E-Pluribus | April 30, 2024
Is PEN mightier than the threats to free speech?; Americans and the First Amendment; and barbarians at the gate - laughing.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Gal Beckerman: A Prominent Free-Speech Group Is Fighting for Its Life
The recent history of PEN America (original meaning of the acronym was “Poets, Essayists, Novelists”) has been rocky, and it’s not getting any smoother. At The Atlantic, Gal Beckerman writes about the latest travails of the self-proclaimed champion of free speech.
In 2015, PEN America, the organization devoted to defending free speech, chose to honor the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo at its annual gala. A few months earlier, Islamic extremists had murdered 12 people at the publication’s offices in Paris. The rationale for recognizing the magazine seemed airtight: People had been killed for expressing themselves, and PEN America’s mission is to protect people targeted for what they express. For some writers connected with the organization, however, this reasoning was not so obvious. Six of them boycotted the gala, and 242 signed a letter of protest. In their eyes, Charlie Hebdo’s editorial staff, including those recently killed, embodied a political perspective that was unworthy of plaudits. The magazine frequently mocked Islam (and, in particular, caricatured the Prophet Muhammad), and this was a form of punching down, insulting a population that, as the letter put it, “is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized.”
PEN America defended itself, the gala went on, and Salman Rushdie, a former president of the group and a writer who knows what it means to have his life endangered because of his art, was given the last word in a New York Times article about the brouhaha: “If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name.”
[. . .]
The clash over Charlie Hebdo felt, in the moment, like a blip. It was not a blip. The forces that demanded PEN America stand for more—that it fight for issues its members considered to be matters of social justice, as opposed to the squishier but essential liberal ideals of openness and dialogue—have in the past two months managed to bring the organization to its knees. Unsurprisingly, the events of October 7, and all that followed, were the precipitating cause.
This afternoon, PEN America announced that it is canceling its World Voices festival—this year was to be the 20th anniversary of the annual international gathering of writers that Rushdie conceived as a way to encourage cross-cultural conversation and champion embattled artists. A cascade of authors, either out of conviction or under pressure, felt they couldn’t take part. PEN America had already decided last week to cancel its literary awards for the year after nearly half of the nominees withdrew their names from consideration. And its annual gala, a black-tie fundraiser scheduled for the middle of May, also seems hard to imagine right now. The language of the protest, too, has reached new extremes, with the most recent salvo demanding the resignation of PEN America’s CEO, Suzanne Nossel; its president, Jennifer Finney Boylan; and its entire board. Everyone I’ve spoken with there is in a state of high panic and deep sadness.
The existential conflict surrounding PEN America—the letters and counter-letters, withdrawals and statements of principle—captures the enormous rupture on the left since Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on October 7 and Israel’s deadly response in Gaza. Can an organization that sees itself as above politics, that sees itself straightforwardly as a support system for an open society, be allowed to exist anymore? For the protesting writers, this lofty mission represents an unforgivable moral abdication at a moment of crisis. But if they have their way and PEN America doesn’t survive, where will these authors turn when they need defending?
[. . .]
The fundamental misperception at the center of this conflict is that PEN America sees itself as a free-speech organization, while the protesters see it as a channel to express their political views. I’ve read some of the letters addressed to PEN America from writers who decided to opt out of the festival—some after first saying they would participate despite the pressure—and there is a clear pattern: Many seemed worried about failing a political litmus test, that they would be throwing in their lot with the normalizers of genocide if they took part in a panel on translation or memoir writing. One letter from a prominent author who had chosen to withdraw mentioned “ongoing harassment.”
PEN America has grown enormously in the past 10 years, from an organization with a budget of $2 million to one with $24 million, and a staff that went from 14 to nearly 100 in that time. It has worked on a wide range of issues, from cataloging book banning to reporting on writers under assault in Latin America. Some of the people I’ve spoken with who have had leadership positions at PEN America have wondered, though, if an outsize focus on threats to free speech from the right has unwittingly contributed to the politicization and the current confusion about what PEN is supposed to be for. One of these PEN America insiders told me that he thought 90 percent of the issues the organization had been campaigning for could be construed as progressive causes.
The group’s free-speech absolutism may have become muddied in the process. “I would say that in the end, if we can get out of this situation,” this same person told me, “if we can find a way to come back to the preservation of the essential mission, which is to stand for free speech and free expression, and the proliferating nature of those demands and those challenges in a 21st century, and not be so exclusively wedded to our fights on behalf of the left, then I think we will have made a real step forward.”
Read it all.
J.D. Tuccille: Americans Favor Freedom of the Press, Sort Of
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on, it’s said. Too many Americans seem to think the truth needs some help from the federal government getting dressed. Needless to say, J.D. Tuccille at Reason is skeptical.
"Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults (73%) say the freedom of the press – enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – is extremely or very important to the well-being of society," the Pew Research Center reported last week. "An additional 18% say it is somewhat important, and 8% say it is a little or not at all important."
While support for press freedom varies across demographic groups, "there are no major differences by political party."
In a country as bitterly divided as the United States, this is a rare example of shared support for the core right to observe the world around us and share information with— Wait. Hold on.
"About half of U.S. adults (51%) say that the publication of false information should always be prevented, even if it means press freedom could be limited," adds Pew. "Meanwhile, 46% of Americans say press freedom should always be protected, even if it means false information could be published."
What? How do you support press freedom and make it secondary to suppressing "false information?"
[. . .]
[A]lleged "misinformation" and "disinformation" often involved disputes among people with fundamental disagreements over what is true. Those with government jobs sought to silence their rivals rather than admit lockdown orders could do enormous damage, or that the pandemic may have originated in a lab leak, or that the president's son really did abandon a laptop full of damning data.
Last September, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found such suppression "in violation of the First Amendment" and issued an injunction to prevent further arm-twisting.
Do you really want to hand the job of limiting press freedom and suppressing false information to apparatchiks with a history of lying and muzzling critics as go-to policy choices?
Read the whole thing.
Bruce Clark: The barbarians are laughing at us
Does Western Civilization deserve to win? Regardless of its worthiness, the plain truth is that there is no guarantee. At UnHerd, Bruce Clark looks at a new book from Josephine Quinn, How the World made the West that argues that Western Civilization is the (somewhat) natural consequence of all its predecessors. But increasingly, many in the West do not seem to recognize the value of what we have or what it will take to preserve it.
There are many contenders to be the world’s predominant civilisation in the remainder of the 21st century. In Moscow in March, a group of top clergy and pious entrepreneurs from the Kremlin’s inner circle lauded their country’s role as creators of the so-called Russian World. This was defined as a “spiritual and cultural-civilisational phenomenon” stretching far beyond the state’s legal borders, embracing all those who recognised the Russians’ self-imposed mission, which was to restrain evil across the globe.
[. . .]
[W]hat, if anything, does Western civilisation have to say in its own defence? Until recently, discussions about such broad ideological questions have been rather introverted. If people argued over the usefulness, or the virtue, of “the West” as a cultural signifier, it was often in the context of narrow debates over the curriculum — or how the past should be presented through museums and monuments. Douglas Murray’s bestselling The War on the West refers more to domestic culture wars than to any global ideological contest — though he does elaborate the argument that the transgressions of the West, including colonialism and racism, have never been Western monopolies.
Given the hitherto confined nature of this debate, perhaps we should welcome an astonishing new contribution — How the World made the West — by Josephine Quinn, who has just been appointed to an ancient history chair at Cambridge. Amid an ocean of fascinating detail about little-known trading links and technological breakthroughs, she makes the impertinent argument that there is really no such thing as a civilisation, or even a distinct culture, and so there cannot be such a thing as a Western one. In her view of history, all the categories by which people have tried to organise the past melt away; there are no transmissions between cultures, but rather endless micro-transactions between individual traders, raiders and people struggling randomly to survive.
[. . .]
The book is presented, in part, as a critique of the “reception” of Hellenism by the post-enlightenment world. It argues that the facts of east Mediterranean history were cynically distorted by imperial Britain. Part of the distortion, she insists, lay in isolating Greece and its golden age from all the cultures with which the Greeks interacted, like the Egyptians and the Phoenicians. Or indeed from the Persians, with whom the Greek relationship — as she notes — was ambivalent not unremittingly hostile.
She is right to say that Western ideologues of the imperial and Cold-War eras reread Greek history and literature in ways that suited them. So did every other consumer of that brilliant canon. Yet over and above her provocative generalisations, there is a real question. Once you remove the liberal-imperialist lens through which Victorian Britain, and indeed Cold-War America, viewed ancient Athens, what remains of the idea of a Greek-influenced West?
[. . .]
The collective West is of course guilty of many historic sins, but it differs from totalitarian societies and resembles democratic Athens in the way it still (just about) retains the capacity for self-scrutiny, self-correction and no-holds-barred discussion. It is unlikely that a history professor in Russia, China or Iran would remain in place long after publishing a book arguing that their country’s civilisation was actually an illusion. Perhaps there is something magnificent about the fact that a book so wildly iconoclastic as Quinn’s can be published, and taken seriously: a perverse proof that the Periclean West is alive, so much so that people can deny its existence with cheerful impunity.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter (X)
Vai Thomas Chatterton Williams, a few excerpts from a Nellie Bowles article in The Atlantic on anti-racism workshops:
Here’s a long-form tweet from Coleman Hughes on “protecting speech [we] hate”:
And finally, via Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR), here’s the state of “civil rights” in 2024: