Rushdie and the Culture Wars

This was inspired by Graeme Wood’s piece in The Atlantic:

I like Wood’s work a lot and liked this piece but I feel its headline and subhead do it a disservice by perhaps making it seem like another salvo in our ongoing culture war. To a degree, it is, but only to a very nuanced degree.

Obviously, Wood is not arguing that our culture wars caused Friday’s brutal attack on Salman Rushdie. If Evergreen State College had never gone woke, if Yale and Princeton were bastions of free-speech liberalism, if the New York Times hadn’t chased away James Bennet, Don McNeill, and Bari Weiss, the fatwa on Rushdie would still have stood there, reeking of close-minded religious bigotry. The mullahs of Iran have never read Judith Butler but they hate idolaters and they are smiling with glee right now.

So Wood is most definitely NOT saying that our culture wars caused this horrible attack. He IS saying that when faced with this ugly hatred, in past the West has collectively blinked. Sure, there were voices raised in Rushdie’s defense back in 1989 when the Ayatollah Khomeini first issued his fatwa, but others were saying, “should he really have said those things?” “Wasn’t he being Islamophobic?” Here is former president Jimmy Carter offering a faint defense of free speech with one hand while he opens the door to justifying a fatwa with the other:

“While Rushdie's First Amendment freedoms are important, we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah's irresponsibility.” Yes, those freedoms are important, but… what about their suffering? That line leaves a particularly nasty taste in the mouth now that Rushdie is suffering the likely loss of his eye and severed nerves in his arm.

The spinelessness shown by Carter also appeared on the other side of the Atlantic. Here is Baroness Shirley Williams saying Rushdie didn’t deserve a knighthood and implying that the expense of defending him was excessive because his words had “deeply offended Muslims.” Christopher Hitchens rightly tears into her but the audience’s support for Hitchens (and Rushdie) is tepid.

Wood reminds us that the same thing happened after the 2015 Paris attack that killed eight writers and artists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. I remember the cries of support that rang around the world (I was one of the many who made the empty gesture of buying the next week’s issue as a sign of support) but also the progressive voices that argued that the magazine was too offensive to receive our full support. When PEN, the writers’ organization, awarded the magazine its Freedom of Expression Courage Award, over 200 PEN members, responded by issuing their own letter of protest. They objected to giving an award to a magazine that had just had eight staffers killed because

Our concern is that, by bestowing the Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award on Charlie Hebdo, PEN is not simply conveying support for freedom of expression, but also valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.

Signatories opposing the Charlie Hebdo award included Eric Bogosian, Junot Díaz, Joyce Carol Oates, and Francine Prose.

Is Wood wrong? Is there a sizable faction of the American left that is reluctant to defend Rushdie and Charlie Hebdo because they don’t want to appear to be “punching down” towards Muslims? I think he’s right and that there is. Yes, those people will sincerely condemn the latest attack, but if you were Rushdie would you feel they had your back?

We have conceded moral authority to howling mobs, and the louder the howls, the more we have agreed that the howls were worth heeding. The novelist Hanif Kureishi has said that “nobody would have the balls” to write The Satanic Verses today. More precisely, nobody would publish it, because sensitivity readers would notice the theological delicacy of the book’s title and plot.

Again, is he wrong?

Back in 2019, George Packer was awarded the Hitchens Prize (the same pugnacious Hitchens featured in the above video) and delivered an acceptence speech that turned into an essay (again, at The Atlantic). It’s a beautiful essay that has stayed with me. Packer deplores how students and writers seem more and more afraid to speak on controversial topics. He noted that while PEN stuck by their guns, future awards were given to activists, not writers.

Two years later, PEN gave the same Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the Women’s March. This time there was no controversy, because PEN members overwhelmingly supported the cause. The next year the award went to three student gun-control activists, and the year after to Anita Hill. However admirable, however courageous, the winners were no longer writers, and the issue was no longer freedom of speech. Perhaps the searing experience of 2015—the murders, the controversy that divided PEN, and then the incredibly tense awards ceremony, with riot police and bomb-sniffing dogs all around the Museum of Natural History—had taken some of the heart out of “freedom of expression courage.” After Charlie Hebdo, it became an award for American political activism. PEN was honoring heroes on its side—public figures whom the majority of American writers wholeheartedly support. The award became less about freedom than about belonging. As Charlie Hebdo showed, free speech, which is the foundation of every writer’s work, can be tough going.

To return to where I started, Wood is not blaming the culture war for the attack on Rushdie, but he does give it some blame for the weak defense offered in some quarters. The fear of offending, or even the belief that offending is morally wrong, has sunk deep into our culture.

As Packer says:

If an editorial assistant points out that a line in a draft article will probably detonate an explosion on social media, what is her supervisor going to do—risk the blowup, or kill the sentence? Probably the latter. The notion of keeping the sentence because of the risk, to defy the risk, to push the boundaries of free expression just a few millimeters further out—that notion now seems quaint. So the mob has the final edit.

Let’s never give the mob, any mob, the final edit.