Sleepwalking into censorship? You can't say that!

Wednesday February 13, 2008

The real challenge to a free society comes from politics not religion, argues Claire Fox

Poor old Archbishop of Canterbury! Dr Rowan Williams has joined a long list of public figures, from DNA pioneer Professor James Watson to TV nature man David Bellamy, from Tory wannabe MP Nigel Hastilow to Pope Benedict XVI, who have recently been denounced and told – YOU CAN’T SAY THAT, OR ELSE. And the problem is less big government, or the nanny state, and more an informal narrowing of what all of us can say in the public sphere.

In the recent row, the leader of the Church of England stands accused of appeasing Islam by his talk of sharia law. I have no sympathy with what he argues (and yes, I have read the speech), but the intemperate response to his remarks, accused of opening a hornets’ nest, feels like nothing less than a witch-hunt.

Conversely, in 2006 the Pope was condemned for offending Islam by Muslim religious leaders who accused him of quoting anti-Islamic remarks during a speech at Regensburg University in Germany. Riots, demonstrations, recanting clarifications and acres of commentary followed.

Whatever these two rather unworldly, erudite Church leaders actually said in their arcane, obscure academic speeches, what they have in common is the hysterical public condemnation and an ensuing media feeding frenzy. Both have been told that they should have moderated their remarks and thought before speaking.

Unhelpful

Hazel Blears, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, has described Dr Williams’s comments as “unhelpful” because they were “always bound to give rise to misinterpretation, misunderstanding and mythology”. Even one of the Archbishop’s supporters, the Rev Martin Reynolds commented that the speech has “damaged the Anglican church” because “People have this impression he’s pro-sharia, but he’s not.”

These days, we are warned to censor ourselves in case there is any adverse impact of our words on others, even to anticipate if what we say might be misinterpreted. Our words are no longer our own, and the consequences of our words, said however innocently, or in a particular context, can be deemed dangerous and harmful.

This is a very dangerous atmosphere for those of us who believe in free speech. If everyone is watching what they say and walking on eggshells in case they offend this or that group, or stray into issues deemed too contentious to discuss in public, we will inevitably be plagued with self doubt and avoid saying anything controversial. This means the sanitisation of public debate, an anathema to free thinking. We are in danger of sleep-walking into censorship.

Religion is a particularly touchy subject in today’s free speech wars. Being accused of insulting one religion or another has already had a chilling effect on a free society. Peter Whittle, the director of The New Culture Forum recently compiled examples, when nervousness about Islam has led to self-censorship. The Royal Court Theatre cancelled a reading of an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistra set in Muslim heaven.

The Barbican Centre cut pieces out of its production of Tamburlaine the Great for fear of offending Muslims. Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, has said that he would not put on a play attacking Islam unless it was by a Muslim. Tate Britain decided against displaying a work by John Latham entitled God is Great 2, which consisted of a Koran, a Bible and a Talmund that had been disassembled.

Fashionable

It has become fashionable amongst those with a penchant for fear mongering about the rise of Islamism, to blame this new censoriousness on a tendency to ‘appease’ Islam. But as Rowan Williams can testify, the explanation for this “you can’t say that” climate cannot be found in the Koran.

The problem is political rather than religious. A lethal cocktail of government-sponsored victim culture, identity politics and an acceptance of the idea that people need to be protected from hurtful, offensive ‘hate speech’ has escalated the cries of ‘you can’t say that’.

Legislation around incitement to religious hatred is only one of the official endorsements of the special category of religious offence that has inevitably led to special pleading by all religions and cultural groups. We have had the unsavoury spectacle of competing victimhoods. Three years ago, angry Sikhs ‘hurt’ by the ‘deeply offensive’ Bezhti, forced Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s ‘blasphemous’ play off the Birmingham Rep’s stage.

In 2004, when Catholics lobbied BBC director general Mark Thompson against showing the controversial cartoon comedy Popetown, the Archbishop of Birmingham’s press secretary explained: “What we want to see is a situation where the BBC wouldn’t treat the Catholic Church in a way that would not be acceptable for Judaism or Islam”. When the then BBC3 controller Stuart Murphy pulled the plug on the series, he predictably justified this by citing ‘the potential offence it will cause’.

Religion is too obvious a straw man to blame for today’s censoriousness. It’s too easy to sign up to trendy Richard Dawkins-style religion bashing. The Rational Response Squad’s The Blasphemy Challenge that encourages YouTubers to record messages damning themselves to hell, may be hugely popular, but its faux irreverence misses the point.

