So, it’s 2017, and we’re going through a moral panic about freedom of speech. For cynics, the peril in which the right to freedom of speech finds itself is yet more evidence that we’re entering a new political dark age. This culture war is mainly being fought over the issue of protest and no-platforming right-wing speakers on US university campuses, and thanks to Anglo-Saxon borrowing Australian and British conservatives are also getting in on the act. Many smart, liberal(-ish) writers who should know better – Andrew Sullivan, Jon Haidt, Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher - and papers of record like The Atlantic, Guardian and Boston Globe are piling on. The latest skirmish involves lefty West Coast radio station KPFA cancelling a launch event for Richard Dawkins' new book on account of his excessive and discriminatory singling out of Islam as part of his New Atheist polemics against all religion.
Don't Panic . . . .
Moral panics are ridiculous in general, relying as they do on the cherry-picking of highly-emotive anecdotes, and this one in particular galls me. Do people wringing their hands about free speech in student politics not remember what being a teenager/twentysomething was like? Universities are always going to be full of young people who take their beliefs too seriously and have poor impulse control. Part of becoming an adult is learning how not to engage with people who hold different views: which strategies are effective (mainly ignoring the trolls) and which aren't. The moralists want to take away young idealists’ capacity to make mistakes and have these kinds of confrontations for themselves. Talk about coddling!
Moreover, there’s no practical solution here that doesn’t involve a serious violation of student rights to protest and assembly. Aware of the power of student movements to have a real impact on social debates, conservatives have always sought to shut down campus democracy and turn tertiary institutions into degree factories. By protraying the inconveniences of a handful of (overpaid) loudmouths as a threat to Western civilization and democracy, the boosters of this narrative play into the hands of those whose own committment to personal liberty and the free contest of ideas is conditional and limited.
Moreover, there’s things about the people pushing this panic that I find repellent. Such men, and they are almost exclusively middle-aged white men, frequently combine their punching down at young progressives with deeply misguided views of their own about feminism and Islam. Dawkins is in many respects the poster boy for this kind of public "intellectual". As much as they profess to care about freedom of speech, they mainly seem interested in their own freedom as powerful men to express bigotry unchallenged. In the end, the so-called ‘liberals’ and centrists who spread the myth that freedom of speech is under assault are at best being useful idiots for conservatives who want to shut down (progressive) student political activism.
. . .but there is a discussion to be had
And yet on the particular issue of freedom of speech, I agree there is an debate here. Of course there is: when the rights of individuals rub up against one another, politics is required to resolve the issue of where the boundaries lie. Readers of Politics for the New Dark Age will recognise that I take a strong stance on individual rights and I don’t believe that no-platforming and boycotts are a particularly effective form of protest. Odious people should air their odious views, if only to demonstrate how genuinely ridiculous they are to and to prevent them from claiming martyrdom. Using social power to censor offending speech does in fact reveal authoritarian tendencies among those progressives that pursue it. I would prefer that intellectual strife be embraced as a generative and creative process for social learning.
But, unlike the Haidts, Dawkins, Sullivans and Mahers of the world, I just don’t care very much about the freedom of speech of conservatives. Culture war skirmishes at universities are not in the top ten issues affecting the ordinary voter, and probably wouldn’t break the top one hundred. The Dawkins issue is particular no-brainer: by sponsoring a book launch, KPFA was associating their brand with Dawkins' and they are well within their rights to protect their reputation by disassociating themselves from him. For both sides on this one, the question of delineating the correct boundaries of rights appears to be less important than the tribal affiliation of the speaker. In other words, this is a political issue that can only be resolved through power, not an issue of principle that can be resolved through argument.
Respectability Politics
The moral panic over free spech is a classic example of how social position shapes political personality, and issue about which I have written previously. For affluent white (liberal) men (including myself), there are very few ways in which they [we] do not benefit from the status quo. Libertarian views are overwhelmingly more likely to be held by privileged men (nb: this relationship does not go the other way: men are not necessarily all libertarians), and as a result freedom of speech has much higher salience to them. This is particularly the case when either a) otherwise progressive individuals worry that immature student protesters might make them embarrassed around their other elite friends, or b) if they suspect (on the basis of their own more crypto-conservative views) that one day they might find themselves subject to protests.
Centrist elites hold firmly to the belief that society is already sufficiently meritocratic (of course it is, they're at the top!) and that steps by the left to address racial, gendered or economic inequalities will only get in the way of action on the yuppie social issues they care most about. When inter-sectionalists ask them to empathise with how their preferred policy stances can affect other identities and interests in unforseen ways, they perceive that as an ask to diminish their own power and perspective rather than expanding it. My own book, Politics, does not employ identity politics as an ideological framework. But as a tactic, coalition-building amongst groups facing multi-dimensional oppression, and building linkages across issues, is the only way that progressives can and must win. Even (especially) if it causes existing elites within the left some discomfort in adjusting to new realities.
In this regard, the moral panic over freedom of speech suggests itself to me as a manifestation of respectability politics. There’s a quote from Martin Luther King Jr that seems apt for discussion:
“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the [greatest] stumbling block in [the] stride toward freedom is. . . the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; . . . Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
So as often through progressive history, we have a bunch of middle-aged affluent, centrist men dictating to a group of young people (with a high proportion of women and minorities) how they should behave in their pursuit of political ends. If they are genuine about wanting what’s best for the left, they need to get out of the way, and stop punching down in the name of their own self-serving aggrandisement.