Freedom of Expression?

by Abir

Begging my colleagues' indulgence, I'm going to stray from this week's topic and talk about some important issues that have been making news in the literary world this week.

A week may be a long time in politics, and three days it seems can be seismic in the world of crime fiction.

 

On Monday night, I was fortunate enough to be attending the British Book Awards in London. The highlight of the night was an appearance, via videolink, by Sir Salman Rushdie to accept the Freedom to Publish Award. Sir Salman used his acceptance speech as an opportunity to warn against what he perceived as the growing threat to freedom of expression in the West. You can read more on his speech here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65612267

 

But here’s a key passage:

 

"Now I am sitting here in the US, I have to look at the extraordinary attack on libraries, and books for children in schools…The attack on the idea of libraries themselves. It is quite remarkably alarming, and we need to be very aware of it, and to fight against it very hard."

 

He also criticised the rewriting of older books in modern times to remove language deemed offensive, saying that books should "come to us from their time and be of their time."

 

A few days earlier, at a crime fiction festival in England, a different author made a speech allegedly criticizing, amongst other things, political correctness and the use of gender pronouns and lamenting the fact that white men were no longer allowed to write non-white characters. All of this was, I understand, wrapped in the language of freedom of expression. The speech was described by some in the room as: “outdated and offensive”, “inappropriate”, and sounding “as though it was written in the last century”. While at least several people in the audience complained about the speech, others appear to have laughed in agreement with its sentiments.

 

I don’t want to talk about the specifics of the latter, because I was not at the festival in question, but I do want to discuss some of the issues underlying it as well as the points raised by Sir Salman Rushdie in his speech on Monday night, because they are, to a certain degree, all linked.

 

First, a couple of things: This article is not a witch hunt. It’s not about attributing blame or casting aspersions. And it doesn’t have any answers. It’s more about setting out my own thoughts and questions. Some, maybe many of you, will disagree with part or all of what I have to say, and that’s fine. I don’t claim to be right, my Twitter bio reads ‘generally confused’ and I stand by that. All I can tell you is that I’m writing this in good faith.

 

Let’s start with Sir Salman’s speech. As I understood it, he is concerned by a creeping authoritarianism and a new puritanism that seems to be infecting the liberal west – an attitude that considers certain ideas or points of view as so heretical that they must be banned. And he chose his words carefully – he criticized those who would stop our libraries stocking books on critical race theory and gender fluidity AND those who would seek to rewrite books from the past in light of present mores. This to me is important. For the intolerance is not just on the right but on the left too. Now these threats have always existed at the extreme margins. What is different now is that the notion that censoring ideas and viewpoints deemed controversial is acceptable or even desirable, now appears to be gaining ground amongst the mainstream, especially amongst millennials and Gen Z, as exemplified by staff at certain publishers refusing to work on books by authors whose views they find disagreeable.

 

 Gone, it seems, is the Voltairean principle that one can be wholly disapproving of what someone might say, yet still defend to the death their right to say it.

 

I’ll be honest. This makes me nervous. I grew up in a time and place where the primacy of freedom of speech was sacrosanct. It you didn’t agree with something, you called it out, you debated it, you ridiculed it, you held it up to the light of scrutiny. You didn’t ban the idea or blacklist the person espousing it most of the time. It didn’t really matter if feelings or people were hurt in the process. And yet, the time and place I grew up in was a far less just and equal place than the world today. The world I grew up in was dominated by the voices of educated, older, straight, white men. The voices and opinions of women, non-whites, non-cis and pretty much any other group were, if not unheard, at least significantly marginalised. The Voltairean principle didn’t always apply to people who looked like me. 

 

When it comes to views and opinions and opportunity, today’s western world is much more diverse, much more multipolar (though still far from perfect) than it was when I was growing up. And it is a better place for it. So, even if I have my doubts, who am I to say that the attitudes of millennials or Gen Z, their emphasis on respect for the views and feelings of marginalised groups over the right of someone to say what they want, regardless of how it affects others, isn’t the right one?

 

And let’s not forget that the right to freedom of speech is not unqualified. It is a right qualified by criminal law. Free speech cannot be used to cause disorder or to harass or cause fear of violence.

 

Yet, like Sir Salman, I can’t help but feel that this new puritanism for what can and can’t be said or published is dangerous. My gut, as well as my lived experience, tells me that banning ideas doesn’t eradicate them. It just sweeps them into the shadows where the fester, ready to infect the disaffected, the malcontents and those forgotten about society. 

 

And that leads me to the issues from the festival in England last week. Again it is couched in the language of censorship – the view that these days, in our new ‘woke’ world, straight white men are at risk of being cancelled for writing characters of colour or non-cis characters. Surely, they argue, this is the same as what Sir Salman is saying? Freedom of expression, they say, is being curtailed. 

