"In August, the author Salman Rushdie was stabbed
in the neck. The novelist has spent decades living under the threat of a
hit put out by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. The religious
directive was a response to Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses,
which Khomeini regarded as blasphemous. For many, the attack was an
opportunity to reflect on the importance of free expression, and a
reminder of the clear distinction between speech and violence.
For others, it was an opportunity to remind others of the clear
distinction between speech and violence, which is something that all
those snowflake libs, who are sort of like the fanatic who stabbed
Rushdie in the neck, should take to heart.
“We live in a culture in which many of the most celebrated people
occupying the highest perches believe that words are violence,” Bari
Weiss wrote on her Substack,
citing no one in particular. “In this, they have much in common with
Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.” She added that “of course it is
2022 that the Islamists finally get a knife into Salman Rushdie. Of
course it is now, when words are literally violence and J.K. Rowling literally puts trans lives in danger and even talking about anything that might offend anyone means you are literally arguing I shouldn’t exist.”
As an outlet, The Atlantic attempts to provide readers
with a broad spectrum of perspectives based on shared values. One of
these values is freedom of speech, a principle to which I and all of my
cherished colleagues are deeply committed. The assassination attempt on
Rushdie was a direct attack on that freedom, and it should be no
surprise that writers here have a great deal to say about it. But I must
respectfully disagree with some of my colleagues about the conclusions
they have drawn from the attack, linking contemporary left-wing
discourse with a fundamentalist theocrat’s call for assassination.
Read: Rushdie’s challenge to Islamic orthodoxy
My colleague Graeme Wood pointed to Jimmy Carter’s 1989 op-ed
criticizing Rushdie to argue that “over the past two decades, our
culture has been Carterized. We have conceded moral authority to howling
mobs, and the louder the howls, the more we have agreed that the howls
were worth heeding.” He acknowledged, however, that “since the attempt
on Rushdie’s life, almost no one has advanced these arguments,” meaning a
link between the emotional injury of blasphemy and the very literal
violence of murder. If our society were truly “Carterized,” I would have
expected instead to have seen some prominent American figures make the
argument Carter did decades ago.
Another one of my colleagues, Caitlin Flanagan, settled for an
exegesis of the views of the Twitter user @MeerAsifAziz1, whose account
no longer exists. She argued that “the culture of free speech
is eroding every day,” and offered a hypothetical example: “Ask an
Oberlin student—fresh outta Shaker Heights, coming in hot, with a heart
as big as all outdoors and a 3 in AP Bio—to tell you what speech is
acceptable, and she’ll tell you that it’s speech that doesn’t hurt the
feelings of anyone belonging to a protected class.”
I’ll make no secret that I believe the focus on the misguided
egalitarianism of undergraduates at private colleges has been
disproportionate. People like this exist, though, and it’s fair to
criticize them. What I frankly find puzzling is presenting this
hypothetical student as the avatar of the idea that dangerous speech and
ideas must be suppressed, when in statehouses and governors’ mansions, politicians who have the authority to enforce their ideas about censorship
with state power are actually putting them into practice. Unlike the
hypothetical Oberlin student, these officials are real, and the threat
they pose to free speech is not only clear and present, but backed by a
certain level of popular demand.
I agree with Weiss and Wood and Flanagan that there is a bright
line between speech and violence that must be respected, and that trying
to kill someone for offending you is monstrous. Speech is not violence,
and to argue so is to imply that violence is an appropriate response.
The unacknowledged reality of these three essays, however, is that what I
just stated remains the broad, widely held consensus in American life,
from right to left. Americans simply do not live under anything
resembling the kind of repression in which people are killed for
blasphemy with state or popular support.
Caitlin Flanagan: America’s fire sale: Get some free speech while you can
Weiss, Wood, and Flanagan also noted the objection of a group of writers and thinkers to the PEN association bestowing an award on Charlie Hebdo,
the French satirical publication that terrorists attacked in 2015 over
its caricatures of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, murdering 12 people,
including several staff members, police officers, a maintenance worker,
and someone who was visiting that day. The letter signers described the
massacre as “sickening and tragic” while criticizing PEN for “valorizing
selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the
anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in
the Western world.”
