You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen
of the world’. (He thought that God would wind us up in 2060, readers expecting to make it through the mid-twenty-first century should note.)
Charges of blasphemy and heresy were once like accusations of libel. The wretched sinner had sought to spread falsehoods against the true religion, which the faithful exposed. The Protestant divines of Elizabethan England and the papacy that confronted them fought over what kind of supernatural power ordered the world. But they agreed on the fundamental question that a supernatural power must order the world. The Catholic believed that if the Protestant converted to Catholicism he would find the truth. The Protestant believed the opposite. Now you have to be a very isolated believer to imagine that your religion, or any religion, can provide a comprehensive explanation of the world. When they study beyond a certain level, all believers learn that the most reliable theories of the origins of life have no need for the God of the Torah, the New Testament or the Koran. The most brilliant modern scientists have little in common with Newton. They are atheists, or believers in a remote God who is nothing like the capricious, interventionist deity of the holy books. The best thought has moved beyond religion. It is for this reason that religion, which once inspired man’s most sublime creations, can no longer produce art, literature or philosophy of any worth; why it is impossible to imagine a new religious high culture.
If you go to the chapel at King’s College, Cambridge – which was Salman Rushdie’s college, as it happens – you will see one response to the loss of religious authority. The inheritors of the priests and stonemasons who sent arches soaring heavenwards to show their confidence in a divinely ordained universe are now modest people. Their information for visitors makes no pretence that the gospels are accurate accounts of Christ’s life and teaching. Cambridge Anglicans stress that unknown hands wrote them long after Christ’s death. They offer worshippers a celebration of tradition, symbolic truths and parables, not literal truths. Everywhere liberal Christians, Jews and Muslims follow the same example. They worship in a narrow religious sphere, which is cautious and a touch vapid, and do not try to force the rest of society to accept their views. For them there is a secular world informed by science, and there is their world of faith.
Religious fanatics appear to be opposed to the liberal modernists. They would never accept that their holy books could be anything other than the word of God. The philosopher Ernest Gellner wrote just after the fatwa that Westerners ought to rethink the assumption that industrialisation undermined religious belief. The post-Khomeini world was showing that the forward march of secularism was not inevitable. Islam ‘demonstrates that it is possible to run a modern, or at any rate a modernising economy, reasonably permeated by the appropriate technological, educational and organisational principles and combine it with a strong, pervasive, powerfully internalised Muslim conviction and identification’.
The differences between religious fundamentalists and religious modernists are not as great as either imagine. Both want to keep religion in a separate sphere; it is just that the religious sphere of the fundamentalist is wider and the means used to protect it from scrutiny more neurotic and brutal. Trying to maintain a ‘strong, pervasive, powerfully internalised’ religious conviction in a world that can manage without religious explanations creates perpetual tensions, however. The effort required to resolve them is harder than Gellner believed. At some level, even murderous fanatics know that their ideologies are redundant. They are not the vanguard for a new age of piety, but reactionaries, who hope that if they indoctrinate and intimidate they can block out modernity. Their desires mock their hopes. The rifles they fire, the nuclear weapons they crave come from a technology that has no connection to their sacred texts.
To prevent defeat, religious extremists stop the sceptical, evidence-based approach of science moving into the religious sphere and asking hard questions about the validity of their holy books. Rushdie crossed the boundary, and asked modern questions about the evidence behind the story of the founding of Islam. His persecution was just as modern. Rather than representing a continuation of the persecutions of medieval inquisitors, who thought they were protecting the truth from its enemies, his tormentors were closer to celebrities’ lawyers, who claim that their client’s feelings would be hurt and their image tarnished by the discussion of unwelcome facts. Rushdie’s critics were more concerned about the effect of his writings on the psyche of believers than whether what he had said was true. The charge they threw at him was that he had ‘offended’ the faithful by ‘insulting’ their religion. It was as if he had invaded their privacy.
I accept that the individual needs protection from the surveillance of an over-mighty state. I accept too that the judges will have to tackle the explosion of character assassination on the Net directed at private citizens. I find the use of privacy law to restrict the media’s reporting of public figures far harder to justify. But if judges could be trusted with the power to prohibit, then I would accept too that people in the public eye need not be exposed to the scrutiny they receive in the United States. All of these acts of censorship, however, are protections for individuals. No honest jurisdiction can defend using censorship to protect ideological systems from the harm or offence of criticism. You must treat ideologies which mandate wars, and govern the sexual behaviour of men and women and, in their extreme forms, every aspect of life for hundreds of millions of people, with the utmost candour. For they are ideas that seek to dominate.
Politics is as much a part of the identity of the committed leftist, green or conservative as religion is a part of the identity of the committed Christian, Jew, Muslim or Hindu. When the political partisan’s beliefs are insulted or ridiculed, he feels the ‘offence’ as deeply as any believer who has heard his god or prophet questioned. We do not, however, prohibit or restrict arguments about politics out of ‘respect’ for political ideologies, because we are a free society. We call societies that prohibit political arguments ‘dictatorships’, and know without needing to be told that the prohibiting is done to protect the ruling elite. If political or religious believers are offended to the core of their being by criticism, free countries must reply, ‘Tough. Learn to live with it. We know that we tell white lies about many things. We accept that the truth can be suppressed on some occasions. But religion and politics are too important and too dangerous to risk handling with kid gloves.’
Respect for religion is the opposite of religious tolerance, because it allows the intolerant to impose their will on others. The Virginia Statute for Religious Tolerance, written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776, highlighted the distinction in flowing prose:
Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.
Salman Rushdie was not free to abandon and criticise the religion of his childhood. The Islamists said that if he – and by extension all other Muslims – changed his religion or decided that he was an atheist, he would face assassination for the ‘crime’ of apostasy. They wanted to make Rushdie ‘suffer on account of his religious opinions’; to restrain, molest and burthen his body for his blasphemy, and to do the same to anyone, Muslim or not, who echoed his ideas. In his most compelling line, Jefferson concluded that ‘all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion’.
‘Argument’ was his key word. Religious toleration did not limit argument, but removed the sanctions of the state and the established Church that had stood in argument’s way. It did not rule out appeals to logic, reason, imagination and sympathy – but gave them the space to breathe without the threat of punishment. Argument involves the true respect that comes from treating others as adults who can cope with challenging ideas and expecting them to treat you with a similar courtesy. The ‘respect’ demanded by Rushdie’s enemies infantilised both the giver and the receiver, and suited religious reactionaries well. They had every interest in keeping their subject populations in a state of infantile ignorance, and in spreading the fear that all who thought about arguing with them would know that they risked becoming the next target.
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