British Novelist to American Grads: There’s Nothing Virtuous about Being Offended

[bonnie]

British Novelist to American Grads: There’s Nothing Virtuous about Being Offended

Ian McEwan  May 19, 2015

A rather uneventful college commencement season full of the usual platitudes and bromides was shaken up by British novelist Ian McEwan’s refreshingly challenging the zeitgeist of trigger warnings, free-speech zones, and campus censorship at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania this week

. McEwan did not shy away from addressing the current temper on campus, choosing to focus on the creeping group-think in faculty lounges and discussion sections instead of the all too easy targets of Russian crackdowns on free speech or the “industrial scale” state-sponsored censorship in China. McEwan directly confronted the problem of a country rooted in the tradition of free expression under the First Amendment meekly submitting to what he called “bi-polar thinking” — the eagerness of some to “not side with Charlie Hebdo because it might seem as if  we’re endorsing George Bush’s War on Terror.

” McEwan criticized the cowardly behavior of six writers who withdrew from the PEN American Center’s annual gala over their discomfort with the organization’s support for Charlie Hebdo. He argued that the time to “remember your Voltaire” is precisely when confronted with scathing speech that “might not be to your taste” and said he was disappointed that “so many authors could not stand with courageous fellow writers and artists at a time of tragedy.”

Self-censorship or forced censorship on college campuses is growing, with recent instances of progressive speech suppression ranging from protests against Bill Maher at Berkeley to Brandeis University’s reneging on the conferral of an honorary doctorate to the Somali-born feminist and ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali over their criticism of Islam. Rejecting the accusations of racism leveled at Hirsi Ali, McEwan forcefully expounded that “all thought systems, all claims to truth — especially the grand claims to truth — must be open to criticism, satire, even, sometimes, mockery.”

A window into the audience’s discomfort with McEwan’s message can be seen in the fact that the first applause came nearly eleven and a half minutes into the 15-minute speech after a reference to recent deaths of unarmed black men in police custody and grinding poverty — what McEwan called the “ultimate sanction against free expression.” His condemnation of the massacre of twelve cartoonists in their Paris offices by contrast drew near silence. ADVERTISING McEwan reminded Dickinson’s students and faculty that “being offended is not to be confused with a state of grace — it’s the occasional price we all pay for living in an open society.” It is unfortunate that so many in our great universities think that price too steep .

The writers objecting to PEN America’s award would prefer that the magazine had targeted a different religion. If there is any group of people on the planet that should feel solidarity with the slain editors of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, it is writers. Appropriately enough, the writers group PEN America is giving its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the French publication now synonymous with martyrdom to free speech. Yet the award has become controversial, attacked by a group of writers who presume to lecture murder victims on not provoking their murderers. These dissenters are an unabashed fifth column undermining PEN America’s devotion to free expression so as to carve out a safe space for Islam from the barbed speech inherent to a free society. They oppose the killing of the Charlie Hebdo journalists — thanks, guys — but otherwise agree with the jihadis that the publication was out of bounds. “A hideous crime was committed,” novelist Peter Carey generously concedes, “but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?” This is like saying, to use the example of another PEN awardee, the jailed Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova, “Sure, it’s a terrible miscarriage of justice for Ismayilova to be behind bars, but should we really get all huffy about it?” These dissenters are an unabashed fifth column undermining PEN America’s devotion to free expression so as to carve out a safe space for Islam from the barbed speech inherent to a free society. Obviously, if you are going to have an organization committed to fighting for free speech, you should be “self-righteous,” to use Carey’s phrase, about violations of free speech, especially when journalists are gunned down for things they draw and write.

The root of the objection to honoring Charlie Hebdo is that the magazine’s staff was massacred by the wrong kind of terrorists for attacking the wrong religion. If the publication’s equal-opportunity offenders had been assaulted by right-wing extremists for their savage mockery of anti-immigrant politicians, or opponents of gay marriage or Catholicism, surely the dissenting writers would be all for recognizing Charlie Hebdo. As short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg argued in a long letter to the executive director of PEN, satirizing Catholicism is fine because it “has represented centuries of authoritarian repressiveness and the abuse of power.” Islam in modern Europe, in contrast, “has represented a few decades of powerlessness and disenfranchisement.”

This is a version of Garry Trudeau’s argument that Charlie Hebdo was “punching downward” against the defenseless, when satire should punch up against the powerful. This is a bizarre notion of power. The weapon of choice of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists was the pen; the weapon of choice of their assailants was the firearm. Charlie Hebdo was indeed punching up against violent forces that had succeeded in cowing the less courageous. Radical Islam compels fear and forces self-censorship in a way no other religion has done in the West in a very long time. So what if Charlie Hebdo was courageous, Eisenberg asks. Its journalists wasted their courage on “a parochial, irrelevant, misconceived, misdirected, relatively trivial, and more or less obsolete campaign against clericalism.” What they did was like jumping from a roof, or having sex with a wild boar. These acts, though, are utterly pointless. Charlie Hebdo had a clear, specific rationale — refusing to submit to rules of expression set out by illiberal fanatics. If Charlie Hebdo’s “campaign” were truly so obsolete, all of its journalists would be alive today to hear the morally obtuse scolding from Deborah Eisenberg and her compatriots. Eisenberg has it easy. No one will ever come try to kill her over “The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor,” “Revenge of the Dinosaurs,” or any of her other stories. She gets to compare Charlie Hebdo to Der Stürmer from a nice perch at the School of Arts at Columbia University, where the most courage anyone will ever have to demonstrate is reading fiction without the appropriate trigger warnings. The martyred editor of Charlie Hebdo, Stephane Charbonnier, famously said, “I prefer to die standing than live on my knees.” The PEN dissenters believe he belonged on his knees. — Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2015 King Features Syndicate VIEW COMMENTS Speak Truth to Narrative

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417574/anti-charlie-hebdo-fifth-column-rich-lowry

Edited May 28, 2015 by bonnie

[JoeMo]

Great article that touches on the ridiculousness of "political correctness".  It is a confusing and complicated thing to know what "political correctness" is, depending on who you are with.  Political correctness at a KKK rally is radically different than political correctness at an NAACP rally.  It is different at an SDA church than it is at a Catholic Church than it is at a Pentecostal Church.  It is different with Dems than it is with Repubs than it is with Libertarians..

"Political correctness" is another term for mob mentality and group think.  Thanks for posting this Bonnie.

Another rant - freedom is NOT the same as security - in fact it is at the opposite end of the spectrum.  If you want total security you'd better be willing to give up all of your freedoms.  If you want total freedom, you will lose most of your security (in other words, you would be at risk).  I prefer freedom over security.    Like Stephane Charbonnier said, "I'd rather die standing than live on my knees".

[lazarus]

I certainly agree with this part of his speech. "there is likely more free speech, free thought, free enquiry on earth now than at any previous moment in recorded history" Despite the protestations about political correctness people are freer now to express their opinions than 50 years ago.

[joeb]

It's too bad McEwan didn't includee the group think that is denying people like Condoleeza Rice the opportunity to speak at a commencement address.  And why was she denied this?  Because she held a cabinet position in George Bush's administration.  A black woman discriminated against is what it boils down to.  Discriminated against because she believed something different than the group think mentality approved of.  So much for toleration of points of view.  So much for open minds. 

[lazarus]

It's too bad McEwan didn't includee the group think that is denying people like Condoleeza Rice the opportunity to speak at a commencement address.  And why was she denied this?  Because she held a cabinet position in George Bush's administration.  A black woman discriminated against is what it boils down to.  Discriminated against because she believed something different than the group think mentality approved of.  So much for toleration of points of view.  So much for open minds. 

​Are you saying she was denied the speaking opportunity because she was black or because she was a member of the administration? I think if she was white she still would have been denied. I think you agree with that too because you said she was discriminated against because of her belief.