New conformism

It is not religion per se that poses the real challenge to freedom, but a political culture that too happily sidelines free speech. A growing number of secular issues are routinely declared off limits for debate. A new secular priestly caste points the finger at anyone who blasphemes against the new conformism.

Modern-day witch-hunts against those who have said the unsayable on race have recently taken the scalps of Tory Nigel Hastilow and eminent scientist James Watson, and anyone who dares challenge the consensus on climate change now faces ritual demonization.

The consequences of saying the wrong thing can be severe. Last October, Professor Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, had invitations to talks at museums and festivals around the UK withdrawn after he suggested in an interview that there is a racial basis to intelligence. Watson was given a public lashing by the media, drummed out of Britain and subsequently resigned his post at the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the US.

I find Watson’s opinions on race, intelligence and Africa objectionable – indeed scientifically illiterate – but what was I am more disturbed that the unelected ‘bien pensants’ at the Science Museum declared he was no longer welcome because he had ‘gone beyond the point of reasonable debate’. So we are to be confined to ‘reasonable’ debate to be allowed to utter our ideas aloud are we? That bodes badly for anyone who doesn’t mould their views into the narrow limits laid down by political consensus.

Meanwhile, Nigel Hastilow, a Conservative Party parliamentary candidate, was forced to step down last year after he suggested that Enoch Powell may have had a point about immigration. It’s worth noting that Hastilow got in trouble for simply mentioning a forbidden name. His actual beliefs on immigration are entirely mainstream, in tune with David Cameron, Gordon Brown and endless commentators, who all think Britain is overcrowded by immigrants.

Airbrushed

As a pro-immigration ‘open the borders’ type, I disagree with all those who indulge in panics about foreigners invading this green and pleasant land, but Hastilow’s offence was not national chauvinism, but rather that he dared to invoke two demonised words – ‘Enoch Powell’ – and for that he was airbrushed out of the Tory party and removed from public life.

Far too many ‘thought-crimes’ also invoke the pernicious ‘you can’t say that’ response. Dare you challenge the sacred script of global warming, and watch everyone from the Royal Society to environmentalists scream “blasphemy”? As David Bellamy explained in an article in The Times, “Those of us who dare to question the dogma of the global-warming doomsters who claim that C not only stands for carbon but also for climate catastrophe are vilified as heretics or worse as deniers. I am happy to be branded a heretic because throughout history heretics have stood up against dogma based on the bigotry of vested interests. But I don’t like being smeared as a denier because deniers don’t believe in facts.”

This branding of anyone who does not wholeheartedly embrace global warming orthodoxies as being a “climate change denier” uses the explicit and intentional echo of anti-Semitic Holocaust denial to silence dissent.

Similarly, Alexander Cockburn, co-editor of the American Counterpunch and a syndicated national columnist whose work appears regularly in the Nation, the New York Free Press and the Los Angeles Times, recently told Brendan O’Neill at spiked, how you can expect to be treated if you dare say what is now deemed unsayable:

Hysterical outrage

“Since I started writing essays challenging the global warming consensus, and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt almost witch-hunted. There has been an hysterical reaction. One individual, who was once on the board of the Sierra Club, has suggested I should be criminally prosecuted. I wrote a series of articles on climate change issues for the Nation, which elicited a level of hysterical outrage and affront that I found to be astounding – and I have a fairly thick skin, having been in the business of making unpopular arguments for many, many years ….

“There was a shocking intensity to their self-righteous fury, as if I had transgressed a moral as well as an intellectual boundary and committed blasphemy. I sometimes think to myself, ‘Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live in the 1450s’, because I would be out in the main square with a pile of wood around my ankles. I really feel that; it is remarkable how quickly the hysterical reaction takes hold and rains down upon those who question the consensus.”

Every time we accept that certain subjects are taboo – whether sharia law, criticism of Mohammed, immigration policies or global warming – and every time someone is drummed out of respectable society, or is harangued and made to recant, the rest of us know we are being told to be careful about what we say, and who we offend.

We are encouraged to become more and more obedient and super-cautious lest we too are humiliated and demonised. That is a recipe for a conservative, banal and anodyne public discourse that inevitably means endorsing the status quo. We have to defend free speech by asserting that we can say that, we will say that, and no amount of media hysteria or moral outrage will silence us. If we don’t, we can expect a free society to go up in smoke.

Claire Fox is director of the Institute of Ideas and a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze