2023 has been an eventful year for free thought, humanism and secularism. Below, Emma Park and Daniel James Sharp look back on some of the major issues that have been debated in the Freethinker this year.

I. Free speech, religion and the culture wars

Free thought and intellectual progress are not possible without a shared culture of free speech, open debate and a willingness to engage with different points of view. One of the Freethinker’s concerns this year has been with attempts to repress free speech, especially in the UK and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, and in the context of the ‘culture wars’.

In Ireland, a new bill on hate offences threatens to undermine free speech, not just about religion but on a variety of the most sensitive topics – in other words, topics on which open debate is crucial. In Wakefield, England, in February, a non-Muslim woman, presumably under pressure, donned a veil and made a humiliating public apology in the local mosque, because her autistic son had brought a copy of the Quran into school and it was accidentally scuffed. And Puffin has made attempts to censor Roald Dahl in the name of ‘sensitivity’.

Free speech at universities also remains under pressure, as illustrated by the case of Professor Steven Greer, who was hounded by Bristol University Islamic Society in a smear campaign that was supported by academic colleagues who should have known better. Daniel reviewed Greer’s book about his experiences.

Across the pond, Professor Alex Byrne’s contract for a book critical of gender identity ideology was cancelled by Oxford University Press, but has since been published by Polity. From a different perspective, former vice chancellor Julius Weinberg argued that ‘freedom of speech is not as simple as my right to express my ideas’.

To supporters of democracy in Hong Kong, the culture wars are all but an irrelevance. The suffocating control of the Chinese Communist Party, said Kevin Yam, forced campaigners across the political spectrum to work together.

II. Science, philosophy, and humanism

As well as exploring the issues of the day, the Freethinker has also explored some of their deeper philosophical and historical contexts.

We interviewed the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett about the relationship between philosophy and science, meaning and consciousness in a godless, Darwinian universe, and New Atheism. With historian Charles Freeman, we discussed the richness and variety of the ancient Greek mind and how the coming of Christian orthodoxy put an end to that tradition. And we caught up with the humanist and author Sarah Bakewell to explore different traditions of humanism.

Meanwhile, Matt Johnson and Daniel Sharp both contributed articles about one of the most famous freethinkers of recent years, the late Christopher Hitchens.

III. Islam and free thought

With the rise of Islam in Britain and across the West, it has become urgent to consider how far the religion can be compatible with Western values and approaches. To explore this question, we interviewed Taj Hargey, possibly Britain’s only liberal imam. Other contributors have explored the need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought around the world, why the hijab is not a good symbol for women, and whether it is possible to distinguish between religious and political Islam.

IV. Secularism

Secularism is the principle that religion and state should be separated, and that religion should have no undue influence on public life. In the UK, thanks to a combination of political apathy and entrenched privilege, we still have an established church and unelected clergy in Parliament. Paul Scriven, a Liberal Democrat peer, spoke to the Freethinker about why he introduced a bill to disestablish the Church of England.

With a general election on the cards for 2024, Stephen Evans of the National Secular Society discussed where the political parties stand on faith schools. Two recent events in which the NSS participated revealed some of the challenges involved in secularisation. Daniel also argued in an article for Only Sky that the Church of England’s record on gay marriage is another reason to hasten disestablishment.

Other contributors to the Freethinker have looked at secularism, its history and future, in Québec, Turkey and Wales, and the strengths and weaknesses of French-style laïcité.

Did you know that, while the advancement of any religion, as well as of humanism, is considered a charitable aim under English law, the advancement of free thought, atheism or secularism is not? See Emma’s piece for New Humanist.

V. Israel and Palestine

One of the year’s biggest events—the Hamas attack against Israel on 7 October and the ensuing war—has produced a wide range of often emotional and heated responses. In contrast to all this sound and fury, the Freethinker has published a series of articles dealing with the conflict from different and often disagreeing, but rationally and charitably argued perspectives.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid wrote about the ‘leftist postcolonial apologia’ for Hamas and argued that the Israel-Palestine conflict is, at root, a religious one, while in Emma’s interview with Taj Hargey, the imam was staunch in his support of the ‘occupied and oppressed’ Palestinians. Hina Husain wrote about her Pakistani upbringing and being inculcated with Islam-based anti-Semitism. Finally, Ralph Leonard responded to all these articles, arguing that the conflict is, in fact, inspired more by competing nationalisms than religious impulses.

VI. Republicanism

Free thought and secularism have been closely intertwined with republicanism in British history. The Freethinker has reinforced this link since its beginnings in 1881.

This year, we have continued in the same spirit of religious and political anti-authoritarianism, publishing a review by Daniel of the republican activist Graham Smith’s anti-monarchy book. Later in the year, Daniel interviewed Graham Smith in person at Conway Hall. Meanwhile, Emma delved into the archives to discover the connection between the Freethinker and Republic, of which Smith is the CEO.

See also Daniel’s article on the republican Thomas Paine’s influence on Christopher Hitchens and Tony Howe’s discussion of an even earlier famous British republican, John Milton.

VII. Free thought history

In June, we were saddened to hear of the death of Jim Herrick (1944-2023), former editor of the Freethinker. Bob Forder, NSS historian, wrote an obituary commemorating Jim’s lifelong dedication to free thought, humanism and secularism.

The composer Frances Lynch wrote a guest post about her rediscovery of Eliza Flower, a radical nineteenth-century composer associated with Conway Hall, who was neglected by the historical record because she was female.

We have also been reflecting on the history of the Freethinker and of the various non-religious movements in the UK. Former editor Nigel Sinnott kindly agreed to let us republish an article he wrote for the magazine in 1970 in which he discussed the complicated historical relationship between humanists and secularists. Historian Charlie Lynch introduced the recent book he co-wrote with two other academics charting the history of organised humanism in Britain, which Emma has also reviewed for New Humanist. And Bob Forder argued that free thought and secularism are inseparable.

VIII. The future of free thought

Artificial intelligence has made great strides in 2023. (We even used Dall-E, a generative AI model, to illustrate this post.) Given the exponential pace of development, it is clear that the implications need to be monitored very carefully. For instance, there are concerns that ChatGPT may be biased in favour of certain interpretations of Islam. And artificial general intelligence (AGI) may be just around the corner, making ethical oversight all the more urgent.

Emma and Daniel spoke about the nature of free thought and the challenges facing it today and in the future on the Humanism Now podcast, on Freethought Hour and to the Reading Humanists. Emma also spoke to the Central London Humanists about Pastafarianism, arguably the world’s fastest growing religion, and a topic about which there is much to say.

This year also saw the publication of two intriguing books about the impact of digital technology on free thought, one by Simon McCarthy-Jones, and another by Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan. Emma interviewed Laura Dodsworth for the Freethinker and reviewed both books for the Literary Review. We will be looking further at the implications of digital technology for free thought in 2024.

Finally, a request for your support…

The Freethinker is an independent, non-profit journal and completely open-access. We are funded by donations and legacies given by generations of readers back to the 19th century – and not by big corporations or billionaires. To keep us going in the future, we depend on the generosity of readers today. If you believe in the importance of fostering a culture of free thought, open enquiry and irreverence, please consider making a donation via this link.

And don’t forget to sign up to our free fortnightly newsletter, to keep abreast of the latest developments in free thought in the UK and around the world.

Postscript: a merry Christmas of sorts from Christopher Hitchens…

The post Year in review: 2023 appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Alex Byrne is not necessarily the sort of person whom you would have expected to become involved in the ‘culture wars’. After an initial career in advertising, he studied philosophy at Birkbeck, King’s College London and Princeton, and then did a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. In 1994 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an Instructor in Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, where he is now a professor. Up till a few years ago, his research centred on abstract philosophical questions like the nature of ‘colour’.

Byrne became interested in the disputes over the meaning of sex and gender in about 2017, after learning about an early academic furore over the analogy or disanalogy between transgenderism and transracialism. He then had a ‘ringside seat’ in the trans debate, or gender debate as it is also known, when his wife, Carole Hooven, was ‘cancelled’ by certain people at Harvard University for publicly expressing her view that sex is biological and binary. His own book, Trouble with Gender, was under contract to Oxford University Press, but the latter withdrew from the contract last year. He discussed the possible reasons for this in an article for Quillette. Trouble with Gender will be published by Polity on 27 October 2023.

I interviewed Professor Byrne across the Atlantic via Zoom. In the edited transcript below, we explore the origins of his interest in the trans debate and his later experience of it, what the debate is actually about, his reasons for writing a book about it, and how a philosopher can contribute to the debate by making clear distinctions.

We also consider how the atmosphere in philosophy departments has changed in recent years, and whether philosophers have a duty to defend words against their destruction.

On debating the trans debate: polite notice

The Freethinker is committed to open, well-reasoned and civilised discussion, in particular on issues where dogma, authoritarianism or fear have led to the suppression or distortion of certain points of view. We are also opposed to extremism and fanaticism of any kind, considering such qualities incompatible with our guiding principles of liberty, reason and humanity. Further discussion here.

We have endeavoured to find contributors to oppose the views advocated in previous articles on the trans or gender debate, but our invitations have so far been met with silence or refusal. If there is anyone out there who has experience or expertise on this topic, and who thinks that the various arguments put forward by Alex Byrne, Helen Joyce and Eliza Mondegreen are fundamentally flawed, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please get in touch via this link.

As always, any opinions expressed below are the sole responsibility of those expressing them.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

Freethinker: How did you get into philosophy in the first place?

Alex Byrne: It was a rather convoluted route. I think that is true of many philosophers. I started off doing mathematics and physics and then I worked in advertising in London for a number of years. And while I was doing that, I went to Birkbeck College in the evenings to study for a second undergraduate degree in philosophy. I had always been interested in philosophy, but in Britain at the time, it was very hard to put a name to the sorts of issues that I was interested in. I did not realise that there was an actual subject that dealt with these problems and questions that fascinated me. One formative episode was when I saw Men of Ideas by Bryan Magee. I also read AJ Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, and found it completely enthralling. I believed for a while that logical positivism was the solution to all philosophical problems – I was soon disabused of that.

Looking back over your career in the philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics, what are the contributions you have made to these fields of which you are the most proud?

