The Truth Hurts: The Humanitarian Threat to Free Inquiry

Jonathan Rauch from the April 1993 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

In one sense the rise of intellectual humanitarianism represents an advance of honesty: It drops the pretense that liberal science is a painless and purely mechanistic process, like doing crossword puzzles. But the conclusion that the humanitarians draw–the, the hurting must be stopped–is all wrong. Impelling them toward their wrong conclusion is a dreadful error: the notion that hurtful words are a form of violence.

Offensive speech hurts, say the humanitarians. It constitutes "words that wound" (writes one law professor); it does "real harm to real people" who deserve protection and redress (writes another law professor). When a law student at Georgetown University published an article charging that the academic credentials of white and black students accepted at Georgetown were "dramatically unequal," a number of students demanded that the writer be punished. And note carefully the terms of the condemnation: "I think the article is assaultive. People were injured. I think that kind of speech is outrageous." The notion of "assaultive speech" is no rarity today. A University of Michigan law professor said: "To me, racial epithets are not speech. They are bullets."

This, finally, is where the humanitarian line leads: to the erasure of the distinction, in principle and ultimately also in practice, between discussion and bloodshed. You do not have to be a genius to see what comes after "offensive words are bullets": If you hurt me with words, I reply with bullets, and the exchange is even. Words are bullets; fair is fair.

In February 1989 fundamentalist Moslems rose up against the British writer Salman Rushdie, who had written a novel they regarded as deeply, shockingly offensive to Islam's holy truth, and to the Moslem community. As they understood it, the novel implied that Mohammed had made up the Koran, an outrageous (to them) slander against their holy book's divine origin. The novel fantasized about a whorehouse where each whore takes on the name, even the personality, of one of Mohammed’s wives. It suggested that Mohammed might have bent his divine inspirations to suit his political needs or even his convenience It referred to him as "Mahound." This is what they saw.

The Ayatollah Rubollah Khomeini proclaimed it the duty of all good Moslems to kill Salman Rushdie: "It is incumbent on every Moslem to employ everything he has got, his life and his wealth, to send him to hell." Rushdie went underground. "I feel as if I have been plunged, like Alice, into the world beyond the looking glass," he wrote a year later, "where nonsense is the only available sense. And I wonder if I'll ever be able to climb back through."

The attack itself was not so very singular; fundamentalists have made a hobby of harassing the unorthodox for centuries. The surprise was that the reply from the liberal democracies was muttered and utterly incoherent. A long week of silence passed before President George Bush got around to saying, unimpressively, that the death threat was "deeply offensive."

In the end the Rushdie affair showed us graphically two things, one that we already knew and one that we did not know at all. What we already knew was that fundamentalism–and not just religious fundamentalism but any fundamentalist system for settling differences of opinion–is the enemy of free thought. More frightening was what we had not known: Western intellectuals did not have a clear answer to the challenge that Khomeini set before them.

This challenge was twofold (at least). First, it was a restatement of the creationists' challenge, the angry outsiders' cry from the heart: "Who gave you, the arrogant West, the right to make the rules? You are imperialists with your view of truth, with your insistence on the intellectual ways of secularism and of science. How dare you flout and mock our view of truth?"

The point was noted at the time. What was not so widely noted was the second dimension of Khomeini's challenge: the humanitarian dimension. This is not to say that Khomeini was a humanitarian, only that the argument that his supporters commonly made was humanitarian in principle: "You have hurt us with these evil words, these impious words, disrespectfully and needlessly written in utter disregard of Moslem sensibilities. You have caused pain and offense to many people. And this you have no right to do."

Liberals will never be able to answer these complaints honestly or consistently until we grit our teeth and admit the truth. Yes, Rushdie's words caused many people anger and pain. And that is all right. But no such honest admission was forthcoming. People often did not seem even to know what it was–free speech? science? religious liberty? nonviolence? respect for other cultures?–that they were defending. A lot of people seemed to have the impression that the Western intellectual system is a kind of anything-goes pluralism in which all ways of believing are created equal and the only rule is: "Be nice."

"Well," quite a few people said apologetically at the time of the Rushdie incident, "for Khomeini to have ordered Rushdie's death was of course bad, and he shouldn't have done that, but Rushdie certainly did write a book that was offensive to Islamic truths, and he shouldn't have done that, either." The chief rabbi of Great Britain said that the book should not have been published: "Both Mr. Rushdie and the Ayatollah have abused freedom of speech."

The Rushdie affair was a defining moment. It showed how readily Westerners could be backed away from a fundamental principle of intellectual liberalism, namely that there is nothing whatever wrong with offending–hurting people's feelings–in pursuit of truth.

The credo of liberal science imposes upon each of us two moral obligations: to allow everybody to err and criticize, even obnoxiously, and to submit everybody's beliefs–including our own–to public checking before claiming that they deserve to be accepted as knowledge. Today, activists and moralists are assailing both halves of the creed. They are assailing the right to err and criticize, when the error seems outrageous or the criticism seems hurtful; they are assailing the requirement for public checking, when the result is to reject someone's belief. They have a right to pursue their attack (nonviolently), but they, and we, should understand that they are enemies of science itself, and even, ultimately, of freedom of thought. And those of us who hold sacred the right to err and the duty to check need to understand that our defense of liberal science must preach not only toleration but discipline: the hard self-discipline that requires us to live with offense.