Cathal Kavanagh | Contributing Writer
Perhaps you saw and read the Piranha’s election special. There’s a good chance you didn’t. Most people I talked to who did so were less than enthusiastic. This issue of the College’s satirical newspaper was certainly less of the humorous take on the annual SU elections than it was perhaps supposed to be. It came across, for the most part, as the unsubtle extension of a cynical ideology and viewpoint that has been asserting itself with increasing confidence across our own campus and leftist politics as a whole. It’s the same thing that is making identity politics the bread and butter of not only undergraduate radicals, but bandwagon-hopping national parties. It’s manifesting itself elsewhere in the form of misguided “No Platform” policies adopted by the British National Union of Students, in increasingly common attempts to ban speakers from campuses, and in an ideological conviction, evident in the Piranha, that is hostile to dissent and overwhelmingly willing to “play the man”. This ideology ought to worry anyone who attaches value to such basic concepts as freedom of speech and expression.
But first, let us backtrack.
It came across, for the most part, as the unsubtle extension of a cynical ideology and viewpoint that has been asserting itself with increasing confidence across our own campus and leftist politics as a whole.
Last year’s election issue of the Piranha was one of the best pieces of satirical writing I’ve ever read. Every candidate was pilloried and ridiculed to the extent that the issue itself was a roaring success. Jasper Pickersgill was lampooned as a member of a dwindling, out-of-touch upper class. Domhnall McGlacken-Byrne was bluntly insulted. Sam Riggs was portrayed as a Nazi. The candidates and the election in which they were competing were brilliantly and satirically assaulted from the perspectives of the people who would actually be avoiding voting for them, their fellow students. No one made the mistake of thinking the elections had any relevance to actual, real-world political issues. It was a brilliant example of exactly what student journalism – and indeed what satire – could and ought to be.
Of course it wouldn’t last.
The edition for this year’s round of the annual hackathon fell flat. Very, very flat. Seemingly influenced by the post-Hebdo commentary on the limits of satire and speech, it was little more than an outburst of vitriol aimed at the writers’ chosen class enemies, which would almost put Pravda in the shade. Many candidates were totally ignored, but the articles that dealt with one or another of the contenders came across as thinly-veiled personal attacks on people who did not subscribe to the ideology of the paper’s editorial team. It was characterised by pure cynicism, genuine name-calling, and an all-too-frequent reaching for the outright ad hominem. Conor O’Meara, by all accounts one of the most inoffensive, typically hack-ish individuals you could ever hope to find in such a contest, and thus one of the most ripe for merciless ridicule, was instead merely a sideshow in an almost self-parodying example of what it is that passes for satire in the world of identity politics. He’s white, you see! What’s that? He’s straight? How many times can we ram the word “privilege” into a single quarter-page article? To Hell with him! Articles and quips about David Gray and Jemma O’Leary may as well have dropped the facade and had “they’re a pair of big fucking misogynists” printed in capital letters beside their pictures. In general, it came across as a castrated, defanged attempt at satire appealing only to a cynical subset of the radical left. There are many things that such a paper could do with the material arising in the last number of months, but reorienting itself as little more than a mouthpiece for a single, unrepresentative political agenda should not be one of them.
That a satirical publication, partly funded by our fees, could put out an issue resembling a poorly thought-out Tumblr post in tone is unfortunate, but hardly an inexcusable offence. That any publication should in part reflect the ideology of the small number of people involved in it is similarly unsurprising. What’s at issue here is of a deeper, more insidious nature.
Seemingly influenced by the post-Hebdo commentary on the limits of satire and speech, it was little more than an outburst of vitriol aimed at the writers’ chosen class enemies, which would almost put Pravda in the shade.
This pointless demagoguery is a different side of the force that saw reactions to the recent Paris massacre seem less like a defence of free expression than an exercise in white guilt and borderline apologetics. It classically revels in the instinctive, dangerously essentialist questioning and condemnation of historically privileged groups as an automatic force for bad in the world, be it men, white people, straight people or the cisgendered. It has a habit of closing down debate or rendering illegitimate genuinely held arguments. Consider the current talk of the “limits” to be placed on what is and isn’t debatable in our society. The opinions of those opposed to marriage equality, on the other side of a debate conducted for a referendum campaign that will change this country’s constitution, are being closed down not only as being wrong, but as being illegitimate, and not entitled to expression. This is dangerous. The silencing of opinions, no matter how wrong-headed and despicable, is a road no society should ever willingly go down.
This is an outlook which increasingly seeks to ban controversial speakers from campus events in the name of avoiding offence and discomfort, and leads to the infantilising protection of students from harm in the form of ideas through “Safe Space” policies. Observe the minor controversy last week over the CSC refusing (rightly) to ban a deluded Islamic figure from speaking to the Muslim Students’ Association. More to the point, recount the actual pushing from campus of extreme-rightist Nick Griffin by leftists in 2012 – an event replicated countless times across various campuses in the years before and since.
A large number of people contend that this censorious, holier-than-thou dogmatism and its illiberal brand of radical liberalism is dragging the name of the left into the intellectual gutter. I shan’t make such a claim. Nor shall I contend, as Brendan O’Neill and Jonathan Chait have to a greater or lesser extent done elsewhere, that the university itself faces in these developments a kind of existential threat, that the torches of free expression and dissent are about to be extinguished. It doesn’t, and they aren’t – not yet, at any rate. Worrying as it is, the outlook outlined above still remains one of many political positions adopted by university students. Nonetheless, the recent lack of amusement in the Piranha is not the result of a lack of inspiration or a rushed deadline. Nor is it exclusively about a single newspaper being surrendered to ideologues. What’s at issue here is an outlook, imported wholesale from obscure academics of our parents’ generation, hostile to free speech and suspicious of historical liberalism, which is rapidly gaining traction in universities throughout the world. If it continues, it has potential repercussions far beyond a single quarterly paper. That a student publication be sold out to a negative political viewpoint is not the end of the world, but it is certainly not encouraging. The students who read it deserve something better.
Illustration by Conor Murphy for The University Times
