Free Speech and Self-Criticism

There's a difference between self-censorship and self-criticism, but a very fine one; indeed, the distinction vanishes if you don't know how to engage in the latter. Freedom of speech--or simply "freedom!"--is the focus of public debate in the last few days.

Some have argued that, in light of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations, the Racial Discrimination Act s18C should be utterly repealed, baldly stating that Charlie Hebdo could not be published in this country under its aegis.

Doubly wrong.

First, such a publication would be exempt under s18D as an artistic enterprise; second, Islam is not a race, so the RDA does not, in fact, apply. Such arguments are manipulative and self-serving.

Freedom of speech really only benefits those with access to the media (as in, the plural of medium, the means by which messages and information are conveyed). Not all media are equal. A blog on the internet read by dozens, maybe hundreds, is not a medium on par with, say, a newspaper or a television station (what we usually think of when we read the word media).

And arguments that "the new media" will supplant the old ignores the fact that a blogger just starting out does not have the same level of capital as a media mogul, who can transform his or her business model, however incrementally, in the new age of e-commerce. Money is still the medium of the age.

I do not support any change to s18C, not because it promotes censorship, self- or otherwise, but because it is one of the few, rather brittle planks promoting self-criticism. We need self-criticism in a world where any opinion can and is offered, quite unsolicited, on the Internet, a medium both liberating and tyrannising at once.

Self-criticism is not about second guessing yourself, but about adopting a posture towards your own ideas in a way a literary or social critic might towards his or her subject. Indeed, we are all critics--albeit critics of society and everything that crosses our path but that isn't actually us.

We can't be immune from critique, and the sooner we adopt ourselves as our primary subject, the sharper our perception will be, and the more insightful our opinions become.

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Speech exists in a finite space; and although it is the cornerstone of a free democratic society, it is not all-pervasive in our private or--importantly--our public lives.

We must consider the economics of public discourse, where policy and institutional choices are formulated, in order to fully grasp the role of free speech.

Charlie Hebdo is a form of satire, offering humorous and provocative critiques of various aspects of the culture and society. One may question its tastefulness, and even how much it is actually satire, but in the Australian context it would be exempt as an artistic enterprise, so for all intents and purposes satire it is.

But Charlie Hebdo does not partake in that part of the public discourse relating to policy or institutional (governmental) choices. At best, it shines a light on something, mocking it, drawing attention to it (and to itself), establishing this or that subject of ridicule as a legitimate target for critique.

What satire does, to put it simplistically, is to erode the barriers that prevent certain things being discussed at all. Sadly, in the aftermath of the recent tragedy, they have achieved something close to their goal, with many news outlets emboldened to publish the forthcoming and very poignant front page of the latest issue (see below).

So, while satire rightly razes sacred idols, reducing them to the sediment of democratic argument, satire is not a part of the decision-making process at an institutional level. Almost always, it is on the outside looking in, a viral messenger of modern democracy.

Self-criticism is the necessary precursor of decision-making, and our decision-makers, our politicians, should be expert self-critics. (Perhaps I should leave you to giggle at this point.)

Here in Australia we can think of many politicians who lack, not so much an internal censor as an internal critic. It is one thing to have an opinion, but it is a higher order function to display reasoned judgement in one's policy offerings, which so many Australian senators ("elders," etymologically) seem to have trouble with.

Self-criticism ought to lead to wisdom, but really it starts with adhering to the adage "think before you speak." The internet rarely promotes thoughtfulness, and that is to the detriment of our public discourse.

It is detrimental because we have only a finite space for public discourse--discourse, quite separate from satire and other forms of expression, in which policy is propounded, decisions made.

Quite simply, we cannot deal with or act upon every issue or special interest. We are, in our capacity as advocates for our causes, competing for attention and resources, and were we to attempt to address all such causes in accordance with their merit (as presumed by their advocates) we would have no time for anything else.

Discourse, conceived as a portioning of time and space for public matters, is a finite resource; our attention spans are limited, as is our capacity and our goodwill for dealing with each other's shit.

The preciousness of this resource should not be underestimated. It has its own economy, which many seek to game or corrupt to their own ends. It is not a resource without structure. And its structure is, by and large, arbitrary, subject to the same analytics and arguments that take place within its space.