That is a difficult question. You should really ask someone else about my contributions, such as they are. I have done a lot of work on perception, and in particular the perception of colour. Most of this has been with David Hilbert, a philosopher at the University of Illinois, Chicago. We have written many papers together defending the view that colours are physical properties. In particular, they are just ways of altering the incident light. This is quite a controversial view in the philosophy of colour – a little subdiscipline of philosophy. One view that is perhaps more popular than our physicalist view goes back to the ancient Greeks, that nothing actually is coloured. Even though it seems or looks as if tomatoes are red and grass is green and the sky is blue, in fact, this is just some sort of global illusion and nothing is really coloured. Or at best, if something really is coloured, it is an item in the mind, a mental image or picture.

I think it was Democritus who said, ‘By convention hot, by convention cold, but in reality atoms and void…’

Yes. Democritus is the standard source for this eliminativist view. As that quotation brings out, it is not just colour that is supposed to be an illusion or only in the mind or a matter of convention. It is also other perceptible properties like heat, tastes, smells, sounds and so on.

How and why did you move from this rather abstruse subject to sex and gender?

I had always been interested in sex differences and the explanation of sex differences – why males and females of our species in particular differ in some trait. Also I had always been interested in issues of free speech and was temperamentally inclined towards an absolutist position about speech. And then, in 2017, the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published a paper called ‘In Defense of Transracialism’, which appeared in the leading journal of feminist philosophy, Hypatia. There was a huge fuss about this paper, which essentially argued that the same courtesies and tolerant attitude granted to a transgender person like Caitlyn Jenner should be extended towards a transracial person like Rachel Dolezal.

The whole message of Tuvel’s paper was very progressive, and you might have thought that, within feminist philosophy, her paper would have been praised. But instead, the opposite happened: it was widely condemned as having the potential to cause great harm to various communities. An open letter appeared signed by many academics, including Judith Butler, the author of Gender Trouble, calling for the paper’s retraction. It was not retracted in the end, fortunately, but it brought home to me very vividly that philosophy at that time had an extremely intolerant side, opposed to academic freedom, which I thoroughly disapproved of.

You mentioned Judith Butler’s book, Gender Trouble. Your book is called Trouble with Gender. Is that a deliberate allusion?

Yes. It is also an allusion to Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham, the British science fiction writer.

You talk about the trouble that Tuvel’s paper caused in academic philosophy. When I was at Oxford in the 2000s, the Philosophy Faculty had a reputation for competitive, no-holds-barred debate. From what I have heard, that was true of many philosophy departments at the time. Is it still the case today? Is frank discussion still possible in university philosophy departments?

Yes, it certainly is, although I think that, over the years, that style of open combat and trying to tear the speaker down has changed. Back in the day, when an invited speaker came to deliver a talk at a colloquium, the attitude of some philosophers was, ‘We have to go into the talk with the aim of humiliating the speaker or destroying his or her ideas, and if we do that, then that is a satisfactory colloquium session.’ Sometimes philosophers went too far in that regard, and the result was that the discipline was less hospitable and welcoming to some people than it should have been.

Now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction: the emphasis is much more on constructive criticism and telling the speaker that his or her paper was excellent and incisive and a great contribution to the topic at hand. There is much more overt praising of speakers at the end of talks than there used to be. And as far as hot-button topics like sex and gender go, unfortunately it is not possible to have a freewheeling discussion without some people getting offended or hurt. As a result, we do not have no-holds-barred discussions about what women are or whether sex is binary.

This timidity came as something of a surprise to me. Philosophers talk a big game. They say, ‘Oh, of course, nothing’s off the table. We philosophers question our most deeply held assumptions. Some of what we say might be very disconcerting or upsetting. You just won’t have any firm ground to stand on after the philosopher has done her work and convinced you that you don’t even know that you have two hands. After all, you might be the victim of an evil demon or be a hapless brain in a vat.’

But when the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing. When there is the real prospect of being socially shamed or ostracised by their peers for questioning orthodoxy, many philosophers do not have the stomach for it.

In your experience, is that true on both sides of the Atlantic?

Yes.

Apart from the trans or gender debate, are there any other issues that cause this amount of friction?

At the moment it is mainly sex and gender. Race is another topic with plenty of no-go zones, in philosophy and elsewhere. Interestingly, in the subdiscipline called the philosophy of race, it is perfectly acceptable to argue for a biological theory of race – that what it is to be black or east Asian or white is to have a certain kind of ancient ancestry, a pure matter of biology, in some broad sense. 

Why is it that this issue of what a person is, or rather, what a woman is, has become such a huge bone of contention among so many people?

That is a good question. I am not sure what the answer is. The question, what is a woman, was asked most famously by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949). And feminist philosophers have been obsessed with the question ever since. But it has never before had the valence that it has now. I suspect that part of the explanation is that in the UK, for example, organisations like Stonewall started hanging their hat on the slogan that ‘trans women are women’. If they had said instead, ‘trans women are trans women’, or ‘trans women deserve to be treated as women’, there is no reason why the issue of what a woman is would have become so contentious. It is quite surreal the way the ‘what is a woman’ question is now used as a kind of ‘gotcha’ question to ask politicians.

In response to this question, for instance, Keir Starmer, the current Labour leader, said in 2021 that it was ‘not right’ to say that only women have a cervix. Then in March this year, he said that, ‘For 99.9 per cent of women, it is completely biological … and of course they haven’t got a penis.’ Finally, in July, he decided that a woman is an ‘adult female’. And as you point out in your book, ‘woman’ was Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2022. Is there a sort of fixation on this question? Why is it always about women?

Of course it is ‘what is a woman?’ – rather than ‘what is a man?’ Not because the ‘woman’ version of the question is harder to answer, but because issues of access to various spaces – sporting competitions, prisons, shelters and so on – are really only an issue for women; there is not a corresponding issue for men. Generally speaking, men could not give a fig about whether trans men are included in men-only sporting contests or use men’s changing rooms or are in the male prison estate. In fact, I think most trans men would very wisely choose to be in the female estate rather than the male estate.

This is one of those rare examples, like the Beatles, where the direction of cultural export goes from the UK to the US. The ‘adult human female’ slogan started in the UK, in 2018, when the infamous billboard went up that quoted the then Google dictionary definition: ‘Woman, wʊmən, noun, adult human female’.

It was only some years later that this made its way over the Atlantic, when Matt Walsh, a conservative commentator who is very popular over here, made a documentary called What is a Woman? The answer that Walsh’s wife gives at the end of the documentary is that a woman is an ‘adult human female’. To get to that rather unexciting point, Walsh interviewed many experts – including, memorably, a gender studies professor – who were completely unable to answer the question coherently.

To sum up, what is really at the heart of the trans debate? What exactly is it about?

That is a good question. There are specific questions or specific issues that divide the so-called gender-critical side from the trans-activist side. One question is about the nature of women and men. What is it to be a woman or a man? Another question is about the nature of sex. Are there two sexes or more than two? Or is sex in some sense socially constructed? Is the notion of sex in good order anyway? Maybe it should be completely junked. And another question is about gender identity. Do we all have gender identities? And is a misaligned gender identity the explanation of why some people suffer distress at their sexed bodies?

There are all these specific issues which are hotly debated. And then, of course, there is the even more contentious issue of how to treat children and adolescents with gender dysphoria – whether to give some of them puberty blockers, for example.

But beyond listing these questions, it is not clear to me that there is some sort of overarching issue which is really what the whole trans debate is about. Everyone sensible in this debate thinks that trans people should be afforded the same dignity and rights as everyone else. They should not be discriminated against, they should receive proper health care, they should be treated with respect in day-to-day life just like their fellow citizens, and if some adults wish to transition, they should be able to.

Is the struggle for trans rights analogous to the historic struggle for gay rights?

No, it is not, because there is no particular right being demanded that trans people lack.

Are there points at which women’s rights and trans rights, whatever these are, will inevitably clash, or do you think there is a way of reconciling them?

I would not put it in terms of a clash of rights, but there certainly are points of conflict. The most obvious of these is in sports. If you are a trans woman and you live your life as a woman and are treated by most people as a woman, it is at least understandable that you would wish to join the women’s team or take part in women’s sporting competitions. On the other side, women have an interest in having female-only categories for many sports. So there is a clear conflict of interest there. Another clear conflict of interest is in the case of prisons.

Let’s talk about your book in a bit more detail. In the ‘acknowledgements’ section, you say your greatest debt is to your wife, Carole Hooven, who was a lecturer on human evolutionary biology at Harvard. In 2021, she published T, which was a popular science book about testosterone. Last year, she wrote an article describing how she was accused of transphobia by certain members of Harvard for explaining on Fox News that sex is binary and biological. To what extent have your wife’s experiences influenced your own interest in the trans (or gender) debate and your views about it?

As a result of the episode you mention, Carole is no longer a lecturer in human evolutionary biology at Harvard. She has a position as an associate in the psychology department, in Steven Pinker’s lab. When this whole affair snowballed, it became apparent that it was not feasible for her to continue teaching in her old department. So she left. Carole’s experiences influenced the book a great deal. In addition to witnessing the backlash against Rebecca Tuvel, Kathleen Stock and other philosophers like Holly Lawford-Smith, I got a ringside seat when it came to Carole’s own cancellation over sex and gender.

That experience made me more determined to write a book on the topic. It is not that I am a particularly courageous person, but it did seem to be extremely unchivalrous to stand by and do nothing when I knew that I had things to say. And many philosophers were promulgating various confusions and mistakes which, I thought, I was in a position to correct.

Where would you put yourself politically?

I am a boring centrist. I have no political affiliation to speak of. I have always voted Democrat in the US. Temperamentally, I think I would really like to be a conservative, but I have never found an intellectually satisfactory way of being one. Socially, I have liberal views of the sort held by most academics.

In your introduction to Trouble with Gender, you write that your book is not about the ‘vitriolic political issues’ associated with the trans debate. Nonetheless, it was refused publication by Oxford University Press, after previously having been accepted. Why do you think OUP refused to publish your book in the end?

This is speculation on my part, but it is worth looking at the immediate history, in particular the fuss over Holly Lawford-Smith’s book Gender Critical Feminism, also published by Oxford University Press. Announcement of its publication produced two petitions of complaint. As I discussed in Quillette, one of these was signed by the OUP Guild (the union representing OUP staff in New York). The other was signed by ‘members of the international scholarly community with a relationship of some kind, or several kinds, to Oxford University Press’. The letters protested against the publication of Lawford-Smith’s book and told OUP to change its procedures so this sort of thing would never happen again.

