Back to censorship as usual

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Back to censorship as usual Jason Walsh Conference: Understanding Charlie Hebdo, June 4–5, 2015 Panel: Radical opinion and the media, June 5, 2015 Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities Queen’s University Belfast After a brief outpouring of solidarity, particularly online under the "hashtag" “Je Suis Charlie", the fallout from the attacks on Charlie Hebdo has been a continuation of business as usual: calls for censorship on the basis of offence. Tolerance is a much invoked nostrum, but it is increasingly misunderstood: tolerance requires disapproval—one does not tolerate that which one already approves of. Recent years have seen a shift from longstanding liberal principles, now often viewed as unworkable or even themselves discriminatory, to new forms of apparently "bottom-up" censorship where interest groups, organised online, attempt to directly shrink the public sphere or seek an institutional mandate to do so.  Nowhere was this more obvious in the Anglophone media, both social media and traditional, than in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders, where the initial outpouring of sympathy and horror was soon challenged by the self-conscious creation of a narrative that the publication was a hate-filled, racist and neo-colonialist project engaged in so-called “structural violence” against minorities, particularly Muslims. Within days of the murders the Je Suis Charlie hashtag was followed by another: Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie. Newspapers were not far behind. Outraged commentators who had never committed themselves to freedom of expression suddenly noticed France’s ban on Holocaust denial. What that had to do with the staff of Charle Hebdo was never explained. Comedian and anti-semite was Dieudonné was arrested for, apparently, “apologising of terrorism”. What that had to do with the staff of Charle Hebdo was never explained. The appearance of politicians at a photo-op after the killings was a “circus of hypocrisy”. What that had to do with the staff of Charle Hebdo was never explained. “Insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile,” wrote one editor. So it is. But that is not the point. Charlie Hebdo was itself, another wrote, “not free speech, it was an abuse of free speech”. An interesting thesis, to say the least. Context was, we were told, the key to understanding everything. Universalism, it seemed, no longer applied. The message was clear: the vulnerable must not be offended. Offence has been directly mapped to harm, shrinking the private sphere and expanding the scope for the

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management of and interference of the personal and intimate. Thus, in contemporary jargon “don’t punch down”. At the heart of this transformation is a political change that has gone, surprisingly, unremarked upon. Surprising because it was recognised in left-wing circles, Stalinist ones no less, as far back as Eric Hobsbawm’s 1979 essay “The Forward March of Labour Halted”. It was also prefigured in the work of critical theorists such as Adorno and Marcuse, at least a decade before labour’s march was obviously halted. Left wing politics has been reduced to an ideology without a subject. Absent the working class, the industrial proletariat — who voted with their feet, abandoning the left; something plainly obvious as early as the 1970s — there is no agent of historical change in left wing politics.  This is why we see a number of trends: the, for want of a better word, “academisation" of the left, the rise of class-substitutionist identity politics and, most importantly, the pick-andmix merger of liberalism and the left—heretofore two distinct and discrete political ideologies with precious little in common. It is this combined collapse of the left and inversion of liberalism that allows journalists and others to demand our rights are restricted in the name of rights. Thus society is reorganised in the name of the protection from harm of the most vulnerable. Vulnerability, hitherto an extrinsic characteristic, is now characterised as intrinsic and immutable: a fixed state. “Workers of the world unite” has been, at the hands of the left, reduced to “the meek shall inherit the earth”. This is no subtle shift. No-one has ever seriously doubted the difficulties people face in making their own destines, but the reduction in status from history-making subject to object of history is a not inconsequential one. The pitiable are not agents of change. They are not subjects. They are, in fact, objects, and it is this relationship between the object of pity and the pitier that defines liberal and left wing political thought today. There has been a similar hollowing out in other politics in other tendencies — witness the Conservative Party's support for same-sex marriage, or the complete and utter collapse of meaning in Irish republicanism — but these are incidental to the matter at hand today, which is censorship in the name of an ill-defined sense of goodness and virtue, demanded overwhelmingly by those who describe themselves as either left-wing or liberal. In general censorship today comes not from the blunt imposition of state power but the inversion of liberal principles, where concepts such as recognition and affirmation have been awkwardly appended to legal non-discrimination. The imposition of such positive claims is accompanied by an inconsistently applied non-judgementalism, demanded of some and refused to others in the name of re-balancing power in society. This represents a significant change in "liberal" attitudes to the use of words and, despite claims otherwise, sets up

