Judge Dennis Davis
To Ban or Not to Ban: Literature, Law and Freedom of Speech
Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer - To Ban or Not to Ban: Literature, Law and Freedom of Speech
- Great. So just first of all to say hi to everyone and hope everybody’s well wherever you are on the Little Blue Planet. And just to say what Dennis and I are going to focus, we are doing it together today, as you know, and as always, love working with Dennis and the team, and thanks to Lauren and to Sean has been a quite a joint effort, and Judy also in terms of our PowerPoint. So thanks to everyone again and welcome. Dennis and I going to focus on this question of Heine, Heinrich Heine, who I know Judy has been mentioning in some of her lectures over the last while, the remarkable German poet, one of the greatest, not only German, but globally, and his amazing phrase. And also then the question which we’re going to focus on today, is Heine, which came out from one of his very early works, “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn people.” And we have to remember that he’s saying this in the 19th century, long before the obvious, the obvious and the obvious horror of the Holocaust.
So it’s an extraordinary phrase, an extraordinary notion for a poet, for anybody of therefore that matter. What does he really mean? And then we are going to go into the question of to ban or not to ban, free speech, law, and literature, which is a huge topic. And you know, obviously Dennis and I could focus on that for many sessions. We are going to tease out hopefully a few aspects, which in a sense concur less around a couple of essential ideas in a way of trying to imagine how does this have a conversation with us today, and why is it important again today as it is to history. One important phrase is from Stephen Hawking, and I love this phrase of his, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” And what Hawking really means, is the illusion of understanding, the illusion of knowing. You know, I know it, and I get it, I do, et cetera, I believe it.
You know, whether I believe the sky is green or I believe that tall people are better than short people, I believe the left hand is better than the right, whatever. I believe that orange hair is better than green hair, and I know it. So it, it’s in a sense, the illusion of knowledge of what Hawking means is when we have such faith and belief and nothing can question, nothing can challenge, certainly not satirise or make us laugh at ourselves in the gentle sense of the word. Nothing can critique us or challenge us, and we don’t brook debate. So Hawking is alluding to when we are so patriotic to any illusion of knowledge, obviously anti-vaxxers at the moment. It’s an obvious thing globally, which is, you know, in the 21st century, quite a remarkable phenomenon. But not only that, many other notions throughout history and in our own times as well, which may not be quite as obvious as that example.
Foucault, the great French philosopher, spoke about all cultures and communities need a theory of knowledge and they buy into that theory of knowledge. We may call it communism, capitalism, socialism, social welfare state, we may call it liberal democracy, human rights, whatever, you know, good and bad, right or wrong in a mixture. Once we buy into a theory of knowledge, what Harari calls a set of narratives, by which we will agree to live by, then we can buy and do what the society wants us to do with that theory of knowledge. And Hawking in a way, for me builds on Foucault’s idea of, it’s not just ignorance or stupidity, it’s the illusion of knowledge. And that’s dangerous when we think we know all, and that’s it, full stop. No, we will not brook debate, question, challenge, possible new ideas, which may or may not be accurate. What Newton said about gravity stays forever. So when Einstein has different ideas about gravitational space time and other forces and so on cannot be accepted. And so we can get so many other ideas, as we all know. So we are going to focus on this idea of illusion of knowledge and how that links to the banning and burning of books. And why? Why is it that so many power structures over history and today insist on banning, suppressing, and worse, burning of books, which ultimately leads, as Heine was suggesting to the burning of peoples, not literally, at least the banning, the suppression, the killing, not only in Afghanistan nowadays, but anywhere. Okay, and why, therefore, what can we say today that holds onto something that is so important that has been fought for over centuries, especially over the last couple of centuries during the enlightenment, but going way back to ancient times.
Okay, so we are going to start with a little bit of, I’m going to give a bit of a history and context to some, if you like, some surprising and different books that have been banned or burnt briefly over the last couple of centuries in history. Just a few of them. And then Dennis will take over and speak in terms of Heine’s quote specifically, and a couple of fantastic ideas that have come out of that. And then we go on to looking at the notion of consequences that it has for us today and the thoughts of two of the great contemporary satirists of our times, John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson, and some of the ideas which we’ll talk. So it’s obviously about control, if you like, in contemporary jargon, hacking the mind, controlling the mind, not only the Hitlerian approach, but the power of the word, the power of speech, the power of the written word to dictate what is right, what is wrong, what is acceptable, what isn’t, what is moral, what is immoral, to reduce everything to a binary choice, to simplify it for the human mind and hence the prejudice of edificator and superior.
And the other is inferior results from that simplicity of a binary choice being set up when we have this polemic, and we have obvious examples, you know, over time, and then, which we don’t have is enough time, unfortunately today. But social media and how it works today, where everything is entertainment, everything is a performance of the inner self. The inner self can be performed in social media in any way all the time. So not only the politician as entertainer, but it’s ourselves as entertainer through social media. Whether it’s a decree cheerfulness that we perform on social media or whether it’s any other aspect of life, it’s the internal world made public performance. It’s an extraordinary change in human evolution in society. But that’s, I think needs, would need another whole series of lectures, perhaps today the phrase has come about, you know, all is entertainment, all is performance to take over from the phrase in the book of Saul, “All is vanity.” Well, it’s vanity through performance and through entertaining. Shakespeare’s great phrase about the question of the debater, the challenging individuals in our times, the satirist, the artist, the writer.
Not only it can be the political leader, that sets the morals and so on. “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” Well, the argument is we need turbulent priests, whether in satire or in serious. What happens when a society does not allow them for whatever reason? And then in addition, later today, Dennis and I are going to talk about a few personal examples from our lives at university or in our cultures, just to give a sense of the level of what is really going on from both the left, the extreme left, and the extreme right as they tried to, if you like, colonise the narrative and force us to interpret polemic between the two extremes. Okay, we all know about “Lady Chatterly” and Joyce’s “Ulysses”, the bannings in America and England, Australia, elsewhere in the world. So I’m not going to talk about some of those very well-known examples, but others. Okay, historical context. This is the burning of the books by the Nazis in the early 1930s, which you all know about. Very powerful memorial in Berlin, which is very evocative, Jewish, not only Jewish, but many authors globally. And not only in terms of literary scholars or fiction, but obviously, you know, from Einstein to Freud, Jewish or of many other kinds. Thomas Mann, so many, so many that we all know. Might be interested to know that from 1929 to 1965 in America, “Lady Chatterley” was banned, and in England.
I’m going to talk about the less obvious countries we know about the obvious dictatorships, “The Naked and the Dead” by Norman Mailer banned for many years in most of the English-speaking countries. The remarkable book by him, you know, about post-war, post-Second World War, interestingly, Aldous Huxley’s, “Brave New World” and in Canada for a long time, England, America, Australia, elsewhere. Gandhi, books on poetry, books that Gandhi wrote, and many others banned by the British authorities in India before Indian independence in the late 1940s. In China, “Alice in Wonderland” is banned for many, many years. It’s not, it’s been unbanned. Why? Because the Chinese authorities thought that it would be a disgrace and a lie to teach children that human and animals both had access to language. “Alice in Wonderland” is banned for that reason, was in China. “Madam Bovary” was banned in France for many years, shortly after the publication, one of the great novels of all time. See now, “Madam Bovary”? Basically, you know, it’s a married woman who’s bored, frustrated, wants some excitement, life and not only bored, but profound frustration in her life and her, as she’s trapped in her situation, not only in marriage but in the culture and work, and in many other contexts in life, banned. A trial is held in France, it’s overturned.
