WILLIAM SKIDELSKY [The Observer] – Stefan Collini is an exemplary essay writer who combines great stylistic elegance with absolute ruthlessness when it comes to dissecting sloppy thought. These virtues are much to the fore in That’s Offensive!…

Collini’s concern here is to analyse just one form of modern censorship (or, perhaps more accurately, self-censorship), one that may not strike many liberal readers as obvious, or even particularly important. This is the idea that, out of concern not to give “offence”, one should refrain from criticising ideas, beliefs or practices that one regards as wrong…

In the type of censorship that Collini is concerned with, the power equation is typically reversed. When, in contemporary society, a particular view is labelled “offensive”, it is usually on the basis that the offended party is in some way at a disadvantage in relation to the person who has expressed the offending view. As a disadvantaged person, he or she is entitled to an additional measure of “respect” – which may include the right not to be criticised. Collini, it should be noted, is not against showing respect. What he does think, however, is that the use of the word, in the context of giving offence, is usually bogus, since it is connected to a form of identity politics that seeks to depict people first as members of a group, and only second as individuals. And that is to treat them not with real respect at all, but with condescension. To regard someone as capable of taking, and responding to, criticism (as long as it isn’t gratuitous) is to treat them fully as your equal.

Continued at The Observer.

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…and no eye-rolling, please.

By MARTHA NUSSBAUM [New Statesman] – But now comes the real problem. The duties of civility turn out to impose different demands on members of the majority when they are dealing with one another and when they are dealing with previously or currently stigmatised minority groups. Because women and African Americans, for example, have for centuries been treated as if they have no right to be in the public assembly room or the academy, special care has to be used when addressing them with critical arguments.

If I give a feminist paper and a colleague rolls his eyes, or speaks in a snarky manner, that conduct is continuous with centuries during which women were assumed to be incapable of rational performance, and with a more recent era during which women’s studies and normative feminism were assumed by most academic men not to be genuine fields of academic inquiry.

Given that context, it is good to be particularly careful…Collini is right about the goal for which we should strive – a community of rigorous and open argument – it seems unfortunate that he is not attuned to the problems of civility often faced by unpopular minorities who are making new demands.

Continued at  New Statesman | More Chronicle & Notices.