The right to be offended

Here’s a marvelous essay by Salman Rushdie (who knows a bit about offending) describing how a free society requires the opportunity to be offended — as only a moment or two of consideration would demonstrate — in the context of Britain’s proposal to ban “incitement to hatred on religious grounds.”

Offence and insult are part of everyday life for people in Britain. All you have to do is open a daily paper and there?s plenty to offend. Or you can walk into the religious books section of a bookshop and discover you?re damned to various kinds of eternal hellfire, which is certainly insulting, not to say overheated.

The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted is absurd. So too is the notion that people should have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted. A fundamental decision needs to be made: do we want to live in a free society or not? Democracy is not a tea party where people sit around making polite conversation. In democracies people get extremely upset with each other. They argue vehemently against each other?s positions. (But they don?t shoot.)

And, arguably, if you deny folks the right to speak, they may resort to shooting instead.

So how do you promote civility toward people while allowing offensiveness? Assuming that’s a desirable target, Rushdie provides this suggestion:

At Cambridge University I was taught a laudable method of argument: you never personalise, but you have absolutely no respect for people?s opinions. You are never rude to the person, but you can be savagely rude about what the person thinks. That seems to me a crucial distinction: people must be protected from discrimination by virtue of their race, but you cannot ring-fence their ideas. The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it?s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

Indeed.

I don’t like being offended, by definition, but I’d rather that than fear that my being offensive toward others might be considered a crime.

(via DOF)