Believe it or not, Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein” was banned in South Africa during Apartheid as indecent. Langston Hughes, a children’s book. Children’s book with cartoons called “The First Book of Africa” was banned in South Africa, portraying a positive image of black persons. Voltaire was banned, his books were burned, not only banned, by the Bourbon Monarchy in Spain after the Spanish Inquisition and were banned for many, many years and other countries. Hemingway, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, banned in Spain, in Ireland and many other countries for many years. Simone de Beauvoir, in the 20th century, under Franco, her book was banned and any mention of her banned because she would propagate feminism in Spain in the middle half of the 20th century. Orwell’s “Animal Farm” in the whole of surveyed Russia until pretty recently, banned. In Spain under Franco and many others banned. Thomas Payne “The Rights of Man”, banned up until the late 1790s and Payne himself were charged with treason for supporting the French Revolution.
And should he have stepped shores in England, he would’ve been executed for treason. In America, “Canterbury Tales”, Chaucer, from the 1400’s, banned sections of it until 1959. Sections were rewritten, adapted, and it’s still only allowed to be studied in various parts of the states if certain sections are left out or rewritten. Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”, more than 500 years old. “Moll Flanders” banned in America, Daniel Defoe novel, 1722 and then unbanned in 1959. Voltaire’s “Candide” was only unbanned in 1959. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, because it was pro being anti-slavery, banned. “The Grapes of Wrath”, Steinbeck. And so the story goes on, and forgive me, I’m choosing, you know, certain works which may surprise me and all of us because we would not expect it in our liberal democracies, which we celebrate and I celebrate and embrace profoundly compared to many of the horrific dictatorships around the world. But it shows, the aim is to show, first of all, it’s fascinating ‘cause you see what’s really taboo in a society and what a society is threatened by and why. When you look at it from the outside and you look at it with the, of course, with the standpoint of history. Chinese philosophy books. In 2013 BC, the Chinese Emperor at the time killed hundreds and hundreds of scholars and writers and he burnt them and burnt their books because he felt that they were against him and his wonderful imperial state in China. The story goes on and on.
The first books in braille in 1842, the officials at the School of the Blind in Paris, ordered by the, they were ordered by the director, a gentleman called Dufau, to burn the books written in new braille. Poetry written by the great Persian-Arab poet from the 8th century was banned and his books were ordered to be burnt in 2001 in Egypt. And 6,000 books of poetry were burnt in Egypt. “Harry Potter” has been threatened with bannings from America to Australia, to the Soviet, to England, to just everywhere because it shows witches for children. And how does that go against certain religions of the West. New Mexico in Charleston 2006, they’re threatened to burn JK Rowling’s books. Certainly not teachers. Believe it or not, “The Diary of Anne Frank”, they demanded in the state of Texas, it was demanded to take it off the textbook syllabus because it was seen as “a downer and depressing to teach students, kids”. JK Rowling’s books have been burnt because of her comments on Twitter about Donald Trump. In Poland in 2019, some Catholic priests and others burnt “Harry Potter” in Gdansk. In Washington during the war of 1812, the British purposely went into Washington, burned the Library of Congress, made sure the books were burnt, and then used those books that were still left to burn the US capitol down. Okay, I’ll give you a few examples from the liberal democracies that we all love and are part of which we have to protect in so many ways. Not only the obvious, horrific dictatorships of elsewhere, this is a quick image of the symbol of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, advocating book burning.
As you can see, the burning of the books goes way back. This is in the seventies in Chile, the burning of books by the Pinochet government, which was threatened by them, of course, satirical books, political treatises, liberal, et cetera. This is the example I gave from China. This is a 19th century drawing of that ancient Chinese from the 213 BC, the Chinese emperor who burnt all the books and burnt all the scholars with their books. Okay, this is a copy here, this is in Yad Vashem, and this is, these are some of the books that were burnt by the Nazis in the early 1930s, and this is an exhibition in Yad Vashem. This is a play done fairly recently in England by the playwright Howard Brenton called “The Romans in Britain.” And it was objected to and Mary White, there were quite a few people in London at the time who tried to have the play banned because of nudity and obscenity, whatever, basically about the Romans coming in and conquering Britain, et cetera, et cetera, as a metaphor for colonialism and other things today or in the past. And do you know how the court case was thrown out? Because the witnesses who in the audience watching the play were sitting further back and what they thought were live penises being shown on stage were actually the actor’s thumbs. And when they admitted that in court, it was thrown out. But the mere thought of taking something like this, can you imagine the mindset that is so threatened to take something like that and all these other things, poetry of the 8th century in Egypt, wherever, to court to ban and so on. The human impulse to reduce things to a polemic of right and wrong, good and bad.
And I know the answers, I have the illusion of knowledge and I’m the font of knowledge. And of course power cannot be threatened and so on, if we obviously translated to society. Now, an interesting example is that in Israel for a while, “Oliver Twist” was, they tried to ban in Israel, “Oliver Twist” of Dickens because Fagin was perceived as anti-Semitic. Ironically, “Oliver Twist” and Dickens were banned under the Nazis because it had a Jew as a main character. So I try to show that we have to be honest, whether it’s Israel or certainly not equating with any other country. South Africa, more than, you know, a country originally obviously. To show how absurd when you look at this all together, it’s, you start to feel this is mad. Or is it? Is it to serve power? Is it to, are there rarely areas that should be banned but burnt? Why go to the extreme of burning? You know, it’s enough to tear out pages. “The Last Temptation of Christ”. They wanted to ban it in Israel in case it offended Christians who lived there or would come to visit Mussolini. What is the, one of the main things that he fights to have banned, which he does in Mussolini’s Italy. It’s the Marx Brothers “Duck Soup”, satire on dictatorship, always the satirist’s first, and the political writers first, the so-called serious writers come a bit later. Norway, Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” banned until 1980. The BBC was originally going to fund Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”. With 48 hours to go, they were all in Tunisia ready to start filming and Cleese and the others get a phone call from the BBC head, “We’re going to pull all the money.
So all the money we’ve put into filming the 'Life of Brian’, stop, we are scared it’s going to be anti-religion, anti-Christianity, et cetera.” And the Bible, and this is the BBC. So 48 hours to go, all the money’s pulled and the “Life of Brian” would never have happened. What happens? George Harrison of the Beatles gets phoned by one of the Monty Python members he happens to be very friendly with. And Harrison says, “I’ll mortgage my house, get some of the other Beatles.” They put in money very quickly. We all know the result, the “Life of Brian” is made. Portugal, “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller banned because there is a scene of a man naked in a tree. Russia, “Gone With the Wind”, “The Godfather” parts I and II, “Star Wars” are banned until 1990. South Africa, the film “Zulu” is banned. Why? It shows Zulus forgiving the English, the British at the end and recognising two great warrior nations have fought each other and they’ll agree to part. Zulus are shown in the phrase from the banning, the censorship committee in a positive light. “Life of Brian” obviously was banned in SA.
