Defend Rushdie and free expression with imagination and irony

We must not let free speech become a battle ground for cheap slogans

In his memoir Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens described the 1989 Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie as ‘one of the greatest ever confrontations between the ironic and the literal mind’ and added that such a conflict is ‘a necessary attrition that is always going on in some form.’ While Hitchens was himself famous for searing polemics, the pugilistic scribbler’s absence has been dramatically felt in the week since the knife attack on Rushdie in New York state. We’ve had no end of culture war polemic and appeals to free expression. All have been welcome, but without the Hitchens wit and depth of passion, many have fallen flat. 

It is important to remember, then, that while Hitchens was never shy of using his writing as a devastating weapon, very often the power of his ammunition came from increasing complexity in the face of ideological simplification. This emphasis on the implied over the direct and the elliptical over the literal and crudely confrontational, was exactly what Hitchens admired about Rushdie and the way he handled the original fatwa—and the decade of living in hiding that resulted from the death threat. In Hitch-22, he writes:

‘I cannot remember any moment when he said or did anything crass, or when he raised his voice unduly or responded in kind to those who were taunting or baiting him. He was at one time very concerned that he would dry up as a writer because of being moved from one safe house to another, but in practice produced seven first-rate fictions and many brilliant essays and reviews, thus disproving Orwell’s fine but fallacious dictum that “the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.”’

It is difficult to know how to address the latest attack on Rushdie without getting lost in the noise of condemnation, equivocation or culture war ‘told you sos.’ We are not in short supply of shows of solidarity, reminders of the importance of free speech and anger about the way extremists have used liberal consciousness against liberal values themselves. However, none of this seems to reach street level. None of it seems to strike home. The commentariat—no matter how correct, no matter how world-wise—seem to be depressingly disconnected from the world of ordinary citizens, that regardless of the moral truths uttered, the barrage of think pieces and hot takes only seems superficial. 

Part of the problem is that everyone is guilty of selective outrage. We all highlight the latest scandal or outrage that is most convenient to our own system of private meaning. For some of us, it was Charlie Hebdo. For some, the murder of Jo Cox. For many, it has been right wing attack on jewish and black worshippers. For others, it is the use of trans rights to attack the sanctity of childhood and female privacy. All of these issues deserve a certain amount of protest and outrage, but the art of selective activism means that those in the media class become ever-more divorced from reality. A degree of consistency indicates honesty. However, even the most dearly felt moral polemics can be easily dismissed now as one-sided and suspicious. 

Another challenge is the fact that writing polemics is not enough, and often allows us to avoid the harder path to defending our values—making uncompromising decisions in our daily lives. It is easy to go on a podcast and talk about the foundational value of free speech. It is quite another thing, however, to do so in the office common room, in the post office, or in a discussion with your immigrant house mate who is sensitive to all hints of alienation. However, it is these hidden moments of value-declaration, these unseen expressions of honesty that mark the true difference between the soft option and the historic moral stand. When we think of the great moments of protest in the past, what marks them out is not the public grandstanding or fetish for polemics that characterise culture war squabbles today. Rather, it is the mundanity of their context. 

Rosa Parks made history at the back of the bus. Muhammad Ali refused to stand forward in a bureaucratic draft meeting. The greatest limits on civil rights manifest themselves in the right to be a citizen in normal life, to occupy the personal space of the unseen worlds of the high street, the public toilet, the water cooler, the theatre, the midnight street cafe and yes, the book festival. Attacks on these things are attacks not on abstract ideals or empty concepts of ‘humanity’ and ‘personhood’, they are attacks on the tangible realities of being a complex, open-ended subject invested in the world. They are attacks on meaning and the acts of living and becoming. 

It is on this front—the right to banal humanity—that we must fight back against Islamic extremism, woke terrorism and all forms of control-freakery, whether they be utopian abstractions, public health just-so narratives or flatulent intonations about any program for trans-humanism in the grand, pink-facaded, googoleplex to come. 

What this means in practice is being prepared to be brave in unspoken and invisible ways. Saying ‘no’ and ‘enough is enough’ around the dinner table, to your boss at work, to your cousin at a christening drinks, to your daughter’s teacher at a parent’s evening. We fight back by reminding our opponents that free expression and independent thought are matters of practical and common-of-garden importance. They matter on the ground, on the level of the one-to-one. Allowing free speech to be sloganised by pedlars of the culture war business model doesn’t just feed a pointless division based on ideological teams shouting across each other, it also allows the very stuff of human subjectivity to be reduced to bland and empty gestures, it robs the values of the open society of the texture of life as it is actually lived. 

Free expression matters—and the right to write a novel without threat of violent reprisals matters—because it is impossible to live as a human being without it. Liberty emerged as a fundamental value in all civilised societies out of a recognition of human complexity, the messy truths of human individuality making it abundantly clear that we are not mere instruments of ideological change, and nor are we foot-soldiers in the cosmic hierarchy of divine right. The awful truth about being human is that our actions impact each other and our environment. The choices we make on the most bucolic levels have lasting consequences. Any parent of a toddler knows this. Anyone wounded by heartbreak lives with this fact. Anyone who has suffered abuse or neglect does not need to be persuaded of the the fact of human responsibility, and that even the smallest actions or utterances can cripple or inspire another in equal measure. 

That is why liberty matters. That is why free expression matters. That is why an assault on a novelist for what he has written is an assault on human flourishing itself. Without the most basic understanding of why ordinary, human daily contact must be free from harassment and violent interference, we cannot hope to build a society that reflects the foundational truths about who we are, and one that allows us to live as intricate, unfathomable subjects—as opposed to neatly obedient objects and faceless abstractions. 

We live in an age when repression and censorship are regarded as the height of justice. When shutting down offensive speech is viewed as preferable to challenging it. This form of ‘repressive tolerance’ has only served to embolden the likes of Rushdie’s attacker, and it is a cultural shift from freedom to safety and constriction, that seemed to begin with the 1989 fatwa. The result is, as Hitchens wrote that ‘the very multiculturalism and multiethnicity that brought Salman to the West, and that also made us richer by Hanif Kurieshi, Nadeem Aslam, Vikram Seth, Monica Ali, and many others, is now one of the disguises for a uniculturalism, based on moral relativism and moral blackmail (in addition to some more obvious blackmail of the less moral sort) whereby the Enlightenment has been redefined as “white” and “oppressive,” mass illegal immigration threatens to spoil everything for everybody, and the figure of the free-floating transnational migrant has been deposed by the contorted face of the psychopathically religious international nihilist, praying for the day when his messianic demands will coincide with possession of an apocalyptic weapon.’

We fight back against this tendency by defending the complex in the face of the simplistic. By choosing the multivalent instead of the binary. Free expression matters because human life as it is actually lived is messy, complex and cannot be simplified for theological, technological or ideological convenience. Sharing a piece from The Spectator is not going to cut it. We have to ditch the us-vs-them meme-wars and Twitter squabbles and deepen the role of the imagination and the irreducible in our every-day lives. We fight back against the bigotry and the slogans and totalitarian misuse of justice by reminding each other of the intrinsic, mysterious and paradoxical nature of what it means to be a person in a world of unknowns.