Weiss attacked the “civic cowardice” of those who objected, while
Flanagan wrote that these writers were pressuring the organization to
“abandon its mission” of protecting freedom of expression. Wood
described the writers’ position as muddling “the distinction between
offense and violence, and between a disagreement over ideas and a
disagreement over whether your head should remain attached to your
body.”
I would not have signed that letter if asked, not only because I
do not sign open letters, as a matter of preference, but because I
believe that blasphemy is a human right, and that the message that PEN
was sending with the award was an endorsement not of Charlie Hebdo’s
content but of the staff’s bravery in the face of an attempt to silence
them through murder. But just as I have no objection to the award, I
have no issue with people criticizing it because they do not want it to
be interpreted as an endorsement of the racist caricatures Charlie Hebdo
is known for, even accepting that they are intended with a layer of
irony. (I’m not sure how many of the people disseminating these images
are aware of the irony.) These may be mutually exclusive positions, but
both are consistent with respecting free speech. Indeed, both the
writers of the letter and its critics are arguing that there are things
you can say but should not.
One of the significant measures of free speech in a given society is
how people deal with blasphemy—whether religious offense provokes state
censorship or violence. America has a relatively strong record in that respect
in comparison with much of the rest of the world, while clearly
faltering in others. The suggestion here, however, is that the writers
who objected to the award granted to Charlie Hebdo are in some
sense justifying the massacre, and therefore defending the notion that
violence is an appropriate response to offensive speech. But surely one
can defend the right of Nazis to publicly protest while rejecting the
tenets of national socialism. If I cannot defend the fundamental right
of a speaker to be offensive while objecting to their speech, then what
am I actually defending?
In this case, the rights being asserted seem to be the right to
be offensive, and the right of the offended to shut up and like it. The
former combined with the latter is not an assertion of the right to free
speech so much as a right to monologue, which I do not recognize.
The American culture of free speech is indeed under threat, as
Flanagan argued. Free speech requires a robust exchange of views without
the coercion of threats and violence, and self-censorship in response
to social pressure is a genuine risk. Yet by definition, there is no
free speech if one person is allowed to make an argument and another is
not allowed to object to it. Nor has there ever been a time in American
history when freedom of speech was not threatened with proscription by
the state, or when one could express a controversial opinion and not
risk social sanction. In short, the culture of free speech is always under threat.
In almost every era of U.S. history, the bounds of free
expression have been contested. In the founding era, patriots tarred and
feathered royalists. Before the Civil War, southern states passed laws
that could be used to prosecute the dissemination of abolitionist
literature and sought to prevent the Postal Service from delivering
antislavery pamphlets, saying they would foment insurrection by the
enslaved. Mobs followed the abolitionist Frederick Douglass across the
North, throwing rotten eggs, stones, and menacing slurs at the orator at
speaking events. After Reconstruction, white supremacists destroyed
the office of Ida B. Wells’s newspaper, The Free Speech and Headlight,
following the publication of an editorial arguing that lynchings of
Black men accused of raping white women were in fact punishment for
consensual relationships. The Red Scares of the 20th century saw
Americans forced from their jobs and prosecuted for leftist beliefs or
sympathies on the grounds that those were tantamount to a commitment to
overthrowing the government. Out of that crucible emerged a civil
libertarian concept of free speech that many have mistaken for timeless
rather than a product of a certain history and a particular arrangement
of political power. The idea that certain forms of speech or expression
justify or provoke violence, let alone that blasphemy does so, is not an
invention of modern social-justice discourse.
Every generation faces a different challenge when it comes to
freedom of expression. Ours includes not only the widespread and growing
campaign of state censorship led by Republican lawmakers, but a
social-media panopticon that can both deny us the privacy necessary to
come to our own conclusions and inhibit the courage necessary to express
them. Most of us are not meant to be privy to every misguided utterance
of a stranger, nor are we meant to have our errors or worst moments
evaluated publicly by people who learned of our existence only as the
focus of political propaganda, as the subject of ridicule, or as acceptable targets in pointless feuds between online cliques.