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demands for the concentration of power and diminution of the role of the individual, including those who are members of groups considered vulnerable. Protection from clashes of opinion, however well intentioned, empower only the already powerful, such as those who make and enforce the law. Calls to protect the vulnerable from speech empower only one body: the state; not an organisation I am content to consider powerless. The Charlie Hebdo murders allowed, for a brief period, voluble displays of virtue and traditional, dare I say old-fashioned, liberal sentiment to align. Within days, however, the story began to change. Charlie Hebdo was, we were told, “frankly racist”—bringing to mind the Marxist jargon “objectively conservative”, which in fact means subjectively.  What the Charlie Hebdo cartoons “frankly” were, was infantile. In fact the entire performance of pro- and anti-Islam sentiment expressed through cartoons, beginning with the Jutland Post affair, has been infantile. But infantilism is fitting for our society today. where feelings, on all sides, trump reason. The performance of virtue, exercised through censure amounting to censorship, has leaked from Twitter and Facebook to the pages of newspapers, where columnists hector and harangue. The daily sturm-und-drang of identity disputes disguises a failure to consider enormous changes in our understanding of rights and in how we relate to one another. As many of the Charlie sceptics appeared to be trying to say, we should also be wary of a chorus of opinion that we agree with. And yet we are not, certainly not when the zero sum game spectre of vulnerability is invoked. Two brief local examples: In the response to the recent case of QueerSpace vs. Ashers bakery, where a fundamentalists Christian-owned bakery refused to bake a cake with a message promoting a campaign for same-sex marriage, for instance, we see not a failure to explore only questions around service provision versus sales (can a journalist now be forced to write for a publication he or she disapproves of ? Can an academic be coerced into teaching at an institution they consider beneath them? The case law, at least in Northern Ireland, now appears to say so) but also revealed a widespread understanding of the issue through the prism of group rights. The problem with this is twofold: firstly elevating one group above another fails to recognise that attitudes to groups can shift and change over time. Two decades ago in Northern Ireland, when I grew up here in Belfast, evangelical Christians were a lot higher in the social pecking order than gays. Who knows how Muslims, or, for that matter, orthodox Jews fit in to this picture? And who knows how the hierarchy of virtue and victimhood will look two decades hence?  Secondly, when we reduce complex individual personalities to mere membership of groups, we not only strip them of much of their unique human dignity, we also deny individuals their ability to think and to act—things which form the locus of a rights-bearing subject, and

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are thus proper to individuals. This applies equally to those we slander as victims and those we slander as aggressors. Writing shortly after the Republic of Ireland voted to allow same-sex marriage, Irish newspaper columnist Fintan O’Toole said that Ireland had moved beyond “mere toleration”. This sentiment, however well meant, should worry anyone who is seriously committed to liberal values.  Toleration of opinion, as per John Stuart Mill, was not merely a question of epistemology: knowing that something is right is not enough. The exercise of individual judgement is the process through which beliefs are transformed into more than received opinion. It is also where new truths are found.  Today tolerance is strictly rationed. Tolerance of, let alone promotion of, sexism, racism, “transmisogny”, climate change “denial” (note the loaded term), homophobia, Islamophobia and countless other ideas and behaviours is “called out” day and daily online and, increasingly, in the pages of formerly august newspapers.  All of these calls are calls for censorship, and beneath them all is a failure to recognise the ability of individuals to reason.  Entirely missing from the debate is the concept of the individual as morally autonomous, able to exercise judgement and to act responsibly. We can see this in the weak defence of Charlie Hebdo by those who persisted in supporting it once the tide of academic and, up to a point, journalistic, opinion turned. “Charlie Hedbo isn’t racist,” they said. But so what if it is? A truly moral society, a truly liberal society, would allow for the unrestricted airing of views considered objectionable by others. It would do so because, instrumentally, it is good for everyone in a society to see objectionable views aired and, more importantly, it would do intrinsically because it would recognise the capacity of individuals for reason and moral autonomy. It would see that people can, even in the worst of circumstances, be moral. The fact that people can, and indeed do, make wrong moral decisions is conflated with the apparent inevitability that they will. Room is not provided for the changing of minds through debate and it is further assumed that those who feel vulnerable are themselves incapable of shrugging off the slings and arrows of heated debate.  The irony here is that we, as a society, lack an agreed moral yardstick and thus have, at best, regressed to the utilitarian consequentialism of Bentham and James Mill. Leaving this aside however, we are still left with the fact that the new intolerance is not so different from the old form. Indeed, much that underpins putatively liberal and left discourse today is prefigured in Lippman, who described the public as “illiterate” and “barbarians”, and Belloc, who complained that the press was run by capitalists: “men of base origin and capacities” and was “a mere commercial enterprise”. The difficulty in being moral, however, should be no impediment to freedom as it is the very reason why we need tolerance in the first place.

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So: Je Suis Charlie? Or Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie? How about neither. How about, as per Kant, we take a step toward maturity and have sufficient faith in our fellow citizens, minority and majority alike, that they can and will do the same thing? ENDS