A few pales beyonded
Oct. 26th, 2009 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus• Britain was convulsed last week by the appearance of Nick Griffin on the BBC's Question Time. The editor of the New Statesman, for instance, came to see the Brel show at the Barbican, but rushed off halfway through to watch Question Time live. While I obviously disagree completely with Griffin's views on immigration, I think the BBC was right to let him express them on TV. A robust democracy can and should allow all views to be aired, and the tolerance which tolerates only tolerable views is both intolerant and intolerable. I can still remember the days when Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein could only appear on TV if his words were voiced by an actor. So the BBC had this Gerry Adams soundalike who popped up to dub interviews. Ridiculous, and hardly a good reflection on the Thatcher government, who at the time were also trying to suppress any information saying that homosexuality was a valid sexual orientation. It's odd what's considered beyond the pale at any given point.
• I was talking with Paris friends about what you could and couldn't say on the internet -- as opposed to "real life" -- if you didn't want hundreds of irate commenters pummelling you. My friends instantly gave two examples. One (a woman) said "I wish I'd been raped by Polanski!" Then another (a man) said "If you look at the pictures of the thirteen year-old girl, she wasn't even that cute." I told them that these views would be considered completely beyond the pale if expressed on an Anglo-Saxon blog, and would trigger a catastrophic comment-cascade in which it would be established that rape is rape, the law the law, and the French terminally immoral.
• The Guardian review which appeared on Saturday is one of the few to end up panning my Book of Jokes as "unpalatable". The woman who wrote it is slightly more conservative than some of the other reviewers, and points out that, no matter how eruditely it's expressed, the book spouts filth. In the interests of balance, I quite welcome this moral caution. After all, the book is intended to venture beyond the pale, and to speak things that dare not be spoken, at least not out loud in public. A world in which no-one declared the book intolerable would be a world in which it was no longer possible to go beyond the pale.
• I'm trying to find -- so far without success -- a copy of Nabokov's first novel, Laughter in the Dark. Everywhere you go, bookshops, if they have any Nabokov at all (and they all have a ton of Naipaul next to him) have Lolita and nothing else. Could it be that Lolita has survived only because it went so boldly beyond the pale? I mean, isn't that what made it a bestseller, which Laughter in the Dark never was?
• I bought a copy of Samuel Beckett's letters. It's an incredibly interesting and impressive book: Beckett makes me feel like a mental pygmy. Wait, can you say that on the internetz? Doesn't it imply that there's something wrong with being a pygmy? I was reading somewhere recently about Roald Dahl's struggle with reviewers and librarians over the appearance of small black slaves in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He ended up rewriting the characters to make it clear that they weren't African slaves, so that children, presumably, wouldn't have to think about Africa or slavery. And didn't Sendak recently tell critics of Where The Wild Things Are to go to hell? More and more seems to be beyond the pale, especially where children are involved.
• Anyway, I was talking about Sam Beckett. There's an interesting bit where he's contemplating translating Sade's 120 Days of Sodom -- which he loves for its ability to show "the impossibility of outraging nature" -- into English. It's 1938, and the book is still untranslated. "I should like very much to do it," Beckett writes to George Reavey, "but don't know what effect it wd. have on my lit. situation in England or how it might prejudice future publications of my own there. The surface is of an unheard of obscenity & not 1 in 100 will find literature in the pornography, or beneath the pornography, let alone one of the capital works of the 18th century, which it is for me. I don't mind the obloquy, on the contrary it will get more of me into a certain room. But I don't want to be spiked as a writer, I mean as a publicist in the airiest sense." Despite these reservations, Beckett provisionally accepted to translate the 120 Days into English, but Jack Kahane, the man who'd asked him, dropped out of sight. So that particular pale was never beyonded.
• I was talking with Paris friends about what you could and couldn't say on the internet -- as opposed to "real life" -- if you didn't want hundreds of irate commenters pummelling you. My friends instantly gave two examples. One (a woman) said "I wish I'd been raped by Polanski!" Then another (a man) said "If you look at the pictures of the thirteen year-old girl, she wasn't even that cute." I told them that these views would be considered completely beyond the pale if expressed on an Anglo-Saxon blog, and would trigger a catastrophic comment-cascade in which it would be established that rape is rape, the law the law, and the French terminally immoral.
