THE TRUTH OF SOMETHING IS UNRELATED TO THE HARM SAYING IT MAY BRING It's So Obvious It Shouldn't Need Saying

We’re now in an era of licensed speech, with much attention to the ‘harm’ speech and writing may cause. The weirdest aspect is in maintaining that anything said which is harmful must be untrue. Licence can only be given for 'truths' - which are defined in this circular way - as judged by progressive governments and political activists.

This particularly struck me when watching an activist lawyer conflate anything he thought might bring harm with being ‘untrue’, as if axiomatically. The particular issue was the marked preponderance of Pakistani/Bangladeshi Muslim men in the grooming gangs which brutalised thousands of young white girls, in cities like Bradford, Telford, Rotherham and Oxford. This activist lawyer does it by trying to bury the issue in UK totals for crime, ignoring the specifics of the particular events and locations. No doubt the victims were reassured by his dismissal.

But does the incendiary nature of an idea or theory - and the harm it may cause someone or some group - make it, by definition, untrue? Of course not! If that were the case, then Copernicus’s and Galileo’s heliocentric solar system would have been untrue, simply because it harmed the authority of the Catholic church (in its eyes). Ditto for Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

It’s an absurd approach to epistemology, which would reject advances and intellectual enquiry in the interests of stability and not causing ‘offence’.

Now for some continuing controversy, which led Dr Nathan Cofnas to be fired by Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He found from researching empirical studies that there are racial differences in basic cognitive abilities. I’m not qualified to comment, other than to say the controversial (even 'hurtful' or 'harmful') nature of his suggestion cannot be relevant to its validity.

But no academic can openly say this. It’s been made 'harmful' to do so, not least to the said sacked academic. And it probably would provoke all sorts of outrage, to suggest there’s evidence for different racial groups - on average - being less or more intelligent than others.

And perhaps it would be 'nicer' or ‘fairer’ if this isn't true. But, whatever those worries, the truth is independent of them.

Ditto for sex and gender being the same thing and fixed at conception, other than for a tiny percentage of intersex people. The whole trans-movement is based on personal feelings and assertions, mostly of disturbed individuals and/or fraudsters. But saying this has been made ‘harmful’ and certainly dangerous, not least by those activists who have issued death and rape threats (for example, to J. K. Rowling). But still, the biological realities are unchanged.

As Churchill said, on the necessity of painful truths being revealed during the War:

United wishes and good will cannot overcome brute facts. Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.