You’re going to have to bear with me. Why? Because for what follows I’ll be trading in my SAFS hat for my philosopher’s one. And – and I’m sorry about this folks – sometimes philosophy, or at least good philosophy, if it’s to do its job of helping us get clear about the concepts by which we manoeuvre our way through the world, cannot but prove tedious and pedantic. So yes, if I’m to do my job, you’re just going to have to bear with me.

The particular concept I want to get clear about here is freedom of expression. And the first thing I want to say about this is that your right to express yourself, were it a right that you possess, can be all-too-trivially satisfied. We simply drop you off at an empty field just outside of town and pick you up an hour later. There! Feel better? No? 

Is that because you think you have a right to be heard? No you don’t. If you did someone else would have a duty to listen to you. Is anyone ever under an obligation to listen to you? Sure. Maybe you’re the town crier. Or she’s signed up to take one of your classes. Or he’s on the team and you’re the quarterback calling the next play. But these are not the kind of cases that need concern us here.

So no. Your right to express yourself isn’t about you at all. It’s about me. It’s about my right to hear (or read) what’s on your mind, conditional, of course, on your willingness to share it with me. Do I sometimes have a right to know what’s in your head notwithstanding you’re unwilling to share it with me? Yes, hence the power of subpoena. But once again, these are not the cases that need concern us here. The case we’re concerned about here is a) you want to tell me something, b) I want to hear it, but c) some third party doesn’t want me to.

Are there cases where we’re inclined to side with that third party? Of course there are. You want to share military secrets with the enemy. And this is the kind of case that concerns us here. It concerns us because it shares the analytical structure of the cases that do. Monika Schafer wants to tell anyone who’ll listen that the Holocaust is a Zionist myth. Why should we care? After all, most of her listeners won’t believe her. But then neither will many of the enemy’s intelligence officers believe what you say about the deployment of our troops. But some will, and that may thwart a forthcoming operation. Some will believe Monika Schafer. And that – I won’t say will, so I’ll just say may – fuel antisemitism. And that antisemitism – I won’t say will, so I’ll just say may – eventuate in tissue damage to a Jewish fellow citizen.

That that tissue damage will involve an actus novus interveniens (an intermediary agent) reduces the culpability of the Holocaust denier, but it doesn’t eliminate it. For example, in his defence Alex Jones argued that he wasn’t culpable because no one would have been stupid enough to believe his claim that Sandy Hook was a hoax. But plenty of people are that stupid. Goldie Morgentaler believes that any criticism of the State of Israel is antisemitism. Well, plenty of people – including, if you’ll recall, some members of SAFS – are too stupid to distinguish antisemitism from anti-Zionism. 

Frances Widdowson declares herself baffled how anyone makes the jump from her questioning the 215 graves at the Kamloops IRS to her denying that there are any, and thence from denying there are any to some kind of wholesale defence of the residential school system, and thence to her being a full-blown racist. But this bafflement is disingenuous. She knows perfectly well that people are that stupid. That only some people are that stupid? No. Most people are that stupid. And surely by now she’s had good empirical reason to know that!

So what does one do in the face of such stupidity? I’ve made a career of addressing myself to people who are not stupid. Or, in my Critical Thinking classes, to making people who start out stupid at least a tad less so. But that is not something Frances knows how to do. And even if she did, unlike the captive audience I had, she doesn’t have an audience at all. She doesn’t have an audience – remember the etymology of that word – because no one can hear her. And no one can hear her because she’s been effectively silenced by the heckler’s veto.

And this is where the distinction I drew at the outset comes to roost. After all, the heckler is just expressing himself. In so doing he does nothing to deny Frances the right to express herself. Rather he’s denying me the right to hear what’s on Frances’ mind. And it’s for that reason that that right – and remember, it’s my right we’re talking about here – has to be protected. If I’m to hear what’s on your mind, then a time and place has to be set aside at and in which I can hear what’s on your mind. And that means a time and place at and in which the heckler’s right to express himself – or for that matter the right of others to hear what’s on his mind – has to be denied, full stop. The moment the authorities allow political considerations to override that obligation – “We’ll lose the indigenous vote!” – the rule of law has been supplanted by that of the mob.

But let’s not beg the question. Do I have the right to hear what’s on your mind? Well, not categorically. And that’s because a right is a voluntary exchange of value for value. I only have that right, or any right for that matter, if you recognise it and act accordingly. And why, in the case at hand, would you do that? Well, you might if but only if I recognise your right to hear what’s on someone’s mind, and act accordingly. Elsewhere I’ve called this the ‘deal’. But you might not find it prudent to enter such a deal. Or I might not. You certainly wouldn’t enter such a deal if you enjoyed an asymmetry in the power to silence the other. Neither would I. 

So the deal, as I call it, entails that there’s a symmetry in the power to silence the other. (The character Glaucon made that point at 358e of Plato’s Republic.) And it’s the nigh-always failure of that symmetry which accounts for why cancel culture is almost invariably one-sided. Today we’re not allowed to express our homophobia. But half a century ago we weren’t allowed not to. Today a trans-woman is a woman. A quarter century ago that was risible. So we each take our turn. And contrary to Michael Shermer, there is no moral arc. More people have been the victims of genocide since 1945 than in the six years leading up to it. So no, it’s not that we’re becoming more tolerant of differences. It’s just that our intolerances have taken on new targets. 

Not so, say our better angels. Rather than taking turns silencing the other, we can sign on to the deal, and keep to it. Isn’t that what John Stuart Mill was all about? No it wasn’t. Mill’s justification for freedom of expression, recall, was that the unfettered competition of ideas leans towards truth. Well, not always. And when it doesn’t? Or at least according to the heckler,  it doesn’t in the case at hand? Then that justification falls apart. Which is precisely what the silencers of the ‘lies’ of Moniker Schafer or Frances Widdowson or Mark Hecht are appealing to. It’s because they know that what these people are saying is false – and yet ignorant people are susceptible to believing these falsehoods – that they’re rightly being silenced. 

Well no, not quite. There’s no need to silence the flat-earthers, because no harm can be done by believing the earth is flat. Nor to admonish me for advocating the extermination of the Scots – yes, it’s because of the haggis – because no one thinks I’m serious. But Holocaust and Residential School denialism, and calls for a more cautionary immigration policy, can and sometimes do lead to harm, even if only via the actus novus interveniens of stupid people. So it’s not every falsehood that must be censored. Only some.

Ah, counters the Millian, but how are we to know which falsehoods, be they harmful or not, are false? And therein lies yet another of my fellow travellers’ errors. They seem to think – and they think this unthinkingly – that truth matters, and that it matters categorically. No it doesn’t. My affairs are in order. If you happen to know the hour of my forthcoming passing, shut the fuck up! All that telling me is going to do is bum me out. More to the point, however, is the mantra – and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to endure this nonsense and bite my tongue – “There can be no reconciliation without the truth!” How can something so patently false sound so unassailably right?

Suppose I’ve just had an affair, and I’ve been found out. The right thing to say – if I have any hope for reconciliation – is “It meant nothing,” whereas the truth is it meant a great deal. So whether the truth about the 215 anomalies at the Kamloops IRS will assist or undermine reconciliation is an entirely empirical matter. Does that mean we should seek the truth and let the chips fall where they may? Not by the lights of the Kamloops band council. And there may well be wisdom in their not wanting to know, and not wanting anyone else to know either.

One suspicion that’s hard to suppress is that concept creep has given itself over to the service of grift. Now cultural genocide is genocide, whereas we used to call it cross-pollination.  Is it pizza without tomato sauce? Doesn’t a banana republic require bananas? For most of human history a sixteen year old was already a mother of two. Now sex with her is criminal pedophilia. Fools gold is not a species of gold. It’s sui generis. But a trans woman is just another woman. Indigenous used to be an indexical, requiring a to-whom. Now it’s a rigid designator. And so on. 

But the grift is especially rampant in the ever-expanding scope of harm – and of its constituent notions of trauma and hate. Is a First Nations woman traumatised not by being told there may be no graves in that apple orchard, but by merely knowing that others are being told this? If I say it might have been closer to five million rather than six, clearly I must hate Jews. That only stupid people fall for this kind of shit doesn’t mean only stupid people are purveyors of it. On the contrary, they’re purveyors of it because most people fall for it. And that they do pays the purveyors irresistibly high dividends.    

Now don’t get me wrong, which of course you will. I’m as SAFSish as any SAFSer can be about academic freedom. Or at least I would be if the academy could have held on to that special place we once occupied. But, we sometimes forget, only briefly. Most of our universities, including our ivy league ones, were dedicated to (what was called) the ‘formation’ for the clergy. Papists wouldn’t abide non-conformists, nor Protestants abide papists. So that sanctuary for free enquiry, where we all subscribed to the deal and kept to it, was both hard-wrought and fleeting. But as my fellow travellers know all too well, that sanctuary, precious though it was, has been withdrawn.

Every institution has a best before date. It’s behind us. That’s a great loss, not just for  the Round Table at which we once served, but for the wider Camelot it served. I never thought the day would come, but it has. Peter Boghossian is right. We don’t need to burn it down. But we do need to leave it to its own demise. As did the Irish monks, it’s time to retreat. They kept the embers of learning alive for almost a millennium. It’s our turn now.

Categories: Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: academic freedom, Alex Jones, antisemitism, Frances Widdowson, freedom of expression, holocaust denial, John Stuart Mill, Kamloops 215 graves, Mark Hecht, Monika Schafer, philosophy, trans women, truth and reconciliation, Zionism