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| Make Buns, not Guns |
If we're going to talk about free speech and political correctness (as Jordan Peterson loves to do to the applause of reactionary audiences), we ought to begin by examining our terms. I begin this post by maintaining that there really is no such thing as free speech, and neither is there anything definitive[1] about political correctness. Both are what could be called memes[2], and memes can be catch phrases that pretend to be real "things" and are most useful in an age of social media to rally support among people who are less interested in factuality than in ideological short answers to problems.
Allow me an example around book burning and censorship. I maintain that
all of us are in favour of censorship; that each of us has a threshold beyond
which written text has no business being tolerated. Our thresholds simply rise
and fall at different places and over time, depending on a variety of factors. Do
I believe that a children's book depicting sexual violence ought to be burned? Where
do I stand on whether to take Huckleberry Finn off the school curriculum
because of racist language? Should a high school teacher be sanctioned for
making Hitler's Mein Kampf required reading for his History class?
Everybody supports censorship, so
saying "I oppose censorship" is a false statement unless followed by
qualifications indicating where one's thresholds lie.
The same principle applies to free speech and political correctness. Speech that is "free" includes only speech that falls under one's threshold where utterances are deemed acceptable/unacceptable. Children's mouths are washed out with soap if they swear; adults are taken to court and punished if they publicly defame another person, lying in a court trial is called perjury and is a crime for which the perjurer is punished. Speech is not and has never been free in its absolute sense, although the parameters in which speech is not punishable has an aura of freeness.
In practice, certain speech is treated like assault and falls outside commonly
accepted parameters of free speech. Here again, to blanket-defend free speech
is to imply that speech is either free or it's not free; arguing for a polarity
which doesn't exist in fact.
And I haven't even mentioned the
promulgation of false information that's become an issue of no small significance
in this internet age.
I have at times supported the argument
that distasteful or dissenting speech be allowed a platform, particularly on
university campuses. My reasoning for that has been based on a principle that the
expression of that which is objectionable, counter-cultural condemns itself in
the act. There are problems with that approach, of course, one being that unless
an argument in opposition to the unpopular viewpoint is being made in parallel, we risk the
gullible being seduced by false or questionable information.
Most legitimate advocacy for free
speech is about the expression of political opinions contrary to those held
by a majority. In effect, the concern is that we're pushing to have non-mainstream
statements made punishable. I would say most citizens of Canada are in favour
of considering unpopular opinions unpunishable, a right under the Constitution.
We are even tolerant of much speech at the margins: "Mayor Smith is a
jackass," said at coffee row does not generally result in litigation. It's
more likely that if Mayor Smith gets wind of Jake Jones going about saying
stuff that impinges on his reputation, that he would simply reply with,
"It takes one to know one," and get on with his day.
Considerable free speech advocacy tends
to apply the constitutional right to much more than the expression of
alternative political opinion. The key to determining what speech can be freed
and what speech cannot lies in the effect on the hearer(s). To use speech to ruin a reputation is not substantially
different from using matches to burn someone's house down.
We've all become conscious, I think, of movements that through publicity, sanctions, and/or what's being called cancel culture, have been decrying, even shaming members of the public for uttering certain kinds of speech and writing. Referring back to free speech, this phenomenon could be seen as pressure to move certain speech and writing from the acceptable to the unacceptable corral, or vice versa.
You
mustn't refer to black people using the "n" word, or to indigenous
women as "squ..s." It's called political correctness, and if by
politics, we mean the total of arrangements a people have agreed to in order to
live together in harmony and peace, then political correctness is probably the
right expression. There are ways of addressing people, speaking about people
that can prevent or disrupt harmony, and those asserting that this
"correctness" goes too far have their own unique criteria for what
should be included in correct speech, and what should not.
The argument goes thus: persons are having their freedom of speech curtailed by an expanding political correctness sensibility well beyond what's necessary to maintain harmony. Here again, what is politically correct and what is not isn't a yes/no matter. To say that one is being criticized simply for reasons of political correctness is disingenuous. If I declare I can say unpopular things as my right, then it follows that others have the right to declare what I said bullshit, defending that utterance with the same argument.
That old adage, "You can say anything …
once," has merit in that it's not a legal question so much as the fact
that majorities elect governments (theoretically) and they also have power to
counter unpopular utterances … in ugly ways sometimes. It's how human cultures
have always worked and if you wish to champion an unpopular cause, it's
advisable to weigh the cost, accept the consequence.
