Charlie Hebdo: On Political Correctness, Speaking Freely, and the Need to Lighten Up

Recent events have demonstrated, as events have many times in the past, how controversies that barely reach room temperature in our colossal country surrounded by unthreatening neighbors and two huge oceans and cushioned by a gargantuan economic margin for error, in Europe frequently turn deadly.

   The tense boundaries between free speech, good taste, and regard for religious and ethnic sensibilities in a fraught religious and racial society erupted this month in Paris in the massacre of cartoonists and staff at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Here in America, the same volatile controversies are played out most noticeably, when they are noticed at all, in the coddled atmosphere of the nation’s college campuses— defused, emulsified and distilled for our contemporary culture wars as the tepid little cocktail called “political correctness.”

   Beyond the general disgust at the killings, there was in the reaction of many here in America a certain amount of politically correct hypocrisy and/or operatic dramatization that actually revealed (while pretending otherwise) the dynamics of consensus-driven speech, of “saying the right thing” at the expense of more complicated nuances.
   The hypocrisy was largely on the side of the left, noted by David Brooks in his article, “I Am Not Charlie Hebdo,” which pointed out that here in the land of the first amendment, Charlie Hebdo would likely never be allowed to be published, certainly if it was attempted on a college campus.

Public reaction to the attack in Paris has revealed that there are a lot of people who are quick to lionize those who offend the views of Islamist terrorists in France but who are a lot less tolerant toward those who offend their own views at home.

Just look at all the people who have overreacted to campus micro-aggressions. The University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality. The University of Kansas suspended a professor for writing a harsh tweet against the N.R.A. Vanderbilt University derecognized a Christian group that insisted that it be led by Christians.

Americans may laud Charlie Hebdo for being brave enough to publish cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, but, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali is invited to campus, there are often calls to deny her a podium.

  
In the 1990s when “political correctness” began to be taken up by the conservative right as a talking point (or shouting point), I tried to believe that the whole thing was a fabrication, something ginned up by talk radio. I don’t believe so anymore. On college campuses, liberal left political correctness of the sort described by Brooks is commonplace. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an extremely interesting woman, exceptionally bright (also very prickly and difficult, I have read) who escaped from an oppressive Islamic upbringing in Somalia to pursue a startling career as a legislator in Holland, then as an intellectual here in the United States. But she now writes and thinks for conservative think tanks, is an extreme hawk in the war on terror, has spoken out against not only the most heinous practices of radical Islam, such as genital mutilation, but also against Islam generally, has ridiculed “multiculturalism” (one of these days I’m going to have to find out what that actually means) and is generally a darling of the American right—so college campuses prohibit her from speaking.
   None of this is good for free speech or for education; nor is it good for the left, I think. Don’t like what someone is saying? Say something smarter, better, more persuasive.
   But Brooks also went on to say that outrageous satire and ridicule, of the sort that Charlie Hebdo engages in, is a kind of commentary that, while occasionally useful and revelatory, grown-ups generally outgrow.

….When you are 13, it seems daring and provocative to “épater la bourgeoisie,” to stick a finger in the eye of authority, to ridicule other people’s religious beliefs.

   But after a while that seems puerile. Most of us move toward more complicated views of reality and more forgiving views of others. (Ridicule becomes less fun as you become more aware of your own frequent ridiculousness.) Most of us do try to show a modicum of respect for people of different creeds and faiths. We do try to open conversations with listening rather than insult.
  
(He went on further to posit a “grown-ups” table where the commentators of Le Monde and presumably, though he didn’t say so, The New York Times, sit, while the satirists and court jesters of Charlie Hebdo, and those of the more tepid American variety, sit at the kiddie table. A tad arrogant, you might say, but how delicious is it that he placed Ann Coulter at the kiddie table?)
   The operatic dramatization was on the side of the cartoon right, which suddenly seized on socialist leaning France, so uncooperative in our misadventure in Iraq, as standard-bearer in the fight against terrorism. “For those who recall Charlie Hebdo as it really, rankly was, the act of turning its murdered cartoonists into pawns in a game of another kind of public piety—making them martyrs, misunderstood messengers of the right to free expression—seems to risk betraying their memory,” wrote Adam Gopnik, who placed the cartoonists in a long tradition of French irreverent satire dating to the 19^th century. The magazine, whose motto was “Nothing Sacred,” was regularly savage toward French Catholics and Catholicism, and caricatured Christ in ways that Sarah Palin might in another context have found to be one more objectionable instance of liberal-left sacrilege.
   On both sides there was a “right thing to say” and the right thing to say was, along with Twitter tweeters everywhere, Je’ suis Charlie. Less common, or at least less audible over the chorus of the righteous, was the voice of one such as Stephen Litt, who pointed out in an exceptional Cleveland Plain Dealer column that the cartoons of Islamic figures in Charlie Hebdo play heavily on exaggerated physical features—uncomfortably echoing anti-semitic Nazi caricatures of Jews. Litt also cited Gopnik’s column and argued in retort, that the satirists of revolutionary France had aimed their slings and arrows at kings and priests and the landed powerful, whereas the modern-day satirists of Charlie Hebdo were lampooning a segment of French society that appears to be hopelessly on the bottom, with no way up. That’s another important factor in understanding what happened in Paris on January 7 and another reason why it was weird to see the American right becoming all Frenchy: France’s vast social insurance structure has provided its people an unprecedented cushion of benefits—a very high level of healthcare accessible to all French-born citizens from birth to death (in a system in which no one ever asks the patient if they have insurance), extensive sick leave, extravagant maternity-leave benefits, paid vacation of the sort unheard of in America, a very generous retirement fund—while also making upward mobility virtually impossible. Adam Gopnik himself (the New Yorker’s expert on all things French) wrote in an entirely different context, the following: “Every Frenchman who is not outright destitute sits…within a domain of private benefits that he enjoys by virtue of his place in civil society. The triumph of the Fifth Republic was to have expanded that domain so that it included nearly everybody. The people who are left outside now seem to be left outside for good. The North African immigrants…are not just a minority; they are without any entrée at all. They are called, simply, the excluded.”

 

**********

“It is not enough to have free speech,” Christopher Hitchens wrote once in a withering column on the subject of political correctness. “People must learn to speak freely.”

   In that essay written during his days at The Nation, Hitchens made the point that political correctness was by no means confined to the left, or to college campuses, or to the sometimes innocuous or silly issues with which the campus left occupies itself (“empowerment etiquette,” Hitchens called it). Rather, he said, “the real bridle on our tongues is imposed by everyday lying and jargon, sanctioned and promulgated at the highest levels of media and politics.” It is the “culture of euphemism” by which everyone learns to repeat certain phrases—say, “peace process”—that may cover a multitude of sins everyone agrees to overlook, “a public language by which almost nobody employs plain speech.” For palpable evidence of what Hitchens is talking about, spend some time watching the Sunday political talk shows where cabinet officials and other dignitaries are supposed to answer questions posed by journalists. After several hours and a torrent of words, you will realize that no one has answered anything, or told you anything you don't already know--that's the point, and even the journalists seem to be in on the game.
 People must learn to speak freely. It’s harder to do, I believe, than many people may think. The hand of the social censor works its way into many a text. You get riled up about something; you sit at the laptop and produce a masterpiece of savage wit and brutally insurmountable logic and reason. You sit back and think—my god, people will never be the same after they read this. You are just about to hit the “send” button when a vision of this thing as it will actually look in print appears in your mind and the thought occurs to you unbidden: I wonder what my friends at church will think. You contemplate this for a moment, feeling a little less triumphant, and then you think again: I wonder what my daughter’s friends’ parents will think (they have all the wrong opinions, you are sure) or what her teachers will think. And what if, having been routed by your brilliance, they start to subtly take out their angry bias against your pride and joy?
   So you go back to the masterpiece to soften it here and there, toss a bone to the other side, round down the edges of your angriest rhetoric—and before you know it what you send to the local rag is just a slight variation on the conventional wisdom. That’s a caricature perhaps, but David Brooks is right—we are social beings and we strive, if we are grown-ups, to be polite and even-handed. But in just such microcosmic ways does wisdom risk becoming conventional, then trite, then meaningless.
   Sometimes the language of political correctness is not so passive, but employs certain phrases that no one (or not everyone) can really define, but which are widely agreed—with little or no examination—to be either very good or very bad, and hence can be used as a weapon to intimidate anyone who might dare to examine the subject further. My favorite candidate in this category is the phrase “socialized medicine,” which has been employed for more than 80 years by the American right to strangle any rational discussion about a publicly funded healthcare system that might finance a basic level of healthcare services for all. This phrase gets applied in all kinds of ways—it has been used to describe the Affordable Care Act, which preserves and enriches the private insurance industry and which was supported by the major for-profit, stockholder-driven private insurance companies—and although I think many people who use the term most promiscuously could not actually describe what a socialized healthcare system looks like (or just as important, what it doesn't look like), everyone it seems knows that it is a very, very, very bad thing.  
      Speaking freely does require a certain amount of reckless courage to break through the miasma of passively acquired non-speech, as well as the coerciveness of accepted but unexamined platitudes. Which is why we honor, or at least tolerate, the satirists at the kiddie table, whether they are the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo or our own Ann Coulter, and why we are right to be outraged when they are prohibited, let alone massacred. But if our aim is to be something more than outrageous, if our aim is the truth—so evasive in this vale of misinformation, misunderstanding, mediocrity and bullshit—then speaking freely will also require intelligence, discernment, and an wide-eyed awareness of the possibility that we might just possibly be wrong.
   Would we risk our college campuses being bombed and shot up if Ayaan Hirsi Ali were allowed to say what she says? Well, we have risked—and we have reaped—a great deal of murderous mayhem at our nation’s schools and elsewhere in our zeal to protect the right of people to own guns and assault rifles. And if thoughtful Muslims and non-Muslims can organize themselves they can talk back to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and say something better, smarter, and more persuasive.

   Much homage has been paid to free speech by many of us who don’t know how hard it is to speak freely, or how easily we all fall into repeating things that obscure a great many nuances. But there is finally also this to be said: that all of us who hold our deities and ideals so dear—everywhere, but certainly here in America where we have so great a margin for error—need, for God’s sake, to lighten up. It is not possible that anyone’s God can be so thin-skinned and quick to take offence as we in our age have become about almost everything.

   I am reminded of the remarks by a notable writer recalling his teenage years when he went through what he called a “crisis of faith”; he felt he no longer believed in God. He went to his rabbi to tell him the troubling news. The rabbi has likely long since left us but he is, I believe, on the short list of humankind’s lasting friends. And though his response may have stunned or shocked the teenage atheist, I believe it must have also been received as oddly comforting. For what he told his young unbeliever was this: “Do you think God really cares?”