Free speech and hate speech

I know what you mean. But on the other hand, look at those who are supporting this legislation.

Take Seamus Milne’s current article in the Guardian for example. He argues:

‘But many of the conditions that gave rise to earlier leftwing hostility to religion have eroded, …the radical strands within religion – have grown stronger, typified by the egalitarian Christian liberation theology movement.’

But this is nonsense. The ‘liberation theologians’ were crushed, by, amongst others the current Pope, who Milne praises elsewhere in the article.

‘Religion cannot but find itself in conflict with the demands of an ever more voracious capitalism to dominate social and personal life, which religion has traditionally seen as its own sphere of influence. ‘

But again this is nonsense, as again Milne points out later on in his article. Extremists in the Bible Belt in the States amongst others see no problem with bringing together their Christian beliefs and squaring them with capitalism. Rupert Murdoch is a born again Christian. So is George Bush.

Milne continues…’Of course, shifts within religion have not only been in one direction… there have also been negative trends.’

But again, the idea that there have been positive trends is a myth. The current Pope, for example, is notorious in Catholic circles for being one of the most authoritarian in history. There has always been a strain of Christianity that disapproves of Capitalism, but only to contrast it with an idealised middle ages. Fascism (well some strains) did the same: there were plenty of fascists who criticised capitalism from what we might now term a ‘left wing’ perspective.

The fact is that fundamentalist religion, amongst Catholics, evangelicals, hindus jews and muslims is everywhere on the rise. There are no ‘progressive’ forces in the sense that that word is normally used. To repeat; the fact that these people attack capitalism is irrelevant: so did fascism. It’s what would you replace it with?

‘Across western Europe, Muslims are the target of an unprecedented level of hostility and attacks’.

I think Milne should check the word ‘unprecedented’ up in a dictionary. It doesn’t mean what i think he thinks it means.

Milne ends up
‘The crucial struggle is now within religion rather than against it. ‘

In other words, he admits that the secular left is dead.

This is defeatist nonsense. The fact is that many (perhaps most) religious statements are not in fact true, which is the salient fact about them. It does not incite religious hatred to point this out, although it should be done, aggressively if necessary.

Moreover, Milne seems to act as if no one in their right mind has ever stirred up religious hatred. But look at Niezsche’s ‘The Antichrist’: if ever a work was to stir up hatred of Christianity it was this one. Milne must, by the logic of his argument want it banned: or is this law to apply only to Muslims?

As we have seen in Australia, a similar law has been a disaster.

Finally: does Milne realise that undoubtedly what will happen is prosecutions of Muslims by Jews, who argue that Muslim criticism (some would put it more strongly than that) of Israel is an ‘incitement to religious hatred’?

“The SBC thinks of free speech on libertarian lines: there’s the little blogger (or journalist, or man in the pub) who wants to say something, and the nasty government which wants to stop them.”

I have to take issue with this proposition. Most people I know who are worried about free speech are more worried about their idealogical opponents using non-government institutions and the courts to try and shut them up. they’re a lot less worried about the government.

Where to start?

Ok, first, we libertarians tend to be either deontologists, or some species of rule utilitarian, so this initial dismissal of the idea of individual rights is a big problem in itself. But I’m glad you did at least make it explicit, in as much as so many liberals attempt to sneak it in by the back door, while retaining the language of rights.

Second, we see here the rather remarkable assumption that drives the liberal effort to increase the power of government: That that power will be used by nice people. Sorry, but governments ARE “nasty”. Look across the globe: Most of them are run by sociopaths, and even the better governments tend to be run by folks you wouldn’t trust to babysit your kids. And the better sort of government is only one or two elections away from becoming the worse sort. At which point it’s too late to decide that you don’t want THAT guy to have the power to punish speach.

So we’re talking about a principle, that governments may ban speach, which has limited upside potential, and HUGE downside potential. I don’t see the point of the gamble.

“The thinking man’s Julie Burchill is of course Julie Burchill”

And what the man thinks is “Shut up you squeaky lunatic”.

There is a gap in your argument at the point where you claim that speech silences, by “cow[ing] its targets (and their defenders) into submission, and … creat[ing] a climate where only the very bravest are willing to express themselves.”

First, there is a wide spectrum of possible cases, from one in which the target is merely discouraged from speaking, at one extreme; to one in which the target is coerced into silence by implied threats, at the other. You need to say at what point in the spectrum we can legitimately force the speaker to “shut up”. I am inclined to doubt whether the speech that is typically classified as hate speech falls far enough along the spectrum to qualify for sanctions.