As for my book, it is not as if OUP should have been surprised by what I actually produced, because I wrote a proposal, eagerly accepted at first, which accurately described the final manuscript. OUP’s single formal complaint against the book, namely that it did not treat the subject in ‘a sufficiently serious or respectful way’, is ludicrous. At least, I hope that readers will find it ludicrous.

Do you think that OUP’s response to your book is a symptom of the way things are going in academia at the moment? Is there a cowardice and an unwillingness to deal with arguments that challenge a particularly entrenched view about things?

Yes, for sure. It is a worrying trend. It is the same phenomenon as the philosophers who talk the talk but do not walk the walk. To put it another way, when academic publishing is subjected to a genuine stress test, it completely fails, even though the advertising beforehand was that it would work perfectly. OUP publishes all sorts of controversial philosophy books, which defend views that other philosophers think are ridiculous, misguided, or completely wrong. Often, in the pages of OUP philosophy books, the author will criticise other philosophers in the most uncompromising terms. It also happens that OUP philosophy books are reviewed by other philosophers in an extremely critical way.

So you might think that OUP would gladly publish a book on a hot topic like sex and gender – maybe that book would get trashed by other philosophers, but this is just the way of academic publishing, and nothing to be ashamed of. That is not what happened.

Your book is designed for a popular rather than an academic audience. Did you intend it to stir up controversy or make inflammatory claims?

No. I knew that some of the claims would be controversial. For example, there is a chapter in which the view that women are adult human females is defended. There is a chapter on sex which defends the orthodox view of what sex is and tries to expose various confusions surrounding this topic. There is a chapter which argues that gender identity, at least as people popularly conceive of it, is a myth. All these are inflammatory claims, but I did not intend to provoke or stir up controversy. No doubt I will, though. The book has eight chapters, and each one will annoy some people.

What does your book contribute to the trans debate that has not been said before?

It is a very different book from, say, Helen Joyce’s Trans or Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls. It deliberately does not take a stand on any social and political issues. It is not written from a feminist or gender critical perspective. It just brings the tools of philosophy to bear on the questions that everyone seems to be asking these days and tries to sort things out. The fact that it is not about social and political issues gives me more room to treat these topics in the detail that they deserve.

I would regard it as a success if readers discovered how you can actually argue about these issues. They do not even have to have to agree with what I say; they just have to see how evidence and argument can be brought to bear on questions like, ‘what is a woman?’ or ‘does everyone have a gender identity?’ Normally, in public discussions of these issues, people do not really argue, in the sense that one side presents evidence and reasons and then the other side counters or presents their own evidence and reasons. They start shouting at each other instead.

What can a philosopher specifically contribute to a debate about sex and gender? Should it not be left to the biologists and psychologists?

I hope that my book demonstrates exactly what a philosopher can bring to the table. Philosophers are good at making crucial distinctions, being relatively clear and precise, and being able to set out arguments in the appropriate way, so that you see why the conclusion follows from the premises. It is not possible to master all academic disciplines in one life, so we need contributions from different specialists. That includes the biologists and the psychologists, but sometimes their discussions of these topics are flawed because they lack a crucial tool from the philosophical toolkit. But it must be admitted that philosophers also have their blind spots and weaknesses.

You observe in your book that ‘a concerning feature of debates around sex and gender is the attempt to prevent distinctions from being made by prohibiting or redefining certain words.’ How far would you argue that sex and gender should be distinguished, and why?

In one way sex and gender should not be distinguished at all, because one of the many senses of the word ‘gender’ is simply ‘sex’. That is, ‘gender’ is sometimes just a synonym for ‘sex’; in this sense, sex and gender are the same. Because ‘gender’ has many other meanings, and to avoid confusion, I think it would be a good idea only to use the word ‘gender’ to mean sex. That is my first point.

My second point is that there are all these other things which we definitely want to distinguish from sex. For example, we want to distinguish being male from being masculine. Everyone going back to the ancient Greeks has seen that there is a distinction here. You can be a feminine male or a masculine female, and one sense of ‘gender’ is as a label for masculinity and femininity. We need to distinguish being male from being masculine, but there is absolutely no reason to use the word ‘gender’ to mark that distinction.

Another distinction we would want to make is that between being female and being a woman. There are numerous females who are neither humans nor adults, so there are females who are not women. On anyone’s view, there is a distinction here. You should not identify being female with being a woman, even if you think that all women are female. Now another sense of ‘gender’ is as a label for the categories man, woman, boy, girl. But again, it is a terrible idea to use the word ‘gender’ to mark this distinction between being female and being a woman.

Another distinction is between being female and having a female gender identity. Assuming we can make sense of the notion of ‘gender identity’ in the first place, we need to distinguish between being female and having a female gender identity, because some males can have a female gender identity, for example. Yet another sense of ‘gender’ is ‘gender identity’. But yet again, it is a bad idea to use the single word ‘gender’ to mark the distinction: we already have the phrase ‘gender identity’ and we should use that instead.

It is sometimes argued that the claim that trans people cannot change gender is incompatible with a humane (or humanist) outlook. Or that to require trans people to live in the sex which they are ‘assigned’ at birth, rather than accepting that they can change, is contrary to their human rights. Therefore, it is argued, to be ‘gender critical’ is fundamentally a right-wing, if not extremist, position, and harsh and oppressive to trans people. What would you say in response to this line of argument?

I am not a gender critical feminist, but it is not part of their position that people should not transition. And if people do transition, it is not part of the gender critical position that they should be discriminated against or their human rights should be reduced or downgraded. If you think of transitioning as it was always thought of, as a palliative measure to deal with gender dysphoria, then assuming that this actually works, at least for some people, it is hard to see what objection there could be to it, because it is an effective medical procedure to deal with a troubling psychological condition. It is not that people transition just for the hell of it or to gain access to women’s spaces. They transition because life has become unbearable living as their natal gender or natal sex.

Like many people on the side of free speech in debates of this kind, you quote from George Orwell’s 1984 in your book. You choose the part where Syme, a worker on the Newspeak dictionary, says,

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words … Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’

In your view, how far is the whole of the trans debate – or gender debate – really a battle about words?

In one way, it is not about words at all. Take the question of what a woman is. That question is not about the word ‘woman’, although of course I have asked it using the word ‘woman’. I am interested in people of a certain kind, women, not in any English words.

But in another way the trans debate is about words. Various trans activist projects concern language: if you can stop people from using various words or get them to use other words or phrases instead, then the various distinctions that the activists do not want to be made, become a lot harder to make. One example of this is the frequent replacement of ‘sex’ with ‘sex assigned at birth’. If you want to get people to stop talking about the fact that we come in male and female varieties, then one excellent way of doing it is to try and enforce a rule where you never say that someone is ‘female’, but instead that she was ‘assigned female at birth’. This has the effect of suggesting that people’s sex is a matter of some doubt or speculation – that maybe no one really knows what sex people are.

Similarly, for expressions like ‘cervix havers’ or ‘uterus havers’ – if you want to avoid the suggestion that any adult female person is a woman, then substituting ‘uterus haver’ for ‘woman’ is an effective way of doing that. Language is extremely important if you are an activist – for the reason that Orwell identified in that quotation.

Do you think that philosophers have a duty to defend words against their destruction?

They have a duty to defend established ways of making valuable distinctions. One very valuable distinction is between males and females. To the extent that people are trying to prevent others from making that distinction, philosophers, I suppose, should step in and say, ‘no, stop, that’s a bad idea’. But that is not to say that anyone will listen to us.

In your experience of academia in the US and elsewhere, how far would you say that free and open enquiry and debate are under threat in today’s environment? 

We are going through a bad patch – I do not think there is any doubt about that. But the pendulum will swing back sooner or later. There are already many signs of pushback; books seem to be coming out all the time explaining what went wrong and how we can correct things. I have a book that just came out called The Identity Trap by the Johns Hopkins political scientist Yascha Mounk, all about the origins of so-called ‘wokeness’ – which is of course closely connected to this present cultural moment and the enthusiasm for cancelling speakers and shutting down certain kinds of speech.

So there is already some momentum in the other direction, and, if history is any guide, these things come in waves and recede eventually. But that does not mean that we should just sit back and do nothing.

Do you hope that your book will help to push the pendulum back in the other direction?

I hope that in a very small way it will widen the Overton window and broaden boundaries of acceptable speech to some extent – whether people agree with the conclusions or not.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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On academic freedom, see further:

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities – interview with Steven Greer

Free speech at universities: where do we go from here? by Julius Weinberg

And on the trans debate:

‘A godless neo-religion’ – interview with Helen Joyce

‘The falsehood at the heart of the trans movement’, by Eliza Mondegreen

The post ‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

The recent burning of the Quran in the Swedish city of Malmo by an Iraqi refugee, Salwan Momika, has caused outrage in many Muslim countries. Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey and others have issued statements condemning the action and have asked Sweden to reconsider its laws protecting freedom of expression. There have been public protests in several cities in these countries, demanding the severance of diplomatic ties with Sweden.

Momika burnt a copy of the Quran on 3^rd September this year, as a protest against Islam. According to the Swedish newspaper, The Local, Momika claimed that his protest was against the Muslim religion, not Muslims, and that the Quran should be banned globally for causing a ‘negative impact’. In contrast, the Saudi Arabia-based Arab News implied that Momika’s act was a cynical attempt to secure his refugee status. In response to his protest, some Muslims in Sweden also attacked local police.

Media outlets in Muslim-majority countries have covered this incident, and others like it, extensively, despite their limited domestic relevance. The media in these countries frame these incidents as a wilful assault on Islam, and portray the doers as malicious. Certainly, the outrage is understandable, given the deep Muslim reverence for the Quran. On the other hand, the strongly negative spin given to these burnings could put the lives of the protesters in danger, and also cause a difficult situation for religious minorities living in the Muslim-majority countries where the articles are published.

Sweden’s Quran burning is just one of several similar acts that have occurred recently across Europe. Far-right groups in Sweden and Denmark have also burnt copies of the Quran during rallies and protests. These incidents provoke intense outrage when covered by the Muslim media. For example, when a far-right activist burnt a copy of Quran in Sweden in 2020, the media outlets in Pakistan and Iran responded with inflammatory language of their own. Whatever the ideological motivations of the different protesters in different cases, the outrage of the Muslim media has been more or less the same.

