Tares and Wheat

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Chilton Beach, PEI after Dorian
What do you think of when you hear either if these two phrases: Free Speech, Political Correctness?

I just finished listening to a YouTube interview: Rex Murphy interviewing Jordan B. Peterson on YouTube. 

You may be aware of the notoriety surrounding Peterson, some—at least—relating to a dispute over what constitutes free speech on university campuses.  Mainly, it’s been Antifa and progressive-leaning students blockading speakers holding views considered to be anti-immigration, anti “political correctness”, or generally—and too simply put, I admit—those advocating extreme right-wing positions politically. 

I’ve tuned in to other appearances by Peterson on YouTube, and am currently reading his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, a book with wide circulation, enough at least to make the Canadian Clinical Psychologist a millionaire--and something of a celebrity.

Anyone who watched CBC a number of years back will remember Rex Murphy’s commentaries at the end of The National. He and Peterson were in perfect synch on issues relating to free speech and the controversies raised by Peterson’s challenges to universities on the issue of who's allowed to speak on campus and who's not. Peterson was literally in tears on a few occasions as he talked about being literally and virtually mobbed by protests, especially because a serious health issue in his family was worrying him.

For me, the definitions of both free speech and political correctness have become crucially important. 

The implication that a focus on political correctness is beginning to throttle free speech certainly needs to be considered carefully, especially by Christians familiar with the Apostle James admonitions about the power of speech. If free speech means I have the right to say whatever I like without fear of punishment or reprisal, then slander and libel laws are totally redundant. If, on the other hand, we accept that speech can damage, threaten or slander another person or group, then why wouldn’t the laws about free speech rest on the same criteria as those that apply to other instruments of harm: knives, guns, clubs?

And then there’s that other bogeyman: political correctness which, according to Murphy and Peterson, stifles free speech in that it punishes persons for expressing certain opinions. An example of a current case is that of the pressure to use appropriate pronouns for transgender persons. We could go back to the mid 1900s when we became sensitive about the verbal demeaning of persons and groups, and terms like “retard,” “nigger,” “Polack,” were shamed out of our vocabulary. But that’s not what’s being talked about here. What we referred to then as political correctness is extended now to the backlash against disallowing certain political views to be expressed publicly. White supremacist demonstrations might be a useful case in point.

We all know to what degree political propaganda, hate speech, demeaning speech can divide a society, inflame a population into stampedes of violence. False reports of child kidnappers circulating in India on WhatsApp recently resulted in hysteria, and ended in the lynching of innocents. History can demonstrate in any number of ways what James' Epistle declares: “The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body.” (James 3: 6, NIV) 

We are also aware how divisive political rhetoric has become in ours and our neighbours’ social discourse these days.

I hope that we would see the folly in choosing membership in one side or the other on speech questions. It’s not, after all, about free speech; there’s no free lunch and there’s no free speech. There’s speech that’s constructive and speech that divides, tears down; there’s speech that’s carelessly tossed off and speech that’s been thoughtfully weighed. The golden rule surely applies to all speech.

I would hope, further, that we would see the folly of pejoratively applying the term political correctness—whatever that is—to the attempts we make over time to practice kindness and an acknowledgment of basic human rights in our discourse.

There’s too much depending on our wisdom in speech matters to ignore this.

Right now, I hold the view that media like Fox News, Rebel News and other purveyors of a highly volatile, extremely biased takes on the news be allowed to do their thing. Also that speakers espousing even fascist views be allowed to visit university campuses. A better approach to ensuring that hateful views don’t prosper is to overwhelm them with their opposite; Jesus parable about letting the weeds grow alongside the wheat lest you tear out the good plants with the bad may have some application here.

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