Category: Free Speech

On freedom of speech, censorship, “cancel culture” and the like.

The @IHEU Freedom of Thought Report 2014

iheu-logo-2013-w300Published today [10 December] by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), the third annual Freedom of Thought Report offers a survey of persecution of and discrimination against non-religious people, with an entry for every country across the world.

In 2014, in addition to laws such as those targeting “apostasy” and “blasphemy”, the report shows a marked increase in specific targeting of “atheists” and “humanism” as such, using these terms in a broadly correct way (the users know what they are saying) but with intent clearly borne of ignorance or intolerance toward these groups.

To put it more plainly, nonreligious people are being targeted as a distinct minority group in various countries around the world. The report also indicates that hateful speech against atheists does not come exclusively from reactionary or radical religious leaders, but increasingly from political leaders, including heads of state.

Cases covered in the report include the Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, who this year labelled “humanism and secularism as well as liberalism” as “deviant” and a threat to Islam and the state itself, in a speech where he also denied that Malaysians had any right to “apostasy” (leaving Islam).

Saudi Arabia is criticised for a new law equating “atheism” with “terrorism”. The very first article of the kingdom’s new terror regulations banned “Calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion”.

Even the supposedly secular regime of Egypt’s president Sisi was found to target atheists directly, through what the report calls “an organized backlash against young atheists”. Beginning in June, Nuamat Sati of the Ministry of Youth announced a campaign to spread awareness of “the dangers of atheism” and why it is “a threat to society”, so that young atheists in particular, who are increasingly vocal on social media would be given “a chance to reconsider their decisions and go back to their religion.”

In the past few months, Egyptian authorities have detained young atheists who appeared on TV media and Youtube videos talking about their right to express atheist views, and in a worrying an unusual development in November, Christian churches actually “joined forces” with Egypt’s AlAzhar in another anti-atheism campaign, saying that “Society should resist this phenomenon [of atheism]”.

Previous editions of the Freedom of Thought Report, which considers and rates every country in the world for anti-atheist persecution, found that almost all countries discriminate against the nonreligious, in some cases through religious privilege or legal exemption, with the worst countries refusing to issue identity cards to the nonreligious, taking children from atheist parents, or sentencing “apostates” to death.

The 2014 edition of the report notes: “This year will be marked by a surge in this phenomenon of state officials and political leaders agitating specifically against nonreligious people, just because they have no religious beliefs, in terms that would normally be associated with hate speech or social persecution against ethnic or religious minorities.”

Fortunately, the situation in South Africa is nowhere near as serious as the examples given above. However, this does not give South Africans cause for complacency. Our schools routinely violate the National Policy on Religion and Education, to the extent that the organisation OGOD has recently instituted court proceedings against six public schools who assert their “Christian character”, despite our public schools having an obligation to be secular.

It is not only school principals and governing boards who privilege one religion over others, rather than supporting religious freedom through remaining neutral and encouraging a secular approach to religion, whereby religious education is welcome but religious indoctrination precluded.

The MEC for Education in Gauteng, Panyaza Lefusi, boasts of having distributed 50 000 Bibles to schools in his first 100 days in office – with no mention of also having distributed Korans, or books on Humanist ethics and thought. This constitutes not only a violation of the Policy, but if the Bibles were paid for with public funds, also a clear abuse of those funds in that revenue from the taxpayer cannot be used to support what amounts to State-sanctioned religion.

The Freedom of Thought Report is published by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) with contributions from independent researchers and IHEU Member Organisations around the world. The South African Member Organisation is the Free Society Institute.

Websites:
freethoughtreport.com and iheu.org; fsi.org.za (South Africa)

For further information, interview or comment please email:
contact@fsi.org.za; (Free Society Institute, for South Africa-specific issues) or the IHEU (report@iheu.org; +44 207 490 8468.

The TB Davie Academic Freedom Lecture 2014 – Max du Preez

mdpEarlier today, I had the privilege of introducing Max du Preez to the audience gathered for the 2014 TB Davie Lecture at UCT. The lecture was recorded, and once the video and podcast are available, I’ll be sure to let you know. In the meanwhile, here are my introductory remarks.

 

Over the course of a 40-year career in journalism, Max du Preez has earned multiple local and international awards for fearless and principled reporting, including the Nat Nakasa Award for Courageous Journalism, as well as having been named the Yale Globalist International Journalist.

He is the author of numerous books that draw on his long history in South African culture and politics, most recently “A rumour of spring”, in which he reflects on whether South Africa can expect “a long winter or an early spring” in relation to the evolution of our democracy.

In 1992, UCT awarded Max du Preez an honorary Master of Social Science degree, and the citation is worth re-visiting. It speaks of:

his fearless exposition of power corruption in high places, in the face of all kinds of attempts at silencing him, from criminal and civil proceedings in the Courts to extrajudicial strong-arm methods.

Max Du Preez has consistently made it clear that he is not serving any sectional interest, but that of all the people of this country, and his cause is to promote the values that should operate in the new South Africa.

After graduating from Stellenbosch University, he joined Die Burger as a cub reporter, and the Editor sent him to cover the Parliamentary sessions. This proved to be an error of judgement. Max Du Preez’ overall impression of the Parliament was one of moral corruption and intellectual poverty, and he conveyed this in his reports; Die Burger’s impression of Max Du Preez was that they had a problem reporter on their hands.

