The Very Detrimental Caterpiller

The world is full of meanings we aren't aware of. "The world is so full of a number of things / we should all be as happy as kings", wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, but the world of thought and ideas is overwhelming and we learn to focus. Out of our tiny focus, we extract our own treasured, and rigid, belief system. Most people narrow their awareness just to get through the day. Maybe it's a safety instinct. We no longer aim for a capacious or well-furnished mind; public school systems certainly don't. People are told they need to "feel safe" and not be "triggered". Too often, other people's ideas are seen as "bullying". 

Hence a renewed book-banning mania. One Canadian school system decided to remove any children's book written before 2008, as "detrimental" for the "marginalized" -- including classics like Anne Frank's Diary, The Very Hungry Caterpiller, Anne of GG, and the Harry Potter series (of course).  Schools were instructed to specially support the Afro-Caribbean and indigenous students, and if that's the new meaning of "inclusive", then schools have problems with word definition. Maybe they'll throw out the Dictionary as well, as something detrimental -- maybe thinking it's as bad as the Very Detrimental Caterpiller. 

A List of Permitted Words Is As Censorious As a List of Banned Words

Even worse than a list of banned words, is a list of permitted words. Adoption of approved speech (policed speech) causes starvation of language and poverty of thought. 

Take the simple but richly evocative word “field”, used in physics, consciousness studies, scholarship, professional accreditation, agriculture … as well as in casual speech. In French as well as English, we see the array of connotations: “le champ’, “la domaine”, “le terrain”, and in Spanish “arena” (seaside or sand). Will we never again be allowed to refer to these things because “field” is considered (at least at the University of Southern California) a “trigger” word? USC departments will no longer present subject areas as "fields" of study.

 

Will ornithologists no longer be allowed to mention that pheasants are found in fields – and we must look in grassy spaces of variegated photosynthesizing plants with seasonally changing green-brown blades?

What word isn’t a trigger, to somebody? Who can account for every association every person might make as a result of memory and emotion? If you fear the possibility of giving offence, simply keep your mouth shut (forever?). There will always be somebody somewhere who has an anxiety attack at the existence of vocabulary. This is tough on someone whose vocation (from “vox” – voice, sound, calling) is communication. Shall we then adopt mass self-imposed censorship?

 

The problem with “field”, according to politically correct academics, is that it can by a few associative steps call to mind places where slaves once worked. Slavery is of course horrendous, a blight on world history going back to primitive tribal times (and recent tribal times), but due to current media obsessions we ironically read and hear astronomically more often the word “slavery” than ever before. So why censor “field” when we throw “slavery” itself into every narrative?

 

And before anyone denounces use of the word “primitive”, please consider that it simply means “first” – from the word “prime”. If we create a list of only the words we are allowed to use it will naturally become an ever-dwindling one, until no one may speak or write at all. Perhaps then we should all take a vow of silence, or communicate only through pictorial symbols such as pre-literate tribes used.

(Speaking of ornithology, a related lunacy is taking place around changing genus and species labels throughout the life sciences – removing the names of the “colonial” collectors who first identified and described them for scientific classification.)

See also: some ideologues would no longer even permit the use of the word “the” when describing a group of people -- https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2023/02/will-we-be-allowed-to-say-ridiculous.html 

Free Speech Is Not Racism

Who needs words to prove a theory, when your opponents' actions already prove it? That happened at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta on Feb.2nd, when hundreds of students shouted down speaker Frances Widdowson. She had warned us that mob-mentality was threatening the free exchange of ideas -- and the mob obliged by proving her point.

The mob came out in force to "amplify black, trans and indigenous voices" when Professor Widdowson tried to deliver a talk at an institution supposedly meant to be a forum for talk.

"Racism is not free speech," screeched the mob. But if it thinks the opposite -- that free speech is racist -- we are in trouble. Free speech is the underpinning of democracy, which is measured, as one author has put it, not by the number of citizens who vote but by the number who feel free to say what they think in public.*

Professor Widdowson's topic was "How Woke-ism Threatens Academic Freedom". By saying what she thinks about that, Professor Widdowson was simply doing her job. As an academic in a university she is supposed to offer alternative thinking -- alternative, that is, to mob-thought, herd-thought and ideological hypnosis. Most politicians merely repeat back at the electorate what the electorate has shouted to them, because they want to be re-elected. Most professors also toe the correctness line, as they too want to keep their jobs.

