When Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses was published, a Fatwa was issued against him and he had to go into hiding for several years. While Rushdie is critical of the fascist Islamic groups in Islam, there was no intention of blaspheme in the book. Below is a video of Christopher Hitchens airing his opinions on the matter.
Still, I will go further, insensitivity should never be a valid reason to censor and silence supposedly bigoted opinions or novels. When a Catholic nun claims to be offended by Ken Russel's The Devils, or when a Muslim is aghast by a cartoon defacing his religious leader, why should they declare that that opinion must be silenced? Don't they, in turn, become bigoted?
The need to transgress is integral to any 'artist' and the need to provoke is vital for any columnist. In another Christopher Hitchens video I saw someone he debated claimed that (paraphrasing) "In an auditorium full of people, a member of the audience should never stand up and shout out FIRE!" Hitchens replies "you should not use such a bullshit example."
Indeed, the need to derail, disorientate and jostle people is, once more, absolutely vital. Don't forget that Galileo, despite the precision of his calculations, was shouting out FIRE. When society continues on the same single-minded course, provocation is essential for progress. By provocation, I don't just mean the simple need to shock, but the airing of remarkable discoveries. These discoveries are often contrary to a society that holds them in contempt, but they are able to lead us to become more aware of ourselves and, indeed, more pluralistic.
Whether it's Venezuela or Ecuador, where newspapers are shut down for criticising populist governments; or North Korea, a secretive totalitarian state that literally starves its people to death; or Syria, a country that kills its citizens for daring to believe in the idea of a democracy; or Iran, where the internet and other media outlets are constantly supervised... These are countries with grievous flaws that need to be criticised - and any attempt to do so should not be met with sadistic bullying...
Though, of course, are all pluralistic countries really that better off? What's the difference between democracies and dictatorships? Are the citizens of Western Europe, U. S. A. and Japan really not just automatons? The media outlets and various kind of institutions often try to drug citizens with various kinds of sedatives - television programming, routine jobs, etc. - until they are immunised. Not that different from the kind of apocalyptic visions that Huxley had in Brave New World... And, in such a society, are journalists really able to express their opinions? Are people, like in Brave New World, labelled and compartmentalised by institutions and just sedated by various forms of entertainment?
1 comment:
I'm not going to address directly the issues you raised towards the latter part of the post but maybe to enumerate the relation to the sciences. It's really quite interesting to look at the history of science to see the greatest paradigms arising from an idea opposing popular thinking. In fact it seems to happen all the time. Whether it's Einstein, reinventing our conception of space and time, going directly against the grain, overturning previous thinking; or quantum theory: proposing abstract axioms, not caring about what the mathematics means in reality and following the theory through to its final consequences. These conceptions always began with an idea. A single idea, usually completely opposing current thought. But what does it say when Einstein hated quantum theory? Enough to claim that: 'God does not play dice with the Universe'? Do even mavericks become entrenched in established scientific theory? To its end this position can be very dangerous to scientific progress.
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