"Who are you to say that?" On free speech and wokeness

Until fairly recently, there was ambivalence on the issue of “female circumcision”, as it used to be called. Is it acceptable for westerners to criticise the practice? “It’s a tradition,” one Arabist professor told me about 30 years ago, as if that were an incontrovertible answer. No one outside a tradition had the right to pronounce on that tradition, he meant. “And the old English tradition of colonialism and racism,” I asked, “is that all right too?” He didn’t respond.

Since then, “female circumcision” has somehow been allocated to the category of things of which we’re allowed to disapprove; it is now called Female Genital Mutilation. But a view that remains pretty much statutory is the moral relativism of the Arabist professor — the view that nothing can be considered right or wrong except within a particular culture at a particular point in time. “Who are you to say that?” “Whose truth? It may be true for you, but…” “Aren’t all cultures as good as one another?” remain standard arguments, often fuelled by guilt or resentment towards colonialism. Yet can relativism be squared with the condemnation of what it condemns, or even with condemning at all? Only comparatively recently — perhaps not fully till after the exposure of America’s interference in Latin America or the fall of the Soviet Empire — did colonialism came to be seen as a major evil. It used to be taken for granted. There were still 16 empires in existence in 1914.

For the relativist, can views and practices strictly count as wrong if they are, or were once, considered right by enough people in a particular culture at a particular time? Certainly the holders and performers of those views and practices cannot justifiably be called bad so long as those views and practices are (or were) part of their engrained cultural background, and are (or were) held and performed in good faith. Even a non-relativist might agree. For why should members of a particular culture and era be expected to rise above it? Indeed how, according to relativism, can they?

The relativist might, however, feel compelled to abandon relativism in the case of slavery, even though it has been an immemorial practice that was only outlawed in the 19^th century, and had, for at least the three previous centuries, been a worldwide phenomenon. Especially as practiced by Europeans and Arabs, slavery has a claim to being considered eternally wrong. Who cares that it was generally condoned? If anyone’s statue deserved to be toppled, Colston’s surely did. And Rhodes’s good deeds may not be sufficient to redeem ones that were unsavoury, even for his time. But Hume? His statue in Edinburgh is now threatened. Of course he wrote racist things. So did Kant, statues of whom in Germany must surely be due for toppling. Locke had shares in the slave-trading Royal Africa Company, and helped draft the 1669 constitution of Carolina, clause 110 of which enjoined that “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.”

As philosophers, Locke, Hume and Kant were committed to questioning accepted beliefs; which in most areas they did. They could, therefore, rightly be held to more timelessly absolute standards than the rest of us. Even if it can be called wrong only in an absolute, non-relative sense, some of what they said and did cannot simply be dismissed (which wrongdoing so often is) as “a mistake”, and should not be obscured or whitewashed.

Yet, given the rest of their work and legacies, it seems unfair to pronounce those men to be undeserving of elevation, let alone wicked. They were writing at a time when it was virtually unquestionable (as, of course, it still is for many people) that your own country, tribe, culture or religion uniquely possessed the truth, that it had the best (often the only real) rules and conventions, and altogether was the best. And, like other Enlightenment thinkers, they were devoted to challenging European ideas and customs, and celebrating the excellences of other cultures.

Leibniz said Europe needed missionaries from China, which had superior ethics and politics; Diderot lauded Tahitian freedom and logic over the crabbed irrationality of French Christianity; Montaigne questioned whether the vices of Brazilian cannibals were any worse than Europeans’. “Ideas that we find to be held in common and in high esteem around us,” he wrote, “seem to be universal and natural, which is why we think that it is reason that is unhinged whenever custom is.” Enlightenment fiction supplemented Enlightenment philosophy. The virtue and integrity of Voltaire’s “ingenu” — reared by Huron Indians — highlighted his French hosts’ hypocrisy. Montesquieu’s Persians revealed Parisian flaws. “You are more barbarous than we are,” said Aphra Benn’s Prince Orinoko.

In practice the Enlightenment could be, and was, used as a mask for colonialism and racism — the oddly un-excoriated Napoleon, for instance, promoted “the Enlightenment on horseback” (ie, sought world-dominion) and he reintroduced slavery only eight years after the French revolutionaries had abolished it. But, as we are constantly told, an ideology or creed cannot be disqualified from having the highest principles whatever the atrocities committed in its name.

Anyway, without the Enlightenment, cultural relativism and identity politics would probably never have existed.

A key Enlightenment legacy was freedom of speech, which, as John Stuart Mill would later articulate, is essential in combatting the “tyranny of the majority”, with their conventions, dogmas and disapproval; as are “experiments in living”. He conceded that an opinion may be expressed that is horribly rebarbative to our accepted views — but after all, he pointed out, these may not be infallible. The uncomfortable opinion may contain some truth, in which case it will be useful; and it is useful anyway, even if wholly false, because truths need to be challenged to ensure their living vivacity and prevent them from becoming stagnant and dogmatic. According to Mill, the only occasions when free speech is not in order are when it is liable to cause harm or incite violence (and inevitably, for all his beneficial influence on our legal and moral customs, he has been taken to task for the open-endedness of his concept of “harm”).

