One of the things that concerns me with Free Speech – despite being a supporter – is that too often the Free Speech being sought or rather, perhaps demanded, is the Free Speech for the self and not necessarily for others. That is, Free Speech can too easily become a demand for MY RIGHT to ‘say something’ that by extension becomes a way to not only put forward a different viewpoint but in fact demand MY VIEWPOINT dominates, excludes or dismisses the right of the other viewpoint to exist in the public realm.
Perhaps an issue is that Free Speech operates too often and two easily within dualistic thinking: there is MY viewpoint and there is THEIR viewpoint; and they wish to stop me saying mine, so I’ll demand MY right, but deliver it in such a way that it negates, excludes and silences THEIRS. In other words, we find Free Speech and its opponents, operating in a latter-day Manichean dualism of a battle between the Forces of Light (and by extension ‘truth’) and the Forces of Darkness (and by extension ‘error’). The problem is that such dualistic thinking not only reduces everything to who has power, noise and perhaps media on their side, it also seeks to reduce public opinion to dualistic, oppositional positions.
My concern is that Free Speech is too often used as a substitute for free thinking: that what is being spoken (or often SHOUTED) is the expression of unfree thinking. For free thinking is much more the result of hard work than so much of what is claimed to be Free Speech. I can be unfree in my thinking but demand my right for Free Speech. I can shout something in the name of Free Speech that also expresses my unfree thinking. For unfree thinking coupled with a demand for Free Speech serves too often to reduce the word to dualistic sloganeering. Yet, conversely, those who seek to oppose Free Speech likewise too often do so from a position of unfree thinking. They effectively SHOUT DOWN Free Speech by in turn reducing the world to a Manichean dualism of unfree thought. They KNOW their opposition is right because they KNOW that free speech advocates are wrong because they are X or Y or A or B etc etc.
What everyone seems to be downplaying – or perhaps ignoring – is the underlying necessity of free thinking; and free thinking can never reduce the world to simplistic dualisms, because where is the freedom in that? Free thinking enables us to engage positively with the messiness and nuanced variety of existence. Free thinking enables, in fact expects and facilitates us to engage with the broad wealth of human existence and creativity. But free thinking not only emancipates; it also comes with a warning that there may be costs involved.
There was a time when such free thinking was part of the school curriculum and perhaps surprisingly, as part of the English curriculum.
I distinctly remember and value two texts that we had to read and wrestle with as part of English in a small country high-school in the early 1980s. It might have just been luck that at Geraldine High School I had English teachers who were able to facilitate engagement with these texts, who perhaps chose these texts. But in doing so they offered an important lesson of what books can do – and the value and necessity of free thought. They were the Soviet Gulag short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt, his play about Sir Thomas Moore. The discussion arising from our in-class reading continuously emphasized the importance of free thinking, of the necessity and costs of free thought. But they also positioned such free thinking in the wider context of the act of reading and the emancipation offered by reading; of having to read and wrestle with texts that demanded something of us. It was the same at Otago University where in in the first two years of studying English we were expected to read and wrestle with Chaucer, with Shakespeare, with George Eliot, with Dickens, with Hardy, but also with Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, with Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock and James Joyce’s The Dubliners, and with the poetry of Yeats, Baxter and Curnow. Similarly, studying History meant reading history, talking history, arguing and discussing history across a variety of times, contexts, issues and events. It was expected you would go critically, intelligently and perhaps sometimes wrongfully, off and beyond any set reading list, making discoveries, making errors, engaging with a plenitude of views and opinions.
You were on campus and in the library, wandering the stacks, making discoveries of texts that may not have been taken out that often, in those years before our current university library mania to remove any book ‘not read’ within a very short number of years. It was also a time when public libraries were more than the current reduction to a preponderance of very contemporary ‘genre fiction’; where you could discover texts from 20 or 30 or 40 years earlier sitting on the shelves, offering different views and opinions, offering entry into different lives and minds and societies.
It was and is in books that the free mind, that free thinking is nurtured, developed, expanded and emancipated. Because in the act of reading, in being open to a diversity of texts, you are having to think for yourself, guided by and in disagreement with the authors, continuously expanding and opening yourself up the pluralistic diversity of human existence and thought and experience. Central to all of this is the library, because no one could or would ever be able to buy all the books they wanted, let alone the ones they need. This is why any calls to reduce local government spending on libraries are in fact an anti-democratic challenge to free thought. It is why the reduction of school libraries is by default, if not intention, the dismissal of free thought. It is also why the wholesale and increasing ‘weeding’ of university libraries in the name of ‘contemporary relevance and use’ is an act of cultural vandalism and an assault on the basis of free thinking the university is founded upon. This is why censorship of libraries is censorship of the mind, the censorship of thought, the censorship of discovery.
