The late Sir Roger Scruton had much to say about the difference between “giving offence” and “taking offence.” In an interview with Douglas Murray for The Spectator about a half a year before his death, for example, he said:
Remember though, that there’s
this great distinction between giving offence and taking offence and we’re
living in a culture where people become experts in taking offence even when it
hasn’t been given. And that’s what is
taught in gender studies. It teaches young women to take offence at every
remark a man might make or even his being there, you know. It’s a wonderful
theatrical thing to take offence but it doesn’t lead to any lasting
relationships. (1)
The importance of this distinction has to do with more than
just gender. Every form of “identity
politics” majors in taking offence.
Identity politics is informed and underlain by the contemporary
“morality” that has supplanted traditional moralities, including both the older
traditional morality informed by classical ethics and Christian moral theology
and the more recent morality of classical liberalism, in the civilization
formerly known as Christendom in the post-World War II era. This is one of the key distinguishing feature
between the contemporary “morality” and traditional moralities. Traditional morality taught you to moderate
your speech and behaviour so as to avoid giving offence. Contemporary morality teaches you to take
offence and to moderate your speech and behaviour so as to minimize the
likelihood of others taking offence.
The distinction is quite simple. Allow me to illustrate. If I were to go up to you and say something to
the effect of “You dirty rotten so-and-so, you are ugly and stupid, a bum and a
loser, and the biggest jerk who ever lived.
Now listen to me you miserable punk, you dress like a clown and smell
like a skunk, your mother is a whore and your father is a drunk” then I would
be giving offence. If, on the other hand, I were to say to you
“I listened to your lecture on this-or-that historical event and I don’t like
your take on what happened because I think it portrays such-and-such a group in
a poor light, bolstering unfair stereotypes, and although I am not a member of
that group per se, I am deeply offended by your micro-aggression and think you
need to be cancelled” or some such blithering nonsense, I would be taking offence.
Ordinarily, when someone gives offence the offence is
intentional, he is deliberately trying to hurt the feelings of the person to
whom he is speaking. To the person who
takes offence, however, the intentions of the person from whom he takes offence
are irrelevant.
With regards to the importance of intent it is worth
observing that the cultural shift from the traditional morality of avoiding
giving offence to the contemporary morality of taking offence, occurred
simultaneously with the rise of technocratic managers in both government and
private business. (2) Traditionally, in the Westminster system, the laws by
which we are governed are subject to King-in-Parliament acting through legislation. While the form remains in Canada, in the
post-World War II era, the Prime Minister and Cabinet have increasingly
by-passed the constraints the traditional system placed on their ability to
impose new rules on Canadians, by relying more-and-more on civil service
agencies acting through regulation
instead. The counterpart to this in the
private sector is the increased control of middle level managers operating
through Human Resource departments.
The reason this is worth pointing out here is because the
traditional Westminster system of legislating by King-in-Parliament was
closely allied with the Common Law tradition which includes the principle with
regards to criminal culpability that actus
reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea (a guilty act does not make guilty
unless the mind is guilty), that is to say, there needs to be criminal intent
for there to be criminal culpability. HR
departments, by contrast, seldom if ever regard intent as an essential
component of any of the myriad of made-up offences in the rule books through
which they micromanage their employees. While
the parallel is not perfect it is notable.
The other factor that distinguishes giving offence from
taking offence is objectivity. If you
give offence to someone by, for example, calling him a horse’s patoot, the
offence is objective because it is reasonable to assume that anyone called this
would be offended by it. When someone
takes offence that has not been given, however, the offence is largely if not
entirely, subjective. In Biblical
hermeneutics, we distinguish between exegesis and eisegesis. In both of these words the basic verb means
to guide or to lead. Exegesis adds the
prefix for “out” and means to bring out of the text the meaning that is already
there in it. This, of course, is the
approved hermeneutical method. The other
one, eisegesis, substitutes the prefix for “in” and means to read into the text
the meaning you wish to find there. Taking
offence that has not been given is similar to eisegesis in this regards.
In this, as in so many other areas, contemporary morality is
a poor substitute for traditional morality.
Morality informs law and when an inferior morality replaces a superior
morality the result will be the introduction and multiplication of bad
laws.
The news media recently learned that the Liberal government
led by Prime Minister Blofeld has come to an agreement with the Lower Canadian
separatists. (3) The separatists agreed
to support the Liberal Bill C-9, a proposed series of amendments to the section
of the Criminal Code pertaining to “hate.”
