Banged drums and chanted slogans
The Times also reported on the Cambridge debate on the right to offend:
Noisy protests were held outside a Cambridge Union debate as an academic abused for her views on gender told students they were terrified of causing offence.
Some kinds of offence. They’re not a bit worried about causing offence to feminist women.
Students angered by the presence of Professor Kathleen Stock banged drums and chanted slogans outside the chamber during the event, even though the philosophy professor was not speaking about transgender rights.
Never you mind what she was speaking about, she’s a contaminant. She could be speaking about lilacs and roses and she’d still be a contaminant.
One of the students due to speak in favour of the motion instead argued at length that Stock should not have been invited. Kass Caldicott from Trinity College said: “The environment for trans people in particular in the UK at present, is abhorrent and the hatred perpetuated by certain people in this room should be a damning indictment.”
What environment? From what I can tell the environment for trans people is downright obsequious.
Stock, who won the debate, said during her speech that she was not going to address personal accusations by previous speakers.
She said society had progressed because of the right to cause offence by overthrowing prevailing beliefs: “The right to offend is good, because every single moral improvement towards a just society has involved massive amounts of offence, and if we restrict offence, we effectively constrain the ways in which society can get more progressive.”
A lot of moral disimprovements towards a just society have also involved lots of offence – look at Trump! – but that’s a subject for another day, or at least another post.
Stock and Professor Arif Ahmed, a philosophy professor who also spoke at last night’s debate, were invited by Lara Brown, president of the union. Prof Ahmed said: “The opposition has spent a lot of time arguing against things that nobody defended and have made up some sort of fairytale castle which they then proceeded to demolish.”
And all the witches and goblins came running out and did a dance on the rubble.
Translation: Too many people are questioning what we say. Too many people don’t believe that trans women are women and trans men are men. Even when we get our way, mean people like Kathleen Stock still manage to say things that upset us.
So SHUT UP. *bangs drum*
“The opposition has spent a lot of time arguing against things that nobody defended and have made up some sort of fairytale castle which they then proceeded to demolish.” What a perfect encapsulation of so many of these complaints.
I am looking forward to it.
The problem IMO is that a lot of people can’t or don’t want to understand the difference between causing offence and being offensive. The first is about daring to talk about a subject or having an oppinion that is seen as taboo and the second is about being obnoxious.
When the new atheïsm movement appeared, a lot of religious people dealt the “I’ am offended card”, to which the atheïst responded that there is no right to be not offended, with which I still agree. Unfortunatly enough people seem to have understood this, that people had no right to a minimum of consideration. They started writing horrible, odious pieces and when people complained, responded with the “no right to be not offended” line.
So people started pushing for the right not to be treated with disdain or contempt, but then talking about a taboo subject became seen as being contempous.
This leads into the “who decides” discussion of a recent post.
If we accept “people shouldn’t say things that offend” as a proposition, then the question is what triggers that threshold? Some possibilities:
1. Anything that even one person finds offensive should not be said. This would give every single person a veto right over speech, and is so transparently silly that I doubt anyone would argue this position. Even if we limit it to sincere offense (as opposed to people feigning offense for the purposes of shutting someone up), and avoid the “who decides” problem by assuming we could flawlessly determine whose offense is sincere, it’s still untenable. It’s a weird world and there’s always someone who’s offended. LGBTQ+ people would have to go back in the closet because millions of people are offended by someone saying “I’m gay.” But then those millions also have to shut up because their speech offends others, in an endless cycle of offense that means nobody can speak.
2. Anything that a majority finds offensive. Now we’re into Stock’s argument excerpted above — this is a recipe for entrenching existing beliefs and power structures. Again, there would be no LGBTQ movement because it would have been shut down long ago when a majority were offended.
3. Anything that the “correct thinkers” agree is legitimately offensive. And this is where we are always headed in these discussions. It’s ok to offend religious bigots because well, they’re bigots. It’s ok to offend TERFs because, well, ditto, right? It’s ok to offend anyone who isn’t a correct thinker. This ends up being the same as #2 except that it’s not a literal majority by head count but it’s a “might makes right” in political/legal/social terms.