The BBC refused originally to give a certificate to show Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs”, to show the film now shown all the time, “Natural Born Killers” and so on. The Theatres Act in Britain only came in in 1968 and that’s what stopped the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship, only in 1968, from being able to censor any piece of theatre that Lord Chamberlain’s men wanted. Before that, Tennessee Williams, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” Arthur Miller, “View From a Bridge” had to be performed in clubs, not theatres because of the implied homosexuality that might exist in the plays. George Bernard Shaw, “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” Prostitution is marketed throughout a string of European brothels. It’s a satire, it’s a comedy on hypocrisy and morals, banned because it’s so, it’s apparently about prostitution, it’s not. It’s about hypocrisy of who goes to the prostitute and who doesn’t. The rich and the powerful, the ordinary and so on. Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”, there’s a phrase in “Endgame” where God is called, where the one character says “God, he’s a bastard. He doesn’t exist, he’s not coming.” The Lord Chamberlain’s letter, and I quote “The Lord Chamberlain will not countenance doubt being cast on the legitimacy or the existence of the Almighty God.” And so we can go on and on and on. A couple of other very quick ones and I’m going to hand over to Dennis.
This is a children’s book, “Tango Makes Three”, it’s about two penguins who are male and have a little baby penguin, which was banned in parts of America because it’s about two daddies and a little baby penguin. They tried to, in various schools and states, stop it being studied and read and so on. Okay, “Anne Frank”, the Alabama State Textbook Committee said “It was a real downer and depressing. We recommended that it should not be taught in our high schools.” George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” banned in the United Arab Emirates until 2002. Why? It has a talking pig, which opposed therefore a pig talking in human language, that’s not congruent with Islamic values. Then we go on, “Black Beauty” banned in South Africa because of the title, how can black be beauty? “Madam Bovary”, I mentioned here very quickly, we’ve spoken about that. “The Famous Five”, the BBC interestingly banned it for 30 years, “The Famous Five” Enid Blyton, okay? It’s another children’s book called “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble” banned in parts of America after its publication 1969 because it had a few pigs who were the police and speaking, you know, language, and the equation was made by the banning committees that therefore police are pigs. You know, there were animals chosen. Okay, and then the very last picture, just to show for all of us here, I’ve mentioned some of these, perhaps what it really is as Bruegel, forgive my pronunciation, mentioned, “The Blind Leading the Blind.” But what does it say to us about society today and our times? The need to ban, to burn, to eradicate these works of literature is such an extreme. And these writers, says a huge amount about such insecurities, about people in power or in positions of so-called leadership or education, even in the fantastic liberal west, which I celebrate. But we have to be aware. Dennis, over to you.
- Thanks very much David. Always a pleasure doing this with you. And these are tricky questions. So I’m going to try to very briefly give you some of the underpinnings of what we’re talking about. But it struck me in preparation for today there’s a book by Matthew Fishburn, F-I-S-H-B-U-R-N, called “Burning Books”, which gives a history of the burning of books. And if you read it, it’s interesting because essentially he suggests that by 1953 with “Fahrenheit 451” Bradbury’s famous dystopian novel about the firemen in America, an American city who burns books and the consequences thereof, Fishburn sort of suggests that in fact thereafter burning of books became a less of a phenomenon because quite frankly, censorship in the way that David has sketched it then took over. But it is fascinating to me that that is not entirely accurate because obviously David has referred to Chile, where for over 20 odd years they burned books. Not just Marxist texts, but Marquez’s books and all sorts of other issues. And of course we know just more recently, you know, the book burning, that took place, even in Florida there was a, locally, there was the attempt of Koran burning planned by a small Florida church in 2010. We know for example, in 2013, Al-Qaeda affiliate militants in Mali burnt the library in Timbuktu, in 2015 ISIS burned books from Mosul’s Library as a show of ideological and territorial conquest. So these things happen and the real question, of course, goes to the broader issue of the suppression of ideas, the suppression of debate. And that goes in many ways to the heart of democracy. But I’m perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself because what I wanted to start with just to amplify, ‘cause that’s my job, just to amplify some of the issues that David has sketched for you. I wonder whether I could go back to the question of Heinrich Heine’s famous statement “Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people.”
And can I recommend, 'cause you can get it on the internet, Shlomo Avineri, the very distinguished Israeli social scientist, who, by the way, just a completely en passant comment has written a wonderful recent biography of Karl Marx, which I would recommend to anybody 'cause it really sets the record straight on all sorts of issues with regard to Marx. But be that as it may, in the 2017 Fall version of the Jewish Review of Books, he analyses the history behind this comment. And let me just summarise it for you as follows, basically, Heine wrote between 1820 and 1821 a play that was eventually published in 1823, when he was 26 called “Almansor”. It takes place in Grenada after the Andalusian city had been conquered by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. The title character of the book is a young Muslim who fled the city before its occupation by the Christians and now has clandestinely returned to rescue his beloved who has been forcibly converted to Catholicism, itself an interesting issue for points that I made about forcible conversion when I was talking about Pauline Grey the other night.
But be there as it may, he is told that the young Muslims are forced to convert in pain of death and he’s therefore also told that the Grand Inquisitor has ordered the burning of the Quran in the town square. It is to this particular threat that Almansor says, “Where they have burned books, they will end up burning people.” It’s an interesting context in which Avineri quite correctly, locates the statement and the point that he makes is further this, that he’s writing, this is Avineri, Heine is writing within a context because some years earlier you’ll recall I suggested he wrote the book between 1820 and 1821. In 1817, on the 300th year of Martin Luther’s 95th Theses, there was a major pilgrimage to Wartburg Fortress where Luther had once sought refuge. And there there was a celebration of book burning, including, interesting enough the Napoleonic Code, which was a universalistic set of ideas of enlightenment, truly spoken about this quite often. And it’s really interesting that that was central to the book burning at the time, which Heine obviously knew about. and because shortly, some years later, in fact, after he’d written the book in 1840, he wrote to his good friend Ludwig Borne, he said, “Illuminated by tortures at Warburg, things were said and done which befitted the Middle Ages.”
That’s the location in which Heine has written these famous words, and that should give us pause. Why do I say that? Because it raises all these profound questions about the way in which a particular assertion of religion or perspective asserts itself over all others, which inevitably leads to burning of books and more as Heine basically warns within the context in which he was writing that. So let me just make three points derived, one basically from a legal perspective, I concede. The first is why should we be so defensive about what David has spoken about? And in fact, even worse, the kind of book burning, which is I want to suggest has gone beyond the 1953 “Fahrenheit 451” Bradbury’s book. Well, the first is because what is underpinning this is an assertion of freedom of expression, of freedom of speech. And I want to give you just one quote from when our constitutional court of South Africa wrote majestic judgments, there was a time, and this judgement is penned by one of our great South African judges, Justice Kate O'Regan, in which she said in her judgement , “Freedom of expression lies at the heart of a democracy. It is valuable for many reasons, including its instrumental function as a guarantor of democracy. Its implicit recognition and protection of the moral agency of individuals in our society. And its facilitation of the search for truth by individuals in society generally. Our constitution recognises that individuals in our society need to be able to hear from and express opinions and view freely on our wide range of matters.”
