The Age of Outrage is Ruining Worthwhile Debates

It’s never been a worse time to be a ‘free speech martyr’. All around the world, those committed to reporting injustice and speaking their minds are being penalised. Across Africa, journalists have been killed by gangsters when exposing corruption in high places. In June 2014, Al Jazeera journalists were inexcusably jailed and mistreated by the despotic Egyptian government after they were accused of being ‘spies’. These vicious acts of molestation on a right we all take for granted put our own liberty into perspective. Even though nothing comparable has happened in Britain, freedom of expression is under a sustained assault in places where it is meant to flourish. Rather than being attacked by government or religious leaders, intolerant ‘liberal’ undergraduates infesting student unions are using social media to corrode the ability to speak one’s mind without fear of condescending, middle-class reprisals.

The sad example of Germaine Greer pulling out of a talk at Cardiff University shows how conservative progressives can be. Greer stands accused of transphobia after claiming men who changed to women ‘weren’t really women’ and could never truly know how it feels to be a woman. Cue outpouring of outrage. Students perched by their laptops waiting to be offended by anything leapt into action, donned their pc armour made by the finest child labour around, and issued a volley of dehumanising abuse against a woman accused of dehumanising transgender people. A petition composed of venom and hyperbolae was created by Cardiff’s student body, calling on the university to ban Greer from speaking. After receiving a sizeable portion of digital vitriol, she revealed on Newsnight that she was voluntarily withdrawing, claiming she was too old to spar with censorship fetishists.

Bafflingly parochial and misguided as her view is, Greer was not being transphobic, nor was she advocating violence against transgender communities. She was simply expressing a view that is unfashionable at best, and ill-informed at worst. Alas, our moral and intellectual superiors, white middle-class students, on whose land we shall toil in the future, disagreed.

Hyper-sensitive custodians of decency in whom we trust are axiomatically superior to anyone who doesn’t hold their worldview. Their staggering level of intolerance absolutely does not mock their supposed laissez faire approach to life. Supporting gay marriage and same sex adoption makes them infinitely pure, and censorious students like the ones at Cardiff are unequivocally not conservative beacons of regression.

Social media facilitates the dissemination of semi-literate abuse from those desperate to look like martyrs for a cause. People who lack the courage to debate in public spaces took to Twitter to harass Greer, to appear on the ‘right side’ of opinion. They might not even believe in what they’re saying: what matters is they reflect the majority of click junky views. Liberal trolls knowledgeable on the Greer case are no better than the moronic American schools who banned Catcher in the Rye because they thought it was part of an ‘overall communist plot’. They savaged an erudite feminist simply because she didn’t agree with their obviously superior body of beliefs.
In this case, and others like it, there is precious little evidence of nuance when assessing views. If someone holds a view that doesn’t match the gospel according to Suzanne Moore, they are condemned as disgustingly incorrigible, a bigot with no good qualities, insert generalised pejorative here. In the process, the Guardianista police have proved to be comically illiberal by refusing to accommodate views that differ from their own. By acting so puritanically, students have given the mainstream media who sneer at young people at every opportunity ample ammunition to further caricature us as reactionary and idiotic.

Greer’s case isn’t the first time a student body has reacted disproportionately and it won’t be the last. By banning Greer, Cardiff students have missed the opportunity to challenge her views. Surely the safest place to have a debate is in an academic arena where likeminded students can interrogate her in a civilised fashion? Her mind will not miraculously change by being ignored, and transgender students will still face abuse outside the campus bubble.

Middle-class liberals who populate universities are wilfully eroding the freedom to speak without fear of being silenced. We should be thankful that we live in a country where Katie Hopkins can say horrid things and not get banged up in a gulag by an eavesdropping Stalinist. Wherever it’s present, the dictatorship of the prevailing orthodoxy stifles debate and intensifies tension around already sensitive issues. Middle-class undergraduates at universities like Cardiff are anything but intellectually savvy or liberal, and have embarrassed themselves and other students with their fanaticism.

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