Freedom of speech on campus — is the discussion missing a fundamental point?
Universities are not the bastions of liberal thinking we thought they were!
There has been some commentary in the UK media over the last week relating to universities and free speech (as well as de-platforming and ‘cancel culture’). Shock headlines are great at grabbing attention, as I’ve just done here. But when you dig in a little more you often find that there is little substance or that claims can’t be substantiated. By the way, universities are indeed the bastions and defenders of free though and have championed freedom of speech for decades (policies and processes to protect it were in place in the Thatcher era).
You may have done well to miss it, if not, I’m hoping that it nevertheless becomes yesterday’s news rather quickly and here’s why. It’s not that I’m dismissing the freedom of speech debate — which given the oft emotive nature of the conversation, makes it a bit of an oxymoron, its just the way that the issue gets framed, mostly by politicians and the media, that bothers me the most.
Express yourself
Firstly, it may help with clarity to define what freedom of speech is. After all we need to make sure we’re on the same page before the emotive aspect of personal perspective joins the discussion (more on that later). Is freedom of speech ‘a right to say what you want, to whom you want, whenever you want’? Whilst that may seem to cover the bases, and may be a common view of the definition, we should really take a bit of time to think again. The best place to go for a definition is the UNESCO ‘International standards on Freedom of Expression’ which lists the various standards used across the globe (handily summarised at sort of continent level). At the top of this list is Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
Of interest is that this provides for the broader freedom of opinion and expression which includes speech. Perhaps this is the first flaw in the recent media commentary: why are we limiting the discussion just to speech? There is also clear mention of ‘without interference’ (this is something I will come back to later) and also implication of a multi-directional movement, in other words, it is much more than just speech as a method of giving out views (as per our initial ‘say what you want’ definition above).
But not irresponsibly
What this UDHR Article does not include, but is considered by other standards listed, are the accompanying responsibilities. Paraphrasing and conflating slightly the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European and US standards, freedom of speech may be restricted in order to: protect national security; public order or safety; public health or morals; prevent disorder and crime; respect the right and reputation of others; respecting the independence of the judiciary. It is also worth specifically quoting the final paragraph of the Article 13 of the US Convention on Human Rights — especially since the apparent right to ‘say what you want’ espoused by many US citizens in recent months:
“Any propaganda for war and any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that constitute incitements to
lawless violence or to any other similar action against any person or group of persons on any grounds including
those of race, colour, religion, language, or national origin shall be considered as offenses punishable by law”
All of this clearly shows that there are responsibilities and also penalties to consider when we want to freely express our views. I would struggle to understand why anyone would object to at least the former if not the latter but perspective and compassion can of course be variable!
Having a better understanding of the definitions — thank you for your patience for those who were already ahead in their understanding — its worth thinking a bit about how we each construct our communication when freely expressing ourselves. I will try to keep the reference to mode of communication broad here, as per the standards, but given the format of this piece I may drift more toward written and verbal expression.
There are many, many aspects of our thinking, our understanding, beliefs and experiences that inform both what we say and how we say it. The one that can be the most critical when it comes to the freedom/restriction of speech debate is emotion. Anything we communicate that is personal and comes from the heart is going to be emotive. In fact, we all can recognise that duality of experience and existence: riding the curve between logic and emotion, head and heart. That is indeed what makes life so frustrating, challenging, exciting and interesting! To help with striking the right balance we could consider a few things such as:
Listening is multidimensional.
Whilst we are considering ‘freedom of speech’, we must think about listening. Without receiving whatever is expressed by others we’re not having an exchange or conversation, we’re effectively either shouting or ignoring. Neither is great in terms of helping to get the message across.
Listening has a number of layers or levels:
1. Ignoring — clearly not bothering to listen
2. Pretend listening — we’ve all done this and experienced it from others. Ranging from ‘phone distraction’ to a placatory “yes dear” (quite possibly one of the riskiest response to give to your partner).
3. Selective or internal listening — often when you are taking some aspects on board but are too mentally busy with preparing your response or showing that you already know this. As Steven Covey famously said: “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply”.
4. Attentive or focused listening — engaging full attention on what the other person is saying
5. Empathic or global listening — full and exclusive attention with the ability to take in the speakers perspective. As per Covey: “To truly listen means to transcend your autobiography, to get out of your own frame of reference, out of your own value system, out of your own history and judging tendencies, and to get deeply into the frame of reference or viewpoint of another person”
We move back and forth through these levels as we interact with people and often not getting above level 3. The most important and valuable level is 5 but it does take effort and energy to maintain this. That said, with practice it gets easier! Also be mindful that it can be a rare ability — master it and you will be recognised for it.
The opposite of anger
Having shone a light on empathy in terms of listening, we should explore this ability a bit more. We’ve all come across people, in the workplace, acquaintances and possibly friends who are somewhere on the sociopathic spectrum. In short, people that seem to have a faulty empathy chip, or who have for one reason or more chosen to turn it off or turn if down. This lack of ability to connect through understanding how another person is feeling, thinking and being, often doesn’t result in a huge amount of positivity. Yes, things may get done but that usually happens through manipulation, control, threat rather than through a spirit of collaboration, mutual support and benefit. Without empathy, its very difficult to win people over to a cause or a point of view.
Developing better emotional intelligence through empathy and compassion also allows us to perform another valuable function which can lower the temperature when views and opinions are expressed. I recently read a piece relating to how the Dali Llama practices compassion. What he is able to do is to effectively separate actor from actions. You would think that he would not be a huge fan of the Chinese for what has happened (and is happening in Tibet). In fact, he has great compassion for the Chinese as he believes that they have the potential to be great friends at a point in the future when bad actions cease and are replaced with different, more positive actions.
This empathic ability is critical to allow good understanding and reasoned argument. If we are raising our voices to get a point across we’ve already lost the argument, as we are also if we can’t separate actions and also opinions from the individuals that hold them. We might on occasion be justified to define a person solely by their views but to do so we must have taken all steps to fully understand them first. Understanding someone’s views and actions require us to understand the context around that — what set them down that path? As is often cited by the Dali Llama: “all people seek out the need to feel happy and free from pain”. Our thoughts and actions can often lead us away from this intent but at the core we all set out to avoid pain in our lives.
The Art of Rhetoric
There is also the requirement to construct clear and persuasive statements that help us to get our message across. There are of course many examples of where the choice of words or sentence structure is such that the message conveyed takes on a skew or bias — we all do this all the time in order to persuade. What is important is to know when the message becomes less clear due to the skew we apply. Not only does this start to fog fact from fiction (I was nearly tempted to go with ‘alternative facts’ there!), but here a line of trust can easily be stepped over. When trust starts to be doubted, especially when truth is also purposely or indirectly distorted, then the conversation is no longer about sharing or expressing, it becomes about manipulation and control. What I’m saying here is that the need to be clear in what we say is an important aspect to our right to the freedom of expression. Its a shame that more time in the educational system isn’t spent on developing these important skills. It can be all too easy to type out something quickly on social media without any thought about the how of what you’re wanting to say. That also leads me slightly off in the direction of self-censorship — something for another blog post!
Think before you speak
Freedom of expression is a very accessible and powerful tool that we individually and collectively have at our disposal (at least in most of the freer democracies of the 21st Century) and with power comes great responsibility. To use this core human right we should all take a little time to ensure that how we employ it is in line with the simple expectations and instruction that have been written down. Above the need to get our point across we need to ensure that we first think of those that will hear our words, see our art, experience our performance. That small piece of empathic consideration is a great start in setting the ground to allow our views to fall on fertile ground, to grow and perhaps flourish — after all, isn’t that the whole point.
Summing up my case
This is why I find the free speech issue, as it is frequently handled by politicians and the media so frustrating and, somewhat ironically, clearly failing to meet the standards of what it is that is being addressed. If we’re getting emotional about freedom of speech then we’re clearly not doing it right! I do understand that an attention grabbing story or soundbite is what shifts newspapers and keeps politicians in the limelight so they can be re-elected (what a cynic I am!), but the issue is larger and more important than either.
The bigger element to all of this is balance. We can all see and sense that the world is out of balance: free and repressed; rich and poor; advantaged and disadvantaged; obese and malnourished; healthy and ill; young and old (probably not much we can do about that one); red and blue (as clearly seen in US politics); manipulator and exploited… unfortunately the list goes on. Rather than feeling depressed or concerned about the lack of balance we should take as many opportunities as we can to add an extra bit of compassion to our lives as well as those around us. Perhaps a multitude of such bubbles of tolerance and balance will come together to create a huge Aero bar of harmony which spreads out across the world (note to self — time for a snack). We do all have responsibilities to listen, to empathise, to understand as well as responsibilities when we want to speak. If we all take a breath to do this before taking that breath to freely articulate a point of view, we can collectively add more light to our exchanges and to reduce the heat.
Well, I think I managed to get through all of that without even mentioning ‘cancel culture’ or ‘wokeness’ …doh!
Image — edit of photo by John Salvino on Unsplash