(In other words, public discourse and its economy is itself always a valid subject of debate. The height of free speech, I would argue, is the right to argue about what is and is not covered by free speech in the public discourse, for without this very meta-democratic right democracy cannot exist.)

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Opponents of s18C, and the RDA more broadly, are well within their rights to call for its repeal--but their argument cannot reside on absolute grounds, for there are none in what is at bottom a self-referential exercise: we are arguing about the rules we want to apply to ourselves; the only absolute is that we will continue arguing amongst and about ourselves.

The need for structure in the public discourse, however, is persistent, for without it there is only violence as a means of settling issues. We must eschew violence totally; it allows for nothing but itself, in public or in private life.

Freedom of speech, then, must exist within a scaffold of public discourse, and self-criticism is a necessary precursor to it. s18C is a plank in that scaffold that promotes self-criticism. It is not onerous, unless your aims are disingenuous. At the very least, if your aim is disingenuous, it should give you pause for thought, an opportunity to reflect on your opinion and to understand its consequences, to think before you speak.

Without this scaffold, those who already have privileged access to various media (again, plural for medium), assert their own structure on the public discourse. And that, ultimately, is the point of the attack on the Racial Discrimination Act.

In a democracy, we are forever in a battle over institutional structures, looking for any advantage, and where possible to entrench it in those structures, shaping society for the next generation. We are, perhaps frustratingly, engaged in an open-ended and society-wide experiment in self-criticism.

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Charlie Hebdo:

Preferences and Electoral Strangeness

One of the more peculiar aspects of the Australian electoral system is the "preference swap" arrangements that, like under the table deals, have an insidious influence on the outcome. I will explain this electoral quirk briefly. At Federal elections, voters have two options on the Senate ballot: vote one candidate "group" above the line, or vote all candidates, from one to whatever, below the line. In New South Wales, there are over 100 candidates, and to vote below the line, you must number every single candidate (although, there is an exception, where you need only number 90% of candidates below the line to cast a valid ballot). Needless to say, most voters vote 1 above the line. This has the consequence of, effectively, giving your vote to the party you voted for to distribute as they see fit. The caveat being they have to tell us, the voting public, just how that distribution will take place. That is, they must provide "preference flows" in advance of the election.

This past weekend, the Senate preference flows were released; and there were some very unusual preference swaps. Minor parties routinely "swap" preferences so as to maximise their chances of election. Normally, you would assume parties would swap preferences with ideologically sympathetic parties; there are some notable cases where this is, indeed, the case. There are, however, other cases where bizarre preferencing has taken place. Two are worth noting: The Australian Sex and the WikiLeaks Party.

The Sex Party has preferenced the racist One Nation party against the more ideologically sympathetic Greens Party, while the WikiLeaks Party that has preferenced the Shooters Party and the racist Australia First Party ahead of the Greens Party. WikiLeaks and the Sex Party have more in common with the Greens than the other parties mentioned, which makes it bizarre that two ostensibly "libertarian" parties (that is to say, "social" libertarian) have preferenced right-wing parties ahead of their left-wing cohorts. This may be evidence of cynical preference swapping, or spite towards a more prominent left-wing party.

The "defence" provided by the WikiLeaks and Sex Party was galling. The former attributed an "administrative error" to the absurd choice, while the Sex Party offered meekly that they "had to put One Nation somewhere!" Which is true; all parties must allocate full preferences, all 110 of them. The question remains unanswered, however, as to why they put them ahead of a more sympathetic party, like the Greens. It is possibly just cynical preferencing, which is entirely acceptable: we have a system that allows parties to swap preferences, or make preference deals, and all parties are free to do so. If that is the case, however, then they could at least be honest about it. Attempting to obfuscate their true intentions is electoral cowardice.

One could argue, and it has been argued, that these other parties are unlikely to inherit the Sex Party's or WikiLeaks' votes. If that is the case, then it makes it even more ridiculous to preference them ahead of the Greens; it has caused needless consternation among likely voters for those parties. What is really taking place is a gamble. The two parties in question are gambling on the order of elimination, hoping to pick up votes from right-wing minor parties ahead of the Greens. It is, of course, acceptable to want to beat other parties, even parties that are broadly sympathetic. The problem is, however, that sometimes electoral gambles backfire. 2004 in Victoria is a case in point. Family First candidate Steve Fielding was elected to the Senate on Labor and Democrat preferences. The latter two parties had preferenced against the Greens in that state; as a result, an adversarial party was elected as opposed to a sympathetic one.

