Free Speech in a World of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity

1

Both books reviewed here argue for the importance of free speech, though apart from that they have little in common. One, The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech is Everything by Eric Heinze is a case for the importance of free speech made by a philosopher at an Ivy League university writing for a prestigious University Press. The other, Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and the Threat to Academic Freedom, edited by Martín López-Corredoira, Tom Todd, and Erik J. Olsson, is published by a minor press, and is a collection of twenty-six short essays criticizing the scale of censorship that has become routinized in universities.

While Heinze’s book is a lengthy reflection upon a philosophical problem that has implications for the political deferment to human rights as providing unassailable principles for legislation and policy, the latter work mostly consists of testimonies by people who have been subjected to some kind of academic censorship. One of the editors who is a philosopher, Erik Olsson, discusses in a Postscript how the article he presents in the book, “Feminine Culture in Academia: The Threat to Academic Freedom Coming from Soft Values,” was censored for breaching policies of equality at the Institute of Astrophysics at the Canary Islands.

As the title of Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and the Threat to Academic Freedom indicates the widespread use of censorship in the universities stems from the managerial power of their administrative bodies. That the power of academic administrators has shifted from facilitating academic and student matters and assisting the enterprises of teaching and research to making the final decisions about the values of the university is but one further aspect of the corporatization and managerialization of Western societies more generally. That not only universities but also corporations have adopted policies of diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) which have been advanced as primary to their “mission” is also largely due to the fact that those policies are strongly supported by student advocates and professorial staff who do not see freedom of speech as a right if it is used to support ideas that are antipathetical to DIE.

Many of the writers included in Diversity, Inclusion, Equity are not tenured professors, and of those that are hardly any are employed within the Humanities. Some of the authors—such as Philip Carl Salzman, Jordan Peterson, Heather Mac Donald and Peter Boghossian—none of whom are (now) employed at universities, are widely hailed and widely hated public critics of the progressive political causes that are advanced through identity politics. And in so far as the institutional and organizational administration and application of policies of DIE is predicated upon people’s identification as members of a group, they are also well known opponents of DIE.

Not surprisingly, this collection will appeal to those who find their criticisms agreeable, most of whom I suspect do not work in universities, and not to those who cannot stand them. It is not a book that seeks appeasement with those who believe that academic freedom of speech is less essential to the development of educated minds than the principles now grouped under the umbrella of DIE. A few chapter titles indicate the pugnacity of the book’s intent: “Feminists Assault Science”; “Academic Freedom under Threat in Sweden”; “Transgender Activism in Academe”; “Let’s Imitate Hungary and Make a Bonfire of Women’s and Gender Studies”; “Conformity to a Lie”; “Racism is Real. But Science Isn’t the Problem”; “Science Goes to DIE at UC-Berkeley and the Rest of the WEST”; “The Groundless and Destructive Tenets of DIE”; “Why Discussing Gender and STEM Is So Dangerous?”

In sum, the book is a work of collective personal and professional frustration about both the ideas which now govern the university and its programmes, and the treatment (from censorship to job loss) of those who disagree with these—as is also evident in its five section headings: Feminism and Gender Mainstreaming; Race, Ethnicity; Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Programs; Censorship, Deplatforming and Job Harassment; and General Considerations on Suppression of Academic Freedom.

As contrarian and belligerent as some of the titles of sections and essays in the book are, to dismiss these essays as examples of hate speech would be absurd, bearing in mind the increasingly held belief within universities and the media that haters should not have rights. But while there are definitely people in the world who hate groups, critics of “hate” speech rarely, if ever, are merely “hating on” the various groups that appear under the language and policies of DIE. Part of the free speech problem is that there is no agreement on the meaning of words, which is why saying so will not mean anything to someone who defines hate as anything that might contravene the methods and ideas that are constitutive of identity politics more generally and their function within DIE policies. Trawling through Social Media comments, I have seen countless examples of sheer hate directed at Jordan Peterson and Heather Mac Donald—they are “human garbage”—but I have not heard them express hate for any group as such, let alone any call for violence against a group, even if they hate the ideas that bind an identity group together for some political purpose, and which they see as sources of hate and division rather than as the means for achieving greater social unity.

