It ought to be possible for a Celtic fan to go to an
Old Firm Game and stand amongst the Rangers fans in his Celtic shirt while
cheering every time Celtic score a goal and booing each time Rangers score. Amongst
all those blue shirts it ought to be possible for a single green and white
shirt to be enjoying the match without any nasty comments and without any risk
of physical harm.
During the women’s world cup Australian fans bought
tickets for the section allocated for England fans, but there would have been
no trouble in that situation. If a Spanish fan ends up by mistake with the
England fans nothing bad will happen.
But this illustrates something important about free
speech. Even if I ought to be able to exercise my right to free speech it doesn’t
mean there are not practical limits on free speech.
I ought in a free society to be allowed to offend. Take
the example of Sweden, which now has a heightened terror alert because some
people chose to burn the Quran. It ought to be possible to do this, but the consequences
of doing so are that large numbers of Muslims are offended not only in Sweden
but in other countries. People may be injured or killed because someone chose
to exercise their right to free speech in Sweden. Is exercising your right to
free speech consistent with other people being injured or dying? There may be
circumstances where this is the case. But it would in most circumstances be
better to refrain from such gestures.
The Quran is one of the most important books in
history. Burning a copy will not make it cease to exist. It will remain an
important book worthy of study even if someone dislikes its content or dislikes
Islam as a faith. Muslims ought not to be so offended by someone burning a copy
in far away Sweden that they are willing to injure or kill because of it, but
burning a copy won’t change the fact that they are offended. In fact, it may
make the situation worse.
In Britain we used to live in a society where people
were imprisoned for their views on religion, lost their jobs or were forced to preach
outside.
John Bunyan believed in the wrong sort of Christianity
and was imprisoned for it. Both Catholics and Protestants were at various times
persecuted for their beliefs during the Reformation. Presbyterian Covenanters
had to preach outside when their side of the argument was losing, but when they
won the argument the lesson, they learned from their persecution was to
persecute Catholics and Episcopalians.
Even when we gained a measure of freedom of belief
there was still in the nineteenth century and later enormous pressure to
conform to the beliefs of Christianity by going to church and not living in
sin. Divorce was nearly impossible to achieve because of Christianity and this
applied whether you believed in it or not. I had assumed we had moved on from
this. But we haven’t.
While there are and indeed must be limits on free
speech, these limits have become ever narrower.
A comedian in Edinburgh has been forced like the
Covenanters to preach in the streets, not because he wanted to burn a Quran,
nor because he wanted to sing the Fields of Athenry in the Rangers end, but because
he disagrees with the prevailing orthodoxy on gender.
Europe and the United States were different from
everywhere else in the world because freedom of thought and the right to write
what we pleased enabled people to think critically about orthodox opinions and
to challenge them.
This finally reached a point after the 1960s where sex
outside of marriage for the first time became normal and commonplace and where
our behaviour was rarely controlled either by religious belief or the conformity
of our parents. You could more or less write what you pleased, think what you
pleased and live how you pleased. This freedom continued right up until the
1990s when as so often happens in history there was a counter reformation.
The West has returned to theocracy, not in the sense
that religious belief is enforced, but in the sense that what results from the absence
of religious belief is enforced.
The collapse of Christianity left a vacuum of virtue.
As Chesterton wrote, when people cease to believe in God it’s not that they
believe in nothing, it’s that they believe in anything.
There was no longer the possibility for much of
society to feel virtuous by living a Christian life, living monogamously and going
to church so instead new virtues had to be created. Initially this was called political
correctness, later it evolved into woke and virtue signalling.
Peak woke has been reached when a remake of Snow White
and the Seven Dwarves has a lead character who is not white and there are no
longer seven dwarves. There is nothing
offensive about dwarves in the original story. They are not people with
dwarfism. They are mythical creatures from German folklore.
But the reason to remake and renounce everything is
because the new gods are equality and diversity. In the name of this we have to
pretend that David Copperfield might have come from India and that in Jane
Austin’s time there were large numbers of black people in the upper classes.
But the falsity of the new religion gets worse when not
merely must we change history to make it equal and diverse we are also made to
believe in critical race theory that tells us that only white people can be
racist and that all white people have white privilege. What if I live in a country
like Poland where there are almost no black people and no one for me to be racist
toward? Who do I exercise my white privilege against? Who is the victim of my
racism?
But if critical race theory is a strange sort of mysticism
transgenderism resembles transubstantiation in the body of a man changing into
the bread of a woman and the wine of her menstrual blood.
It becomes:
All bachelors are unmarried.
Socrates is a spinster.
Therefore, Socrates is a woman.
I can still write reasonably freely. But if a comedian
can be forced to preach outside his church, then the same might happen to you. Perhaps
not now, but what about tomorrow.
People in their twenties who have gone to university believe
in the new religion almost universally and almost without question. In twenty to
thirty years, they will be in charge.
I can if I am careful still just about question
everything, but it’s getting harder. If I met a young person who believed in transgenderism,
I would keep silent rather than discuss it. If I met someone who thinks everything
needs to be decolonised and that it is racist to try to limit immigration at
all, I would keep silent. If I met someone who believed in critical race
theory, I would not argue against it. This is the new conformity.
Like Wilkie Collins I might be able to get away with
living in sin and writing novels that subvert Victorian convention, but there
are limits on free speech today just like there were when he was writing. He
could not live as he wanted openly. Nor can we. In certain jobs and in certain
company we are as restrained and constrained as if we lived when Collins did. Try
speaking openly if you doubt me.
The best writing needs to not have to worry about
someone looking over your shoulder waiting to cancel you. Self-censorship is worse
than overt censorship because it cuts deeper.
We ought not to gratuitously offend, nor should our
actions lead to harm for others, but the new theocracy is offended by what used
to be called common sense. Must I write nonsense not to offend? Must writers
hide their lives like George Eliot did?
The danger of making a comedian perform on the street because he offends is that it takes us back to the Covenanters. It brings us closer to a society like Iran where offending against religious beliefs will get you killed or maimed. It puts us back to witch hunts and it took us three hundred years from there to get to freedom only to lose it again in three decades.
