Jan.23 | Free speech
Understanding hate speech starts with understanding free speech | Free speech is even more important in a symbolic culture | Reflecting on speech in 2022 on the Free Speech Union's podcast
To understand hate speech, we have to understand free speech
Three big reasons that free speech is valuable, especially in this election year
The Government is pushing ahead with new hate speech laws. It’s introduced a Bill to make it illegal to “excite hostility” against religious believers or bring them into “contempt” with “threatening, abusive or insulting” words, and the Law Commission will be asked to look at more extensive changes. Most of the debate will be about the problems with hate speech laws, like the way they can make people afraid to speak freely about important but sensitive issues. So to really understand what’s at stake we have to understand why free speech matters in the first place. This is particularly important because we’re starting behind the eight ball. Professor Dawn Freshwater, Vice-Chancellor at Auckland University, recently wrote: “New Zealand does not have a strong tradition of public debate nor of discussing serious issues at length. We err towards pragmatism and our small society can quickly coalesce around a single viewpoint.” (Click here to keep reading)
This post was first published as an op-ed by Stuff on 4 January 2023.
Free speech is increasingly important in our symbolic culture
What the reign of the Virtuals and the Fourth Industrial Revolution tell us about free speech and hate speech
Recently I argued a case for free speech in a Stuff op-ed—three reasons to think free speech is good for us and good for society, and that this should be the starting point for thinking about hate speech laws. But I left something out, a fourth argument that needs a little more space to tease out than op-ed word limits allow and that’s a little different in character. It’s based on this observation: thanks to technology, virtual reality is swallowing up more and more of our lives. What is intangible, un-touchable, is increasingly how we define culture and therefore reality. Speech is a primary way that we create and make sense of this world of ideas and symbols so as that world expands, our ability to participate in it and express ourselves grows increasingly important. This is all rather abstract, so let me try to explain what I mean by connecting the dots between our current “ruling class”, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the symbolic culture that they produce. (Click here to keep reading)
Free speech, now and then
In December, I had the pleasure of joining a panel on the Free Speech Union’s podcast to talk about free speech issues and trends, drawing on my Maxim Institute research on COVID and our constitution.
This was an opportunity to reflect on the High Court’s extraordinary name suppression decisions protecting the identity of employees challenging vaccine mandates—people who, judges said, rightly feared real personal and professional consequences for their views even though they themselves had been “on the front line in the public health response.”
It was also an opportunity to talk about the superficial nature of COVID discourse, with its emphasis on a thin version of “kindness” sitting awkwardly alongside a matter-of-fact embrace of a two-tier society. It’s difficult at the best of times to have fully fleshed discussions about values and meaning in the public square; COVID was not the best of times. I hope that in the future we’ll be able to bring a fuller range of values into public debate and that we’ll listen with more empathy to those who hold them. On the podcast we also talked about some ways we could come together to build empathy and understanding with people who are different to us, that might make us more thoughtful and less likely to sling off on social media.
My fellow panellists were Karl du Fresne and Professor Natasha Hamilton-Hart who shared perspectives on trends in the media and in academia. You can find the podcast here.