My speech is free, but I am not so sure about yours. You are an annoying patriarchal male who expresses yourself clumsily about women. Or you are too obviously in the grip of your privilege for me to talk to you about my experience of race, class, gender, geography, history, politics, policy, art… and more to come. At worst, I think you are so “toxic” that the debate would be purer and the world a nicer place without your dim ideas frankly. They are uncomfortable and distressing. I feel offended and the more I feel this, the more burning my resentment becomes.
And once I have decided this for reasons which seem pretty good to me, I can advocate to have you cancelled from lectures, articles, social media or anything where I might have to actually engage with what you say. So go away or, at least, be prevented from having a platform where I have to hear from or see you.
I paraphrase for brevity, but this is the core of a pernicious argument against freedom of speech which has been rumbling through the public realm and expanding its tentacles. Hitherto, its natural home has been on the intolerant or dopily acquiescent fiefdoms of the Left. It has, like many bad ideas, proved pervasive. A desire to push awkward voices out of the public square now springs up with disconcerting frequency on the Right and in officialdom too. It has done so in a bureaucratic over-reach with a political backdrop in the case of Dan Kaszeta, a chemical warfare expert at the RUSI institute, who found himself banned and then thankfully unbanned from a Ministry of Defence conference because he had adverse views to the Government on Brexit and asylum policy. A campaign by Kaszeta found that most Government departments had blacklisted speakers critical of policy, usually out of an excessive interpretation of the guidelines. But still. Every autocracy I have written about, from East Germany to Russia and China, started out claiming to speak for the many and then ended up censoring any view that departs from the official or approved one.
A desire to push awkward voices out of the public square now springs up on the Right and in officialdom
It is true that sustained campaigns or personal attacks are a waste of time, unless both sides are clear they are there to exchange views on something more profound than whether Tories are evil and venal and Labour is venal and stupid. Government events are not obliged to book Private Eye’s great caricature Dave Spart or his EDF-supporting mirror image. But a generous amount of disagreement is good and useful.
I have spent a lot of time working with Radio 4 on a series called Across the Red Line intended to bring people who disagree together in a more productive way than cancelling each other or shouting. Pluralism at its core is about understanding why others do not think as we do, especially when it angers us. So it worries me to see a public intellectual of the calibre of Kenan Malik on his history of thinking about race, from a position of inquiry, not rigid ideology, attacked by the ex- and still noisy home secretary Priti Patel as unsuitable to address civil servants under a programme called (of course) the Open Innovation team, whose purpose is to have civil servants listen to scholars, to figure out where their research might be useful or challenging.
Patel thinks it is a “betrayal” of people who voted Brexit, but there never was a referendum clause which said that any challenge thereafter should be banned. That is Leninism on the Right, not Conservatism. To declare my own default mode, I think many elites, perhaps especially highly-educated liberal ones, often got their just deserts when Brexit happened and are still tone-deaf about their distance and snobbery. But that is an argument for more vigorous, engaged and fearless argument — not less.
Echo chambers are expansive and seep across the political spectrum. It is, after all, convenient, divisive and attractive to the worst clickbait to foment outrage without enlightenment or real argument.
When Schiller’s great work, Don Carlos, recently in opera form at Covent Garden, boils down to tensions over crown, family, loyalty and beliefs, it peaks in his 18th-century rallying cry, “Grant us freedom of thought!” Because without that, there is no freedom that can speak its mind. Left or Right and down the centuries, that is the battle to unite us.
