'To be tolerant', Umberto Eco once wrote, 'one must first set the boundaries
of the intolerant'. One of the ironies of our more inclusive, more diverse
society is that the preservation of diversity seems increasingly to leave
less room for a diversity of views. To show respect for other peoples, other
cultures, and other viewpoints, the argument runs, one needs to be intolerant
of people whose views give offence or who transgress firmly entrenched moral
boundaries. Hence the recent furore created by Chris Morris's satire on paedophilia
and the High Court's decision to overturn the immigration ban on Louis Farrakhan.
On the Monday Home Office minister Beverley Hughes declared Morris's Brass
Eye programme (which she had not seen) to be 'unspeakably sick'. On the
Tuesday she was 'dismayed' by the decision of Lord Justice Turner to lift
the ban on Farrakhan because the presence of the Nation of Islam leader would
undermine 'the social cohesion and racial harmony of this country'. The government
hinted that it might strengthen the powers of the ITC to censor offensive
programmes and that it might appeal against the unbanning of Farrakhan. It
was a view that found considerable support among both liberals and conservatives.;
For many, those who make jokes about child abuse or claim Hitler to be a 'great
man' clearly lie beyond the boundaries of the intolerant.
The trouble with the 'you have to be tough to be tolerant' argument, however,
is that toughness inevitably trumps tolerance. Most strong views will give
some offence to some people. So where do we draw the 'boundaries of the intolerant'?
The answer appears to be ever more widely.
A few years ago, a national newspaper asked me to write an essay about the
eighteenth century revolutionary Tom Paine; the occasion was the 200th anniversary
of his book The Age of Reason. I opened the piece with a quote from
Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. As the greatest freethinker of
his age, I wrote, Paine would not only have approved of Rushdie's novel, but
been astounded at the pusillanimity of liberals in defending it. A few hours
after I handed in my copy, an editor phoned me back. 'We've discussed it with
senior Muslim figures', she told me, 'and they find any quote from The
Satanic Verses offensive. We can't use it.'
A few years later, in the wake of the Princess Diana's death, I was talking
to another editor on another newspaper. Diana was no victim, I argued. She
was rich, privileged, and a great manipulator of the media. Anyone else who
ordered their chauffeur to drive them through a city centre at breakneck speed
would be condemned for their idiocy, not revered for their compassion. 'That
would make a great article', the editor told me, 'but it's too provocative;
it would offend too many people.'
Then there was the time I was invited, together with the writer Marek Kohn,
to debate Chris Brand, an Edinburgh University psychologist and self-styled
'scientific racist'. A disciple of Francis Galton, the 19th century founder
of eugenics, Brand believes that black people are genetically less intelligent
than whites. We never got the chance to challenge Brand's pernicious views.
The Anti-Nazi League protested that there should be 'no platform for racists'
and the organisers complied.
Muslims, monarchists, anti-Nazis - is there anybody left out there whom one
can offend? The world, it seems, is people by sensitive souls, too weak to
be confronted by strong opinions, controversial statements and provocative
arguments. As a result we all have to live our lives as if in a church service
- all hushed tones and reverential attitudes, and no bad language, or bad
thoughts.
Yet it is the freedom to blaspheme, to transgress, to move beyond the pale
that is at heart of all intellectual, artistic and political endeavour. Far
from censoring offensive speech, a vibrant and diverse society should encourage
it. In any society that is not uniform, grey and homogenous there are bound
to be clashes of viewpoints. Inevitably some people will find certain ideas
objectionable. This is all for the good. For it is the heretics who take society
forward. From Galileo's vision of the universe to Darwin's theory of evolution,
from the drive towards secularism to the struggle for equal rights, every
scientific or social advance worth having began by outraging the conventions
of its time. Without such heresies and transgressions, society may be more
ordered, and more polite, but it will also be less progressive and less alive.
It is true that many who today cause offence, such as Louis Farrakhan or Chris
Brand, are objectionable characters with odious ideas, heretics who wish to
drag society back to the dark ages rather than take it forward. But the right
to transgress against liberal orthodoxy is as important as the right to blaspheme
against religious dogma or the right to challenge reactionary traditions.
'We believe in free speech', claimed Greville Janner, chairman of the Holocaust
Educational Trust. 'But there's a limit, and arousing racial hatred is beyond
the limit.' Free speech for everyone except anti-Semites and racist demagogues
is, however, no free speech at all. It is meaningless to defend the right
of free expression for people with whose views we agree. The right to free
speech only has political bite when we are forced to defend the rights of
people with whose views we profoundly disagree.
Moreover, it is only through freedom of expression that we can articulate
our disagreements with such people and challenge their ideas. Censoring ugly
ideas will not make them go away. It is simply a means of abrogating our responsibility
for dealing with them. It is fanciful to suggest, as Beverley Hughes does,
that Farrakhan should be banned in order to preserve social cohesion and racial
harmony. During the last fifteen years, when Farrakhan has been excluded from
these shores, those who wished to create social disruption and racial disharmony
have done very well without his aid. Keeping Farrakhan out has provided an
easy way of avoiding thinking about why his views may have purchase on certain
sections of society, and how to tackle them. In the same way, those who demanded
that Chris Brand not be heard, and those who today seek to ban the British
National Party, sidestep the necessary task of directly challenging their
ideas. Putting on the censor's hat suggests a striking lack of confidence
in one's ability to persuade an audience of an alternative viewpoint, not
to mention a certain contempt for people's capacity to consider the evidence
rationally.
Easy solutions, however, have become the order of the day. In these post-Cold
War, post-ideological times there is a great desire for quick-fix political
consensus and moral certainties. The disintegration of both the traditional
left and right, and the collapse of old moral codes, has become a source of
insecurity. In the search for novel ways of regulating society, politicians
and intellectuals are trying to establish new boundaries of what is sayable
and doable, increasingly replacing the politics of right and left with the
pieties of right and wrong. It is no coincidence that the Chris Morris and
Louis Farrakhan affairs touch on the two issues - child abuse and the Holocaust
- about which few people have any doubt as to what constitutes moral right
and wrong.
The very fact that we talk of ideas as 'offensive' is indicative of the political
shift that has taken place. There are many ways of disagreeing with someone's
views - we may see them as irrational, reactionary, or just plain wrong. But
to deem an idea 'offensive' is to put it beyond the bounds of rational debate.
Offensiveness is an affront to an entrenched tradition, a religious precept
or one's emotional sensibilities that cannot be erased by reasoned argument.
It is a notion that sits well with the moralising, emoting, often irrational
approach to politics that we all too often see today.
Far from being the cornerstone of a diverse, plural society, the refusal to
give offence shows respect neither for oneself nor for others. Respect for
oneself requires self-belief, a willingness to take a stand, to be unpopular,
to refuse to see oneself as a victim easily disturbed by provocative beliefs.
Respecting others means not ignoring them but engaging with them by putting
them on their mettle and challenging their ideas and arguments. Without heated,
entrenched debate a plural society becomes but a hollow shell.
Edmund Burke once complained that Tom Paine sought to 'destroy in six or seven
days that which 'all the boasted wisdom of our ancestors has laboured to perfection
for six or seven centuries'. To which Paine replied: 'I am contending for
the rights of the living and against their being willed away, and controlled,
and contracted for, by the manuscript-assumed authority of the dead'. Paine
had no time for custom, no reverence for the past, no notion of deference
to authority. Would that we had a few more Tom Paines and few less Edmund
Burkes today.