Other parties have been more principled in the preferencing. The Secular Party has stuck to a sympathetic flow (on a personal note, their preference flow in New South Wales is closest to my below the line vote); while the Pirate Party took a more democratic line, allowing their members to vote on the preference order. Perhaps the strangest preference flow comes from the Shooters Party, which is, quite simply, all over the place and is, at present, unfathomable (at least to this observer).

There are two points I will make in conclusion. First, these kinds of shenanigans have only strengthened my support for Optional Preferential Voting (which would eliminate these very shenanigans!); second, it is ridiculous for minor political parties to preference against their sympathies. The Senate is so finely balanced that counter-intuitive preferencing can throw the Senate out of kilter for up to six years. If the gamble some of these parties have taken backfires, it could lead to antithetical policy directions that undermine their own agenda, and the agenda of progressive politics more broadly.

"Voting For": Against Electoral Cowardice

There's no such thing as a "vote against" a party or candidate; there is only a "vote for." You must vote for someone. To vote is an inherently positive thing; it has no negative or negating qualities. It is, as such, disingenuous to encourage others to vote against a party or candidate; it is patently not what occurs in the act of voting. The tension within this for/against dichotomy is most acute in two-party electoral systems. To vote against one party is, to put it simplistically, to vote for the other party. The peculiarities of the Australian electoral further exacerbate this for/against dichotomy.

At the Federal level, compulsory preferential voting is used. To put it briefly, every candidate on the ballot must be numbered, meaning that, even if you don't "vote 1" for either of the major parties, you must put one before the other in the number sequence or your vote doesn't count. So you end up having to vote Coalition or Labor in the end if you want your vote to count at all. I'm not going to debate the merits of the electoral system here, but the system highlights the importance of understanding that to vote is an inherently positive act; positive, that is, in that it must be given to someone (a party or candidate), it is never taken away. Mathematically speaking, voting is an act of addition, not subtraction.

I say it is disingenuous to encourage a misunderstanding of the act of voting, but I would go further and argue that it is a form of cowardice. Recently, the Sydney Telegraph used its front page to call for the Labor party to be kicked out, the title screamed "Kick This Mob Out!" (Read related story here.) Other pundits have expressed a similar sentiment. But a vote against Labor must be a vote for the Coalition, yet it is not often couched in such explicit terms. Perhaps it is out of fear of losing credibility by explicitly endorsing a party or candidate, a vain attempt at retaining some degree of objectivity. Once you endorse a party or candidate everything you say subsequently will be viewed through that prism; not only that, such an endorsement is an acknowledgement that your subsequent words will and can be viewed through that prism. There is no defence or deflection once you have acknowledged your bias, and this can be seen as giving up a strategic advantage.

It is cowardice to encourage a vote against a party, especially in a system where voting is compulsory and the form of voting is as onerous as ours. It is no bad thing to support or endorse a particular party, but when it is obfuscated in the manner that it so often is, behind outrage and indignation directed towards that other party, it is dishonest. If you wish to support a party then positively endorse them, because that is ultimately what voting is: a binding endorsement of a particular party, not a dis-endorsement of any other party.

Cory Bernardi Vs. Western Civilisation

According to this article,

THE pillars of Western society are under threat, and Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi has a plan to prop them up.   

      
Unfortunately, when Cory Bernardi and people like him talks about "Western society" or "Western Civilisation," they invariably mean white, Christian, straight, and patriarchal. It is an extremely limiting view of a complex historical movement. And Western Civilisation is a movement; it has travelled a long way from what we commonly take is its origins. It is not a static state of affairs, and this is the great mistake made by conservative thinkers and politicians.

When I talk of Western Civilisation I mean the more than 2500 years of intellectual and cultural change; I mean a reverence and re-engagement with what, for pragmatic reasons, we take as the zero-point of Western Civilisation: Classical Greece; I mean the Dark Ages and the closing of the Western mind, the attitudes of which time we still seem to struggle against; I mean the Renaissance; I mean the Enlightenment; I mean the Scientific, Industrial, and Democratic Revolutions. In short, I mean the 2500-plus years of the struggle of reason and the imagination against prejudice and oppression. That is Western Civilisation.

