I recently returned from a trip to Britain, where I discovered, to my consternation, that the government is proposing a law to ban what it is calling "incitement to religious hatred." This measure, much beloved by liberals, is apparently designed to protect people "targeted" because of their religious beliefs.
But I see nothing to applaud. To me it is merely further evidence that in Britain, just as in the United States, we may need to fight the battle for the Enlightenment all over again.
That battle, you may remember, was about the church's desire to place limits on thought. Diderot's novel "La Religieuse," with its portrayal of nuns and their behavior, was deliberately blasphemous: It challenged religious authority, with its indexes and inquisitions, on what was possible to say. Most of our contemporary ideas about freedom of speech and imagination come from the Enlightenment.
But although we may have thought the battle long since won, if we aren't careful, it is about to be "un-won."
Offense and insult are part of everyday life for everyone in Britain (or the U.S., for that matter). All you have to do is open a daily paper and there's plenty to offend. Or you can walk into the religion 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, or in which they have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted, is absurd.
In the end, 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.)
At Cambridge I was taught a laudable method of argument: You never personalize, 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 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.