Now, our drafters of our constitution weren’t that stupid to think that it was utterly unlimited speech. So we do have a protection against hate speech, but it’s very qualified. And the reason for that was because it seeks to prevent disruption to public order and social peace stemming by, from retaliation by victims to prevent psychological harm to targeted groups that would effectively impair their ability to participate positively in the community and contribute thereto to society, to prevent both visible exclusion of minority groups that would deny them equal opportunities and benefits of society and invisibly exclude their acceptance as equals, and to prevent social configuration and political disintegration. So it’s not as if there was a suggestion in the assertion of freedom of speech that there aren’t parameters which we must police, but they need to be very carefully done. And that is why I want, if I may, time running on as it is, to refer you to an article written by one of the preeminent 20th century legal philosophers, Ronald Dworkin, who of course taught both at Oxford, at New York University Law School, and at University College London, a remarkable author and theorist.
And he was responding here to something which essentially links to the Heine point that I was making, to the question of the Danish cartoons of some 15 years ago that you may remember. He says, and I’m just going to give you a couple of arguments because this gives you some idea about perhaps the anxieties of this whole area that David and I have started this evening, which I suspect we’ll have to continue because it’s such a vital area to our democratic society. He writes, he says “The British media were right on balance not to republish the Danish cartoons that millions of furious Muslims protested against in violent and terrible destruction around the world. Reprinting would’ve likely have meant more people killed and more property destroyed, it would’ve caused more British Muslims great pain 'cause they would’ve been told that the publication was intended to show contempt for their religion, and though that perception would’ve been inaccurate and unjustified, the pain would’ve been genuine.”
But then he goes on to say, of course, that some of this, there was evidence that the rioting and destruction was orchestrated by various groups within the Middle East for various nefarious political reasons and says perhaps pragmatically, there was a, it was correct not to publish. But then he goes on to say this, “There is a real danger that the decision of British media not to publish their whys will be wrongly taken as an endorsement of the widely held opinion that freedom of speech has limits, that it must be balanced against the vertex of multiculturalism and that the government is right after all to propose that be made a crime to publish anything abusive or insulting to religious group.” And here’s the assertion. “Freedom of speech is not just a special and distinctive emblem of Western culture that might be generously abridged or qualified as a measure of respect for other cultures that reject it, the way a crescent or menorah might be added to a Christian religious display. Free speech is a condition of legitimate government. Laws and policies are not legitimate unless they have been adopted through democratic process, and a process is not democratic if a government has prevented anyone from expressing his convictions about what those laws and policies should be, no matter their content. So in a democracy, no one either powerful or impotent can have a right not to be insulted or offended.
That principle is of particular importance to a nation that strives for racial and ethnic fairness. If weak or unpopular minorities wish to be protected from economic or legal discrimination by law, if they wish laws to be enacted that prohibit discrimination against them in employment, they must also be willing to tolerate insults or ridicule of people who oppose such legislation and who wish to offer to their fellow voters, Because only a community that permits such insults may legitimately adopt those laws. If we expect bigots to accept the verdict of the majority only once the majority has spoken, then we must permit them to express their bigotry in the process whose verdict we ask them to accept. Whatever multiculturalism means, whatever it means to call for increased respect for all citizens groups, those virtues will be self-defeating if they were thought to justify official censorship.” He goes on to say, and I’m going to conclude on this point, “Muslims who are outraged by Danish cartoons point out in several European countries it’s a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever existed.” They say that Western concern for free speech is a self-serving form of hypocrisy.“ And he goes on to say, however, that "We need to work towards a new understanding of the European Convention on Human Rights that would strike down the Holocaust denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are, violations of freedom of speech.”
He suggests that, this is a very controversial argument, which I share with you, not necessarily endorse, troubles me, but I’m going to end the Dworkin article by just referring to the following. “We cannot make an exception for religious insult if we want to use law to protect the free exercise of religion in other ways. If we want to forbid the police from profiling people who look or dress like Muslims for special searches, for example, we cannot also forbid people from opposing that policy by claiming, in cartoons or otherwise, that Islam is committed to terrorism. however silly we may think that opinion is. Religion must be tailored to democracy, not the other way around. No religion can be permitted to legislate for everyone about what can or cannot be drawn any more than it can legislate about what may or may not be eaten. No one’s religious convictions can be thought to trump the freedom that makes democracy possible.” Now, I’ve cited this, in a way, deliberately provocatively, it’s written by a very distinguished legal philosopher. I’m not sure that I am of a view that Holocaust denial, for example, other forms of denial, are the form of speech that I want to protect.
But here’s the rub. Where do we draw the line? And how do we protect the fundamental value, which Justice O'Regan has spoken about, at the same time as we actually protect the dignity of people? I do think this is a subject in which we need to have a serious and thoughtful debate. And I raise Dworkin precisely because if you link it to Heine, what Heine was writing about was the concern in this particular case that there was going to be burning of the Koran and the discrimination against Muslims, and look where that would go, he said. Back to the Middle Ages. So, where do we draw the line in circumstances we say we protect freedom of speech and where do we limit it? I think it’s a debate that’s not only worth having, which we have to have, and I think it’s come home in a way, in various personal experiences that both David in his own teaching and I as a member of the University of Cape Town faculty have experienced recently. So David, I’m going to hand over to you to talk about your own experience and then I’ll talk about what happened at UCT.
- Dennis, thanks and thanks so much. And I think the point that you’re saying also, you know, is that the supremacy of democracy over religion is such a fundamental tenet and that the principles, and the crucial notions of democracy are so important to embed, and then to have a perception of how, you know, religion can be part of that but not overrule it, which is a profound and provocative debate as well. But I think it’s such an important distinction, certainly in liberal democracies of the West, that you’re saying. A couple of the personal experience experiences, which I’m just going to mention one or two, and then Dennis will as well, when I was teaching here in Liverpool during lockdown and I happened to mention, 'cause I assumed many of the students would’ve read Harry Potter, you know, or their brothers or sisters and so on. And they, I got an unequivocal response not only from students but from colleagues, often, “We cannot teach JK Rowling, we cannot discuss JK Rowling.” Why?
Because she gave one tweet, which I haven’t even read, but apparently something about trans and transgender. And it struck me that we are dealing with something profound in our times in one of the great liberal democracies of the world here in Britain. One of the great writers, and I really say that profoundly because if you really look at her writing, she’s a brilliant writer. She’s not only writing fantastic stories and children’s stuff, et cetera, et cetera, but she, the sentences, the stories, the character so carefully thought through, it’s quite remarkable. Not only has she given money to establish an amazing neurological centre at the University of Edinburgh, millions and millions, which has an a dedicated multiple sclerosis research and other neurological centres in honour of her mother who died of MS and many other causes. But that the entire works of JK Rowling should be thrown out, questioned, not even willing to discuss because of a tweet. And it takes me back to the phrase of Stephen Hawking “The enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it’s the illusion of knowledge.” The illusion that I know because of a tweet of this or that or whatever, I know, therefore, that every word written by this remarkable writer is, it must be thrown out. So that’s one example which gives pause to reflect. The challenge that I, not only me, but many academic, many people face in, not only Britain, in other parts of the world is teaching Shakespeare.
