Dalrymple has an excellent essay on hate speech laws in the Summer, 2011 edition of The Salisbury Review that amounts to a strong defense of America’s first Constitutional amendment:
…hatred is by far the most powerful and durable of political emotions. One’s feelings for one’s political enemies are warm and lively, while those for one’s political friends are cool and torpid. It is obvious that the rich and the foreigner are in general hated much more than the poor and the fellow countryman are loved; while hatred of oppression is much stronger than love of freedom, especially when it is other people’s freedom. To hate injustice is easy, to love justice, or even to know what it is, is difficult. Hatred, in short, makes politics, and much else besides, go round; and while Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, he might just as well have spoken of the hatred caused by small differences.Nor is hatred exhaustible. On the contrary, it is indefinitely expandable. It often increases with its own expression, becoming more virulent with every word uttered; it is not a fixed quantity like fluid in a bottle. It is very easy, as most people must surely know, to work oneself up into a fury of indignation and insensate rage merely by dwelling on some slight or humiliation. Above all, hatred is fun: it gives a meaning to life to those who otherwise lack one.The idea therefore that hate speech can be banned, is of course, is [sic] a sign of impatience with the intractability of the human condition. It wants to legislate people into kindness, decency and fellow-feeling. It appeals to the sort of people who forget (or never knew) that supposed solutions to human problems frequently throw up further problems that are greater than that which the solution is designed to solve. For its protagonists, it has the advantage of creating a bureaucracy of virtue with pension arrangements to match.
There follows a step-by-logical-step analysis of the difficulty of defining oppression and of delineating hate speech from legitimate commentary, and the question of the effect of one’s words vs. one’s intent. His conclusion:
The American approach is best (of course, American universities, with their speech codes, are trying to subvert it). We have laws against incitement to riot and other crimes, and laws against insulting behaviour. That should be enough.
All Salisbury Review content is behind a paywall, with no links to individual pieces. $16 buys you a one-year online-only subscription, and an individual online issue is $3.
Has anyone signed up to the Salisbuty
review? If you had could you tell me what is it like and would you recommend it?
Thank you.
Damo, it is excellent.
Damo, I would definitely recommend it. It is extremely literate, heavily focused on art and book reviews. Dalrymple has two pieces in the latest issue (going to post the other one soon), and they are some of his best work lately, which tells me something about the publication.
Here is the table of contents for the Summer, 2011 issue:
Articles
4 A Day out in Luton
Jane Kelly
6 Horses on the M1
Brian Ridley
7 America and Britain’s Child Protection Systems
Stephen Baskerille
10 The Bright Side of the Right
Nigel Jones
12 Nuclear Panic
Christie Davies
14 Ulster Unravels?
Charles Bennett
Arts & Books
39 Ian Bradley
on Religious Victorians
40 Celia Haddon
on Animal Cruelty
41 Anthony Daniels
on Kenneth Minogue
43 David Conway
on Immortality
44 Bernadeta Tendyra
on Poland in India
46 Penelope Tremayne
on the Levant
47 Richard Packer
on Feminist Failures
48 Merrie Cave
on Roy Kerridge
50 A W Purdue
on Gavin Stamp
51 Christopher Arkell
on Spiritual Collapse
52 Television: Myles Harris
on Al Jazeera
54 Jonathan Paquette
on Classical Realism
56 Nigel Jarrett
on Neville Cardus
57 In Short
Columns
32 Conservative Classic — 43
A Field Guide to the English Country Parson
34 Reputations — 33
Charles Morgan
36 Roy Kerridge
37 Eternal Life
Peter Mullen
18 A Plateful of Platitudes
Parveen Chhibber
19 The Cosmic Reaper
Caroline Martin
21 Hating the Truth
Theodore Dalrymple
23 Politically correct Shakespeare
Ralph Berry
25 Woe unto thee O Land
Margaret Brown
28 Death Knell for Egyptian Antiquities
Jonathan Tokeley
38 Letters
As unlikely as it might seem, the Salisbury Review was at the centre of a furious debate in the mid-1980s over an article written by Ray Honeyford who was a headmaster at a school in Bradford who got into trouble with his politically correct masters regarding the education of the local Asian (mostly Pakistani) population:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3654888/Education-and-Race-an-Alternative-View.html
Thanks for the response folks. If I sign up would I have access to their archives?
Dalrymple has written an essay eloquently praising Honeyford as “The Man Who Predicted The Race Riots.” He says that a grammar school system would allow highly intelligent children from all races and ethnic groupings to start making friends with each other at 11, thus imparting mutual respect among the future elite of the country. Honeyford wanted the children of strict Muslim families to have equal opportunities to education, so was in fact an anti-racist. He knew it was a criminal offence for their parents to forcibly keep them at home from the age of 11-12, often working long hours to supplement the family income, to prevent them being Westernised and thus “depraved” or “soiled”. He tried to protect children from this injustice by reporting their absence from school but leftist council chiefs preferred not to interfere in their “culture”.
It’s in “Our Culture, What’s Left Of It.”
Thank you for the link to that Ray Honeyford piece. The TD essay defending him, by the way, is available here:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_2_oh_to_be.html
The situation is not quite identical here in Australia but there are many similarities. The children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese migrants, whose culture is indelibly stamped with the virtues of a traditional education, work hard and thrive in the New South Wales selective system where I teach; their parents are only too aware of the benefits of a real education (as are the kids, to varying degrees). The children of Middle Eastern migrants (not necessarily Muslim, by the way, there are plenty of Maronite Christians among them as well) languish in the godforsaken comprehensive schools in Sydney’s west and will clamour racism at the drop of a hat, while the Chinese and Korean kids at my school only ever do so as a self-deprecating joke.
Hope you enjoyed your time here!
I live not far from North Strathfield…it’s become quite gentrified recently. There’s quite a large migrant presence in the wider Strathfield area, mainly Koreans and Chinese. And they, for me, represent a shining example of successful integration here. As a rule (obviously there will be a few exceptions) they work hard (much harder than we Anglo Aussies, truth be told), obey the law, and are very keen for their kids to succeed rather than to get stuck in a ghetto. Their kids, who I’m in contact with every day, are clearly only too happy to be considered Australians. And they maintain the important and valuable aspects of their own culture, but have no desire to flaunt them or use them as a stick to beat others over the head with.
The Lebanese and Sudanese communities have been a little less successful (and the failure is partly that of the existing Australian community, of course), but they and we have still managed pretty well on the whole.
Incidentally, I’m not saying this out of national chauvinism, but merely to suggest that integration (within the education system and elsewhere) can still work with some give and take on both sides. Unfortunately it seems in Europe at the moment that all the give is expected to come from the existing population of the country in question.
“The idea therefore that hate speech can be banned, is of course, is [sic] a sign of impatience with the intractability of the human condition. It wants to legislate people into kindness, decency and fellow-feeling.”
Tell me about it!! Bastards… bastards! bastards! bastards!!