PC nation?

There’s a certain irony in a column on the evils of political correctness by Larissa Nolan appearing in the Irish Times just on foot of a week where historian Mary Beard faced an upwelling of antagonism and hostility on social media for her supposed temerity in suggesting that the balance of probability was that black Africans were likely to have been in Roman Britain. For Nolan writes in her piece published both online and in print in a national newspaper and with wide distribution beyond social media, taking a tweet by Lena Dunham about supposedly transphobic airline workers as example A, that:

[there has been] a hijacking of true liberalism that has its basis in stifling free speech. Those who really are liberal – definition: willing to respect and accept behaviour and opinions different to our own – must fight this pervasive belief system that is threatening the most cherished of all liberties. Otherwise we are rolling back decades of progress that has created a western world where free speech is one of the fundamental tenets of society.

She chides Dunham for not providing any proof of the alleged incident – though logically, by her own argument whether it was an actual incident or not is beside the point,the problem for her perspective being that Dunham complained about people being transphobic.

For Nolan:

There was no proof provided. American Airlines later said that the times and places didn’t match up. They don’t fly from the terminal she was flying from. They were “unable to substantiate” her allegation.
Clearly, she couldn’t miss the opportunity to jump on board the most current, right-on cause. It showed her up to be, at best, incoherent, and at worst wrong.

Well it didn’t really show her up to be either of those because we know there are transphobic people in this world so, whether one agrees with Dunham or not (and I’m somewhat dubious about anonymous incidents being perhaps the best starting point in terms of educative moments), it doesn’t mean she is either wrong or incoherent on the substantive point. Indeed if Nolan argued that there are better ways to move forward there might be some strength to her case, but instead her position is that the left or liberals or whoever isn’t on the right are in the wrong. She writes:

Why is is now acceptable for certain political groups to shout down and shut down anyone who isn’t in agreement with their orthodoxy?

And:

Why is it coming from the left, not the right. The branch of politics we should be able to trust seems to have largely forgotten that tolerance and equality cannot be parsed.

I’m not really sure what she means by that last. But again, given the treatment of Mary Beard by the right, in relation to an hugely innocuous point, the idea that it is ‘coming from the left, not the right’ is at best naive and arguably tendentious.

Furthermore she continues:

In the process it has alienated good people with diverse opinions and important minds. Rather than debate, many people now say nothing. Instead, they keep their thoughts to themselves. The space for intellectual debate is reduced. But a society without an open and honest debate is one that is more likely to turn to violence.
Political correctness, a stultifying, boring, self-righteous and prissy movement that patronisingly assumes everyone is a victim, began as a good idea to protect the vulnerable in society. Now it is silencing dissenting voices of any kind. What started as awareness and education has morphed into finger-pointing and thought-policing.

To even afford the term PC the agency of a movement is a wild over-exaggeration. There are definitely self-righteous and prissy aspects to some areas of speech as used by the left. Angela Nagles excellent Kill All Normies, amongst other works from a strong left perspective, underscores that. But as she notes given, say to take just one example, the pools of misogyny alone online, it is impossible to argue that this is one-sided, or indeed that it is equivalent. Nagle seems to me to implicitly make a case that online it is right wing speech that has the greater agency (and she has some interesting thoughts about how left libertarianism was pushed from the web in part during the anonymous period of the early 2010s when the US state amongst others went looking for those active in same).

There’s some real oddities too to the following:

The smothering of free speech is being carried out in a very modern way and appears to be the preserve of naive activists.
In the media, it’s about wilfully conflating opinion with news. It’s about reading the headline and deciding you’re offended, without any context, and instantly labelling the target sexist/misogynistic/homophobic/racist, delete as applicable. It’s lazy and it’s anti-intellectual.

Is she writing about newspapers and journalists? Again, in a world where we have had Myers employed until last week is the above entirely tenable?
And later Nolan appears blissfully unaware of doxxing or similar when she writes about the following..

It’s about setting a lynch mob on social media, calling for the sacking and destruction of people with whom you do not agree. Making them social pariahs, or turning an individual with the brain to question a contentious issue into a bad guy.

I find the following telling:

It’s creating a climate of fear so that those few brave enough to do the important job of putting a voice to what many people are thinking – but are afraid to say – are intimidated and cowed.

Has she looked at the White House recently, the US administration? Does none of that register? Well actually she has, but the functional aspect of that is ignored so that she can blame the left once more…

And ultimately there is a reaction. Irish-American satirist Bill Maher believes that the backlash against this forced thinking and free-speech stifling has resulted in “a madman in the White House”.

I guess I could stop and reflect on the further irony of her repeating without qualification the idea that there is a ‘madman’ in the White House given her complaints earlier. And I have, I have. But the problem is, of course, that there isn’t a madman in the White House and the roots of his victory aren’t restricted simply to free speech or otherwise. There’s a strong argument that the inability on the part of Democrats to articulate economic issues salient to their base skewered their run last time around (though one also has to note the way in which Republicans and the right in the US has narrowed the space for – yes, speech in relation to taxation, and other economic matters at least as regards left wing approaches, and let’s not even get started on voter registration and other issues that constrain votes and voters). But that goes well beyond speech and into economics.

But then if we start to pick at that we begin to see the real power centres in society, and they aren’t focused on social media and they almost invariably aren’t focused on the left. But that, perhaps, is inconvenient…

And returning to her initial point ‘those who really are liberal – definition: willing to respect and accept behaviour and opinions different to our own – must fight this pervasive belief system that is threatening the most cherished of all liberties’ while there are exaggerated responses on occasions, there are also limits to behaviours and opinions. Would Nolan set forth to support Milo Y’s freedom to say what he said at the pinnacle of his career and which brought him rapidly down to earth? Is that a set of ideas she’d feel comfortable defending the right to articulate? I doubt it. Few would.

So once we accept that there are ideas that are incorrect or not worth defending or – hey, illegal, we move beyond simplistic notions of freedom of speech. And where do we move? Into a different area where it is also accepted that some speech ranges from illegal to probably not a good idea to simply discourteous. As I noted at the beginning, calling out, albeit anonymously, two airline employees, is probably not where I would start (though again by Nolan’s own logic surely that was Dunham’s right under free speech, and shouldn’t those employees have to defend their speech?). But this article is too one-sided, too oblivious to the reality of many strands on the left but also on the right, and arguably more dominant in this period, to really provide a path through this area.