He was hastily transferred to Die Beeld in Johannesburg. There he reported on the Mozambiquan independence, and the Soweto riots of June 16 1976, but caused so many problems for the Government-supporting Nationale Pers that he was banished to the Siberia of South Africa, the Namibian desk.

In Windhoek, he was quickly branded a Swapo ally, and Du Preez and Nationale Pers soon parted company. In 1980 he joined the Financial Mail in the post of political editor, the only Afrikaner on the staff, and in his own words, “their token boer.”

Later he transferred within the same media group as political correspondent to the Sunday Times and Business Day.

In 1987 Dr Van Zyl Slabbert invited Du Preez to join the delegation of Afrikaner personalities who attended that highly controversial and historic meeting with the then banned African National Congress in Dakar, Senegal.

It was there that the idea of starting an independent Afrikaans language weekly newspaper was born.

That newspaper, launched in 1988, was die Vrye Weekblad- the Independent Weekly. The newspaper was almost immediately in court, thanks to the first few editions having to appear on the street illegally after the Minister of Justice responded to the threat it posed by raising the cost of registering a newspaper from R10 to R30 000.

At this newspaper, it was du Preez and his colleague Jacques Pauw who led the exposure of apartheid-era murder squads at Vlakplaas when other publications wanted no part of the story – or simply denied its truthfulness. Without their hard work and courage, many of these details might well have remained a secret to this day.

The paper was forced to close in February 1994, thanks to the costs incurred in defending its charge that South African Police General Lothar Neethling had supplied poison to security police to kill activists.

Du Preez went on to be the founder and editor of the television programmes Special Report (documenting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) and Special Assignment.  Du Preez ended up being dismissed from Special Assignment for “gross insubordination towards management”, after objecting to a management decision to bar the screening of a segment on witchcraft.

That same weekend, Special Assignment won six awards at a television prize-giving.

If a more recent sort of threat, by actor and economic freedom fighter Fana Mokoena to “seize his farm” is more typical these days, it’s not because du Preez has slowed down, or toned down, his challenges to political authority and the abuse of power. Nor could it be because he has a farm, as he has none – but accuracy is seldom a primary concern for bullies.

It might instead be exactly because – thanks in part to him and other courageous editors – newspapers in South Africa no longer need fear being bombed, as the Vrye Weekblad offices were in 1991.

To return to the 1992 citation,

Mr Chancellor, the sensational disclosures which struck at the malignant core of apartheid are only part of Max Du Preez’ achievements. He is clearly a non-conformist, an independent thinker, a maverick. Some would use stronger terms. The French noun might be a sansculotte-  ‘without breeches”. In Afrikaans, the expression is earthier – he is hardegat.

Ladies and Gentlemen: please welcome Max du Preez.

Liberal bullying can still be bullying

To quote a September 2013 version of me,

there’s an arms-race of hyperbole going on, especially on the Left, and therefore especially in matters pertaining to social justice. This is understandable, especially because the Right has bombarded the world with similar hyperbole for long enough. But the trend is not a good one, and we should resist it.

It’s not good, partly because we denude language through doing so. More importantly, though, it’s not good because it gives an intrinsic advantage in argument to those who shout the loudest, and who are willing to claim that they are most fundamentally or critically hurt. And in the long run, it’s not good because the only rational (or sadly, so it might seem) way to respond to a climate of hypersensitivity is to shut up, and not say anything at all, for fear of offending someone.

EichI’m not at all sure where the dividing line is between expressing justified grievances and bullying someone out of a debate – or out of a job, as happened to Brendan Eich, ex-CEO of Mozilla, yesterday. While it’s true that some viewpoints are not worth entertaining, that doesn’t necessarily mean that someone who holds those viewpoints shouldn’t be allowed to, and shouldn’t be allowed to campaign for them without fear of reprisals.

Homophobia is wrong, and harmful – you’ll find plenty of posts over the years highlighting the offence, hurt, injustice and sometimes even murders that can be attributed to homophobia, from the relatively trivial cases of Error Naidoo to the properly odious Scott Lively, who had a part in inspiring the criminalisation of homophobia in Uganda.

However, it’s not at all clear to what extent Brendan Eich is a homophobe at all, unless we define homophobia simply as the belief that certain legal entitlements should be reserved for heterosexual people. Again, I must stress that I personally reject that belief – discrimination based on sexuality is premised on an entirely arbitrary characteristic, and is thus unjust and should be unlawful.

Usually.

Because as usual, there’s a background issue that needs to influence our reading of a case like this, and that issue is that Eich is a Christian, who believes that marriage is something ordained by God, and reserved for a man and a woman. And for as long as we (or in this case, the USA) respects freedom of religion, that’s not only a legitimate belief to hold, but also a legitimate position to campaign for, and to donate money to defending.

Perhaps we should weaken our respect for freedom of religion, and insist that a church or a minister who wanted to marry anyone should also be willing to officiate marriages for gay couples. If you won’t marry a gay couple, you can’t marry anyone. Perhaps we should argue that if you get tax breaks from government, you should lose them if you discriminate on arbitrary grounds such as sexuality, or race, or gender.

