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发帖数: 29846 | 1 British Novelist to American Grads: There’s Nothing Virtuous about Being
Offended
by Mark Antonio Wright May 19, 2015 4:22 PM
A rather uneventful college commencement season full of the usual platitudes
and bromides was shaken up by British novelist Ian McEwan’s refreshingly
challenging the zeitgeist of trigger warnings, free-speech zones, and campus
censorship at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania this week.
McEwan did not shy away from addressing the current temper on campus,
choosing to focus on the creeping group-think in faculty lounges and
discussion sections instead of the all too easy targets of Russian
crackdowns on free speech or the “industrial scale” state-sponsored
censorship in China. McEwan directly confronted the problem of a country
rooted in the tradition of free expression under the First Amendment meekly
submitting to what he called “bi-polar thinking” — the eagerness of some
to “not side with Charlie Hebdo because it might seem as if we’re
endorsing George Bush’s War on Terror.”
McEwan criticized the cowardly behavior of six writers who withdrew from the
PEN American Center’s annual gala over their discomfort with the
organization’s support for Charlie Hebdo. He argued that the time to “
remember your Voltaire” is precisely when confronted with scathing speech
that “might not be to your taste” and said he was disappointed that “so
many authors could not stand with courageous fellow writers and artists at a
time of tragedy.”
Self-censorship or forced censorship on college campuses is growing, with
recent instances of progressive speech suppression ranging from protests
against Bill Maher at Berkeley to Brandeis University’s reneging on the
conferral of an honorary doctorate to the Somali-born feminist and ex-Muslim
Ayaan Hirsi Ali over their criticism of Islam. Rejecting the accusations of
racism leveled at Hirsi Ali, McEwan forcefully expounded that “all thought
systems, all claims to truth — especially the grand claims to truth —
must be open to criticism, satire, even, sometimes, mockery.”
A window into the audience’s discomfort with McEwan’s message can be seen
in the fact that the first applause came nearly eleven and a half minutes
into the 15-minute speech after a reference to recent deaths of unarmed
black men in police custody and grinding poverty — what McEwan called the
“ultimate sanction against free expression.” His condemnation of the
massacre of twelve cartoonists in their Paris offices by contrast drew near
silence.
McEwan reminded Dickinson’s students and faculty that “being offended is
not to be confused with a state of grace — it’s the occasional price we
all pay for living in an open society.” It is unfortunate that so many in
our great universities think that price too steep. |
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