I write to be mischievous, subversive and perverse. There’s no room for any of that in a culture obsessed with offence

LIONEL SHRIVER

© REX SHUTTERSTOCK, ALAMY

In the 1980s, pop psychology promoted the shibboleth that “you can’t argue with what people feel.” Since then, that line has brought many a contentious conversation to an impasse. The consequences of anointing emotion as beyond interrogation are vividly illustrated in Mark Lawson’s biting novel The Allegations: when an aggrieved party feels bullied it means, ipso facto, that he or she has been bullied, and employment tribunals are mere formalities. Sacked by the BBC for the same offence, but never allowed to confront his anonymous accusers whom the Corporation trusted, Lawson should know.

But you can argue with what people feel. Emotions range from the justifiable—grief that a brother just died—to the irrational, unreasonable and disproportionate: spitting fury that you’re not allowed a chocolate cream, but only a caramel. That was me, throwing a tantrum aged 10. Pity I wasn’t born 20 years later. I might have screamed at my mother when she sent me to my room: “But you can’t argue with what people feel!”

Worse, in English “I feel” and “I think” are roughly synonymous.

If we enshrine as a truism that “you can’t argue with what people think,” we can throw in the towel on intellectual debate in perpetuity. Which, the way things are going, maybe we should do.

One emotion has grown so sacrosanct that an astonishingly large segment of Europeans now thinks that provoking it should be illegal: umbrage. According to a 2015 Pew Research Centre poll, only the barest majority of Britons—54 per cent—and a scant 27 per cent of Germans any longer believe government should allow people to make statements offensive to minorities.

(Why only minorities? Wouldn’t equality under the law argue for banning speech offensive to anyone?)

Thus in January, in an interview with the Canadian free-speech advocate Jordan B Peterson that went viral, Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman referred casually to the “right not to be offended,” as if the entitlement were a familiar point of common law. Though Peterson got the better of her in that instance—we don’t often see Newman flustered—defenders of the “right not to be offended” are starting to prevail in European public opinion.

It doesn’t take much parsing to conclude that protecting all and sundry from the terrible experience of having your feelings hurt is the end of free speech altogether. Since nowadays “you can’t argue with what people feel,” umbrage is freed from rational justification. Given that the better part of the human race is crazy, stupid, or both, there’s nary a thought in the world whose airing won’t offend somebody. Doesn’t Darwin offend creationists?

Furthermore, in granting so much power to woundedness, we incentivise hypersensitivity. If we reward umbrage, we will get more of it. We do reward umbrage, and we’re buried in it by the truckload.

Time was that children were taught to turn aside tormentors with the cry, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!” While you can indeed feel injured because Bobby called you fat, the law has traditionally maintained a sharp distinction between bodily and emotional harm.

Even libel law requires a demonstration of palpable damage to reputation, which might impact your livelihood, rather than mere testimony that a passage in a book made you cry.

That words-will-never-hurt me rejoinder is out of fashion.

The “safe spaces” cropping up on university campuses aren’t shelters to protect students from hailstorms, or havens for young women whose boyfriends beat them up, but bubbles in which to hide from ideas—to hide from words. In a tweet this January, the journalist Matt Baume decried Ryan Anderson’s controversial book on transgenderism, When Harry Became Sally, as “violent.” He didn’t mean it was full of gory shoot-outs.