Bernardi-ism, like so much that is inane about conservatism, is grounded upon a misreading of history prompted by personal grievance, the loss of aristocracy. Western Civilisation is about progress and self-criticism; the Bernardian world-view is grounded on the anxiety that self-criticism often threatens us with, and it replaces self-criticism with self-certainty. The "six f-words" at the heart of Bernardi's plan - Faith, Family, Flag, Free enterprise, Federation and Freedom - are emblematic of this self-certainty. What they are also emblematic of is the vague simplifications of an anxious ideology; it is an ideology that requires homogeneity and stasis to survive. Western Civilisation is about change, progress, and adaptation. In short, Western Civilisation evolves, and that is its greatest strength. Conservatism, such as Bernardi's version, in asserting "traditional values," does not take a proper account of Western history.

Mimesis and Critical Literacy

It's time for a bit of convergence. There are three major ares of interest I have been blogging about recently: Australian politics, critical literacy, and a couple of blogs on neuropolitics, or neurophilosophy. These are not disparate areas of interest; there are common threads that unite them, although it may not seem obvious at present. In this post, I will begin the process of weaving the second and third strands together. Previously, I have blogged about the discourse of imposition, whereby, due to our mimetic nature, we are driven to impose ourselves upon one another. As a supplementary to this blog, I more recently blogged about the misguided metaphysics that assumes that we are hyper-rational agents, quite distinct from our neurophysiology. I asserted in the latter post that such a position is just another kind of imposition in the aforementioned discourse. I have also blogged about the importance of critical literacy to democracy, and provided a demonstration of critical literacy in action. The crux of this post is to argue that, while we are governed in large part by our neurophysiology we can emancipate ourselves from the more negative implications of that fact through critical literacy.

Critical literacy, it must be remembered, helps to guard against manipulation by fallacy, particularly appeals to emotion. Our emotions are the product of neurophysiological processes that qualify our experience of the world around us. Emotions are necessary, but their necessity also makes us vulnerable. Emotional fallacies are the bread-and-butter of populist politicians, fear and envy perhaps the most commonly preyed upon. Language, as our primary tool of communication, is also the primary tool of manipulation. Language, it must also be remembered, presents only an approximation of the world around it; the world language represents is, as such, malleable. The world we live in bombards us with meaning from every angle and over a period of time that extends further than our personal memories; the legacy of ancient events from far off places still affects us, shaping our experiences from remote locations in space and time. In short, life is much more complex than can be captured in a linear language.

Language is an extension of our mimetic capacities into an abstract space. "Metaphoric space" is perhaps a better term. Recently, I have begun blogging on a fourth thread on sexual politics, where I have discussed the role of the imagination and the metaphoric processes of meaning-making that are grounded in the human body. Metaphor is an extension of our embodied experience in and understanding of the world around us, and language is grounded in metaphor; language is metaphor. Merlin Donald perhaps puts it best: "language floats on a sea of metaphor." Language is a projection of our embodied, mimetic experience into an abstract "metaphoric" space that can be translated, reproduced, and shared. Importantly, however, our experience can be shaped in that space; it is a reciprocal process of meaning-making.

Nevertheless, while language can shape our experience it is still our experience, which presupposes that which does the experiencing: the human organism. Language can be viewed as a filter through which human experience is channelled and refined. To extend the metaphor, a lot of the sediment that gets filtered out in the process, however, is still meaningful to our embodied experience. This has considerable implications for our understanding and our communication. There is an argument to be made, for instance, that the experience of women is filtered in just such a way (this was suggested to me recently in a reply to a previous blog, which I have responded to elsewhere). It is important, then, to understand the short-comings of language, as well as the processes whereby it enacts this filtration of experience. This is the role of critical literacy.

Our experience has shape prior to language, but language comes to superimpose itself on the native shapes of human experience. Importantly, language does not supplant our natural mimetic and embodied understanding of the world; we retain "body language" and other pre-linguistic modes of communication and expression, including the native intonations of voice on which, as my favourite poet Robert Frost would say, our "words are strung." There are sounds before words, and those sounds are meaningful, but that's a topic for another day. This is not some special case I'm making for human sounds; all animals have the capacity for some kind of vocal signalling, all mammals at least. Only humans have a complex conceptual language that they exalt above their other modes of communication and expression.

Language goes further than our embodied modes of communication, but is nonetheless grounded in them. Language cannot mean anything without its reference point being the body; more than they, language loses its meaningfulness when it loses it reference to the culture it sustains. A "dead language" is one that has fallen into disuse because it no longer supports the culture, or the collection of social activities, that promulgated it, and upon which it relied for its own perpetuation. We come so much to rely on the conceptual structure that language provides us that the substratum of embodied meaning is overlooked or diminished, except where it supports or augments linguistic meaning; for example, sarcasm is a prosodic augmentation that changes the meaning of the words used through inflection. The sarcastic utterance means the opposite of the conceptual meaning of the words used.

The problem, of course, is that language also empowers us to go beyond our immediate experience. We cannot do away with language; we cannot revert to "body language" and pheromones. We are our bodies, our brains, our chemistry, our instincts; but that is not all we are. We are the stories we tell about ourselves, about our experiences; we are the ideological (political and religious) debates we have about the shape of our community; we are out poetry and our songs. We shape and re-shape the perception of ourselves through our language; this can change the way we interpret our embodied experience, which in turn can change our behaviour. Even though our fundamental experiences have not changed, our understanding of them does.

By fundamental experience I mean the embodied processes, the organs of perception, the mimetic engagement, and the chemical and neurophysiological processes that underpin our experience; these processes, which we do experience, whether in the form of basic percepts, or emotional responses, do not change. Our understanding of them, as represented in art and language, do change. Love, for instance, perhaps to most common aesthetic object in human history, whatever stories, songs, poems, customs, or laws are produce with regard to it, the chemical responses remains the same. It is the language of love that changes. I mention customs and laws quite deliberately; love has been legislated, and in many ways still is. Marriage laws, divorce laws, sodomy laws, interracial marriages laws in the U.S. to name but a few. Language is used to impose control over behaviour; but language is also used to undermine such control, the "marriage equality" movement is a worthy citation here. The term "marriage equality" is an important departure from other prominent terms, such as "gay marriage" and "same-sex marriage." "Marriage equality is a much more inclusive term.

Language matters; that's why critical literacy matters. A thorough understanding of the relationship between language and our embodied mode of understand is also vitally important. We must understand where our meaning comes from, because it comes to us in a highly filtered form; if we simply accept that filtered meaning without critical analysis, or without reference to the origins of meaning-making in human understanding, then we abnegate our control and our contribution to human understanding. What's worse, we risk giving up our own bodies in the meaning-making processes; we risk letting others tell us what our body means, how it means. Language is neither perfect, nor isolated from human embodied experience; but it plays a critical role in how we perceive and represent our experience within society. As such, it is important that we maintain a critical relationship with language so that we are not manipulated by those who seek to impose their experience, their "wisdom," on us.

The Discourse of Imposition: Mimesis, Politics, and the Impossibility of Freedom.

We are social creatures; we are not "free," whatever freedom might mean to you. "Freedom" can be a mantra, put to good effect, in the political arena, used to close down debate on novel policy ideas - alternately, "freedom" can be used to pry open previously closed debates. Freedom is a tool; how you use it depends on your agenda.

But I say we are social creatures and not "free," certainly not in the romantic perception that implies that more freedom is somehow the panacea to all society's ills. We are not free because we are driven to impose upon each other. Sharing your opinion is just such an imposition (this is why "freedom of speech" is so important!). We impose upon one another in direct, indirect, and collective ways. We impose upon our family and friends; we impose upon service staff and public servants; we impose upon the institutions that we rely upon to conduct our everyday business; through those institutions we impose upon people we have never met. We are, in turn, imposed upon by our family and friends; by various institutions and public officials; even by complete strangers, directly and indirectly.

It is through this dynamic and pervasive imposition that politics emerges. Politics is the endless discourse, indeed struggle, of social (and economic) imposition. Man, to quote Aristotle, is a political animal because man is a social animal. The discourse of freedom, however nebulous, is bound up in this discourse of imposition. It is not to be considered illegitimate, as such; it is quite a natural expression of political desires. It is, nonetheless, a part of the discourse of imposing political interests and perspectives on others - and, conversely, of resisting the same imposition in return.