And I’ve just seen an article in this last weekend’s, in yesterday’s, one of the great newspapers of Britain, I’m not going to mention, you know, which goes through some of their Shakespearean productions of the last 25 years and how they’ve been so scared and careful to edit out certain words or have a framing document first because there is violence. This is not going to be suitable for this. There’s a war scene, there’s a killing scene, there’s a, and I’m going to use, there’s a rape scene, there’s a this or a that in Shakespeare from “The Taming of the Shrew” and the very title of that play. And I understand all the arguments, of course, understand all the arguments, you know, gender debates, racial, ethnic, we all do. We understand the debates profoundly. But are we going to say that great works of art must be constantly changed in order to fit a certain, if you like, moral paradigm of a particular time which didn’t exist 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
And who knows, in 20 or 30 years or in 100 years when AI takes over, who knows? As Dennis was saying, I’m not necessarily trying to agree or disagree. I’ve done productions myself, which pushed this angle or that angle in a Shakespeare production. You have to, you can’t pretend to be totally neutral and you know, be Pontius Pilate, sit on the fence and pretend you’re only going to, you know, be sacred to the sacred word. You, always interpretation is involved with any piece of literature from novels, that’s the beauty. That’s what we love about poetry, plays, novels. You can have a thousand interpretations of the same sonnet. There’s no one given commandment. The 11th commandment is not, “Thou shall read this sonnet in this particular way and have no other illusion of knowledge.” That’s the magic of metaphor and fiction in literature, destroy that and have a bit of a problem. The other quick examples that I give, well that’s enough, Dennis, over to you.
- Yes, I want to just talk very briefly about something had happened at the University of Cape Town, University that I spent most of my life teaching at, just very recently the renowned author, Ngozi Adichie, came to give the vice chancellor’s open lecturer. She’s a renowned, of course, author. And her lecture was about the limitations of theory and the importance of storytelling. And just to give you a texture of what she was saying in her lecture, she said, “When I came to South Africa, I wondered if the theory of the Rainbow Nation, what happens to”, which was of course Tutu’s great metaphor for South Africa, post '94, “What would happen to stories that did not fit that theory?
An inflexible adherence to theory.” She argues, “Can make us tell incomplete stories. It can limit the options that we are willing to consider for real life situations. But not a single story has been weaved together perfectly. Stories,” she argues, “are always imperfect. I don’t trade in perfection.” She says, “I don’t trust perfection, I do not believe in perfection. If human beings were perfect, stories would not exist.” She goes on to say slavery was possible because people were traded, enslaved people dehumanised were traded, enslaved people dehumanising them. Colonialism was possible because the groups of people who were colonised were dehumanised by their colonisers. The Holocaust was possible 'cause of Hitler’s horrible dehumanising and the Nazi exercise of dehumanising of Jewish people. It’s impossible to have a true story that is flat and has no texture. It’s our imperfection that makes truth possible. Well, this is a sensible and important contribution to what we’re talking about. But it turns out that before she gave her lecture, the student representative council at the University of Cape Town attacked the invitation given to Adichie because it referred to a 2017 interview that she’d given in which she had said “Transwomen are transwomen”, in response to a question on whether she considers transwomen as real women. To some extent she apologised for that, but then qualified it later by saying what she was really meaning was that transwomen who at one point were men, have very different experiences to women who were not transwomen, as it were.
And she thought to talk about that precisely that, she said, “Transwomen had lived with the privileges afforded to men before their transitioned to womanhood, therefore their experiences differ. Their stories differ from those of persons born as women.” “Oh.” said this student representative council and some of the woke academics who happen to populate my university. “And as an institution which actively promotes intersectional feminism through its curriculum, it’s important for us to recognise that Ngozi Adichie divided the feminist community with her remarks. Instead of recognising our transwomen also have a right to simply be recognised as who they are without having to defend their womanhood.” And they then suggested the lecture has to be cancelled because she is anti-transwomen and therefore she should not be given a voice. This was a serious request, which, mercifully, the University of Cape Town turned down. I mentioned this to you precisely to show you, I think, the threat that university institutions, which are a site of engagement of stories, if you use her word, in order that we get a whole range of them and from which people can negotiate their attempt to discover the truth, that is rarely under fundamental threat. And this latest ill-considered attempt to silence, to cancel, if you wish, a distinguished author who had really interesting things to say is precisely why I agonised about where the boundaries should be. Of course I, unlike Dworkin, I think there are boundaries, I think there are boundaries in relation to the Holocaust. I think there are boundaries in relation to certain forms of hate speech, which ultimately do incite violence, or are calculated to do, or are foreseeably able to essentially cause harm to various groups.
But we need to debate those, and the broader question at the moment is there’s a cloud hanging over the entire enterprise of engagement, which is taking hold of our universities and of our public discourse in circumstances where some of us will never be able to tell our stories 'cause they don’t fit into the dominant narrative. That’s the point she was making. And ironically, that’s what she was trying to be silenced for. And I just wonder whether, in fact, in a year or two or three, somebody with a similar set of perspectives which they wish to engage with us on at a university will, as already has happened at university, be shut down. No surprise to me that that David illustrates the point about JK Rowling. I know that when I teach now, I tread far more cautiously than I would want to precisely because of that particular problem. And therefore I think it’s no question just of burning of books indicated that happens. It’s the question of what are the limits to an enterprise which is central not just to the development of knowledge, but to the fundamental fabric of democracy, which is the point that Dworkin had made. I think given the time, perhaps we should show one of those clips, David, of the satirist, yeah.
To add there what the satirist we’re going to show the first one briefly, just a couple of minutes of Rowan Atkinson and then two minutes of John Cleese, which is really what we are talking about today, in a sense, if you allow me the metaphor, the burning of the idea is enough and the horror and this, the fear that arouses in me is scary. Okay, this is first from Rowan Atkinson and from a speech he gave recently.
My starting point, when it comes to the consideration of any issue relating to free speech is my passionate belief that the second most precious thing in life is the right to express yourself freely. The most precious thing in life, I think, is food in your mouth. And the third most precious is a roof over your head. But a fixture for me in the number two slot is free expression, just below the need to sustain life itself. That is because I have enjoyed free expression in this country all my professional life and fully expect to continue to do so. Personally, I suspect highly unlikely to be arrested for whatever laws exist to contain free expression because of the undoubtedly privileged position that is afforded to those of a high public profile. So my concerns are less for myself and more for those more vulnerable because of their lower profile. Like the man arrested in Oxford for calling a police horse gay. Or the teenager arrested for calling the Church of Scientology a cult or the cafe owner arrested for displaying passages from the Bible on a TV screen. When I heard of some of these more ludicrous offences and charges, I remembered that I had been here before in a fictional context. I once did a show called, “Not the Nine O'Clock News” some years ago. And we did a sketch where Griff Rhys Jones played Constable Savage, a manifestly racist police officer to whom I, as his station commander, is giving a dressing down for arresting a black man on a whole string of ridiculous, trumped up, and ludicrous charges. The charges for which Constable Savage arrested Mr. Winston Kodogo of 55 Mercer Road were these: “Walking on the cracks in the pavement.”
“Walking in a loud shirt in a built up area during the hours of darkness.”
And one of my favourites “Walking around all over the place.” He was also arrested for “Urinating in a public convenience.” And “Looking at me in a funny way”, Who would’ve thought that we would end up with a law that would allow life to imitate art so exactly. I read somewhere a defender of the status quo claiming that the fact that the gay horse case was dropped after the arrested man refused to pay the fine and that the Scientology case was also dropped at some point during the court process, was proof that the law was working well, ignoring the fact that the only reason these cases were dropped was because of the publicity that they had attracted. The police sensed that ridicule was just around the corner and withdrew their actions. But what about the thousands of other cases that did not enjoy the oxygen of publicity, that weren’t quite ludicrous enough to attract media attention? Even for those actions that were withdrawn, people were arrested, questioned, taken to court, and then released. You know, that isn’t the law working properly, that is censoriousness of the most intimidating kind guaranteed to have as Lord Dear says, “A chilling effect on free expression and free.”
