This is an extract from A Heretic’s Manifesto thanks to Spiked:
Words hurt, they say. This is the ideological underpinning to so much censorship today – the idea that words wound, as a punch might wound. The imagery of violence is deployed in almost every call for censure in the 21st-century West. Speech has been reimagined as aggression, hence “microaggressions”. People speak of feeling “assaulted” by speech. “Words, like sticks and stones, can assault; they can injure; they can exclude” – that’s the thesis of Words That Wound, an influential tome published in 1993. Activists claim to feel “erased” by controversial or disagreeable utterances. Trans campaigners speak darkly of “trans erasure”, as if words from the other side of the divide, the speech of gender-critical feminists, might contain that most awesome and nullifying power of genocide.
Words make us feel “unsafe”, people say. Witness the rise and rise of Safe Spaces on university campuses, designed to ensure students’ psychic security against the terrible threat of their hearing an idea they disagree with. Safe Spaces recreate the state of childhood, complete with colouring books and ice cream, speaking to how determinedly some long to retreat from the adult world of hurtful chatter and brickbats.
The United Nations wrings its hands over “hate speech and real harm” (my emphasis). The “weaponisation of public discourse for political gain” can lead to “stigmatisation, discrimination and large-scale violence”, it says. Better keep a check on those hurtful words. One US university even maintains a list of “words that hurt“. It includes the phrase “You guys”. That scandalous utterance “erases the identities of people who are in the room” and “generalise[s] a group of people to be masculine”. Shut it down. Silence that act of violence.
Both the formal and informal punishment of words rests on the belief that they can wound. Laws in Europe claim to guard people from speech that is alarming, distressing, hurtful. The overlords of social media censor speech for “the wellbeing of our community“. Everywhere the cry goes up: words injure, they can cut like a knife, they can be used as “weapons to ambush, terrorise, wound, humiliate and degrade“. And just as the law protects us from such dreadful things when they are done to our bodies with fists and kicks, surely it should also protect us from them when they are done to our minds with words and ideas. Surely our psychic wellbeing should be accorded as much respect by the powers-that-be as our physical integrity is.
The temptation of many of us who believe in freedom of speech, in the liberty of all to utter their beliefs and ideas, is to damn this claim that “words hurt” as a libel against public discourse. As a slippery untruth that is cynically designed to depict words as all-powerful, as containing so much energy, so much heat, that they can lay waste to self-esteem and even make us fret over erasure, over being wiped out entirely by that sore comment or that disturbing idea. Actually, we often say, words are just words. They’re not sticks, they’re not stones, they’re words. They won’t kill you, they won’t hurt you, you’ll be fine. They say words are a force of nature like no other, we say: “Relax. It’s just speech.”
We need to stop doing this. We need to stop countering the new censors by accusing them of exaggerating the power and the potency of words. We need to stop responding to their painting of speech as a dangerous, disorientating force by defensively pleading that words don’t wound because they’re just words. We need to stop reacting to their branding of speech as a weapon, as a tool of ambush and degradation, by effectively draining speech of its power and saying: “It’s only speech.” As if speech were a small thing, almost an insignificant thing, more likely to contain calming qualities than upsetting ones, more likely to help us overcome conflict rather than stir it up, more likely to offer a balm to your soul than to stab at it as a knife might stab at your body.
For when we do this, we play down the power of words. And that includes the power of words to wound. Words do wound. It’s true. Words hurt people, they hurt institutions, they hurt belief systems. Words make churches tremble and ideologies quake. Words inflict pain on priests and princes and ideologues. Words upend the social order. Words rip away the comforting ideas people and communities might have wrapped themselves in for decades, centuries perhaps. Words ambush the complacent and degrade the powerful. Words cause discord, angst, even conflict. Isn’t every revolution in history the offspring of words? Of ideas? Words do destabilise, they do disorientate. People are right to sometimes feel afraid of words. Words are dangerous. When they say words wound, we should say: “I agree.”
