You do not defend free speech by demanding it for yourself but by demanding it for others, especially when you reprehend the use to which they put it or what they say. Freedom to agree with yourself is no freedom at all and inevitably ends in tyranny. But increasingly a tyranny of self-proclaimed virtue seems to be the aim of university-trained intellectuals who, in the name of their own beneficence, seek to silence those whose opinions they find objectionable. It is the very class that one might have supposed had most to fear from censorship, both legal and extra-legal, that most strongly advocates it. There has been an astonishing change in cultural atmosphere with regard to free speech in the last quarter century. In the middle of the 1990s I wrote an article which displeased a certain pressure group, one of whose senior members wrote to the chief executive of my hospital to complain, and even to ask for my dismissal. The chief executive replied that he was sorry the complainant was upset, but that it was a free country and I could say what I liked. I doubt whether any hospital chief executive would write—dare to write—in such forthright terms nowadays; a certain robustness in the defence of freedom was then still possible. What seems to me clear is that central governments and the managers of lesser or subordinate institutions, such as the police and universities, increasingly think of themselves in the way that Stalin thought, or said that he thought, of writers: namely as the engineers of souls. This they deem to be necessary because, left to themselves, people are inclined to think the wrong thoughts, and wrong thoughts are very dangerous, especially to those who invariably have the right thoughts. Indeed, so dangerous are wrong ideas that their expression should either be criminalized or those who express them socially marginalized, preferably ostracized; but since prevention is better than cure, children, adolescents and young adults should be immunised against them by indoctrination. In effect, a large number of people, especially in universities, now dream of a world in which nobody has bad thoughts or bad feelings—bad as defined by them, of course. Such a world would have to be highly policed at first, no doubt, but with modern techniques of surveillance, that should pose no insuperable problems.
Theodore Dalrymple