Freedom of speech has toppled tyrants and propelled humanity forward. We lose it at our peril.
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.
