We must learn to challenge, not silence, what we don’t like hearing
COLUMNIST
If I hear another teenager telling me “you can’t say that”, I am going to carve whatever pseudo-offence phrase it is on slate and hang it on the wall.
I would tattoo it on my skin, but I find ugly tattoos mildly offensive, not that I’d tell someone sporting one that.
The right to have a hideous tattoo is, like free speech, one of those things I think are generally a good idea, even if what is being shown and said is not always what I want to see or hear.
Besides, surely there’s something inherently lopsided about the current trend for young people to try to silence their elders. If we are going to have censorship, shouldn’t it be the other way around?
When I was a teenager (a phrase bound to illicit yawns, but bear with me), we prided ourselves on saying things to shock.
It was the punk era and shock was in. If your parents didn’t gag at a safety pin through your ear lobe (God, it hurt when my friend stuck it through), you employed a swear word or an opinion aimed to rile them.
It wasn’t hard really – the punks versus ageing hippies.
Trouble was, they tended to give those pained frowns and an understanding look before asking in infuriatingly reasonable tones: “Why is your generation so angry?”
Angry? Ha! Little did they know what was coming in the shape of the Twitter generation, sent to punish the generation who thought they were ripping it up and starting again by spitting in other people’s drinks at gigs and generally being obnoxious.
We were sedately polite compared with the storm of bile currently swilling around the universe in the guise of free speech, informed opinion or comment.
Even our piercings were mild by today’s standards. No-one back then had ear lobes pulled out of shape like Haribos swinging at their jawline. We hadn’t thought of lobe stretchers, we were just coming to grips with nose rings, let alone multiple piercings – although there were a few.
But body art is a sideshow. What is more worrying is the paradox we find ourselves in. We now operate in a world where on the one hand we have unbridled social media yelling all sorts of furious and offensive things, and on the other a generation demanding “safe spaces” where only certain views can be aired and held.
Maybe it’s a reaction to all the garbage spewing out online, or maybe one extreme feeds the other?
I was thinking about this while having a drink (mercifully unadulterated with anyone else’s saliva) with the recently come-of-age daughter and talking about Wales’ top university.
Cardiff University’s Vice Chancellor Colin Riordan has defended his institution against claims it is a “hostile environment for free speech” after it was given a “red ranking” in the Free Speech University Rankings organised by Spiked Magazine, a journal which champions “intellectual risk-taking”.
Spiked stated in its write-up: “Cardiff University and Cardiff University Students’ Union collectively create a hostile environment for free speech.”
It said the university “restricts offensive speech and operates an outright ban on homophobic speech”. In the section on the students’ union, it highlighted opposition in 2015 to Germaine Greer delivering a lecture.
A petition calling for the veteran feminist not to speak because of opinions that were considered offensive to transgender people gathered international attention.
Recently Professor Riordan appeared alongside figures linked to the magazine in the UK Parliament to give evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, as part of an investigation into freedom of speech in universities.
He argued his university’s refusal to back down to those who opposed Professor Greer speaking demonstrated Cardiff ’s University’s commitment to free speech.
Prof Greer eventually decided to go ahead with her lecture at Cardiff University, having initially pulled out after the vocal campaign against it.
She said she did not “want to go down there and be screamed at and have things thrown at me”, after being criticised for saying men who had undergone surgery cannot be considered women.
Some 2,500 people even signed a petition against allowing her to give the Haydn Ellis Distinguished Lecture at the university because of her views on transgender women.
Prof Greer’s belief that having surgery cannot turn a man into a woman is controversial, but what is more worrying is the campaign to silence her and the belief by some people that there should be safe spaces where views they don’t agree with cannot be voiced.
In a world where we are deafened by voices on the internet declaring ever more outrageous things, it is more vital than ever that we learn to counter those views constructively.
We’ll only do that by listening to those views.
Listening is not the same as agreeing or condoning.
We must learn to be brave and hear what we don’t want to hear so we can challenge it. If we don’t, the yobs who shout loudest will win.