Why does this matter? Because books and libraries enable the individual to discover other minds at work: minds in dispute, in argument, in critique, in outrage, in discovery, in acts of creativity, wonder, hope and despair. In reading you are constantly reminded there is more to life than dualistic, oppositional positions; in reading you are reminded that life is complex, fragmentary, provisional and nuanced. I would suggest that our Free Speech issues are in fact a symptom of our free thought issues, and that in turn these arise from the decline of reading and libraries in our schools, universities and society. For it is in our new dark age that Free Speech – and its opposition – is too often used as a substitute for and dismissal of free thought. Speech without thinking, opposition without thinking, reducing the world to Manichean simplicities, a dark age of reduction…we can perhaps but wait, hope and read…
Mike Grimshaw (PhD Otago) is associate professor in sociology at the University of Canterbury. This article was first published HERE
My concern is that Free Speech is too often used as a substitute for free thinking: that what is being spoken (or often SHOUTED) is the expression of unfree thinking. For free thinking is much more the result of hard work than so much of what is claimed to be Free Speech. I can be unfree in my thinking but demand my right for Free Speech. I can shout something in the name of Free Speech that also expresses my unfree thinking. For unfree thinking coupled with a demand for Free Speech serves too often to reduce the word to dualistic sloganeering. Yet, conversely, those who seek to oppose Free Speech likewise too often do so from a position of unfree thinking. They effectively SHOUT DOWN Free Speech by in turn reducing the world to a Manichean dualism of unfree thought. They KNOW their opposition is right because they KNOW that free speech advocates are wrong because they are X or Y or A or B etc etc.
What everyone seems to be downplaying – or perhaps ignoring – is the underlying necessity of free thinking; and free thinking can never reduce the world to simplistic dualisms, because where is the freedom in that? Free thinking enables us to engage positively with the messiness and nuanced variety of existence. Free thinking enables, in fact expects and facilitates us to engage with the broad wealth of human existence and creativity. But free thinking not only emancipates; it also comes with a warning that there may be costs involved.
There was a time when such free thinking was part of the school curriculum and perhaps surprisingly, as part of the English curriculum.
I distinctly remember and value two texts that we had to read and wrestle with as part of English in a small country high-school in the early 1980s. It might have just been luck that at Geraldine High School I had English teachers who were able to facilitate engagement with these texts, who perhaps chose these texts. But in doing so they offered an important lesson of what books can do – and the value and necessity of free thought. They were the Soviet Gulag short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt, his play about Sir Thomas Moore. The discussion arising from our in-class reading continuously emphasized the importance of free thinking, of the necessity and costs of free thought. But they also positioned such free thinking in the wider context of the act of reading and the emancipation offered by reading; of having to read and wrestle with texts that demanded something of us. It was the same at Otago University where in in the first two years of studying English we were expected to read and wrestle with Chaucer, with Shakespeare, with George Eliot, with Dickens, with Hardy, but also with Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, with Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock and James Joyce’s The Dubliners, and with the poetry of Yeats, Baxter and Curnow. Similarly, studying History meant reading history, talking history, arguing and discussing history across a variety of times, contexts, issues and events. It was expected you would go critically, intelligently and perhaps sometimes wrongfully, off and beyond any set reading list, making discoveries, making errors, engaging with a plenitude of views and opinions.
You were on campus and in the library, wandering the stacks, making discoveries of texts that may not have been taken out that often, in those years before our current university library mania to remove any book ‘not read’ within a very short number of years. It was also a time when public libraries were more than the current reduction to a preponderance of very contemporary ‘genre fiction’; where you could discover texts from 20 or 30 or 40 years earlier sitting on the shelves, offering different views and opinions, offering entry into different lives and minds and societies.
It was and is in books that the free mind, that free thinking is nurtured, developed, expanded and emancipated. Because in the act of reading, in being open to a diversity of texts, you are having to think for yourself, guided by and in disagreement with the authors, continuously expanding and opening yourself up the pluralistic diversity of human existence and thought and experience. Central to all of this is the library, because no one could or would ever be able to buy all the books they wanted, let alone the ones they need. This is why any calls to reduce local government spending on libraries are in fact an anti-democratic challenge to free thought. It is why the reduction of school libraries is by default, if not intention, the dismissal of free thought. It is also why the wholesale and increasing ‘weeding’ of university libraries in the name of ‘contemporary relevance and use’ is an act of cultural vandalism and an assault on the basis of free thinking the university is founded upon. This is why censorship of libraries is censorship of the mind, the censorship of thought, the censorship of discovery.
Why does this matter? Because books and libraries enable the individual to discover other minds at work: minds in dispute, in argument, in critique, in outrage, in discovery, in acts of creativity, wonder, hope and despair. In reading you are constantly reminded there is more to life than dualistic, oppositional positions; in reading you are reminded that life is complex, fragmentary, provisional and nuanced. I would suggest that our Free Speech issues are in fact a symptom of our free thought issues, and that in turn these arise from the decline of reading and libraries in our schools, universities and society. For it is in our new dark age that Free Speech – and its opposition – is too often used as a substitute for and dismissal of free thought. Speech without thinking, opposition without thinking, reducing the world to Manichean simplicities, a dark age of reduction…we can perhaps but wait, hope and read…
Mike Grimshaw (PhD Otago) is associate professor in sociology at the University of Canterbury. This article was first published HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment