When planning this term’s calendar I really hadn’t expected to be pencilling in (another) mock election, but here we go again and its an election where, whatever the outcome, social media, and Twitter and Facebook in particular, seem set to play a major role. Until the EU Referendum last year Twitter had always seemed the more aggressive and partisan of the social media options, but many people were surprised, including myself, at how personal and at times very hurtful some comments got on Facebook last year. I gather the same had happened in the Scottish Referendum too. I think it partly has to do with a willingness for people to say via an email or on-line things that they wouldn’t say to someone’s face, and certainly the emotions on both sides were stronger than you usually get in an election, but I also suspect a lot of people were quite taken aback to discover that friends and relatives had views, often strongly felt, that thy didn’t realise they had. Traditionally, in Britain at least, we have preferred to talk about sport and the weather, not religion or politics, but suddenly, whether through likes, responses or posts, we were revealing attitudes previously kept fairly private.
After the Brexit vote, and then again after the election of President Trump, I kept seeing posts on Facebook announcing that people would unfriend anyone who had expressed support for one side or the other, particularly, it has to be said, those supporting the winning side. Then last week I saw something similar happening with the coming election when a friend on Facebook promised, I won’t comment on your posts to try to convince you otherwise if you also refrain from commenting on mine… we should just agree to disagree right now and save the arguments of last summer.
This post sounds at first to be positive and sensible – it’s about avoiding conflict, keeping friends and so on, but it worried me enough to talk about it in assembly this week. I and for three reasons in particular:
Firstly, I was concerned that it suggests we cannot be friends if we disagree. I disagree with friends on a whole host of issues, from Brexit to marmite, and we should be able to disagree and still enjoy one another’s company. It isn’t impossible – after all there was a point not long ago when the Prime Minister of Norway was married to the Leader of the Opposition and most people assume Winston Churchill’s wife was a Liberal voter and his Labour opponent and Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, had a wife who voted Conservative.
Secondly I am concerned, and this seems to me to be a particular problem with social media, that if you only want to engage with people who agree with you then you end up reinforcing your views rather than considering and developing them. If we only talk with people who share the same instincts then we can quickly lose sight of the wider picture. I saw a young woman on the TV last night in Paris saying she knew Macron would win the next round in France because she had not met anyone who had voted for Marine Le Pen. But that said rather more about her than France, for more than 1 in 5 French voters did vote for Le Pen. The danger of getting rid of people who disagree with you is that Facebook becomes an echo chamber for your views so on the one hand your views become unchallenged and thus sloppy and on the other you might lose sight of majority or at least alternative opinion. I am lucky to have a whole host of friends who hold wildly different views and it makes me think carefully about my own arguments – sometimes that means I change my view, but at the very least I formulate and develop arguments with care.
My third concern, and this is the most profound, is that I see this as part of a current trend that I know is increasingly real at universities, of not tolerating alternative views, of attacking in a sense what we would call Free Speech – and Free Speech is one of those things we closely associate with British values. One of the most famous of Voltaire’s quotations, even if we are not certain he said it, is ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ It captures perfectly the principle of free speech, for what is the point in supporting free speech if you only defend people who agree with you?
But how far do we really agree with that statement?
It doesn’t seem to be the view of a good number of people, maybe even the majority, at universities today. There the increasing willingness to ‘no platform’ people with strong views that go against prevailing polite opinion find themselves banned from speaking. To some extent this has always been the case – when I was at university I remember attempts to ban speakers from South Africa and Israel, or representatives of the National Front for example. In many European countries it is illegal to argue that the Holocaust did not happen. But there does seem to have been a growth recently in stopping people expressing views that reflect, if not the majority, then at least a mainstream position and people with a fine record in asking difficult questions and challenging authority, for example the feminists Jenny Murray and Germaine Greer, both recently prevented from speaking because of their views on transgender and Peter Tatchell. Tatchell seems to have been criticised not because of his views, but because he has supported the right of people with opposing views to express them and he has debated with them. When he said “I’m prepared to share a platform with people I profoundly disagree with, precisely in order to challenge and expose them,” an officer of the National Union of Students refused to debate with him.
It is not just student unions though – critics of the Government’s Prevent Strategy, aimed at stopping the growth of violent Islamic fundamentalism – are worried that the Government is trying to silence legitimate views, even if those views are disapproved of by the vast majority. After all, whilst Karl Marx was writing about the violent overthrow of western society he was living in London and holidaying in Ventnor.
Supporters of free speech at any cost would argue that it is far better to have these arguments out in the open, to challenge and so defeat poor arguments and to help strengthen the counter argument. They argue that too many people take offence at comments rather than argue back and that the younger generation, the snowflake generation as they call it, is too easily upset and fragile to engage in robust and challenging debate and so prefers to shut their ears to argument, retreating to a safe space where everyone agrees with them. I totally understand this, and I worry too about our moving into a world predicted by George Orwell of double think – a world where we dare not say what we really think because it is socially unacceptable so we keep it to ourselves, but that means our views go unchallenged and also apparent consensus is not a consensus at all.
And yet – do I really believe in free speech? Because how far do you take it? In that exchange on Facebook I mentioned earlier, someone commented as follows:
Of course, in my rational mind, you’re right and I agree – no point being in an echo chamber etc. However, I personally think the real problem lies in the definition of ‘opinion’ or ‘view’ on something. In my mind an ‘opinion’ that involves somebody voicing a racist, sexist, disablist, homophobic etc remark, I view as discrimination and that, in my opinion, is an altogether different thing.
How far should we be prepared to tolerate language or ideas that promote hate, or violence, or advocate distasteful things. Should we allow people to make the case for racism, or paedophilia, or terrorism? Should we allow extremists the chance to influence people? But if we don’t, who decides what is extreme? If we ban people speaking in favour of Hitler, why don’t we also ban people for supporting Mao or Stalin? What is an extreme political party? The National Front? UKIP? Yet 1 in 5 French voters supported the Front National at the weekend and four million voted UKIP at the last election.
And what of the position of the Government? We know there are some Mosques where preachers speak a language so violent and hateful, one was near here in Portsmouth, that some of those who heard them were motivated to go out and fight and kill, first in Syria and Iraq, now on the streets of London, Stockholm, Paris and Berlin. Are the speakers as guilty of the crime they advocate or encourage as the person who carries it out? Should we stop that? But if we do, should we also have stopped those who left Britain in the 1930s to fight and kill in the Spanish Civil War?
I am not providing answers here, but I do want all our pupils at Ryde to think about where they stand on this question, one which I feel is becoming the question of the age. It is not a new question and it boils down to how far in a tolerant society we can support the intolerant. Voltaire would I feel sure have argued that you only defeat the intolerant by open and reasonable debate, but he hadn’t lived through the C20th. One who did, the philosopher Karl Popper, had this to say.
If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with it.
And as we ponder this questions I hope that over the next six weeks we can have a civilised debate which we approach with open minds, where we can respect and learn from one another’s opinions, and after which our friendships will be intact.
Head Master, Mark Waldron's Blog 