Theos-Talk Archives (April 1996 Message tl00730)

Rushdie's comments tie in with recent discussions, so I
thought I'd post them.

-- Eldon

----

PERSPECTIVE ON FREEDOM
'RESPECT' AND THE THOUGHT POLICE

By Salman Rushdie
"Los Angeles Times", April 18, 1996

In any vision of a free society, the value of free speech must
rank the highest, for that is the freedom without which all the
other freedoms would fail. Journalists do more than most of us to
protect those values, for the exercise of freedom is freedom's
best defense, and that is something you all do every day.

It seems to me, however, that we live in an increasingly
censorious age. By this I mean that the broad, indeed
international, acceptance of 1st Amendment principles is being
steadily eroded. Many special-interest groups, claiming the moral
high ground, now demand the protection of the censor. Political
correctness and the rise of the religious right provide the
pro-censorship lobby with further cohorts. I would like to say a
little about just one of the weapons of this resurgent lobby, a
weapon used, interestingly, by everyone from anti-pornography
feminists to religious fundamentalists: I mean the concept of
"respect."

On the surface of it, "respect" is one of those ideas nobody's
against. Like a good warm coat in winter, like applause, like
ketchup on your fries, everybody wants some of that.
Sock-it-to-me-sock-it-to-me, as Aretha Franklin has it. But what
we used to mean by respect -- what Aretha meant by it -- that is,
a mixture of good-hearted consideration and serious attention --
has little to do with the new ideological usage of the word.

Religious extremists demand respect for their attitudes with
growing stridency. Very few people would object to the idea that
people's rights to religious belief must be respected -- after
all, the 1st Amendment defends those rights as unequivocally as
it defends free speech -- but now we are asked to agree that to
dissent form those beliefs -- to hold that they are suspect or
antiquated or wrong -- that, in fact, they are arguable -- is
incompatible with the idea of respect. When criticism is placed
off limits as "disrespectful" and therefore offensive, something
strange is happening to the concept of respect. Yet in recent
times, both the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts and the
British Broadcasting Corp. have announced that they will use this
new version of "respect" as a touchstone for their funding and
programming decisions.

Other minority groups -- racial, sexual, social -- also have
demanded that they be accorded this new form of respect. To
"respect" Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree
with him. To "diss" him is, equally simply, do disagree. But if
dissent is also to be thought a form of "dissing," then we have
indeed succumbed to the Thought Police.

I want to suggest to you that citizens of free societies,
democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around
their fellow citizen's opinions, even their most cherished
beliefs. In free societies, you must have the free play of ideas.
There must be argument, and it must be impassioned and
untrammeled. A free society is not a calm and eventless place --
that is the kind of static, dead society dictators try to create.
Free societies are dynamic, noisy, turbulent and full of radical
disagreements. Skepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked. And
it is the skepticism of journalists, their show-me, prove-it
unwillingness to be impressed, that is perhaps their most
important contribution to the freedom of the free world.

It is the disrespect of journalists -- for power, for orthodoxy,
for party lines, for ideologies, for vanity, for arrogance, for
folly, for pretension, for corruption, for stupidity, maybe even
for editors -- that I would like to celebrate and that I urge you
all, in freedom's name, to preserve.

[Salmon Rushdie, whose latest work is "The Moor's Last Sigh"
(Pantheon, 1996), is the British author under an Iranian
assassination threat because of his writings. This passage is
taken from a speech he gave Wednesday to the American Society of
Newspaper Editors meetings in Washington. -- "LA Times"]