Over the past couple of years, Canadians have become increasingly
disturbed and disgusted at a particular type of “protest” that has been popping
up all over our country and the wider civilization. Ostensibly about the Israel-Palestine
conflict in the Middle East, these protests openly embrace not merely the cause
of the Palestinians but the organization Hamas, glorify its worst actions, and
are filled with violent, revolutionary, rhetoric directed not only against
Israel but against our country and Western Civilization as a whole. Bill C-9 is the Liberals’ proposed “solution”
to this problem. It is typical of the
“solutions” put forward by politicians, especially Liberals, to problems that
are largely of their own creation, in that it creates new statutory offences
and laws where the already existing laws are more than sufficient to handle the
situation if they would only be followed and enforced. Bill C-9 would make preventing access to a
place of worship or community centre by means of intimidation – which already
violates more than one law – into a distinct “hate” offence. It would also criminalize the public display
of certain symbols. To gain the support
of the separatists, the Liberals agreed to include a further amendment in the
bill that would remove the existing provision in Section 319 of the Criminal
Code that exempts speech that expresses what the speaker holds in “good faith”
based on “a belief in a religious text” from criminal culpability.
To do this would be to make a bad law worse. What I said about bill C-9’s making of new
statutory offences in the previous paragraph applies to all laws about “hate
speech.” Anything prohibited by “hate
speech” laws that warrants being prohibited by law was already prohibited by
law before there were any “hate” laws.
The most defensible limitation on speech in “hate speech” legislation is
the prohibition of incitement.
Incitement is the urging or encouraging of others to commit a criminal
act. If the other person(s) actually
commit the criminal act, the person who did the inciting shares in their
responsibility and therefore criminal culpability for the act. It is reasonable, therefore, that criminal
incitement be prohibited by law, at least if the incitement is acted on. Criminal incitement, however, was already
against the law before “hate speech” laws were thought up. All “hate speech”
laws did was single out a specific type of incitement, as if telling people to
commit a crime against person X was much worse than telling people to commit
the same crime against person Y, if when telling them to commit the crime
against person X, you give the person’s race, sex, religion, whatever, as part
of the reason.
Worse, they expanded the prohibited speech beyond actual
incitement. Actual incitement is
explicit. It involves someone saying, in
so many words, that such-and-such a criminal act should be committed. The concept of “hate speech”, however, treats
as the equivalent of actual incitement, speech that portrays groups that
supporters of “hate speech” laws think should be protected in such a negative
light that someone might be inspired to act criminally against that group. It is interesting, isn’t it, how the progressive
supporters of these kind of laws think that in the case of groups to which they
think the law should extend special protection, negative portrayals will inspire
people to commit crimes who were not already inclined to do so, whereas in the
case of groups they do not think should be specially protected by the law –
Christians, rather than Jews or Muslims, whites rather than any other race, men
rather than women, heterosexuals rather than homosexuals, actual men and women
rather than transsexuals – the non-stop stream of negative rhetoric on the part
of progressives themselves, usually far more full of expressions of hate in the
literal sense of the word than that which they seek to ban, will have no such
effect. Basically, “hate speech” laws in
effect protect groups that progressives feel are entitled to special protection
from having their feelings hurt. Here,
the thinking of the contemporary morality with regards to taking offence finds
its legal manifestation.
The old laws against actual incitement were justifiable
limitations on freedom of speech because they were not there to prevent the
circulation of ideas but rather to prevent the encouraging of criminal acts. “Hate speech” laws are not similarly
justifiable. Narrowing the range of
ideas that can be circulated is precisely what those who introduce such
legislation have in mind. Moreover, good
laws are few in number, clear and easy to understand, protect people and their
property from objective, quantifiable, harm and not from subjective hurt
feelings and extend this protection to everyone in the realm and not just to
certain groups that progressive political parties think need special
protection. “Hate speech” laws do not
meet any of those qualifications but are rather the opposite. They are the textbook example of bad laws.
After the news was leaked about the deal between the Grits
and the Bloc, the apologists for removing the exemption came crawling out of
the woodworks. Unsurprisingly, foremost
among them was Marc Miller, (4) whom Blofeld just named Minister of Canadian
Identity and Culture, replacing Steven Guilbeault who resigned from Cabinet last
weekend over Blofeld’s pipeline deal with Alberta. It was difficult, prior to last weekend, to
imagine that replacing eco-extremist Guilbeault could be anything but an improvement,
but lo and behold, Blofeld managed the unthinkable. Miller, a childhood friend of Captain
Airhead, belongs to the former prime minister’s innermost circle. If Blofeld really wants to move his party and
the government he leads away from the blighted legacy of his predecessor,
replacing one Trudeau-insider with another is not the way to go about it. To the point at hand, however, Miller has
been shooting his mouth off for months about how he considers certain Biblical
texts “hateful” and wants to see the religious text exemption for “hate speech”
eliminated. (5)
In a meeting of the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on
Justice and Human Rights, of which he was at the time the chair, just prior to
All Hallows, Miller said “In Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Romans — there’s other
passages — there’s clear hatred towards, for example, homosexuals.” This is a nonsensical statement. The Bible identifies many different acts as
sins. This is not ordinarily interpreted
as “hatred”, clear or otherwise, towards those who commit such acts, the late
Fred Phelps notwithstanding. When the
Ten Commandments say “thou shalt not commit adultery”, which act carried the
penalty of death under the Mosaic Law, do we understand this to be hatred
against adulterers? When the Ten Commandments say “thou shalt not bear false
witness against thy neighbour”, do we interpret this to be hatred against perjurers?