We need universities, though, to play their role as arenas for free expression of ideas (to embody universality). 

If the arena is taken over by the herd, the Professor Widdowsons of the world are driven into media outlets where their views are already accepted. In other words they're only allowed to talk to their followers, and the famous "bi-polarity" we are said to be living with only deepens. 

Professor Widdowson had already been censored and de-platformed at a different university for suggesting there are various ways of judging Canada's variety of residential schools. (In a variety run by different agencies and individuals with multiple objectives over more than a century, maybe some students did learn to read, write and do arithmetic -- as intended?) 

The two sides on that inflamed debate will never listen to each other in the community at large if they can't even do so at a university.  

(The same shouting-down technique was used by trans activists at McGill University on January 10th of this year: https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/shutdown-of-talk-at-mcgill-threatens-freedom-of-expression-in-canada-jamie-sarkonak-for-inside-policy/)

* Ramaswamy, V. Woke, Inc. Center Street, 2021 

The Invasion of the History Snatchers?

The Canadian Museums Association wants government money to finance "indigenous-led reconciliation in the museum sector". ( Canadian Museums Association recommends 10 ways to decolonize heritage sector - Victoria Times Colonist )

The "museum sector" is one of the channels by which knowledge of History is delivered to the public. Indigenous groups want material artifacts now in museum collections to be returned to them, which sounds only reasonable (although which individuals actually own them isn't clear). Beyond material artifacts, however, they want "sovereignty" over material created about them, which includes accounts, photos and art produced by others. The proper owners of artistic and written works are their authors. 

Material "created about" aboriginals includes accounts of Canadians' shared past -- the story of the whole nation, by the whole nation. It's hard to record the history of Canada without writing about aboriginal people ... and everybody else. To say that only one in-group "owns" a story is censorship, a silencing of the speech of others. (Can you imagine a decree saying that only white people can write about white people??)

History as a subject should be presented in museums, archives and textbooks by professional historians, not by ideologues with a political purpose. (Personal memoir and fictional-imaginative narratives might be by anybody of course, and are protected as free speech.)

The government money for the reconciliation which the Museums Association wants more of, is taxpayers' money. Taxpayers come from every ethnic background and ancestry.

Imagine legislation saying "only Canadians of European ancestry are allowed to write about other Canadians of European ancestry" -- how would that go over? Let's make sure the equity and inclusion principle so proudly adopted in other contexts, prevails also in the matter of Canadians writing about their society and each other. Someone can feel they "own" their own culture, but they don't own somebody else's words. That's what "right to free speech" and copyright means.

Combatting Systemic Erase-ism

How can the past be future-proofed, if Systemic Erase-ism blanks it out for current and future generations? Erase-ism doesn't see history as a series of events that have happened, but as an assault on the sensibilities of some people in the present. It re-shapes history as parable ("fictitious narrative or allegory") in defense of dominant attitudes of the present. Once it becomes a creature of ideological opinion-shaping, History as a subject is no longer a scholarly discipline but a branch of identity politics. 

The problem is not only that new parables are written to suit contemporary tastes (every generation does that), but that actual historical evidence in the form of documents, memorial sites, graves, archaeological remains, architecture, letters and memoirs are being erased and destroyed.

In every generation, knowledge of the past must survive depredations of the present. If we (the present) suppress parts of our past story considered discriminatory or "unsafe" for some (e.g. "privileged, dominant, colonialist, white, elitist, etc. ...), what will we be leaving descendants and future scholars? The future, where scholarship is concerned, will be blank.

How is this erase-ism accomplished? With displays of diversity-equity. This takes forms we have become used to: statue destruction, vandalism of buildings, removal of inconvenient documents from public archives and libraries, name changes of cities, streets, schools and universities.

This process is common when one regime or zeitgeist replaces another. It can change names and streetscapes, but not the actual facts of what happened in the past, because the past cannot unhappen. It can be unknown however, to an ignorant populace. This is engineered ignorance.

