telegraph.co.uk
JK Rowling’s treatment is a grim sign of how Twitter mobs have poisoned our cultural life
Nina Power 8 July 2020 • 11:20am
7-9 minutes
In philosophy, there’s an idea called the “principle of charity”. Whatever the topic under discussion, you grant your interlocutor the same credit you give yourself. You accept the strongest possible version of their argument, and you imagine they have good reasons for why they’re making their claim. And then you talk about it.
Public life today seems, on the other hand, to be governed by a principle, or perhaps an anti-principle, of meanness. Whatever the topic, and no matter how careful and patient you’ve been, and how you got there, someone will come along and accuse you of being motivated by the basest and most vicious sentiments available to man: hatred, intolerance, even murderous desires.
Recently, in the arts world,
we have been treated to the unedifying spectacle of the writer JK Rowling being accused of wanting to hurt trans people and, in the last couple of days, of “harmfully” criticising the over-use of opposite-sex hormones by making a parallel with the over-prescription of anti-depressants.
I, and many others I’m sure, happen to agree with Rowling – non-invasive ways (talking, getting fit, acceptance) of addressing unhappiness of body and mind are always preferable to medicalisation, not least because the side-effects of prescription drugs are often unknown. But whether you agree with Rowling or not is not the point. She has, by any understanding of the principle of charity, been painfully clear and careful in the way she has outlined her thoughts. She gave reasons. A discussion should be possible.
But many of her attackers, of course, do not care for a dialogue – they just want her to shut up. Having accused Rowling of harbouring malicious feeling, they declare open season on her, frequently exhibiting the murderous rage and intolerance that they unjustly ascribe to her. Everyone should get wise to this tactic. Over the past few years, many people on the cultural scene have lost work and friends for not toeing the line – whatever the line is supposed to be that week. The four-letter word – “Nazi”, “TERF”, “hate” – a kind of debased magic spell, is supposed to tell you everything you need to know about who to punish.
How did it come to this? Where is the principle of charity today? How have our cultural, artistic and intellectual institutions become so pathetic that they no-platform invited speakers, or pull shows, or distance themselves from artists and thinkers because a few ‘activists’ send some malevolent tweets, or emails, or threaten to protest?
There are, depressingly, many recent examples from which to choose. Any woman accused of holding views inimical to the current definition of gender will likely see themselves embroiled in attempts to no-platform them. Rachel Ara, due to give a lecture at Oxford Brookes on making large-scale artworks on a budget, had her talk cancelled and then postponed for the crime of liking a couple of gender-critical tweets. Nina Edge, a part-time lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University Art School, was hounded for raising concerns on Twitter about predatory men identifying as women in prisons.
I myself have been cancelled quite a few times now, had a fellow co-panellist refuse even to look at me or listen to my talk (after she tried to get me banned from the event, much to the bemusement of the organisers). I’ve been picketed and had one institution decide to pay for security guards to protect me. I’ve had former friends write untrue and horrendous things about me in public in an attempt to smear me – and all for suggesting on Facebook that the Labour Party might have a problem with women raising questions about proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act, and for refusing to accept the terms of a small number of people regarding who we can and can’t talk to. When you ask to talk to your cancellers face-to-face, they always, of course, refuse.
It appears to me that contemporary culture is screwed, and not only by the virus. After plagues, there are often periods of great artistic flourishing. Perhaps we’re on the cusp of this, but it’s not going to come from these cowardly institutions, more concerned to avoid bad publicity than they are in understanding the world.
For all of the bewildering and occult dimensions of present-day life, it is possible to get some idea of what’s going on. In 2017, a curious incident in the London art world set the tone for 2020’s apotheosis of cancelling. LD50, a small Hackney gallery, came under serious attack by “antifascists” after its director, Lucia Diego, was deemed to be unforgivably equivocal about Donald Trump in a private message to an artist. The message was publicly leaked and the gallery came under the paranoid and forensic eye of various self-described “antifascists” – furious, no doubt, at Trump having assumed the Presidency a month earlier in an election in which they could not possibly have voted.
LD50, as befitting a contemporary art gallery with a role and interest in the vicissitudes of contemporary visual life, was then hosting a show about memes, whose role in the US election and in internet culture more broadly, was (and is) a matter of great interest to many, and the gallery had hosted a discussion on “Neo-Reaction” – a relatively obscure trend in contemporary thought. Because of Diego’s apparent dissent – how dare she not hate Trump as much as we do! – not only was it felt ethical to publish her private messages, but a small group called Shut Down LD50, decided to attack the gallery itself, which had now become in the minds of its attackers, a “Nazi gallery”.
In late February of that year, a protest was called outside the gallery. Apparently unconvinced by the idea that it was possible to see a show, and criticise it in whatever way you might like, the protesters had determined that prohibiting the gallery from continuing to exist was the only way to proceed. The history of authoritarian regimes – both left and right – engaging in prohibition, censorship and punishment for expression and dissidence somehow forgotten, an angry group of people shouted at the shuttered exhibition.
Just one person, writer DC Miller, someone I am honoured to call my friend, staged a counter-protest, standing against the crowd holding a little sign reading “The Right to Openly Discuss Ideas Must Be Defended”. (You can read his detailed account of the madness
here.) Miller was in turn, with depressing predictability, himself falsely accused of holding fascist ideas. And so it goes – anyone who stands up is supernaturally contaminated, even when the very thing they are defending – freedom of expression, thought, association – is the very opposite of the reality of the authoritarian regimes whose name gets hurled at us.
The LD50 shutdown set the tone for the subsequent crisis in cultural life, one that sees not only famous authors such as Rowling but people who’re far less visible being punished for refusing to submit to the tyranny of unthought, unfreedom and the vicious punishment of free expression. It’s often the same people, and the same tactics used every time.
Bravery is in short supply, and many people have a lot to lose: but how much more we will have lost when we can all no longer think, and feel, at all. Charity begins at home – that is to say, by being fair, first and foremost, to your own mind. What do you think?