On the other side, I'm reminded of Galileo who
scientifically determined that the earth was not the centre of the universe …
and said so. He was brought up before a church tribunal and ordered to recant
on peril of his excommunication. He did. But only in words. Legend has it that
as he exited the event he muttered, "… and yet it (the earth) moves!"
We need mavericks who steer us out of ignorance into knowledge and ought to
thank people like Galileo and Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther who weighed the
consequences that conservative stubbornness and resistance to change would
bring down on their heads, and went ahead with an unpopular mission. What we
don't need are mavericks who drive us back from knowledge into a jungle of
misinformation in order to sabotage progress.
In the North American culture as
we find it today, public conversation is poisoned by those who weaponize memes
like political correctness, freedom of speech, leftist/rightest, censorship,
etc., to the point where citizens are herded into adversarial camps stamped
with labels they assume to be definitive. An anatomical analysis of the January 6, 2021
attack on the US Capitol should open our eyes to the power hidden in this strategy.
Interviews with participants produced no deep philosophical discussions, but
rather a recitation of memes deliberately planted in the soil of America by
Donald Trump and those riding on his coattails.
We don't want to witness a repeat
of the post-World War I struggle between communists, fascists and democrats in Germany. "Almost
from the start, the Weimar Republic came under attack from within. Right-wing
extremists, meanwhile, used their political power to oppose any democratic
system, and to blame the country's WWI defeat on a conspiracy between
socialists and Jews. Although the moderate government-maintained power,
violence erupted on the streets between the left and right. It was a rough
start for this democracy." [3]
Relative memes of the time included, "Juden 'Raus," (Jews get
out), "Sieg Heil" (Hail to Victory), "Vaterland"
(fatherland) and "Lebensraum," (living space, i.e., creating space
for the Fatherland by reclaiming land once occupied by Germany and conquering
new territory). The denouement of this internal super-partisanship included, of
course, WWII, the Holocaust, the deaths of millions in the conflicts and the massive
destruction of European infrastructure.
"It
can't happen here" is a childish, foolish sentiment.[4]
The NAZI movement started small but gathered steam as the chaos and hardship of
the country persisted under massive resentment, hyperinflation, decimation of
the middle class, increasing poverty and finally, the Great Depression of 1929.
Hard times nourish the desire
for a messiah with an ideology: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and so many other
ordinary persons gifted with rhetorical skill and a basket of catch phrases, hate
memes, and the support of those who hope to achieve greatness on their
coattails.
Perhaps the questions about free speech, political
correctness and related subjects are answered best by John Pavlovitz in If
God is Love, Don't be a jerk, p. 48:
"In this life, you've surely hurt other
people and you've done so in one of two ways: either you've accidentally
injured someone by saying or doing something that you weren't aware was
offensive or painful to them or you've intentionally wounded them because that
was either partially or fully what you were trying to do from the beginning. In
the former case you were human and in the latter case you were a jerk—and
oftentimes you're the only one who knows the truth [of motives behind your
actions]."
Or perhaps it's all summarized by the
essential humanness that's common to all members of the species, namely their
capacities for love of the other versus love of self. One path leads to
cooperation and compassion, the other to conquest and power, power that can
only come from forms of subjugation.
Were we
all human in Pavlovitz's statement and not bent toward being jerks,
free speech and political correctness wouldn't have any currency
because following in Christ's footsteps, our faith in the efficacy of love
would guide our words and our actions. Like Lion parents teach their children
to hunt as their primary task in life, we must see our duty as adult humans to
raise our children to be human and not jerks.
[1]
Definitive, meaning that a word matches precisely that to which it refers.
[2] Merriam Webster: an idea,
behavior, style, or usage that spreads from one person to another in a culture.
[3] For a dramatic, fictionalized portrayal
of the descent into chaos during the Weimar Republic, I recommend the Netflix
series Babylon Berlin.
[4] It Can't Happen Here is a dystopian novel written in
1935 by Sinclair Lewis. I reviewed this novel in 2017 on http//:readwit.blogspot.com
and the book is available from multiple sources online. Seen by many as prophetic of
the rise of Donald Trump, it was conceived in the Weimar era, in the midst of
the Great Depression.
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