But that’s not where we are, yet, and (some) churches are still operating in a grey zone where their archaic morality is grudgingly accommodated, even in progressive democracies. Maybe it shouldn’t be – but for as long as it is, Eich has a warrant for believing (on his, archaic, standards) that it’s not unjust to deny homosexual couples the right to marry, and that it should be unlawful for them to marry.

This is the cause that Eich was supporting, in that he gave a $1000 donation, in his personal capacity, to a campaign in support of Proposition 8 (that sought to outlaw gay marriage) in California. He wasn’t alone – Proposition 8 passed, meaning that over 50% of voters voted in favour of it, before it was later overturned by the courts.

All of those people who voted for Prop 8 were – and no doubt, still are – wrong. But of those thousands of people, Eich might be the only one who was hounded out of his job, after his donation came to be public knowledge. The dating website, OKCupid, displayed a banner to Mozilla Firefox users, telling them  to change their browsers because of Eich’s position. This and similar moves (e.g. Rarebit apps, who pulled their apps from Firefox), as well as sustained criticism on social media, led Eich to resign (or so we’re told – he might well have been pushed, judging by the Mozilla chairperson’s statement that “We failed to listen, to engage, and to be guided by our community”).

So, in essence, Eich lost his job for being a Christian (of a certain sort). One of my closest friends would (I think – I haven’t checked this detail) hold the same view regarding gay marriage, and is certainly no homophobe in any other sense. I think he’s wrong about marriage and who it should be reserved for – but I would think it even more wrong if he were not able to hold the view he does, for fear of losing his job.

Yet, of course we should be able to express our dissatisfaction, even sometimes outrage, at the things people do and support. As I said at the top, I don’t know where we draw the line. But Eich operating in his personal capacity is a separate thing to his role at Mozilla, and his personal democratic choices are legitimate ones until the law says they are not. He was acting in accordance with his religious beliefs, which are constitutionally protected.

If you think that’s wrong, you need to campaign against freedom of religion, not against Eich.

(Related – an earlier piece on the Chick-fil-A homophobia.)

Zille on Carien du Plessis and the ‘race card’

Briefly, on Helen Zille criticising journalists, and specifically Carien du Plessis, on Twitter. As I said at the time, Twitter is the wrong medium for this in any case – prone to misinterpretation and uncharitable readings. Plus, Zille has a similar problem as Dawkins has on Twitter – she can all too often sound like she’s simply trolling, which doesn’t do her arguments any justice.

It’s entirely possible that du Plessis is overcompensating for something in her reporting. It’s entirely possible that this might have something to do with race, gender, experience and the like. But how could this ever be proved? The fact that it can’t be – that it’s unfalsifiable – makes making the claim the story, rather than the claim itself.

Making the claim that she does demonstrate bias now becomes a character slur of sorts, and in that context, can amount to ‘playing the race card’, even though Zille is quite right in her general description, in a comment to her column in Daily Maverick, regarding how we often misuse the idea of the race card.

Let us sort out this “race card” red herring. When a reference to race is relevant, it is NOT playing the race card. Only when race is irrelevant to the argument, does it involve the “race card”. e.g. if someone is corrupt and they claim they are persecuted because of their race, THAT is the race card. If I have come to the conclusion, over many years, that a reporter’s race and background is something that they have to constantly over-compensate for in every report, I will say so. It is not the race card. Of course it is offensive. But freedom of speech is the right to say things one believes to be true but that may be offensive to others. No-one has the right NOT to be offended. And why is everyone so shocked when a relevant point is raised about the baggage of race and history on some white South Africans — while there is not a word about the constant gratuitous racial insults others of us have to face on a daily basis. Stop this double standard and hypocrisy.

As she correctly points out, if race is relevant, there’s no logical fallacy in highlighting it. Playing the race card is just one instance of an ad hominem fallacy, and should be treated just the same, in a logical sense. Calling something ad hominem shouldn’t be used simply as a way to avoid dealing with the substance of the accusation, assuming there is any substance to the accusation. And that is where Zille errs.

Because if you want to make the case that there’s bias – and not simply create the impression that you don’t like what’s being said – you have to actually make the case, not simply allude to it. Helen Zille just asserts her conclusion regarding du Plessis, appealing to her impressions as evidence. But we don’t have access to those impressions, meaning that for us, as readers, the claim is without warrant. This sort of claim is permissible, and we shouldn’t shout it down just because we disagree.

We should shout it down (by which I mean, point out its failings) more because it’s poorly made, and because we care about good arguments.

Right?

Academic freedom in South Africa

Higgins on academic freedomOn December 11, my University of Cape Town (UCT) colleague Prof John Higgins will be holding the Cape Town launch of his new book, “Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa” (click on the picture to enlarge and to get details). I’ll certainly be attending, both to support John (a friend) and also because it’s a subject of great interest to me.

In my capacity as chair of the Academic Freedom Committee at UCT, I was approached by a local journalist for comment on some issues raised in this book. Because only a sentence or two (if anything) might survive the editing process, here’s the full list of questions and my answers, for those of you interested in this topic.

1.Do you think academic freedom is under threat in South Africa?
There are certainly implicit threats to academic freedom, and also explicit ones such as the Higher Education and Training Laws Amendment Act.

