By Mark Steyn
Saturday, April 19, 2014
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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