State doesn’t own rights of citizens
Freedom of speech is not the high holy ideal it once was. Freedom of expression, the wider concept, expression as thought, speech, art, performance and protest, is likewise no longer the clear and unchallengeable central core value of our democracies.
However imperfectly, the modern democracies were built around these concepts, their primal values. They have, alas, often been broken, but until very recent days, whenever they were violated, especially by state force, a genuine, near reflex response was outrage and condemnation. Their existence as ideals, to be relentlessly pursued and deeply cherished, supplied a guard against such violations, something close to a taboo. Those who attempted to degrade them, used power or status to walk around or through them, or sought to override the protections enshrined in the Charter, brought pariah status upon themselves.
As an ideal, free expression has been ever-present as a guiding star to the proper operations of any democracy. The freedom of the individual, and thereby his or her dignity as a human being and citizen emerges only when these rights are seen as belonging to the individual human being, owned by the individual, are not never to be diminished or circumscribed by the state, or the mob. And, more relevantly in the present moment, never through the actions and mood swings of the current and shallow ideologies of “progressive” politics.
The state does not own the rights of its citizens. It’s an inversion of the relationship between citizen and government to think so. Citizens give orders to governments. Citizens are the ultimate rulers, which any definition of the word democracy will affirm: demos - people; cracy -rule.
Yet we have experienced a grave dilution of how these rights are presently understood, in parallel with a grave dilution of respect for them. The rot began and was sadly nursed in the very institutions by those which should most defend and explain them. Our decaying universities.
Was it not the universities who pioneered the idea of “free speech zones” on campus? This was the granting of some small and marked piece of campus territory where students, whom the university decreed might say something “offensive” or “insensitive” or “perceived as discriminatory” (unwoke is the current terms for all these categories) would be forced, under edict and threat of expulsion to go to these islands, and only there be “allowed” to speak their minds.
All else was forbidden space. “Allowed” speech is the antithesis of free speech, and designated “spaces” wherein that allowed speech could be voiced, a surrender of intellectualism, and a woeful instance of the cowardice of elite institutions.
It was the universities which played midwife to the new anti-intellectual doctrines such as “speech is violence” with its reverse twin dogma that “violence is speech.” They spread the intellectual acid of relativism. The most faithful guardians, so we thought, of unrestrained thinking became the efficient and sly agents of its curtailment.
Even just a few years ago almost everyone could reference the great negative power the great churches of the West once held, the power to excommunicate, set up heretic-hunting inquisitions, draw up lists of which books could be read, and carried to stake or dungeon those who would challenge its power and self-declared infallibility. How the churches have been scorned for treading on such freedoms.
There is no stake or dungeon today, merely cancel culture. However Twitter mobbing and cries of racism or homophobia, declamations for woke bishops are fine 21st century versions of the same.
The 20th century in particular supplied horrendous illustrations of what governments who suspend or absolutely deny the right to free speech, thought, or gathering. We have seen how very quickly they descend into mass persecution and mass murder. The Gulag Archipelago is out there for all to read. Animal Farm and 1984 are still available.
Or, to take a home a recent example, when the employees of a publishing house in Canada “revolt” over the printing of their most prized author, Jordan Peterson. They actually wept, they wept at the thought that a publishing house was going to … publish a book. A book they had not read and could not have read. But still they knew that it would be “traumatizing” (that word is now pure lexical junk) and “offensive” and “hurtful.” Let us hope that none of these internet neurasthenics ever stubs a toe. What words will be left for him except to deplore the white supremacy of geologically stationary rocks and stones?
Throw away core concepts and all that is left is silliness and virtue-signalling.
To show how ludicrous and servile we’ve become, not that long ago Pepé Le Pew, a poor misguided personable amorous French skunk, was sent to the cartoon Gulag. For pursuing a cat.
I skip hundreds of examples of woke Puritanism’s descent into politically correct censorship. Only because the examples are legion, just too epidemical to report in the meagre spaces of a column. They require a modern Gibbon.
Some or all of the foregoing should be top of mind as we see our own government moving into regulating the internet, and putting the
THERE IS NO STAKE OR DUNGEON TODAY, MERELY CANCEL CULTURE.
posts and performances of any and every Canadian under its righteous regulatory eye. There’s much more to say on that.
For now, professor Michael Geist, a student of internet communications, in his many (currently permitted) observations, offers the strongest warnings of what this prospective legislation means. And for a stern and particular condemnation of the insolent initiative read Terrence Corcoran’s detailed condemnation of it.
I trust colleague Corcoran realizes he’s gnawing away at Canada’s social cohesion. But he is such an independent fiend, he may not.