Offending and being offensive might not, for Mill, have counted as outweighing the value of free speech. “Offensive” then meant (still does according to its dictionary definition) “causing someone to feel resentful, upset, or annoyed”. Yet it has acquired a weightier meaning — “causing resentment, upset or annoyance that is felt justifiably because a lack of respect has been shown”. It has become a moral term, with a claim to some sort of objectivity such that the person accused of being offensive rightly incurs reprimand.

Some transpeople claim that it is offensive to countenance debate on whether sex is biological, or whether a cis-girl or -boy should be considered too young to decide to transition before the age of 18. And they assume that whatever they call offensive not only offends them but ought to offend absolutely everyone, if not in all eras, then at least in the present one. Suppose it didn’t and doesn’t, that what they call offensive would not until recently even have qualified as controversial, and would still be endorsed by a high proportion of people? By the same token, so would capital punishment, and that is no reason not to condemn it. But it is only no reason if you invoke some sort of moral absolutism by which certain things qualify as right or wrong whatever society’s verdict — an appeal that ill accords with the woke’s relativism, especially when it comes to judging customs in cultures they don’t want to criticise.

It was free speech that broke the iron bonds of social censure and custom. Yet, now that it has helped us achieve so much that was once denied or forbidden, it tends to be derided as the perverse luxury of the reactionary (just as liberalism is vilified and equated with ruthless right-wing libertarianism). “Who are you to judge?” “Whose truth? — there is none” have become, though not explicitly, “Who are you to say anything that might question what I, as a member of a particular identity group, know to be true and morally right?” For all their lip service to relativism, the current Righteous think, or seem to, that the nature of truth and goodness has now been ascertained once and for all.

Certain principles, apparently, are infallible. And not only infallible now; they always have been, even before being enunciated, so that anyone who does not espouse them, or did not in other periods of history, counts as reprehensible. Harm (or offence) is objective too; it is constituted by questioning these principles. Enlightenment thinkers are constantly sneered at for having sought to achieve progress, assuming that progress must be the same for everyone no matter their ethnicity or culture. Yet, equally, it seems that seeking progress must actually have been in order after all, for it has now, apparently, reached its culmination.

Enlightenment thinkers are also condemned for surreptitiously basing their notion of the ideal human on that of the white entitled male. Yet, perhaps in compensation, members of each identity group talk as if the default nature of a human being is the one they themselves inhabit or identify as. Thus the majority of human beings aren’t, it turns out, born with a fairly obvious sex (a new-born’s genitals tend to be oddly enlarged) but need to be “assigned” one. The category “woman” is now divided into “ciswoman” and “transwoman”, as if it begs the question to assume that a “woman” is ordinarily cis, as, given the statistics, she surely is. This may help rectify smug certainties about what counts as the normal default category, and perhaps is only a temporary measure until the balance has shifted, but it is often disingenuous. The presuppositions and dogmas, the doctoring of scientific consensus that it demands seem to exceed those required for believing in God.

Tyranny was once the prerogative of the privileged and wealthy. Thanks to attempts at democracy, there then arose what Mill called “the tyranny of the majority”. Currently there is a tyranny of the minorities, the power of the righteous, the authority of specialised victimhoods. Specialisation, however, hampers activists’ attempts to sing from a unified hymn-sheet. Victimhoods clash, even in cases of intersectionality (when someone can boast of belonging to several simultaneously), so there has to be, if only tacitly, a pecking order. Feminism, for instance, is fairly low down on it, and is trumped by cultural relativism; which is why criticism for men’s patronising and demeaning attitudes to women only seems to apply to men within the Western tradition. Men outside it do not apparently, qualify for the same critique, although in some communities mansplaining is the least of a woman’s worries — she is explicitly (and legally) declared to be subject to male guardianship.

If you think through the thought of Hume, Kant and Locke, in each case racism is broadly untenable in it; indeed it has helped to expose and oppose racism. Hume argued that morality is based on humans’ natural attunement to one another’s feelings and a discomfort at sensing others’ discomfort that can be elevated into more impartial justice. Kant claimed that morality is founded on the equal value of everyone to which each of our actions should do justice. He and Locke were instrumental in articulating and furthering human rights.

If, on the other hand, you think through the activists’ purportedly unified agenda, you find that you can’t think through it. It is too riddled with inconsistency and incoherence to stand up. Which is why its supporters cannot oppose its questioners with argument, and resort instead to accusations of phobia and hatred, and to issuing rape and death threats. They say, often with reason, that they feel unsafe — then proceed deliberately to ensure the certifiable unsafety of those they disapprove of.

In the interests of everyone, whatever their identity, let’s abjure the unthinking cowardice of those stumbling to distance themselves from J K Rowling and other misspeakers. Let’s not be like medieval Christians piously asserting that there are three persons in one God without, in most cases, knowing what on earth that could mean. Let’s not condemn heretics to eternal damnation.