By
Charles C. W. Cooke
Friday, November
06, 2015
‘Sticks
and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”
Or so we
were told as children. Of late, alas, this maxim has come under sustained fire,
as the conflation of physical violence and verbal criticism has become de rigueur. Hate-speech laws, which are
now ten a penny outside of the United States, rely heavily on the preposterous
presumption that opprobrium and disdain are equal in severity to battery and
bloodshed, and that the state is capable of sensitively superintending their
use. Once, it was accepted as a staple of the Enlightenment that any government
that attempted to closely supervise speech was destined for disaster, if not
for tyranny. Now, even the home of John Stuart Mill has slid backwards into the
mire. In Britain each year, as across Europe, tens of thousands of people are
investigated by the police for nothing more than being awful in public. And the
voters applaud like seals.
By way
of sobering example, take the news that an E-list British celebrity named
Ursula Presgrave was this week found guilty in London of “malicious
communication.” Her crimes? To have written on Facebook that “anyone born with
down [sic] syndrome should be put down” before they are subjected to the
“pointless life of a vegetable,” and to have saved onto her smartphone a series
of memes that mocked the disabled. When asked by prosecutors whether she
accepted that she had committed a crime, Presgrave confirmed her liability
without so much as a fight. Within the month she will be sentenced, and, depending
on the judge’s mood, required to spend half a year in prison or to pay a £5,000
fine. Another hammer has been used to crack another nut.
That a
putatively free person so readily accepted the prospect of being jailed for
holding ugly opinions should provide some insight into the contemporary state
of intellectual liberty in Britain. Presgrave is without doubt a fool, and her
views are morally repugnant. But that is the business neither of Her Majesty’s
government nor of those under who operate beneath its carapace. There were no
threats made here; there was no imminent danger or incitement to law-breaking;
no conspiracies were uncovered. Instead, a person of below-average intellect
and questionable ethical calibration issued an abstract opinion that both the
majority and the chattering classes found abhorrent. In a country whose people
are at liberty, this cannot be a crime. To the contrary: Toleration of
precisely this sort of culturally egregious expression is what distinguishes
free nations from tyrannies. By prosecuting Presgrave for what amounts to
nothing more than thoughtcrime, Britain has erred badly.
Bad as
they are in and of themselves, the charges leveled against Presgrave are
rendered all the more grievous when one observes that the opinion for which she
was disciplined is both culturally normal and legally protected in Britain.
Under that country’s laws, mothers who are expecting children with Down’s
syndrome and other disabilities are permitted to abort right up to the moment
of birth — months after the statutory
limitation on termination have kicked in elsewhere. There is no reasonable way
to comprehend this legal distinction other than as a reflection of the belief
that disabled children are often better off dead — the very contention, in
other words, that landed Presgrave in court. Judging by its behavior, we have
no choice but to conclude that the British government considers not only that
words can hurt as much as sticks and
stones, but that they can hurt more.
Under the current rules, the doctor who kills an unborn child a week before his
due date is worthy of praise and legal immunity, while the minor celebrity who
exalts the use of euthanasia a few days later in the cycle is deserving of
incarceration. How’s that for a rabbit hole?
When
lambasting the state’s inexorable temptation toward suppression, it is typical
to cast the censors as the villains and the people at large as their innocent
victims. In a dictatorship or a monarchy or when the government is at a remove,
this habit makes perfect sense. But in Britain, a representative democracy, it
does not. As the Daily Mirror
confirms, Presgrave’s arrest came after a number of her fellow citizens lodged
formal complaints with the police. It is a regrettable fact that to read of a
free-speech outrage in England in 2015 is invariably to read of a group of
vexed civilians willfully “shopping” to the authorities somebody they dislike.
Nobody, it seems, is safe from the informants: not celebrities, not
journalists, not university administrators, not drunken social-media users, not
faithful Muslims, not unfaithful atheists — nobody.
If you step out of line, somebody, somewhere will call the cops. Is there
nobody left in Britain who will hang up with a chuckle?
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