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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The Writer Needs to Be a Non-Writer As Well

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing” – Benjamin Franklin

Re. CanLit and Canada Reads 2020 -- when considering it here's an old-fashioned and unpopular concept: "writer" isn't a career category. It never used to be, when writers were brilliant and literature could be "classic". People used to write about their areas of expertise. Writing was a tool, and such luminous novelists as Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes, the "Bloomsberries", early Canadian writers and countless others would have been puzzled by the concept of a university degree in "Creative Writing". Writing was what people did to explain what they already had a vocation in, or to get an idea across -- or it was imaginative storytelling. Storytelling was done in the "room of one's own" after the home was maintained, the family cared for, the income secured. Perhaps it was done around the fireplace on a winter's night before television hi-jacked imagination. Since anyone can do it, whether well or boringly, can storytelling properly be called a profession?

Apparently rapper, addict and refugee can be (if Canada Reads 2020 is anything to go by) and one can also be a professional queer, two-spirit, or aboriginal. There's nothing wrong with identifying as these things, but are they job categories? When did an identity become a career?

If we count as a profession anything you get paid to do, presumably these things are indeed professions now, because plenty of people get paid for talking about their identity. How does this affect professionalism as a concept? The word used to suggest high qualifications. Can we assume that it no longer does? Logically this would follow from the everyone's-a-writer proposition.

It used to be that only someone with something to impart wrote a book, that writing was a tool and a process. Young writers are less interesting than old because they have less experience and knowledge to write about, and too often end up writing about writing. They lack fuel, meaning subject matter. Life experience, expertise, research and scholarship create subject matter. Maybe the label "writer" should be reserved for people over forty. The top of the line practitioners are generally over sixty.

This is not about limiting free speech. Anyone of any age should scribble, practice constructing eloquent sentences, record memories, experiment with verse forms (ideally not "free verse", until they've learned the forms to get free of), but to be called a "writer" you need to be other things as well. You need something substantial to offer readers. You need emotional maturity and at least one body of information to be master of, and to pro-fess interestingly about.


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Don't Lose the Plot, Writers

"Plot" is one of those glorious Middle English words of unknown parentage, those guttural and simple single syllables that reverberate with meaning. A "plot" is both a piece of ground and the plan of a play or story. The word straddles matter and mind, physical and mental, earthy and human. Plot is essential in a story -- it's the ground of meaning. In traditional story-telling it's the piece we possess, or discern, of the wild landscape of ideas and meanings we live with.

The plot is what we enclose and cultivate in story-telling, and requires a traditional beginning, middle and end: development, action, revelation, conclusion (harvest). We have narrative minds and narration requires process. From that comes meaning -- food for thought. No overlord should tell us what to grow, what to think. We must not let ourselves be dictated to, and the ideas we grow in our plots must not be censored.

The garden plot is a simple metaphor, and it should be simple to keep diverse growth in our garden of thought. The "native plant only" ideology in gardening is akin to the identitarian one in speech and writing: a form of control, of policing, of failing to dig new compost into the soil. Students and young writers need one simple writing tip: resist narrow ideology with wide reading! Fertilize your plots.