The Charlie Hebdo attack, free speech, and the personalisation of politics
The attack on the periodical Charlie Hebdo is one of the most nihilistic acts of our times. The attackers take their politics, and the idea of effecting change, so seriously they didn’t even demand anything, or issue a statement to explain their attack. If it weren’t so deadly — and ruthlessly executed — one would consider it a childish tantrum.
The confusion of enigmatic enemies
Many are rightly outraged by such an attack on free speech; but historically such attacks have come from the state, or a force identifiable with a meaningful interest group in society (one thinks of fascists in the 30s). In such scenarios one has a target with which to engage. But with what group might one engage here? And if this group is so nebulous can it really be a serious threat? (One wonders too, if Westerners were offended by anti-Western cartoons penned by a Muslim, would the Parisian murderers consider it legitimate for a bunch of Westerners to respond likewise?)
Doing the terrorists’ work for them
On the other hand — as we have found with fear and (in)security — we have ended up doing the terrorists’ work for them. In this case we have allowed the insidious progress of the ‘culture of the offended’, from the fatwa on the Satanic Verses in the 80s to the closure of the UK play Behzti in the early noughties, from the cancellation of the publication of book The Jewel of Medina in 2008 to the (thankfully unsuccessful) protests against Jerry Springer: The Opera and, most recently, the closure by the Barbican Arts Centre of its EXHIBIT B show, after protests.
At the same time, we have tended to redefine society in terms of ‘ethnic’, religious and cultural groups whose members are subsumed by that (inscrutable) identity; the state has only an indirect relationship to these groups, and can only defer to them when their representatives claim to be offended.
There’s no ‘right not to be offended’
But there is no ‘right not to be offended’. Where one makes a choice, for instance of a religion, one should be prepared to defend it, argue for it — and, perhaps prompted by satire, be open to reconsidering it. If one can do this one will find one’s choice further validated. And if one can’t one’s views are probably less valid — and less easy to proselytise!
Personalised politics
But in the West, we too have personalised politics. When I was growing up political ideas were contested in an open, informed and good-natured — if fiery — manner. While as individuals we were closely identified with our ideas and beliefs, they weren’t our identity. Today, beliefs — and they are largely beliefs — are often so closely held that any questioning of them tends to create an almost existential crisis in the person being questioned, and results in a visceral hostility to the questioner. Perhaps these ideas are our ‘last man standing’ in an intellectual landscape many times decimated, and we cling to them the tighter as a result.
Disillusioned with ourselves
Many see radical Islamists as being hostile to ‘the Western way’ of life, as Allison Pearson notes in the Telegraph, but they only amplify a hostility already abroad in the West — to over-consumption, gluttony, selfishness, our ‘destruction of our environment’, whatever you’ve got! — which one can peruse in the comment pages of our media on the day’s columnists aren’t rediscovering the importance of free speech.
We’ve already accepted limits to free speech
Our political leaders have tolerated limits to free speech for years. They call for bans here, and prosecutions there, and curtailments everywhere. And on the rare occasions they are moved to defend free speech there is always a ‘but…’. But what they fail to understand is that free speech is about our freedom to hear and judge ideas for ourselves more than for people to be able to say what they want. Of course, people should be able to say what they want, and if they act like idiots we will tend to ignore them — or defend their targets. That many politicians and media outlets have tended to blame the victim — and the Financial Times was a case in point (though it has since in part rescinded its stance) — or argue that the media, like the other estates, should be subject to checks and balances on its power, is shameful, and demonstrates their lack of belief in the decency of us, the demos. (Kenan Malik argued cogently for ‘the right to satirise, provoke, and be downright offensive’ after the 2011 firebombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices.)
To his credit French President François Hollande said ‘We are threatened because we are a country of freedom… Freedom will always be stronger than barbarity’. But the responses of UK Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and US President Barack Obama were pat, and tired. Will any political party show some leadership and belief in its ideas and organise a rally or meeting — or even a broadcast or Web site — in response to the massacre? Sadly I suspect not.
What is to be done?
Many in the media are now arguing in defence of free speech in publishing. David Aaronovitch in The Times notes that ‘Charlie Hebdo could be singled out for attack is because the rest of us have been cowards’, which is true, but he fails to credit the many other advocates of free speech in the media. Charlie Beckett of the POLIS journalism programme at the London School of Economics writes in Medium that the hopes the response from the media ‘is in the best tradition of liberal, positive journalism’. In the Gaurdian Suzanne Moore notes that ‘Some have died for this. The least we can do is carry on being disrespectful’.
For me the best response to these events is to insist that:
- all ideas — and insults — are up for debate;
- intellectual progress is the product of the clash of ideas;
- progress is possible (and necessary);
- we should be confident enough to separate ourselves from our ideas;
- we should not make pariahs of others whose ideas make us uneasy; and
- debate makes us intellectually stronger.
