In a recent piece for online magazine e-tangata, Moana Jackson outlines the
need for society to “debate the whole context and meaning of ‘free speech’”. He
does this with reference to the prominent case of rugby player Israel Folau,
who said on Instagram to a fan that God’s plan for gay people was to send them
to hell. Unfortunately, Jackson’s fundamental argument for why free speech
should be curtailed revolves around a central mistake. He argues that because
‘Europeans’ betrayed their Enlightenment ideas and liberal democratic values by
extending the project of capitalist imperialism through colonisation, this
shows that the right of freedom of speech is ultimately a lie. Now freedom of
speech is just used as a shield for racism and bigotry. These two comments are
both completely mistaken.
The Israel Folau debacle is not actually a
helpful example for Jackson’s argument. In fact, the wave of public backlash
and spirited debate with Folau’s comments demonstrated precisely why free
discourse and the laxity of limitation on speech is preferable to a culture of
censorship. Many young Pacific Islanders demonstrated their unhappiness and
resentment with Folau’s comments. Some shared stories of how their gay and
lesbian relatives were persecuted and harassed. Others talked about how for
Islanders, homosexuality was a taboo topic within families and this encouraged
a toxic culture of silence that hurt gay people. Folau’s comments reignited this
ongoing conversation in New Zealand and Australia about homosexual acceptance,
but more specifically among Pacific Island communities. It is that spirit of
ideological clash that allows for the possibility of an understanding, a
comprehension of people and their beliefs and conceptualisations of the world
that otherwise would be viewed in a prejudicial manner as a feared ‘Other’.
Nothing should be beyond criticism, but in order to criticise nothing should be
beyond comprehension. Jackson’s talk about ‘colonisation’ being the issue for
Folau is all very well and good, but it more or less appears as a nice excuse
for Folau to hide behind. By blaming ‘the coloniser’ Jackson also neatly sidesteps
the very real work we have to do in our communities to fight residual
prejudices, which is actually helped – not hindered – as a result of freely
flowing discourse.
People will inevitably say things that
offend others. Offense is actually a highly subjective feeling, not an
objective function of a supra-ideological matrix of ‘oppression’ as many
sociologists and political theorists influenced by the dogmatic reductionisms
of ‘identity politics’ wrongly believe today. Offense comes from many places,
both legitimate and illegitimate. Speech will offend different people to
differing degrees at any one time. The question for us is, in a democracy, how
that offense is dealt with in the very informal court of public opinion and
debate. The way in which the Folau situation sparked an ongoing conversation,
which invited reflective comment on a large scale and for otherwise
politically-neutral institutions to seriously question their activities (such
as Rugby Australia) shows the benefit that such an explosion of public
commentary has to society.
As usual with this line of argument,
Jackson conflates the intellectual movement known as Enlightenment, which he identifies
as the origin of freedom of speech, with colonialism and racial ideology. He
pours cold water on those who use the wonderful quote misattributed to Voltaire
– “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I defend to the death your right
to say it”. But ultimately, Jackson’s view of the Enlightenment is a product of
the worst kind of reductionism; historical inaccuracies and false attributions
of collusion that plague contemporary understandings of colonisation, which are
everywhere divorced from long-run historical perspective. Jackson says “in the
far from noble history of colonisation, the notion of freedom, and certainly
free speech, has always been a term subjected to troubling interpretations”;
that is, interpretations which result in the dispossession and displacement of
indigenous peoples. The reality is that the Enlightenment had nothing to do
with these interpretations. The Enlightenment was an intellectual period, not a
self-identical ‘project’ as post-colonial scholars claim. It is very difficult
to draw a line between it and the expansionist economic project of capitalist
imperialism and the political project of empire-building, which in any case was
not a specifically ‘European’ project – a view which also arises from an
occlusion of history.
Jonathan Israel, the world’s most eminent
historian of the Enlightenment, distinguishes between two main ‘tracks’ the
Enlightenment took. The ‘liberal Enlightenment’, the public faces of the
movement, consisted of well-known philosophers like Kant, Hume and Locke. But
the ‘radical Enlightenment’ of Spinoza, Condorcet, Diderot and others is
conveniently less well-known. The two tracks were divided on a number of questions,
including whether reason and thought should triumph in human affairs (the
radical position) or whether reason should be constrained by religion and
tradition (the mainstream position). The liberal thinkers did turn to
race-thinking and theories when it seemingly became apparent to them that
equality was not forthcoming. Because social divisions persisted despite
movements in the direction of equality, they took on an illusion of permanence
– Marx would say they were reified.
Voltaire, Hume, Kant and Hegel all used racist language, although generally,
the Enlightenment belief in a universal human nature meant that racial
taxonomies appeared very little in Enlightenment works. The radical
Enlightenment thinkers, on the other hand, were explicitly anti-racist.
Take Scottish thinker George Wallace for
example, who said that slavery was an abhorrent institution and every slave had
a right to liberty. Those imprisoned as slaves were human and therefore ‘had a
right to be free’. Wallace did not only militate against slavery but against
the entire institution of ownership of private property: ‘it must be
necessarily banished from the world before an Utopia can be established’.
Condorcet said racial theories made ‘nature herself an accomplice in the crime
of political inequality’. These ideas not only influenced the French
Revolution, the usurpation of the ancien
regime, but also the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. As C.L.R.
James writes in his book on the revolution, The
Black Jacobins, L’Ouverture studied the ideas of those radical
intellectuals and put them to use, leading an ultimately successful slave
revolt that established the nominal independence of Haiti. The universalist
conception of humanity those intellectuals held not only conceives our species
as common beyond national or cultural specificity, but also as an idea exceeds social and historical
location. Moana Jackson, however, is worryingly keen to localise the radical
ideas of the Enlightenment, positioning his system of thought (the fundamentals
of which are essentially liberal pluralism and particularism) in opposition to
it, and altogether producing an historically incorrect picture of its
constitution and effects. To say this reveals that Jackson is not fighting a
battle between ‘the West and the rest’, as he thinks. The battle is actually
between the liberationist ideologies of progressive and revolutionary movements
on the one hand, which Jackson does not realise he opposes. He instead proffers
as an alternative a highly undesirable conservative ideology of appealing to
tradition and ‘culture’, against those liberationist impulses.
What might happen if we employ Jackson’s
preferences for speech in practice? Let’s revisit the Folau case as a
demonstration. Jackson says that the idiom “sticks and stones may break my
bones but words will never hurt me” is a “Western idea” and that “our people”
(presumably Māori) “have understood the contrary”. Putting aside the highly
specious nature of such an argument, what Jackson is essentially arguing,
though conveniently in an implied manner and in not so many words, is that
words which ‘hurt’ a person’s or group’s feelings must be censored. In the
Folau case, the group that is presumably ‘hurt’ by these remarks is gay people.
If a gay person says they are hurt by Folau’s remarks, Jackson says they must
be retracted. But it is unclear whether Folau himself could claim that his
religious beliefs are being maligned as a result – for this is exactly what he
did do. With the dubious help of venomous creatures like Destiny Church founder
Brian Tamaki, Folau constructed for himself a convincing victimhood that
popular religious-conservative figures tend to do when their beliefs are
challenged in public. How does Jackson decide that Folau’s feelings, and by
extension the feelings of religious conservatives, are not also hurt? The
condition that Jackson qualifies to be eligible for consideration of hurt
feelings, that the person or group must be ‘marginalised’, does not seem to
suffice here. For in a liberal polity that has now legally sanctioned same-sex
marriages and enshrined gay rights into law, is Folau’s viewpoint not
acceptably ‘marginal’ to be nominated as such? But this is not the only thing
that is put into question if we adopt Jackson’s mistaken precepts. It is
questionable as to whether the same level of public discourse and fervour on
the subject – getting usually quiet and taboo-restricted Pacific Island
communities to talk about these latent issues – would have actually manifested
had Folau merely been silenced by liberal bureaucracy and that was the end of
it.
Moana Jackson belongs to what is
increasingly becoming the dominant political faction of humanities and social
sciences academia. This faction’s thought-system is called ‘culturalism’. It
attempts, and ultimately fails, to synthesise a belief in the primacy of ethnic
belonging in one’s life with a liberal political outlook. The spirit of
ideological debate I have just outlined can only be celebrated if one thinks
that it is important for people to unite under a common sign of humanity
despite apparent differences. The left used to believe this. The theory of
historical materialism postulated that history was defined by class struggle.
The systems of material organisation of resources have invariably led to
differentials of accumulation and desert, whether in slave societies, feudalism
or capitalism. The global structure of capital accumulation can only continue
to function if inequality between the capitalist class and workers is
maintained. Otherwise profit is cancelled out and the system ceases to work.
Marxists saw this class division as the key antagonism of an otherwise unified
humanity that should struggle together to realise freedom. Other divisions,
such as race and gender, were illusions that sought to divide humanity further.
Today’s left wrongly sees the nebulous and largely confected realm of ‘culture’
as the primary foundation of difference. This is what culturalism does. It
accepts social division prima facie
and coolly distances itself from the idea of a common humanity, sneered at as
outmoded, or worse, a function of European colonialism. Jackson has repeatedly
made this mistake throughout his work, as have his main intellectual ancestors
like Ranginui Walker.
The culturalist left today that Jackson is
a part of performs the same function that the liberal Enlightenment did back in
the eighteenth century. When inequality fails to disappear, and people lose
faith in the grand narratives of social transformation such as Marxism and the radical
Enlightenment, consolatory narratives borne of that failure appear in their
place. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Francis Fukuyama wrote that the world
has reached the ‘end of history’ – liberal democracy has prevailed. Identity
politics is precisely one of those fatalistic narratives that reflects the
retreat of the left. But even now when liberal democracy is seriously fraying
around the world, the culturalist leftists have barely passed judgment on the dangerous
political machines of nationalism and chauvinism sweeping the world, instead
choosing to double down on identity politics and bureaucratic means of
controlling ‘diversity’. This is not the zenith of progressivism but its exact
opposite: an admission of a lack of ambition. Instead of empowering people to
identify the sources of social conflict, view social problems objectively with
long-run historical perspective, and throw off the shackles of fear and risk to
threaten political and economic elites with a project of egalitarian
transformation, Jackson and those of his liberal-left ilk view people of
‘minority groups’ as vulnerable victims who are too weak to stand up to these
expansionary forces and require special protection. This view of humanity is profoundly
negative. It insulates people from developing the critical faculties,
argumentative skill, and systems of thought that enable the challenging of
power. It also infantilises people in a culture of vulnerability that
reinforces gendered and racialised prejudices, for example, the stereotyped ‘weakness’
of women amidst a culture of sexism that threatens their frail being at every
turn.
The identitarian notions of censorship are
indeed taking a dark turn – take, for example, Carrie Stoddart-Smith’s claim
that the phrase “Māori tribal elite”, used in the context of identifying the
extraordinary growth of inequalities among Māori as a result of iwi-led
corporatisation processes, was a ‘racist’ phrase and ‘distorts how Māori view
who they are”. The function of Stoddart-Smith’s claim is to silence those, mostly
Māori, who are attempting to speak truth to power by identifying those class
inequalities and linking them to wider socio-historical processes of capitalist
class reconfiguration. She does this by turning this issue of class and
material resources into an identity-based issue that is inappropriate to speak
about because it causes offence. This is highly disturbing, yet is precisely
the consequence of the narrow-minded culturalist view. This view actually
energises the opposite tendencies it claims to support: it reifies differences,
encourages prejudicial backlash, and homogenises voices of the distinct
‘cultures’ by amplifying self-appointed representative lobbyists and
spokespeople who largely come from the middle class and promote the capitalist status quo. The example from
Stoddart-Smith merely demonstrates that culturalism is only a barrier to serious
liberationist and emancipatory political movements from emerging. This barrier
is set up by figures that have a rhetorical veneer of leftist radicalism in
what they say, but they do not actually adhere to any meaningful leftist
principles which would differentiate them from current liberal orthodoxy.
The abuse or manipulation of, or diversion
from, an ideal does not invalidate the ideal itself. To end on a quote from an
1860 speech from Frederick Douglass, black leader and former slave: “Liberty is
meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to
exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they
first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions,
principalities and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble,
if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to
come in their presence. Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.” We should take
Douglass’ word. Asserting the right to free speech is central to fighting
racism and bigotry, rather than Jackson’s futile request that it be censored
away.
