Sudden converts to the cause of free speech

The double standards of the left-leaning commentariat (is that a tautology?) have been laid bare by the fuss over Australian philosopher Peter Singer.

Singer, you’ll recall, was scheduled to speak at Auckland’s SkyCity Theatre in June, but the event was cancelled by risk-averse management worried about possible protests. Disability activists object to Singer, and with very good reason: he has argued that in some circumstances, it’s morally acceptable for parents to kill a seriously disabled child.

It should be noted that no one had threatened to disrupt Singer’s appearance, so SkyCity’s cancellation was a case of corporate timidity which the company tried to disguise with some PR mumbo-jumbo about the need to respect values of “inclusion and diversity”. In any case, Singer’s tour promoters soon secured an alternative venue, so his speech will go ahead – as it should in a country that professes to allow freedom of expression, regardless of whether some people find the speaker’s views repugnant (as I do in this instance).

But never mind all that. The really significant thing about the Singer kerfuffle was the sudden emergence of a whole bunch of new converts to the cause of free speech. Commentators who were silent about the de-platforming of the Canadian speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux in 2018, and in fact by their silence gave the impression of approving it, seemed to undergo a remarkable Road to Damascus-type experience now that it was a favoured leftie philosopher’s right to free speech that was threatened. But their feeble attempts to justify this  about-face left them open to accusations of rank hypocrisy.

Danyl Mclauchlan on The Spinoff was among the first to object to SkyCity’s cancellation of Singer’s speech. Possibly alert to the risk that he would be accused of double standards, Mclauchlan asserted that Singer couldn’t possibly be compared with the Canadians. Why not? Because according to Mclauchlan, “Singer is a category of thinker we should pay attention to and whose ideas we should consider, even though we disagree with some of them”.

So how, exactly, did this make him different from Southern and Molyneux? That wasn’t explained. We are left to conclude that Singer should be allowed to speak because Mclauchlan thinks he has something worthwhile to say, whereas the Canadians couldn’t possibly have been worth hearing.

Perhaps I can help here by suggesting some reasons why Mclauchlan might find Singer acceptable and the Canadians not. The obvious one is that Singer supports causes that the left embraces. He donates 40% of his income (which, given the enormous fees paid to celebrity speakers, plus his author’s royalties and professor’s salary from Princeton, would be not inconsiderable) to charity. He’s a champion of animal rights and veganism, and he believes people in wealthy Western countries have an obligation to help those living in poverty (none of which strikes me as either profound or original, but then what would I know?).

All of these stances tick the right boxes with the left – so much so that they seem willing to overlook the inconvenient fact that Singer has advocated euthanasia for disabled babies, which even hard-core lefties must find hard to defend.

While Mclauchlan is prepared to cut Singer a lot of slack, no such tolerance was extended to Southern and Molyneux, who were summarily dismissed at the time of their visit to Auckland as being “far right” or “alt right”, whatever that means, and who therefore couldn’t possibly have had anything interesting or provocative to say. (As it happens, New Zealanders still have little idea what message the Canadians intended to push, because we weren’t able to hear them and evaluate their arguments for ourselves. The totalitarian bigots of the far left, ably assisted by Phil Goff, the Gauleiter of Auckland, made sure of that.)

Mclauchlan went on to write: “ … thinkers who genuinely challenge conventional wisdom and the status quo are going to be wrong a lot of the time, and even their good ideas are going to generate a lot of uncertainty. If we ignore them because they’ve been cancelled for being wrong about something else we diminish our ability both to change our own minds and change things for the better”.

So this argument, which is a classic justification of free speech, applies to Singer but not to the Canadians? We’re supposed to retain an open mind about Singer’s provocative positions and allow that he might be right, but squeeze our eyes shut and clamp our hands over our ears for fear that Southern and Molyneux might have contaminated our thinking?

Here, laid bare, is the conceit of the leftist elite that presumes to know what opinions other New Zealanders (presumably less enlightened ones) may safely be exposed to. There’s an element of plain, old-fashioned bigotry in play here, combined with an authoritarian urge to control the public conversation. Together they make a toxic mix.

A similar line – essentially, “We believe in free speech, but not for people we disapprove of” – was taken in a commentary by someone named Emile Donovan on the Newsroom website. Donovan recalled the controversy over the Canadians in 2018, then went on to say: “But this case is a bit different. Singer is a world-renowned philosopher whose professional role is to conceive and debate boundary-pushing ideas and arguments”.

There it is again. Singer is somehow "different" from Southern and Molyneux, though Donovan makes no attempt to explain why Singer’s “boundary-pushing ideas and arguments” are worth hearing while those of Southern and Molyneux were not. The leftist commentariat has taken upon itself the right to decide whose ideology makes them acceptable and who should be regarded as beyond the pale.

Donovan then goes on to quote broadcaster Graeme Hill, who has twice interviewed Singer, about the dangers of society succumbing to oppressive groupthink. Er, quite so.

Now we turn to a Stuff editorial headlined The slippery slope of cancel culture, which talked admiringly of Singer’s “deep engagement with tricky and important moral issues” and his “eloquent” advocacy for Syrian refugees wanting to emigrate to New Zealand. All of which is fair enough – but the editorial simultaneously rebuked a rival media outlet for daring to suggest that Singer was in the same category as those “infamous YouTube activists” Southern and Molyneux. 

Again, by implication the Canadians’ views were without merit and therefore not worthy of a platform, although the editorial writer didn’t bother, or perhaps wasn’t able, to make a case for that proposition.   

It was clear that the writer heartily approved of free speech for Singer, but didn’t think the same right should be enjoyed by couple of provocative neo-conservatives from Canada. But that’s not how free speech works; it can’t be applied selectively so as to reinforce approved political prejudices to the exclusion of unpopular ones. I find myself again forced to quote Noam Chomsky: “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”