Thales of Miletus (circa 620-546 BC) believed the origin of everything was water. The sciences have long since moved on but our speech still draws on images of water to describe our inner and outer worlds.
Some people are deep, others shallow; some are still, others bubbly. Conversation flows, meanders and spills over. Information trickles, leaks, comes in torrents or dries up. The wise are fountains of knowledge, lovers of poetry spout it. Souls are wells, emotions can be tapped. Love is like a sea and bliss is an oceanic consciousness.
These old images point to an important modern insight: the flows and counter-flows of thought, expression and feeling wouldn’t be possible without the rivers and aquifers of language.
Humans are creatures of the sea of language, whose currents and undercurrents shape our speech and silences, our energies and attention in ways we cannot always fathom or see.
Language is the environment of our political culture and identities. A steady change in the temperature of public discourse leads to a climate change for our way of life. So it is right that the government’s recent anti-racism strategy is concerned with public discourse in all its forms: face-to-face, broadcast media and social media.
However, it seems that the strategy is based on the idea of hate speech as a kind of volcanic geyser: an erupting individual, operating alone or in a particular pocket of society, with little to do with the rest of public discourse.
Owen Bonnici, the minister responsible, insists hate speech needs to be ‘stamped out’. As a sign of government commitment it’s welcome. But as an image of the problem – localised trouble that can be put out like a small fire – it underestimates the depth and the breadth of the political task.
It’s overambitious to think that hate speech can be stamped out. Even if the unit that’s supposed to monitor hate speech is, finally, properly staffed, it’s asking too much. No country has managed it. If anything, everywhere hate speech is on the rise.
Hate speech is not simply an individual’s outburst. It is, frequently, the result of organised incitement. A government may be able to clamp down on vicious groups and ideologues based in Malta. It has far less control over groups based elsewhere.
Nor is the problem simply identifiable groups. No Maltese government has control over the algorithms used by Big Tech, like Facebook, whose business model is based on bringing people together on the basis of shared outrage, instead of enabling them truly to engage with people of opposing points of view.
You cannot clean up the sea of racist language while filling it with the sewage of partisan discourse- Ranier Fsadni
To be clear, outrage in itself is not hate speech; sometimes it’s the only possible moral reaction to vice and scandal. Neither is it necessarily hate speech to give offence or wound people’s feelings. It can be deplorable without, in a legal sense, constituting hate. Hate speech begins at that point where people’s rights and safety are endangered.
However, hate speech has favourable conditions in a public culture where arguments take place in silos of righteous indignation and anger. If opponents are never truly seen and heard, it is easier to demonise them.
And that, alas, is the state of large parts of Maltese public discourse today, aided and abetted by a partisan public broadcaster, party-owned media and online partisan armies, ready to portray a critic as an enemy.
The problem is an environmental one, made worse by the practices of institutions and organisations that themselves stick to the right side of the law but close to the boundary. The broadcasting media, public or partisan, routinely and wilfully misrepresent others. When that happens, it implicitly presents adversarial points of view as unworthy of a hearing and undeserving of any effort of sympathy and empathy.
The topic doesn’t need to be race. If public discourse is coarse in one area, it legitimises coarseness in others. This manner of treating dissent gains the force of authority.
When it’s considered normal to target your opponents as unworthy of minimal respect, the path towards hate speech begins, on grounds that are themselves legal.
It is nowhere near enough for the anti-racism strategy to declare it will develop an anti-racism and intercultural pact with media houses. Training political parties in zero-tolerance for racist language will not be enough to set an example.
Intercultural understanding is fine but what we desperately need is a single public culture where people can learn how to handle disagreement and favour evidence and where media houses are expected to live up to their social responsibilities.
We need a code of minimal respect, which the government should invite media houses to sign up to. The code would commit the media to report differing political points of view and to present them without caricature. They don’t have to get equal time but critics and opponents will be treated with dignity, without being smeared.
On PBS, a greater social responsibility must be placed: to be an environment which is hospitable to debate that fosters empathy and understanding.
What counts for the broadcasting media applies also to the organised partisan presence on social media. The well-documented stoking of anger against journalists and civil society activists, which stops short of hate speech but incites others towards it, has to stop.
You cannot clean up the sea of racist language while filling it with the sewage of partisan discourse. In the sea of language, we are poisoned or saved together.