Yet many in the West have been quick to turn the attack on Rushdie by a Hezbollah group from New Jersey into “fodder for highly politicized controversy,” as the New York Times put it. The unspeakable violence against Rushdie has become another “flashpoint in the 21st century’s tumultuous debate over free speech, liberal values and the ‘cancellation culture'”.
Thus, the Financial Times editorializes that freedom of speech “must be defended more vigorously after the attack on Rushdie”. Moreover, “freedom of speech in a liberal society must include the prerogative to say disturbing or offensive things.”
Few will dispute this ancient saw of liberalism. However, we must also consider the new complex fact that liberal society is endangered by many who vigorously defend free speech and the prerogative to say offensive things. In the same week that Rushdie was attacked, Alex Jones, the ultra-rich talk show host and founder of Free Speech Systems LLC, was ordered by a court to pay $45 million to grieving parents who were deeply troubled by his repeated lie that the 2012 massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School never happened.
Jones is just one of many entrepreneurs around the world who have cold-bloodedly earned the right to offend – and in doing so have helped poison politics and society on several continents. They thrive because liberal society’s appetite for people saying offensive things has never been greater. Certainly, their presence and success confirms that there has never been, for better or for worse, so much free speech, especially words that are intentionally offensive.
Anyone with a smartphone today is a potential news broadcaster, political analyst, historian, literary critic and conspiracy theorist on a variety of digital platforms. Strangely, however, a section of Western mainstream intelligence insists that, as the much-hyped Harper’s Paper put it in 2020, “the free expression of information and ideas is becoming more restricted every day.”
This untried and unprovable notion is now back in circulation after the attack on Rushdie. Thus, a sentence after condemning the horrific murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government, the Financial Times invokes Harper’s Letter, asserting that, “less brutal but more insidious, perhaps, has been the effect of the ‘cancellation culture’ in freedom of speech.”
The Western signatories of the Harper Letter may have occasionally come to blows in their Twitter spats. But virtual lynch mobs, more insidious than Saudi oysters with bone saws, have failed to silence any of them. In fact, some thinkers routinely “unfollowed” on social media enjoy thriving careers; they confirm how easy it is today to secure a high income and reputation in the West by claiming righteous victims.
In the absence of concrete evidence of the widespread stifling of free speech, culture warriors have become purveyors of fearful speculation. In its report on the “tumultuous debate” over free speech last week, the New York Times quoted a commenter on Twitter as saying that “sensitivity readers” at publishing houses today would block the publication of The Satanic Verses.
It might have been useful to ask Rushdie’s publishers about this. Such a conjecture might also have been balanced by noting that much of what could not be published for centuries because of rampant racism, misogyny and homophobia is now finally making it into print.
The dominant beliefs of a society determine what can be published in it at any given time. These beliefs, controlled by a political and cultural establishment, are inevitably challenged when people previously excluded from the public sphere enter it with new media technologies. The outcome of such battles over narrative authority is always unclear: More free speech about some things and less about others.
The question of “who gets to say what” cannot be separated from ongoing political contests for power and demographic and technological change. This is why the free speech debate is endlessly muddled and can never be resolved to the satisfaction of all the debaters.
Members of an insecure cultural establishment in the West have taken it upon themselves to fiercely imagine a golden age when speech was truly free, unpunished by “cancellation culture.” An aged commentary is particularly apt to see the decay of civilization in its loss of power and influence.
However, the fear of slowly becoming irrelevant is not as dire a fate as the actual murder, torture and rape suffered by writers and journalists in Asia, Africa and Latin America, or the truly horrific violence that Rushdie became. It is more imperative than ever to disregard the narcissistic declinism of a long-privileged Western minority and correctly identify the truly malevolent, resourceful and terrifying persecutors of art and thought around the world.
More from other writers at Bloomberg Opinion:
• Rushdie’s attack has its roots in India, not Iran: Mihir Sharma
• Rushdie Attack Shows Iran’s Hard Truth Soft Power: Bobby Ghosh
• Can China really prosper without freedom? Probably not: Ian Buruma
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or of Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Pankaj Mishra is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He is the author, most recently, of Run and Hide.
More stories like this are available at bloomberg.com/opinion