Removing statues of early explorers, politicians, inventors and philanthropists in Canada doesn't remove the fact of their having been nation-shapers. Changing the name of Ryerson University (for example) to Toronto Metropolitan University, doesn't change the fact that Egerton Ryerson the person had enormous effect on Canadian literacy, education, journalism and free speech. It can only erase public knowledge of the fact.

In the past, churches and polite taste muzzled certain expressions of speech, but speech was loosened up during the 20th century -- only to be re-muzzled today. Today we suppress not profanity but ideas that others say make them feel marginalized. 

Now, scholars with a different take on history than the ideologically correct one are banned from campuses (exactly the arena where they would be speaking, in an open society). It only needs someone to call their theories "hate" for them to be sent the way of statues: de-platformed. 

Next, editors of mainstream media accept submissions only from "disadvantaged" groups. Festivals, conferences and theatres only receive funding if they demonstrate the right kind of "diversity" (i.e. non-diversity). We live in paradoxical times. 

Thought can be erased before it even finds expression -- through self-censorship.  This is about freedom of speech, debate and analysis among citizens, academics, writers, bureaucrats and officials. Only if we preserve open expression can the past and present be held proof against future erase-ism.

“If we lose our freedom, it will not be because of invasion from without, but erosion from within; not because of autocratic dictators looking to do bad, but parochial bureaucrats seeking to do good.”
                     — Alan Borovoy, Canadian Civil Liberties Association

The Elephant Has Left the Building ...

... so we can speak freely now. 

Yet it's lonely without an elephant in the room. People used to feel anxious, apparently, when an elephant-topic loomed large and took up space, but now we have nothing to not talk about so we'll chatter about anything. What can't be said is big, so now we have only small talk and a silent question: where's the elephant? Has it died? Has the whole elephant species gone extinct? Is everything shouted from rooftops now, never faintly whispered in rooms? 

If nothing is unmentionable, what then are we going to not say? Must we say everything? We're surrounded by vast discussion-space, paradoxically trapped by scary open-ness so overwhelming that it's like a new claustrophobia. 

So where do we go now for silence, secrecy, evasion, hidden meanings? Where will we find double-entendres, sans l'elephant dans la salle? So much intriguingly unsaid information will be wasted, so much that's only subtly grasped will vanish completely. The implied will be dis-implied. We'll miss that elephant ...

Rumour, speculation and secrecy used to create profitability in the newspaper industry. Now, online social media drown us in streams of ultra-personal information accompanied ideally with tears of emotion (and preferably some hip-hop dance moves as well).

Traditional journalists are taking early retirement, saying "with no subject off-limit what is there to skirt the edges of libel and defamation about? I didn't enter this profession to not warm readers of things not yet proven in court." 

Instead of being secreted away, news is being excreted through new-media pipelines emitting an overwhelming stench of too much personal revelation.

So now readers cancel their subscriptions, complaining "how can I read what's not between the lines?" 

Sometimes free speech only happens in the gaps. 

We Ban Hate-Speech and Substitute Dislike-Speech

Everyone has inner censors, unconscious and conscious. An author's conscious self-censor is practical, knowing what not to say if you want what you say to be read. This means focus on core messages and don't repel readers at the outset. 

Controlling your tongue has always been wise. Remember those old-fashioned phrases: "least said, soonest mended", and "if you can't say anything nice don't say anything at all". 

Some would call this muzzling, yet would simultaneously like to silence anyone quoting such Euro-cultural phrases. (Ironic, or what?) But those who really care about free speech like to analyze what frees it. "Softly softly" goes further in enhancing communication than does furious shrieking that offends others. 

There's a lot of hysteria about "hate speech" at present, and by accusing others of it ideologues are killing the messenger whenever they don't like a message -- for instance, if it's about a history they deny and for tribal reasons pretend didn't happen, or shouldn't have. Scholarship in universities is more deeply injured by that kind of censorship than social media chatter is.

The knee-jerk "Hate Speech" accusation is disingenuous, but what may be more corrosive, and no one is objecting because it may be their favourite rhetorical tool, is Dislike Speech. How should we calibrate the distinction between "hate" and disapproval?

Love and hate, like and dislike, are emotions, and we can't abolish emotion. Whether expressed or hidden, it's there.