• The Guardian review which appeared on Saturday is one of the few to end up panning my Book of Jokes as "unpalatable". The woman who wrote it is slightly more conservative than some of the other reviewers, and points out that, no matter how eruditely it's expressed, the book spouts filth. In the interests of balance, I quite welcome this moral caution. After all, the book is intended to venture beyond the pale, and to speak things that dare not be spoken, at least not out loud in public. A world in which no-one declared the book intolerable would be a world in which it was no longer possible to go beyond the pale.
• I'm trying to find -- so far without success -- a copy of Nabokov's first novel, Laughter in the Dark. Everywhere you go, bookshops, if they have any Nabokov at all (and they all have a ton of Naipaul next to him) have Lolita and nothing else. Could it be that Lolita has survived only because it went so boldly beyond the pale? I mean, isn't that what made it a bestseller, which Laughter in the Dark never was?
• I bought a copy of Samuel Beckett's letters. It's an incredibly interesting and impressive book: Beckett makes me feel like a mental pygmy. Wait, can you say that on the internetz? Doesn't it imply that there's something wrong with being a pygmy? I was reading somewhere recently about Roald Dahl's struggle with reviewers and librarians over the appearance of small black slaves in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He ended up rewriting the characters to make it clear that they weren't African slaves, so that children, presumably, wouldn't have to think about Africa or slavery. And didn't Sendak recently tell critics of Where The Wild Things Are to go to hell? More and more seems to be beyond the pale, especially where children are involved.
• Anyway, I was talking about Sam Beckett. There's an interesting bit where he's contemplating translating Sade's 120 Days of Sodom -- which he loves for its ability to show "the impossibility of outraging nature" -- into English. It's 1938, and the book is still untranslated. "I should like very much to do it," Beckett writes to George Reavey, "but don't know what effect it wd. have on my lit. situation in England or how it might prejudice future publications of my own there. The surface is of an unheard of obscenity & not 1 in 100 will find literature in the pornography, or beneath the pornography, let alone one of the capital works of the 18th century, which it is for me. I don't mind the obloquy, on the contrary it will get more of me into a certain room. But I don't want to be spiked as a writer, I mean as a publicist in the airiest sense." Despite these reservations, Beckett provisionally accepted to translate the 120 Days into English, but Jack Kahane, the man who'd asked him, dropped out of sight. So that particular pale was never beyonded.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-27 07:21 am (UTC)Nobody has to defend popular expression - so if you are in favour of free speech then it's only ever unpopular expression you'll be defending.
surely a democracy is more robust when it demonstrates a willingness to protect disadvantaged or minority groups from threatening speech by other (usually dominant, like in this case) groups.
No. That's not a democracy - that's a dictatorship. We protect people from threatening actions, and from direct incitement to violence. Other than that, the cure for "incorrect speech" is more speech, in opposition to it.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-27 11:50 am (UTC)You misunderstand the point i was making. It's not a matter of 'being in favour of free speech'- seeing free speech as some absolute value to defend blindly is a crude simplification of a complex world. Rights overlap, and we also need to see that there are other things besides rights to which we need now to give attention. Whether or not people are right or wrong to use their rights to free speech is a more productive line to discuss. The debate needs to be moved on.
I don't understand how you can say that defending the vulnerable from racist hate speech is 'dictatorship'. You ignore the idea that free speech conflicts with other values such as respect for women or ethnic minorities. A weakness in your standpoint is that any argument for freedom of expression must apply across the board. We can and should distinguish between, say, poliical dissent, which contributes to the running of democracy, but you can't invoke this for, say, racist speech.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-27 01:04 pm (UTC)I'm perfectly happy to discuss that too - but whether people use a right is predicated on that right existing. Once I've declared that I believe the BNP have a right to hate speech I'm then happy to follow that up with my belief that their speech is awful and I'd rather they didn't say it.
On the other hand, I also know that thoughts that are unsaid are never disagreed with, and thus cannot be changed. The problem, to me, isn't that people say "I wish all the black people would go back where they came from." it's that they believe it in the first place. Banning them from expressing that sentiment doesn't solve that problem - because you can't then tell who needs to be engaged with.
