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Safe spaces are the enemy of critical thnking
Our risk-taking and open-minded graduates could offer an education to the universities they join, writes Paul Regan
The 18th century French writer and satirist, Voltaire, famously wrote that he disagreed with what another (sometimes claimed to have been the French philosopher ClaudeAdrien Helvétius) had said, but would defend to the death his right to say it. He was only one of many towering figures of the period known as the Enlightenment; philosophers, writers, polemicists and scientists, who opened up the post-mediaeval mind to reason, and the public and political institutions of the time to the principle of free speech. The road taken has since been a long and winding one; until quite recently in the United Kingdom, for example, charges of blasphemy could be made for challenging religious authority, something we might now expect to find only in theocracies such as Iran. Each generation has its fresh struggle to define and explain the parameters of what it is acceptable to write or to say, as social policy and public opinion create new ways to give offence, and new barricades to defend.
Since the advent of ubiquitous social media it has without doubt again become much easier to offend someone or something and to be punished for doing so. The frantic echo chambers of Twitter and Facebook are awash with vile insults, irrational condemnations, one-line political judgments and personal abuse, whilst Google and YouTube allow the peddling of fake news and extreme propaganda. Citizenship can be exercised with one press of a button to support a petition, and the call to take up your placard can be passed around in minutes to thousand of users. Confirmation bias is encouraged as a virtue and raised to the level of art as ad hominem rants replace rational debate.
As we assemble in cyber crowds to pass instant judgments on anything from climate change and presidential elections to the inappropriateness of using certain words, individuals increasingly suffer for speaking out against orthodoxies which happen to be in trend. It has become the lazy default option of activists to ‘no platform’ speakers, to condemn reasonably held views as unacceptable, to pass off opinion as incontrovertible fact and to claim a monopoly on truth. This is happening every day in many ways and, left unchallenged, could in time become the political norm. Totalitarian regimes thrive on creating a vicious hysteria around any activity or view which does not agree with their accepted doctrines. Nazi Germany had its vilification of Jews and its myths of the Aryan race, and Soviet Russia saw wrecking and sabotage in every simple expression of individuality. Worryingly, we now seem to be witnessing simultaneously the deaths of oratory and debate in the very places where they should be cherished and protected.
The most egregious examples of this stifling of debate are coming from some universities in the UK and the USA. No-platforming of speakers who have at some time expressed a view which might disagree with a particular orthodoxy, no matter how nuanced the disagreement might be, has become all too common. The celebration of diversity and the pursuit of equality are noble undertakings, but they