Take the Pakistani media’s coverage of the recent Quran burning in Sweden as an example. Some local media outlets in Pakistan used the word ‘Maloon’ (‘accursed’) of Momika in headlines and news content. They described his act of burning the Quran as ‘na paak’ (‘impure’) and used the words ‘be hurmati’ (‘disrespectful’) to describe what had happened to the holy book of Islam. This inflammatory language probably has its roots in Pakistan’s stringent blasphemy laws, which consider even mentioning blasphemous words or acts to be blasphemous. However, such biased reporting fosters further intolerance in the country, especially toward religious minorities, who already face grave dangers from false blasphemy allegations. Influential figures in parts of Punjab and Sindh already exploit blasphemy charges as a weapon against minorities.

For instance, Asia Bibi, a Christian woman in Pakistan, was accused of blasphemy in June 2009 after an argument with a group of Muslim women. A year later, she became the first woman sentenced to death under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. In 2020, despite the Supreme Court overturning her conviction, she was forced to flee to Canada in fear for her life. Bibi now lives there in exile with her husband and two children, while three of her children remain in Pakistan.

Bibi’s plight highlights the grave dangers faced by religious minorities under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. The sensationalised coverage of blasphemy cases by the Pakistani media further fans the flames of intolerance, as it has failed to cover these issues responsibly. The disproportionate coverage given to Quran burnings in Europe stands in stark contrast to the lack of attention by the Pakistani media towards domestic issues, such as the Christian community of Faisalabad, who lost their homes in a mob attack on 16 August this year. In that incident, a mob of hundreds attacked Faisalabad over a false blasphemy accusation against two Christian men. The mob burnt churches, looted homes and damaged the properties of people who had paid for them with their life savings.

The Pakistani media rarely highlight the human impact and the stories behind blasphemy accusations and persecuted minorities. Most of their coverage is dominated by the trials and outrage of the Muslim majority over perceived insults to Islam. They give little attention to the perspectives of freethinkers, progressives, atheists and agnostics – even if they tacitly admit their existence through accusations of the harm that such freethinkers allegedly inflict on society and Islam. The media also overlook the plight of Ahmadiyya community, who are living in constant fear in Pakistan. In this context, their extensive coverage of Momika’s Quran-burning in Sweden makes no sense. The Pakistani media’s attitude to this topic shows clearly that their agenda is to stir up intolerance and hatred at home.

Yet this is not only the case in Pakistan. The media in other Muslim countries follow the same trend. The Iranian media are an example. I tried to search news about Momika in Tehran’s Times of Iran. I found that the incident was being reported in a disturbing way. The paper reported that the Iranian government had asked Sweden to deal with Momika and other culprits or extradite them to Islamic states. In another news item, it described Momika as a member of Israel’s spy agency, and alleged that he was on a mission to deflect attention from Israeli crimes in the West Bank.

In contrast to the Tehran Times, the reporting of these incidents by Bangladesh’s Daily Star was quite balanced. It described the incident and the outrage of Muslim world about it without accusing Momika himself of anything. Its coverage of the incidents lacked vivid details about protests or retaliation. This more measured agenda-setting subtly discourages intolerant sentiments from dominating public discourse in Bangladesh. This is probably because of the more secular political environment of the country and the less stringent blasphemy laws, which together allow media organisations in Bangladesh to adopt a balanced approach in their journalism.

In Nigeria, the country with the biggest Muslim population in Africa, the media followed the line taken by the Tehran Times in their coverage of Momika. The country’s leading English newspaper, Vanguard, used words like ‘provocative’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘abominable’ and ‘heinous’ to describe his action.

This type of inflammatory rhetoric and narrative framing reinforces perceived grievances and breeds intolerance among the mass audience of these media outlets. It fuels a sense of collective outrage and offence by portraying incidents like this as intentional affronts to all Muslims, rather than as isolated acts with a specific political agenda, such as protesting against Islam (rather than aiming to attack Muslims). In contrast, the more responsible reporting from outlets like Bangladesh’s Daily Star resists overblown narratives that could incite a backlash.

These examples suggest that the media in Muslim countries face systemic disincentives that hinder responsible reporting on issues that could be considered blasphemous by local laws and society. These countries have zero tolerance for questioning religious dogma. Their journalists often internalise the biases of wider society. There also exist commercial pressures to cater to audience outrage and increase viewership by sensationalising events like the recent Quran burnings.

Despite these constraints, however, building a culture of ethical journalism remains critical. While overnight change is unrealistic, attitudes can gradually be shifted through training journalists in objective reporting, diversifying newsrooms, and cultivating connections with progressive civil society groups.

There is an urgent need for the media in Muslim countries to develop a code of conduct on reporting incidents deemed blasphemous under their laws. They need to make guidelines to ensure balanced, ethical coverage of those incidents, otherwise their hyped-up reporting will endanger lives both at home and abroad. The media have a moral responsibility to address internal biases and overblown narratives when covering such incidents. They must develop a mechanism for internal reflection on such biases, and must clarify and enforce standards to promote ethics in their coverage of these issues. Only then can they cover religious offence responsibly without compromising human rights and bringing any danger to any community locally or internationally.

Every person has the right to protest, but it should be capable of being practised within safe limits. Desecrating the Quran is a dangerous act that some people carry out to express frustration and anger towards Islam, despite the offence that it causes to Muslims. The media’s sensationalised reporting of such incidents often intensifies this danger for protesters. The media also deliberately ignores the perspective of the protester and the challenges they face afterwards.

As a result of the enormous hostility to acts of protest against Islam, whipped up by the media in Muslim-majority countries, even liberals who would theoretically support the protesters’ right to burn the Quran prefer to stay silent, so as to avoid putting their own lives in danger. Thus a culture of fear is created in which all possibility of reasonable discussion and criticism is suppressed.   

No doubt, the road to unbiased coverage upholding human rights in Muslim world will be long. But it must begin with media houses themselves taking an introspective look at how their rhetoric could prove harmful in a long run.

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On 26 October 2018, Ireland voted to remove the archaic criminal law of blasphemy from its constitution. Almost one million people (64.85 per cent of participants) voted, in what Taoiseach Leo Varadkar called a ‘quiet revolution’, to remove the word ‘blasphemous’ from article 40.6.1.i of the Constitution. This had previously stated that ‘the publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.’

The bill to remove blasphemy was signed into law by the president later that year. However, just three years later, the Irish government are introducing a new, even more authoritarian bill that will severely limit free speech, and has the potential to criminalise modern blasphemers. Barring amendment or rejection, this bill is set to become enshrined in Irish law.

Currently being debated in the Seanad, the upper house of the Irish parliament, the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 would update and expand Ireland’s hate speech laws to include incitement to violence or hatred against persons or groups on the basis of protected characteristics, including religion, race, disability and gender. 

The bill contains many provisions that will make the average liberal or civil libertarian’s blood run cold. Under this bill, existing crimes such as assault and vandalism could lead to longer prison sentences if hatred is found to be the motive. According to Section 7, the mere possession of material that the state deems ‘hateful’ could result in citizens being sent to prison for up to five years if their actions are held to be ‘likely to incite violence or hatred’ against a person with protected characteristics. Should the bill it find its way onto the statute books, then, despite the government’s insistence that it includes a provision to ‘protect genuine freedom of expression’, there is little doubt that Ireland would become the ignominious holder of one of the most comprehensive ‘hate speech’ laws, if not the most totalitarian, in Western Europe. 

In April, the bill passed through the Dáil (Ireland’s equivalent of the House of Commons) relatively unscathed. Only 14 of the 160 Dáil members voted against the proposed amendments. Yet its provisions are comprehensive and authoritarian.

The Justice Minister Helen McEntee, who was responsible for the bill, argued that it was necessary in order to discourage the targeting of those with protected characteristics. Her comments were echoed by Pauline O’Reilly, a senator of the Green Party, who told the Seanad that restrictions on free speech were necessary to protect vulnerable people from ‘such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace’. The senator is also reported as saying, using highly emotive language, that ‘the dirty, filthy underbelly of hatred in Irish society’ necessitates ‘the restriction of freedom’.

On the face of it, these proposals may sound like a good idea. Few would oppose laws that protect the rights of individuals, especially if the individual belongs to a persecuted or marginalised group. No ordinary, sensible person would tolerate despicable acts such as racist or misogynistic violence. 

Except that words are not violence. Verbal abuse is not the same as physical abuse. According to those who support hate speech legislation, living in fear of being ‘attacked verbally’ is a restriction on one’s freedom. A rhetorical question commonly deployed by opponents of free speech in this debate is, ‘why is it acceptable to protect freedom of speech for everyone when doing so harms the right of some people, in particular, those with protected characteristics, to live in peace?’ The question is what conclusion should follow from this. Those who support the severe limitations on free speech proposed by the bill would say that it is justified by its alleged ability to protect vulnerable people’s right to ‘live in peace’. But the alternative conclusion would be that everyone has to accept a certain amount of rough-and-tumble, and that no one’s ideas are above criticism. Sometimes, words can even act as a bulwark against physical violence – against which every liberal democracy has numerous laws to protect people.

Clarification is essential when it comes to the application of laws, especially those relating to civil liberties. But tyranny likes grey areas. The bill’s current definition of hatred (clause 2(1)) is vague and tautological:

‘“Hatred” means hatred against a person or a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics or any one of those characteristics.’

This non-definition – ‘“hatred” means hatred against’ – led Thomas Pringle, the Independent TD (MP) for Donegal, to criticise the bill. He noted in a debate in the Select Committee on Justice that one ‘remarkable’ feature of the bill was that ‘hate is not defined in it’. Fundamentally, it is difficult to see how ‘hatred’ or ‘hate speech’, where it does not cross the line into existing criminal offences, such as harassment, libel, death threats or incitement to violence, could really mean anything more than ‘offensiveness’. But whatever the Merseyside police or hardline progressives might think, the idea that being offensive might be worthy of criminalisation is well beyond the current laws of either England or Ireland, and would be an extraordinarily illiberal step. 

Failure to define a crime can potentially lead to anyone being found guilty. When such vague definitions serve as the basis for a conviction, courts often have to base their sentence not only on a person’s actions but also on their beliefs. 

