Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle

Author:Andrew Doyle [Doyle, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2021-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

Identity Quakes

It is somewhat inevitable that language and, by extension, freedom of speech, should come to be mistrusted given that most of these recent developments are connected to the rise of an identity-orientated social justice ideology which is largely post-modernist in origin. In particular, contemporary activists have retained the postmodernist notion that reality, or at least our perception of it, is constructed predominantly through language. Michel Foucault’s belief in the interconnectivity of power and knowledge is often seen as the basis for current discourses of the ‘power structures’ that dominate society. In this model, language is not only a means of communication, but a weapon of the powerful to maintain their hegemony. This is why those who support censorship often claim that unfettered speech has the effect of ‘normalising’ or ‘legitimising’ hateful and violent views. As I have outlined, this does not merely apply to insulting or offensive sentiments, but also transgressive opinions.

We have all felt that sensation of disquietude when our most cherished certainties are challenged. Tom Holland has noted how the palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope, who was raised a Quaker and taught that the Bible was the literal truth, was ‘so unsettled by the dinosaurs he found entombed in rock that they came to visit him in his dreams’, where they would kick and trample upon him. A similar crisis of faith befell Charles Darwin, who could not reconcile the notion of a ‘beneficent and omnipotent God’ with the brutal reproductive practices of the ichneumon wasp, which paralyses caterpillars with its sting so that its larvae can develop inside a living host. Darwin’s Christian identity was shaken by the evident cruelty of the natural world.

Such realisations are known as ‘identity quakes’, described by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay as the ‘emotional reaction that follows from having one’s core values disrupted’. For the open-minded, life is by necessity punctuated with these little shocks of awakening. Without introspection, there can be no individual development. We all remember Socrates’s famous dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living, and it seems to me that we deny ourselves the opportunity for growth when we refuse to interrogate our own certainties. It is intellectual suicide in slow motion.

Words are indubitably a potential source of great distress, whether that takes the form of a challenge to our worldview or outright abuse. Yet taking offence is a matter of choice. Marcus Aurelius said it this way: ‘Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been’. Of course, we have every reason to suppose that the life of a Roman emperor might be more comfortable than ours but, in the interests of self-preservation, there is something to be said for the stoical ethos.

It comes down to a question of consent. If a man were to punch me, or otherwise inflict harm upon me by physical means, I am in no position to prevent the injury. There is no such loss of liberty in the taking

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