If you don’t want a ‘climate of fear’ against difficult ideas, don’t add to it
Suddenly Fintan O’Toole decides that attacks on those who offend the new gods of political correctness may have gone too far, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
CANADIAN author and broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi was accused by eight women in 2014 of a range of sexual misbehaviours. He was fired from his job, but subsequently cleared at a criminal trial on four counts of sexual assault on grounds of insufficient evidence.
Earlier this year he wrote an account of his experience of being tried and found guilty anyway on social media, which was published in The New York Review Of Books. This provoked an immediate backlash from those who felt that Ghomeshi should not have been given such a prestigious platform considering some of the sordid accusations still hanging over him — a reasonable enough concern in the age of #MeToo, when sensitivity is rightly attuned to the mistreatment of subordinate women by powerful men even where the behaviour in question has not, legally speaking, broken any laws.
The magazine’s editor, Ian Buruma, has since been forced to step down as a result of the backlash, prompting a group of leading writers, including John Banville and Colm Toibin, to write a joint letter this week lamenting his departure as an abandonment of the magazine’s core mission to foster the “free exploration of ideas”.
One of the signatories to that letter is Fintan O’Toole, who wrote a companion piece in The Irish Times under the headline “#MeToo cannot win in a climate of fear”, in which he used the downfall of Buruma — a man he knows and “greatly admire(s)” — to argue that “the great insurgency against misogynistic abuse cannot achieve its full goals in an atmosphere of guilt by association”, adding: “If all those who take wrong turnings are instantly thrown overboard, the whole ship will be sunk.”
Well, better late than never. The #MeToo movement is now a year old. It arose in the wake of a slew of sordid allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. It’s been one of the most momentous social upheavals of our time. A necessary one too. Powerful men had it their own way for too long. This has been their reckoning.
Prudent observers, though, have drawn attention for some time to potential dangers in the febrile climate that #MeToo unleashed, including Ronan Farrow, whose tireless investigative journalism helped bring Weinstein’s crimes to light in the first place. As long ago as last November, he was conceding that innocent men could become casualties of #MeToo. He was referring to men whose sexual conduct might unfairly be called into question, but what has happened to others who merely dared to discuss these matters openly should not have surprised anyone who was paying attention.
They certainly didn’t need one of their greatly admired friends to be hit by the train of popular hyste- ria before recognising the pitfalls.
O’Toole was widely praised for what he wrote, but that’s neither here or there. He could publish his shopping list and some Irish admirers would think it was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Fintan attracts sycophancy the way that pollen attracts bees.
But the irony is that he didn’t subject himself to the same self-questioning which he demands of others. He never does.
When Kevin Myers was sacked amid accusations of anti-Semitism arising from an ill-judged column in the Sunday Times about female broadcasters’ pay, O’Toole did not use his platform to warn against throwing overboard all those who take wrong turnings. Instead he piled in merrily to add to Myers’s humiliation. Everything is connected.
He said on that occasion that all concerned had “failed to notice they were sleepwalking across a line”, and that’s it exactly. Carelessness may prove the downfall of us all. One day we’ ll make a slip and the hyenas will pounce. It’s a climate which the liberal left, of which O’Toole is a mainstay, has encouraged. Now they find that one of their own has also strayed across a line they didn’t realise was there. Fintan’s friend thought he was merely providing a platform to alternative views. Instead he was suddenly the hated enemy. It’s very easy to incur the career-ending wrath of those recently hailed by O’Toole’s newspaper colleague Una Mullally as “the risen people”.
On sleepless nights, does Fintan O’Toole ever wonder if he might have contributed to that climate with his populist exhortations against anything which offends liberal orthodoxy? When he said, for example, that the Trump administration was a “trial run for fascism”, why should his readers not have concluded that the gloves must come off in this great war between the forces of progressive virtue and conservative vice, and if a few good men must be sacrificed “pour encourager les autres”, then it’s a price worth paying?
It might have been interesting had O’Toole chosen to reflect on all of that, but of course he didn’t. In fact, even when writing about Buruma last week, he was keen to iterate that he wouldn’t have published Ghomeshi’s essay had he been the editor, because his greatest fear is not that ideas might be under threat but that his support for free speech could be mistaken as support for the wrong sort of free speech. It’s such a cop out.
Free speech doesn’t only belong to those who say things we want to hear. It also belongs to those who say things which repulse us. O’Toole instead wants to pose as the great defender of liberal values, while quietly slipping in plenty of qualifiers along the way, just as he did when he recently declared that transgressing moral boundaries, once at the core of art and culture, had become debased in the hands of “the alt right” and now “belongs to the neo-fascists”. (He’s terribly fond of that loaded little F word).
In other words, it was daring and ground-breaking when the people with whom he has sympathy were doing it, but those rowdy right-wing barbarians just don’t have the necessary intelligence and sophistication to carry it off.
See what he’s doing? He constantly shifts the goalposts so that he can reserve the right to express certain ideas for those already on his own side. It’s a crisis when Ian Buruma is forced by an enraged social media mob to step down from his job, but Kevin Myers? Who cares, right? He’s not One Of Us. This does not challenge the “climate of fear” that he claims to deplore, but rather emboldens it.
In sharp contrast to O’Toole’s faint-hearted tip-toeing through the minefield, the redoubtable US academic Camille Paglia warned on radio last week that the culture of political correctness which now prevails in academic, media and cultural circles has reached “toxic proportions”, and that it is “obligatory on the critic and intellectual to find the sensitive points in current ideology and go right for it, because those are the places where repression and censorship start”.
At least someone gets what’s really at stake. Fintan O’Toole could learn a lot, if only he could hear her above the hurrahs of his admirers. We’ll not hold our breath.
‘It’s very easy to incur the wrath of angry liberal mobs these days’