Douglas Elliffe: A Tale of Two Meetings

Last month I attended the Free Speech Union’s annual conference to hear panel discussion of hate speech between Andrew Doyle, Samira Taghavi and David Cumin, chaired by Tim Wilson of the Maxim Institute. Naturally, the audience was alive to the dangers of governmental restriction on free speech and the implicit reintroduction of blasphemy laws, and the panel shared those concerns.

But even in a meeting of people who strongly favour free speech, most questions from the audience were directed to the problem of protecting identifiable groups from abuse and hate. Reconciling free speech with protection from harm is a knotty problem. Defenders of free speech point to the principle that the best response to harmful speech is more speech, not censorship, and they’re right. But it’s an answer that may be better in theory than practice. The human tendencies to stereotype and demonize those with whom we disagree, to treat groups that we don’t belong to as more homogenous than they really are, and to extol the unique virtues of our own groups have deep roots in our social and cultural history, and they’re hard to overcome. More speech can degenerate into shouting matches between entrenched tribes, and to the answering of hate with hate in return.

There’s another answer, but it’s hard and takes conscious commitment. It lies in a resolute and uncompromising refusal to treat people as members of groups first. Hate speech directed at groups disappears if we don’t think in terms of groups, whether to denigrate or to sacralize. This can only happen if we reject the idea that group membership is the most important thing about a person, recognize that we all have partial membership and loyalty to a number of different groups, and insist that the political unit is the individual, not the collective.

It’s hard because it requires that we give up the comforting security of our tribe – my country, right or wrong – and that we also give up the easy but lazy heuristic of judging others by our opinion, positive or negative, of the group they belong to. This echoes both Martin Luther King’s 1963 dream that people be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character, and the classical liberal principle of common humanity, with all individuals alike in value and dignity – regardless of their group membership.

We could have a system of government that refuses to compromise on this principle. We could call it democracy. We used to think that that’s what we had and that it would last forever.

So, in current New Zealand politics, which is the party that cleaves most closely to this ideal of government, and appeals to the better angels of our common humanity rather than to our ingrained tendency to revert to tribalism? Not many do, whether by deliberate emphasis on policy through the lens of group membership, or by queasy reluctance to discuss the issue at all.

The meeting that bookends this column was Paul Henry’s ACT event in West Auckland. One question from a man of obvious Pasifika heritage was whether ACT proposed to disestablish the Ministry for Pacific Peoples. A ripple of slight unease around the room preceded Paul asking whether this man was a Pacific person. His response was ‘well, I’m a person.’ The crowd’s response was spontaneous and uninhibited applause.

Here was an audience who recognized the moral imperative to deal with individuals as individuals rather than group representatives. Here was a party that has both policy and practice that is more committed to this imperative than any other. Here was the reason that I will be voting ACT this election.

Dr Douglas Elliffe is Professor of Psychology at the University of Auckland. The views expressed in this column are his own and do not represent an official position of the University.