Consider the idea brought forward in the UK by Stella Creasy to make misogyny a ‘hate crime’. For several years the Labour MP has sought to make being motivated by misogyny an aggravating factor in criminal sentencing—with a potential prison sentence of up to seven years if it was determined that the crime was committed by someone with a hatred of women. We already have laws that deal with the most serious of misogynistic crimes, such as sexual assault and domestic abuse. Yet it is strange to think that a violent crime against a woman where the defendant was not motivated by misogyny should automatically be punished less severely than one where he or she was so motivated. If the harm done to the victim is the same in each case, there are real concerns with arguing that the law should categorise specific kinds of beliefs, when they motivate a crime, as making that crime liable to more severe punishment than it would be, had the defendant not been motivated by those kinds of beliefs.

McEntee and other supporters of the bill claim it is necessary to protect minority groups from actual verbal abuse. However a provision deeply buried in the bill indicates that its effects would reach much farther than that. Under Section 10 of the bill, the preparation or possession of material ‘likely to incite violence or hatred’ against people on account of their protected characteristics is a criminal offence punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment, when such preparation or possession is ‘with a view to the material being communicated to the public or a section of the public, whether by [the defendant] or another person’, and ‘with intent’ to incite hatred or violence or ‘being reckless’ as to whether they are incited.  In other words, if you privately possess material that might incite, not even violence, but the more nebulous response of hatred, and you are ‘reckless’ about whether hatred is incited if the material is shared publicly, then you could be guilty of a criminal offence – regardless of whether the material actually results in anyone’s being abused.

An even more chilling provision is then introduced (clause 10(3)): where the defendant is found to have possessed such material, and ‘it is reasonable to assume that the material was not intended for [his or her] personal use’, it is to be presumed ‘that the material [is] not intended for personal use’ unless he or she can prove otherwise. Thus, if the defendant is found to possess material likely to incite hatred, then, if it is reasonable to assume it was not for personal use, then they would be required to prove that it was, in order to escape conviction. In other words, this section, a little over 30 words long, effectively abolishes the presumption of innocence. The burden of proof will shift from the prosecutor to the defendant, on the grounds not of a proved intention, but of what it is ‘reasonable’ to assume the intention was.

As the ‘possession’ clause suggests, this bill, like other hate-speech laws around the world, such as Scotland’s infamous Hate Crime and Public Order Act, does not seek to protect vulnerable people from abstract definitions of hate, but rather is intended to limit what you can say or write. As such, it will curtail legitimate debate and pose a serious threat to free expression. Anything that prevents people from freely holding beliefs not sanctioned by the state, or viewed by the law as ‘dangerous’, is a threat to a free and liberal society. The idea of an informed citizenship is anathema to authoritarians.

As noble as they sound, laws against hate speech do not promote equality. They give victims an artificial sense of justice, but in reality, they do little to address the issues that have led to the supposed crime in the first place. If Irish lawmakers want to reduce prejudice against protected characteristics, they must abandon this bill and focus on education. Knowledge increases tolerance and acceptance. The irony is that this can only be achieved through the free exchange of ideas – which is exactly what this law is intended to prevent.

In The Gulag Archipelago (1973), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn points out that people are unaware that they are complicit in acts of wrongdoing because dogmatic adherence to an ideology seems to justify their actions. In the case of Ireland, an ideology of identity that promises to protect minority groups from offence is allowing its adherents to hide their illiberal behaviour under the guise of moral righteousness. 

If Ireland is to remain a free country, it is essential that this bill be rejected in its entirety. A copy of Solzhenitsyn’s book should be left on the desk of every member of parliament. 

For a bibliography of our articles on free speech and free thought, see: Free Speech in the Freethinker.

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In the last fortnight, the National Secular Society participated in two quite different discussion events in London. Both events contributed to the debate on how and why Britain should continue its movement towards greater secularisation, why religious privilege should be abolished, and the extent to which free speech should be a fundamental democratic principle.

On Wednesday 10th May, the Free Speech Union hosted FSU In-Depth: Blasphemy law by the back door, in central London. The speakers included the NSS’s CEO, Stephen Evans. He was joined by Dr Rakib Ehsan, author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities; Emma Webb, director of the UK branch of the Common Sense Society and a member of the National Conservatism conference committee; and Ben Jones, the deputy director of the FSU cases team, who has recently completed a PhD on British ex-Muslims. The meeting was chaired by the FSU’s founder and director, Toby Young.

On Wednesday 17th May, the NSS hosted Future of church and state in Committee Room 5 of the Houses of Parliament. Stephen Evans chaired a disparate panel consisting of the veteran Labour journalist and long-term secularist Polly Toynbee; Martyn Percy, former Dean of Christ Church, Oxford; Tommy Sheppard, a Scottish National Party MP and chair of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group; and Jayne Ozanne, a gay evangelical Christian activist.

In the ‘culture wars’ which are so fracturing British society at present, the NSS occupies a finely balanced position.

On the one hand, the society has been a strong critic of the imposition of de facto blasphemy laws by religious groups in the UK. Opposition to blasphemy laws and the free criticism of religion, as Evans observed at the FSU meeting, have long been key aspects of secularism. This goes right back to 1883, when GW Foote, the second president of the NSS and first editor of the Freethinker, was imprisoned for publishing cartoons that were blasphemous of Christianity. Secularists, from a political perspective, have always resisted the authority adopted by religious institutions and their power to impose their doctrines on wider society.

In recent years, probably dating back to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, the main drive to rein in free speech about religion in the UK has come not from Christians, as in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, but from hardline Muslim organisations and leaders. This was made clear in the Batley Grammar School case, the Jesus and Mo cartoon mug case, and, earlier this year, the Wakefield Koran-scuffing case. The NSS has certainly been vocal in criticising the readiness of secular authorities, including schools and the police, to sacrifice the teacher who showed a cartoon of Mohammed in class, or the student who dropped a Koran, to the wrath of religious demagogues.

As Evans also pointed out, the NSS and the FSU – along with other organisations, including Humanists UK – have criticised the definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that was proposed by the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims and subsequently adopted by Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party, and all of Scotland’s political parties. According to this definition, ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.’ But this invocation of racism enables it to be used as a way of silencing people who criticise Islam, said Evans: as Charles Bradlaugh, founder of the NSS, put it, ‘without free speech, no search for truth is possible.’

The problem is with what Young, who makes no secret of his right-wing sympathies, calls the ‘woke’ left – many of whom, particularly at educational and arts institutions, seem to have fallen over themselves to adopt this muddled concept. When the law academic Steven Greer was accused of Islamophobia by the Bristol Islamic Society – falsely, as was later proven – it was his own progressive colleagues, as well as the university authorities, who were involved in his ostracism and effective ‘cancellation’.

On the other hand, Rakib Ehsan argued that freedom of expression was the ‘friend’ of socially conservative minorities, such as the Muslim community in which he had grown up. He explained that one of the reasons he supported free speech was that he wanted to be able to criticise the teaching of some forms of sex and relationships education at his children’s school. In doing so, he accepted that the right to criticise extends to everyone. (Readers may recall the controversy surrounding the protests by conservative Muslim parents in Birmingham in 2019 against the teaching of LGBT relationships at a primary school.)

George Orwell, one of the greatest of free speech advocates and a socialist, declared, ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ The FSU has duly adopted this as one of its slogans. In ironic contrast, the Guardian seems of late to have become ambivalent about Orwell’s legacy, including these very words.

Such points of tension raise fundamental questions. If there should be free speech about religion, should there also be free speech about other equally emotive subjects, such as race or transgender debates? Where is the line to be drawn, in any of these cases, between criticising ideas and criticising persons? How far should either notions of offensiveness, or parents’ rigid views about any subject, influence what is taught in schools?

The attitude of the FSU was clear: ‘free speech’ simpliciter should be added to the list of ‘British values’ that are affixed to the classroom wall in schools across the country. At a time when many in the Conservative party are trying to replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights, the ‘British values’ list almost seems to have become a mini-manifesto for the Bill. Those on the left may see the whole idea of ‘British values’ as a distasteful form of nationalism, as well as overly authoritarian. And yet it was the left-leaning and nationalistic SNP that introduced Scotland’s Hate Crime Act 2021, which restricts speech about a range of protected characteristics, including, to a lesser extent, religion.

Among Britain’s neighbours, free speech on religion and other matters is currently under threat. As Young pointed out, the Criminal Justice Bill 2022, currently passing through the Irish Parliament, looks like an attempt to reintroduce blasphemy offences into a country that has only just formally abolished them. The Bill would criminalise behaviour that is ‘likely to incite violence or hatred’ against a person or group on account of protected characteristics, including religion, provided such behaviour is done either with intent to incite violence or with recklessness as to whether violence is incited. This seems like a dangerously low bar. The European Union is also considering whether to extend ‘the list of EU crimes to hate speech and hate crime’, which may have a similar effect.

For its part, the FSU is in turbulent waters: although it claims to be a ‘non-partisan, mass-membership public interest body’, its director’s sympathies make it all the easier for progressives simply to dismiss it as a right-wing organisation. On the same day that the NSS was meeting to discuss church and state, Young gave a talk to the National Conservatism conference entitled ‘A Dispatch from the Woke Wars’ – a move unlikely to endear him to the left.

Progressives who have endorsed the Islamophobia definition would doubtless claim that criticism of Islam by an organisation like the FSU can all too easily slip into xenophobia and hatred of Muslims and immigrants generally. This is an area fraught with controversy. It certainly increases the delicacy of the NSS’s position, as the representative of ‘secular liberals’ who support free speech on religion but categorically oppose what the NSS describes as ‘anti-Muslim bigotry’.

National Conservatism emphasises ‘God and public religion’; the list of talks at its conference included such titles as ‘Faith, Family, Flag, Freedom’. Its supporters would doubtless not have approved of many of the secularist campaign aims discussed by Stephen Evans, Polly Toynbee et al.; indeed, the week before, Young had interrogated Evans as to whether the NSS’s opposition to state-funded faith schools was not just ‘dogmatic secularism’. The proposals mooted by the panel included removing the bishops from the House of Lords, disestablishing the Church of England, abolishing prayers at the beginning of Parliamentary sittings, and removing state funding from faith schools. Abolishing the monarchy was mentioned, though the NSS itself does not have a position on this issue.

Although all the speakers were broadly secularist, there were differences of emphasis, and a few tensions, between the religious and non-religious stances represented.

