IN DEFENCE OF OFFENCE

One of the defining features of contemporary society is its increasing discomfort with offence. Across universities, workplaces, media institutions, and public discourse, there is a growing expectation that people should communicate in ways that minimise discomfort and avoid causing offence wherever possible. The intention behind this shift is understandable. Most people would prefer a society that is respectful rather than hostile. Yet beneath this aspiration lies an assumption that deserves closer examination: the belief that offence is fundamentally a social problem and that a healthier society is one in which offence occurs less frequently.

I believe this assumption is mistaken.

The attempt to minimise offence often ignores the role that offence has historically played in intellectual and social life. Every society develops assumptions that appear natural to those who inhabit it. These assumptions become so deeply embedded that they cease to appear as assumptions at all. They become common sense. Any challenge to them is therefore likely to produce discomfort, resistance, and offence. If offence is treated as something inherently undesirable, then the interrogation of prevailing assumptions becomes increasingly difficult. History provides countless examples of this phenomenon. Many of the individuals and movements that are celebrated today were regarded as deeply offensive by the societies in which they emerged. Martin Luther’s criticism of the Catholic Church was not received as a harmless disagreement but as a profound challenge to religious authority and established belief. The revolutionaries of eighteenth-century France offended monarchs, aristocrats, and defenders of the existing social order by questioning principles that had long been treated as natural and unquestionable. Abolitionists offended societies that regarded slavery as a legitimate institution, while advocates of women’s rights challenged assumptions about gender that many considered self-evident truths. What is striking about these examples is that the ideas themselves are less important than the pattern they reveal. Significant intellectual and social change has rarely occurred without causing offence to those invested in existing structures of power, belief, or identity.

This is not because every offensive statement is wise, profound, or morally admirable. Many offensive statements are foolish, malicious, or simply wrong. The point is not that offence is inherently valuable. The point is that a society which seeks to eliminate offence may also eliminate one of the primary mechanisms through which its foundational assumptions are subjected to critical scrutiny.

At this point, many defenders of free expression offer a familiar response. They argue that offensive speech should be tolerated because it helps us discover truth or advance human progress. Although this position is preferable to censorship, it introduces a different problem. It assumes that someone possesses the authority to distinguish between offence that serves truth and offence that does not.

Who exactly possesses such authority?

History gives us very little reason to trust those who claim it.

One of the recurring patterns of human history is that some of the greatest acts of violence have been committed by individuals and institutions convinced that they were creating a better world. Colonial powers justified conquest as a civilising mission. Revolutionaries justified terror as a necessary step towards liberation. Totalitarian regimes justified repression as a means of creating a superior society. The problem was not that these actors believed themselves evil. The problem was precisely that they believed themselves good.

Every historical project that sought to transform humanity was animated by some vision of progress, justice, civilisation, equality, or truth. The language changes, but the structure remains remarkably similar. Individuals become convinced that they possess a superior understanding of what society ought to become and consequently acquire a sense of moral authority over others.

For this reason, I am suspicious whenever someone claims that offence is justified because it serves a higher truth or a greater social good. Such claims presume a degree of epistemic certainty that human beings rarely possess. Before one can argue that an offence serves truth, one must first explain what truth is and how one has acquired privileged access to it.

The difficulty is that what societies regard as truth has often changed across history.

Ideas once considered unquestionable have later been abandoned. Scientific theories once accepted as fact have later been dismissed as error. Medical diagnoses once treated as authoritative have later been regarded as products of their historical moment. The history of knowledge reveals not a steady accumulation of unquestionable truths but a succession of interpretive frameworks through which human beings have attempted to understand the world.

This does not mean that reality itself is fictional. Events occur. Objects exist. Human beings experience the world. However, the meaning assigned to those experiences is never independent of interpretation.

The distinction becomes clearer when we turn to history.

Consider the events of 1857 in India. There is little disagreement that an uprising occurred. Soldiers rebelled. Battles were fought. Colonial authority was challenged. These events belong to the realm of historical fact. Yet the meaning of those events remains contested.

