I remember being assigned Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut in my first-year Law, Power and Politics course. After the first few pages, I was intrigued and completely immersed in the story. By the end, I was at a loss for words and left with the conviction that extreme equality can be used for censorship.
Dystopian futures presented to us by Vonnegut, Orwell and Huxley have been terrifying influences on me. As a moral libertarian, I’ve always been worried about the censorship of the far right. However, over the past few years, it’s the far-left that’s positioned itself as far more worrisome. It has used the premise of equality – pushed to extremes – to threaten our freedom of speech.
You may have heard about PC Principal’s antics on South Park, or be vaguely aware university protests in the United States are escalating. You’re familiar with terms like safe spaces, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and cry-bullies. Some may believe this is the next step in human evolution and we are moving towards a beautiful utopia of equality. But I lie awake at night wondering what our world will look like, one day, when students achieve positions of power.
As university students, our objective is to expand our minds and develop our ability to think critically. Intellectual discussions, debates and an evaluation of both sides of an argument are required, even uncomfortable ones. Students aren’t forced to accept controversial ideas but are expected, at the very least, to be open to discuss them.
“Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity,” Immanuel Kant wrote in An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment in 1784. The solution? “Nothing is required for this enlightenment, however, except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely the freedom to use reason publicly in all that matters.”
A recent Pew Research study found 40 per cent of millennials believe government should be able to prevent individuals from using language offensive to minorities’ publically. Not an unreasonable position as the majority of the Western world does not tolerate hate speech, though it is constitutionally protected in the United States.
However, in December an undercover reporter at Yale University asked students to sign a petition eliminating the First Amendment of the U.S. constitution. They reported receiving over 50 signatures within the first hour. Students were shown on video commenting, “I think it’s great that you’re out here.” In case you are not aware, the first amendment guarantees not only freedom of speech and peaceful association, but freedom of religion, free press and freedom to petition.
Public figures, such as Donald Trump, only to give these debates momentum. By making openly racist and bigoted comments, he demonstrates exactly why social justice warriors may be onto to something. On the other hand, it may be that his extremism responds to the hardline echo-chambers the political right has to contend with on the political left.
But there are also moderates speaking out against this behaviour, including Barack Obama.
“I’ve heard of some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative,” he announced at a high school in Des Moines. “Or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans, or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. And I’ve got to tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of views.”
Obama echoes Kant’s centuries old ideas of permanent immaturity. Millennials are infantilizing themselves. When students literally retreat into safe spaces with videos of frolicking puppies, colouring books and bubbles, it’s hard to call them anything but children.
The problem is no longer confined to university campuses in the United States. A Laurentian University professor was recently removed from the classroom. He said he’d created a “statement of understanding”, under the university administration’s request, and students were asked to sign at the beginning of the course. It indicated warnings of graphic and explicit content in order to help the students think critically in his psychology course.
Students had been warned of his methods, were asked for consent to participate and if they were not up to it, they were welcome to transfer to another section. Despite academic freedom, he’s been removed from the class. The university is now claiming the waiver violates their policies.
Unlike in the United States, where students have been caught screaming at faculty “university is not about creating an intellectual space, it’s about creating a home,” faculty members and his students have been fighting for Persinger’s reinstatement. So far, they’ve been unsuccessful. In the age of social media, how long before the desire for censorship creeps its way into Canada?
As John Stuart Mill pointed out in On Liberty, debate and discussion of both sides of each argument are essential to human progress and engagement.
“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that,” Mill wrote. “That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact in his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.”
So where will the lines be drawn? Will the future be one in which we are only allowed to use proper language free of profanities? Will the content of our ideas and opinions be censored to the point of complete ignorance, – as well? Will dissenting opinions be accepted in discourse? As a journalist, will my life parallel that of Winston Smith in 1984 – spending my days “rectifying” facts in old news articles to “protect the public” in “newspeak? “
I’ll leave you with words from John Milton’s speech Areopagitica: “it will be primely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of Truth, not only by disexercising and blunting our abilities in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that might bee yet further made.”
