At the end of the second world war, George Orwell went to an event organised by PEN, a campaign dedicated to defending freedom of expression. He walked into a scene we encounter everywhere in 2022.
The meeting was meant to celebrate the tercentenary of John Milton’s Areopagitica, one of the earliest and still one of the best defences of freedom of thought in the English language.
Institutions are not censoring because they are true believers but because they are frightened
Journalists, novelists and poets depend on that right. They should know that, if they lose it, they lose their soul. Milton’s cry from the 1640s should be their cry: ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for.’
For many jobbing writers, alas, talk of souls and racing for immortal garlands is, well, a little too high-flown to move them. You might expect that the more down-to-earth need to put bread on the table would motivate them instead. Freedom of expression allows writers to sell their ideas in a marketplace. If one publisher does not approve of their views, they can shrug their shoulders and take their work to other publishers. Censorship creates backlists that take away their chance of paid work anywhere. Economic necessity should turn them into idealists.
But Orwell found that neither the speakers on the platform nor the audience would offer a wholehearted defence of liberty.
‘Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticise and oppose.’
The intellectuals of the 1940s were concerned about the British empire’s repression of the rights of conquered peoples. But they left the subject of free political speech in the UK alone. The left fanatics at the meeting believed that true freedom of speech could only exist under communism, when to use modern language, the privileges of the wealthy no longer ensured that their ideologies dominated the culture. They admired Stalin’s Soviet Union, even though it was cancelling writers in the most thorough manner imaginable by killing them.
Professional associations are amoral. I mean that as a compliment. Their officers defend members regardless of what they think of them. Officers at a writers’ organisation do not have to agree with the ideas of a novelist or think that a novelist is any good. They have a duty to defend freedom of expression and to combat rapacious publishers, just as trade unionists have a duty to stand up to the bosses on a worker’s behalf, regardless of whether they privately believe the worker is a shirker.
In moments of cultural revolution that commitment to a basic level of solidarity feels thin. Surely, there must be more to the job of leading a trade association or cultural organisation than defending the rights of the men and women you represent.
In these heady circumstances the job turns into a mission to fight racism, misogyny, transphobia, just as it was once a mission to defend communism and fight the bourgeoisie. That the intellectuals of the 1940s were overwhelmingly bourgeois no more matters than the fact that the men and women at the top of the arts are overwhelmingly white (and indeed bourgeois). Guilt drives them on, as does the fear that their advantages make them easy targets if they fail to display the required fervour.
The transition from professional organisations defending all members to only defending right-thinking ones is already underway, and I expect it to accelerate as the cultural revolution gains momentum.
Just before she resigned in 2021, I interviewed Kathleen Stock. I could hear the fear and the exhaustion in the philosophy professor’s voice. She was a gender-critical feminist, and her belief in the material reality of biological sex made her a target for vicious trolls. The abuse did not stay online. Her enemies protested on the Sussex University campus, near her office, saying her ideas endangered trans people. Posters on campus demanded her dismissal.
The police had advised Stock to install CCTV at her home. Security guards protected her. But far from defending her, or making a wider case about the need to uphold the academic freedom to argue and think, the University and College Union’s Sussex chapter said, ‘In light of recent events on campus and ensuing public response on social media, we extend our solidarity to all trans and non-binary members of our community who, now more than ever, should receive the unequivocal support of the university and its management.’
The union ‘has just effectively ended my career,’ Stock said, and resigned.
‘The right looks for converts, and the left looks for traitors,’ goes the old political wisdom. The Conservative government sensed a division on the left it could exploit. It duly awarded the radical, lesbian feminist an OBE. But no other philosophy faculty employed her. She was too dangerous to touch. As far as her career as an academic philosopher was concerned, Stock was on a blacklist.
Guilt drives them on, as does the fear that their advantages make them easy targets if they fail to display the required fervour
In an echo of the PEN meeting from the 1940s, the Society of Authors recently voted down an attempt to criticise its chair. She was accused of not defending JK Rowling after her support for gender critical feminism earned her thousands of death and rape threats on Twitter. Nor had she stood up for Kate Clanchy, who was reviled for tiny linguistic faults in her book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (which won the Orwell Prize, incidentally). Her former students did not believe for a moment that she was racist. Why would Clanchy teach the children of asylum seekers if she were? Her critics called her a ‘colonialist’ for describing the ‘almond eyes’ of one pupil. Shukria Rezaei, the pupil in question, wrote in the Times that she did indeed have almond-shaped eyers and ‘Kate helped me find scholarships and helped me with my university applications. I owe all of it to Kate, and I am sure she has done the same for many of her students. I feel very privileged to have met her.’
No matter. Clanchy’s publishers dropped her and blacklisted her too.
The state is not censoring. The climate of opinion in the arts and academia is imposing a censorship of its own, and it is no less effective for that.
The position of our jobbing hack in the arts or academia no longer seems perverse. Ideally, she ought to defend free expression. But she can look around and see what happens to those who do. If she speaks up, she suspects that charges of guilt by association will endanger her chances of putting bread on the table. Milton and Orwell have become treacherous guides in the culture wars of the 2020s.
Last week James Marriott of the Times warned how a ‘motivated minority with strong opinions can easily override the preferences of the majority of people, especially if those preferences are only mildly held’. He did not realise that all ideas for change begin among small groups of people. John Milton was fighting the Presbyterians in Parliament, who wanted to reintroduce censorship after it collapsed during the English civil war. They were convinced they had the right to impose their views because they were the elect, God’s chosen. The Leninist-influenced leftists George Orwell fought saw themselves as an elect too, the vanguard of the working class who needed dictatorial power to bring a better world.
They were authoritarians. But democratic reformers seeking change by creating a new consensus also begin as minorities, who believe they know better than everyone else.
Maybe we will look back on the Terf wars of the early 2020s and conclude that gender-critical feminism was just bigotry. Or we may look back and see one of the great medical scandals of our lifetime. No one knows. Equally, it may be that the hounding of writers for minor linguistic slips heralds a better world where new, diverse voices finally receive the cultural prominence they deserve.
But here the concessions must stop. No one knowing how the trans debate will end is the best reason imaginable for allowing it to rage freely. And what is the point of having new voices if they are not allowed to say what they think?
In any case, institutions are not censoring because they are true believers but because they are frightened. But when idealism fails to inspire your supporters, fear works just as well. Outsiders will fail to understand the convulsions in progressive institutions if they fail to notice the atmosphere of barely suppressed panic. Kathleen Stock’s colleagues in the Sussex philosophy department did not dare come to her defence. True Picador’s publishing director, Philip Gwyn Jones, told the Daily Telegraph he regretted not being braver in his defence of Clanchy. His words triggered such an internal backlash at the publisher that he was forced to apologise. Like a character from The Crucible, he promised that in future he would ‘use my privileged position as a white middle-class gatekeeper with more awareness.’
A little fear goes a long way. And cultural fear is dangerously stultifying. Artists and academics cannot challenge a consensus if they fear they will lose their incomes.
George Orwell left the PEN meeting worrying about the intellectual consequences. ‘At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity,’ he wrote. You need only inspect the cages of today’s cultural zoo to know he was right.
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