The Ever-Present Danger of Censorship
Henry Louis Gates Jr's reflections on Salmon Rushdie foreshadowed the coming threats to free speech
“Censorship is to art what lynching is to justice.” - Henry Louis Gates Jr
Responding to the sentence of death unleashed upon Salmon Rushdie in 1989, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr gave a talk at a Lincoln Center rally. He not only compared censorship to lynching, he noted that in this instance the two had come together. He was keen to stress, however, that the issue could not be dismissed as “a form of savagery practiced in distant, alien lands”, drawing attention to the number of people in countries like Chile and Czechoslovakia who were in prison for “a dissidence not of deeds but of words”. The United States, he pointed out, was only ever inches away from enacting its own censorship laws (one had been tabled at the very time he gave the speech).
His analogy only name-checks ‘art’ in the context of censorship, as if this was the only domain that it was plausible to censor. Today, the United States government feels empowered to pressure social media companies to censor everyone who disagrees with their policies, not to mention silencing objections to their increasingly sketchy scientific interpretations. The First Amendment no longer applies to those it was expressly created to bind. Thus far, Gates has said nothing about any of this; perhaps he is not even aware it is happening. The beauty of State-sponsored censorship, after all, is that once you can prevent those who disagree with you from voicing their objections, the public square can carry no word of your skulduggery. All dissidence has been excised.
Gates was a Harvard professor back when Harvard meant something, and had been at Yale, Cornell, and Duke before then. It is from Gates’ legal scholarship that I first appreciated how the First Amendment was not originally intended to defend the speech of citizens: “Congress shall make no law...” did not preclude states and cities from doing so. It is only in 1931 that the Supreme Court recognised that freedom of expression was a right that applied to citizens, and solely during the time of Chief Justice Earl Warren that the scope of this principle was advanced. Freedom of speech, far from dating back to the founding of the republic, only came alive in the sixties... and has been fighting for its survival ever since.
The decline of freedom of speech in the United States intersects with attempts to supress ‘hate speech’. Gates suggests this resulted in ‘civil liberties’ being seen as an obstacle to ‘civil rights’. I find this wording strange... freedom of speech to a Kantian like myself is a right. What is meant by ‘civil rights’ among those who would seek to silence ‘hate speech’ are positive interventions meant to redress some imbalance in society. Yet Kant’s ‘rightful condition’ cannot survive adjudicating the petty conflicts of specific groups - it requires that our principles for justice apply to everyone. Pushing partisan grievances above shared principles for rights swiftly undermines the foundations of anything with a legitimate claim to democracy.
Conflicts do occur, and need to be handled carefully. As Gates argues in one of his papers, flag-burning illustrates the kind of disagreements that must be wrestled with. On the one hand, the flag symbolises something important for a great many citizens, something that is tarnished when the flag is defiled. But on the other side, the freedom to burn a flag also symbolises something vitally important, albeit to a different set of citizens. Likewise, opposition to ‘hate speech’ comes into conflict with the right to speak freely.
I feel this tension acutely in the case of the Salman Rushdie incident that brought forth Gates remarks, above. I find The Satanic Verses a despicably racist novel. But I defend to the death Rushdie’s right to say such disgusting things, or else I cannot uphold the principle of free speech that is essential to any attempt at negotiating ways of living together. The ever-present danger of censorship is that it will destroy the conditions that make the fragile alliances upholding democracy possible. Just as lynching corrupts justice into murder, censorship corrupts democracy into tyranny. The terrifying problem we now face is that many caught in the throes of ideological passion are all-too willing to demand these dire sacrifices.
RZB, Chris, I’m just beginning to wade through your dialogue, but I want to thank you both for posting it. Corralling the total truth about anything in social reality is probably impossible. Someday in the far future humankind may have a version of Azimov’s psychohistory that will provide some credence for this assertion. Meanwhile we must make do with ongoing and probing dialogue to at least stake out some boundaries we can use to direct policy and action.
“not to mention silencing objections to their increasingly sketchy scientific interpretations.”
There is particularly no basis for this phrase.
In general scientific interpretations conveyed by the US Government are formed by convening panels or committees and often with open hearings.
The National Academies play a major role and their studies involve members and non- members
https://www.nationalacademies.org/about/our-study-process