'I Find That Offensive!' E-Book

Claire Fox

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

When you hear that now ubiquitous phrase 'I find that offensive', you know you're being told to shut up. While the terrible murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists demonstrated that those who offend can face the most brutal form of censorship, it also served only to intensify the pre-existing climate that dictates we all have to walk on eggshells to avoid saying anything offensive - or else. Indeed, competitive offence-claiming is ratcheting up well beyond religious sensibilities. So, while Islamists and feminists may seem to have little in common, they are both united in demanding retribution in the form of bans, penalties and censorship of those who hurt their feelings. But how did we become so thin-skinned? In 'I Find That Offensive!' Claire Fox addresses the possible causes of what is fast becoming known as 'Generation Snowflake' head-on (no 'safe spaces' here) in a call to toughen up, become more robust and make a virtue of the right to be offensive.

Leseprobe

PROVOCATIONS

‘I FIND THAT OFFENSIVE!’

CLAIRE FOX

SERIES EDITOR: YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN

Dedication

IDEDICATE THIS BOOK to my much younger colleagues at the Institute of Ideas (IoI), who are an embodiment of the resilient and smart young people that are bold enough to want to change the world, however many insults are thrown at them. And also to the thousands of IoI Debating Matters alumni, from sixth form to young adulthood, who are proof that arguing about ideas without restraint, learning to take criticism on the chin, having better things to do than feeling hurt, can help encourage others to be not so easily offended.

I offer special thanks to Rob Lyons, Austin Williams, David Bowden, Rossa Minogue and Geoff Kidder for reading first drafts and helping me to better articulate what I wanted to say.

Contents

Title PageDedicationPrologue: A tale of two schoolsPart I:‘You can’t say that’ – walking on eggshellsPart II:Creating the Snowflake GenerationPart III:Letter to a generationCopyright

Prologue: A tale of two schools

IN SPRING 2015, I was asked to give two different talks to sixth-form students at two very different schools. This book is inspired by what happened.

* * *

The first incident was at a school with over 90 per cent Muslim students and I was there to discuss free speech post-Charlie Hebdo. Credit to the teachers who invited me; they realised that this talk would most likely offend the pupils. Indeed, it did. Almost everything I said in defence of Enlightenment values – my arguments against protecting any one group, whether based on religion, ethnicity or sexuality, from offence – was met with gasps of disbelief. At one point I apparently made a religious faux pas when I explained, ‘It doesn’t matter how upset people were by a picture of Mohammed on a magazine front cover, the point is…’ and was interrupted by screeches of horror. I had seemingly broken some rule by failing to say ‘The Prophet Mohammed’. While a minority heckled ‘how dare you’, many seemed more upset than angry. Some of the girls in the front row looked close to tears. I feared that some were ready to walk out and I had to shout through the uproar, explaining that I was there to talk about free speech, not theology. While I had not sought to be gratuitously offensive about Mohammed, I urged them to listen to my arguments and discuss with me, rather than being outraged about a linguistic mistake. It took a while before relative calm was restored, but what struck me was how distressed they were by my remarks. This was not a feigned response or an affectation; they had been genuinely hurt.

In the discussion that followed, it became clear that these lovely, bright young people had found it difficult to hear my arguments without taking them personally. The girls in particular seemed distraught, as though I had insulted each one of them rather than making a general case for free speech. One young woman, her voice quivering, explained that she felt devastated whenever the Prophet Mohammed was disrespected. Another tearfully said that maybe non-Muslims didn’t care about the precise use of words or images but, for her, seeing something like the Hebdo cartoons was, she explained, like being physically assaulted or being exposed to the vilest pornography. And while some of this may have been a demonstration of typical teenage melodrama, the pupils did seem taken aback that I was prepared to stand up to their diktats – telling me what I was permitted to say about their religion – without being defensive about challenging some of their ill-informed prejudices. When I took on one boy’s conspiracy theory that there was no proof that Islamic terrorists had perpetrated 9/11, he replied, ‘Well that’s just your opinion.’ Other pupils argued against him, but suggested I needed to make allowances. Several London-born-and-raised teenagers explained that maybe, as a Western woman, I needed to be more sensitive; I couldn’t possibly understand their pain or the suffering of the worldwide Ummah. Maybe, one pupil suggested, I should listen to him, not the other way round.