Second, the “silencing” argument is open to the objection that other remedies are preferable. We can positively promote a climate in which the targets of offensive speech are encouraged to speak up for themselves, and are applauded for doing so. Shutting people up is not the only way of encouraging others to speak, and it ought to be the last resort.

Finally, I think that you fail to take into account the ways in which sanctions against hate speech can disadvantage their intended beneficiaries, by lending color to suspicions that they have something to hide, cannot defend themselves, and so on. Holocaust revisionism has received a tremendous shot in the arm from efforts to silence it as hate speech. Measures regulating hate speech against Muslims will only feed folk suspicions about evil doctrines lurking in the Koran, where we are forbidden to criticize them.

If you’re getting Julie Burchill in to raise the tone then things are much worse than I thought..

PT: Shorter Chris: Multiculturalism trumps free speech.

No, I’m afraid your basic comprehension skills are wanting.

Shorter Chris by Chris:

Assuring all of a fair opportunity to speak can trump unrestricted freedom of expression.

Assuring all of a fair opportunity to speak can trump unrestricted freedom of expression.

I think the only reasonable response I can make to that is “We’ll have to agree to disagree.”

Whoops.

“But their insistence on these points amounts to an almost wilful neglect of another, namely that even if religion is a matter of choice, religious identity may not be. There are societies where “Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?” is a sensible question”

Good point, but I have a couple of questions. One, isn’t there some difference between degrees of choice here – between internal identity and external identity? We can’t choose how other people choose to identify us (George Bush for instance for all I know thinks of me and all my fellow Murkans as Christians, whether we like it or not), but we can (and do) choose how we think of our own selves. As in the Balkans: many people insisted that they were Yugoslavian, not Bosnian or Serbian, despite the insistence of other people that they were the latter not the former. So if I’m right (big if in your book, I realize) that the religious hatred law would tend to reinforce that already existing tendency to conflate and even confuse religion with identity…do you see that as a problem, as unfortunate? Perhaps as unfortunate but worth the cost all the same? Or not unfortunate at all. The way it looks to me, the law would tend to give reinforcement to the wrong side (‘wrong’ in ways I can elaborate on if they’re not obvious) in the disagreement between Sarajevan internationalists and Serbian & Croatian and other nationalists, and all other similar disagreements.

Very good questions Ophelia.

I wouldn’t want any law to impose a particular identity on anyone. And I quite see the danger that you are pointing to.

But there’s a broader, non-law, question about what the reaction of people should be to attempts by bigots to foist an identity on them, and what the reaction of those wish to show solidarity with them should also be.

I’m in danger of straying into territory here where’s I’m ignorant (as well as being in danger of violating Godwin’s law), but there may be instructive lessons in the formation of modern Jewish identity. Many assimilated Jews did not identify as Jewish in any strong sense, were hostile to militant Zionism, thought of themselves as primarily German or French or, perhaps, as socialist internationalists. But the fact of
anti-semitism changed their self-perception: not being Jewish
wasn’t an option any more, and Zionist rejection of assimilation
became more attractive as did gestures like Schoenberg’s adoption of Judaism at the end of his life.

Rejecting the labels and boxes that bigots foist on you is probably usually the right thing to do, but sometimes it can be right to accept the labels and try to force a revaluation of them.

Chris, I know, I know. I’ve been musing on that whole Jewish-assimilation-or-identity thing for years. I have so many friends and relatives who’ve lived it – who were raised by thoroughly ‘assimilated’ Jews and ended up feeling deprived and sort of vanilla-ized; who didn’t want to be white-bread Americans, thanks, who wanted to remember Poland and Russia and their furrin-sounding names that had been changed to Smith or Miller or Porter. I used to know exactly what they meant and I still do, but I also have more sympathy for the other view than I once did. If their parents simply wanted to be secular, or cosmopolitan, or interested in things other than their Jewishness…it seems hard to fault them. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to do that? But then along comes the next generation and they want to be Jewish, dammit. Or Muslim or Québecois or Cherokee or whatever it is. So I never come up with any conclusion to all this. It just seems to be a standing tension.

But I agree about the solidarity question. (But then the tension comes right back, because the people who want to escape that identity could also use some solidarity. So back to nail-biting…)

Speaking of Darwin, it would be interesting to chart everyone’s opinions on a given topic — like freedom of speech — on a massive tree, with the base being some essential concept held universally (or nearly so):

[I]n a just state, we should assure people both of certain basic political freedoms and of the fair value of those freedoms.

