How the Left, here and abroad, is trying to shut down debate — from Islam and Israel to global warming and gay marriage
By Mark Steyn
These days, pretty much every story is really the same story:
- In Galway, at the National University of Ireland, a speaker who attempts to argue against the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) programme against Israel is shouted down with cries of ‘Fucking Zionist, fucking pricks… Get the fuck off our campus.’
- In California, Mozilla’s chief executive is forced to resign because he once made a political donation in support of the pre-revisionist definition of marriage.
- At Westminster, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declares that the BBC should seek ‘special clearance’ before it interviews climate sceptics, such as fringe wacko extremists like former Chancellor Nigel Lawson.
- In Massachusetts, Brandeis University withdraws its offer of an honorary degree to a black feminist atheist human rights campaigner from Somalia.
- In London, a multitude of liberal journalists and artists responsible for everything from Monty Python to Downton Abbey sign an open letter in favour of the first state restraints on the British press in three and a quarter centuries.
- And in Canberra the government is planning to repeal Section 18C — whoa, don’t worry, not all of it, just three or four adjectives; or maybe only two, or whatever it’s down to by now, after what Gay Alcorn in the Age described as the ongoing debate about ‘where to strike the balance between free speech in a democracy and protection against racial abuse in a multicultural society’.
I heard a lot of that kind of talk during my battles with the
Canadian ‘human rights’ commissions a few years ago: of course, we all
believe in free speech, but it’s a question of how you ‘strike the
balance’, where you ‘draw the line’… which all sounds terribly
reasonable and Canadian, and apparently Australian, too. But in reality
the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and
strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild
temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all.
So screw that.
But I don’t really think that many people these days are genuinely
interested in ‘striking the balance’; they’ve drawn the line and they’re
increasingly unashamed about which side of it they stand. What all the
above stories have in common, whether nominally about Israel, gay
marriage, climate change, Islam, or even freedom of the press, is that
one side has cheerfully swapped that apocryphal Voltaire quote about
disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to
say it for the pithier Ring Lardner line: ‘“Shut up,” he explained.’
A generation ago, progressive opinion at least felt obliged to pay
lip service to the Voltaire shtick. These days, nobody’s asking you to
defend yourself to the death: a mildly supportive retweet would do. But
even that’s further than most of those in the academy, the arts, the
media are prepared to go. As Erin Ching, a student at 60-grand-a-year
Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, put it in her college newspaper the
other day: ‘What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal
arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.’ Yeah, who
needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate diversity
by enforcing conformity.
The examples above are ever-shrinking Dantean circles of Tolerance:
At Galway, the dissenting opinion was silenced by grunting thugs
screaming four-letter words. At Mozilla, the chairwoman is far more
housetrained: she issued a nice press release all about (per Miss
Alcorn) striking a balance between freedom of speech and ‘equality’, and
how the best way to ‘support’ a ‘culture’ of ‘diversity’ and
‘inclusiveness’ is by firing anyone who dissents from the mandatory
groupthink. At the House of Commons they’re moving to the next stage: in
an ‘inclusive culture’ ever more comfortable with narrower bounds of
public discourse, it seems entirely natural that the next step should be
for dissenting voices to require state permission to speak.
At Brandeis University, we are learning the hierarchy of the new
multiculti caste system. In theory, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the
identity-group fetishists dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. If
conservative white males were to silence a secular women’s rights
campaigner from Somalia, it would be proof of the Republican party’s
‘war on women’, or the encroaching Christian fundamentalist theocracy,
or just plain old Andrew Boltian racism breaking free of its redoubt at
the Herald Sun to rampage as far as the eye can see. But when the
snivelling white male who purports to be president of Brandeis (one
Frederick Lawrence) does it out of deference to Islam, Miss Hirsi Ali’s
blackness washes off her like a bad dye job on a telly news anchor.
White feminist Germaine Greer can speak at Brandeis because, in one of
the more whimsical ideological evolutions even by dear old Germaine’s
standards, Ms Greer feels that clitoridectomies add to the rich tapestry
of ‘cultural identity’: ‘One man’s beautification is another man’s
mutilation,’ as she puts it. But black feminist Hirsi Ali, who was on
the receiving end of ‘one man’s mutilation’ and lives under death
threats because she was boorish enough to complain about it, is too
‘hateful’ to be permitted to speak. In the internal contradictions of
multiculturalism, Islam trumps all: race, gender, secularism,
everything. So, in the interests of multiculti sensitivity, pampered
upper-middle-class trusty-fundy children of entitlement are pronouncing a
Somali refugee beyond the pale and signing up to Islamic strictures on
the role of women.
That’s another reason why Gay Alcorn’s fretting over ‘striking the
balance’ is so irrelevant. No matter where you strike it, the last
unread nonagenarian white supremacist Xeroxing flyers in a shack off the
Tanami Track will be way over the line, while, say, Sheikh Sharif
Hussein’s lively sermon to an enthusiastic crowd at the Islamic Da’wah
Centre of South Australia, calling on Allah to kill every last Buddhist
and Hindu, will be safely inside it. One man’s decapitation is another
man’s cultural validation, as Germaine would say.