On the non-religious side, Tommy Sheppard focused on the removal of bishops from the House of Lords and the replacement of Parliamentary prayers, which he said ‘offends against our sense of democracy’, with a ‘secular moment of reflection’. Polly Toynbee, for her part, poked fun at the anachronistic moments in the coronation, including the ‘Wizard of Oz’ anointment behind a screen. She read out the oaths which the king swore to ‘maintain the laws of God’ and the ‘Protestant reform religion’, and described the event as a ‘shocking wake-up moment’ for those who had not expected so much religion to be involved. She also highlighted the continued opposition to assisted dying legislation by bishops and other religious representatives.

There was something of the sermon in Martyn Percy’s thoughtful speech, in which he compared the Church of England to a ‘overcrowded vestry cupboard’. He focused on the Church’s numerous involvements in child sexual abuse scandals and safeguarding failures in recent years, right up to the present. He also made the point that the Church has its own system of canon law which still ‘trumps common law’. The solution, he said, quoting Michael Caine, was to ‘blow the bloody doors off’ and clean it out from top to bottom.

Jayne Ozanne said that she was not opposed to religious leaders in the House of Lords, as long as they were required to ‘earn the right’ to be there rather than entering ex officio. As a gay Christian, she bemoaned the way in which the bishops in the Lords used their position to push for exemptions to legislation which had the effect of discriminating against people like herself. She also criticised the Church of England’s ‘institutional homophobia’.

In the Q&A session, however, Ozanne warned Toynbee to ‘careful about ridiculing religion’ in the context of the coronation. Toynbee responded tartly that it was ‘not a question of being rude about what some people think of as sacred’, but of the ‘ludicrous’ intersection between religion and the monarchy.

One of the issues which was rather glossed over was how disestablishment would occur in practice. Given the nearly five centuries in which the Church of England has been intertwined with the secular state, there are likely to be far-reaching legal and practical difficulties in disentangling them. This does not mean it should not be done, but, as with any major constitutional change, it will take time and resources, and the devil will be in the detail.

Another problem raised by the discussion goes back, once again, to the culture wars. If Britain is so divided on so many fundamental issues, from Brexit to ‘British values’, from immigration to the definition of ‘woman’, it is very unclear how we as a society are going to be able to reach a consensus on what collective traditions and ideas, if any, we want to adopt. One of the key arguments made by monarchists and supporters of the established church has long been that church and king, and their associated ceremonies, are historic traditions that provide Britain with some sort of identity. Right-wing commentators delight in painting the aims of secularists and humanists as purely destructive, and as leading to a cultural and moral wasteland. This is clearly wrong; but more needs to be done to counter this narrative.

Ultimately, in modern Britain, there seems little necessity to retain an established church, or even a monarch. But the case for their abolition would be strengthened if more consideration were given to what exactly is going to happen once they have gone.

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The post Blasphemy and bishops: how secularists are navigating the culture wars appeared first on The Freethinker.

In Pakistan, religion exerts a significant influence over society. This often results in restricted freedom of expression for those with different views. George*, when he was living in Pakistan, always had to keep his thoughts and questions to himself: he knew he could not talk about them with anyone. While talking to me in a private Twitter conversation, he said that he had kept his thoughts, ideas and questions to himself his whole life, as he never found a safe environment around him.

‘I turned 45, and until then, I found no space to talk about my thoughts, even in a small circle,’ he said. ‘If we were sitting and talking about something, and I said something about religion, they would start saying, “What are you saying? You should not be talking like that.”‘

Twitter Spaces was the first platform where George was able to share his thoughts, using an anonymous ID. He found Spaces on atheism, the evolution of religions, blasphemy allegations, human rights, social issues, and every topic that he had always wanted to talk about. He found people like him who also wanted to engage in live conversation and share their thoughts on these controversial subjects.

Twitter launched ‘Spaces’ in December 2020, initially as a beta test and then as freely accessible to everyone on the platform. Spaces allows anyone to host and participate in live audio conversations with other users on the platform. Since its emergence, ex-Muslims from Pakistan have been using this feature to talk about issues that were previously forbidden. They share their stories, voice their concerns, and connect with others who understand their experiences.

George’s story highlights the challenges faced by individuals in Pakistan who do not conform to religious norms. Although his family knows about his views on religion, he feels that he cannot share his opinions with them, even at home. For him, Twitter has become a valuable platform that has allowed him to finally express his views without fear.

Pakistan’s penalties for blasphemy, apostasy, or atheism are among the harshest in the world. According to a BBC report of 2017, ‘Although atheism is not technically illegal in Pakistan, apostasy is deemed to be punishable by death in some interpretations of Islam. As a result, speaking publicly can be life-threatening.’ Recently, as reported by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid in The Diplomat, Pakistan has reinforced its laws even further, adding to the already oppressive environment for Pakistani atheists and agnostics. Social media has become the only option for them to express their views, but the government has tightened its grip on these platforms too. It has become increasingly challenging for them to connect with like-minded individuals.

From Facebook to Twitter

Smith* and Syed Rahat Shah joined Twitter after feeling that it was not safe to share their thoughts on Facebook, where family and friends were present. During a Zoom meeting, Smith told me that he had filtered out everyone he knew in real life from his Twitter account. Initially, he used his real name, but later changed it to an alternative account, although he still uses his own picture. He was outspoken in real life, but noticed that people were not willing to listen to him. During a gathering, someone asked him to recite kalma (a declaration of Islamic belief in the oneness of God and the prophethood of Muhammad) to prove that he was a Muslim. Since then, he avoids talking about religion offline. On Twitter, his main focus is science and technology, but he occasionally discusses religion in Spaces and gives his opinion.

During a WhatsApp call, Syed Rahat Shah said that he identifies more as a cultural Muslim, despite not believing in any religion. He started criticising religion on his personal Facebook profile, specifically its laws relating to women. However, every time he did so, his brothers or someone from his family would shut him down: ‘It became extremely difficult to question religious practices. In Pakistan, I used to feel like I had a lot to say, but there was no space or acceptance for it.’

After Twitter released Spaces for everyone, Shah started to join some of them in his free time. There he found the freedom to say what he has been keeping within himself for years. ‘I joined Spaces initially, where people would talk about social issues and also discuss religion, like how it causes issues. I would join those Spaces and speak my heart out. Now, I feel like the frustration I had inside me that I couldn’t express has gone.’

Alice*, in a Zoom meeting, said that she identifies as agnostic. Talking further, she said that Generation Z are very lucky as they have many platforms and resources where they can easily access the information that she and people of her generation took years to find. ‘When we were growing up, we neither had that knowledge nor access to platforms where we could seek the information we wanted and network with like-minded people,’ she said. ‘It was especially hard for young girls who were curious. They had no ways to satisfy their curiosity as there were stricter societal and cultural rules in place for them.’

Finding like-minded people

Grace* had a similar experience. She told me, also via Zoom, that a couple of years ago, she had been going through some personal problems. In that phase, she tried to connect with God. She decided to read the Quran in translation. She read thirteen chapters; with each chapter, her confusion about her religion increased.

‘I started listening to Quran with translation on YouTube during my daily commute, which was a forty to forty-five-minute drive from my house to my office,’ she told me. ‘However, I quickly became confused because, in every second or third verse, there was a mention of hell and the punishment for sinners.’

Two of her friends introduced her to the YouTube channel of Harris Sultan, an ex-Muslim Atheist activist and the author of The Curse of God: why I left Islam. She started watching his videos, and this made her realise that she was not alone. There were other people like her who had the same confusion or concerns about religion.

Grace therefore decided to set up her own YouTube channel. Her channel focuses on social issues but religion comes in the discussion in one way or another. Last year, she joined Twitter, where she found that people were more responsive and open to discussion. ‘Twitter also provided the anonymity to express opinions freely, which made the response time much faster,’ she says. ‘I started visiting Twitter spaces and found other people like me there.’

Nuriyah Khan is a well-known ex-Muslim who runs her own YouTube channel. She observes that Twitter spaces can become toxic quickly. As a woman and a host, she feels empowered by the ability to mute or remove disruptive individuals. As she told me via Whatsapp, ‘Twitter Spaces and YouTube each have their unique benefits and drawbacks. Twitter Spaces are great for quick connections, whereas YouTube is better for a larger audience and more extended conversations.’

Are Twitter Spaces safe?

A Twitter user with the name A(nti)theist, whom I spoke to via WhatsApp, said that Twitter provides better security and privacy than other social networking platforms. However, he said that people should be careful not to offend others, especially when discussing religion. In his view, atheists should avoid attacking religious figures and instead focus on the religion’s ideology.

In the view of Harris Sultan (via WhatsApp), Twitter Spaces may not be the best platform for dissidents. He argues that the platform encourages users to create fake or anonymous accounts, which can be risky for those discussing sensitive topics.

Sultan also spoke about internet censorship in Pakistan. ‘The Pakistani government loves to censor anyone they find critical of religion or the army,’ he explained. ‘They don’t have access to Twitter users’ information. Still, they do regularly ask Twitter to ban accounts they don’t like, which puts the accounts of dissidents under the threat of a permanent ban in Pakistan. Eventually, they do get banned – like my ID @TheHarrisSultan.’

Most of the Twitter users who were interviewed for this article reside outside Pakistan. When asked about the digital security measures they take before going on the internet, most of them said they do not feel themselves in danger because they do not live in Pakistan.

Nuriyah Khan, however, takes her safety very seriously (for this reason, she did not tell me her location). She does not have a LinkedIn account as she does not want people to know where she works and track her down. Instead, she just uses Twitter and YouTube. She has deleted her accounts on every other social media platform, except her private Instagram account.

Blasphemy and the digital world in Pakistan

Yasser Latif Hamdani is a barrister who qualified at Lincoln’s Inn and is now based in Islamabad. When I contacted him via Whatsapp, he told me that the government heavily censors the internet through the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, which is empowered to block content that is deemed un-Islamic or immoral, including materials that may be considered blasphemous or critical of Islam. Hamdani stresses that the internet is heavily controlled through Section 37 of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), which violates the fundamental right to freedom of expression in Pakistan. This section grants the Government unrestricted powers to block access or remove speech not only on the internet, but also as transmitted through any device.

As Hamdani explains: ‘Section 37 of the PECA is used to block content online which is deemed unIslamic or immoral. Online defamation is also a criminal offence under Section 20 of the Act. There are several attempts by successive governments to further restrict social media.’

He also points out that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are the strictest blasphemy laws in the world. ‘What these laws have done is to weaponise blasphemy allegations. Many of the blasphemy cases are just false but that should not be the point. Freedom of expression necessarily includes within its ambit the freedom to offend, but there is absolutely no appreciation of this right because the society is medieval and largely reactionary.’

