Free Speech

Some comments in light of recent events at the US Capitol.

My view on this is broadly contained in this video, The Capitol Riot Explained

Trump isn't an aberration and isn't an anomaly. Republicans and Democrats have been playing the same bat-and-ball game for decades now, both sides knowing that it leads nowhere. The only difference now is that the sterility of that game is now becoming so obvious as to lead those who have been hoodwinked by it into demanding actions beyond the sterility. The Republicans have been obstructing reasonable and feasible action on social and environmental goods for years, and Democrats have been happy to offer mock outrage and protest that allows them to pose as the go-to party for the good guys. Biden claims that the US needs a 'strong Republican Party.' It is precisely such a strong Republican Party that has enabled the Democrats to get away with doing nothing for years, blaming the obstructiveness of the Republicans for every failed reform measure from healthcare to the environment. The two parties rely on each other to maintain the status quo; they are both right-wing corporate parties beholden to millionaire donors. They play the outrage game over identity politics, exchanging accusation and counter-accusation, each portraying the other as the greatest evil and the greatest threat to liberty/democracy/decency/all that is holy. The leadership in the game changes every few years, but nothing else does. If Biden was serious about real change, he would be taking advantage of the way the right have shown their hand and blasting them 24/7. Instead he is asking for people to be nice and unify. Just a continuation of Democratic weakness and complicity.

For more, watch the video. My concerns here are with something else. Whenever the lie morphs into the Big Lie, and those who believe in it find it confirmed the more it is shown to be false, a nation and its government and people are in trouble. Fact and fiction have been inverted. The way that those who have either bought into the lie or are interested in spreading it are now looking to other forms of social media to continue their activities has caught my eye. It used to be cranks who inhabited this space. It is striking how many are 'normal' people. Arendt wrote of the banality of evil. As they go their way, they are citing Orwell and free speech and denouncing those attempting to silence their hate filled lies as fascists. The video above makes it clear that sometimes Nazis really are Nazis. It also points out that censorship nearly always impacts most upon the left and has done for years. But maybe we can find something to agree on here - big business has far too much power over public life. It was the left that said this first and loudest, and were accused of being marxists by those crying fascism and free speech now.

I have found that many of those who are most insistent on the virtues of free speech tend to have the most closed minds, seeking a public space merely to repeat their predictable views and check the views of others. I rarely see evidence of that such minds ever value what others have to teach, merely seeing these others as opponents to counter and enemies to 'own.' I rarely see them having anything to teach themselves. On the contrary, many times, I have caught them out blatantly lying, sharing information which a mere minute's checking reveals to be a distortion of the truth, and which is often so blatantly untrue that in all likelihood the person issuing the information knows it to be untrue. They are unworthy of their place in any public space. It's a political game. They are out to mislead, deceive, and sow the seeds of division and confusion. It's all just a power-play to them. I've seen the claims, checked them, and more often than not see that they are lies being spread on social media and which quickly go viral. Free will is a gift from God. There is no biological basis for that freedom. Neuroscientists are busy telling us that free-will is an illusion and that we are all determined beings (it all depends on the definitions being employed, I say - those familiar with God's plan of justice will know all about freedom and necessity as two aspects of the same thing, coinciding in the love of the one God that encompasses all things). Free will is a sacred trust, and the people who use it to lie and divide abuse it. That is a desecration. I would accuse such people of being atheists were it not for the fact that at core atheism is the affirmation of the goodness of life and its rich potentials for happiness. Lucretius, Epicurus et al are scathing of those people who dabble in what a Christian idiom calls a deadly sin. These people abuse that gift of life. For Dante, the worst sins are fraud and treachery, the breaking and poisoning of trust, of the bonds that hold people together, turning people against one another and harming the social good. He condemns all who do this as people who are true to nothing but their own self- and sectional interest, reducing society to a war of all against all. In other words, the issue is not one of free speech at all, but of speech which crosses a line into harm of others. 'Liberty, they say, when they mean licence' (Aristotle). Those who reduce freedom to a licence do so deliberately in order to destroy standards of right and wrong, good and bad, truth and falsehood, and level intellect and morality on the ground of asymmetrical power relations. We move beyond a world of reason and enter a world of naked power. Such people use liberal principles to destroy liberalism. They know that liberalism is defenceless against such an assault. Hence I am not a liberal. I am a post-liberal who draws on an older tradition of the virtues. And I give short shrift to such people. Their motives are transparent. They lie through their teeth and do so systematically, playing the victim and the martyr whenever they are found out (which is often). They are a menace to the true, the good, and the beautiful. They love to pretend that they are in favour of robust debate and that those who criticise them do so because they lack robust arguments. Those who have gone through long arduous processes in learning how to access and weigh evidence, construct arguments, reason, entertain alternative views etc see right through the pretence. They want the freedom to lie, bully, abuse, and confuse. They are threatened by truth and therefore seek to drown it in a sea of lies. They lack discernment, they lack intellectual and moral virtue. They use freedom to destroy freedom. And society, through government and law, should not allow them that licence, for the reason it is toxic and will unravel the moral, intellectual, and social fabric in short order. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think I have ever called for anyone or anything to be banned. I am always more interested to develop ideas and learn than in wading through nonsense. I have argued with said libertarians and know it to be a waste of time. I don't ban them, I just cease paying any attention to their views. They neither listen nor learn, merely check and counter and negate. Manufacture a crisis, have it checked by Politfact, go back to the world of conspiracy theories etc What a sad world they inhabit. Such people are acidic in relation to all that is good; they are divisive. In my own spaces, I move such people on. I don't need to be forever arguing with a brick wall, not least because I know for certain those arguing do so to sap the energies and waste time. I retain a wide range of contacts with a wide range of views. I have no problem with that. I get bored with people saying the same thing over and again ("follow the science, follow the science" dreary question-begging rubbish. Same with identity politics and the rewriting of history as a story of continuous decline from some golden age that never was). I do have a problem with those who intervene in this diverse public to go to war and entrench and extend division, political ideology, and bigotry. You have either to defeat such people politically or let them wear you down in a war of attrition. That is precisely what they are engaged in - a war of attrition. I'm afraid it is a tactic many groups and causes are using these days, all the time wearing down the public realm and public authority. It won't end well. Instead of a genuine public, you will have a society in which victory will go not to the strongest argument - no one will believe in truth anymore, let alone search for it - but the loudest voice, the strongest arm, and the biggest guns. And the fact is, those who seek licence in the name of liberty know this and fancy that they have the greater resources to win in a fight. Those asserting licence cannot but breed a reaction made in its own image. I think that sums up the politics of the age. I'm rather proud of the fact that my first degree was in history. Straight A student, top honours. I can say that there are some very dubious views of politics and history being peddled in the present age. An age that is so casual with history is in a dangerous place; a society that has a loose grasp of the past can bear tyranny easily - it knows no better.