Refinements on the basic tenet would then branch in different directions, differentiating further with more branches, thus illustrating graphically what the “mainstream” position on the topic is. For instance, Chris departs from the mainstream (or at least from me) pretty quickly when he says:

States and societies where broadcasting is dominated by a few conglomerates or where the money people make film-makers tone down the anti-religious content of their films, are seriously defective from a free-speech point of view.

Most certainly not! “Money people” (assuming they are spending their own money) can put any damn restriction they want on the content of the speech that they are paying to publicize. That’s their free speech. As I said regarding the post in question, if the filmmakers want to distribute their product as-is, let them find another distributor; there are plenty who would be up to the job. Or pay for it themselves.

Brett, we aren’t discussing any actual law but the principles that ought to regulate free speech in a just society.

It is very misleading for you to say that hate speech laws are about _content_ , if, by that you mean the propositions expressed. The same content can be unexceptional in one context and highly offensive, threatening and intimidatory in another. Same words: different speech acts.

What you won’t accept, I suspect, is my contention that the use of hate speech might so raise the costs of speech to its targets, that we can say they are deprived of an opportunity to participate in the political community on fair terms. You won’t accept that because you think that only physically preventing them from speaking, or threatening them with a gun, or shouting them down (or similar) would amount to interference with their (the targets of hate speech) freedom of speech.

But in the end, I’m not sure whether your disagreement is one of fact or principle. So let me stipulate some facts and see how you react. Suppose group A can utter sentences S with the effect that members of group B, whilst remaining physically able to speak, will be effectively psychologically deterred from doing so. And suppose, further that A know that this is the case and utter their sentences S with the intention of making it the case that members of B are deterred from speaking. Would you agree that the As have stopped the Bs from speaking? And if they do it all the time are the Bs denied an opportunity to participate in discussion on fair terms? Or not?

So I can respond by saying that we can legitimately force the hate speaker to shut up at whatever point it is that their speech is denying others a fair opportunity to participate etc, whilst leaving open the possibility that that point may never arrive in the actual world. My belief, and I don’t think it an unreasonable one, is that hate speech can create a “climate of fear” with such silencing effects – but I can’t specify the exact point at which it might do so.

This is one of those statements that I want to agree with in principle, but which worries me in practice. I think I can agree with it if we have a fairly strict view of “denying others a fair opportunity to participate”. If we are talking about threats and putting someones life in danger, I agree. If we are talking about things that make people uncomfortable and not interested in participating, I don’t.

People who are that easily intimidated don’t need hate speech laws, they need psychiatric treatment.

Well, that must be why Jews invented psychoanalysis…

(sarcasm, in case anyone misunderstands)

Chris, I’d think you’d take the contrariness of your commentors (with CT or with themselves, same diff) as a point of pride.

But seriously, can I take a crack at your challenge? You said:

Suppose group A can utter sentences S with the effect that members of group B, whilst remaining physically able to speak, will be effectively psychologically deterred from doing so. And suppose, further that A know that this is the case and utter their sentences S with the intention of making it the case that members of B are deterred from speaking.

If it actually happened that way, I think you’re right that we’d have to consider whether speech such as group A’s should be allowed. But I’m having a hard time imagining such a case in the real world where (1) some rather basic provision of existing law such as the prohibition of libel did not already apply, and (2) the speech involved is not trivial. So I can’t figure out if you’re providing intellectual support for existing law, or advocating new law. Generally, unless there’s a real world basis for any new law, no new law should be made. (Though I’ve never researched it, I strongly suspect that anti-libel laws weren’t enacted out of pure principle, but because people were libeling each other and the effects were observed to be bad.)

George, I was just trying to work out what Brett’s views were by confronting him with an imaginary case, rather than suggesting that was a typical one.

Sebastian, I’d want to be pretty stringent too. Speech that is merely annoying, or even highly offensive, should be protected. We agree about that.

I was the subject of sustained bullying myself, in elementary school. It left bruises, where it didn’t shed blood, so I tend to sneer at verbal bullying; I should have been so lucky to have had nasty things said about me.

God, you guys are wordy.

The question is whether it makes sense to make it a crime to incite violence against a subset of the population.

If the violence is imminent, I think this makes sense. You don’t want gangs of men going down the street saying things that might incite other men to rape women or attack a subset of men they deem “other.” (Black men, gay men, etc.)

So I am all for laws making it a crime to say hateful things to women or sexual or racial minorities in public. What people say in writing is their own business.

