He's Spartacus

On 29 March, I was invited to speak about campus censorship at the annual conference of the Liberty League. My speech is published below.

My all-time favourite censorship story is from 2008.

At the start of March 2008, Britain finally abolished its blasphemy laws. It was great news for those of us who think there should be no laws against slagging off Jesus Christ or calling into question the Bible or ridiculing God.

These were laws that punished the publication of any scurrilous, reviling or contemptuous material about God, Jesus or the Bible. People had had their tongues pierced for breaking these laws; later they were sent to the Tower for breaking them; and as late as 1977 the boss of a magazine was given a nine-month suspended prison sentence under these laws for publishing a poem about a Roman centurion giving Christ a blowjob.

So it was great that these laws were done away with in early March 2008. But then, later in March 2008, just seven or eight days later, a TV advert was banned on the basis that it was offensive to Christians. The ad was for hair products and it featured nuns clasping rosary beads to their bosoms and praying before these hair products. It was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority after 23 people, mostly Christians, complained about it. It was judged to be offensive to a group of people, and therefore it had to go.

So, in the space of about a week, we had the abolition of the blasphemy laws and the banning of an advert for being offensive to Christians. I think what we were witnessing back then, in March 2008, was a really important shift in censorship in Britain, or rather the crystallisation of a shift that had already been occurring: a shift from the old censorship to a new kind of censorship; a shift from the old system of explicit moral or political censorship towards a new empire of offence and the policing of offence.

We witnessed the shift to a new system of censorship in which it isn’t really ideas that are protected from ridicule — it’s individuals. It isn’t gods or saints that are protected — it’s people’s self-esteem. It isn’t Jesus or kings who are forcefielded from offence — it’s homosexuals, ethnic minorities, students, women, all of us: all identity groups, all identities, all individuals who claim offence or hurt. It was a shift from an objective form of tyranny — where everyone knew which objects could not be blasphemed against, what couldn’t be said — to a subjective form of tyranny where the wickedness of your words is determined, not by any clear-cut morality or laws, but by infinitesimally small numbers of listeners who take offence.

Today, pretty much anyone can demand protection from what they, as individuals or a group, consider to be scurrilous, reviling or contemptuous material. We are witnessing the emergence of, in essence, individually tailored blasphemy laws, designed to protect you, a little god, from hurt or harm. We are all jumped-up Jesuses now. We are all arrogant little Christs, guarded from having our souls pricked or our identities and ideas mocked in a way that once only Jesus could expect. And this new system of censure and silencing is, in my view, worse than what went before.

Nowhere is the subjective empire of offence in more evidence than on university campuses. These are places that should be hot seats of open, free, rigorous, robust debate. But they have been overrun by the new individually tailored blasphemy laws, designed to protect individual students from encountering scurrilous, reviling or contemptuous material.

Just as surely as Christ was once ringfenced from ridicule, so students now expect the same. They erect Safe Spaces, highly anti-social bubbles in which they seek escape from the crowd, the swarm, and from its scurrilous, reviling and contemptuous ways of thinking and speaking. They No Platform anyone who makes them feel uncomfortable, striking down those who question any aspect of any student group’s identity — just as those who questioned the identity of Christ were once struck down.

They forbid speakers who deny climate change or deny transsexualism — just as the old morality police forbade the denial of Biblical truths. Once, you would be punished for questioning transubstantiation, an eccentric Catholic belief that the bread they eat at Mass is actually, literally the body of Christ; now you are punished if you question trans politics, the idea that a man who removes his penis becomes a woman — a nonsense idea that is every bit as magic and medieval, if not more so, as the notion that bread becomes flesh via a few priestly incantations. In the past you risked punishment for stating the fact, “This bread is not flesh”; now you’re ostracised for stating the fact, “This man is not a woman”.

So what we have on campuses, among the censorious, robotic Stepford Students, is a clear example of how the old objective censorship that protected certain beliefs and ideas from scurrilous criticism has been replaced by a new subjective censorship that shields identities and emotions from allegedly hurtful speech. These Stepford Students have the same combination of phoney humility and gobsmacking arrogance that old religious censors once displayed. They pose as meek and mild and persecuted, but they will rain hellfire upon you if you raise a peep of criticism about any of their beliefs or feelings.

But this campus censorship merely mirrors what is happening in society at large. These Stepford Students did not invent today’s empire of offence — they’re just another expression of it. Across society we’re surrounded by jumped-up Jesuses waving their individually tailored blasphemy laws to guard themselves against offence or contempt. Whether it’s feminists online, demanding protection from trolls, or Muslims crying “Islamophobia!” at any criticism of their religious beliefs, or gay activists demanding the censorship of bus adverts that question their identity or the sacking of people who ridicule gay marriage, arrogant little Christs are everywhere, calling for the punishment of those who dare to blaspheme against their personal, subjective worldview.

This is the really curious thing about our era: the old brute laws against expressing certain moral or political ideas have either disappeared or are rarely used, and yet these nonetheless feel like deeply censorious times. Yes, there are still laws against hate speech and extremist propaganda, and they must be abolished. But there is no longer the explicit state policing of moral views or political dispositions. And yet, despite this lack of state tyranny, this feels like a morally suffocating era, where apologies are extracted from those who “mis-speak”, Twittermobs hound those who have divergent views, TV shows and art exhibitions are closed down by gangs of offended petitioners, and we are all told, or simply feel, that “You Can’t Say That!”

What has happened, I think, is that censorship has been outsourced to the mob — by which I don’t mean the public, the masses, ordinary people; I mean media mobs, moralistic mobs, often very well-educated, middle-class mobs, informal networks of non-state authoritarians who now police speech effectively on the state’s behalf.

We live under increasingly flakey states that constantly outsource their authority. And not just for health services or transport, but for authoritarianism, too. The guarding of prisoners is outsourced to private firms. Profit-seeking mercenaries are employed to fight in Britain’s wars. Even tax collection has been unofficially outsourced, to those ridiculous Uncut left-wing groups that do HMRC’s bidding by hounding firms that don’t pay sufficient tax. And now, censorship is being unofficially outsourced, too.

So the state doesn’t have to punish those who “deny” climate change, despite the fact that climate-change alarmism is as important to our rulers as the Christian faith once was, in terms of promoting low horizons and containing our material desires. No, informal networks have thoroughly demonised climate-change denial as a new kind of heresy.

The state doesn’t have to police and punish criticism of gay marriage, despite the centrality of this institution to its thirst for interfering in family life and its desire to impose a new, post-traditionalist morality. No, informal networks of non-state offence-takers police the parameters of acceptable thought on gay marriage, punishing those who criticise it with social ostracism and the dreaded diagnosis of phobia: homophobia, the mental malaise no one wants to be branded with.

And the state doesn’t have to police speech or thought on campus because informal networks of students are doing a very good job of that, banishing anyone who questions the status quo and the rule of the divisive, narrow-minded, ambition-squashing politics of identity.

Today even when the state does act, and uses its still-existing laws of censorship, it often does so at the behest of these loud moralistic mobs — such as when Twittermobs successfully get the cops to arrest a troll or secure the banning from Britain of sexist or Islamist speakers. Even the current Theresa May-led state intervention on to campuses, to police and punish the expression of extremist views, can be seen as simply building on the informal tyranny already constructed by the non-state authoritarians of the NUS and other Stepford Students.

The real problem we face today is not coercion — it’s consensus. It’s not the boot stamping on a human face forever — it’s conformism, social and moral conformism, informally policed and willingly imbibed. This generates the worst kind of censorship: self-censorship; self-hushing; the sheepish suppression of our inner eccentric thoughts and daring ideas for fear that they might cause offence. This doesn’t only make individuals dishonest and undaring — it also makes public debate flat, lifeless, bereft of the kind of new and challenging ideas that might help to propel our hollow, robotic societies in a new and interesting direction.

We’re living under what Mill called a “tyranny of prevailing opinion”, of stifling conformism and suffocating consensus, all kept in order by “means other than civil penalties”, as Mill said. But this tyranny is only as powerful as we allow it to be. It is parasitical on people’s willingness to silence themselves and to bend their knee to the new personal, highly individualised blasphemy laws. We can smash it by being brave and risking social ostracism through saying what we truly believe, regardless of what little god it pisses off.

The Australian, 14 March 2015

IT’S probably easier to get into Fort Knox than it is to break into Britain’s chattering classes.

Unless you have a subscription to The Guardian, love the EU, hate supermarkets, dream endlessly of having a bonfire of the tabloids, and think poor people are too fat and must be nudged and nannied towards fitness, then you haven’t a hope in hell of joining this most aloof of clubs.

Forget the secret handshake of the Freemasons; to become a British chatterer you must learn a vast, complex system of nods, winks, shared opinions, and raised eyebrows — usually at Them, the vulgar little people who, shudder, read the Daily Mail.

There is, however, a shortcut to this top table of right-thinking folk.

There’s one thing that acts as a passport into their world, allowing one to become at least a hanger-on, if not a full member.

What is it? Hatred for Jeremy Clarkson.

Clarkson-bashing is the glue of Britain’s liberal elite. Fearing and fuming about the Top Gear presenter, wringing one’s manicured hands over the impact of this engine-revving bloke-in-a-blazer on gullible TV viewers, has become the great unifier of the snootier sections of Britain’s media classes.

You want in to their starched, censorious moral universe? Then practise shaking your head and making vomiting noises in response to every utterance of the words “Jeremy” and “Clarkson”.

The chattering classes’ Clarksonphobia was on full display this week, following Clarkson’s suspension by the BBC after he allegedly hit, or in the Beeb’s words “had a fracas with”, a Top Gear producer.

Apparently, after a long day’s filming, Clarkson was expecting a steak dinner but was given a plate of cold cuts, and he flipped.

Now, being giving cold meat instead of hot steak does sound fantastically annoying, but it doesn’t justify alleged fisticuffs.

Don’t hit your bosses, folks! But the wild glee that has greeted the suspension of Clarkson, the media demands that this “ogre” (The Guardian’s actual word) be forever banished from the Kingdom of TV, has very little to do with his alleged use of force.

No, the Clarksonphobics want him out because of what he represents: car-loving, free-speaking, un-PC folk, those eco-unfriendly, somewhat rough sections of society that the chattering classes would rather didn’t exist. Literally. The New Statesman, house magazine of Britain’s zombie Left, this week even fantasised about Clarkson fanboys being boiled to become biofuel.

No sooner had the Beeb announced that JC had been suspended than the Clarksonphobics were hollering: “Make it permanent!”

“Why does the BBC put up with Clarkson?” demanded a Guardian hack who clearly doesn’t have access to Google. For a quick web search would have revealed to her the reason the Beeb “puts up” with him: Top Gear is phenomenally popular, with the kind of people whose shoulders will never rub with Guardian writers’ shoulders. Five million Brits watch it on BBC2, 300 million people around the world tune in, and it has made the BBC £50 million ($95.6m).

This is what most terrifies Clarksonphobics: the fact that people, the little people, like him.

The Guardian writer said Clarkson has become a blot on the Beeb, through “pushing the boundaries of … political correctness”. Apparently the BBC should only be for PC people, people like Us.

Meanwhile, a Guardian editorial insisted in its best schoolmarm voice that Clarkson doesn’t “belong in public service broadcasting”. This “bellowing and belching” creature, “drunk on his own testosterone”, should be sent packing from respectable TV. “Ogres are fine, but only in fairytales”, it said, which is unwittingly fitting, given Clarkson-bashing is itself drenched in the simplistic moralism of the fairytale, turning JC into an unspeakable beast corrupting the kingdom and his column-writing critics into whiter-than-white defenders of decency.

The way Clarkson has become a chattering-class measuring stick for working out who’s good and who ain’t was clear in comments made by Steve Coogan, one-time funnyman turned campaigner for state regulation of the press. He wrote in The Observer that Top Gear fans remind him “of the National Rifle Association … who I’m sure we can all agree are a bunch of nutters”.

The key word here is “we”. Who’s this “we”? It’s Us, broadsheet readers, supermarket-avoiders, who just know what is right and wrong. That little “we” speaks volumes about how Clarkson-bashing has become the nod-and-wink du jour of the right-on set.

Elsewhere in the media Clarkson has been denounced as a dangerous “petrolhead”, an otherworldly creature who “regards political correctness as a curse”, and “the nation’s biggest oaf” who should not be allowed to “get away with offending all of the people all of the time”.

First of all, why not? Free speech includes the right to offend. Secondly, Clarkson doesn’t actually offend all of the people all of the time.

What about those hundreds of millions who watch Top Gear? They love him. Media luvvies who are lucky if they have a couple of thousand readers never sound so spectacularly out of touch as when they slam as unacceptable, as Offensive To All, a man who is watched by throngs of humanity.

And it is really these people, the Clarkson fans, that the pseudo-liberals loathe. Clarkson is seen as a corrupting force, turning mushy-brained viewers into car-desiring, rude-joke-telling Bad People. This is why The New Statesman, on hearing that 500,000 people this week signed a petition for Clarkson to be reinstated, basically wished these people were dead.

Clarkson fans live in a “world of stupid”, it said, and “if every signatory to this petition were boiled down for biofuel, the world would be a cleaner, smarter place”.

In short, these folk are dirty and dumb and we’d be better off without them.

Such Victorian-style loathing for a lower breed of people cuts to the heart of Clarksonphobia. This is really a culture war that dare not speak its name.

What is packaged up as a spat over a TV presenter is really a coded clash over morals, speech, decency and the masses.

The Clarksonphobics hate Top Gear petrolheads because they sin against chattering-class commandments. They break eco-commandments by loving fuel-guzzling cars. They break the PC commandment “Thou shalt never offend”. Their desire for stuff — bigger cars, nice gadgets, flatscreen TVs on which to watch JC — flips a finger at the commandment that it’s better to be thrifty than blinged-up. Behind the PC assaults on Clarkson there lurks intolerance of anyone who dares to think or behave differently to the small but influential sections of society that imagine everything they do and say is right.