People who hide their hatred often feel free to convey serial dislike (hatred-lite), directing it at values they object to. This Dislike Speech colonizes space from which full-on free expression is driven out -- casting a pall of negativity over communication everywhere. 

So what is the result of all this? Speech law can control what people say, but not what they feel. We need to create an atmosphere of honesty plus courtesy, without letting the heavy-handed "tone police" take over. These are speech-suppressors who call honest feelings of dislike which they don't share, "hate". 

There have also arisen two classes of hate speech -- the permitted (against white, "settler" and "colonial" people) and non-permitted (against anyone else). If you put someone in any sort of "privileged" category, you get a free pass to hate him or her -- and to say so.

When the targeted group dislikes the tone of what's being said they must reserve the right to say so … even if they hate to be disagreeable.

 

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Feminism and Free Speech on International Women's Day

What are you doing for International Women's Day this year?

Same as every year: being a woman.

But what is a woman? Is it about body parts?

Yes. (And mind parts.)

What do you mean “yes”?

I guess if “No Means No”, then Yes Means Yes.

But if it's about body parts, what about men who identify as women?

They aren't women, they're men experimenting with “identity”.

But they identify as women, they choose the female gender. 

I don't care if they identify as hippopotami, that doesn't make them hippopotami.

That sounds trans-phobic. 

I'm not saying they can't say how they feel.

What about hate?

(???) I'm against it. 

What about J.K. Rowling's attack on trans-folk?

Keeping them out of women's washrooms isn't “attacking” them. Stopping them from saying their piece would be attacking them, but they can and do say their piece.

You're just being triggering.

Indeed. Trigger warning: unsafe space ahead. It's called private thoughts.

SOME FEMINISTS WHO FOUGHT FOR OUR RIGHT TO FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Nellie McClung -- Canadian novelist, columnist, MLA, reformer and delegate to the League of Nations

Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes -- persecuted by governments and churches for spreading information to women about birth control

Many brave women in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East today -- ditto

Catherine Dawson Scott -- launched PEN International in 1921 for the protection of writers everywhere

Elizabeth Cady Stanton -- wrote The Woman's Bible, and said "... in the sunset of life … I feel it to be my special mission to tell people what they are not prepared to hear".

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

It is a mistake for feminists to assume, in contrast to these free-speaking thinkers, that speech must be censored because some women (black, indigenous, queer or otherwise called "marginalized") must be protected from ideas and open discussion. In fact, women have always been at the centre of the world. In Atlantic Monthly in 1864, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote "women are the real architects of society". Ironically, some  today are being de-platformed by Critical Social Justice Theory. Far from marginalized, women actually made the world -- check out some examples of (centralized) women here: 

https://canadianteachermagazine.com/2020/10/01/who-is-marginalized/

The religious authorities of (philosopher-mathematician) Hypatia's day, they who felt it their mandate to control the speech of others ("nailing their tongues to the floor" as Antigone called it), had a gang of illiterate monks murder Hypatia in Alexandria, Egypt, in 415 AD. Her ideas were considered dangerous, evil, wrong-headed. Such judgements against open discussion need to be resisted repeatedly, since no era, including ours, is free of them.

For Hypatia's story as a dialogue, go to: 

“The Life and Death of Hypatia of Alexandria”, Sundial Magazine, January 2021. https://sites.google.com/view/sundial-magazine/curios/the-life-and-death-of-hypatia?authuser=0

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Let's de-fund the language police, and remember that Private Lives Matter

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-cbc-host-wendy-mesley-apologizes-for-using-a-certain-word-in-2/

De-fund the Language Police

   Some months ago, retailers downtown demanded more police presence due to an epidemic of shop-lifting. City Council refused to increase police funding, so retailers hired private security. Then residents and businesses called for more policing in other neighbourhoods as well, when homeless camps arrived and drug-dealing, break-and-entering and fights became frequent.

   Now that demand for “police visibility” has fallen right off the table. When news broke of ugly police assaults on Blacks in the U.S., the pieces on the civic board game were moved. Now we hear “de-fund the police” in Canada too, some claiming that we are “just as racist” as the U.S. Calls for increasing police presence were no longer popular even though shop-lifting had been increasing. During 2020 – the COVID period – business break-ins increased by 567%.

