The Enemies of Writing – The Atlantic

In 2015, PEN America, an organization I belong to and admire, gave its first Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French weekly. Four months earlier, two jihadists had slaughtered most of the papers staff at its weekly meeting in Paris. The award caused a lot of controversy among American writers. More than 200 PEN members denounced it, including some of the countrys most illustrious writers, and half a dozen table hosts refused to attend the awards ceremony. Charlie Hebdos satire, often juvenile, also took aim at intolerance in the Catholic Church and Orthodox Judaism, but the PEN writers found its crude caricatures of angry imams and the Prophet Muhammad beyond the pale. Theocratic Islam should be off-limits to satirists, the PEN writers argued, because French Muslims belonged to a marginalized, embattled, and victimized group. So do French Jews; so, at that moment, did French satirists. In fact, it took some nerve to argue that the balance of power between the heavily armed jihadists and the defenseless cartoonists was with the latter. These 200 writers wouldnt honor other writers who had paid the ultimate price for expression. They were members of an organization dedicated to free speech, but they wouldnt defend it in the face of murder. As Salman Rushdie said, I hope nobody ever comes after them. To its great credit, PEN held its ground.

Two years later, PEN gave the same Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the Womens March. This time there was no controversy, because PEN members overwhelmingly supported the cause. The next year the award went to three student gun-control activists, and the year after to Anita Hill. However admirable, however courageous, the winners were no longer writers, and the issue was no longer freedom of speech. Perhaps the searing experience of 2015the murders, the controversy that divided PEN, and then the incredibly tense awards ceremony, with riot police and bomb-sniffing dogs all around the Museum of Natural Historyhad taken some of the heart out of freedom of expression courage. After Charlie Hebdo, it became an award for American political activism. PEN was honoring heroes on its sidepublic figures whom the majority of American writers wholeheartedly support. The award became less about freedom than about belonging. As Charlie Hebdo showed, free speech, which is the foundation of every writers work, can be tough going.

Among the enemies of writing, belonging is closely related to fear. Its strange to say this, but a kind of fear pervades the literary and journalistic worlds Im familiar with. I dont mean that editors and writers live in terror of being sent to prison. Its true that the president calls journalists enemies of the American people, and its not an easy time to be one, but were still free to investigate him. Michael Moore and Robert De Niro can fantasize aloud about punching Donald Trump in the face or hitting him with a bag of excrement, and the only consequence is an online fuss. Nor are Islamist jihadists or white nationalists sticking knives in the backs of poets and philosophers on American city streets. The fear is more subtle and, in a way, more crippling. Its the fear of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. Its the fear of landing on the wrong side of whatever group matters to you. An orthodoxy enforced by social pressure can be more powerful than official ideology, because popular outrage has more weight than the party line.

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The Enemies of Writing - The Atlantic