Something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past year, which for me at least is a useful, albeit difficult lens through which to consider many of the conversations that have arisen around justice, inequality, “censorship” etc, is the notion of harm.

Many of the movements that have grown up over the past few years (me too and BLM being just two examples) at root address the issue of harm. They remind us that many types of harm are not in fact covered by the law.

They also remind us that indeed the law itself, or at least the structures by which we enforce the law, causes harm. Indeed, many social and political structures actually hinge on harm. The hostile environment would be another example.

Part of that discussion of harm necessitates a discussion of language. The way we speak to and about each other can, I think we can all accept, cause pain, so we can understand that as a form of harm too.

At the same time we are slowly learning that some of our contemporary media behaviours can also be harmful. A tweet can have consequences, as can a think piece. Those consequences are not always felt by the person who made the utterance, but by someone else.

So we find ourselves in a moment when all of us, in all walks of life, are being asked to consider the harm that we do to others, whether through our personal behaviour, our thoughtlessness, our words, or the harmful structures we tacitly enable.

Running alongside that difficult work has been another discourse: the power and deep humanitarian importance of literature and journalism.

Writers, understandably fearful that a shifting media and information landscape leaves them occupying a shrinking platform, have made all sorts of claims for writing.

We need stories in order to live. Stories make us human. Books build empathy. Books are an essential mental health resource etc.

Writing, in other words, has power.

How strange then, that given our championing of writing, given our apparently deeply held belief that writing has power, we’re unable to countenance the fact that writing might cause harm?

Because we can’t have it both ways, right? There is no such thing as a power which can only ever be used for good. Power is power. If you have the power to heal, as so many writers claim they do, then you have the power to harm.

So suddenly authors, journalists, people with massive twitter followings etc, are operating in an intellectual environment in which we’re all being asked to consider the impact of what we do, the harm it might potentially cause to others.

What has become clear is that many writers, unuccustomed as they are to that level of self reflection (ironically, given their job) experience that as censorship.

And so conveniently, having made a strident case for the power and necessity of writing, they suddenly want to make an entirely separate and contradictory argument: ideas are just ideas. They can’t hurt people. We must be able to share them freely.

So I think we have a choice. We can say: ideas are just ideas. Language can’t cause harm. But if we choose that option then we have to dispense with all the guff about books being a basic human need and a tool to make us kinder etc.

Or we can say: books, writing, ideas, are incredibly powerful. We are very privileged to be able to use them to express ourselves and interrogate the world around us.

But *then* we must accept that with that power comes significant responsibility, and we must anticipate that, given we are all at present engaged in quite a significant wider conversation about power and harm, people may want to interrogate *our* power, and the harm we cause.

That is not censorship. That is not “cancel culture”. It’s simply the lens we as writers are accustomed to training dispassionately on others being turned back in ourselves. It’s the process of holding power to account we should already be doing as part of our writing.

What we see when that happens is probably ugly. What we do having seen that ugliness though is up to us. We can ignore it, we can whine about the process of being forced to look, or we can attempt to transform it.

That after all is the power of writing we’re always hearing so much about, no?