Given the extent of adoption of DIE policies within universities and corporations, it is reasonable to say that the overwhelming consensus is that free speech is frequently seen as a tool used by the privileged to prevent a more diverse, inclusive and equitable society. But while this is the go-to argument behind identity-value laden politics, the problem is that it is a generalisation that does not stand up to scrutiny. Of course, this refutation can be discounted as ignorance of the facts by a privileged person. But to discount the argument, one would have to argue (and let me just stay with universities) that being underprivileged is a meaningful category to apply to professors at prestigious universities. And as for students, the whole point of attending a prestigious university is to be credentialed by a brand, whose very rationale is to provide competitive advantage in the marketplace of jobs and opportunities. Class membership is a matter of relationship and of occupying a position within the social division of labour. Old style Marxists generally do not buy identity politics because it conceals the class nature of social conflict, and as well as the fact that, as they see it, identity politics is a middle-class phenomenon deployed by professionals to garner more resources to themselves by means of advancing and administrating policies that leave class inequities fundamentally untouched. Indeed, the argument that they leave them untouched is the reason why DIE policies are adopted as if they must ever remain, which also means those who earn a fine middle class living from those policies will always be needed to monitor the never-ending social injustices that they are incapable of stopping. DIE, from this position, is just another middle-class recruitment strategy of the ruling class.

This does not mean that people may not face instances of discrimination which are hurtful to them, though the argument that the administrators of DIE are capable of protecting people from being hurt can also be seen as entrenching and expanding society’s dependency upon professionals who must monitor every word and deed for the possibility that they are hurtful to some minority member. So again it can be argued that the institutionalisation of DIE is simply one more example of what Foucault had analysed as the will to power of professionals who create their “object” and the discursive regimes that make them socially indispensable.

No less open to critique is the idea that as an academic one’s identity should comply with certain normative priorities, including being committed to DIE policies being invoked for hiring or scholarship provisions or even curricula design—because many black students perform poorly in science or maths ergo maths and science are racist (this theme is one that appears in a number of essays in Diversity, Inclusion, Equity). Thus when those who build a career out of arguing about the injustices of gender or race (even though they themselves may well be whites) are confronted with women or black men who criticize certain tenets of their feminism or whiteness studies, the common response is to dismiss them as dupes of patriarchy or white supremacy. This, though, is a consequence of a decision to make identity and a particular set of norms that are integrated into policy and more generally social narratives which garner frequent (and uncritical) repetition completely congruent with each other.

Looking more closely at DIE then raises uncomfortable political questions that university managers and corporations can simply close down by deferring back to the policy. It is also fairly obvious that one cannot have criticisms of a policy’s real reach, or the motivations behind those who advance, administer and protect it, without also allowing for the freedom to speak out against it. Concomitantly, shutting down free speech on certain topics in the name of social justice and the policies that ostensibly deliver it, is the means by which a class of people no longer has to think beyond the interests they have and serve.

The above is all pertinent to the why behind Diversity, Inclusion and Equity. It is also a book that illustrates how far the distance is between social justice, as construed through the various critical social theories that operate around the dyad of oppressor and oppressed, and the importance of free speech. The fact that there is a tension between pursuing a society based upon open dialogue and freedom of speech and conformity to principles of DIE is indicative of the fact that many see the application of the principles of DIE, and perhaps even the principles themselves as carrying problems within them that outweigh their benefits. For, if the principles of DIE were so manifestly good and true why would they need to be defended through censorship?

There is also the question whether the social problems within groups identified as marginal are best solved by requiring policy commitments to such principles. As any first-year philosophy student would once have been encouraged to see, the very terms are themselves philosophical conundrums. To accept that the rectitude of those principles is beyond critical reproach is also to accept that freedom of speech cannot now extend to critical comment about those principles within the academy. Hence irrespective of the fact that there seems to be a professional consensus about the primacy of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity taking precedence over free speech, it is the critique of the primacy of these principles and their institutional and political application that has made free speech such a hot topic.

Although I have not noticed philosophers as being peculiarly vocal in criticizing the idea that principles of diversity, inclusivity and equity are beyond philosophical reproach, it is notable that philosophers, in the main, at least in the past, thought everything was fair game for an argument. For it had been assumed by almost all the philosophers I had met over many years that only through the relentless exploration of the potential weaknesses of an argument might we ever find the more secure ones for arriving at truths we might stand by. Sure, there were positions considered just crackpot, and hence not worthy of philosophical discussion, but the extent to which the goalposts have drastically shifted are very visible not only by looking at which ideas are now considered, within the academy and more generally, to be crackpot or “dangerous,” but also at how people who hold those ideas are treated. Diversity, Inclusion, Equity is itself a symptom of that shift. For while books bemoaning political correctness have existed for well on forty years, tenured professors losing their positions because of arguing or expressing a point of view contrary to a social or political consensus was not something that was commonplace. The shift is one in which opinions and words have taken on a heightened importance that they simply did not have ten years ago—but ten years ago was another world. What once may have been thought crackpot is now treated as seditious. This leads to a much broader analysis than the limited and personal testimonies that are provided in Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and while it will appeal to those who already fear what is happening with the suppression of academic freedom, the fact is that there is now little expression of sympathy in universities for academics not wanting to go along with social justice. So for those for whom academic freedom must be subordinated to the wider social goals of social justice this book will be just one more example of disgruntled privileged people dealing with the fact that they are being called out for being privileged.

The larger question, though, of what happens to a society when academic freedom is subordinated to the ideas of a class that dictates the social priorities and tactics for achieving those priorities—may brook no institutional dissent. The answer to that is obvious—it will look much like the United States, the United Kingdom or most other Western countries today, which for some will mean that we are making progress, but need to do more, and for others, that we are making a more totalitarian and stupid society.

2

The central argument of The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech is Everything is iterated throughout the book, and the following is as good a summation as any of its “thesis”:

Goods are things of value, like protection from torture or decent housing. Rights are claims to those goods, so rights presuppose the genuine ability to claim goods. … If there is no genuine opportunity to openly claim a promised good, including through public criticism, then … there is no serious sense in which a human rights regime exists at all. (33)

Immediately when I opened Heinze I was thrown back some fifty years to when the disciplines of Political Philosophy and Political Theory were rejuvenated along normative lines by John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls had worked for decades on his social liberal vision, A Theory of Justice (1971), which ignited a swift libertarian response from the younger Nozick. In spite of their different conclusions about what justice is and how one arrived at one’s understanding of it, both built their argument upon social contract theory and the ahistorical idea of rights which provided them with what they, unlike their critics, saw as rationally sound first principles. Although they opened up the floodgates for academics and grad students to dispute not only the nature of justice but also the nature of rights, I don’t recall Heinze discussing either Rawls or Nozick in the book—and neither appear in the Index, though Rawls’s The Law of Peoples (1993) makes it into the bibliography. For too many reasons to mention here, I never found the opening moves of Rawls or Nozick to be compelling. The problems of Normative Political Theory leave me unconvinced that it adds serious value to Political Theory, partly because it asks too much of philosophy, and too little from other areas of knowledge such as history, sociology and anthropology.

Nevertheless, if one is to make a philosophical argument about rights and their grounding, Heinze’s opening move is the right one—rights are predicated upon claims or demands and, subsequently, on the recognition that the claims should be met by the state incorporating those claims into law and policy. Rawls, Nozick and other political philosophers take claims for granted, but the most original right involves being able to make a claim that can be refuted or accepted. That is, if people are not free enough to make a claim then the other claims they make are not ever going to be aired, let alone recognized.

The fact that all rights begin as claims still does not sway me that Normative Political Theory is able to resolve that much, if anything. And that is because the social and institutional (i.e., political) instantiation of our reasons, as with rights, are also predicated upon their being recognized, not to mention being agreed upon. And there are all sorts of reasons other than merely the lack of “rights” why various rights claims are not recognized, not the least being that social reasoning is social, and social life is as predicated upon distinctions and divisions and as it is upon unity.

Nevertheless, I agree with another very closely related core part of Heinze’s argument, viz. that all too frequently—and as he rightly points out this is done in the UN Declaration—the move from rights to goods is made without adequately accounting for the fact that the goods, however socially desirable they might be, are themselves predicated on the claims that have been made for access to them. That is, if the political and institutional conditions of the claim are absent they would not be rights. But it is not the absence of such conditions that is at the centre of the debates over the right to life versus the right to choose, or the rights of the fetus over those of the mother, or the rights of the mother to do with her own body what she will. When there is genuine social division on an issue that is pitched as a rights’ matter, what takes priority, or what is affirmed and what is negated, is a political decision that satisfies the belief system of one group of people more than that of the other.

