Freedom of speech, we are often told by those with access to a dictionary of quotations, does not extend to the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre. Sensible-sounding stuff, you might think, if a little hackneyed. Well. The remark is originally credited to the supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr and, says Richard King, "given the analogy's provenance, its ubiquity is hard to fathom": "The case on which Holmes happened to be ruling when these words found their way through his imperial moustache had nothing to do with shouting fire but with a Yiddish-speaking socialist who'd distributed an anti-conscription leaflet to military draftees in 1919. The socialist was being sent to jail not for causing a stampede on Broadway but for protesting against US involvement in the first world war!"
It's a good caution against leaning on "common sense" or, worse, on something so seductively simple as a metaphor, when considering the way we police public debate. There's wide agreement that incitement to violence is a no-no. Where things get fuzzier is when it comes to so-called "hate speech". Is calling somebody a "nigger", a "kike" or a "fag", say, a coded incitement to violence? Or is it an act of symbolic violence (violence against the identity) that civilised society should regard as intolerable?
These are deep waters. King is a coolly thoughtful analyst of how, through 50-odd years of identity politics, these ideas have come into play. I especially admired his brisk and unhysterical summary of the history of political correctness: yes, it existed; no, it is not what the right has taken it for. In particular, he shows how giving or taking offence – a shift from thinking to feeling, and from doing to being – has been weaponised in our political discourse as never before: "In short, politics is increasingly a matter not of reasoned argument but of identification."
Self-pity, as he puts it, has become the new self-esteem. The Tea Party in the US offers a fish-in-a-barrel instance of the way that the reactionary right now draws from the identity-politics playbook set out by its opponents. King quotes the American political analyst Thomas Frank approvingly on the way "these hymners of Darwinian struggle, of the freedom to fail, of competition to the death, advance their war on the world by means of tearful weepy-woo".
We can see a shift from what you might call the situational to the ontological – from what you do to what you are – in the way that offence is now parsed: I have been wilfully misconstrued; you made an offensive remark that needed to be called out; he is a bigot.
A key point, says Frank, is that we conflate "tolerance" with "acceptance". The former opens a space for disagreement; the latter closes it. Hence the situation to which our own Nick Cohen often points, in which liberals hesitate to denounce misogyny in non-western cultures for fear of appearing racist.
While King's book takes the long view philosophically its sociological focus is on the here and now. King begins with an account of Richard Dawkins and a creationist pastor having a silverback grunt-off about the existence of God and in short order runs us through a greatest hits of offence-related shitstorms from the last few years: the batty American pastor with interesting facial hair who threatened to burn the Qur'an (remember him?); the Rushdie affair; the rise of the Tea Party; the row about the cartoons of Muhammad; the other row about the cartoons of Muhammad…
King's is essentially a straightforward argument – sensible, philosophically robust and aggressively stated. His prime concern, boiled down, is that if we start legislating for hurt feelings – even recognising that hurt feelings can actually cost lives – we are on a slippery slope. Courtesy, in other words, needs to be voluntary to be meaningful, and the notion of harmful or "assaultive" speech is less controversial than it ought to be. If there's a weakness in King's case, it's that his distinction between belief and identity is sometimes too rigid, too theoretical. Is a religion a set of ideas or an identity? It is, unfortunately, both.
There's a slight grinding of gears between King as analyst and King as polemicist, too. When the makers of a film of Monica Ali's Brick Lane were intimidated into moving filming away from Brick Lane itself, for instance, and the government failed to intervene, it was "nothing less than a national disgrace"; we meet the "filthy English Defence League", "repellent reactionaries", the "abominable" Glenn Beck and so on. Nothing many of us will object to in the sentiments – but it tips the book in the direction of an op-ed column. It's stronger when it's cooler.
But no surprise that something this contemporary is a bit on the journalistic side. At the time of writing, an article wondering whether "no platform" – originally a tool of the anti-fascist movement – is being used to suppress legitimate debate has sparked a vicious Twitter war. Both sides see themselves as victims. Are TERFS ("Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists") bullying trans people? Or are trans people bullying TERFs? You pays your money…
This is a book about right now. The question of what is sayable, and what should be, has seldom been such a live one.