(Although it must be said, there are those who thrive in such
conditions, and have successfully exploited them for fame, profit, and
status.)
Yet, as Aaron R. Hanlon recently wrote in The New Republic,
this wave of censorship laws in Republican-controlled states bears
scant mention among many of the most prominent self-styled defenders of
free speech, or at least, far less than the tyranny of the ratio.
But we do not become little Rushdies when our inboxes and mentions are
inundated with deranged filth from disturbed strangers, as a result of
the public-facing profession we chose and the technological advancements
that make us more accessible to such people.
It is not minimizing the power of digital mobs to say that
spending decades with the state-backed threat of an assassin’s blade at
your throat is coercion of a different magnitude. The wrath of an online
mob can be harrowing: harassment, outrageous falsehoods, and threats
are not pleasant to bear, and can threaten not just your mental health
but your livelihood, and in extreme cases your safety. To pretend that
seeking to avoid such an experience does not condition what people say
and how they act would be foolish. But to pretend that this is a
left-wing ideological phenomenon rather than a structural one, when educators, medical providers, election officials, and others from all walks of life are being driven underground by right-wing influencers who can conduct a mob like an orchestra, would be equally foolish.
The United States is living through the largest wave of state censorship since the second Red Scare. Beyond the plague of education gag laws restricting the teaching of unpleasant facts about American history, conservative judges seek to rewrite constitutional free-speech protections to punish the “liberal” media, and conservative states pass laws against public protest and immunize from liability those who would run over protesters with their cars, while law-enforcement organizations hope to use civil lawsuits to sue demonstrations against police brutality out of existence. Conservatives have sought to fire librarians and purge public libraries of books they deem controversial by categorizing them as obscene, as state officials try to punish teachers who provide their students with public information that allows them to access samizdat from libraries in states where it is not forbidden.
Not only do abortion bounty laws seek to enforce silence around
reproductive health, lest a person discussing the subject prick the ears
of some snitch seeking a payday, but the overturning of Roe has coincided with explicit attempts to criminalize speech about abortion. In the strongest labor market in a generation, billionaires seek to use their power and authority to crush workers organizing for better conditions and a living wage.
Adam Serwer: The myth that Roe broke America
There is no shortage of major free-speech issues to address in
America today, but many of us in the writing profession are primarily
concerned with our social-media experience, because that is what we most
directly and frequently encounter. Instead of recognizing that the
warped behavioral incentives created by social media are a structural
problem, we tend to blame the people online who annoy us the most. In
many cases, those defending “free speech” are not defending freedom of
expression so much as seeking the power to determine which views can be
publicly expressed without backlash, and which can be silenced without
reproach. When we speak of an idealized past without chilling effects,
we are simply imagining a time when the social consensus was repressive
and stifling for someone else.
These conflicts are far more complex precisely because there is
no clear line where social pressure from those exercising their rights
of free speech and association crosses over into censoriousness. State
censorship and violent compulsion are relatively easy to identify and
oppose, if not always easy to prevent. When does accountability become
harassment? When does protest become coercion? What views should be
acceptable to state in polite society, and which should be appropriately
shunned by decent people? When does a voice of criticism become the
howl of a mob? When does corporate speech become corporate censorship?
No society in human history has ever had simple answers to these
questions. In a free society, sometimes people will choose to be
horrible, and there is little to do other than make a different choice
and counsel people to do the same.
Presenting these dilemmas as similar to an attempt to silence
someone with a theocratic death mark is trivializing, and ahistorical.
There has never been a golden age when anyone could say what they wanted
without consequence, only eras in which one shared perspective was
dominant. Though nostalgia may cloud our perceptions, those times were
no more free, even if politics, ideology, or self-promotion might compel
us to remember otherwise."
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