Ms Greer has reached that Circle of Tolerance wherein the turkeys
line up to volunteer for an early Eid. The Leveson Inquiry declaration
of support signed by all those London luvvies like Emma Thompson, Tom
Stoppard, Maggie Smith, Bob Geldof and Ian McKellen is the stage that
comes after that House of Commons Science and Technology Committee —
when the most creative spirits in our society all suddenly say: ‘Ooh,
yes, please, state regulation, bring it on!’ Many of the eminent
thespians who signed this letter started their careers in an era when
every play performed in the West End had to be approved by the Queen’s
Lord Chamberlain. Presented with a script that contained three ‘fucks’
and an explicit reference to anal sex, he’d inform the producer that he
would be permitted two ‘crikeys’ and a hint of heavy petting. In 1968,
he lost his censorship powers, and the previously banned Hair, of
all anodyne trifles, could finally be seen on the London stage: this is
the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Only four and a half decades after
the censor’s departure, British liberals are panting for the
reimposition of censorship under a new ‘Royal Charter’.
This is the aging of the dawn of Aquarius: new blasphemy laws for progressive pieties. In the New Statesman,
Sarah Ditum seemed befuddled that the ‘No Platform’ movement — a
vigorous effort to deny public platforms to the British National party
and the English Defence League — has mysteriously advanced from
silencing ‘violent fascists’ to silencing all kinds of other people,
like a Guardian feminist who ventured some insufficiently
affirming observations about trans-women and is now unfit for polite
society. But, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it’s hard to
stop. Why bother winning the debate when it’s easier to close it down?
Nick Lowles defined the ‘No Platform’ philosophy as ‘the position
where we refuse to allow fascists an opportunity to act like normal
political parties’. But free speech is essential to a free society
because, when you deny people ‘an opportunity to act like normal
political parties’, there’s nothing left for them to do but punch your
lights out. Free speech, wrote the Washington Post’s Robert
Samuelson last week, ‘buttresses the political system’s legitimacy. It
helps losers, in the struggle for public opinion and electoral success,
to accept their fates. It helps keep them loyal to the system, even
though it has disappointed them. They will accept the outcomes, because
they believe they’ve had a fair opportunity to express and advance their
views. There’s always the next election. Free speech underpins our
larger concept of freedom.’
Just so. A fortnight ago I was in Quebec for a provincial election in
which the ruling separatist party went down to its worst defeat in
almost half a century. This was a democratic contest fought between
parties that don’t even agree on what country they’re in. In Ottawa for
most of the 1990s the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition was a
chap who barely acknowledged either the head of state or the state she’s
head of. Which is as it should be. Because, if a Quebec separatist or
an Australian republican can’t challenge the constitutional order
through public advocacy, the only alternative is to put on a black
ski-mask and skulk around after dark blowing stuff up.
I’m opposed to the notion of official ideology — not just fascism,
Communism and Baathism, but the fluffier ones, too, like
‘multiculturalism’ and ‘climate change’ and ‘marriage equality’. Because
the more topics you rule out of discussion — immigration, Islam,
‘gender fluidity’ — the more you delegitimise the political system. As
your cynical political consultant sees it, a commitment to abolish
Section 18C is more trouble than it’s worth: you’ll just spends weeks
getting damned as cobwebbed racists seeking to impose a bigots’ charter
when you could be moving the meter with swing voters by announcing a
federal programmne of transgendered bathroom construction. But, beyond
the shrunken horizons of spinmeisters, the inability to roll back
something like 18C says something profound about where we’re headed: a
world where real, primal, universal rights — like freedom of expression —
come a distant second to the new tribalism of identity-group rights.
Oh, don’t worry. There’ll still be plenty of ‘offending, insulting or
humiliating’ in such a world, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Mozilla CEO
and Zionists and climate deniers and feminist ‘cis-women’ not quite au courant with
transphobia can all tell you. And then comes the final, eerie silence.
Young Erin Ching at Swarthmore College has grasped the essential idea:
it is not merely that, as the Big Climate enforcers say, ‘the science is
settled’, but so is everything else, from abortion to gay marriage. So
what’s to talk about? Universities are no longer institutions of inquiry
but ‘safe spaces’ where delicate flowers of diversity of race, sex,
orientation, ‘gender fluidity’ and everything else except diversity of
thought have to be protected from exposure to any unsafe ideas.
As it happens, the biggest ‘safe space’ on the planet is the Muslim
world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a
climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there’s nothing to
debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development
Programme’s famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated
in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the
last 1,000 years. Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are
intimately connected: a culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on
race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that
will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.
As American universities, British playwrights and Australian judges
once understood, the ‘safe space’ is where cultures go to die.
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