Just to hold it there for a moment, when the whole point of satire is to ridicule power, to ridicule those in authority, to call to, if you like, to the stage or the page, the absurdities of structures of power structures, of perceptions of history and life in society. And the satirist from Aristophanes came back, you know, a couple hundred years, two and a half thousand years ago in ancient Greece and been persecuted by Cleon and yet Cleon the King allowing satire, the satirist is there to ridicule and absurd to make us laugh, to the Marx brothers, through, and so on and so on, we can go on is also the role of the satirist and the writer to criticise, to challenge. And as Dennis was saying earlier, to stimulate debate, not necessary to give answers but debate. And I want, we are going to show finally a short clip from John Cleese where he talks about this.
I’m offended every day. For example, the British newspapers every day offend me with their laziness, their nastiness, and their inaccuracy. But I’m not going to expect someone to stop that happening, I should just simply speak out about it. You know, sometimes when people are offended, they want to, somebody to just come in and say, “Right, stop that.” to whoever is offending them. And of course as a former chairman of the BBC once said, there were some people one would wish to offend. And I think there’s truth in that, too. So the idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is one I absolutely do not describe, subscribe to. And a fellow that I helped write two books about psychology and psychiatry, he was a renowned psychiatrist in London called Robin Skynner, said something very interesting to me. He said, “If people can’t control their own emotions, then they have to start trying to control other people’s behaviour.”
And when you are around super sensitive people, you cannot relax and be spontaneous because you no idea what’s going to upset them next. And that’s why I’ve been warned recently don’t go to most university campuses because the political correctness has been taken from being a good idea, which is “Let’s not be mean particularly to people who are not able to look after themselves very well.” That’s a good idea. To the point where any kind of criticism or any individual or group can be labelled cruel. And the whole point about humour, the whole point about comedy and, believe you me, I’ve thought about this, that all comedy is critical. Even if you make a very inclusive joke like “How’d you make God laugh?” Answer, “Tell him your plans.” Now, that’s about the human condition. It’s not excluding anyone. It’s saying we all have all these plans which probably won’t come, and isn’t it funny how we still believe they’re going to happen? So that’s a very inclusive joke, it’s still critical. All humour is critical. If you start say, “Ooh, we mustn’t, we mustn’t criticise or offend them”, then humor’s gone, with humour goes a sense of proportion. And then as far as I’m concerned, you’re living in 1984.
Okay, so we just bringing to a conclusion some of these thoughts of these highly intelligent and really interesting writers and satirists in order to, as Dennis was saying earlier, to provoke a debate and questions. Dennis, any concluding thoughts you’d like to?
No, the only thing I wanted to say was that precisely what we’ve said, you know, you are very welcome to disagree. That’s the whole point, it’s the whole point. And I do think that the boundaries are difficult to determine. There are obviously boundaries as I’ve indicated, which is why I don’t agree with the Dworkin article fully. But what I’m trying to suggest is, that unless we have some clarity about how important this issue is, both on the left and on the right, there are significant attacks on the idea that we should be able to engage with one of each other and accordingly, centrally promote an idea of democracy. And it’s therefore not surprising to me that democracy, as we’ve indicated in previous lectures, is significantly under threat in countries where, say 25 years ago, you’d never have thought to be the case. That’s essentially, I think the take home point from what much of what we’ve said. It’s not just a history we’re talking about, it’s the present we worried about. But I suspect we should go to some of the questions and David, I’ll just start and then I’ll hand over to you 'cause I think, like, they’ll probably be an equal poise of them.
Sure.
Q&A and Comments:
- Oopsie. Well, I think you’re going to thank you for recommending disgrace and rightly so, if I might say thank you, Barbara suggested “Like fake news re: vaccinations”.
It’s a great point Barbara. I just done a television programme on that South African television yet again on the question of mandated vaccinations and the question of fake news and fake science. And you can see the devastation that that has. Question is, do you allow these people to talk? One of the issues that I’ve had as a host of a country affairs television programme is who do I give a platform to, to everybody or can I choose not to? So I just wanted to say you raised an important point, but it it just shows where do we actually, how seriously do we take that kind of engagement? “
Stephen Hawking cancelled the visit”, says Carol, I think that was a reference to your reference to him David in Israel to BDS, that is true. He had been to Israel on numerous occasions before and I think in 2012 or 2013, if memory serves me correctly, 'cause it was quite controversial, he did in fact not go to Israel at the time. And so he’s had a really, he did have an ambivalent attitude to Israel. It’s interesting that so much of his work was intertwined with an Israeli scientist, Jacob Bekenstein. But be that as it may, you know again, and we can debate whether people have a right to actually boycott. My own view is academic boycotts are a disaster. And I’ve, together with William Kentridge some years ago, we sought to debate the issue that the academic boycott of Israel was absolutely a disastrous step to take and mercifully, the University of Cape Town agreed. But I don’t suggest that it’s not an issue still underway.
- Absolutely, and I agree, Dennis completely, I’m completely against any kind of academic or artistic boycott for that matter, by anyone, anywhere. I don’t think it, you know, it completely, well, for a whole lot of reasons. So I don’t agree with Hawking about this at all and many others. And for me, one has to look at a series of ideas, knowledge, thought, you know, in this very way, going back to the idea it’s not simply, you know, sort of cowboy and Indian, goodies and baddies, right and wrong. These things are complex and profound and it does provoke a dilemma for me. But it also said it, I cannot deny the body of his thought and his ideas. Not only his of overcoming, of extreme physical adversity, but the contribution to science. And I cannot ignore that because of what he did then, on not going to Israel. I have to try to really understand, you know, Scott Fitzgerald said, try to see both sides of the same story and come to a decision, that’s intelligence. And I believe we are provoked here in Lockdown University and in every university, anywhere. Look at the debate, look at the questions, and then we make our choices. But I’m not going to dismiss everything from Hawking because of that. In a way, with others as well, although I don’t agree with him in the slightest of boycotting anything or any other artist for that matter, or scientist.
Q: - Vod And Rowe ask “How does the very powerful belief that wealth is all reinforce the illusion of knowledge?” It’s an interesting question.
A: - It’s huge.
A: - Yeah, it’s a huge question. I think I’ll just say this, I think that, you know, the fact of the matter is that, if you control the media, you just simply have to look at Murdoch to look at the damage that he’s done throughout the world in relation to fake news. In order to do that, have a look at Fox News to suggest that it does, it allows for an illusion of knowledge to be propagated right throughout. But I don’t want to, we haven’t got enough time to go into that. BDS is Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, Maron, which is a movement which is quite prevalent around. Yura and Alfred “Our theory of knowledge is a terrible misuse of the word theory. A theory is something that is demonstrable and says as a tool of prediction.” Dunno if you want to say anything, David.
- Yeah, that’s in relation to Foucault phrase, which is translated, perhaps not quite extremely well, from the French, but Foucault talks about every society needs a theory of knowledge. What is the knowledge of a society from the '60s, in the '80s, let’s say in the west in particular, theory of knowledge of various kinds, which involve cultural values, changing fashions, if you like, ideologies, economic, political, religious beliefs and so on. That gives rise to theory of knowledge articulated through a series of narratives or stories that Adichie and Herrera and others would say. So, and that’s how it gets communicated to us. But it’s a theory of values and belief systems, economic, political, religious, moral, and so on. And the, if the majority of a society buy into it, then the majority will go along with it. So let’s buy into that, everybody will, you know, we’re 10 of us, and I’m not being patronising, but 10 of us are each entitled, we’ve got 10 oranges. Should the leader have two oranges or three and the rest cut up and have half an orange? Should everybody have a full orange?
