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Greetings and Salutations, and welcome to Vesperisms: The Art of Thinking for Yourself. I’m here to help you recalibrate toward an artistic worldview. So grab your coffee, and have a seat in my studio, and let’s have a chat.
This is Season 2, Episode 7, Censorship & The Stories We Tell.
With this episode, I’m beginning a series on the subject of censorship. This is an important one for artists, because the history of art is also the history of censorship. In fact, to be an artist is to be open to the possibility of censorship. A lot of art gets censored, or cancelled, or erased down the memory hole, whether in its own time or sometimes decades later. I want to look at why it happens, how artists have responded, and how we can think through some responses to what is happening in our own time .
In our last episode, I spoke of the proper place of the artist as being on the margins. To be clear, I’m not talking about being marginalized—that’s a different word and a different subject. Being on the margins doesn’t have anything to do with how an artist dresses or how edgy their artwork is or even with their immutable characteristics. It doesn’t have to do with whether they’re a mainstream creator like a pop singer, or someone slugging it out with an old guitar in a basement club. To be an artist is to be on the margins. Living on the margin is not about having certain qualities or creating certain types of work. It’s not a question of qualities. It’s a question of position.
The previous episode of Vesperisms, “On Being Fireborn,” was based on a talk I gave earlier this year called The Fireborn are At Home in Fire, based on the poem The People, Yes by Carl Sandburg. It’s a phrase that resonated with me the moment I first read it. We artists, no matter our personalities, nor the subject matter or medium we work in, whether we’re writing novels about human evil or making greeting cards, we are fire-born. We’re meant to live on the border between worlds. That’s why we often feel like we don’t fit. It’s because…wait for it…we don’t fit! And it’s why people who don’t have an artistic worldview agree that we don’t fit. And it’s why sometimes those people push back at artists, because they either don’t understand what the artist is attempting to communicate (and sometimes that’s the artist’s fault), or that they believe the artist’s work presents a danger to the status quo.
A BATTLE OF STORIES
So after all we know about history and how badly this can go, why do people and institutions censor artists…and even justify it? It comes down to a battle between stories. Humans are a storytelling species. Long before there was a written word, people gathered around fires and tried to make sense of their worlds. They called to remembrance the events of the past, the origins of families, the exploits of their adventurers, the deaths of their heroes. There were natural and personal phenomena which needed categorization. This is the origin of myth. And by myth, I don’t mean fiction. And I certainly don’t mean that a myth is a story that stupid people created because they didn’t have “science.” We still have myths, even in the modern world. No, by “myth” and “story”, I’m talking about the sense-making apparatus that we exchange with each other so that we can agree on the nature of existence.
This is why children clamor for stories. A child climbs on the lap of an elder and pleads, “tell me a story” not because they are looking to be entertained or given simple answers. (Spend any time with a preschooler and you’ll get to shudder at the word “why”.) No: The child is looking for categorization. That is so vitally important. Children need stories in order to make sense of their world, in which every experience is new.
But we don’t stop being interested in story when we reach adulthood. Otherwise the only books would be children’s books. Even nonfiction has to have a certain mythical framework: “this is the way it is now, because of these fundamental origins.” Story is a way of laying out the structure of reality so that we finite human beings can move within the world with some degree of ease, for our own sake as well as for others. It’s how we make social contracts like “love your neighbor as you love yourself” or “don’t double dip” or “don’t take that candy bar without paying for it” or “don’t poke the sleeping bear.” It’s how we figure out what works.
The problem is that we are very prone to forget what works. This is why in the Hebrew Bible we are admonished time and time again to “remember”, and why the biggest lesson of the Holocaust is “never forget.” It’s because…we forget.
So what does this have to do with censorship? I said that censorship is a battle between stories. It’s easy in a relatively confined group—let’s say on the scale of a tribe—to have a continuity of story over centuries. When things are small and peaceful, that story changes little. A culture’s story will contain its associated rituals around marriage, coming of age, death and so on. It can be fairly self-contained, a kind of “theory of everything” in miniature. And if that group’s myth conflicts with the myth of another group, it’s easy enough for them to establish territorial boundaries, hopefully without an open outbreak of hostilities.
But once a culture begins to absorb other cultures, it sets itself up for a conflict of stories, or myths, or reality structures. The size of a country matters. Let’s take the United States, for example. In the beginning, there was obviously a clash between the stories of the First Nations people who were here for many thousands of years, and the European settlers who arrived on its shores. The story of the new nation came to be dominated by the story of the settlers. Within that settler group, were mainly English and Dutch colonialists who had similar legal structures, religious backgrounds and the like. But even within that seemingly homogeneous group, there were contradictory stories.
One of those stories was constrictive: it had to do with the perceived right of Europeans to dominate the land, displace its original population, and bring enslaved people from an entirely different continent to do forced labor. The other story was expansive , and it had to do with the freedom and equality of all people, and the importance of putting one’s own hand to the plow for one’s own agency. The result, ultimately, was a civil war, in which the expansive story won out. Several centuries since those settlers arrived, what now exists is a vast country called the United States, which encapsulates almost an entire continent, and has widely varying regional cultures within it that, at any other time in history, would have made more sense as separate countries, as in medieval France or Germany. But because of the expansive story of the Enlightenment, the US developed this novel founding philosophy that allowed it to integrate people with many different cultural stories, and rightly so: integration is a beautiful and noble experiment that has inarguably made the world better.
So we have an example of how stories can cycle between constriction and expansion. Now take a deep breath, because I’m going to talk about a story that’s not as familiar to us today, but also comes from the same time period.
The Enlightenment did not just bring forward philosophies of individual freedom and equality. Toward the end of the 18th century and through the 19th, we saw the emergence of Enlightenment philosophies concerning the nature of reality itself. Coming out of the medieval world (and, I would argue, from the Great Plague of 1348, but that’s another story), this had to do with the question of whether reality could be known at all. For thousands of years, the framework for the Western world was the basic Judeo-Christian concept that not only could reality be known, but that the God who created everything wanted it to be known. The concept of this God-who-wants-to-be-known was associated with the Greek word “Logos,” giving us words like “logic” and the practice of ending fields of study with the suffix “-l-o-g-y” like “psychology” and “biology”. Think of the scientific method, for example—it came about as a direct result of the assumption that nature was knowable at all, and could be classified by repeatable experiments.
But another framework arose, with philosophers like Emmanuel Kant, who posited that reality could not be known. It could only be critiqued for its failure to live up to certain inferred ideals, and if it didn’t, dismantled, torn down or deconstructed. This conflict in our stories about the nature of reality continued in a fairly straight philosophical line through Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Horkheimer and Marcuse and others, and down to our own day, in the emergence of the Critical Theory fields of academia, the disciplines that end in the word “studies.”
And so where we find ourselves today is in battle of stories. The two stories are, 1., that reality can be known, and that with our commonly-held knowledge, we can work together to improve it toward specific goals, and 2., that reality cannot be known, only critiqued and dismantled, in hopes of attaining theoretical goals. That’s what’s at the heart of the question that is pulling us apart today: can reality be known, or not? Can we work together to improve it, or does it need to be torn down for the sake of simply exposing its innards? These two stories contradict at their foundations, and so, like any two opposing cultures, they will clash. This is why it feels like territorial boundaries are being drawn: because they are. It’s why we feel like certain words we took for granted have two different meanings: it’s because they do. It’s why it feels like we’re struggling between two different stories of reality itself: because we are.
STORIES DOMINATE INSTITUTIONS
The 19th century satirical cartoonist Honoré Daumier was one of a new type of artist Through his art and its availability to the masses, he and other satirists could show the reality of the poor and working class, as contrasted with the wealthy power structures. Until the availability of mass media—newspapers and broadsides—the bread and butter of the artist was working for the nobility or the church, telling the stories of those institutions. In his most famous work, The Third Class Carriage, Daumier depicts the 99%, as it were, living their daily lives, old and young crammed together in a train car, a woman indiscreetly nursing a baby, carrying provisions for a long journey. The satirical cartoonist began to occupy the role that jesters or traveling actors once did: serving as an outside voice to the institution, a conscience that held up a mirror to power. That role was confined for most of history to the palace. Anyone else who tried it ended up chained to a dungeon wall or having their head separated from their body.
But this era we live in, in which people without institutional power—the proverbial “99%”—can actually speak out against the 1% without having our heads chopped off, is unbelievably new and radical. I, as a nobody artist from New York with a laptop, can send out my ideas and be listened to by anyone, from a student to a prime minister, and at least for now, share my ideas, my thoughts on the nature of reality, and keep my head on my shoulders.