2.If yes, kindly give us a few reasons to support your answer
Attempts to control the possession and dissemination of information as in the Protection of State Information Bill is an implicit threat, as is the occasionally hostile reaction of the State to uncomfortable questions being asked of it, for example regarding topics such as the arms deal or Nkandla. The South Africa public might itself present a different sort of threat, in that political and socio-economic preoccupations sometimes appear to create a distinctly anti-intellectual climate, where demands for “ideological purity” can intrude on academic activity. Then, legislation such as the Act – regardless of whether this is the intent or not – allow the Minister to subvert university autonomy for overly vague and broad reasons, thereby putting universities in a state of perpetual probation, hardly conducive to freedom.

3.Do you think that the ANC’s policies on higher education seek to subordinate universities’ important decision making to the policies of government?
Whether they seek to do so is one question, whether they will serve to do so quite another. Regardless of the intentions behind these policies – which some certainly seem to think sinister – the policies (the aforementioned Act, and also potentially the eventual scope and power of the Ministerial Oversight Committee on Transformation) could certainly serve to subvert university autonomy.

4.Does this amount to curtailing “academic Freedom?”.
The State has legitimate interests in the role and functioning of public universities, so the universities cannot demand that academic freedom be defined without any concern for those interests. But the way in which government has developed and seeks to implement these policies – often with little or no discussion or negotiation with the universities – does add up to an intrusion on academic freedom.

5.The ANC has clearly said it wants universities to churn graduates who are competent in dealing with a modern economy. In other words, universities suddenly become instruments to achieve certain policies of government. Does this pose a threat to academic freedom?
Yes, certainly. While the developmental needs of South Africa certainly merit a focus on, for example, STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), this should not come at the expense of the long-term goal of producing strategic and creative thinkers of the sort that typically emerge from the liberal arts – history, philosophy and the like. A disproportionate focus on more practical fields might serve our interests in the short-run, but also serve to cripple academic enquiry and progress (and thus, freedom) in disciplines that are more esoteric.

6.Do you think the ANC’ s policies on higher education seek to control universities even more than what the National party did?
The comparison is unnecessary, and a distraction from the more important issue of whether the current government seeks to do so to a troublesome extent. This sort of comparison is perhaps emblematic of exactly the anti-intellectualism described earlier, in that keeping score in this way is good for headlines, rather than inspiring critical thought.

7.Do you think the Higher Education and Training Laws amendment Act is problematic for Academic Freedom? If yes, how so?
It could be problematic, depending on the extent to which the powers it allows for are used or abused. The Act makes it easier for government can place a university under administration, dissolving that university’s Council and assuming its powers. It sanctions more government intervention than is currently the case, and does so on grounds that are broad and poorly defined. We should have no objection to dysfunctional Councils being challenged or replaced, but if the Act allowing for this also allows, for example, Councils that aren’t “ideologically pure” to be replaced, then institutional autonomy and academic freedom are significantly threatened, and to an unacceptable degree. Further cause for concern regarding this Act is that key stakeholders, including Higher Education South Africa (Hesa), which represents the vice-chancellors and the Council on Higher Education (CHE) were not consulted in its drafting.

Homophobia and the politics of outrage

The morning has brought one of those Twitter Groundhog days, where everyone is making the same points about Heritage Day/Braai Day as they did last year – mostly complaining about how offensive it is that someone else is telling us that it should be about X, and how offensive it is that someone else has co-opted it to make it about Y. Because liberty on these particular terms is the only liberty that matters, or something.

Another Twitter war that’s raging today is around homophobia, and can be traced back to the advertisement below (subsequently pulled, and also the subject of an apology from the agency concerned).

Flora ad

The ad was part of a sequence. The (only?) two other ads in the sequence involved the idea of Malema becoming president; and a Kama Sutra reference – in all cases, the idea was presumably that you need to protect your heart from excessive strain or shock, and that Flora margarine could give you added protection.

I’ll link to the opinion pieces that are being fought over at the end of this post, because the squabble between their respective authors is not the point of this blog post.

I want to go back to the ad, and the question of whether it is homophobic at all.

A literal understanding of homophobia would involve fear, but more colloquially judgement, prejudice and so forth against gay persons or communities. This definition is difficult to sustain here, because the judgement being expressed is against the holder of the “fragile” heart depicted in the ad – that person is weak, unable to deal with reality, and so forth. They need external assistance from the margarine to strengthen their (naturally weak) defences against some information (or exertion, in the Kama Sutra case).

This analysis of how the ad is supposed to work is consistent with all three versions of it. You can criticise such a campaign on various grounds, one of which would (and I think, should) be the choice of examples meant to serve as the “bullet”. If you want to highlight the things that some folk are hypersensitive, prejudiced or bigoted about, then the campaign should make that element clear – otherwise it runs the risk of being perceived as being particularly insensitive to those examples it does choose to use (with the ones left out being given a free pass). In fact, if you don’t make this element clear enough, the stereotypes you leave out are defined as normal by their exclusion.

So, the campaign I would have run (easy in retrospect, I know) would have involved “uh, Dad, I’m an atheist”. Or “uh, Dad, my boyfriend/girlfriend is black/white/Christian/Muslim/French”, or whatever.