What about a law making it a crime to say hateful things about a religious majority?

I was living in d.c., working for Uncle Sam on 9.11.01 (DRMS PO @ NSF). I felt that p(I would die) on that day was not high, but noticeable.

But the horror of that day pales in comparison with the horror at the USA’s behavior since then. I hate Uncle Sam much more than I hate Osaddama.

I think the war in Iraq is evil. I think that part of the reason Sam is so evil is because he’s so Christian.

I am full of rage, disgust, fury, shame, guilt, anger and contempt for the old white capitalist Christian men who dominate the U.S. government.

I think Jesus was an enlightened human, like the Buddha. I have no doubt that he does not consider faux-Christians like Bush, Cheney and most of the other sleazebags who control the US to be true Christians.

Aside from worshiping an alleged old white guy in the sky, Sam’s other problem is that he drastically overestimates the extent to which economics is a science. He has blind faith in an invisible hand, just like he has blind faith in an invisible guy in the sky. The combination of the two delusions is dangerous.

Speaking of which, this is the most disgusting example of how the christians and capitalists are in bed together I’ve seen.

http://www.reason.com/hod/ww121304.shtml

So fuck Blunkett, Ashcroft and other assholes who want to make it a crime to say kristians are kooky.

Or Muslim or Québecois or Cherokee or whatever it is.

You’re mixing categories, Ophelia. Muslim is a religious identification (depite Chris’ fudging of the issue); the other two are not. Jews are a different case. My wife is Jewish and atheist. She grew up as “Cone” but decided to revert to her father’s original “Cohen”. She is Jewish in the secular way Einstein and Schoenberg were and she finds it an honour to be so identified. I agree. Myself, I was born a Catholic Québécois/Canadien. In the space of my lifetime French-Canadian society has gone from being one of the most religiously conservative and cleric-ridden in the western hemisphere (certainly in North America) to one of the most liberal. What remains of Catholicism in Québec is largely cultural nostalgia. And not too different from what Judaism (as opposed to Jewishness) is for my wife.

Chris, don’t get too upset about Hollywood toning down anti-religious sentiment in films. The same forces also mean that since I’ve started keeping up with the movies (about 1990) I haven’t seen any clearly sexist or racist movies. (There is a fair bit of implicit sexism or racism, e.g. the habit the heroine has of being useless at the climax so the hero can rescue her, the low-frequency of inter-racial romantic relationships, etc. However Christains tend to find a fair bit of anti-Christainity in Hollywood’s outputtings).

The moral horror of being forced to fund through taxes, or, if I ever happen to become a money person, directly, a movie say presenting slaves in the Southern USA as happy, simple people lovingly watched over and guided by the caring whites, or defending violence as a way of keeping women in line I think far outweigh any restriction in debate arising from expensive movies having to appeal to as large an audience as possible. And yet, these are attitudes held by a non-zero proportion of the population.

Or does giving “everyone a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum” actually mean giving “everyone who holds a position Chris approves of a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum”?

Or does giving “everyone a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum” actually mean giving “everyone who holds a position Chris approves of a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum”?

Right, Tracy. But the irony in all this is that the group this law aims to help, the Muslims, don’t seem to have any problem getting their voice heard in the (British) public forum. Certainly the more militant of them. If anyone is being cowed into silence it is the moderate Muslims. So, is Chris proposing to apply his hate speech law against the MAB and Qaradawi (and his accessory, Livingstone)?

”The right of apostates to express their apostasy, of gay Muslims to express their views etc, is plausibly threatened by hate speech directed at them by the ultra-religious.”

Can’t you read?

Yes I can Chris. And my question remains: would the hypothetical (sorry, not “your”… and certainly not my) hate law be applicable in this case? And where would the MAB, Qaradawi and Livingstone figure in this scenario? This isn’t just a rhetorical question; I’m trying to understand exactly whom this law would help — and, especially, how — and what collateral damage it would inflict.

Sorry for getting grumpy…

I guess my answer is that if extremists Muslims engage in speech the aim of which is to deny others, such as apostates, the opportunity to participate in public life, to express their views etc, by creating a climate of fear, then the speech of those Muslim extremists isn’t entitled to protection.

Ok — continuing in the seasonal spirit — it would be nice if we could pick and choose whose voices needed getting heard — and we seem to agree about some of the more obvious ones — but my objection to any law drafted to accomplish this, um, affirmative action, is based on its inevitable consequences. I can see a flood of complaints, and by all the wrong people. They’re doing their damnedest already, and hardly need the encouragement this law would bring.