Should we do Brexit and grow our own oranges? Whatever, okay, I’m purposely trying to be a little bit satirical, but it’s an idea of a theory of ideas and ideologies. And if that is the majority, that’s what groups will do. But part of that includes the theory of knowledge, the right to ridicule, the right to challenge, debate, question, argue without the threat of the idea being burnt, let alone the page, let alone ultimately the people. And I’m trying to link for Foucault’s idea with what we are discussing today. And then Joanne, the Shakespeare quote was, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” Okay, and you can get an idea, the turbulent priest is, you know, the challenge, everything we are talking about, which is more than the fool in Shakespeare, it’s the critic, it’s the comic, the artist, the satirist, the outsider who’s always looking and doesn’t have the answer, but provides a profound role in democracy, which is to question, to provoke, to ask, and only the very insecure and scared will not allow that.
Yeah. Where are we now? Why were things unbanned in '59. I don’t know, I have no idea, I mean. Was braille banned? Why was it banned? Dunno if you’d have an answer.
“Black Beauty”.
Black beauty, I know was, yeah, yeah.
Miriam, yes. I love that.
Oh, braille. What he did, was he, yeah, yeah, yeah. This was a director at the Braille Institute in Paris who banned, can you believe it, braille. I wanted to give this as an absolutely extreme, absurd example of the lengths to which petty people with power, where Shakespeare said, dressed in a little bit of authority, the extreme lengths they will go to, to show that their theory of knowledge is the one and no one else may interfere. You know, it’s such an extreme ridiculous idea, the kind that Rowan Atkinson mentions, you know, walking the cracks of the pavements, whatever, to try and give us a spectrum of where do we sit on the freedom of speech and freedom of expression debate? Where do we position ourselves? On the extreme left, the crazy examples, the extreme right, the crazy examples. And I’m purposely using these words as opposed to somewhere else. And it’s an ongoing dynamic of debate, and crucial in our times, that democracy is under such a cloud.
Wonderful thing about the banning of braille, by the way, was that it was banned because the banner, the fellow who banned it was worried that if braille was there, you wouldn’t need sighted teachers to teach blind people. How’d you like that for opportunism? Now, that’s extraordinary. Maria-
If I could just add in there, Dennis. You know, one of the books that the Nazis ban first and burnt was Helen Keller. I just shared that with everybody, I’m sure knows, you know, and why they chose her to burn her books as well, okay.
Yeah, Miriam, you’re right. Micha Ullman’s wonderful, The Empty Library library, which is in Berlin, which has the Heine quote, remember when Claudette and I went to Berlin, it’s a most memorable memorial, fantastic. In fact, so many of them are in Berlin.
Elina says, “I guess I missed how you define banned. Some of your comparisons are not really equivalent.” I’m not entirely sure precisely what that means, I’m sorry.
Q: David, you asked the questions asked by Rod Rowe, why was “The Famous Five” banned?
A: - Well, they were banned from the BBC for 30 years because Enid Blyton was regarded as a very second grade writer. So it didn’t have anything to do with ideology of political belief, but the ideology of what constitutes great literature and it was regarded as poor, inadequate, very ordinary literature, which it may or may not be. But that was the reason given, whoever decided they were the judge of what is great literature or not.
Q: - Should there still, should “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” be banned?
A: I think they do fall, certainly, within the parameters of our constitutional restriction of hate speech that insights as it were, diminution of dignity of groups. I certainly think so, in my view, yes, I would go along with that. I don’t think “The Perfumed Garden”, which was, if I recall, was a sex manual or some sort, was banned still in South Africa.
Good God, Carol, “Italy gave a gift to Jerusalem municipality of Michelangelo’s "David”, which was refused 'cause religious sensibility. He says he was nude.“ Well, there you are, Michael AR "Mein Kampf” and the Protocols. It’s interesting, what do you do about “Mein Kampf”? I mean, you know, do you ban it? Well, I listened to a very good lecture by David about “Mein Kampf” on this particular Lockdown University recently. If you banned that he wouldn’t have been able to have, to discuss that. I dunno what you have heard, David, since you lectured on it.
I haven’t lectured on it, no, I mean, I would agree with you entirely about hate speech. That’s different, you know? When Cleese and the others talk about comedy is, will offend, but Cleese’s word is right. It’ll criticise no matter what, and we have to allow space for the critical. But I agree entirely about “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” or Holocaust deniers. There are some areas which are verboten, out of bounds for me, personally, but I’m giving a very personal response here. But at the same time, I would be very hesitant to ban or outlaw so many things because of all the reasons that we’ve discussed today. I think there are certain things that need to, but I think the very strength of a democracy is, and I really believe it, not just as a platitude, it really is on how much criticism it can handle.
There are a whole lot of questions about who the author was. It’s Shlomo Avineri, not to be confused with Uri Avnery. They’re very different people. Schlomo Avineri is a very distinguished political philosopher and social scientist from the Hebrew University. Very different man to Uri Avnery. David, there’s a question about why was, when was “Zulu” banned? I know it was, but I can’t remember when.
I have to check the dates. It’s also slipped me, apologies and I’ll get back to you on that, those dates.
Yes, Irv, I agree about Holocaust denial, which is precisely why I’m with you. I think Holocaust denial is precisely sort of saying that one has to attack as opposed to, it’s a total factual misrepresentation, totally different thing.
I’m sorry Janet, that I read too fast. It’s true, I was rushed for time. I would’ve spent an hour dealing with Dworkin in a normal case, apologies. But I can tell you that if you go onto, anybody wants to, can just Google Ronald Dworkin, the Guardian, 2006, and they’ll find the article to which I was referring. The book on Karl Marx is a book on Karl Marx by Schlomo Avineri. Yuona and Alfred, the real question is not where do you redraw the line, but rather why do we draw it there? Okay, I accept that.
And Ervis, I agree that there should be some limits on free speech and advocating paedophilia would certainly fall within my limit of that. Just to mention recently in South Africa there was a case, it’s a rather incomprehensible judgement to put it mildly. But essentially what it does, it perhaps might well be right, in fact not might be right, definitely right result was that it outlaws forms of homophobic speech. And of course, if you have homophobic speech of that particular kind, in fact, not only does it demean the dignity of people who are the gay and lesbian community, but it actually does more than that. And we know in a country like South Africa where all sorts of gays and lesbians are subjected to vicious physical attacks is precisely why that is out of bounds.
Q: And ElBarba, I realise this talks more about books. “How are the confederate flag and other symbols of oppression viewed in this light?”
A: That’s an interesting question. I can’t just say, I’ll give you one answer to it and I won’t go further. In South Africa, we now have taken the view that the waving of the old South African flag, it is justifiable to restrict it because it actually incites division and hatred. And that jurisprudence may well extend as far as a confederate flag is concerned.