Alternatively, you leave out the one ad that deals with a social prejudice at all, and replace it with “it’s about your child”, or “uh, Dad, I took your car keys”. The point is that in only including gay folk as an example of the sort of child that a parent might have a prejudice towards, you certainly take the risk of disproportionately offending gay people in this campaign.

One logically defensible stance here is that the ad uses the example of a homophobic person (the father) to make its point, rather than being homophobic itself. Critics will argue – not entirely without merit – that this is too narrow a definition of homophobia, in that we should also count as homophobic language and images that treat (technical, in the first sense above) homophobia as “normal”, or expected.

This broader understanding of homophobia certainly accords with what I perceive and see reported as being the experience of many homosexual people. Rebecca Davis (of the Daily Maverick) pointed out in a comment to one of the pieces that gay teens disproportionately commit suicide, partly (presumably) for fear of being othered, marginalised, cast out by parents and so forth – and that these fears are immediately prompted by an ad such as this. If, like me, you listen to the fabulous Dan Savage podcast, Savage Love, you’ll not go a week without hearing some heartbreaking story of parental or societal prejudice of this sort.

I’m sympathetic to the view that the ad is homophobic in this broader way, but only because of the failure of execution highlighted above. If the ad had consistently focused on prejudice of other sorts too, the campaign could easily have been read as affirming ways of living and being that some considered (and sadly, still consider) to be marginal, immoral or taboo. The ad might even be trying to do that now, and failing – so I can understand why it’s caused the outrage it has.

Here’s something else that I’d hope we can consider, though, even while saying it’s a bad ad, that an apology is merited, or even that the ad should be pulled. And that is that we do our language, argument and political battles a long-term disservice by calling an insensitive, poorly-executed ad concept homophobic instead of calling it “offensive”, “insensitive” or somesuch, including whatever qualifiers necessary (mildly, extremely, and so forth).

Our reactions to offence need to be proportional, because language and the words we choose to use signal the degree to which things are regarded as wrong. If anything that offends on the grounds of sexual orientation is homophobic, and anything that offends on the grounds of race, racist, then we are leaving no room for mistakes, or for implicit cultural biases to be recognised as unfortunate (and needing remedy) while not being wilful (and thus, more wrong). There are degrees of moral failing, and our language needs to take those degrees into account.

Lowe and Partners (the agency who made the ad in question) are not homophobic in the sense that Jon Qwelane or President Zuma are. Using the same language to describe them all is not only lazy, but also counts against a long-term project of getting people to think about the nuances of their language and behaviour. I’d wager that shouting at someone for their homophobia will not encourage as much reflection as explaining to them why gay folk might find the ad offensive would.

The point is that there’s an arms-race of hyperbole going on, especially on the Left, and therefore especially in matters pertaining to social justice. This is understandable, especially because the Right has bombarded the world with similar hyperbole for long enough. But the trend is not a good one, and we should resist it.

It’s not good, partly because we denude language through doing so. More importantly, though, it’s not good because it gives an intrinsic advantage in argument to those who shout the loudest, and who are willing to claim that they are most fundamentally or critically hurt. And in the long run, it’s not good because the only rational (or sadly, so it might seem) way to respond to a climate of hypersensitivity is to shut up, and not say anything at all, for fear of offending someone.

The Daily Maverick columns, in order of appearance:

Twitter, where obnoxious guests can gatecrash any party

twitter-bird-white-on-blueOne of the alleged sorts of “troll” that has been taxonomised on the Interwebs is the “tone troll” – someone who, lacking an argument, counters their opponent’s claims through pointing out that said opponent is being obnoxious, rude, or shrill (etc.). While I agree that tone can’t invalidate an argument, it certainly can make the argument difficult to hear. Also, it can make the speaker come across as either a reasonable person or not, depending on what sort of tone they employ.

There’s the risk of a false choice here, in other words, in that some invocations of the idea of tone trolling like to suggest that tone should never be relevant, and others like to suggest that we should never be rude or aggressive. The truth lies somewhere in between, as is so often the case. Ideally, we’d be such high-minded creatures that we’d be able to hear the argument, and assess it on its own merits, regardless of tone. And ideally, we’d perhaps be able to restrain ourselves from being rude or aggressive, except in truly exceptional circumstances.

(Of course, the problem with rude or aggressive folk is sometimes exactly that they think most situations are exceptional, and that you are exactly that sort of idiot that they should be able to yell at, most of the time.)

The false choice obscures the fact that tone matters on a psychological and political level, regardless of the truth or falsity of what someone might be saying. Consider an analogy, outside of social media and the web: when considering our circle of friends, or when drawing up a guest list for a party, I’d think it a common experience for all of us to know of someone who, while interesting, is a boorish character.

Perhaps they are too self-important, too loud, too sweary, etc. And perhaps they simply don’t fit the context under consideration, in that while you might invite them to one sort of party, you wouldn’t invite them to another sort (the loud, drunken occasion for dance, versus the dinner table, for example).

There’s no logical obstacle that I can see for wanting your Facebook or Twitter conversations, and your website comment spaces, to have a certain character. You might imagine yourself to be part of some sort of libertine Internet community, where people can do as they please, or perhaps you’re on a particular space because you value interesting – and even potentially civil – discussion with people you’ve never met in (physical) person.

