Voices of Division and Anger

It was necessary to destroy politics in order to save it

Most discussion of the doctrine of free speech…begin by specifying the values or goals that a free-speech regime will presumably protect or encourage…Once this list…is in place, it becomes possible and indeed obligatory to ask of any instance of speech… ‘Does this speech contribute to the healthy flourishing of the relevant values, or is it positively dangerous to their continued existence?’

-Stanley Fish, ‘Jerry Falwell’s Mother, or, What’s the Harm?’

You will perhaps be familiar with the bizarre episode of mask-slippage that took place the other week, when a presenter on America’s CBS News, Margaret Brennan, made the assertion that the Holocaust was made possible through a ‘weaponisation’ of free speech. Moments like this, when a purportedly intelligent and well-informed adultintheroom reveals him- or herself to be an ignorant simpleton, obviously have a delicious quality to them. And, more broadly, the incident was anthropologically interesting in that it revealed how deeply said adultsintheroom have descended into Baudrillard’s dystopia, where reality itself has ‘died out’ to be replaced by mere symbols and simulacra: We don’t like free speech, and we don’t like Nazis, therefore the Nazis must have liked free speech. Imagine how it must be to inhabit a thought world completely comprising false syllogisms - that is the world in which our discombobulated elite classes find themselves.

But it is important to make clear that Brennan was not merely saying something stupid. She was, in a very cackhanded, Chinese-whispers sort of fashion, channelling what is now more or less mainstream thinking in UN human rights circles with respect to the importance and nature of freedom of speech. While in those circles it is rare to find people who will openly say that they simply don’t like freedom of speech per se - this would, if nothing else, subject them to pretty severe cognitive dissonance - they instead couch it within the language of risk and danger. Free speech, they are always careful to say, might go too far. And this, in the end, always leads them to the position which Brennan was effectively espousing, which is essentially that freedom of speech is bad because it can be ‘weaponised’ to do unpleasant things, and therefore it simply should not be allowed to exist.

A good illustration of this can be found in the Management Plan 2024-2027 for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which lays out the strategic priorities for the UN human rights system for the next few years. As one might expect, an awful lot of the contents concern climate change, sustainable development, and AI - the OHCHR is nothing if not steeped in the anxieties of adultsintheroom circa 2025. But the Plan does find some things to say about freedom of speech - though it expresses this, illuminatingly, through what it calls the ‘right to participate’ (more on that in due course).

The basic framing of the Plan’s approach to free speech is as follows. First, it tells us, we face a problem: ‘people cannot meaningfully participate in public affairs because they are prevented from accessing information from independent sources or cannot meet in participatory spaces that are enabling, inclusive, and safe.’ And it follows that creating ‘participatory spaces’ that are ‘enabling, inclusive and safe’, and facilitating access to information from independent sources, must be prioritised if ‘meaningful participation in public affairs’ is to be our goal.

Sounds lovely so far. But, of course, the devil is in the detail, and the creation of ‘participatory spaces’ that are ‘enabling, inclusive and safe’ is not quite the same thing as securing freedom of expression for reasons which I suppose will be obvious. What if people want to freely express themselves in such a way as to undermine enablement, inclusivity and safety? What, indeed, if they want to engage in ‘anti-rights narratives’ or ‘anti-gender narratives’ (I think this means trans-exclusionary feminism), to use the Plan’s language? And, similarly, access to information from independent sources is all very well, but what if those independent sources are purveying ‘disinformation’ or ‘hate speech’? What then?

The answer, of course, is that those types of speech have to be ‘countered’ in ‘innovative ways’ - one presumes this means, with digital tools - and thereby suppressed. In order to secure participation, you see, it is important that some people be prohibited from participating. In order that an environment be made ‘enabling, inclusive and safe’ for participants, some people must be disenabled, excluded, and problematised. It is necessary to suppress free speech, that is, in order to facilitate it. It is necessary to destroy participation, you might say, in order to save it.

Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the instigator of the Management Plan (a man who I have written about at some length before) is a close confidante of the UN Secretary-General himself, António Guterres (rumours in UN circles have it that Türk, a hitherto obscure figure, was hand-picked by Guterres to serve as his mouthpiece and cheerleader). And Guterres himself made the reasoning behind the Management Plan even more explicit in a speech on the 24th of February at the UN Human Rights Council. Taking the podium to beat the drum for human rights as the solution to all of the world’s ills, Guterres specifically identified one of those ills as what he called the ‘voices of division and anger’ who, he said, view ‘human rights not as a boon to humanity, but as a barrier to the power, profit and control they [seek]’.

