To read their statement is like being attacked by a deranged Pekingese: were it not dangerous, it would be ridiculous. But even putting aside the statement’s overblown rhetoric, it is surely difficult to imagine anyone evoking the war in the Middle East without mentioning the savagery Hamas inflicted on entirely innocent Israeli civilians. Displaying the creativity they vaunt, the “Creatives” manage that feat with ease.
They are, unfortunately, not alone. Joining them in entirely ignoring the atrocities that triggered the current crisis are several hundred members of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance.
In a statement accusing Israel of “apartheid, ethnic cleansing and settler-colonial control”, these self-proclaimed defenders of media ethics urge editors to “deliberately make space for Palestinian voices”, “prioritising” those voices over others. And parroting the “Creatives”, they too claim to be victims of “silencing and intimidation” for championing the Palestinian cause.
There is a rich vein of irony in seeing cancel culture’s staunchest advocates howl about being cancelled. It is troubling, however, that Industry Minister Ed Husic has echoed their complaints, damning any constraint on the activists’ access to their preferred platforms as “McCarthyism”.
That these individuals are free to make their views known is beyond doubt. But expressing a view is one thing; cramming it down people’s throats another. The indispensable corollary of each person’s right to speak is the right of others not to listen: it is only in dictatorships that institutions have to broadcast the party line, hire party members and herd a sullen public into singing the party song.
By contrast, in liberal democracies, theatres are entitled to select who will act in plays and how, just as media outlets have the right to pick their employees and determine their tasks. The exercise of those rights is hardly a McCarthyite attack on freedom of expression; it is, on the contrary, that freedom in operation.
Thus, the spectators who paid to see The Seagull weren’t buying tickets to a political rally. What they expected for their money was a performance of the play, not the parading, in a context where they were unable to challenge them, of political views they find abhorrent.
By preventing actors from hijacking the public for their own purposes, the STC was therefore simply respecting its promise to spectators. That leaves competing theatres entirely free to mount performances in which the audience is harangued with militant speeches, required to don keffiyehs or led in shouting Palestinian slogans. The fact that the opportunity remains unexploited suggests the popular masses may still have a mind of their own.
Media outlets too are free to choose. They can colour their portrayal of events; alternatively, they can seek to attract readers who value objectivity and think facts should be distinguished from opinions.
If they opt for the latter, with all the difficulties it entails, they have every right to be wary of journalists – such as those signing the MEAA’s open letter – who consider bias a virtue, if not an obligation. To claim those outlets must allow Israel’s most strident critics to report on the Middle East is as nonsensical as claiming Benjamin Netanyahu’s fans have an inalienable entitlement to write about Hamas for Green Left Weekly.
All that ought to be blindingly obvious. That it needs to be said points to a pathology that has gripped Australian society: the belief, endlessly promoted by “progressives”, that every venue – from the arts and acting to sports and schools – should be a political platform.
Few beliefs could do more harm. Indeed, nothing played a more significant role in the birth of liberalism than the recognition, during the fratricidal wars of religion, of the dangers it poses.
As Thomas Hobbes put it, reflecting in 1642 on the factors that pushed England into civil war, the greatest “champions of anarchy” were those who incessantly thrust their “vain philosophy” on to others, unleashing torrents of “insults which the lowest class of people use when aroused to fisticuffs”. Given that “it is the nature of men to hurl abuse at each other”, the outrage cascaded throughout English society, leaving “hatred’s bitter poison” in its wake.
Hobbes’ solution to the inevitable “contrariety” of opinions was to prohibit the expression of divisive views; that of his contemporary, John Locke, was to channel the potentially uncivil passions into venues where they would not provoke public tumult.
Locke accepted that “Any one may employ as many Exhortations as he pleases”; but he argued that intense controversies should be confined to contexts where the proponents “give one another a fair hearing and answer calmly”.
Thus was born what John Rawls, an eminent American political philosopher, called “the precept of avoidance” – the conviction that in a world where none of us is immune to the heat of disagreement, civility is doomed to go up in flames if the tinder of disagreement is spread over the entire fabric of social life.
Rather, maintaining a workable society requires the old-fashioned virtue of tact: the self-restraint that silences, in large spheres of activity, the most incendiary sources of tension. That not only keeps those spheres open to all; by encouraging people whose views differ sharply to fraternise in the venues in which searing disagreements do not intrude, it helps forge the bonds that underpin mutual toleration.
Locke’s point was, in many respects, the exact opposite of what is at the heart of today’s zeitgeist. We do not, he thought, need “safe spaces” because we are individually fragile; we need them because our innate ferocity, and the “roughness and contempt” that are its corollary, always threaten social cohesion.
And the goal of protecting civility – which Locke called “the first of the social virtues” – from that risk is not, as the zeitgeist suggests, to make all opponents into best friends; it is, more realistically and much more importantly, to make sure we don’t turn every opponent into an implacable enemy.
This Christmas, that goal seems further than ever from our grasp. Worse, the importance of preventing social life from becoming a vast battlefield has vanished from public understanding. The result is a contagion of contention, in which arguments degenerate into quarrels and quarrels into all-out brawls.
There is no simple recipe for reversing that trend. But we can surely do better than caving in to the protesters, whose aim is not to convince but to intimidate, not to discuss but to proclaim. Until they learn that their rights cannot be bought at the expense of the rights of others, ours will be a society perpetually at war with itself.
Adding a hefty dose of inanity to the current wave of insanity, a “Creatives for Palestine” collective called last week for mass protests against the alleged “silencing” of the actors who donned keffiyehs at the end of the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull.