On The Right To Publish Terrible Books
NOTE: This was originally published in January of 2017 amidst the campaign to get Milo’s book cancelled. You can find my more recent thoughts on Milo here.
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall, explaining Voltaire’s philosophy in The Friends Of Voltaire
Milo Yiannopoulos is a terrible person. This is a statement which, I would hope, most decent people can agree with. Milo is offensive and outrageous for the sake of being offensive and outrageous. Politically incorrect for its own sake, as Cathy Young once put it. His obsessive disgust with feminism, for instance, borders on the pathological, from his disdain of birth control to his mockery of online harassment. Milo is simply a sexier version of his bigoted patriarch, Donald Trump, a narcissist who gets his kicks insulting liberal values and basic decency. His upcoming book will undoubtedly be terrible, but he still has the right to get it published.
I always believed a free press to be a basic principle of freedom of speech. It has long been recognized that books are an indispensable venue through which people can get ideas across. So it follows that a “free press”, as I see it, extends towards the right of writers to write any book they damn well please, and the right of publishers to publish them. Any free society, or one that claims to be, believes in the free exchange of ideas, even ideas that one finds to be hateful. There are two means of effectively combating bad ideas: ignoring them and presenting good ideas in their place.
Many liberals have chosen to boycott the book, an action in which I’ll join. I don’t have much respect for Milo as a writer, and I suspect his book will be terrible, so I have no plans to read it. My issue, however, comes from the whole tenor of this conversation: that Simon and Schuster never should have published Milo’s book to begin with. Of course, there are plenty of books that I’d prefer didn’t exist, but I’m not going to whine to their publishers about having printed those books in the first place. These are terrible books, but a book is a voice. The moment we deny a voice the ability to speak is the moment we deny ourselves. The right to speak, and by extension, publish a book, is one we afford even to the worst of society, as all people are deserving of human rights.
Ray Bradbury wrote in his afterword to Fahrenheit 451 that, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people with lit matches.” Now people want to stop terrible books before they even come into fruition. The reason this bothers me so, is because liberals are abandoning the very principles they profess to believe in. It also, like the recent Electoral College campaign, reveals a disturbing shortsightedness over how these very tactics could easily be used against them. What if the shoe were on the other foot? What if Bill O’Reiliy or Rush Limbaugh encouraged their fans to harass publishers from making book deals with left-wing writers? If this tactic catches on, don’t fool yourselves into thinking that it will only resign itself to assholes like Milo. The tools of destruction have been wielded by many hands. Do we not celebrate banned book week to remind ourselves what a wealth of literature could’ve been lost to censorship, from Huckleberry Finn to Lady Chatterley’s Lover?
The Left would do well to remember Noam Chomsky (with whom I often disagree), in particular the “Faurisson affair”, since many seem so apt to call Milo a Nazi. Robert Faurisson was a French Holocaust denier whose insulting idiocies include the denial that gas chambers were used in extermination and the doubting the authenticity of Anne Frank’s Diary Of A Young Girl. In France, where hate speech is a punishable offense, Chomsky defended Faurisson’s freedom of expression from government interference. As a result, Chomsky’s reputation in France was severely damaged, and some critics mistakenly took his defense of Faurisson’s free speech to be a defense of Faurisson’s views.
Journalist Christopher Hitchens once said of the debacle, “The recurring attempt, therefore, to bracket him with the century’s most heinous movement must be adjudged a smear.” Chomsky himself was confronted on this stance, and he responded with the following,
“If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. I mean Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked, right? So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of freedom of speech.”
This is a wholly different matter from Milo’s recent Twitter ban, a punitive action which held more justification. It is very fair to accuse Milo of inciting the abuse of comedian Leslie Jones from the crime of acting in a tacky remake. He wrote a review in which he referred to the leading cast (including Jones) as “fat” and “ugly”, while calling her a “black dude” and “barely literate.” Worst of all, this supposed “journalist” posted fake tweets of her supposedly saying hateful things about him. Of course, there are no tweets where Milo explicitly says “go and get her”, but he was stoking the fires of provocation (as is his forte), and given his platform, certainly could’ve been more careful with his words. I would even go farther and argue that it would be permissible for certain universities to ban Milo from their campus, as he has gone beyond the limits of free speech into direct harassment of students, which we saw with his bullying of a transgender student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Books seem to me a different matter, as you can’t force people to read books that they don’t want to read.
The clearest measure of a free society, is whether or not their bookstores sell books that most contradict their values. Ideas far worse than Milo’s are in circulation around the country, such as Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Do we stop the influence of Nazi ideologies by banning Mein Kampf? That would be attacking the symptom and not the disease. We need to ask ourselves why such evil holds so much currency, and start fixing the problem from there.
Let’s not make Milo into a martyr.
Originally published at http://sansuthecat.blogspot.com on January 5, 2017.
