24 December 2023, Sydney Morning Herald, Letters

Maley’s understanding of free speech is misguided. For a start, we no longer live in 19th century France, let alone postwar Europe. Ideas of unfettered free speech versus rigid censorship are shallow binaries in a world in which ‘‘doing your own research’’ has eclipsed expertise and where one’s views, whether on vaccines or Israel, ‘‘15-minute cities’’ or climate change, increasingly resemble a choose-your-own-adventure video game.

The overwhelming complexity of the Middle East has tormented the minds of the greatest thinkers of the past 80 years and encompasses notions of trauma, history, memory, indignity, ethnicity and language. But too busy or too distracted, many people, especially the young, feeling helpless to effect any change, seem to get a great deal of their opinions now from social media, especially influencers, empty vessels whose primary concern is stoking outrage for clicks and whose advocacy comes pre-packaged in easily digestible portions. This in turn lends to catastrophes, such as the one unfolding in the Middle East, a quality of sport in which absolute fealty to one’s ‘‘side’’ must not only be maintained but publicly displayed without the slightest deviation, lest one let down one’s ‘‘side’’.

A point and click culture, polarised politics, a degeneration in public discourse, a lack of meaningful interaction in society, and an inability to accept complexity have led to this. Thinking is difficult, but reacting immediately and vociferously is so much more gratifying, especially when one can get an instant hit from being unquestionably right. Of course, even facile, immature or callous expressions of support must be ‘‘allowed’’ in a free society.

But for me, there are bigger questions at stake. How can we get to a place in which the suffering of all murdered civilians is lamented without abandoning our moral imperatives to combat oppression? How can we begin to raise the intellectual and emotional level of society in which the language of condemnation seems increasingly to be an end point in itself?

Simon Tedeschi, Newtown