The picture being laid out, then, is clear enough. If you are for ‘enabling, inclusive and safe participation’ then your freedom of expression should be secured. If you are not, however, your speech should be vigorously suppressed - you should not be allowed to participate at all. And the way we find out who is for ‘enabling, inclusive and safe participation’, and who is a ‘voice of division and anger’, interested only in ‘power, profit and control’, is by identifying those who support human rights as a ‘boon to humanity’ and those who don’t. Four legs good, two legs bad, in other words; human rights good, division-and-anger bad - the logic is impeccable. And it follows from this that freedom of speech itself is made contingent on support for human rights: as long as you are speaking in favour of human rights you are free to express yourself, but the moment you speak against them, you are presumptively being divisive and angry and you have to stop.

The rhetorical strategy being deployed is so transparent that it is almost insulting to your intelligence to spell it out. You can only speak freely if you like human rights. And since ‘we’ - the elite, the cognoscenti, the adultsintheroom, what George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, called ‘the Clever Ones’ - get to decide the content of human rights, what this actually means is that you are free to say what we decide you can say. We say ‘jump’ - you are free to say, ‘how high?’ We say ‘human rights’ - you are free to say, ‘hooray’.

This is why, to refer back to an allusion I made earlier, it is so important that the phrase ‘freedom of speech’ (or freedom of expression) is disappearing from UN nomenclature, and being replaced by ‘the right to participate’. This in itself is a ‘tell’. The right to speak freely and the right to participate are different things: the language of the former is that of liberty, while the language of the latter is that of gatekeeping and exclusion. If you are against human rights (the content which being determined, remember, by the ‘Clever Ones’) you may not participate - you are not allowed into the wonderful inner sanctum of enablement, inclusivity and safety. You must instead make your way outside, in the bitter snow, with the wolves and the brigands and the purveyors of disinformation, hate speech and anti-gender narratives. Out there you can bleat your pathetic, irrelevant anti-rights narratives to your heart’s content, but you don’t get to trouble the rest of us and you certainly don’t get to exert any influence whatsoever on what the rest of us decide.

The implication of that, it probably goes without saying, is that politics itself becomes fundamentally a contingent matter in the minds of these people. Politics is something that one is allowed to do when one is being ‘enabling, inclusive and safe’. But if one rocks the boat - if one gets divisive or angry - one is no longer permitted to be political; one is no longer permitted in the public sphere; one must die a kind of civil death.

The picture this paints is that of a sham democracy or anti-politics, in which nothing is worth getting angry about and no divisions are permitted to exist - a Potemkin public sphere within which nothing is determined because nothing is at stake. One may participate in the sense that one may sing from the correct hymn sheet - one may speak freely provided that one says what one is supposed to; one must think, by implication, of ‘nothing but rejoicing’, as de Tocqueville put it.

That people like Türk and Guterres imagine that talking in this way will make people less angry or divisive is in itself rather extraordinary and brings us back to Baudrillard: the universe in which it is possible to improve social harmony by preventing people from participating in politics unless they agree with those who govern them is the stuff of daft fantasy. But it is important to remember that it is easy for unelected bureaucrats, who are chiefly accountable not to electorates but to the people who fund them, to indulge in daft fantasy - in a way, it is the name of the game, because daft fantasies can be plausible ways of generating funding.

But the more important issue, obviously, is that anger and divisive language are sometimes the entirely appropriate political responses to conditions of corruption and malaise. And in the end, behind all of the important-sounding language and in spite of all the furrowing of brows and wagging of fingers, the truth of the matter is that the people in question, those who purport to be in charge, are by and large well aware that they are presiding over corruption and malaise and don’t have the faintest clue how to go about fixing the problem. They have one tool in their toolbox, and it is to try as best they can to suppress the entirely natural ‘anger and division’ that is bubbling beneath them as though in a pressure cooker waiting to explode. They think they can contain politics, but it is already being revealed, across the developed world, that they - like any other class of leaders who have tried - simply can’t. In the end the contents of that pressure cooker are going to come out and ‘participate’ - whether anybody likes it or not.

Politics, in short, cannot be contained, and in the long-term leaders cannot determine who may or may not be political and who may or may not exert influence. One would have thought that after all these years people would have learned that lesson. But then again - as Margaret Brennan made clear - history can be difficult to get one’s head around when one lives in a world of sheer make-believe.