Within Indian nationalist narratives, 1857 is frequently remembered as the First War of Independence, a heroic struggle against colonial domination. Within older British imperial narratives, the same event often appears as a mutiny, a military rebellion that threatened administrative order but lacked broader national significance. The historical event remains the same. What changes is the interpretation.

The persistence of these interpretations cannot be explained solely through evidence. Interpretations endure because they fulfil deeper psychological and historical needs.

For a colonised society, the nationalist interpretation provides agency. It allows people to view themselves not merely as victims of imperial power but as active participants in resistance. It transforms historical subjects from passive objects into historical actors. For an imperial society, a different interpretation serves a different function. It protects a particular understanding of empire and national identity.

Interpretations survive, therefore, not simply because they are true but because they provide meaning.

Human beings do not merely seek facts. They seek narratives through which facts become intelligible. They seek stories that allow them to understand who they are, where they came from, and what place they occupy within history.

This is why offence becomes inevitable.

People are rarely offended simply because they encounter unpleasant words. More often, they are offended because they encounter an interpretation that threatens the framework through which they understand themselves and their world. Offence emerges when one system of meaning collides with another.

A nationalist becomes offended by a historical interpretation that appears to diminish national agency. A religious believer becomes offended by an interpretation that challenges sacred assumptions. A progressive becomes offended by an interpretation that questions contemporary moral commitments. A conservative becomes offended by an interpretation that challenges inherited traditions.

In each case, the offence arises because an established framework encounters a competing one.

The modern desire to eliminate offence therefore misunderstands its source. Offence is not merely the product of insensitive language or poor manners. It is often the consequence of intellectual plurality itself. As long as human beings inhabit different interpretive worlds, offence will continue to exist.

Nor should this be regarded as entirely negative.

The collision between competing interpretive frameworks generates productive contradiction. Contradiction forces individuals to confront assumptions that would otherwise remain invisible. It reveals that what appears natural, self-evident, and unquestionably true may in fact be only one interpretation among many.

This does not lead to the conclusion that all interpretations are equally persuasive. Some interpretations account for more evidence. Some acknowledge complexity more effectively. Some prove more convincing than others. Yet even the most persuasive interpretation remains an interpretation rather than an unquestionable truth standing outside history.

The purpose of intellectual life, therefore, is not to construct a world free from offence. Such a world would require the elimination of deep disagreement itself. Rather, the purpose of intellectual life is to expose assumptions to challenge, interpretations to criticism, and narratives to competing narratives.

Offence plays an important role in this process.

Not because the person causing offence possesses the truth. Not because offence automatically produces progress. And certainly not because every offensive idea deserves celebration. Offence matters because it disrupts certainty. It reminds us that the frameworks through which we understand the world are neither natural nor inevitable. They are human constructions, constantly challenged by alternative ways of seeing.

A society without offence would not necessarily be a more enlightened society. It might simply be a society in which prevailing assumptions had become so dominant that nobody was willing, or permitted, to question them.

The importance of offence becomes even greater in the contemporary world. Unlike previous generations, many people no longer encounter a broad range of competing ideas in their everyday lives. Increasingly, their understanding of the world is mediated through algorithmic systems that curate information according to existing preferences and habits. A person lingers on a particular video, engages with a particular opinion, or repeatedly interacts with a certain type of content, and the algorithm gradually supplies more of the same. Over time, individuals find themselves enclosed within perspectives that largely confirm what they already believe.

The consequence is the formation of intellectual echo chambers. People become increasingly insulated from serious disagreement. Their assumptions are reinforced rather than challenged, and their convictions grow stronger without ever being exposed to sustained critical pressure. In such an environment, offence becomes one of the few remaining mechanisms capable of disrupting intellectual complacency. The encounter with an idea that feels uncomfortable, provocative, or even offensive may force individuals to confront assumptions they would otherwise never examine.

This is why universities and other spaces of public discourse occupy such an important role. Their purpose should not be to reproduce the comfort of algorithmic environments. They should function as sites where competing assumptions collide, where arguments are tested against rival arguments, and where individuals encounter perspectives that fundamentally challenge their own. The value of such encounters lies not merely in demonstrating the strength of one’s arguments but in exposing their limitations. Without the possibility of offence, this process becomes increasingly difficult.

