Thursday 29 October 2020

The Absurdity Of 'Hate Crimes'



I have faith that most people in the UK can see how ridiculous, foolish and damaging the SNP’s prospective ‘hate crime bill’ is – it deserves repudiation at every level. There are actually a lot of interesting elements to consider on the complex subject of ‘hate’, but nothing in the bill gets close to engaging with them.

 

Consequently, this is a post-it note summary of what I think is the general problem. There’s a lot of hate in the world; and hate is unpleasant, and should be challenged and corrected whenever it is reasonable to do so. But once you start trying to criminalise it, things get problematic, because of two principal reasons:

 

1) It isn’t illegal to hate

2) It’s nigh-on impossible to define hate as a legal entity

 

There are no rigorous ways to define justifiable or unjustifiable hate, because people are complex, so are our feelings, so are our ideas, and so is the world that surrounds us. What about if you hate Donald Trump, or Extinction Rebellion, or Islam – are those expressions of hatred candidates for hate crimes?

 

Some people use the term ‘inciting hatred’, but what does that mean exactly? The UK Law defines the offence of incitement to hatred as “when someone acts in a way that is threatening and intended to stir up hatred” But that doesn’t help much, as different people feel threatened by different things. And ‘stirring up hatred’ is, as we’ve discussed, equally ambiguous. If it is not illegal to hate, then why is it illegal to stir up hatred? If someone feels threatened by a negative Tweet or by an abusive rant against Communism on their blog, who decides when a negative Tweet or rant is too much? The mechanics behind ‘hate crime’ logic are built on folly.

 

Moreover, it hasn’t slipped my attention that quite often the people shouting loudest against so-called hate crimes are the people who appear to me to be more hateful than most. Nor has it escaped my attention that the people shouting loudest against intolerance are quite often far more intolerant than the average citizen. It's difficult to take these people seriously: they are like butchers holding up signs against the evil of eating meat.

 

More generally, I think we should be very careful about the way we are suppressing opinions, no-platforming people, and pandering to the snowflakes and the supine easily offended reactionaries. Here's the thing - and this is a variation on Carl Jung's "Fool is the precursor to the Saviour" epigram - in order to say things of importance you have to take risks, you have to be courageous, you have to risk offending, and you have to make challenges to ensure that there is no false security or complacency in consensual opinion. In other words, to be profoundly right, you have to be prepared to be profoundly wrong, a fool, an outcast, even a disgrace sometimes. You have to be free enough to be able to say what others might also be thinking but haven't yet said.

 

Finally, as I said in a previous blog post:

 

"A society that puts people in gilded cages and encourages them to lock the door from the inside is not only fostering an environment that suppresses speech, it is fostering an environment that suppresses thought as well, because we do lots of our best thinking from talking and sharing ideas and hearing feedback. A society that makes people craven about speech makes people craven about ideas, because it keeps a lot of our best stuff locked away in the safe space of our cranium - unexpressed, and therefore unfulfilled.

 

Seek the truth and you will never be afraid to hear anything, because you can't lose: if something offensive or heterodoxical comes along, it is going to be evaluated through your robust truthseeking lens - and if it adds any value by way of a corrective you will modify your view to an am improved state, and if it merely reinforces your view stronger, you will have an even more robust opinion, and a better defense of it. You have to be free to explore ideas and express them, because it’s only by expressing ideas and talking about them that we have a full capacity for learning. You have to be free to offend, and free to speculate in bold ways, and your children will pay a big price for attempts to stultify that."

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