Is there such a thing as a neutral stance on free speech? In the midst of the ongoing debate, Kathleen Stock has written a perceptive piece in UnHerd, critiquing Amia Srinivasan’s recent essay on free speech in the London Review of Books. Srinivasan downplays cancel culture and portrays it as a fabrication of “Right-wing culture warriors” – evidence, Stock argues, that both sides have their blind spots. Here is an excerpt.
Is it ever possible to take a neutral position on the importance of free speech? The task certainly seems quite difficult. As Vogue’s favourite philosopher, Amia Srinivasan, notes this month in the London Review of Books, many Right-wingers seem to assert the value of free speech, mainly or even only to make room for political views the Left would prefer smothered at birth. Occasionally, someone on the Right will complain about the suppression of a position or person they don’t agree with, but usually more to avoid complaints of inconsistency than anything else.
The Left, however, also has its blind spots — many of which are apparent in Srinivasan’s essay. Scathing about the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act’s attempt to create a culture which promotes academic freedom in U.K. universities, she barely acknowledges the problems diagnosed by its authors and defenders. Instead, as many a defensive-sounding progressive has implied before her, real cancellation almost never happens in academia — except, of course, where it happens to exactly those people who deserve it (cough).
Despite the occasional admission that campus life these days is becoming censorious and risk-averse, Srinivasan mostly presents the idea of cancel culture as confected by “Right-wing culture warriors”. (Even when you’ve previously written a book on contemporary sexual politics and are now writing about freedom of speech, becoming a culture warrior is still something that only happens to other people, apparently.)
Her framing is depressingly one-dimensional in other ways, too. Nasty Right-wing men twirl their moustaches and prosecute dastardly secret plans under cover of darkness. A bit like a window display in Ann Summers, dog whistles and fig leaves are everywhere you look. The Good Left bites its lip and stares nobly into the middle distance, trying to hold the line on causes such as anti-racism, trans rights and preventing climate change. Meanwhile, lecturers like me, who have experienced strong hostility within universities for expressing controversial academic views, have mistaken our hurt feelings over personal critique for a general social problem.
Indeed, academics like me are presented as somewhat confused about whether our speech has been suppressed at all — for some of us still write for newspapers and talk on television. As is often the case, the putative problem is treated as, at most, one of self-expression. Critics insist: didn’t you get your thoughts out into the world anyway? Well, then, what are you complaining about?
This assumption — that the plausibility of a given narrative about the suppression of an academic’s work is inversely proportional to the total number of her media appearances — ignores the obvious point that a set of ideas can be anathema in one venue and celebrated in another. For instance, as I’ve written before, though welcomed in some media outlets, gender-critical feminists seem to give Guardian and BBC editors a fit of the vapours.
Worth reading in full.
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“many Right-wingers seem to assert the value of free speech, mainly or even only to make room for political views the Left would prefer smothered at birth”
Please give examples.
The left are in the ascendancy so it’s natural that it’s mainly the right who raise free speech issues as only the left has the power to suppress it.
I tried to read the article but it seemed like word salad to me.
“seemed like word salad to me.”
I have to agree tof.
Almost a perfect political speech, cancel the pros with the cons, and you are left with little substance.
I’ve read it twice and didn’t find any real content, just nicely worded platitudes.
https://thenewconservative.co.uk/when-this-lousy-war-is-over/
A bit of good timing methinks:
“The woke (perhaps the Left generally nowadays) recognise that what they need to control are not the commanding heights of the economy but the even more commanding heights of the language, to make some things hard to say and to think, others hard to avoid saying and thinking. Conservatives need to learn that displacing them from those heights requires the displacing of more than the obvious wokeisms and leftisms, like all those pronouns that are supposed to fit all those newly-discovered ‘genders’; it requires the displacing of a mode of speech now near-universal among the university-(mis)educated, one that is abstract and pseudo-technical, that has no roots in anybody’s daily life and that makes a good growing medium for all things woke and left. Conservatives need to learn that you can only think conservatively in a conservative style and that that means retracing our steps, going back.”
Or as I am won’t to say:
Never cede the language to our oppressors.
A fine article and worthy of your time.
Worth reading the ATL piece and then reading the article from The New Conservative posted above.
One of the articles is cogent, eloquent and stimulating and the other is circulatory mush.
Thanks for that link – it is indeed excellent and I agree with everything you say. My mother was an immigrant who took it upon herself to learn perfect English. It’s very hard to do that, but few seem to try these days – but then speaking perfect English seems rare generally, and not aspired to much.
What is especially frustrating about the article above is that the case for more or less absolute freedom of speech is simple to make. It doesn’t require overthinking, neither does it require being apologetic or conciliatory.
Thanks tof.
Charles II tried to close down the London Coffee houses because he didn’t like the ability of people to talk and trade freely, which they did without reference to rank and possibly gender. Charles II also tried to take the UK back into Europe, or rather the Roman Catholic Church. He failed on both counts. We now have Charles III.
Make a plolitical argument for dummies: Write Britain at the beginning of a sentence and Europe towards the planned end of it. Insert random filler words in between.
There was a seriously long-drawn-out and brutal war in ‘Europe’ (a mystery place east of the French border some people believe to exist despite nobody ever saw it[*]) soley (mostly, actually) to get rid of the influence of the Roman-Catholic church during the reign of Charles II.
[*] Isn’t this where Poland must be located? Considering all the Poles (ie, people from Europe living east of France and north of Romania) it surely got to be somewhere!
Ridiculous. We don’t have a major right wing party in the UK while academia, the press and the media are run by the sort of woke, left-wing types who would cross the road to avoid having a discussion with a working class Brit.