There is a further dimension to this argument that deserves attention. The capacity to offend is not merely a philosophical abstraction. It is, historically, one of the few instruments available to those excluded from the institutions through which knowledge, legitimacy, and authority are produced and distributed.

When a historically marginalised person challenges the intellectual elite, presses an uncomfortable argument, or questions the assumptions upon which an institution rests, offence is almost inevitable. Yet what follows is often more epistemologically revealing than the original offence itself. If the institution responds by engaging with the argument, it acknowledges the challenger as an intellectual equal. If it responds instead by questioning whether the challenger belongs in that space at all – by retreating into the language of credentials, status, or legitimacy, it has made a significant and self-incriminating admission. The discussion ceases to be about the argument and becomes a question of who is permitted to speak. In doing so, the institution reveals that its authority has always rested not on the persuasive force of its ideas but on the power to police the boundaries of participation.

Offence, in this sense, functions as a diagnostic instrument. The intensity of the reaction – and crucially, its form – often reveals the extent to which an institution has relied upon exclusion rather than argument to sustain itself. For those who have historically been denied intellectual participation, the willingness to offend established assumptions is therefore not merely an act of disruption. It is an epistemological assertion of equality. It is a refusal to accept that certain questions cannot be asked simply because they unsettle those who have historically controlled the terms of the conversation.

At this point, a possible objection presents itself. Critics may argue that this essay pays insufficient attention to the purpose behind offence. Surely, they might say, there is a difference between offence intended to promote understanding and offence intended to demean, exclude, or harm. Any serious discussion of offence, they would argue, must distinguish between these categories.

The appeal of this objection is obvious. Yet it rests upon the very assumption this essay has sought to question throughout. It assumes that some authority exists capable of determining which purposes are legitimate and which are not – that someone can reliably distinguish between offence that serves emancipation and offence that serves oppression, between offence that advances society and offence that degrades it.

History gives us little reason to trust such certainty. The most destructive political projects in human history were rarely driven by openly malicious intentions. Colonial administrators believed they were civilising the world. Revolutionaries believed they were liberating humanity. Totalitarian regimes believed they were constructing stronger nations, fairer societies, or brighter futures. The problem was never the absence of noble purpose. The problem was the dogmatic certainty with which particular purposes were elevated beyond criticism.

For this reason, I resist grounding a defence of offence in appeals to intention or moral purpose. Intentions are neither transparent nor politically neutral. More importantly, they are themselves subject to interpretation. The same statement may be regarded by one audience as a defence of intellectual freedom and by another as an act of ideological aggression. What appears emancipatory from one hermeneutic position may appear oppressive from another.

Indeed, the present essay itself illustrates this problem. A reader committed to the liberal tradition may interpret these arguments as a defence of free inquiry, intellectual pluralism, and open debate. Another reader may interpret precisely the same arguments as a defence of insensitivity, privilege, or reactionary politics. Neither reading emerges outside interpretation. Each is shaped by the normative assumptions and conceptual frameworks that readers bring to the text.

This is precisely why the question of purpose cannot resolve the problem of offence. The moment we attempt to distinguish acceptable offence from unacceptable offence through supposedly higher goals, we reintroduce the same problem of authority that has appeared throughout this discussion. Once again, individuals and institutions acquire the power to adjudicate which ideas serve truth, progress, justice, or human flourishing. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that such certainty is often the precondition of dogmatism rather than its antidote.

The argument advanced here therefore does not depend upon the claim that offensive speech serves a noble purpose. It rests upon a more modest but philosophically defensible observation: that human beings inhabit competing interpretive worlds, that serious disagreement is unavoidable, and that offence is one of the inevitable consequences of genuine intellectual encounter. Its value lies not in the purity of its intentions but in its capacity to expose assumptions, challenge certainty, and remind us that no interpretive framework – however dominant, however self-assured – is beyond question.