I have faith that most people in the
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."
