News from the New Party

In praise of heresy

Claire Fox in the Independent stands up for free-thinkers:

I fear that we are engaged in modern-day witch hunts. Western societies seem to have become prey to powerful illiberal and intolerant influences and have rediscovered the charge of heresy as a means of silencing those who question prevailing cultural orthodoxies. Healthy heresy - described in more enlightened times as critical thinking, sceptical enquiry, or even free speech - is again being hunted down. That is why no subject should be treated as a taboo...

A new priestly class has arisen to police secular heresies. Say the wrong thing on race and watch the CRE swoop zealously to demand you retract, are sacked, are humiliated. Their viciousness and intolerance would make medieval cardinals blush. Dare you challenge global warming orthodoxy, and watch everyone from the Royal Society to environmentalists shout "blasphemy"? James Watson may not have been shown the instruments of torture as Galileo was but his treatment speaks to some chilling similarities between the new and old inquisitions.

Take 19-year-old drama-school brat Emily Barr being dragged from her bed to the Big Brother diary room at 3.30am, confused and groggy, while the disembodied voice of Channel 4 authority condemned her for using an "unacceptable word" ("nigger") while she pleaded hysterically that she was not racist. She was then asked to leave the house in only a night-gown, and holed up in a hotel before being placed in the hands of a psychologist - the modern equivalent of the stocks. As we watch young Emily, Professor Watson and Jim Davidson drummed out of respectable society and recant, we know we are all being told to be careful what we say, and who we offend. We are encouraged by every telling-off to become more and more obedient and super-cautious lest we too are humiliated.

One of the key weapons of the new inquisitions is the notion of denial. The label of "denial" - applied with ever-greater promiscuity - expresses the illiberal notion that contentious issues are beyond debate. It is the most pungent and effective tool in shutting up those who challenge today's received wisdom. It began with Holocaust denial. Few of us would want to get into an argument with an actual Holocaust denier - why argue with lunatic theories? But the criminalisation of Holocaust denial has led to the repression of other denials of conventional wisdom. To be accused of denial is to be outcast...

Other "thought crimes" - whilst not against the law - also invoke the pernicious denial label, most obviously the accusation of "climate-change denial" attributed to anyone who does not wholeheartedly embrace global warming orthodoxies.

So what do you do if you have serious doubts about the received wisdom, but you know that your ideas will be denounced as heresy? If we stigmatise those who question "self-evident" truths, how will interrogative debate survive?

The way things are going, it won't.  It's not supposed to.  We are in the grip of a new totalitarianism promoted by the New Inquisition which seeks a monopoly on permissible thought, and which has the power to discredit any transgressor.  One such inquisitor is Steven Rose, the academic and energetic proponent of "anti-Zionist" boycotts of Israeli academics and universities.  Rose comments (regarding the controversy over the Nobel laureate James Watson's reported views on race):

Responses to my comments on the cancellation of James Watson's lecture tour fell, predictably, into two categories. On the one hand there were those (like Sue Blackmore, self-confessedly ignorant of the scientific issues) who argued that Watson had the right to speak his mind whether he was correct or not - that is, for absolute freedom of speech however unpleasant, malicious, hate-filled or untrue the content. If you believe this, there is nothing I can say that will convince you and you are free to end up as a victim or hero of British libel laws or hate speech legislation. That is, I think human rights trump free speech rights, and you don't, irrespective of the fact that your freedom of speech, for instance to abuse and encourage prejudice or violence against gays, ethnic minorities or feminists may damage the human rights of gays, ethnic minorities or feminists.

In response, Oliver Kamm remarks:

I find unexceptionable Rose's insistence that "heritability of group differences ought to be as irrelevant to today's biology as phlogiston theory is to chemistry or 'intelligent design' to evolution". I have no more training in chemistry and biology than the psychologist Sue Blackmore has. It doesn't take specialist knowledge, though, but merely a respect for scientific reasoning to understand the difference between, say, evolutionary biology, which proceeds by evidence, and "intelligent design", which is dogma. The first of those fields is science; the second is pseudoscience.

But that is a different issue from the political premises that Rose advances in the paragraph I've quoted. The notion that "human rights trump free speech rights" is chilling. The best case I can make for it is the proposition that free speech, while desirable, needs in a civilised society to be balanced against other values. Even then, it's a pernicious argument. In the form that Rose adopts, it's also peculiarly dishonest.

Consider the work that the conjunction "or" is doing in Rose's argument. Libel and hate speech are not the same thing; nor are they the same type of thing. Few would argue that an individual complainant should have no recourse to law to correct errors of fact that, if left uncorrected, would lower the public's estimation of him. Some do make that argument. I don't, even - indeed, particularly - in the case of minor figures. (The corollary, of course, is that minor figures have no more right than anyone else to abuse the legal process in the hope of suppressing accurate but damaging information. I have pleasing and unexacting experience of thwarting such activity.)

Hate speech is an expression of prejudice and bigotry about a group or its members based on common characteristics. Why does an expression of bigotry - as opposed to a specific defamatory accusation against a person, or a direct act of discrimination on morally irrelevant grounds such as race or sex - transgress human rights? Likewise, the phrase "encouraging prejudice or violence" conjoins different things. Encouraging violence is incitement to crime, and is already dealt with by criminal law. Why does encouraging prejudice violate someone's human rights?

The answers to these questions must be obvious to Rose, or he wouldn't have left them unstated. But they are not obvious.

Kamm further cites Jonathan Rauch:

Equating "verbal violence" with physical violence is a treacherous, mischievous business. Not long ago a writer was charged with viciously and gratuitously wounding the feelings and dignity of millions of people. He was charged, in effect, with exhibiting flagrant prejudice against Muslims and outrageously slandering their beliefs. "What is freedom of expression?" mused Salman Rushdie a year after the ayatollahs sentenced him to death and put a price on his head. "Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." I can think of nothing sadder than that minority activists, in their haste to make the world better, should be the ones to forget the lesson of Rushdie's plight: for minorities, pluralism, not purism, is the answer. The campaigns to eradicate prejudice--all of them, the speech codes and workplace restrictions and mandatory therapy for accused bigots and all the rest--should stop, now. The whole objective of eradicating prejudice, as opposed to correcting and criticizing it, should be repudiated as a fool's errand.

Fox, Kamm and Rauch are right.  Rose is dangerously, perniciously wrong.  The effort to remove from individuals the right to think for themselves by declaring certain concepts out of bounds has its ultimate expression in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where a new language, Newspeak, was devised to make politically correct thoughts unthinkable.  As Claire Fox has suggested, heresy is a human right, too.