If identifying someone’s behaviour as sinful
is expressing “hatred” against that person, then the Bible could be interpreted
as expressing hatred against all mankind when it says “For all have sinned and
come short of the glory of God.” That it
would be absurd to interpret it this way, however, is generally understood
because the text, St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, goes immediately on to say “Being
justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Far from an expression of hatred towards those
who sin, the Scriptures are a message of God’s redeeming love to sinners. The thought contained in the verse from St.
Paul just quoted is also expressed in what is undoubtedly the best-known verse in
the Bible “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son that whosoever
believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.’
When his words were immediately understood by several
commentators, members of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, and provincial
ministers as calling for these Scriptural texts, their being read as Scripture
lessons in church, and preached on from the pulpit, to be criminalized, Mr.
Miller took offence. All he intended, he
maintained, was to say that these texts should not be allowed as defences, in
cases of public incitement. This is how
he is now defending the proposed removal of the religious exemption from Section
319. Note, however, the sleight-of-hand
that is at play. He hopes that those whose
suspicions he wishes to allay will understand the public incitement, to which
he says sincere belief in these Scriptural texts should not be a defence, to
mean someone telling other people that they should commit some kind of violent
crime. If, however, interpreting these
Scriptural texts in accordance with traditional Christian orthodoxy as identifying
same-sex sexual activity as sinful is itself regarded as an expression of hate,
then removing the religious exemption from Section 319 would have precisely the
effect that Miller’s opponents say it would have, of opening the door for criminal
prosecutions of Christian ministers who faithfully preach on these portions of
Scripture.
All one has to do is look at the track record of the Liberal
Party since Miller’s lifelong intimate friend Captain Airhead took over as leader
in 2013 to realize that Miller should not be trusted to mean merely that the
religious defence should be removed from cases of actual, explicit, incitement
to violent crime. One of the first
things that Captain Airhead did upon becoming Liberal leader was to ban anyone
who held the orthodox Christian view of abortion from running for a seat in the
House as a member of the Liberal party.
During Captain Airhead’s premiership, the Liberal government made a lot
of noise about combatting Islamophobia and anti-Semitism at the same time that
a wave of arson and other vandalism directed against Christian churches was
underway. Arguably, the Liberal
government itself had a hand in inciting that wave. One of Miller’s Liberal colleagues, John-Paul
Danko described the factual reporting of the over 120 churches so attacked as a
“conspiracy theory.” Repeatedly, over
the course of the Airhead premiership, the Liberal government promoted as “Canadian
values” ideas that were contrary to orthodox Christian moral theology – and, as
they discovered to their discomfort, contrary to the traditional morality of
other religions as well – and sought through various measures to coerce
Christian churches into changing their moral theology to align with progressive
values.
So no, we should not believe Mr. Miller that the removal of
the religious defence will not lead to a wave of litigation and even criminal
charges against churches unwilling to change their orthodox moral theology or
to muzzle themselves.
Instead of doing what the Liberals and the Bloc are planning
on doing, I propose that the government do the right thing instead. It should strike Section 319 from the Criminal
Code in its entirety and abandon its plans on reintroducing legislation similar
to the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the bill repealing
which had gone into effect the year after it received royal assent and the year
before the Liberals resumed government.
It is the right thing to do because “hate speech” legislation is by its
very nature, fundamentally bad law. (6)
Since morality informs law, we will also need to repeal the
contemporary new morality that encourages people to take offence over every
perceived slight to their identity, real or self-chosen, and reinstate the
traditional morality that merely encourages people not to give offence. This will be more difficult to do because it
cannot be accomplished simply by passing or repealing a bill, but it is here at
the cultural level rather than at the political and legislative, that the real
battle must be waged.
(2) Today, due to decades of speculative fiction and the current state of AI development, “technocratic”, probably suggests to most people the idea of machines taking over. That is not how I am using it here. I am referring to the fact that the professional managers – government bureaucrats and HR types in the corporate world – considered as a class, are distinguished by the use of language that is “technical” in the sense employed by Michael Oakeshott in the title essay of his Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962) in which he distinguishes “technical” from “traditional” knowledge.
(3) https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/liberals-bloc-hate-speech-laws-religious-exemptions
(6) Earlier this week, paleo-libertarian editor Lew Rockwell published an article entitled “Why Banning Hate Speech is Evil.” I agree with the premise entirely although I would employ a different line of reasoning to argue for it. Bans on “hate speech” are attempts to legislate what is in the human heart. The civil government that attempts to do this, however, exceeds its own jurisdiction and intrudes into that which belongs to God alone. This is the root of the evil the ancients called tyranny and that is often called totalitarianism in our own day. https://www.lewrockwell.com/ 2025/12/lew-rockwell/why-banning-hate-speech-is-evil/