Real problems involving rights are often like Russian dolls, and they invariably lead us back to Alasdair MacIntyre’s questions Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988). (Interestingly MacIntyre also does not make the cut in the book.) It is because rights’ talk does not adequately resolve such collisions that many philosophers and political theorists do not pitch their political inquiries in terms of rights. Moreover, there is little agreement amongst philosophers that social goods and social virtues even need to rest upon human rights—as any reader of Aristotle or Plato well knows, they certainly don’t think they do. And whilst claims upon states supplying social goods are frequently pitched in terms of rights, Heinze rightly emphasizes that they are not one and the same thing. Indeed he goes further by pointing out that the provision of socially desirable goods can be made by managerial regimes. “Most nations,” he reflects ruefully, “are, at best, managerial regimes of goods, and, sadly, that is the model our contemporary human ‘rights’ regimes have adopted” (8). Thus the fact that the UN Declaration of Human Rights lays down a plethora of conditions which most developing states simply cannot afford to have—to spell it out, a right is a claim that someone has to do something about—does indeed weaken the integrity of institutions whose authority is not only built around rights that cannot exist in all manner of locations, but whose members routinely violate even those goods/rights which are among the more compelling in terms of providing a just society, such as the right to a fair and free trial. That, though, is not what Heinze wants to prioritize in making his argument, lest he gives sustenance to those who argue that ideas about rights are but hot air.

His argument is undertaken to consolidate or create the civic condition of a public sphere in which “individuals in pursuit of their essential goods and interests” (60) can express their claims to goods they claim are essential and desirable. Claims and rights develop and are articulated over time and in social contexts, and it is only if people can articulate those interests that their rights will eventually be recognized.

Up until this point, Heinze makes a good case for the kind of rights which might cost taxpayers but do not divide people about their value. A state provided education, for example, that does not rule out the possibility of religious schools, provided that education does not, as ever more people now think is no longer the case, set out to undermine parental values, is one such example. It is a case for why a political order that is responsive to rights better reflects the interests of those who believe that they are being deprived of social goods that matter, and that will not be delivered unless they are allowed to articulate their claims and reasons for holding them. As with Rawls, Heinze is making an argument about “stuff” and “access to stuff” as the key to a good society, even if the basis of access is determined by rights rather than utility—which is also to say that it does not veer into the kind of Political Theory which moves beyond what is acceptable to the liberal mind.

Critics of the primacy of rights in general, and the liberal end of politics and the social formation it engenders (and this is precisely the criticism that is expressed by the geopolitical rivals and enemies of the liberal order) argue that liberalism has been a relatively recent experiment, which has delivered a great deal of material stuff, though very unevenly distributed, at a psychic cost which threatens to undo it. That Heinze proceeds oblivious to this criticism is indicative of a failure that it would be wrong simply to lay at his door. It is a widespread failure within the Western academic mind as it is represented within the Humanities. Indeed, the most culturally and politically pressing aspect of Heinze’s argument about free speech is the question whether there should be free and open discussion on the topics or ideas that have increasingly come to polarize Western democracies. These are the topics and ideas of race, class, gender, and sexuality now providing the pitch of much contemporary public debate from the liberal progressive side which have also become the battleground within school curricula, and the source of much populist discontent. Of these ideas, Heinze adopts the role of the oracle at Delphi, of which we recall Heraclitus writing, “neither speaks out nor conceals, but gives a sign.” That is, he smudges the issue by conjuring up the category of “extreme speech.”

And Heinze largely ignores the problem of what happens when one group deems speech to be hateful and another to be based in values that they think are more conducive to common sense and personal and social well-being. Those who claim that the lack of a right—say, the right to teach children about trans issues often complain that opposition to that right is based on hate, or that it enables the kind of psychological insecurity and danger to a child’s well-being that is even worse than hate speech. It is also very common to then claim that those who oppose that right are not only hateful but fascists, and hence not worthy of being permitted to speak or have their concerns recognized. It is certainly not how those who oppose the claim for this “right” see themselves.

