"...you cannot control what happens inside someone’s head. You cannot stop them from thinking a thought. All you can do is make them too afraid to speak that thought aloud. You can find proof of this in the fact that, in a recent survey, under the cover of anonymity, 12% of Saudis declared themselves to be atheists and in the fact that the Arabic version of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion has been downloaded 10 million times. Even in the world’s most repressive country, in which unbelief is punishable by death and people are not free to utter the mildest skepticism aloud, in their minds, some of them are free. Fear and threats are poor persuaders. Arguments must be refuted with arguments; speech can only, in the long run, be effectively countered with speech..
When you take away someone’s right to speak, you also infringe on the
rights of others to hear them. You prevent those students from learning
how to confront, challenge, sift, weigh and evaluate the ideas of
others. These are vital skills.
I learned far more discussing things
with my fellow students than I ever did in lectures. We must learn to
counter speech with speech, to have the tools to respond with arguments,
rather than violence. And we must also understand that being mistaken
in a theory or wrongheaded about an idea is not, in itself, prove of
iniquity. I strongly disagree with Peterson on a number of issues, but I
feel able to refute his arguments because I have read his work and
heard him speak.
Watching students harass and threaten him and hearing
about the death threats and kidnapping threats he and his wife and
children have received, on the other hand, makes me feel pity for him as
a person. Ideas should be critiqued, but human beings deserve our
respect and protection.
When we make decisions about who to allow to speak and who to silence,
we often make very poor decisions. Even in the West. That’s why reformer
Ayaan Hirsi Ali met with death threats from some members of the Muslim
community in Australia where she wanted to speak out against practices
like child marriage and FGM, while the group’s imam gives talks on such
subjects as why and how a good Muslim should beat his wife with
impunity.
When we don’t allow ideas to be fully discussed, when we don’t encourage
people to read and listen to the actual work of scholars and writers
before passing judgement upon them, we get quote mining, witch hunts,
careers and reputations ruined and families faced with death threats —
often on the basis of partial, twisted or even completely fictional
misrepresentations of their ideas. In all fairness, we must always allow
controversial figures to put their own case. We must retain a principle
of innocent until proven guilty.
I often hear the argument that if speakers are allowed to make certain
bigoted generalisations about specific minority groups or utter racist,
sexist or homophobic slurs, this will create a hostile atmosphere which
will effectively silence members of minorities. While I believe we
should all strive to be as polite, kind and considerate of people’s
feelings as possible, I don’t think we should allow specific words to
become taboo, as it gives those terms a disproportionate power over us
and can even increase prejudice since it may seem that the thing itself
is so horrific that we shy away from even naming it.
Queer was the
Voldemort word of my own generation. Usually uttered in a sotto voce
hiss, it was an accusation which could make the victim’s blood run cold.
Now, it is one of the most politically correct of terms and its power
to hurt has been completely neutralised. Likewise, we cannot base our
morality on our fear of confronting the possibility of certain ideas.
Our psyches must become resilient enough to not be cowed by a collection
of syllables. And our ethical instincts must be robust enough to
explore, investigate, face up to truth and still be able to decide on a
course of action which will maximise human happiness...
This doesn’t mean bad ideas should go unchallenged. On the contrary,
we can only effectively challenge bad ideas if we actually know what
they are. So I want to know what someone like Richard Spencer is telling
his followers. I don’t want it shrouded in mystery. I don’t want him
made into some kind of a martyr. I don’t think punching him convinced
anyone to oppose him. I want to know what he is saying because I want
his racist, white supremacist ideology exposed, derided, ridiculed and
debunked. Give him the rope. Let him hang himself..
The New York Times article falls into one further fallacy which is the
result of a deep blindness to the author’s own privilege. I call this
the Pastor Niemoeller Fallacy. The writer believes that he will always
be one of those in charge of deciding who is allowed to speak and who
must be silenced and that his own free speech rights will therefore
always remain protected, even as those of others are infringed. This is
selfish. But also, I think, naive.
And not just because, on a worldwide scale, those silenced are
overwhelmingly atheists, liberals, dissidents and freethinkers.
We are
living in the age of Trump. It’s surely not that far-fetched to imagine
an America under right-wing rule where you are forbidden to teach
evolution, where sex education is a taboo topic, where your career could
end if you didn’t pay lip service to Christianity. There are already
plenty of pockets of repressive anti free-speech authoritarianism on the
right, too. Just look at Liberty University, where staff have to agree
to teach their students the ludicrous fiction that the world is only
6,000 years old.
We have to make a clear distinction between speech and violence.
When we
use hyperbolic language, such as claiming that not using someone’s
preferred pronouns is an act of assault or that criticizing Black Lives
Matter is an erasure of African Americans, we are equating speech and
violence. That’s something we should never do: even when we find the
speech in question despicable, disgusting, deeply offensive or vile.
Because if just saying something is considered an act of violence, that
means it’s OK to counter it with actual violence. That will convince no
one. And simply perpetuate a cycle of hate.
We also should never assume that the fact that people are outraged by
something someone has said or allegedly said means that the speaker
deserves to be punished. They placed Galileo under house arrest; they
burnt Giordano Bruno at the stake; they terrorized Salman Rushdie. And,
most recently, a mob of hundreds of his fellow students beat promising
young intellectual Mashal Khan to death, on campus, in broad daylight.
Don’t silence anyone. Answer speech with speech. Always."
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