We cannot step outside this discourse of imposition; it's in our DNA. We are hard-wired to identify with others, and to assert ourselves - to impose. We are, to quote William James, the imitative animal. We learn by imitating others; nowhere is this more evident than with children. To make the point explicit: children learn by imitating their parents and others in their environment. Acquiring language is predicated on this imitative education. Our social nature is also predicated on this inherent imitative, or mimetic, capacity.

We are drawn together because it is required for the proper functioning of our organism - the biological entity that we are. We are, after all, animals, whatever else we might be. We have a biological purpose to satisfy, with many biological functions necessary for that purpose to ultimately be satisfied. We are by no means "free" to pursue this biological satisfaction apart from the discourse of imposition. We are biological, social, imitative, and political animals all at once.

That we are drawn together out of mimetic instinct has many consequences. We not only persist in imitation throughout our lives - imitation is, after all, an important cognitive short-cut: we accept received wisdom and opinions from many quarters, including religion and politics, and we regurgitate that wisdom vociferously, now, perhaps, more than ever - but we impose upon each other because of this mimetic instinct. Politics is mimetic in the sense that we are engaged, permanently, in a social transaction predicated on imitation.

Politics, furthermore, is a projection of mimetic instinct. We do not imitate blindly (although this might be debatable in some regards), but we construct, through our original mimetic learning and beyond, a model of behaviour based on the aggregation of mimetic patterns. Our "world-view" is predicated on these patterns - we are a satisfied when these patterns are reaffirmed through our social interactions and experience. That is, when the world is presenting us with mimetic patterns that match our mimetic patterns all is right with the world. More simply, when we see people acting in a way that matches the patterns we are used to (the patterns we acquire through our initial mimetic learning, and which persist through adulthood), we are satisfied that things are going smoothly.

When we see people acting in ways that are not sanguine to our preferred patterns of behaviour and experience, in ways we are not used to imitating and which are not successful models of behaviour for us, there is a cognitive conflict. We do not like what we are seeing - it is wrong! This applies, not merely to immediate or direct experience, but abstract experience as well. And this is where we return to politics.

Politics - in a democracy at least - is a largely abstract experience. Politics is the argument of abstract objects, policies, laws, regulations, that govern specific sets of behaviour. The more politically inclined view the world through an ideology: an abstract set of protocols about what should or should not happen at the communal or societal level. Ideology, in other words, is a world-view predicated on mimetic instincts. Indeed, there is research to suggest this link neurologically between political identification and mimetic instinct. I direct you to Marco Iacoboni's 2008 book Mirroring People, Chapter 10, "Neuropolitics," specifically. I'll discuss this marvellous book in greater depth another day. In a nutshell, there is evidence to suggest that we are hardwired to identify and imitate the actions of others; generally, this idea comes under the rubric of "mirror neuron theory." This neurological predestination has implications for politics,  marketing ("neuromarketing"), or anything else that involves human behaviour - even the abstractions of human behaviour.

We object to behaviour that we cannot imagine ourselves engaging in. In short, behaviour that is (to re-purpose a fading word) "inimitable." Inimitable behaviour presents us with an inaccessible mind - if we cannot imitate the behaviour, if we cannot identify with it because our mimetic model of morality has never included it, then we cannot be sure we are dealing with a fellow mind-haver. We opine to impose our mimetic model - through the wonderful tool of language - on other, but clearly inferior, mind-havers. If our words cannot reach them, then surely they are subnormal! The derision and vitriol on the Internet suggests that political subnormality is, in fact, the norm! There is little respectful or intellectual discussion; epithets and condescension are commonplace.

We are never free because we are biologically incapable of freedom - at least the metaphysical kind of freedom that so many seem to appeal to. Freedom cannot be imitated - what can be imitated is ideology, or a politically-based mimetic model of the world. Conversely, ideology can be imposed because it can be imitated. Inimitable behaviour is unacceptable, even in abstract experiences like political discourse. We are political animals because we are imitative animals. Without imitation, there is no need for politics.