Like many other political philosophers I think Heinze wants Reason to do more than it can: and what it cannot do, at least of its own accord, is conjure up out of thin air the kinds of contingencies which facilitate social cohesiveness and collective cooperation based upon shared values. Those are not the results of philosophical principles but events and group responses to those events. But these are just the tip of an enormous iceberg of the sort that Political Theorists should investigate that also threatens the moral certitudes driving the rights talk/justice demands that are in vogue in Western societies today.

Furthermore, in the last six or seven years the word fascism has been thrown about by all sides—pro-Trump American nationalists are fascist, say one lot; corporate globalism and its enablers are fascist, say its populist opponents. The fact that there is no agreement about the terminology of value or identification—something by the way that was not the case in the 1930s when fascists proudly declared themselves to be fascists—is an indication of a broken political culture.

In sum, by going along with the idea that “extreme” speech is what one group of people deem to be hateful or harmful to them, Heinze illustrates how the “formalism” of his argument breaks down when group reasons cannot be politically reconciled within the very type of regime that he argues is the condition of social and personal betterment. Heinze is right that all societies reproduce themselves through norms dividing permissible and impermissible speech—the classical argument for liberalism, as he also rightly points out, which was laid out by John Stuart Mill who used the harm principle to discriminate between the two. But “harm” is just one more Russian doll, as critics of Mill have been pointing out ever since the publication of On Liberty in 1859.

Given that Heinze is trying to pitch his argument in such a manner as not to offend those who do think it their duty to keep the public square a safe space, free from hate/extreme speech, it is a psychological question whether one thinks that he might be presenting an argument conducive to their interests and way of seeing things. I don’t think it is, but time itself will tell whether Heinze’s work ends up having anything like the influence of Rawls. But then, again, Rawls was riding the wave of his time.

Critics of Heinze might well argue that he simply has no idea of how to deal with the riven-ness that now typifies liberal societies because it comes from the elevation of the rights talk itself, which has also been at the expense of the more classical virtues. Among those virtues is courage, and those who agree with the authors contributing to Diversity, Inclusivity, Equity might make the point that the difference between them and Heinze is that they demonstrate courage in the face of the attacks upon free speech.

Although Heinze largely skirts around the hot divisive issues of recent times he very briefly touches on two: the social media censorship of Donald Trump, and the cancelling of Julie Bindel at the University of Manchester in 2015 for her insistence on the biological primacy in the making of womanhood. The brevity and non-committal nature of his treatment of both these issues indicate that he wished such issues would go away. They won’t; on the contrary, they keep expanding, and the appeal to rights has only intensified the claims being made and the fractures that occur. Some will welcome this fracturing process—others won’t. In any case, the serious question is—will liberalism go the same way as free speech?

In sum: free speech is both a flashpoint of contemporary political life in a way that it had not been previously in liberal democratic countries, and also the tip of an enormous iceberg. Just as values are enmeshed in the decisions and priorities, actions and rules we accept and live by—what and how we think about free speech, and what and how we think about diversity, inclusivity and equity have shifted and play a decisive role in our institutions, and in our socially and politically riven liberal democracies. Whether for good or ill, the professional consensus in the media and the universities around what is to be institutionally tolerated has both increased drastically and shifted dramatically. That has also come with further shifts, not the least being the coincidence of the enhancement of corporate power with the power to dictate values amongst the workforce and customers. Given that many academics in the Humanities deplore capitalism, whilst also deploring social oppression of minorities, it is worth noting this fusion of power—as it is not one that is touched upon in either book, as neither book strays far from the principle under discussion or, in the case of Diversity far from the university. So in both books the cloth is cut too short, and much is lost if the matters discussed above are omitted.

Matters are also not helped by the fact that whereas once the defence of freedom of speech typically did draw the line at explicit advocacy of violence, the penumbra surrounding the word violence has so expanded within a range of critical theories that are deployed in making the case for the primary importance of such values as diversity, inclusivity and equity that words themselves are perceived as violent. Thus terms and ideas that were all but unheard of a generation or two ago—micro-aggression, safe spaces, hate speech—are now invoked against “free speech absolutists.” In so far as both books defend free speech, neither will reach those who have made up their mind about the dangers of free speech outweighing its virtues.