Being offended

Society is full of people who appear to be offended by so many things. In our ‘woke’ times (horrible term) it is apparently necessary to take offence at the slightest thing, often when the object of the offence has little to do with the person claiming to be offended. It is a little like people claiming to be traumatised about something they have read. You are not traumatised, you are upset. You have not been offended, you disagree with someone. There is a big difference.

People are offended too easily. They are offended by the slightest comment, by careless remarks, and particularly by comments made that are not in agreement with the ‘woke’ agenda. A good example is when JK Rowling remarked that women need spaces where they are safe from men, including biological men claiming female gender. Rowling made a reasonable point, basically that people with penises shouldn’t be in women’s toilets. If you disagree with this then fine, argue your alternative point, but it is not reasonable to do as some have done, refused to countenance opposition to current notions of gender and assuming those who disagree are committing hate crimes, and in this case effectively cancelled Rowling. That is just a childish or mardy response and entirely inappropriate to the circumstances. If you listen to people like Rowling (who probably represents a majority of people), all she meant is that biological women needs places they can be confident there are no biological men around because biological men can be, or can be perceived as, threatening. Tht sounds to me like a pretty strong statement in favour of caring for women.

Whether or not you agree or disagree with Rowling the point is that people should not be taking offence so easily, it endangers free speech and open dialogue. We are entitled to different opinions. It is through argument that we make progress, that ideas, morality, science, etc improve.

There is a big difference between personal offence, where someone has directly and personally insulted a specific individual, where it may be appropriate to take offence (though it is often better to ignore or respond reasonably), and indirect offence, where the comments are indirect, as is the case of Rowling. People have a right to criticise, to have an opinion, and society cannot move forward if this is not the case, if people just claim to be offended to shut someone up. That stifles debate and is illiberal – which is ironic given that many of those claiming to be offended by certain comments on transgender, race, sexism and so on also claim to be liberals on the left of politics, with the often implicit suggestion that those who oppose their ideas are right wing conservatives. This is so far from reality.

These ‘woke’ (that word again) people are not liberals, they are authoritarians, and authoritarianism, whether on the left or right, is undesirable in an enlightened society. We need to be more openminded, more accepting of different points of view. Don’t ‘cancel’ someone you don’t agree with and get offended, listen to them properly, and if you still don’t agree with them, argue your own case. Society will be better for it.

At the moment the woke people make a lot of noise and have caused significant damage to free speech and debate. People are being cancelled on social media, TV shows (and adverts) are woke, and woke people are criticising the use of books that contain supposedly unacceptable words such as nigger (my nickname as a child by the way). There are many instances of this problem and I hope to address some of them in future blogs. It is largely a very recent phenomenon and, I hope, will only be a temporary one. I don’t want to live in a society where they burn books because, as the Geman Jew Heinrich Heine said, “where they burn books, they will in the end burn human beings too.” And he was right.

Taking offence is largely something you choose to do. If you want to improve interactions among people in society, try being less offended and more openminded. We will all be better off.