I would pause, for at least a few seconds, if I found myself arguing that my freedom of speech was in a state of extreme jeopardy in this, my column in a national newspaper. The historian Niall Ferguson, it seems, did not pause when making such an argument in his column in the Sunday Times this week. For Ferguson, speaking to the masses online and in print, the ability for him and his fellow travellers to freely speak their mind is in such dire jeopardy that the only answer is to set up a defence treaty, a form of Nato for academics who experience backlash when they express their views.
The people it would protect, he argued, include Roger Scruton, the academic sacked from an unpaid government post for expressing views he’d previously expressed in an interview with the New Statesman; Jordan Peterson, the bestselling author, who had the offer of a Cambridge visiting fellowship revoked after posing with a fan wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “I am a proud Islamophobe”; and Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist under investigation for sexual harassment (which he denies). That Fryer has not received a wave of support from academic colleagues Ferguson blames on political correctness.
Surely, anyone accused of sexual harassment in the workplace should be investigated, regardless of their politics – so lumping in Fryer with other people criticised for their views muddies Ferguson’s already weak argument and risks appearing to argue that complainants are politically motivated.
But that aside, the Venn diagram of men arguing that freedom of speech is the central, precious tenet of “western civilisation”, and those who scream bloody murder the second they are subject to any criticism, or are forced to bear any responsibility for their speech, is a single perfect circle.
Free speech does not occur without responsibility: to use the traditional metaphor, if you scream “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, you will be culpable when a stampede ensues. If your arguments are racist, sexist or homophobic, the people you attack will rightly point out your prejudice and query whether your professional position is compromised by holding such prejudices. A government certainly should not claim to represent all people equally, then appoint people who hold incendiary views about certain groups or communities.
Two things are occurring simultaneously that grate with Ferguson, Scruton and their ilk. First, the growth of internet access and the proliferation of social media means that more people than ever can both access your arguments, and argue against them. A greater number of people can read your arguments, but also interrogate your sources and approach, and then proffer their own take.
That means more people will naturally disagree: interpretations are myriad and the flattening of power structures to a small extent online means an individual can find their audience with relative ease, without having to get published by Penguin.
Second, a new generation of academics, writers, journalists, historians and readers is emerging and, as with each generation, critiquing the status quo and the arguments and theories taken for granted by their elders. As ideas about colonialism and nationalism shift, as well as traditional attitudes to gender, sexuality, race, class and ethnicity, they become sites of intellectual contestation between generations.
This can be uncomfortable for anyone accustomed to unquestioned status and veneration: but that’s life, if you believe speech should be free. For years, privileged men have been able to frame themselves as agents provocateurs – often spouting the kind of opinions a roaring, angry drunk on the night bus might, but with a plummy accent, an Oxford degree, and an overreliance on antiquated vocabulary – in columns in national newspapers. Their fury is not that they have been silenced – they have not – but that their victims have argued back, and they have been forced to bear responsibility for their words.
For centuries, powerful people have been allowed to pour their prejudices freely into the public discourse. Their free speech is still not remotely under threat – the pages of many newspapers globally, and the volley of abuse anyone other than a white, straight man on social media receives daily, should assure them of that. But for the first time, the people targeted by the right, especially the academic right, are fighting back. With free speech comes responsibility: borrowing the language and ideology of the far right, but cloaking it in a style lifted from Brideshead Revisited, fools no one.
• Dawn Foster is a Guardian columnist
