The themes I shall tackle in this book are closely related, but do not form a single thread of argument. The idea that unites them is intellectual freedom, but this must be understood broadly. I am concerned to defend a kind of freedom that bears on a range of topics that have come to the fore in public debate, especially since the millennium and intensified by the spread of social media. Many commentators of widely varying persuasions have noted a rise in tribal thinking, shunning, shaming and a decline of civility of discourse. Disagreements about free speech, identity politics, equality, nationalism, and religion have become ever more acrimonious and are played out in institutions that have traditionally been held up as guardians of free expression and open debate. In certain quarters, civility and tolerance are in decline and people are cautious about expressing their true opinions or expressing reservations about those of others, for fear of social censure of even of losing their jobs.
To worry about these things is not necessarily to pin one colours to one political mast; people can disagree profoundly about many political questions yet be committed to freedom of enquiry and civil debate. Yet there are people who apparently think that concern about threats to intellectual freedom is itself part of an objectionable right-wing political stance. For example, on the matter of the real or alleged decline of free enquiry and speech in universities, there are those who think either that the problem is grossly exaggerated, or that even if the facts are as claimed, they are to be welcomed ā that it is about time that the freedom of speech of certain privileged classes is now being challenged. Here, they part company with those who are substantially on their side when it comes to (for example) matters of race, gender or sexuality but strongly defend the right of their opponents to state their views without being vilified, silenced or denied their chosen employment.
I wish to make a case, often implicitly, for intellectual freedom, while being sensitive to the ways this may sometimes need to be qualified, and receptive to counter-arguments. This will not be an easy task: the philosophical issues are difficult, and we all have biases. No doubt mine will become apparent to readers who are not guilty of them. Moreover, intellectual freedom covers a loose array of things. It overlaps with the familiar problem of free speech, but it also concerns separate questions about free enquiry, and whether there should be a right to announce the outcomes of such enquiry, or not.
To stimulate a lively sense of the problem, I shall deliberately begin in an impressionistic manner. Intellectual freedom fosters the ability to think, speak and act without being stifled by an atmosphere of taboo, whether this is legally, institutionally, or socially enforced. It enables one to live oneās life without the burden of self-censorship, without always having to second-guess the surrounding opinions and qualify oneās ideas to make them acceptable. To breathe the atmosphere of freedom is to live in a world where facts can be admitted, good reasons can be accepted and bad ones exposed; where people do not assume the worst about others and are willing to forgive them their errors and misdeeds; where people can admit to uncertainty and past mistakes without being thought weak or morally deficient; where humour, nuance, eccentricity, complexity, beauty and the erotic can thrive. This atmosphere of freedom, this general liberality, is a fundamental condition of individual and social flourishing.
The Overall Strategy
These sentiments ā platitudes, some might think ā will work in the background as my arguments develop throughout the book. The chapters, though partly self-contained, all discuss related themes that often crop up in the culture wars.
The structure is as follows. In this first chapter, I try to reinvigorate the case for free inquiry and discussion about any topic, guided by a desire for truth. The reader will see my indebtedness to John Stuart Mill, whose ideas on liberty are widely accepted, at least nominally, in academic circles but in practice not always enacted as enthusiastically as they might be. This will lead, in Chap. 2, to a discussion of contemporary arguments about the proper limits on free expression, especially in the light of recent events, some of which raise the matter of power differentials between speakers and those spoken to or about. Again, in the spirit of Mill, I shall reiterate his implicit distinction between causing offence and causing harm, using some recent examples of speaker disinvitations on campuses to illustrate a disturbing tendency, in some cases, towards prioritising offended sensibilities over allowing controversial ideas to be aired and debated, with the result that even private thoughts become more timid and ideologically policed than they should be, sometimes even risking a serious detachment from reality.
In Chap. 3 I discuss a seductive way to sidestep the apparent obligation to allow possible truth to be aired, which is to deny that there is such a thing as truth (or objective truth) and so nothing worth protecting or arguing over. I eventually apply this idea, no doubt controversially, to recent arguments about the philosophical status of gender identity, conceived as arising not from observable biological facts but from something irreducibly subjective such as an āinternal senseā of being male or female. I then proceed, in Chap. 4, to address some questions and prevailing assumptions relevant to determining the nature and extent of āmale privilegeā and āwhite privilegeā and conclude with a brief philosophical analysis of āidentity politicsā in general, arguing for a traditionally liberal position on these things. In Chap. 5 I note the acrimonious divisions over the issues I have discussed and ask whether, or when, we may reasonably end friendships or initiate enmity with people we disagree with, pointing out the reasons why friendship can exist with ideological opponents. In Chap. 6 I bring various ideas together, looking at the informal fallacies and āintellectual black holesā1 that bedevil the contemporary culture wars between what may be called identity politics, old-fashioned liberalism, and the cultural right. I outline various rhetorical tropes and modes of distorted thinking that are ubiquitous and contribute to a contemporary spiritual malaise.
The reader may have already decided that I am a āfriendā, or an āenemyā. I hope, in some cases, that both judgements will be revealed as at least partly false. While I do have a general view, which may be defined as a qualified traditional liberalism, I try throughout to show the drawbacks and the questionable arguments found on all sides. As implied by the rest of this chapter, I value an old-fashioned Socratic Method in philosophy, a method of using questions, answers, counterexamples, and refinements of initial positions, not unlike legal cross examination to reach reasonable judgements. This method is remarkably effective in bringing out hidden and perhaps false assumptions in arguments found on all sides of the culture wars. It is needed to counteract lazy assumptions and over-emotional thinking, which all too often lead to needless hostility and demonisation of supposed enemies.
Conformity, the Goal of Truth and J. S. Mill
Back, then , to my opening impressions. These need to be explicated and sometimes qualified. The liberal atmosphere I advocate does not entail the absence of rational constraints on our thinking. When trying to find out the truth about something, we need to exercise duties and virtues concerned with forming beliefs ā in philosophical jargon, epistemic duties and virtues - such as the duty to weigh evidence impartially and the virtue of open mindedness. How we think is important; there are better and worse ways of thinking. But rather than tell against a presumption of intellectual freedom, thinking well requires it; an environment of intellectual freedom is the best soil for the flourishing of epistemic virtues. Moreover, we are more likely to have warranted confidence in our beliefs if we can look back on how they were formed and judge that we were free to form them as we saw fit, and were not subject to distorting influences such as the fear of censure or of not āfitting inā.
Those trying to form the outlooks of others, especially the young, might try to justify their attempts to enforce conformity by saying that this is the best way to ensure that people end up believing what is true. If people of school age read the āwrongā books or have the āwrongā conversations, they will be unduly influenced and will end up believing things that are false and dangerous. Yet even on its own terms, such an argument is dubious. Some people come to ask themselves why they believe what they do, and if they recall their formative years as a time when they were expected to hold certain views and were told off or punished if they did not, they might conclude that they were indoctrinated and that their belief-forming mechanisms were thus warped. As a result of seeing this, they might reject what they were taught and even feel angry with those who taught them, eventually disavowing not only what was silly in their education but also what was sound.
We should want to form our beliefs, especially those that are central to the meaning of our lives, using truth sensitive methods such as careful observation and reasoning, rather than using other methods which happen to lead to true beliefs in certain environments but could as easily lead to false or absurd beliefs, in other environments. If socially approved beliefs happen to be true, then social pressure to embrace these beliefs is probably effective in producing true beliefs. But individuals with conformist tendencies are more likely to embrace false beliefs if the beliefs there is social pressure to adopt are false. Since many widely accepted beliefs are false, exaggerated, or incomplete, we should be wary of accepting socially prescribed beliefs just because they are socially prescribed. We should cultivate the desire to work out what is likely to be true, and what attitudes and emotions it is appropriate to have, whatever pressures we are under to conform.
This is obviously not to say that we should disregard the opinions of others, since they may have good reasons for their beliefs. Nor is it to say that there are no authorities concerning what is true. A great many of our beliefs are taken on authority, and this is both rational and inevitable in practice. But supposed authorities are reliable only if they have good reasons for what they hold true. Investigation often reveals that these supposed authorities got their opinions from other authorities, which in turn got them from yet other authorities, which got their opinions from sources that careful research can show to be unreliable. Often, the false beliefs persisted because of an atmosphere of intellectual conformity, or even their enforcement by totalitarian states. If you value intellectual freedom, you will be keenly aware of this, and suspicious of attempts to prevent discussion of ideas that go against the prevailing consensus, especially in such contentious areas as ethics, politics, and religion. Many beliefs widely thought to be unquestionably true are probably false, and many reasons given for believing them are unsound. In societies where independent thought is discouraged and where conformity is rewarded, false beliefsā chances of survival are considerably increased, compared with their chance of survival in more open societies.
Much of what I say in this book is in the spirit of the liberal view forcefully defended by J. S. Mill in his famous essay On Liberty in 1859 (Mill, in Gray and Smith 1991) which is generally seen as the classic defence of freedom of thought and discussion. But the last thing Mill would have wanted was for people to agree with his view, as he puts it, āin the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational groundsā (Mill, in Gray and Smith, 1991:70). He would not have wanted commitment to intellectual freedom to become āa mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experienceā (Mill, in Gray and Smith 1991: 70). When the belief in intellectual freedom itself becomes āa mere formal professionā, it is casually expressed by people who have no āheartfelt convictionā of it and are all too ready to compromise it. This, I shall argue, is happening in many spheres, including academic disciplines, where it is having a deleterious effect on the intellectual and ethical culture of the academy.
Millās defence of liberty of thought and discussion belongs to a tradition whose earlier exponents include the seventeenth century poet and essayist John Milton, who argues for a free press in his essay Areopagitica (Milton, ed. Poole, 2014, first published 1644) and the philosopher John Locke (Locke 2016, first published 1689) who argues for a somewhat limited religious toleration. I shall return to religious themes from time to time, for although Western nations have been mostly secularised (despite a highly religious culture in parts of the United States) we should not forget countries where religious dissent can still cost people their lives. Mill, too, addresses religious matters, as he tries to show that his arguments for liberty should appeal to Christians, if only they can be persuaded that that there is no real conflict between his case for freedom and Christian devotion, properly understood. Mill was writing in socially conservative mid-Victorian England, and it is doubtful that he believed that intellectual freedom and orthodox Christianity were entirely reconcilable. But he shared Lockeās view that there was something of a contradiction in the notion of enforced religion. You can march someone to Church at gunpoint, but you cannot make them truly pray ā and no doubt he thought he had arguments that devout people could accept, without diluting their religious devotion.
āCrimestopā
Before looking at Millās main arguments, I shall elaborate on the motivation for my enquiry mentioned earlier. This has largely to do with the effects on people with non-conformist tendencies of a culture in which one is expected to hold rigidly prescribed beliefs on certain subjects. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell [Orwell 1949] inserts into his narrative passages from a book supposedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein, ...