When free speech conflicts with public health

Conflict has flared in some universities about hearing — or excluding — unpopular viewpoints. Some controversial speakers have been boycotted, some invitations rescinded, some presentations shouted down.

Recently, universities in Canada have found themselves embroiled in controversy over — of all things — personal pronouns.

The movement towards inclusive language started in the 1970s. It’s now almost universally accepted that, at least in English, masculine pronouns no longer include the feminine.

In reality, they never did. The so-called rule about male pronouns including the female was invented by a pedant named John Kirby. He published a prescriptive grammar in 1746, attempting to impose the rigid principles of Latin grammar on 10 centuries of undisciplined English.

Over the last 50 years, the revolt against “he” as the proper generic term for any unidentified person, and against the assumption that “man” includes women and “mankind” describes all humanity, has grown into an irresistible tide. But as always, there are holdouts — people who consider themselves immovable objects stemming that tide.

One of those holdouts, University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, told the CBC’s Carol Off, “I don't recognize another person’s right to decide what words I’m going to use, especially when the words they want me to use …are constructs of a small coterie of ideologically motivated people.”

Peterson labels some university courses “indoctrination cults.”

Wilfred Laurier University master’s student Lindsay Shepherd wanted her undergraduate class to think about the use of gender-neutral pronouns. So she showed them a short video clip of Peterson.

The university first censured her. Then apologized. And all kinds of pundits weighed in. Harriet Lyons, professor emerita in the University of Waterloo’s anthropology department, took Shepherd’s side: “The answer to the question of free speech is actually pretty simple: if one has a position on a social or intellectual issue, one should have the freedom, at a university, to advance it, in class or published research, using appropriate expertise and respectful language.”

Rex Murphy, who cannot resist polysyllabic verbiage, fulminated against “politically correct” language: “This is an egregious illustration that some humanities courses at universities function not as educative undertakings, but as commitments to a narrow, predestined ideological viewpoint.”

I suggest that they’re all missing the point. They’re assuming this is a philosophical issue, the kind of abstract debate that Aristotle might have enjoyed on the slopes of the Acropolis in Athens.

It’s not. It’s about health. About our society’s health.

In health, we don’t debate whether a poison or a disease has a right to exist. We restrict it, isolate it, eradicate it.

We’ve wiped out smallpox. We’ve almost eliminated polio. We might have ended measles, too, if a few attention-seekers had not exploited freedom of speech to promote irrational fears of vaccines.

Similarly, we do not let our children play with, say, cyanide. Or plutonium. We don’t let them balance on the railing of a 27th floor balcony. We don’t let them run out into traffic. Because we know those things are dangerous.

We do not hold public opinion surveys to decide whether I can carry the ebola virus. Or whether I may incinerate hazardous wastes in my back yard. We know the harmful effects of those actions, so we prohibit them. Period.

Diseases, poisons, and toxins are not optional. One can’t justify them as personal choices.

In the same way, we know that certain viewpoints are dangerous. We have seen the effects of white supremacy in Germany and Africa. We have seen what religious extremism can do in Syria and Iraq.

We also know that the language we use can have negative effects. If some kinds of language encourage concepts that are harmful to individuals and to society, why would anyone argue that they should be defended?

I doubt if Professor Peterson would pepper his lectures with words like nigger, gook, chink, jap, or kraut. Or for that matter, with broad, floozy, or nympho. Let alone fairy, faggot, or — well, no, let’s not go there. Because we know how derogatory words can legitimize prejudice.

As Michael Coren wrote in the Toronto Star, “We have, thank goodness, made enormous progress in expunging some of the worst excesses of social rudeness and abuse from common conversation. This is sometimes tendentiously referred to as political correctness — but try asking a member of a sexual or ethnic minority what life was like before it.”

The issue is not about censoring someone’s freedom of speech. It’s about banishing speech that does harm.

It’s not about personal privilege; it’s about public health.

Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca