“One of the problems with defending free speech is you
often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and
disgusting,”
-Salman Rushdie
As a
lifelong liberal I am sad to say that I no longer recognise this new strain of
liberalism, one that seems infected by close-mindedness, intolerance and a
severely judgmental view of everyone that does not conform to some inane and
thin-skinned acid test.
It seems
that as the liberal world order began to thrive across the globe in the
seventies and eighties, the liberal mind grew smaller. Rather
than embrace diversity of thought, the left today seems to take pride in
chastising, publicly shaming and tearing down anyone whose thinking diverges
even slightly from the liberal mob.
As a result,
liberals come across as closed-minded, parochial and so thin skinned that they
seem unable or unwilling to recognise that protecting free speech means that
everyone is entitled to his or her views, no matter how vehemently we might
disagree.
In 2014, Brendan Eich,
Co-Founder of non-profit browser Firefox and inventor of the programming
language JavaScript, was forced to step down of CEO of his company after a popular dating site called for the boycott of the browser.
Mr. Eich’s unforgivable crime: he had made a single donation of
$1,000 to a group that opposed gay marriage six years earlier.
Seems it did not matter
that Mr. Eich was a highly qualified technology executive who had also been
part of creating a company that had a history of an open and inclusive
workplace, nor did it matter that there was no charge against him of discriminating against
gays by bringing his political views into the workplace. He
was punished simply because he had a different opinion. I disagree with his
view, but I also respect that he has the right to
have it.
More recently, Google, which claims
to be a champion of free speech, quashed and censored the freedom for one of
their employees. By firing James Damore, Google basically proved his point. His
memo titled the ‘Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber’ was arguing that
Google's, and more broadly, Silicon Valley’s
corporate culture is wholly intolerant of conservative views. Forget the merits
of Mr. Danmore’s argument in his memo. The point is that he not only has the right to hold
such views, but also to openly share them without fear
of persecution or prosecution, provided doing so does not break any laws or
violate the first amendment, which he did not.
I have no doubt that
Google’s lawyers found sound legal grounds to fire him based on some violation
of their corporate policy, but a wiser course for Google, as the Economist
argued, would have been for Larry Page to have written a full-throated
and detailed rebuttal of Mr
Damore’s argument. Google
would have shown that it respects free speech, especially when it disagrees,
and using data and scientific evidence could have eloquently debunked Mr. Danmore’s
contention that women are inferior software engineers
and programmers.
The whole point of free speech is not that bad or insensitive views and ideas will cease to exist, but that when we encounter ideas like Mr. Danmore’s, we can use more speech to defeat them with better ideas and actual evidence.
The whole point of free speech is not that bad or insensitive views and ideas will cease to exist, but that when we encounter ideas like Mr. Danmore’s, we can use more speech to defeat them with better ideas and actual evidence.
If we shut down opinions
simply because we find them unkind or hurtful, we will kill free speech. We need to look at actions and
not views alone; this is why expressing even the most heinous ideas or opinions
publicly is protected under the first amendment. We can
draw a line when such views trample on someone else’s rights, discriminate
against a group or break laws.
This
ideological censorship
based on some group deeming something “offensive” is
happening even in the media. A conservative writer, Daniella Greenbaum, resigned from
Business Insider (BI) after being censored. She wrote a piece defending
Scarlett Johansson playing a transgender man, arguing that the main challenge
of acting is to portray someone other than oneself and that
“Johansson's identity off the screen is irrelevant
to the identities she plays on the screen.”
Her article went through
the publication’s editorial review process before it was published, but the
moment it met with resistance, BI took it down. They claimed it was suddenly in
violation of their editorial standards, which the article had passed earlier. Rather than take it
down to placate the mob, BI should have encouraged everyone who disagreed with her to pen
a rebuttal.
I call this disturbing
trend, one that shuts down various points of view, ideological racism and it has become even more pervasive in the
age of social media mobs. I decided to do research to try and understand how,
liberals, once open-minded, thick-skinned and
valiant defenders of free speech, had suddenly become
so sensitive, plaintive and censorship-happy.
Over
the last generation, a dangerous idea has started to take hold among students
and faculty on college campuses across the country, one that suggests
that speech is violence.
We
are not talking about verbal threats against individuals, which are illegal and
not protected by the first amendment. No, this idea of words inflicting violence refers
to speech that is deemed by members
of an identity group to be critical of the group, or speech that simply
‘upsets’ people. Basically,
saying that if I were to give a speech on a
college campus criticising Indians for not wearing deodorant (a fact),
it would be considered violence against Indian
students.
