Standing Up For Freedom of Speech
Journalist Brendan O’Neill talks to Conor Shearman on the right to offend, fostering intolerance and why students refuse to engage in debate.Freedom of speech may sound like a simple idea, but for Brendan O’Neill – unlike a majority of outspoken figures in the past few weeks – it is a philosophy which he holds consistently and absolutely: “People pay lip-service to freedom of speech but they don’t want to live it as a reality and you can see that all the time.”He offers the example of politicians championing free speech with the slogan ‘Je Suis Charlie’ yet attempting to get rid of page three in The Sun; “You see these contradictions all the time where on the one hand, people will say they like freedom of speech, but there’s always something they secretly want to censor.” For the journalist and editor of Spiked magazine, a walking contradiction to some in his self-described stance as a Marxist-Libertarian, freedom is an ideal which should be strived for far more in an individual’s life.
"On the one hand, people will say they like freedom of speech, but there’s always something they secretly want to censor.”
Defending offensiveness is integral to O’Neill’s commitment to freedom of speech, “some of the great leaps forward by humankind were made by people who were willing to be offensive.” He points to Copernicus’s discovery that the earth goes around the sun as one which was deeply offensive to the Catholic orthodoxy of the era. “You know what seems like a blasphemy to us today might actually appear quite mainstream and truthful in the future, so we have to allow people to constantly push at the boundaries of acceptable thought.”A persuasive speaker, O’Neill portrays the current decade as one of intolerance, dominated by a culture of offence taking and censorship. Social media, he outlines as one of the tools which facilitates this culture; although he suggests it has the capacity to open debate, the reality is that it achieves the opposite. “It can actually stifle debate, it can enforce conformism, it makes people less thoughtful, less considered, less sensitive to nuance.” The phenomenon of the twitch hunt, whereby an online storm is generated in pursuit of a figure who has said or done something controversial is an all too familiar occurrence to provide credence to such a view.
"We have to allow people to constantly push at the boundaries of acceptable thought.”
In an article published in the Spectator before Christmas, O’Neil accused students – once viewed as bastions of open mindedness – as some of the prime practitioners of this culture of intolerance. The article which refers to a number of personal experiences on campuses, describes students’ attempts to shut down, rather than participate in debate; outrage issued at arguments which refuse to conform to the designated norm.It is a trend which he believes originates from a generation who have been taught to prioritise their own self-esteem: “We’ve created a new generation that seems to think its own self-esteem is the most important thing in the world, which it isn’t.” The potential damage this creates, he outlines, is when one’s political outlook is bound up in their personal identity; contrasting arguments to the outlook which defines oneself will be dismissed, as “younger people tend to be more sensitive to anything that they feel impacts on their identity or on their way of life.”
“We’ve created a new generation that seems to think its own self-esteem is the most important thing in the world."
Same-sex marriage is one of the examples around which O’Neill believes such a stifling of debate is taking place. “The debate around it is very worrying,” he begins. “There is a quite stifling atmosphere and if you are not in favour of gay marriage, as lots of religious people, you can be demonised. You can be cast out of polite society like Brendan Eich at Mozilla who was basically forced out of his job by an online mob simply because he donated money to an anti-gay marriage campaign.”Although neither for or against marriage equality, he describes it as a somewhat “invented issue,” portraying comparisons between it and the civil rights movement in the United States in the 50s and 60s as “completely disingenuous” due to the lack of protest which has accompanied it. Instead he believes it to be a campaign championed by a “middle elitist class.”It is a middle class which have come to dominate society in many ways according to O’Neill, counting journalism, politics and acting among a number of fields now controlled by the middle class. “You have the lower classes and the upper classes no longer as influential as they used to be and so into the vacuum the middle classes come.” A middle class dominated society may not be in itself a terrible thing to O’Neill, but it is if middle class values are imposed on everyone at the expense of individual liberty. Freedom, it appears, is that pillar which stands above all else.