No Platform!
This is one of those posts that could always have a news hook, but doesn’t need a specific one. Someone has recently written about being “cancelled” or “no platformed,” and other people have wrung their hands about it in public and bemoaned the censoriousness of the left, the necessity of exposing ourselves to new ideas, the criticality of debate, the problem of “bubbles” or staying inside our comfort zones. Others will be raging about free speech and the right to offend and such. The topics this week will be different from those in a year’s time, but only slightly. Change a noun or two and the arguments are all recycled versions of things that have been broadcast on a continuous loop for years.
Nobody in the media appears to be able to ask any specific questions when faced with these cries of unfair censorship, instead uncritically regurgitating the lines that have been fed to them. When someone says, “These are the honestly held beliefs of real working-class patriots,” would it really be too much trouble to ask, “What views, specifically, do you mean here?” When someone claims the Woke Left just want to censor people who disagree with them, could we not drill down slightly further into the substance of the disagreement?
Free speech arguments are irritating because they are never about what they pretend to be about. Nobody in the whole world, no society in history, has or believes in the kind of “free speech” that people complaining about cancel culture or no-platforming claim to believe in, and that’s a good thing. Yet we are required to take these arguments seriously, to go along with the pretence anyway.
There are already very good, very justified restrictions on “speech” as a concept, some socially imposed and others which come with the added weight of state sanction. You cannot express your deeply held beliefs about the supremacy of the white race by painting a swastika on a synagogue. You cannot threaten people with violence, shout slurs at a bus full of people, deny the reality of the Holocaust, or claim that your wonder elixir cures all ailments without demonstrating that to be true. We have laws against libel, slander, hate speech and false advertising, and you would struggle to find many people who would argue against any of these things.
We also have the much older, broader concept of “reputation.” Every society trades in reputation. It is a basic cornerstone of human interaction, without which you cannot really have a society at all. What you do and what you say change how people feel about you, and those feelings will alter how they relate to you, and whether they want to continue relating to you. How you move through society will be impacted by your reputation: whether people like you, whether they think you are likely to do what you say you will do, and so on and so forth.
In any society there are things considered “beyond the pale,” things which will impact your reputation if you say them. These things might be, depending on historical context, “The king was not appointed by God to sit on the throne” or “Women should not be allowed to go to work.” Some things, like the n-slur for black people, used to be acceptable and are now beyond the pale. Some things, like saying you have sex with people of your own gender, used to be beyond the pale and are now acceptable.
None of the people arguing for “free speech” are ever suggesting that the general rules be changed. Nobody is ever suggesting that we try to operate in a society without reputation, without the basic concept of socially unacceptable speech. What they are really arguing about is where those boundaries are drawn. The actual principle that some things should be socially unacceptable to say is already the ground truth, and has been for millennia. The argument is about which things should be socially unacceptable to say.
There are arguments about the boundaries of speech all the time, and as times change so does our understanding of what kinds of speech are beyond the pale. Forty years ago, it would have been acceptable to say AIDS was God’s judgement on the sinful homosexuals for undermining traditional Christian society. That was a mainstream position held by the President of the United States. Now, it is much more likely that saying that out loud would result in social sanction and would make you unelectable or unemployable. I think that’s a good thing. And it happened, as these things do, not by the natural arc of the universe bending towards justice, but through a process of conflict. The fight over language was not just about what is or is not “offensive” to say, but about how that language reflects the values held to be good by society at large; whether a large minority of people’s sexuality and gender presentation should mark them out as unpeople or whether they, too, should be treated as fully human.
The people who make the most noise about free speech maximalism, by and large, have no problem making the argument that other people’s speech should be restricted, whether that’s trans people appearing in public, Palestinians talking about their experiences under Israeli occupation, or any of the other issues which they think should be considered beyond the pale. Their arguments simply presuppose that the things they want restricted are incontestably unacceptable, the things they want to say incontestably permissible.
It is a project, in other words, whose aim is not to expand the boundaries of socially acceptable speech, but to curtail it. The calls for “freedom of speech” around contentious issues are, just like the New Eugenics described in my previous posts, a defence of existing power structures dressed up as an insurgent movement of underdogs.
It is a way of declaring “This is how it is and ever shall be, and those who disagree are outside of the acceptable boundaries of society,” while also affecting the stance of people pushing back against an imagined power structure. This is a much more flattering self-image for people to hold. Most people don’t like the idea of being the white people standing outside schools that are desegregating. They don’t like to think of themselves as the people whom history will look back on as the villains. That’s why it’s also easy to sell them on the narrative that it’s the Queer PC One World Order Globalist Conspiracy that’s forcing this on the unwilling population from above.
This is not just about rolling back the norms of allowable speech to the 1970s. It is part of a broader project to maintain the narrative of the busybody left, a bunch of middle-class freaks who want to just tell everyone off for singing Baa Baa Black Sheep or expel Christian children for not saying their pronouns in English class. This “loony left” is constructed in the popular imagination as outside of the political mainstream in totality. They are inherently illegitimate, and not to be listened to.
This achieves two things. Obviously, it makes it more difficult to have conversations about racist or transphobic language at all, locks in bigoted speech as normal, and gives people social license to ignore or even aggressively reject attempts to shift those norms. It also associates broader left-wing criticism of the status quo – for example that housing and food should be affordable – with “unserious” stereotypes of censorious scolds and yoghurt-weaving hippies.
We have to analyse this stuff within the broader contexts and systems and understand how they connect. Not in the sense of a top-down conspiracy, but how extractive, colonialist capitalism and reactionary politics are mutually reinforcing. How each impacts the other and creates space for the feedback loop to continue.
Free speech absolutism is a racket, aimed at limiting speech while claiming to expand it. But we should not simply put the success of this racket down to the gullibility of the marks in the media who go along with it. Rather, we should recognise this as another situation where their selective stupidity is helpful to them, furthers their careers and bolsters the systems that sustain them. We should not take their arguments seriously, but we should also recognise that pointing out the fundamental unseriousness of these arguments is not a killer blow against them. They are not successful because they are convincing, but because they are useful.