I missed "dom" off "freedom" and so put it back. I would say "dumb" were it not for the fact that the perpetrators of this deceit have at least a modicum of intelligence. I despise the satire and the way some take the opportunity to sneer as the stupid people they say are out there. There are a lot of poor folk who are being badly misled, their grievances - sometimes legitimate, sometimes not - are being exploited by people who do know better. Dante's Inferno is full of the rich and powerful. This is not a question of intelligence, it's a question of will and intent. All the knowledge and education in the world won't save us without the cultivation of the moral and intellectual virtues and a genuine commitment to truth-seeking. I was rather hoping for the scales to drop from the eyes and people to show leadership. Instead, there is the obvious and the easiest - the world of false equivalences. I say this as someone who did condemn the protests and the riots of 2020 in the most vehement terms. All I see are isolated and rather lukewarm criticisms of what was patently a planned insurrection (and a lot more apologetics - "Forgive me Father, for I haven't sinned, it was Antifa who coveted my wife's ox" ... and they let us in in any case) followed by a relentless quoting and citing of liberal and democratic hypocrites who - so it goes - were complicit in the events of 2020. I damned those too. Way back when, in Windleshaw Infants, when I was six, the headmistress Miss Hankinson caught me swinging off the tree. I was copying what everyone else had been doing for the last ten minutes. They saw her coming and stopped before she could catch them. She caught me, who merely joined at the very end to see what the appeal was. I was told I was "hurting the trees." I said "they were all doing it." She was hearing none of it. "Never follow a multitude to do evil" seemed to be the lesson, and I got my legs slapped. "They did it earlier" is the kind of reasoning you would expect of a six year old, not supposed community and political leaders. And the simple truth is they know what they are doing, covering their tracks and the complicity of their politics in what was an insurrection. The details that are coming out on this are getting worse by the day. There had better be a reckoning. I'm noticing that people who usually defend the police come what may are incredibly silent. I defended the police in the summer. I'll do it again (whilst looking at those who may have been complicit), in their own words - Daniel Hodges: "“If it wasn’t my job I would do it for free. It was absolutely my pleasure to crush a white nationalist insurrection,” he said. “And we’ll do it as many times as it takes.”

And no, the evidence does not support the lockdown 'sceptics' who cherry pick from a range of studies to claim the science is on their side. It is somewhat galling to see people on social media who lack the intelligence and patience and the capacity for sheer hard boring work helping themselves to 'studies' to peddle fatuous nonsense that suits their political agenda. I wouldn't ban them. As I have argued for aeons, liberalism - the idea that individuals are free to choose the good as they see fit - becomes untenable in a democratic age. In a democracy, the character of the individual matters. If a lot of people under the sway of propaganda and misinformation choose bads instead of goods, society is in severe danger. The solution to this free speech 'debate' is to once more create a habitus which cultivates the moral and intellectual virtues on the part of the general populace. There is some comfort in noting that a lot of people do identify these 'sceptics' as the ideologically driven cranks they are. But I'd rather not have important issues constantly in the balance like this. They've done it on climate change for years now, trying to claim that the science is divided. Nearly everyone attributes global heating to human causes (which doesn't rule out the natural causes either), the odd muppet prattling on about solar and volcanic activity doesn't. I do hope to see political will firm up on this, less appeasement and pusillanimous moderation. The world is being driven to extremes by the morally and intellectually bankrupt. They have nothing, hence the constant peddling of lies and hatred. They are so detached from realities as to have no ground but delusion to stand on. We've been playing this game for decades. Nothing to beat, if people finally muster the wit and the will to see them off. At this juncture, that wit and will is a matter of self-preservation. This crowd will keep coming back until they are defeated. The trick is to generate a politics that addresses grievances rather than ignores or denies them. I heard one Democratic referring to the demonstrators as "losers living in their moms' basements." Great. That'll help. For the sake of argument, even if people crying are "losers," do they deserve this contempt and abuse. There's a lot wrong in politics of all kinds at the moment, glad I've quit them all to affirm greater possibilities. The conditions of doing politics well do not exist at the moment. The work of reconnection and remoralisation needs to begin.