We can and should distinguish between, say, poliical dissent, which contributes to the running of democracy, but you can't invoke this for, say, racist speech.
And racist political dissent? Which, after all, what the BNP is all about?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-27 01:52 pm (UTC)I sense that, with the persistant emphasis on 'rights' you are skirting around the whole issue of the cost of such a right, and how it lies, often, in contradiction to other things I mentioned earlier - duties, values, etc. To me, any justification for free speech is the constructive contribution it can make to society rather than that free speech is automatically a good/constructive end in itself, which I see as oversimplified nonsense. I sympathise with your argument that abuse of free speech for attacking ethnicities, gays, women or whatever makes it easier to see 'who needs to be engaged with'; yet one of the flaws in 'free speech' rhetoric is the tendency to stretch support all the way from political speech to racism in the mistaken belief that arguments for one must apply to the other.
I am in favour of free speech but don't believe we have to decide between either being a fanatical defender of free speech for its own sake or, on the other hand, some kind of control freak. we need to realistically assess how this right can be used, abused and how other more important things can trump it.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-27 02:43 pm (UTC)Certainly, free speech has limits - the famous case being that of shouting fire in a theatre. I'm definitely against things which produce a clear and immediate danger, for instance.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-27 03:10 pm (UTC)I would not defend the right of such a person to free speech; the ins and outs of his legal rights are not as interesting and valuable a discussion as -and this to me is where we need to move -whether he was correct to use them in that way. And this whole line is what you are unable or unwilling to take on board ....
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-27 03:17 pm (UTC)If people were saying "I wish he wouldn't say that, it's really annoying", then I'd happily join in a conversation about the pros and cons of such speech, how he's spoiling it for some kids, that it was obnoxious of him, etc.
If people were saying "He should be stopped from saying that - there ought to be a law." then I'd join in that conversation.
When it comes to the BNP I've bumped into lots of conversations of the latter type and pretty much none of the first type. Largely, I expect, because pretty much everyone I know thinks that the BNP _are_ being obnoxiously unpleasant and wish they would stop. The only disagreement has been over whether they have a right to say what they are saying, so that's where the dialogue has been.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-27 01:57 pm (UTC)Here, I'd like you to show me an example or historical precendent to indicate how exactly racist political agndas have improved the workings of democracy. Then we can start discussing the purported value of such 'free speech'.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-27 02:34 pm (UTC)Racist political agendas are _part_ of democracy, because they give a voice to those people who have racist beliefs, thus allowing them to take part in the democratic process. If you don't allow people to have a voice in the political process then you're not actually a democracy. Supporting democracy, to me, means including all voices, as a base principle.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-27 02:57 pm (UTC)"Supporting democracy, to me, means including all voices, as a base principle."
once again, we return to the flawed absolutist free speech argument. Free speech can, and has, cost people their lives. Free speech is not free. The cost of disregarding the limits on it are the sacrifice of other values we cherish, such as freedom of minorities from attack, privacy, even utilitarian welfare-of-society arguments.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-27 03:01 pm (UTC)Sorry. To be clear - it does not. But nor does 99% of political speech. I don't believe that speech has to support democracy in order to be permitted.
Free speech can, and has, cost people their lives.
Yes? And? Electricity has also cost people their lives. And cars. Also dogs. And pointy objects.
freedom of minorities from attack
So you're attacking a position that I've repeatedly said I don't hold?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-27 03:20 pm (UTC)Neither do I. Yet, to ignore the costs to democracy by allowing its free use by those set to destroy it has been shown, historically, to be very foolish indeed.
"Yes? And? Electricity has also cost people their lives. And cars. Also dogs. And pointy objects."
..the point I was making, and that you seem to have missed here, is that speech ISN'T free; it has a cost. And hence, we are always balancing our right to share speech or information against other values, such as privacy or avoiding distress to innocent third parties.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-27 03:24 pm (UTC)Racist speech is something I've weighed up and found to be insufficiently harmful to be outlawed. You have clearly weighed it up and found the opposite.
Yes?