   "Ethnic minorities” are not uniquely targeted by the overzealous security industry which replaces police and plainly stalks and spies on all shoppers. Plenty of incidents of police harassing white people are listed in Canadian Police Complaint files, although discussion has been shaped around the “black lives matter” theme.

   Whatever the reality of police behaviour, the censorship of discussion is real. Anti-white, anti-government graffiti on walls are permitted, while their opposite would not be. Print and broadcast media are running with the censorship ball, fearing to become targets themselves of popular rage if they don't play the right game. These media should be platforms for discussion, not shapers of discussion. Case in point: the CBC has dropped Stockwell Day, a participant in its discussion panels, for expressing the view that Canada is not, in terms of policy and institutions, “systemically” racist.

   Freedom of opinion is not wanted on Canada's taxpayer-funded broadcaster. Yet what, we might ask, is the point of an “open” panel discussion if the moderator tells the participants ahead of time what they must say? Are media outlets platforms for free speech, or for authoritarian dictatorship? If a publicly-funded organ of communication is going to fall on the anti-free-speech side, it's not doing its job. Should we de-fund it then? A few days after the Day fuss, the CBC suspended veteran broadcaster Wendy Mesley -- for using “a word”. Coyly, they refused to identify the word, but never mind, the language police are happy to throw Mesley to the wolves without specifying the crime. Guilt is assumed -- like that of a hooded black man when seen on a city street on a dark night.

   To point out that the CBC is behaving dictatorially (dictating which diction is permitted) in the Stockwell Day example, is not to be a champion of Stockwell Day, who not surprisingly has detractors (isn't he the guy who gets his knowledge of science from the Book of Genesis?) The point is that whatever the public policy of a government may be, everyone has the right to think independently.

   Canada's Constitution, government and public institutions protect equality among ethnic groups: in terms of “system” Canada is not racist. That doesn't mean private thoughts aren't racist, but these cannot be forbidden, for they are private. Personal. Free opinion is by definition idiosyncratic rather than ideological, free-range rather than herded. Denunciation can't make race-based private thought less race-based, only more private. Public policy rests on the views of the majority – the "demos" of democracy – but a healthy democracy also protects dissenting views. We hear a lot about “diversity”, but government and media fear diverse opinion. 

   Few Canadians defend aggressive, let alone violent, behaviour toward others and few support non-equality under the law, considering that both repugnant and irrational. One can respect others' rights without liking them however. One person might have good reason to despise another. It's a personal feeling. Do we really want to criminalize feeling? Do we want to live in a nation where citizens have no right to private thoughts? Private Lives Matter.

   We are entitled to weigh evidence, make observations, develop hypotheses. In schools they teach “critical thinking” but they also impart the message that you can only be critical of white people, politicians, or those you perceive as “privileged”. It's censorship, then, that's systemic.

   The root meaning of the word privilege is “having access to privacy”. Let's strive to make everyone privileged then, by protecting everyone's right to private opinion. It shouldn't be banned by thought-control ideologues. The latter shout loudest, while many of humanity's best ideas have been passed down the ages in whispers. Someone, somewhere, had disagreed with them, and tried to silence them.

   Our world is riddled with thought-police. A TV News channel asks a 21-year old black man who organizes a rally whether he believes racism exists, knowing how he will reply (he having organized a rally to oppose it). He speaks of being profiled by police in a case of mistaken identity. Some of us have white friends who have been detained by police in cases of mistaken identity and who, when taking the police to court, were brushed off by the courts. If a black person sues police in the present climate, they won't be brushed off, for officials would fear being called racist.

   Maybe, however, some black people don't want to be poster-figures for a movement. Maybe they too want a private life. They have their own work to do (as scientists, scholars, explorers, novelists or whatever) which may have nothing to do with politics. You, Reader, might have a problem with the idea that “Private Lives Matter” because you presume I express it as a white person. But am I a white person? You don't know, and being not “racialized” means you don't need to know, because it doesn't matter.

   What matters is to let thought itself be free. Police do need to be restrained in their treatment of citizens. The language police also need to be restrained. Every dictatorship begins with censorship, but you cannot legislate feelings. 
A.J.