Yeah, I’m sorry Joanne, about the long thing. I take your point. “You can’t shout fire in a crowded place.” Yes, Miriam, I think it might go further than that. That’s what we are dealing with. Well, Monty, you I see you talk about Uri Avnery. Uri Avnery wasn’t the person I was talking about. Please do not conflate him with Shlomo Avineri. If you want to criticise Shlomo Avineri then you must criticise Shlomo Avineri, not Uri Avnery.
Are there links says Helen to the current debates, discussions about public statues depicting, oh goodness, this is depicting historical figures who’s behaviours are no longer respected by modern models. That’s a debate all of its own, it’s an extraordinarily important debate. I would prefer at the lateness of the hour to duck that question. But David, if you want to say something under the pleasure.
I think we are going to have to duck it as well because of, but I think it’ll be a fascinating topic to debate.
I think maybe we should, I think we should have a discussion about it. I think it’s a very legitimate thing, Helen, and I think, we’ll take that up as a topic all of its own. James, so depressing that JK Rowling has been classed as beyond the pale for daring to challenge prevailing woke ideologies. We agree.
What’s fascinating there, James, is also, you know, of the extreme left and the extreme right. You know, ultimately you see that they are about power and the conviction, the passionate intensity with which they have the conviction to paraphrase WB Yeats, that they are right and they can brook no question, you know, that their illusion of knowledge, their sense of what is, you know, the sky is blue and that is it, must hold. And to me that is what John Cleese and what, you know, what we’ve been saying today has gripped many education systems around the world. And what’s important is that these are educational systems, and the whole point should be, a little bit at least, question, challenge, provoke, debate, argue, decide, instead of just rote learning or repeat the fashionable, you know, learnt propaganda of the past.
Ruth has asked a terribly important, and made a very important observation. The US there many professors who’re censored or denied tenure because of their research on the effects of the occupation of the Palestinians. This is another serious example of censorship and banning of free speech. And you’re dead right.
The truth about it is you may not like what people say, but then in fact, the answer to that is to give you as much free speech as they have and to engage on these particular questions. Banning people and restricting them because of their views is utterly antithetical to a university. And let me say this, we Jews must actually defend, and I know this is not entirely Jewish audience, but the extent that this is a focus on Jewish, we need to hold onto free speech. Minorities desperately require free speech. Because the answer is that’s what protects us best. And so your point is well made and the implications are clear.
I think there are a whole series of questions about the DG?
Q Oh, can you comment on the banning of the Protocols of Zion in South Africa?
A: Well, I dunno if you are asking me should it be banned, which the answer is yes, I do think, banned, I think I’ve answered that already.
Lauren, “The cloud hanging over academics disseminated by the Neo-Marxist left and we should not fair stating that reality.” Yes, it’s true, but I think, as David and I have both suggested, it’s on the left and the right, and we need to resist both here. The substantial point is you either accept the enterprise or you don’t, and you resist the attack on the enterprise from whatever the perspective. If you like the view and they’re suppressing it, that’s not good because they’ll soon come for you. So I’m not against your point, but I’m suggesting that it’s a wider out problem. James, perhaps government should legislate to prevent the banning of speakers and… I hate government’s interfering with anything. We should actually deal with that ourselves.
Ronald Bornstein. Yes, Ronald Dworkin was one of the great legal minds, and thank you for your comment. Yes, he was, his second wife was, Alfred, I think it was Alfred Brendel’s actual first wife, was wife, if I recall correctly, but that’s not relevant. Joanne, “Who said, 'People who cannot control their own emotions have no business trying to control the emotions of others.’”
The quote there, Joanne was from John Cleese who wrote the book with his psychiatrist, Robert Skynner, if I’m right, “Families and How to Survive Them”. And it’s a wonderfully witty but pretty profound book by Cleese. And the quote was, “It’s often people who can’t control their emotions, who try to control other people’s behaviour.” That’s the actual quote of John Cleese’s, which kind of, a lot of it goes, which he explores with the, his psychiatrist in the book.
Sorry, Evelyn, thank you very much, Esther, I’m not going to get into the whole question, the vaccinations, so you can have a debate about that later. Maxine, I am not aware of the article that Hawkins wrote in New Scientist in relation to Israel. But as I think both of us have made clear, we have our view on that, which is a totally different view. Yes, Riva, democracy is a work in progress, but by goodness are you right, it’s the best you’ve got.
Yes, Churchill’s phrase, jaw-jaw instead of war-war. bottom line, you know? And better to have jaw-jaw wars than of war-war wars. Okay.
Q: - I think Sandra, you’re dead right, the, you posed an enormously important question. “How do you treat misinformation that influences elections and behaviour adversely?”
A: We are seeing as we speak the threat on democracy all over, I mean, consider United States of America, where even in Arizona now, they’ve proved there could not possibly been a steal of the election, but the propagation of that lie continues. It’s a dreadful problem. You cannot have that kind of discourse prevailing. And that’s why I mentioned Fox News. You cannot have that kind of dominant discourse prevailing in a society and sustained democracy over time. But it’s a much bigger issue about how we think. Again, I suppose it falls outside it.
Q: Edward, can you not support censure of lies, fake news?
A: No, I can’t stand the no-vaxxers, Edward, but I’m reluctant to ban them. I would rather actually ensure something that our government in South Africa has not done, which is proper, serious education to show people why vaccines are so important.
Patricia says libraries in the Cape, not sure about the rest of the, it didn’t keep Enid Blyton either for the same reason that David mentioned, huh? The removal statues, we’ve spoken about, Carol-
And Judy, Enid Blyton, It wasn’t because of that, it was because she was regarded as a very average writer. So the BBC chose not to, if you like, publicise her books in any way. They made the decision about who’s a good and who’s an average writer for children and adults.
Yeah, yeah. Devora, you know, we are, the people use the word occupation of Palestinians as a fact. The answer is, people do assert opinions as facts. I accept that. My answer to that is I want to have a, I am sufficiently convinced in my view that I’m prepared to say, you give me freedom of speech, and at the end of the day, I think my view, if we can do it on an even keel, I’m going to persuade enough people to come to my view and restrict your view. The alternative is you start down that slippery slope. Then David, there’s this thing. Isn’t it ironic at the classical author of the state banning Aristophanes just because they’re classical authors?
Yeah, well, Anne, interestingly, a lot of the classical authors are banned, Greece during the military dictatorship in the after the war banned Aristophanes’s plays the “Lysistrata” in particular, which as we all know is the great anti-war play where all the women of Athens deny sex to the men until they make peace. Written 2,300, 2,400 years ago, it was banned by the Greek military leaders in post the Second World War. and sometimes “Lysistrata” has been the one interestingly, of Aristophanes to be banned at different times, in different cultures, as have certain works of Shakespeare and many others.
Q: - Yeah, so what I, what I’m going to say, sorry, there’s finally, Mike, would you agree books too horrendous should still not be burned, but available for academic research?
A: Absolutely, I mean, otherwise, how are you going to study the history of Nazism if you can’t actually get a hold of a copy of “Mein Kampf”? Absolutely.
Point made, I think we’ve come to the end of the questions. David, thank you very much, as always, thank you to the audience. I hope we stimulated you, angered you, frustrated you, annoyed you as much as possible. That’s what free speech is about.
Our job is to remain turbulent priests, okay? And we will annoy, irritate, stimulate, provoke, and maybe inspire. But thanks so much to Dennis and to everybody for listening and being part of it today.
Take care, go out, stay safe everybody, bye.
Thank you all.