The unconscionable barbarism of cancel culture

There are so many good things in Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Reith lecture on freedom of speech. She shatters the case for cancel culture. She lays waste to the patrician left’s claim that free speech serves the powerful but harms the powerless. She issues a stirring call for a new solidarity of liberty-lovers against the ‘unconscionable barbarism’ of punishing people for what they think and say. But the best thing, the thing that makes the breath catch in your throat as you listen, is just how unrepentant her love of freedom is. This is no meek, apologetic plea for a few more rights to say what we think. No, she’s passionate about this liberty, and it is rare indeed to hear that today. It is a truly infectious and inspiring call to arms.

This year’s BBC Reith lectures are titled ‘The Four Freedoms’. The first, Adichie’s, is on the freedom to speak. Her diagnosis of the crisis of free expression is peerless. She says the problem we face in the West right now is not the jackboot of government tyranny pressed on the throat of free debate. It’s social conformism. It’s the overbearing pressure to adhere to ‘the collectively sanctioned attitudes and behaviours of this era’. ‘The biggest threat to speech today is not legal or political, but social’, she says. She recognises this is ‘not a new idea’: ‘When John Stuart Mill warned against “the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling”, it reads as though he foresaw the threat that orthodoxy poses today.’ But the ‘present manifestation’ of this ‘social censure’ is, she says, especially severe. It desires nothing less than the permanent banishment from society – that is, the cancellation – of anyone caught deviating from sanctioned thought.