The issue of freedom of speech and expression becomes fundamentally important given the situation that we’re in, wherein the attacks on this particular principle are characteristic of both the Right and the Left. Totalitarian regimes all across the world limit the agency the citizenry has to effectively criticize it, and subsequently hope to change or improve the State itself. The Left chooses to denigrate the principle in a different way, political correctness and the gender-pronoun issue.
Before we dwell further down into this issue, it’s particularly important to point out the mischaracterisation of the freedom of speech and expression that exists in popular political discourse. It’s viewed simply as a tool to be able to criticize the government and so on and so forth. But that becomes fundamentally problematic given that it is a gross over-simplification of said freedom. Its function does include the ability to be able to criticize the government, but it’s value is not limited to that.
Speech and thought are largely non-exclusive when it comes to exercising the agency to engage with either, given that one thinks in words, in terms and nomenclature that is available through the means of language, which we engage with through speech. So, the ambit to which you can process externalised and internalised reality by thought is limited to the words that you can use to effectively put down your ideas into, by the agency of speech.
To simplify this idea, I’d ask the reader to think of all the things that language defines and tags through words, and then observe how it’s difficult to really envision ideas and entities that aren’t largely defined by the vocabulary available to you. This is precisely what Orwell talks about in 1984, for instance, wherein the Ministry of Truth edits history and words are constructed precisely to create contradiction in thought and hence seize it.
And free thought serves a crucial purpose in civil society, the fact that it can inspire change in status quo. Individuals without the agency of free thought will not be able to deconstruct societal structures and account for objective and subjective interpretations of reality and then they will not be able to act and inspire change, fight the oppressor, or benefit the society even as it exists, as creative ability produces the most ‘valuable’ results in civil society.
Now there are fundamental restrictions on this freedom too, which are reasonable, like you can’t incite violence against another entity directly or you can’t defame someone based on falsity, and I accept those restrictions, but in our times, we’re crossing a line which we largely shouldn’t as a society, and I’ll elucidate that position given the current context.
Coming to the situation at hand, I guess I don’t have to reasonably take on the authoritarian regimes, given the harms of quashing dissent are fairly self-evident as they manifest in society. I’ll focus on political correctness, which has prominent critics like Zizek and Peterson on different sides of the political philosophy spectrum.
As I explained, you think in words, and words convey the seriousness of the issue at hand. The idea of masking connotations with the issue by the use of carefully constructed jargon tends to trivialise the issue at hand and/or dehumanises the individuals being talked about. The earliest critics of political correctness on these lines are found in comedy clubs of all places, with people like George Carlin and Bill Hicks. Carlin takes up the example of war veterans and how the situation they were faced with, currently called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder has involved in terms of its nomenclature and how the jargon has rather trivialised the issue in the mind of the American people and dehumanised war veterans to the extent that their mental health became a ‘back-log’ issue at Congress. This is also precisely the issue that Zizek talks about, saying that the oppressors in any given society mask the true extent of their oppression through the use of jargon, and it creates a comfort zone for the oppressed which becomes difficult to get out of. Since words invoke the seriousness of the issue or situation, and since any objective situation can have infinite subjective interpretations, the way it’s understood becomes significantly different given that the jargon serves to mask certain nuances of the situation.
Also, I doubt the effectiveness of political correctness even on the goals that it sets out for itself, take the instance of the so called ’n-word’. It invokes exactly the same idea as the word ‘nigger’ does, given that it directly invokes the word ‘nigger’. It becomes a self-defeating cycle.
Since words invoke the seriousness of the issue or situation, and since any objective situation can have infinite subjective interpretations, the way it’s understood becomes significantly different given that the jargon serves to mask certain nuances of the situation.
On the issue of engagement and whether or not so called ‘despicable’ opinions should be discussed. Principally and pragmatically, the proposition that people with said opinions should be driven away from mainstream political discourse is very harmful. Now I’m obviously not defending hate speech and Nazi propaganda to inspire violence, but the case is with a very different group of people, which can be enunciated with for instance ‘rational’ Trump supporters who fell for the economic nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment. The problem with driving these people away is two-fold.
Firstly, opinions also represent a set of beliefs that help you functionally deal with the society around you and find your place in it. And the process of the formulation of opinion and thought necessarily involves feedback. If one wants to create a ‘better’ society it becomes important to give feedback to people one disagrees with. Without feedback, it is very difficult to flesh put errors of judgement, and without directly engaging with people on the values that they prioritize, it is fundamentally problematic to get them back into the ‘rational’ political landscape, which gets me to my second problem. These people, regardless of whether or not the Left chooses to drive them away, still exist, and have a vote. Ostracization only serves to create further resentment and polarization which precisely creates the problem of populists like Trump and Bannon. The moral posturing and identity politics hinging on polarization that the Left continues to use for political discourse and campaigning doesn’t work and the left must seek to away from it if it wants to be a reasonable political force in the coming years.
The issue of gender pronouns involves more nuance than just the freedom of speech and expression.
The post-modern school of thought argues that any given event can have infinite subjective interpretations and that all value systems created around any of those interpretations has some merit and must be considered. That is a profound concept, but problematic when it comes to civil society and how it chooses to regulate intra-society dealings amongst people. The need for State and Society comes from mitigating the harms of State of Nature and also because cooperation amongst individuals who serve different functions produces a better result for all entities involved. But for society to collectively move forward, it has to reach a consensus which is just to its entire citizenry, at least to the extent of marginals. For consensus, people need to negotiate and engage and for that they have to come to the most reasonable functional interpretation of reality and what the best course of action is given that ‘this’ is real. Without free thought, a society gets dominated by the political class, because a homogeneity of opinions and the fact that the State can also now control what that opinion is going to be means that the benefits that reasonable discourse creates in and off itself get mitigated, but also the fictional interpretation agreed upon in no longer just but skewed in the favor of certain individual actors who have rigged the system to benefit themselves.
WRITTEN BY
DAANISH KAUSHAL
IMAGE CREDITS - GOOGLE IMAGES
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