There goes liberty

Steven Rose writes on The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site about the controversy concerning the Nobel laureate James Watson's reported views on race:

Responses to my comments on the cancellation of James Watson's lecture tour fell, predictably, into two categories. On the one hand there were those (like Sue Blackmore, self-confessedly ignorant of the scientific issues) who argued that Watson had the right to speak his mind whether he was correct or not - that is, for absolute freedom of speech however unpleasant, malicious, hate-filled or untrue the content. If you believe this, there is nothing I can say that will convince you and you are free to end up as a victim or hero of British libel laws or hate speech legislation. That is, I think human rights trump free speech rights, and you don't, irrespective of the fact that your freedom of speech, for instance to abuse and encourage prejudice or violence against gays, ethnic minorities or feminists may damage the human rights of gays, ethnic minorities or feminists.

I find unexceptionable Rose's insistence that "heritability of group differences ought to be as irrelevant to today's biology as phlogiston theory is to chemistry or 'intelligent design' to evolution". I have no more training in chemistry and biology than the psychologist Sue Blackmore has. It doesn't take specialist knowledge, though, but merely a respect for scientific reasoning to understand the difference between, say, evolutionary biology, which proceeds by evidence, and "intelligent design", which is dogma. The first of those fields is science; the second is pseudoscience.

But that is a different issue from the political premises that Rose advances in the paragraph I've quoted. The notion that "human rights trump free speech rights" is chilling. The best case I can make for it is the proposition that free speech, while desirable, needs in a civilised society to be balanced against other values. Even then, it's a pernicious argument. In the form that Rose adopts, it's also peculiarly dishonest.

Consider the work that the conjunction "or" is doing in Rose's argument. Libel and hate speech are not the same thing; nor are they the same type of thing. Few would argue that an individual complainant should have no recourse to law to correct errors of fact that, if left uncorrected, would lower the public's estimation of him. Some do make that argument. I don't, even - indeed, particularly - in the case of minor figures. (The corollary, of course, is that minor figures have no more right than anyone else to abuse the legal process in the hope of suppressing accurate but damaging information. I have pleasing and unexacting experience of thwarting such activity.)

Hate speech is an expression of prejudice and bigotry about a group or its members based on common characteristics. Why does an expression of bigotry - as opposed to a specific defamatory accusation against a person, or a direct act of discrimination on morally irrelevant grounds such as race or sex - transgress human rights? Likewise, the phrase "encouraging prejudice or violence" conjoins different things. Encouraging violence is incitement to crime, and is already dealt with by criminal law. Why does encouraging prejudice violate someone's human rights?

The answers to these questions must be obvious to Rose, or he wouldn't have left them unstated. But they are not obvious. I am - to state something that ought to be completely obvious - opposed to Holocaust denial, racism and anti-homosexual prejudice. (Religious "hatred", being about beliefs rather than characteristics, is a different matter. I can at least say that, while I disrespect all organised religions, I oppose all religious tests for civic participation and public office. I should add that my disrespect for all religions is not equal; my greatest aversion is reserved for those faiths that stress the claims of revelation over reason. I am more hostile to Islamism than I am to Unitarianism.) It is a task of government to outlaw discrimination on morally irrelevant grounds, owing to our common citizenship. I do not, however, regard it as any legitimate part of public policy to eradicate bigotry. Let me direct you to an American (and, as it happens, Jewish and gay) writer I've cited several times on the issue of speech, Jonathan Rauch. In an article in Harper's some years ago, Rauch wrote:

Equating "verbal violence" with physical violence is a treacherous, mischievous business. Not long ago a writer was charged with viciously and gratuitously wounding the feelings and dignity of millions of people. He was charged, in effect, with exhibiting flagrant prejudice against Muslims and outrageously slandering their beliefs. "What is freedom of expression?" mused Salman Rushdie a year after the ayatollahs sentenced him to death and put a price on his head. "Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." I can think of nothing sadder than that minority activists, in their haste to make the world better, should be the ones to forget the lesson of Rushdie's plight: for minorities, pluralism, not purism, is the answer. The campaigns to eradicate prejudice--all of them, the speech codes and workplace restrictions and mandatory therapy for accused bigots and all the rest--should stop, now. The whole objective of eradicating prejudice, as opposed to correcting and criticizing it, should be repudiated as a fool's errand.

Steven Rose's politics are far from mine (we have taken part - I as a witness, and he as a cross-examiner - on Radio 4's Moral Maze). But New Labour, of which I'm a sympathetic observer and whose recently retired leader I greatly admire, has its own version of Rose's principle. This is the presumption that we are parts of our various communities, and that those groups are entitled to respect for their collective identities and beliefs. I deplore this notion, and greatly regret the activities of New Labour in promoting it.