Notes from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's BBC Reith Lecture 2022

Background

The lecture takes place in the shadow of two events. The first is the recent stabbing of Salman Rushdie . In 1988 Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, which prompted Ayatollah Khoemeini to issue a fatwa against not only Rushdie, but also his publishers, in 1989. As Adichie tells it, it then followed that Rushdie's "Italian translator was stabbed, his Norwegian publisher was shot, and his Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was murdered in Tokyo."

Adichie's response to this has been to read Rushdie's oeuvre, "not only as an act of defiant support but as a ritualized reminder that physical violence in response to literature can never, ever be justified." Although Adichie is not fearful for her physical safety, she is concerned about emotional and mental safety. Therefore, Adichie's lecture is more concerned with cancel culture, than authoritarian suppression of free speech, which Adichie sees as a lesser threat at this time.

The second shadow is Adichie's own bruising encounter with cancel culture in 2017, after a Channel 4 interview in which she said, "... my feeling is that trans women are trans women," and was subsequently accused of transphobia. Adichie addressed the ensuing backlash in a Facebook post.

The mob is us

To Adichie, the biggest threat to free speech is the fear of social censure, which forces some to practise an "exquisite kind of self-censorship." We live in ideological tribal affiliations where positions are already assumed, and we're afraid of questioning the prevailing orthodoxy.

Social censure creates not only an atmosphere of fear, but also a reluctance to acknowledge this fear. "It is only human to fear a mob, but I would fear less if I knew my neighbor would not stay silent were I to be pilloried. We fear the mob but the mob is us."

Adichie is unequivocal in her condemnation of online pile ons. Mobs attack putative transgressors with ad hominem insults, doxxing and trying to get people to lose their jobs.

To anyone who thinks, “Well, some people who have said terrible things, deserve it,” no. Nobody deserves it. It is unconscionable barbarism. It is a virtual vigilante action whose aim is not just to silence the person who has spoken but to create a vengeful atmosphere that deters others from speaking.

Threat to literature

Adichie goes on to say that social censure is a threat to literature, because "To create, one needs a kind of formless roving of the mind, to go nowhere and anywhere and everywhere. It is from that swell that art emerges."

Literature is increasingly assessed through ideological lenses with publishers hiring sensitivity readers to weed out the potentially offensive words in unpublished manuscripts. Adichie acknowledges that words wound and have the power to break the human spirit. But they also have the power to elevate. This is why, Adichie asserts, freedom of speech is important.

There is something honest about an authoritarianism that recognises itself to be what it is. Such a system is easier to challenge because the battle lines are clear. But this new social censure demands consensus while being wilfully blind to its own tyranny. I think it portends the death of curiosity, the death of learning and the death of creativity.

Censorhip

Adichie does not think that censorship is an appropriate response to bad ideas or blatant untruths. Adichie points out that it's impractical to ban books and ideas because the instinct is to seek out the banned material. Instead of banning, Adichie suggests we answer back. Better to engage with people you disagree with, to understand their ideas so you can demolish them.

the suppression of speech is not so much about the speech itself, as it is the person who censors.

Censorship for the sake of tolerance is a bad idea, as it is a form of capitulation and suggests that the wounded cannot fight back. Adichie quotes Dutch lawyer Jacob Mchangama, "To impose silence and call it tolerance does not make it so. Real tolerance requires understanding. Understanding comes from listening. Listening presupposes speech."

The culture of social censure today has, at its center, a kind of puritanism that expects us to be free of all flaws, like angels, and angels do not need free speech.

Of course, we all need free speech. Free speech is indeed a tool of the powerful, but it is also crucially the language of the powerless... Dissent is impossible without speech.

It's not an absolute right

Adichie thinks that some speech restrictions are necessary in a civilized world. To suggest that one should be allowed to say absolutely anything at any time is "to me is a juvenile position, for being fantastical and detached from reality. Free speech absolutism would be appropriate only for a theoretical world inhabited by animated ideas rather than humans."

Which then begs the question of who should decide what should be silenced? Is it those with the power to answer back? Owners of social media who decide who can speak?

Adichie suggests that social media companies though private entities, should be treated more like a public utility, becuase of their outsize influence on modern society.

What you can do

Adichie encourages us to have moral courage, to stand for the freedom of speech, and suggests these broad rules to follow:

• Assume good faith
• Refuse to participate in unjustified censorship
• make your case, respectfully and factually.
• "We must agree that neither sanctimonious condescension on the left nor mean-spirited hectoring on the right qualify as political arguments."
• Insist not only on truth but also nuance.
• Hear every side and not only the loudest side
• Protect the values of disagreement and agree that there's value in disagreement
• Support the principle of free expression when it does not appeal to your own agenda, difficult at that may be.
• Wean yourself of the addiction to comfort
• Stop assuming that everyone knows or should know everything
• "We must demand that people behave on social media only as they would in real life, and we must also demand reasonable social media reforms such as the removal of anonymity, or linking advertising only to accounts with real names, which would provide an incentive to promote voices of actual people and not amoral bots."

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