A
few years ago, a group
at Columbia University penned an Op-ed in the student
newspaper calling on the school to start implementing “trigger” warnings in
curricula to alert students about potentially
distressing material, even for classics like Greek mythology or Roman poetry. In 2014, students
at the University
of California urged the school to make trigger warnings mandatory on all
class syllabi, which would require the school to issue
advance alerts and allow students to skip those classes.
Recently, a
Rutgers University sophomore suggested that alerts should be issued for F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ to say, ‘TW: suicide, domestic
abuse and graphic violence, and
a Columbia student publicly complained about
her professor using the word “negro”, even though he said it in a lesson about 1960s
America.
Sadly,
this anti-intellectual, anti-learning and anti-free speech movement has spread
well-beyond classrooms and now extends to blocking all Conservative speakers,
and even Liberals who don’t spout the party line, from
lecturing on campus, often using the ridiculous argument that
words are weapons that can cause physical harm.
Ironically, while students complain about
the ‘violence’ of words, they seem to have no issue resorting to physical violence to
prevent speakers from setting foot on campuses. A talk by conservative
social scientist Charles Murray was violently shut down by students who
physically attacked him and in the process injured a
Middlebury professor who was with him. At University of California, Berkeley,
once a bastion of free speech, a group with bandannas
wrapped around their faces, tore down barricades, shot projectiles at police
and lit a light stand on fire, causing more than $100,000 worth of damage, and succeeded in cancelling
a scheduled talk by Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversial far-right speaker.
Another trend
contributing to this growing ideological racism has been the creation of ‘safe
spaces’. The original purpose of a ‘safe space’ was narrowly defined and meant
as a temporary physical space on campus for marginalised
groups, often gay and transgender students, to discuss issues without abuse or
public attacks. However, what was meant to be a temporary space is morphing
into permanent ones for various aspects of campus life; from segregated study
halls and libraries and some advocates have
turned their attention to student housing, which they want to turn into safe
spaces by segregating student living quarters.
Another factor is the
lack of diversity within faculty. In 2016, the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA that has
surveyed undergraduate teaching faculty for the last twenty-five years found
that liberals now outnumber conservative professors, five to one. Another 2017
study by Econ Journal Watch found that faculty
at the top 40 colleges, in the fields
of Economics, History, Journalism/Communications, Law
and Psychology were registered Democrat versus Republican by a whopping 11.5 to
1 margin. The New Yorker described this failure among our higher education institutions,
now completely dominated by the left, as an
unwillingness to engage with conservative thought, an aversion to debate, and a
weakened commitment to free speech.
For me the main issue is
that these developments defeat the main purpose of higher education, which was
to open minds rather than to create conformity. Colleges are meant to challenge our
thinking by introducing new ideas and exposing us to a broad spectrum of
viewpoints. Instead, it seems education is now focused
on creating false realities and safe echo
chambers which do not prepare students for the realities
of life in the real world.
Colleges are the final rite of passage between the safety and security of
home and the unfairness and harshness of life. Time there is
meant to help students grow thicker skins, in
part by interacting with people who have different views, backgrounds and life experiences than their own. As our
world continues to shrink, having a thicker skin has become more, not less,
important.
The point is not to
pretend that there are no Holocaust deniers or to tell them never to engage
with people with offensive views.
Progress requires us to work with all types of
people. We need to teach children the facts of history (good, bad and ugly) and
equip them with critical thinking skills and thick skins so they can publicly
debate and defeat bad ideas with better ones.
How can
you change the world for the better, if you refuse to accept its ugly realities
first?
Every successful
democratic society requires a broad spectrum of views, thoughts and ideas to
thrive and succeed. This is the point of diversity, not simply skin colour, but diverse
thinking. As a brown person, I would rather someone openly hate the colour of
my skin but embrace my thinking, not the other
way around. If we try to mould everyone into
one way of thinking, then that is the end of
innovation and progress in society.
As
Mr. Rushdie said, the price of free speech, and a free society, is that
ugliness comes with it. If we try to close down speech we define as critical, unkind,
hurtful or distasteful, then we walk away from free speech all together – there is no middle
ground.
As a society we would be wise to remember that sticks and
stones may break bones, but censoring words and
thoughts destroys democracy.
