The good guys don’t always win

And we speak of peace now, when war is raging, a war born of one man’s tyranny and greed for power and conquest; and another bitter conflict has exploded in Israel and the Gaza Strip. Peace, right now, feels like a fantasy born of a narcotic smoked in a pipe. Peace is a hard thing to make, and a hard thing to find. And yet we yearn for it, not only the great peace that comes at the end of war, but also the little peace of our private lives, to feel ourselves at peace with ourselves, and the little world around us. It is one of our great values, a thing ardently to pursue…

My fate, over the past many years, has been to drink from the bottle marked Freedom, and therefore to write, without any restraint, those books that came to my mind to write. And now, as I am on the verge of publishing my 22nd, I have to say that on 21 of those 22 occasions, the elixir has been well worth drinking, and it has given me a good life doing the only work I ever wanted to do.

On the remaining occasion, namely the publication of my fourth novel, I learned – many of us learned – that freedom can create an equal and opposite reaction from the forces of unfreedom. I learned, too, how to face the consequences of that reaction, and to continue, as best I could, to be as unfettered an artist as I had always wished to be. I learned, too, that many other writers and artists, exercising their freedom, also faced the forces of unfreedom, and that, in short, freedom can be a dangerous wine to drink.

But that made it more necessary, more essential, more important to defend, and I have done my best, along with a host of others, to defend it. I confess there have been times when I’d rather have drunk the Peace elixir and spent my life sitting under a tree wearing a blissful, beatific smile, but that was not the bottle the pedlar handed me.

We live in a time I did not think I would see, a time when freedom – and in particular, freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist – is everywhere under attack from reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, half-educated, narcissistic, careless voices; when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favour of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one that appears virtuous, and which many people, especially young people, have begun to see as a virtue.

So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old. This is something new, made more complicated by our new tools of communication, the internet, on which well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which; and our social media, where the idea of freedom is every day abused to permit, very often, a kind of online mob rule, which the billionaire owners of these platforms seem increasingly willing to encourage, and to profit by.

What do we do about free speech when it is so widely abused? We should still do, with renewed vigour, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it broadly. We should of course defend speech that offends us, otherwise we are not defending free expression at all.

— Salman Rushdie, from “The good guys don’t always win” (The Guardian, November 8, 2023)