If you’re of the latter sort, and you (politely) point out that that’s the sort of conversation you prefer, then people who ignore that request or signal are surely simply rude, lacking in certain basic social graces? And (here’s the conservative bit, I guess) surely that is still something we’d like to describe as wrong? Even in this world of virtual people and micro-opinions on Twitter, surely having basic manners can still be a thing?

Instead, it sometimes seems the case that on Twitter, you can gatecrash any party, and be as boorish a guest as you like. At some point you might be asked to leave, sure – but by the time that happens, you’ll often already have compromised the party for the rest of us. I’m not talking about simply seeing people in your timeline that annoy you – you’re of course free to unfollow, and thus not see that which annoys you. I’m talking more about the people who butt into your conversations with others, or who simply butt in, to say their piece, giving little thought to whether what they are saying is at all relevant to you.

One can ignore these interjections, yes. But a) that’s a (minimal, to be sure) burden I shouldn’t have to endure. I could ignore them, but I shouldn’t have to. More and more, it seems to me that we define our moral standards by reference to the lowest common denominator. So, people troll you on Twitter – toughen up! So, you encounter sexist abuse – come on, they aren’t serious! Despite the fact that we can sometimes be oversensitive, the fact remains that the basic wrongness lies with the troll or the rude gatecrasher – regardless of what we do to cope with them, they can’t be allowed to forget that we’d like them to learn some manners.

There was an (a) up there. The (b) is about how persistent they can be. It’s sometimes not just one interjection when you and someone else are talking about something, but an incessant expressing of a view on a conversation that you’re both not part of, and where you’ve been given every indication (in this case, consisting of the indication that nobody has replied to you, ever) that you should gracefully exit, closing the door behind you.

During a quite therapeutic rant with a friend over private message the other day, he confessed that Twitter was radicalising him, in that the endless stream of often vacuous pronouncements on things sometimes makes one want to disagree on principle, even if you’d ordinarily be inclined to sympathy with the cause or issue. This is simply because the sentiment you’re rebelling against is expressed in such a mindless or reactionary way, and so often by the same people.

In South Africa, it’s often around racial politics, and party politics, where a chorus of knees jerk at every instance of the Democratic Alliance doing something which (could, at an uninformed stretch of the imagination) be construed as exclusively anti-poor (thus, anti-black), with no prospect of it being part of some longer-term strategy that might or might not be defensible, in the minds of people who have spend many hours/days/weeks debating it. Likewise, a chorus of knees jerk at every instance of the ANC doing something which fits (however spuriously) a narrative of corruption or incompetence.

A larger problem, and not the point of this post, is that the deck is stacked against one set of critics, of course, in that criticising the DA is relatively safe, in that you can’t easily be accused of racism. So, a whole cottage industry of banal criticism has sprung up, where indignant opinionistas turn their postmodern attentions to the latest sins committed by the demonic DA.

The critics are often right – but they are never told that (or when) they are wrong, because to do so opens you up to various accusations (chief among these, the charge of racism) that make it easy for the opinionista to slide off the hook. And because these opinionistas are too rarely told that they are wrong, they have little opportunity to improve their arguments, and confirmation bias rules supreme.

So as you can see, Twitter is perhaps radicalizing me also, but perhaps also inducing a sort of bemused smugness, which doesn’t seem very healthy either. I had meant to offer some examples of the sorts of Twitter folk that I’m now starting to block, rather than ignore, but this post has gone on long enough. So I’ll get to that in future, and in the meanwhile, point you to something that makes similar points to those I had intended to make, namely Daniel Fincke talking about how he enforces civility on Facebook.

Caroline Criado-Perez, #ReportAbuse and Twitter

In a 2010 column on abusive comments posted below online articles, I wrote:

As Theodore Dalrymple reminds us in his “Thank you for not expressing yourself”, “The immediacy of the response which the internet makes possible also means that people are able to vent their spleen in a way which was not possible, or likely, before. The putting of pen to paper, to say nothing of the act of posting the resultant letter, requires more deliberation than sitting at a computer and firing off an angry e-mail or posting on a website.”

This, I believe, captures the essence of when it is permissible rather than gratuitously offensive to resort to abuse: Would you have said the same things in an old-fashioned letter to the editor? Would you say the same thing to the columnist in person, if you were to meet him at a dinner party? If yes, I say go ahead. But if not, perhaps you should do yourself and all of us a favour, and simply shut up.

But there’s no chance, or a vanishingly small chance, that the trolls will do us that favour. After all, their purpose is to (at least) provoke and offend, and telling them to shut up will do little but invite them to send some abuse your way. So what can we do?

imagesThousands of people have now signed a petition for Twitter to introduce a “report abuse” button, where this petition was precipitated by the numerous rape threats that Caroline Criado-Perez received after her campaign to have more women feature on UK banknotes. Notung has highlighted some of the issues in a recent post on SkepticInk, and I agree with his skepticism regarding implementing such a reporting mechanism efficiently.

For all the properly abusive Tweets and Internet comments that people somehow think it appropriate to send, this reporting mechanism will surely be exploited by those who want to simply censor things/people they don’t like – or just for mischief (think 4Chan or similar). So whatever else happens, I’d hope for there to be a human or team of humans assessing reports of abuse – carefully – before implementing any bannings or account terminations.

