things have been conflated in the contemporary usage of the term “identity politics”. We are supposed to believe that, for example, the mass movements for racial and economic justice that constituted the civil rights movement, or the anti-capitalist militancy of the Black Panther Party, are somehow in the same category as neoliberal elites who use the language of social justice to discourage policies that would address economic inequality. These elites, who control the supposed left wing of mainstream politics in the United States, claim that addressing economic inequality would not overcome the inequalities of race and gender. They completely obscure the reality that, for example, better wages and union representation in the workplace could help provide protection from sexual harassment by employers, and could help raise the standard of living for a great deal of people of colur. The Fight for 15 campaign, ridiculed by Democratic Party elites, is one example of such an initiative. But because these elites use the language of social justice, their rhetoric is extremely influential in establishing false oppositions between so-called “identity politics” and “class politics.”

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The threat to civil liberties goes way beyond ‘cancel culture’

We are facing a “historic disaster”, argues Leigh Phillips writing in Jacobin. Today’s so-called progressives “have become indifferent to free speech, or, worse, come to view the defense of free speech as something foreign to the Left and a weapon of oppression”.

One might expect the liberal-left to be among the strongest defenders of free speech at work, and of the right of workers to say what they wish, but too many have enthusiastically called upon employers to fire workers for alleged reactionary speech outside of the workplace, in effect cheering on at-will termination of employment, and embraced the multibillion-dollar human resources department–organized and employer-supervised “sensitivity training” industry, imposing top-down workshops, where workers are petrified they might say the wrong thing.

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We’re facing a tsunami of censorship

“The authoritarian tide is rising”, warns Toby Young. It’s now “open season on mavericks and dissenters”. How can we push back?

If you publicly challenge any of the sacred nostrums of the social justice left and you work in a school, a college, a university, an arts company, a public broadcasting organisation, a tech company, a charity, a local authority or, indeed, Whitehall, you are at risk of being cancelled. How do I know? Because in February I set up the Free Speech Union to protect those being targeted in this way and in the past month we’ve been contacted by people in all of these fields who have either been fired, suspended or are ‘under investigation’ for having said or done something controversial, usually on Facebook or Twitter.

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