Historian and author Victor Davis Hanson argued in a lecture addressed to the Heritage Foundation that there is a new narrative defining the debate between security and liberty that is more characteristic of a post-9/11-plus-hindsight world.
Hanson suggested that the government is not infringing upon American individual rights, as was generally feared in the past, but rather Americans themselves pose the greatest threat to their freedom of speech by practicing self-censorship. This consequently stifles thought and discourages freedom of expression.
“Right now at this time, there is a collective mood in the West that is self-censoring, is not self-reflective, and has had a deleterious effect on free expression,” said Hanson. “And while we have a history of state coercion of the individual, the problem right now is not in the stars, so to speak. It’s within ourselves.”
Hanson attributed the change in the narrative to three post-modern ideologies in the West: multiculturalism, utopian pacifism and moral equivalency.
Multiculturalism has caused confusion in muddling the United States’ national identity, Hanson argues. “We are a multi-racial society that largely abides by the protocols of western culture, society and civilization,” Hanson said. “We confuse that by suggesting that we are simply a menu of equal cultures, which we’re not.”
Multiculturalism is problematic, Hanson alleges, because it creates a different standard to hold non-western countries to. For example, the west does not want to reprimand genital circumcision practices in the Sudan or “honor killings” in the West Bank because “we either think that we have a bad history in our past of projecting our values on colonial sins on other people or we feel that multiculturalism is part of the post-modern idea that there is no right or wrong,” explained Hanson.
Hanson warned that adherence to multiculturalism in the U.S. invites a precarious environment where people are afraid to speak because they fear offending other cultures. The natural reaction to this fear is to self-censor in order to avoid stepping on any toes. He said “multiculturalism has forbidden people collectively in the west from exercising independent judgment … and that has had a chilling effect on free speech.”
Another worldview that has had a “chilling effect” on free speech, according to Hanson, is utopian pacifism. The premise of utopian pacifism is that even though man is imperfect, he is still able to eradicate antiquated conditions, such as war, since he is guided and empowered by western thought and advancement. Utopian pacifism has ill effects similar to multiculturalism, like creating a different standard for non-western nations that ultimately permits the West to pardon behavior that should be condemned.
“We assume under the tenets of utopian pacifism that other people cannot be judged by the same standard because to do so might escalate a controversy into war,” said Hanson.
The last ideology Hanson mentioned in his lecture was moral equivalency, a doctrine that suggests everything is of equal value with no consideration for context. Hanson defined it as “the notion that there shall be no magnitude in assessing the West’s misdemeanors versus the felony of some person outside the West, that they are morally equivalent.”
“We can have 2,000 terrorist incidents in the United States each year committed by people who identify themselves as radical Islamists of some such fashion, but we will continue to cite Timothy McVeigh and suggest that Christian extremism is of the same level of worry, not because they are, but because we want to find some mechanism that makes the non-West equal to the West, or the foreigner the same as ourselves,” said Hanson.
Hanson advocated the reinstatement of an absolute standard in place to hold others in judgment. He said in regards to the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, “We should have the ability to assess that on an absolute standard and compare it to other things in history and come to conclusions whether it’s barbarous or necessary, whatever one’s views are about it.”
Emily Miller is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.