But it’s not as simply as a mere free speech issue for me, because asking the victims of abuse to simply “deal with it” doesn’t acknowledge the fact that some of us are more equipped to deal with abuse than others are – and that those who are less equipped to deal with abuse tend to attract more of it (getting a reaction being, after all, part of the point of being a troll).

It’s also not as simple as saying “don’t feed the trolls”, partly because that smacks a little of victim-blaming, and also because – thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet and a postmodern rejection of authority – everyone thinks that they are an expert on everything, and aren’t afraid to express their views, no matter how ill-considered those views might be. There’s seems to be an intolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty, which results in a default stance of dogmatism and hostility on many corners of the Internet.

Furthermore, as Notung points out, an unintended consequence of a “report abuse” button might be that those who are calling for the button get reported for abuse themselves. Not only because some “social justice warriors” can be rather brutal (in terms of using abusive language) in response to anyone who questions their point of view, thus perhaps meriting being reported, but also simply in retribution for perceived slights. (I don’t mean to generalise about social justice warriors, by the way. I’m referring to the subset of those concerned with social justice issues that appear to be ideologues, brooking little or no dissent).

Like Notung, I don’t have any answers here. But my two suggestions are:

  1. That more jurisdictions think carefully about implementing legal frameworks that are updated for the digital age, where every abusive twit has access to the means to cause distress to people like Criado-Perez. New Zealand is currently investigating how to go about this, and I think it’s important to work from first principles here. Existing laws on libel, defamation and the like would usually not take 21st-Century communicative possibilities into account, but if we did so, it might well be possible to eliminate much of the abuse without threatening free speech unduly.
  2. That we continue playing what part we can in discouraging trolls. I’ve written extensively about this before, in these two columns as well as numerous others – and a persistent fear for me is that if we don’t continue actively trying to provide quality content and commentary, blocking and banning trolls on our respective websites, the environment will become unattractive enough that some folk won’t even bother to read, let alone comment. Yes, the Internet is a free-speech zone, and should remain so – but you don’t have an obligation to allow any content on your corner of it. Just like you’d kick an abusive ass out of your house, do so on your blog, or your Twitter feed.

Jonathan Glover: TB Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom, 2013

NYXThis year, the Academic Freedom Committee of the University of Cape Town (that I’m privileged to be chairperson of) welcomed Prof. Jonathan Glover to present the annual T.B. Davie Lecture Memorial Lecture. It’s been a pleasure spending time with him, and hearing him speak – not only earlier today, but also yesterday at a seminar on the boundaries of psychiatry. I’ll post links to video once UCT makes them available, but in the meanwhile, here are the opening remarks I delivered earlier today.

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In his book HUMANITY: A MORAL HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, Jonathan Glover discusses the brutality of that century with reference to the declining authority of morality, and diminished faith in the possibility of moral progress.

We don’t need to agree on a framework for moral judgments, or any particular content produced by such frameworks, to be sympathetic to one of Glover’s premises – that “questions about people and what they are like” should be central to our ethical debates.

He argues that the 20th Century has brought some erosion of our moral identities, making it easier for us to treat each other as mere objects, rather than as equally valuable members of overlapping societies. Among the potential causes of this he discusses are the imposition of belief systems or ideologies by powerful actors, especially governments; the postmodern abandonment of the search for objective truth; confusing ends and means; and the physical distancing between agents, often enabled by technology.

A suggestion he offers for resisting this erosion is for us to focus on developing a vision beyond the given, the surface impression, or the merely pragmatic. We should cherish our imaginative awareness, and foster the democratic habits of tolerance, persuasion and compromise. Crucially, Glover argues, we should develop our abilities to resist dogmatism and to accept complexity or ambiguity.

These forms of engagement are perhaps becoming increasingly rare, but the place where they are traditionally exercised is the University. Despite the need to respond to aspects of what markets might desire, we cannot forget that we’re not only in the business of producing marketable students, or generating research outputs that are aimed at attracting funding rather than developing knowledge.

Learning is sometimes found in our mistakes – in being wrong – rather than in our successes. When we no longer provide the space and opportunity to make productive mistakes, instead focusing on being an efficient production line of graduates and research outputs, we run the risk of sacrificing some of the virtues that make universities, and UCT, such fruitful places in which to work and learn.

Given these considerations, I’m very pleased to welcome Prof. Jonathan Glover to UCT today. His 1977 book CAUSING DEATH AND SAVING LIVES was certainly one of the texts that helped me realise that I wanted to devote my academic attention to philosophy, and in particular, that highlighted the role practical ethics could play in bettering our lives.

Glover’s work has frequently focused on improving lives – HUMANITY, discussed earlier, is one example, and numerous others can be found in his writings on neuroscience, psychology, disability and genetic design, and in his teaching of ethics, for many years at Corpus Christi and New College, Oxford, and now at Kings College, London.

Towards the end of HUMANITY’s first chapter, Glover writes: “another aim of the book is to defend the Enlightenment hope of a world that is more peaceful and more humane, the hope that by understanding more about ourselves we can do something to create a world with less misery”.

Understanding more about ourselves is facilitated by spaces such as the one we are in today, hosted by universities such as ours. Threats to academic freedom could be said to run counter to that hope of understanding ourselves, and by extension, counter to reducing the amount of misery in the world.

It is these interests and insights of his, among others, that make it my great pleasure to welcome Professor Jonathan Glover to UCT to deliver the 2013 TB Davie Memorial Lecture, on the topic of “Universities, the market and academic freedom – how treating education and research as merely marketable commodities can threaten academic freedom”.

Freedom of speech doesn’t come with a guaranteed audience

Originally published in the Daily Maverick

Phumlani-Mfeka-e1369903581366-250x250During one of Dara Ó Briain’s stand-up shows, he ridicules the way that panel discussions sometimes include lunatic views “for balance” (watch the clip below). His target in this skit is homeopathy and pseudoscience more broadly, but the general point he makes is that we aren’t obliged to offer a platform to any opposing view, no matter how entitled the holder of that view might be to believing what they do.

We can distinguish between your moral right to believing in something, rights to free expression of that belief, and then any obligations that others might have to listen to or even publish that belief. Crucially, defenders of free speech are not inconsistent in refusing to entertain any given view – they would need to actually attempt to stop you from expressing it.

What this means is that censorship, or violations of your freedom of expression, would typically only be something that a government could do. But when we speak of controversial things in the media – for example racism – there seems to be a view that not publishing racist rants constitutes censorship.

The City Press generated a debate on exactly this issue last week, when they chose to publish an anti-Indian screed by Phumlani Mfeka in which he reminds Indian citizens that they have never been comrades, and that they should “realise that Africans in this province [KZN] do not regard Indians as their brethren and thus the ticking time bomb of a deadly confrontation between the two communities is inevitable”.

Some of us were quick to denounce the publication of this piece as an instance of editorial failure, for reasons that I hope to make clear here. I also want to argue that refusing to publish a piece such as the one in question violates nobody’s rights to free expression, and is certainly no betrayal of your covenant with readers.

To start at the end: a newspaper can’t be obliged to publish everything. Someone on Twitter told me that “media must reflect all opinion to allow rebuttal”, but this is quite clearly nonsensical. If all opinions must be included, all publications would need to be infinite in length (and could never in fact go to print, since you’d have to spend an infinity looking for the nth variation of any given opinion).

Secondly, that view is nonsensical because editorial decisions to include or exclude content are are made all the time, for various reasons. One piece might be cut due to space considerations, another because it’s dated, and yet another because it’s too poorly written. And then, we can also choose to not publish something because it’s rubbish.

In whose view is it rubbish, I imagine some asking? The editor’s view is the answer – for that is his or her job. The editor has a certain vision for what the newspaper should carry, and for what sorts of ideals or ideas it is intended to highlight. Neither the City Press – nor, fortunately, most of our newspapers – carries horoscopes. Yet we would not humour an astrologer’s claims that his (I use the masculine because I’m reminded of Primedia’s CapeTalk567, who give stargazer Rod Suskin a full hour every week) right to free speech is being violated as a result.

So the City Press could have chosen to not publish the piece in question, without violating anyone’s rights. While it’s true that we sometimes want to hear what the racists are saying – both as a safeguard against soporific versions of the Rainbow Nation narrative, and in order to expose and rebut them, no particular newspaper is obliged to give space to particular types of bigotry.

Choosing to include content like this signals either inconsistency (why anti-Indian racism, and not homophobia, blasphemy, or articles advocating incest – they all raise “debate”, after all) or a willingness to enter the tabloid space, where you stop pretending to have editorial standards at all, and just pander to sensation.

The column has become a springboard for debate, in that we’ve already seen responses from the editor, Ferial Haffajee, and others. But while debate can be constructive and even sometimes necessary, let’s not make the mistake of assuming that it’s always any of these, nor that you can’t have this debate without publishing the likes of Mfeka.

While we know that racism exists and is even fairly prevalent, it nevertheless comes in different degrees of sophistication. This is true for all views, and we – as editors, publishers or simply conversationalists – indicate what our minimum standards of coherence and sense are through which of those views we decide to engage with.

If there are sophisticated racists out there, and we imagine ourselves to be a sophisticated discussant, we’ll talk to them rather than to Hendrik Verwoerd. Likewise, we might discuss same-sex marriage with someone other than the leader of Westboro Baptist Church, and evolution with someone who at least agrees that the earth is more than 6000 years old.

What we might prefer not to do is talk to, or publish, views that are so simple-minded that the only function they can serve is as a springboard for ridicule (if you’re feeling uncharitable) or sympathy (if you’re not). This has no bearing on anyone’s right to hold that view, or your right to publish it.

But those rights don’t come with the obligation to publish. And as a superb recent essay by Mark Rowlands puts it, the reader has the right “to be completely uninterested in views that you find stupid or abhorrent”.

It is of course up to those who manage content to decide what to publish. But just as readers can and will ignore some views, it’s a small step from ignoring views to ignoring platforms for those views. The racist, misogynistic or homophobic trolls have enough places to congregate already – let’s not give them the City Press too?

City Press Editor-in-Chief, Ferial Haffajee, has subsequently commented on the reasoning behind publishing Mfeka’s piece.