PETER TATCHELL: I find it offensive
when people say bigoted things about women,
Black people, or LGBTs.
ASH SARKAR: Offensive it's generally not a word
that I use to identify problems with things.
So when I think of something that's offensive,
I think of a bad smell.
When I look at somebody in blackface, I go that's racist.
IAIN WILSON: There might be things that personally annoy
me, for instance, when people are peddling false
information-- and we've seen a lot of that recently--
about the coronavirus and the American election.
So that perhaps could wind me up a little bit,
but I try not to take offence.
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PHILIP SEARGEANT: Defining offence
is a slightly tricky issue because it's something which--
you can be offended by the very small things.
A lot of people get, for example,
offended by punctuation errors.
But on the other hand, you can get offended by very--
the use of very violent language, the use of brutality,
and so forth.
So it's a very wide concept.
But I think the basic notion of what offence is
involves when someone causes harm to your sense of self,
to the values you believe in.
PETER TATCHELL: When someone says something
that causes offence, one always must
be mindful of the intention and motive.
So people may say something quite
innocently without intending to cause offence,
and in that case, I don't think it should be held against them.
PHILIP SEARGEANT: An important issue
around the relationship between language and offence culture
is this paradox that language has.
On the one hand, language is just words.
Sticks and stones may break my bones.
It's not an actual physical violence, coercion,
or anything.
But on the other hand, language is
absolutely central to the way that society is organized.
Language does have an incredible power.
ASH SARKAR: You can say sticks and stones may break my bones,
but words will never hurt me.
Well, tell that to the kids who during the desegregation
of education in the United States
had to walk a gauntlet of racists in the South
hurling the N-word at them, right?
You tell me sticks and stones may break my bones,
but words will never hurt me because those words were also
connected to systems of violence.
So you've got the mental health toll,
you've got the connection between certain forms
of language and certain systems of violence,
and then the third thing is that dehumanizing language creates
the room for dehumanizing policies.
PHILIP SEARGEANT: In the attention economy that we now
operate in, this can be a very useful--
a very good way of drawing attention to yourself,
getting a lot of press coverage, and thus getting your message
out.
And we've seen this a lot with populist politicians,
Donald Trump obviously, Boris Johnson to an extent,
saying things which are offensive and thus provocative
and thus get endless coverage in the media.
ASH SARKAR: There's a gamble that's being made,
and one side of it has been made quite clearly
by Dominic Cummings which is that no one cares really
about these confected outrages.
Yes, you've got micro events.
Yes, they keep us all busy.
Yes, they dominate the headlines,
but it doesn't necessarily affect voting behavior as much
as people thinks that it does.
So it's a way of distracting, right?
Keeping your opponents busy with something which ultimately
won't be effective when it comes to changing people's minds.
PHILIP SEARGEANT: The second way it can be used in politics
is as a way of demeaning your opponents.
It's a classic propaganda technique
to demean, dehumanize, and so forth an enemy within politics.
And a good way of doing this is through insults
and being offensive in certain way.
ASH SARKAR: Once we acknowledge that as well as speaking
as individuals, we are often speaking on behalf of
or to a collective, then it means
that we can be a little bit more honest about what's
driving some of this dismissive language.
And it helps us explain sometimes
why there's so much heat and hostility and an urge
to completely delegitimize your opponent
and grind them into the dust.
It's because what's at stake is so much
more than a conversation.
PHILIP SEARGEANT: And the third way
is that the concept of offense culture
can itself be exploited as a divisive technique in politics.
We see this particularly around notions
of political correctness, around notions of social justice
where to one sides, it's important to mind
what sort of language you're saying
because that is an indicator of a certain political viewpoint.
On the other side, it's a violation of free speech
and so forth.
ASH SARKAR: So when you've got things
like, oh, you're just a millennial snowflake,
you've never worked hard a day in your life,
your generation doesn't know they're born,
it's an expression, an outgrowth of a material,
a cultural, and a political divide, which in this country
is pretty much unprecedented.
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