A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable

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And yet even as we remind people of the violence and intolerance of censorship, of censorship’s threat to life as well as to our right to use our faculties of reason, we should not baulk from admitting that speech can be dangerous, too. Speech hurts. Very often it is intended to. That is one of its powers. Indeed, the heretics mentioned above knew very well that their speech was hurtful, that it would feel deeply unsettling and even threatening to many who heard it, and yet they continued to speak. They used their words as weapons. Most entitled of all are the interviewees who demand to know why there even has to be a discussion about gender identity. ‘Why can’t we just be accepted for who we say we are?’, is their plea. They may smile sweetly while raising this question, but a group of Scottish women’s rights campaigners reminds us that they are really asking women to allow men into all the places where they are most vulnerable. And while they’re at it, they’re asking women to give up their claim to the word ‘woman’. It is difficult to overstate Tyndale’s contribution to freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. In translating and printing and spreading the Bible, Tyndale was doing more than challenging the stranglehold that the Catholic Church had over religious ideas, over the Word of God itself. He was also, in turn, expressing a great faith in ordinary people’s ability to understand things for themselves. To no longer require ‘shepherds’ to instruct them and guide their thoughts. His trust was not only in God, but also in the capacity, as Clarke had it, of ‘the ignorant and the unlearned’ to enlighten themselves. It was a searingly radical idea. It remains a radical idea, still unfulfilled in so many ways. By ‘EU values’ what is really meant is hyper-federalism, multiculturalism, diversity and the mainstreaming of gender-identity ideology. The plot against the Hungarian presidency is ultimately an attempt to prevent the Hungarian government from having a platform to promote its own values, such as its attachment to national sovereignty and to tradition. Some MEPs go so far as to claim that these values are incompatible with membership of the EU. This is how twisted libel law is. It births a world in which a celebrity’s hurt feelings matter more than a working man’s lost eye. In which Roberts-Smith’s view of himself potentially carries more weight than a journalist’s honest, serious investigation of his behaviour. In which a judge enjoys an almost godly authority to decree what is true and to punish anyone who deviates from this ‘truth’. So, just two cheers for the newspapers’ victory in Australia. The third cheer won’t come until Australia’s libel laws, and our own, have been radically reformed, or scrapped entirely.

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Consider William Tyndale (1494-1536), one of the great heretics in the history of England. Tyndale was a 16th-century religious scholar who would become a leading light in the Protestant Reformation. His crime, his utterance of words that hurt, was to translate the Bible into English. That was forbidden at the time. Biblical knowledge was for priests only, for men versed in Latin, for men of learning and insight, not for the English-speaking throng. As FL Clarke put it in his great 19th-century biography, The Life of William Tyndale, ‘good and noble’ men thought that ‘for the Bible to be placed in the hands of the common people was a dangerous thing – the poor and ignorant should be content to hear only those portions that the priests might think fit to read in the churches; they were the shepherds who were appointed to feed the sheep’. Remi Adekoya – author of It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth – is the latest guest on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Remi and Brendan discuss the truth about racial inequality, the dangers of racial identity politics and how Africa can realise its potential.Australia’s libel laws, like England’s, are deeply illiberal. They’ve been described by one legal expert as the ‘most media-hostile laws in the common-law world’. Between 2008 and 2017, media organisations in Australia were dragged to the courts 300 times. And the claimant normally wins – in just 29 per cent of those cases were the defendants successful. Then there are the unseen impacts of libel law, the stories that are never published because editors understandably fear being sued and potentially destroyed. This is ‘ the chilling effect’, where ‘fear of a prohibitively expensive loss’ stops a news story at the very start. The three newspapers deserve praise for refusing to be chilled by this ominous, always-present threat. Too often today, believers in the liberty to speak baulk at the truth about words: they hurt. No, they are not violence – equating speech with violence is foolish and wrong. But speech is powerful, it can wound, it can induce pain in some of those who hear it. If speech did not have this power – to unsettle, to overthrow, to change minds and worlds radically – what would be the point of defending it? Surely we defend speech precisely because it contains so much extraordinary energy, because it can be a ‘blizzard’, because it does wound.

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We must point out that where words hurt – and they do – censorship hurts more. Physically, spiritually, existentially, censorship is more wounding to the individual, and to society, than unfettered speech is. Those in the 21st century who claim to feel bruised and bloodied by words should take some time to read up on the heretics of history, and even the heretics of today. You want to see wounding? Witness their trials.The European Parliament has long been committed to cutting Hungary and its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, down to size. Last month, MEPs drew up a long resolution that calls into question Hungary’s ability to manage a successful presidency. It was passed by the parliament this week. No, we are no longer deprived of English-language Bibles. But we are discouraged from reading certain texts, lest they unsettle or inflame our small minds. ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?’, as the prosecutor in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial of 1960 infamously asked. Today, good and noble people still believe that for certain books ‘to be placed in the hands of the common people [is] a dangerous thing’. Only now they don’t crush or pulp said books, as the ecclesiastical authorities did with Tyndale’s Bibles, but rather add trigger warnings to them. That’s the new form of shepherding, where experts, rather than priests, attach danger signs to books so that we sheep will know of the risk involved in reading them, and might avoid reading them entirely.