Hamdani notes that while there is no law against apostasy in Pakistan, hardly anyone will identify as an ex-Muslim. Pakistan’s constitution guarantees freedom to profess, practise and propagate one’s religion to all citizens of Pakistan regardless of their faith, but at present, no distinct category exists for atheists, agnostics or freethinkers.

‘Any speech that is deemed criticism of the Prophet of Islam or Islam itself poses legal risks,’ writes Hamdani. ‘Section 295 ABC especially [the laws relating to blasphemy against religion, the Quran and the Prophet] might be used to target ex-Muslims. Criticism of the government of the day as such is not a crime, and indeed, sedition law was struck down recently. However, criticism of the army or the judiciary might land people in trouble both legally and extralegally.’

Twitter Spaces have given ex-Muslims in Pakistan a safe platform to express themselves and engage with the public on topics that are usually considered taboo in Muslim societies. One of the reasons that such free expression is possible, however, is that only about two per cent of the entire population of Pakistan is present on Twitter.

In real life, on the other hand, the situation for perceived critics of Islam is extremely dangerous. Recently, a Chinese engineer at the Dasu hydropower project in northwestern Pakistan was accused of blasphemy after he highlighted the slow pace of work during Ramadan. In December 2021, a Sri Lankan factory manager in Pakistan was beaten to death and set ablaze by a mob, in an incident reportedly linked to blasphemy.

It is also common in the country for mobs to attack Ahmadi mosques or murder Ahmadiyya Muslims due to their beliefs. In this environment, it is extremely dangerous to speak freely about religion as an ex-Muslim on the internet. In 2017, the government reportedly ‘asked Facebook and Twitter to remove content considered insulting to Islam or Muhammad’. Prior to that, as reported by Shahid, several Facebook pages and accounts of Pakistani ex-Muslims were removed by Facebook on the request of the Pakistani government. Twitter’s better community standards have provided Pakistani ex-Muslims with a platform for assembly and discourse. Time will tell, though, if Spaces will continue to be available to them, or if some may have to bear the consequences of the freedom that they have found there.

*The names of some individuals have been changed on their request.

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The trial of Ashfaq Masih will mean little to people in Britain today. It could be suggested that it means even less in Pakistan, where his alleged crime took place. Masih was a Pentecostal Christian who owned a bicycle repair shop in Lahore, the capital of Punjab province in eastern Pakistan. In 2017, he was arrested following an oral disagreement with a Muslim customer after the latter refused to pay his bill. The man in question, Muhammad Irfan, told Masih not to charge him for the repair to his bicycle as he was a devout Muslim. Masih refused, supposedly telling Irfan that Christ was the true prophet. His lawyer, Riaz Anjum, told Morning Star News, ‘Masih rejected his request, saying he only followed Jesus and wasn’t interested in Irfan’s religious statutes as a Muslim.’ The police charged the 31-year-old with disrespecting the prophet Mohammed. He was to spend the next five years in prison awaiting trial.

When he appeared in court, Masih testified that he had been deceived by the shop owner, Muhammad Ashfaq, and the businessman Muhammad Naveed, who owned a nearby bicycle repair shop. Masih told the court in Lahore that Naveed was jealous of his success and had conspired with Ashfaq to destroy his business. The case was riddled with errors. Irfan, who was the primary witness, failed to show up to court to testify, while according to Masih’s lawyer, statements from other witnesses ‘were contradictory’.

Despite a clear lack of evidence against him, Judge Khalid Wazir sentenced the now 36-year-old to death. On July 4, 2022, Masih was sentenced to death by hanging.*

The tragic case of Masih is no outlier. As reported in Morning Star News, between October 2020 and September 2021, 620 people were murdered in Pakistan for their beliefs. The country ranks second behind Nigeria for the number of Christians killed for their religion. 

Blasphemy, defined as speaking or acting in a way that is critical of or offensive to God, is still prevalent in four out of ten countries in the world. According to an analysis conducted by the Pew Research Centre, of the 198 countries and territories they studied, 79 criminalised blasphemy. Among these, penalties ranged from fines to prison sentences and public lashings.

While this research found blasphemy laws on the statute books on all five continents, the region where these laws were most commonly located was the Middle East and Africa, where 90 percent of the 20 countries studied had laws criminalising blasphemy. It is here that the penalties for blasphemy carry the severest punishments. It is predominantly countries in this region—Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia—that carry the death sentence for blasphemy. 

Britain has officially abolished blasphemy laws—except, it seems, as far as concerns one religion, Islam. I found myself thinking about Masih recently as details of an incident at Wakefield began to emerge. In February, four boys were suspended from Kettlethorpe High School after slightly damaging a copy of the Quran. Rumours were spread—notably by the Labour councillor Usman Ali—that the holy book had been ‘desecrated’. In truth, the book was lightly scuffed, suffering minor damage to the front cover. Still, to placate a vocal minority of Muslim reactionaries, the police were called, and it was recorded as a non-crime hate incident. The 14-year-old autistic boy who had brought it into the West Yorkshire school on a dare was deluged with death threats. It led to his mother effectively begging the local mosque for forgiveness; to complete this shameful act of submission, she was required to cover her hair.   

Just a few miles away from Kettlethorpe is another West Yorkshire school, Batley Grammar, the scene of another moral panic over blasphemy two years ago. It was here that a religious studies teacher was forced to go into hiding after showing his students cartoons of Mohammed during a class about free speech. Once again, religious fundamentalists got involved and showed up outside the school’s gates, causing it to shut down for days. A local Islamic charity, Purpose of Life, published his name online. The Yorkshire Examiner reported that the teacher sought police protection after receiving numerous death threats. To this day, the teacher is said to be in hiding. 

In modern Western society, no one should be prosecuted for blasphemy. Using the threat of imprisonment or death to criticise an idea is the very definition of tyranny. This archaic legislation is like something out of medieval times—or the Old Testament, as it is appropriately called. Unfortunately, incidents like Wakefield are not a new phenomenon. Britain has been heading in an illiberal direction for years. 

The seeds of surrender to Islamist intolerance were first sown 30 years ago with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses. The book’s perceived blasphemy led Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa, effectively condemning the author to death, in 1989; last summer, a New York assailant came disturbingly close to claiming the bounty set on Rushdie’s head. It is worth recalling that the first protest against The Satanic Verses happened not in the streets of Peshawar or across the Middle East, but in Bolton on 2nd December 1988. 

Incidents like this, with their associated threats of violence, arguably show that Islam must be treated differently from other religions. If the UK yields to the demands of religious extremists, it will be sanctioning the spread of a de facto blasphemy law. Freedom of expression and religion are essential in a free and liberal society. The freedom to criticise, question, mock and insult a religion is as important as the freedom of its adherents to practise it. 

Offence can act as a catalyst for social change. In 1976, Denis Lemon, the editor of Gay News, was put on trial for blasphemy for publishing a homoerotic poem about the death of Jesus Christ. The poem by James Kirkup, The Love that Dares To Speak its Name, was included in issue 96 of Gay News and depicted a Roman centurion fantasising about having sex with Christ’s crucified body. Lemon’s subsequent conviction started a debate about blasphemy laws, eventually leading to their abolition in 2008 and expanding freedom of speech for all of us.  

In contrast, since the Masih case, Pakistan has legislated for even stricter controls on blasphemy laws. In January, its National Assembly passed the Criminal Laws (Amendment) Act 2023, increasing the power of the state to impose even more draconian punishments and widening the definition of blasphemy to include insulting figures connected to Mohammed. 

Time will tell if Pakistan will row back on its antiquated constitution. In the meantime, there is much to be done in Britain. Much of the blame has to lie with the moral cowardice of modern-day progressives, who are unwilling to confront religious authoritarianism and defend the values that define a liberal democratic country such as this one. Failure to address this uncomfortable issue has meant that it has been outsourced to the far right. It is a sad indictment of a country in decline.

Worse, the enforcement of blasphemy laws in the UK is a stain on the vast majority of Muslims living here, who are peaceful, law-abiding citizens. Blasphemy laws, de facto or otherwise, infantilise Muslims by robbing them of their agency. It implies they require special rules and regulations to protect their feelings, making them seem incapable of living in a society that upholds liberal values. 

It has been over one hundred years since the death of John William Gott, the last individual imprisoned in Britain for the crime of blasphemy. Yet through our failure to act and speak up in defence of freedom of speech, it may not be long until someone else is put in prison for this ‘crime’. Rights are universal and non-negotiable; you cannot opt out of them. Offence must not be a motivating factor in what people can and cannot say. There is no right to not be offended. These are lessons that contemporary progressives need to learn. Liberty is a wonderful thing, guaranteeing both secular and religious people the freedom to believe what they want. If we wish to live in a free society, we must be free to blaspheme. We owe it to the next generation to keep reinforcing these points. But most of all, we owe it to people like Asfaq Masih. 

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*Correction, 21/5/23: This article originally reported that Asfaq Masih had been ‘executed by hanging’. It has now been amended to state that he was ‘sentenced to death by hanging’. We have not been able to verify whether the sentence has yet been carried out (see further report here).

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‘There’s more than one way to burn a book,’ wrote Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. The case of Roald Dahl, one of the best-known children’s authors of the twentieth century, having a number of his classic books rewritten, is a powerful example of just how true that is today. 

The publisher hired a team to revise and remove all language they deemed offensive. This culminated in extensive alterations being made to some of the writer’s most famous books, as revealed in the report in the Telegraph which broke the story. Puffin brought in sensitivity readers to pore over Dahl’s words and make hundreds of changes to his work—in some cases, adding new passages to justify the author’s use of descriptive adjectives. For example, in The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs now includes the line, ‘There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.’ In other cases, they are simply erased. The sentence, ‘There was something indecent about a bald woman,’ has been removed entirely. These are just two examples of the 59 edits made to just one of Dahl’s books. 

For almost seventy years, Dahl’s stories have enchanted generations of children. The characters he created are some of the most memorable in all of children’s literature. This is partly because he employed a simple literary device: ‘good’ = ‘handsome’, ‘bad’ = ‘ugly’. In his surreal, bifurcated world, Dahl equates physical and moral beauty, evoking the darkly comic tradition of such literary heavyweights as Evelyn Waugh. As Dahl writes in The Twits, ‘A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.’ Part of the pleasure in reading his books was in picturing the many imaginative ways in which he described dispatching the villains. The feeling evoked in reading about their downfall was a kind of gleeful sadness. And Dahl always made sure the good guys were the final winners. 

A majority of the edits have been made to Dahl’s descriptions of the characters’ physical appearance. The word ‘fat’ has been removed from every new edition. For example, Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now ‘enormous’, and Aunt Sponge in James and the Giant Peach is ‘tremendously flabby’ when she used to be ‘terrifically fat’. Meanwhile in The Twits—my all-time favourite childhood story—Mrs. Twit is no longer ‘ugly and beastly’, she is just ‘beastly’. 

Numerous references to gender are also gone. In The Witches, ‘chambermaid’ is now ‘cleaner’, while a woman’s likely profession is changed from ‘cashier’ to ‘top scientist’. It does not stop there. Any reference to race, indirect or otherwise, is gone. We now have a situation where a character turns ‘quite pale’ instead of ‘white’, while Mr. Twit’s monkeys no longer speak a ‘weird African language’, just an ‘African language’.

Dahl is no longer with us—he died in 1990. As such, he did not live to witness the impact that political correctness would have on literature. But novelists are not the only ones who have caught the attention of sensitivity readers. Fiction’s new moral guardians have now taken aim at the world of cookery books.

Last year, The Times reported that Jamie Oliver uses ‘teams of cultural appropriation specialists’ to review his recipes in an attempt to make sure they do not ‘offend anyone’. His ‘empire roast chicken’, which the chef said you can eat with your hands, along with his ‘punchy jerk rice’, were both previously deemed offensive to the Indian and Caribbean communities. In 2018, Labour MP Dawn Butler took to Twitter to voice her opinion. The former shadow equalities minister tweeted, ‘Your jerk rice is not ok. This appropriation from Jamaica needs to stop.’ Initially, the Essex-born chef did the right thing and defended himself, telling Hello! magazine (as reported in the Daily Mail) that ‘authenticity’ was a word that should be used ‘very carefully as most of the things we love…are not what we think they are.’ But the damage was done. By supposedly stealing other people’s cultural heritage for commercial gain, Oliver’s critics were basically accusing him of a bizarre form of culinary colonialism. 

I would argue that Oliver uses ‘cultural appropriation specialists’ nowadays in order to be financially successful. Shielding your work from offence is the latest way to signal your right-on credentials. And it is a big business. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) managers command six figure salaries. Get their approval, and the world is yours – they will even open the door for you. Cookery books are one of the most difficult industries to break into in the publishing world. In 2020, 5,000 cookbooks were published; of these, only one-tenth, (556) sold over 100 copies. The ‘Naked Chef’ has sold more than 48 million books. After his chain of Italian restaurants collapsed, Oliver would seem to be trying to protect his empire. (No chicken pun, I promise). 

With the possible exception of ‘cultural appropriation’, there is no phrase more idiotic in the politically correct lexicon than ‘lived experience’. Yet within just a few years, this meaningless shibboleth has come to dominate the world of literature. 

In recent years, sensitivity readers have become the most talked-about people in publishing. Essentially, freelance copy editors are hired by publishers to review new manuscripts in an attempt to ‘cancel-proof’ new works of literature. They are paid to read books that portray characters that exist outside the ‘lived experience’ of the author. For example, the white Canadian author Paul Carlucci had a publishing deal fall through after a sensitivity reader made a series of objections to his portrayal of an Indigenous character from the Canadian Odawa nation. Carlucci felt that the increasing list of objections would have ruined the character development and narrative flow of the novel, telling The Sunday Times, ‘I got their notes—and they were ridiculous… If I’d followed this advice I would have portrayed an 1830s Canada that is more racially just than it is today. It would have been sanitised.’

Sensitivity readers are a modern version of a centuries-old problem. These self-appointed censors are not a new phenomenon. Literature has had a long and bloody relationship with the written word.  

When William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in 1476, it revolutionised the world of literature. It helped spread ideas and opinions wider and faster than ever before. The response from successive English monarchs was to control it. Long before Orwell, they realised that he who controls language has power. Henry VIII established Crown licensing of the press in 1529. It meant nothing could be published without the express permission of the Star Chamber—a network of judges and privy councillors. Anything critical of the Crown or the Church could be branded treason or seditious libel.

Fifty years after Caxton, William Tyndale printed an English version of the New Testament in Germany. When he brought it to England in 1526, it was immediately proscribed. Ten years later, he had not yet finished his translation of the Old Testament when he was captured in Antwerp, before being tried, strangled and burnt at the stake for the crime of heresy. Yet just three years later, Henry VIII split from Rome and founded the Church of England, thereby giving his approval for an English text.

In 1663, John Twyn was hanged, drawn and quartered at what is now Marble Arch for printing—not writing—a book justifying people’s right to rebel against injustice. The system of Crown licensing finally ended in 1695. All it took were the deaths of a few revolutionaries and a passionate plea from John Milton, set against the backdrop of a protracted civil war. Give me liberty or give me death!

As history has shown, our relationship with the state has often been bloody, especially when we have fought so hard for our civil liberties. But it is not just the state that imposes top-down collective control over our right to speak freely. Censorship can often come from other, less abstract relationships much closer to home. A lighter touch was required. Think less iron fist, more velvet glove. 

When we reach the 18th century, we enter a new, less violent era of censorship. In 1779, Frances Burney wrote a play called The Witlings. The comedy satirised modern society. Despite this, it was not performed or printed for almost two hundred years. It was censored and suppressed by what she called her ‘two daddies’, her father, Dr Charles Burney, and her ‘elderly friend and literary censor’, Samuel Crisp. Censorship had found a new home in Georgian high society. 

Henrietta (known as Harriet) and Thomas Bowdler found themselves, somewhat ironically, contributing to the English language when they edited The Family Shakespeare in 1807. They went through some twenty works of the Bard and removed all ‘words and expressions…which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.’ The practice became so widespread that it led to the creation of a new verb: ‘bowdlerise’, that is, to alter and remove offensive language from a literary work – thereby reducing its creative impact. 

As censorship became acceptable among the upper middle classes, it also increased in frequency. It was still going strong last century; James Joyce’s Ulysses, which turned 100 last month, was banned in the United States before Joyce finished writing it. Meanwhile, in 1960, the Old Bailey—a court normally reserved for the most serious cases of murder and violence—found itself presiding over the ultimate crime of words: giving offence. Penguin Books was put on trial for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and was eventually acquitted. Yet there is a tragic irony to all this. Puffin is a subsidiary of Penguin Books. Some sixty years after the Lady Chatterley debacle, Puffin is now doing a similar thing to Roald Dahl – proving that we have not learned anything from history. 

Contrary to popular opinion, Dahl has not been ‘cancelled’: the original text will continue to be published, after a climb-down by Puffin. But that misses the point. The fact that the publisher at first simply tried to replace the originals, and the public outcry against this move, shows how much we take freedom of expression for granted. The censorship of all art, literature, painting and music is an attempt to eradicate the past and impose a single, politically driven narrative on history. Worse, giving someone permission to do this is nothing short of cultural vandalism. It shows a profound ignorance of history and a tragic misunderstanding of liberty that fewer and fewer of us seem to share. Such ignorance is what led to Edward Colston’s statue being tipped into Bristol harbour. 

There are signs of a pushback. Later this year, Carlucci’s novel will be published by Swift Press, a new, independent publisher specialising in cancelled authors and books that other publishers will not touch. Swift Press sold 100,000 books within the first nine months of 2021. Scrolling through its list of authors, one notable name stands out: Kate Clanchy. Sensitivity readers censored her Orwell prize-winning memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Despite the prize, the book caused controversy after critics accused her of using racial stereotypes and ableist language. She eventually parted company with her original publisher, Picador, and had the book reissued by Swift.

Roald Dahl was a wonderful writer whose books have now sold in excess of 250 million copies worldwide. Children love them because they are drawn to the surreal and the grotesque. For them, to see authoritarian adults in all their physical and moral hideousness can have a certain rebellious charm. Dahl’s writing can be a means of catharsis.

Children quickly learn the difference between literal and other interpretations of words. As such, Puffin’s attempted censorship is an insult to both their creativity and sophistication. With these edits, children are being taught not to see the ugliness, the strangeness and sometimes even the horror of the world around them – to pretend it does not exist. That is a story truly more sinister than anything Dahl could create. 

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Freethought, open enquiry and free speech – or ‘free discourse’, as it has elegantly been called – are often concerned with the critical and dispassionate examination of controversial subjects. Arguably, there is no freethought worth the name unless these subjects can be discussed. Not to discuss them, out of fear of causing offence, is tacitly to accept the imposition of ‘blasphemy’ laws or taboos on whole areas, not just of abstract ideas, but of our lives and humanity. Granted that they should be discussed, the question is how.

In 2022, the Freethinker was concerned with developing ways of approaching difficult topics, as far as possible in a civilised, clear, intelligent and objective manner, but without fear of offending those who want to impose silence on anyone who disagrees with them. We shall continue with this approach in 2023.

Below is a selection of articles on six of last year’s themes that were most controversial, sensitive or liable to be censored: Islam, blasphemy, the trans debate, race, the pandemic, and China.

Islam

Silence of the teachers – by Nath Jnan

The ‘Women’s Revolution’ – by two activists in Iran

The radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK: an ongoing problem? – by Khadija Khan

The price of criticising Islam in northern Nigeria

Blasphemy, freedom of religion and freedom of speech

The secular religion of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – by Mienke de Wilde and Paul Cliteur

Secularism and the struggle for free speech – by Stephen Evans

Jesus and Mo on civil rights – cartoon by Mohammed Jones

Blasphemy Month at the Freethinker

The trans debate

The falsehood at the heart of the trans movement – by Eliza Mondegreen

‘A godless neo-religion’ – interview with Helen Joyce

Race

Race: the most difficult subject of all? – interview with Inaya Folarin Iman

The pandemic and civil liberties

‘The defence of liberty is a state of mind’ – interview with Jonathan Sumption, Part I

‘The light of democratic scrutiny was switched off for two years’ – interview with Adam Wagner

When science and civil liberties clash – by Helen Dale

‘To protect us all’: the UK government’s contempt for Parliament during the Covid pandemic – by David McGrogan

China

Jackboots in Manchester – by Simon Cheng

Hong Kong exodus, 2021-22 – by James Lin Shan Hon

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