As many more tried to inform me that Europe was awash with Islamophobia, I managed to challenge them, but found it difficult to reassure these genuinely frightened pupils with facts. They quoted mainstream politicians and news programmes on the dangers of a backlash post-Charlie Hebdo, and seemed to believe that anything less than uncritical respect for Islam amounted to hate speech and was just one step away from anti-Muslim pogroms.

I got through the event shaken but intrigued. The hard-pressed teachers seemed delighted that I had started a debate. When I related this story afterwards, many people concluded that the problem here was the nature of Islam. They suggested that the Koran, or a perverted reading of it, had somehow taught these pupils intolerance and had bred a particular inability to have their views challenged. But, actually, the reception to my remarks was personal, and I recognised that look of hurt in the pupils’ eyes when I criticised their views. I had seen a similar thin-skinned reaction before: when I received an almost identical response from a completely different group of pupils to a speech on a completely different topic.

At the second school, I had been asked to debate the motion ‘Ched Evans: social justice or mob rule?’, about whether footballer Ched Evans, a released convicted rapist, should ever be employed to play professional football again. I was on the back foot from the start. The allegedly neutral sixth-former introducing the debate explained that, as a feminist, she was against rehabilitating rapists. My official opponent, a well-known TV personality, followed on with a rousing speech about the horrors of rape. When she asked 25 per cent of the audience to stand up so that she could illustrate how many of them were likely to end up being sexually assaulted, the pupils were gripped. That infamous ‘one in four’ stat may be inaccurate, but it has become an unchallengeable truth. My rather dry defence of rehabilitation, the rule of law, natural justice, impartiality, a fresh start once you have done your time, and the dangers of emotionally clouded judgements on sentencing were never likely to win me allies. They didn’t.

But it was when the Q&A started that things really heated up. It became obvious that there was an accepted, acceptable narrative here, and any challenge to it led to accusations of victim-blaming or rape apologism. The contributions became increasingly shrill, with several students demanding that anyone convicted of rape should be locked up for life and denied the right to be a father, let alone be allowed to have a job. It was then that it dawned on me that one of the reasons that my arguments were making little headway was that the students had already internalised the ‘fact’ that rape and sexual assault were unquestionably the most heinous thing these teenagers could imagine happening, a crime beyond forgiveness, and that its victims would never be able to get over it. Whatever I said was secondary. The definitions of rape being used by the pupils were very broad, incorporating everything from unwanted advances to regretted sex, and were being discussed as though it was an imminent threat to each and every one of them.

I was genuinely worried that these students – particularly the young women – would fare badly in the post-school real world if they were so terrified. I decided, perhaps rashly (quoting Germaine Greer for recognisable feminist cred), to tell them that rape was not necessarily the worst thing that could ever happen to an individual. Yes, it is a serious crime, but we need a sense of proportion. The room erupted. The audience shrieked. A teacher yelled out ‘you can’t say that’. Girls were hugging each other for comfort. The majority seemed shell-shocked. Even posing this viewpoint was a step too far, it seemed. I was told that I was dangerous, irresponsible and offensive. My careless comments, they told me, could send a message to the young men present that sexual assault was OK.

As in the first school, pupils’ reactions betrayed a genuinely felt personal hurt and surprise that I – or anyone – could say the unsayable out loud and then refuse to back off when they told me ‘you can’t say that’. One pupil came up to me, not to shake my hand, but to tell me that my views had made her feel nauseous. A group of emotional girls suggested that maybe as an older woman I needed to be more sensitive to the plight of younger women and that I obviously had no empathy with women worldwide who are raped daily.

I am pretty hard-nosed, and I don’t take pleasure in making teenagers cry, but these reactions did shake me up. What these two schools had in common were teenagers who believed that words really hurt and that contradictory opinions to their own beliefs were the cause of real harm.

And yet, despite the pupils’ apparent hyper-sensitivity, their emotional suffering was combined with an almost belligerent sense of entitlement that their feelings should take precedence. In both instances, I was put under pressure to retract, apologise and assuage students’ distress. While these young Muslims and young feminists may superficially seem to have little in common, they were indistinguishable from each other in demanding bans and apologies for what they considered offensive, dangerous ideas. Both groups agreed that my advice that ‘sticks and stones might break your bones, but words will never hurt me’ was an outdated misunderstanding of the fundamental damage that words can inflict on vulnerable individuals.