 

Except it’s not. It’s not the same thing at all because no one – literally no one - is saying to straight white men not to write characters of colour, or non-CIS characters or for that matter, female protagonists. What is being said is, if you create these characters, make sure you do it from a position of knowledge, not ignorance. Do it with the care and love and research you put into your straight white male characters. Gone are the days when you could portray the rest of us as tokens, or eye-candy or stereotypes of the worst kind, because WE, the non-white, or non -straight, or non-male, or whatever else minority group that you’ve focussed on, are not bit players in a straight white male world. We are real and three dimensional and your depiction of us matters.That’s not to say you can’t make us villains or the bad guys or anything else, but for god’s sake, make us real. Trust me, you do it well (you understand our cultures, you don’t exoticize us, you treat us as normal people) and no one has a problem. In fact I would hope that the opposite is true. I certainly want to see you write more such characters. But you need to do it properly, not in a lazy, half-arsed way. The issue is that for too long, too many of you haven’t bothered to do that, probably because until recently, you’ve never had to.

 

And at this point, I’ll make an admission. I think it will be harder for a straight white man living in the west to write authentically about a non-white, or non-straight person, or a woman, than it would be for one of those groups to write authentically about a straight white man. And that’s because we still live in a world where the straight white man’s experience has primacy. We see it in every facet of our lives, and so, I think, we find it easier to write about your experience authentically than you might find it to write about ours. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It just means it’ll take you a bit of extra work, and if you’re a writer, isn’t discovering these differences part of the joy of writing?

 

Differences.

 

I suppose that leads us to the issue of objecting to someone’s preferred pronouns. I won’t say much on the subject, other than to ask: why do it? 

 

How does someone’s wish to use different pronouns affect you? If it makes someone else feel more accepted and literally requires nothing from you except a bit of understanding, then what’s the problem? 

 

And if this is about free speech, then for me, freedom of speech is intrinsically linked to tolerance. How can you believe in freedom of speech whilst being intolerant to the wishes of someone to be addressed by different pronouns?

 

With regard to the speech at the festival, a lot has been made online of the fact that certain members of the audience were laughing in agreement at some of the points being made. I’m not going to condemn anyone for that. Our views, I think, are shaped by our lived experience. If you are in your sixties or seventies, you’ll have grown up in a world very different to people in their twenties and thirties. During your formative years, you may never even have met a non-white person, or a person who wasn’t straight. You probably wouldn’t have seen them portrayed in a positive light in much of the media you’d have been exposed to. In those circumstances, I would imagine it’s difficult to understand and to empathise with the issues faced by people growing up in a different time, with different values. And suddenly those people whom you can’t empathise with are wanting a say, and everything you’ve been taught or taken for granted your whole life is now considered wrong. It’s a difficult position to be in. 

 

I would imagine that many of the claims of the world going ‘woke’, or of ‘political correctness gone mad’ are simply a reaction to the world changing. It’s not a new phenomenon. It happens with every generation, though I guess it’s exacerbated by the advent of social media.

 

The attacks on pronouns and the laughter that may have been given in receipt, I think, come from this fear of a changing world. A world without the certainties that those making the attacks grew up in. It doesn’t make them bad people. My gut says it’s more out of confusion, a rage against the dying of their light, an anger at the world having moved on and them having been left behind. I think it’s the laughter of the bitter, not of the all-conquering victor.

 

But how can these people be condemned for their lack of empathy if we too, cannot empathise with them? Their world has gone. It might be your world today, but not for long. One day your views might be considered just as outmoded as theirs are now. What's worse, if you're in your twenties or thirties, pretty much every opinion you've ever had is probably recorded somewhere on social media. When attitudes change (and they will), there's a fair chance that you'll be even more prone to cancellation that those out-of-touch people we criticise today.

 

So that’s about it. As usual, more heat than light. And so I’ll end by making a plea for tolerance. I’ve found that most people in the writing world start from a position of open-mindedness and goodwill. Disagreements are often magnified through the medium of social media and complex issues reduced to bald statements of two hundred and forty characters. Nuance is lost. Everything is either black or white, right or wrong, good or evil, when we know the real world isn’t like that. The real world is full of fallible people with good intentions who sometimes (well, pretty damn often) make mistakes. That doesn’t make them racists or bigots or anything else. We know the real thing when we see it. Let’s not condemn or paint others in those colours simply because we disagree with them about something, because that, I think, is what leads to polarisation. Much better, I think, to have the dialogue; to explain, to rebut, to discuss, to change opinions. Because conversion, I think, is better than condemnation.

  

Feel free to leave comments in the chat. I’m interested in your thoughts. As I say, I could be totally wrong on all of this. I’m getting old and I’m certainly irrelevant, but my mind is open to change.

 (Note: My thoughts regarding the issues from the festival in England relate solely to the points around freedom of expression which I understand were raised in the speech, not any other aspects of that speech, nor anything else that may have transpired at the festival.)