The freedom to be offended

University of Tasmania behaviour policy would stifle debate,

IN my five years at the University of Tasmania, I was frequently offended by the words and deeds of other students and staff members — particularly regarding my religious and political beliefs.

You might think then that I would welcome the university’s new draft behaviour policy, which requires community members to “behave and communicate in a manner that does not offend”.

It features a list of 18 protected attributes that includes religion and political persuasion. This policy forbids community members from offending, humiliating, intimating, insulting, or ridiculing one another, based on the “reasonable person” test.

I consider myself to be a reasonable person.

As a reasonable person, I am extremely offended that our universities continue to teach Marxism and its derivatives as valid and even desirable socio-economic theories. Because what reasonable person can defend an ideology that was responsible for something in the order of 20 million deaths in the Soviet Union, 65 million deaths in the People’s Republic of China, and a further eight million deaths in countries as diverse as Cambodia, North Korea, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Vietnam, not to mention the various Eastern Bloc countries?

I find it offensive that someone who supports offshore processing can be labelled a Nazi, but socialists around the world can continue to push an ideology which starved six million or more Ukrainians in a single year, to applause.

Does this mean that I welcome the university’s policy? Quite the contrary — I am so offended by these discussions of Marxism and its totalitarian twin brother, fascism, that I want to make sure we have more conversations about them, not less.

If you label someone a Nazi because they support offshore processing, then you might not understand Nazism — and it’s probably more horrible than you’ve ever imagined.

If you think that, as a society, we should still be aiming to redistribute “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” then it appears — just 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall — we’ve already forgotten the great lessons of the 20th century.

In his famous book, The Gulag Archipelago, which exposed the black heart of the Soviet system to the world, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”.

This is just as true here today as it was then in Russia. The seeds of totalitarianism still lie in our hearts, and unless we have full, frank and often offensive conversations about them, there is a real danger that they will sprout, grow, and bear fruit once more.

Last year, Penguin Books rereleased The Gulag Archipelago to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its publishment. It contains a new foreword by Dr Jordan Peterson, a professor and clinical psychologist who has shot to fame for his principled defence of free speech, and his pushback against postmodernism in universities.

In one of his lectures (freely available on YouTube), Peterson explains that the purpose of university education has always been enculturation. A university is a place where you come to grapple with the great ideas of history — and to let yourself be transformed and improved by them.

That is, he continually emphasises, an incredibly scary thing. Because to embody an idea and to allow it to transform you is to allow a part of yourself to die and be reborn. But it also allows you to incorporate the wisdom of your ancestors into your being, and emerge a far stronger, and more articulate person.

In an existence characterised by suffering and malevolence, it’s far easier to allow yourself to be offended, and let your old beliefs die than it is to go through the incredibly painful process of acquiring the wisdom of life by yourself.

Earlier in 2018, Peterson released his own highly successful book, Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. The ninth of his rules articulates succinctly the approach I adopted for dealing with offence at university: “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.” To do this isn’t easy.

It goes against our natural desire to see arguments as just another struggle for position in the dominance hierarchy.

But if we can learn to respect the personal experience of other people, and assume that they have careful, genuine conclusions based on these experiences, then we can engage in the kinds of conversations which lead to wonderful exchanges of knowledge: knowledge that can shape and change us, allowing us to move forward to better places.

I know that I am a better, more articulate and more integrated person for having allowed myself to be offended.

It’s far easier to allow yourself to be offended, and let your old beliefs die than it is to go through the incredibly painful process of acquiring the wisdom of life by yourself.