My tale of two schools captures trends that I have been worrying about for some time. At school or university events, I have noticed an increasingly prickly willingness to take offence – and the corrosive effect that this is having on attitudes to free speech. This trend, to be easily offended, is now exploding into public consciousness with the unravelling madness that has taken over so many American universities, and is now emerging on British campuses. Spiked’s Free Speech University Rankings 20161 show that 90 per cent of universities and students’ unions censor speech. Rising from 80 per cent in 2015, the vast majority of these censorious policies are carried out by students’ unions. Barely a week goes by without reports of something ‘offensive’ being banned from campus. But dubbing students as cry-babies and ‘snowflakes’ for their thin-skinned reactions to everything from Halloween costumes to song lyrics, statues to tabloid newspapers, doesn’t really explain why this is happening.

Should we worry about such silly, trivial incidents? Perhaps we can just wait for these fragile youths to grow up and not worry too much about broader consequences for society. However, this all-pervading sense of grievance, displayed by so many students, is now beginning to cause serious anguish for older commentators, who look on with horror at the increasing evidence that young people have become dangerously thin-skinned. This reflects worries that the young are becoming too mollycoddled and infantilised for the rough and tumble of real life.

When Dr Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, issued an open letter to his students saying ‘This is not a day care. This is a university’, he was quoted internationally because he captured concerns about a generation who too often behave more like sulky, demanding children than young adults. Others are exasperated with the petty nature of contemporary complaints that seem so po-faced, joyless and censorious. Comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke. Even President Obama has weighed in during an interview with National Public Radio in December 2015, in which he told students that they should engage in debate with those who share different beliefs: ‘Feel free to disagree with somebody, but don’t try to just shut them up.’ And in her first interview as new vice-chancellor of Oxford University, Professor Louise Richardson (the first female VC in the university’s history) raised concerns about free speech on campus, explaining why it is positive for students to be exposed to ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘objectionable’ ideas.

Theme and structure of this book

It’s hard not to become irritated about the younger generation when we hear that delegates at NUS Women’s Conference find applause to be so stressful that they announced: ‘Some delegates are requesting that we move to jazz hands rather than clapping, as it’s triggering anxiety.’ When a student union bans sombreros as offensive to Mexicans, or another condemns a yoga club for ‘cultural appropriation’, the young can seem exasperating. But, while there are plenty of easy targets to snigger at, it is much harder to work out who and what is responsible for what US public intellectual Todd Gitlin describes as a new ‘generational norm of fragility’.

So this short book will explore why the young, in particular, have developed this insidious deference to offence. I will not deal with the main explanation, which is undoubtedly the decline of a liberal commitment to free speech. (For a full account, see Mick Hume’s recent book Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?) More modestly, I want to concentrate on identifying a number of problematic cultural and educational culprits that have softened up today’s young, making them susceptible to easy offence. You see, young people are the expression of a problem that is actually caused by the retreat from reason by the older generation. We can sneer at youth’s foolishness, but we need to take a long, hard look at official social policy influences that have created this generation out of the raw material of the previous one.

Part I surveys the contemporary offence scene, using examples from Britain and America. (Events in the US are often a useful warning of what is to come here.) It looks at the new trends on and off campus that are threatening free speech, from the privileging of victimhood and the splintering of identity to the new theories of microaggressions and the toxicity of Twitter.

Part II looks at therapeutic educational interventions, such as anti-bullying campaigns, through which the young are taught that psychological harm is interchangeable with physical violence, and which emphasise that safety is a virtue that trumps all else. This part also explores the industries that promote and encourage narcissistic tendencies in the young, from self-esteem to student voice.

Part III is a call to arms to the young, and a sketch of the challenges they face.

Before I start, I want to introduce a rider: I write this knowing that not all Millennials, Gen Y, Gen Z, NetGen, iGen etc. are spoilt wimps or over-anxious cry-babies. So if you count yourself among these groups, don’t take it personally when I describe generational trends that are less than flattering. I feel for Joshi Herrmann, executive editor of The Tab, when he pleads, ‘It would be cool if everyone could stop treating the authoritarian streak of a small minority of activists as a generational bellwether.’2 But we need to confront these trends head-on, precisely to arm Joshi and his pro-free-speech peers with the intellectual arguments needed to create a new zeitgeist. So, let’s start with a survey of the contemporary offence landscape.

1 Free Speech University Rankings, spiked, January 2016

2 Joshi Herrmann, ‘Now the NUS is making our whole generation look bad’, The Tab, 14 February 2016

Part I