Free speech ain’t cheap

The generation brought up on the internet’s sound and fury is understandably less laissezfaire, says James Marriott.

One day five years ago when I was in my final year at university, a friend sent me a link to a popular new Facebook group. It was called ‘‘C...try Living’’ (censorship mine) and we were baffled by it. Most of its members seemed angry and were using a language we’d never encountered before: ‘‘cultural appropriation’’, ‘‘cisgender’’, ‘‘heteropatriarchy’’.

Founded as an offshoot of a feminist zine of the same name, C-Living (as we’ll call it from here on) was the soon-to-be-infamous online hub of the extreme wing of a new kind of campus politics.

Furious arguments broke out about something called ‘‘privilege’’ and the group’s members were routinely expelled for disagreeing with moderators. Famously, one member once asked whether she could wear the lensless hipster glasses that were fashionable at the time without offending anyone. After an argument, it was concluded that wearing fake glasses would constitute oppression at the intersection of ableism and class privilege.

Inevitably, reports about these goings on began to filter into the national press. Brendan O’Neill wrote a Spectator cover story titled ‘‘The Stepford Students’’, which warned of a frightening new generation of monstrously illiberal students whose Stalinist attitudes to free speech threatened the very fabric of society. Most commentators concurred that this was a generational issue. Five years on, it seems to me that they had the wrong end of the stick. The problem wasn’t young people, just people.

Human beings have always been confounded by one another. We jostle around each other with our complicated feelings, our stupid opinions and insensitive remarks. The urge to purify this frightening complexity and whip everyone into line is an old one. C-Living was absurd, but the absurdity was hardly new. In Ben Jonson’s satirical play Bartholomew Fair (first performed in 1614), a zealous puritan destroys an innocent woman’s gingerbread on the grounds that a foodstuff that is at once bread and man (like the communion host) is offensively papist.

Recently, reading Philip Roth’s novel The

Counterlife (1986) I was struck by this speech, from a character recalling her experiences of

1960s radicals: ‘‘People were just carried away with a wave of Sixties sentiment that turned their brains to custard. They were very intolerant. If you dared to question some piety or dogma, they would give you a monstrous time that could reduce you to tears... I was frightened of expressing anything I really felt intellectually.’’ Those words could have been spoken by a recently expelled member of C-Living. This is why I’m wary of generational analyses of the campus free speech wars. The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt pins most of the blame on parents. They argue that anxious middle-class mums and dads ‘‘coddled’’ their Millennial offspring, banning them from dangerous play equipment or playing outside and warning them incessantly against ‘‘stranger danger’’. This culture of ‘‘safetyism’’ meant that young people arrived at university unused to dealing with risks and unable to cope with different points of view. Instead, they set out to de-platform everyone they disagreed with.

But this is baloney. No generation has been exposed to more offensive points of view and dangerous situations than the one which came of age online. In a recent viral Twitter thread, a mother complained that her teenage boys were deluged with ‘‘racist, sexist, homophobic and antisemitic’’ jokes on the internet. Parents piled in with similar stories and I was reminded of the time I sat in a maths class at the age of 12 and listened to a group of boys behind me eagerly discuss the violent and graphic pornography they’d all watched together on the internet. They were hardly coddled.

I think this explains much of my generation’s ambivalence towards free speech. If you’ve grown up online, the awfulness of human beings is pressed into your face at all times. We are all angry puritan preachers jostled by unsavoury types in a crowded market. The urge to purify can be hard to resist. To a Baby Boomer, ‘‘free speech’’ means something noble: the right of newspaper columnists to criticise the government. To Millennials, free speech looks ugly. It conjures the Reddit forum dedicated to posting pictures of dead children and sick young men congratulating mass shooters on achieving a new ‘‘high score’’ on the website 8chan.

The deluge of horrific stuff on the internet is so vast and unmanageable that you can’t control it or reason with it. Most human beings get angry. They block trolls, post furious messages and try to get their enemies fired from positions of power. If Brendan O’Neill’s Stepford students looked frightening, it wasn’t because they belonged to a generation unlike any that had come before. It was because it was the first time we’d witnessed the sort of political arguments people get involved in if they spend a lot of time on the internet – especially if they’re young, idealistic and naive. Now, scrolling through Twitter reading Remainers and Brexiteers of all ages ranting at each other over esoteric matters of political doctrine, I’m reminded of C-Living and I think that compared with this it actually seems pretty sane. We’re all Stepford students now.