The Tyranny of Opinion_Conformity and the Future of Liberalism_Think Now by Russell Blackford

Author:Russell Blackford [Blackford, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350056022
Amazon: B07GFBSXKX
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2018-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

7 You can’t say that! Identity politics and its victims

Threats from all sides

We might expect that the greatest threats to individual freedom in post-Christian liberal democracies – and especially to the freedom to express and discuss our ideas – would come from church and state. The Christian churches might be motivated to suppress heretical speech, including challenges to traditional mores. Government officials might try to crush anything they regard as sedition or subversion of the political order.

It often works out like this, and I’ll return to the point in Chapter 9. Too often, however, supposedly liberal or left-wing individuals and organizations are at least complicit in attacks on freedom. They use a wide array of tactics involving propaganda and outrage. Sometimes they are not above appealing to the power of the state to censor political enemies. A relatively recent case in Australia involved a hard-line anti-abortion campaigner from the United States, Troy Newman, who was denied entry to the country to give a scheduled lecture tour under the auspices of a pro-life group.

Newman has defended some genuinely outrageous ideas: in particular, he regards abortion as murder, and he has asked, rhetorically, why it should not be a capital crime in jurisdictions with the death penalty. He has even expressed sympathy for a convicted murderer, Paul Jennings Hill, who was executed in 2003 for killing a doctor and his bodyguard. However, no evidence has ever been produced that Newman posed a threat to Australian society in the sense of being likely to incite violence during his visit. His opponents campaigned for his exclusion by government action largely, if not entirely, because they wanted to keep his opinions from being expressed, heard, and discussed in Australia. I submit that Australia should not have denied him entry, and his opponents should never have sought such a thing.

(As events turned out, Newman arrived illegally. After making an unsuccessful application to the High Court of Australia to be permitted to stay, he was deported in early October 2015. See Blackford 2015b for a lengthy blog post that I wrote during the heat of the debate.)

This should have been a straightforward case. While Newman’s substantive views were, in my opinion, wrong, ugly, and bizarre – and of course, offensive to many people – he should have been allowed to express them in a liberal democracy such as Australia. Conversely, those who wished to hear him in person should have been able to. From a strictly prudential viewpoint, the fracas inevitably ended up giving more publicity in Australia to Newman’s views. Furthermore, he carried out at least some of his plans by speaking from abroad, using modern communications technology. It’s not clear, at least from any information available to me, whether Newman and his organization ended up worse or better off overall.

Newman is himself a highly illiberal individual. Very often, however, the victims of efforts such as these – campaigns to silence or punish opponents – have good credentials of their own as liberal or left-leaning thinkers.

An

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