I think often of the artists of the Terezin concentration camp. Prominent Jewish artists, intellectuals, musicians and writers were often sent to Terezin as a holding station en route to death camps. While they were interned there, they were allowed a certain measure of artistic pursuit. The prisoners staged operas, gave concerts and lectures—and did commercial art. There was a graphic design studio at Terezin, where by day, talented illustrators and designers were exploited to create propaganda art for the Nazis. But by night, these artists would sneak their art materials to draw and paint the reality behind the gloss. Grossly overcrowded barracks. Carts of dead bodies. Starving children. And they hid their drawings in hopes that they would testify to the reality behind the official narrative, behind the institution.
In Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny, he speaks of the importance of protecting our institutions and not allowing them to be captured by ideologues. Institutions are by nature prone to corruption. Even a concept like “democracy” is prone to corruption. We hear it often: Hitler was democratically elected. It’s possible for institutions to be captured by tyrants. In the 1940s and 50s, in the uncertain postwar environment that became the Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin essentially captured the Congress to intimidate and prosecute those suspected of holding communist sympathies. This famous example is just the tip of the iceberg. In the vast bureaucracies of modern nations, everything from the presidency to the local school board has an element that wishes to put people on blacklists, to purge dissidents, to remove those who do not protect the institution’s interests. The reason we hold McCarthy in disdain isn’t because of the group he was persecuting. It was the fact that he had captured an institution and was wielding it against the people it was purportedly created to serve, always couched in language of “serving the greater good” in the name of “protecting the people”. That is the very definition of authoritarianism. Lenin and Stalin did it. Hitler did it. Castro did it. Those are the famous examples. When a university, or a publisher, or a movie studio, or twitter, is captured by ideologues who use institutional power to remove dissident thinkers, it’s equivalent to the king cutting off the head of the jester. It’s the height of injustice. It’s the institution removing its own conscience. And that is the essence of censorship.
CANCEL CULTURE
At the risk of sounding cynical, I’m not sure where we got the idea that censorship, blacklisting, McCarthy-esque lists, etc. can’t happen in America or other Western democracies. There’s a reason we always turn to the example of Germany, as a modern nation with a deep cultural and technological tradition that also fell to institutional capture, authoritarianism and genocide. To believe that America is somehow immune to these tendencies is to believe the very myth of American exceptionalism that a modern liberal person eschews. And it causes people to be blind when it is happening in their midst, perhaps perpetrated by their own friends, peers and colleagues.
Almost a year ago, in July 2020, “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”—colloquially dubbed “The Harper’s Letter”—was published in Harper’s Magazine. It aimed to shine a light on a growing trend of illiberal censorship taking place at reputedly liberal institutions like journalistic outlets, universities and publishers. The letter was spearheaded by author Thomas Chatterton Williams and signed by over 150 signatories who included heavyweight authors like Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie, musician Wynton Marsalis and choreographer Bill T. Jones, among a number of journalists and academics.
On the subject of censorship, it’s hard to argue with the bona fides of someone like Rushdie, had been subject to censorship of the kind accompanied by death threats. If Salman Rushdie tells you there’s censorship going on, that’s worth noting. And yet, the pushback against the Harpers Letter was intense. Prominent writers claimed that there was no censorship because the signatories were already famous and free to express their ideas in Harpers of all places. But the aim of the Letter wasn’t to protect the signatories: it was to keep the door from closing on those who came after them. It was an act of artistic generosity. Remember what I said about stories going in cycles of constriction and expansion? The signatories of the Harper’s Letter were arguing for expansion. This is what artists do. Artists stand in the margin—outside of the institutions—and act as their conscience. We keep a foot in the door so it does not close.
And so the pushback said a lot more about the people pushing back than it did about the signatories. It’s easy to say censorship doesn’t exist, if you’re not the one being censored. Of course you wouldn’t perceive it. Those who pushed back were mostly of a new generation of institutionalists who could not see that they were part of the capture itself.
Their total denial that censorship (or what we call cancel culture) exists—and that, oh, by the way, some of these signatories should be canceled—was exactly the king of gaslighting and gobbledygook reasoning used when an institution is captured by ideologues who claim to serve and protect an abstract concept like “the people” while sending them to reeducation facilities. Censors will always couch their actions in words like “accountability” or “just consequences.” With this very reasoning, they incriminate themselves as censors.
One of the signatories, journalist Jesse Singal, had the perfect response to the pushers-back: “A hit dog will holler.”
So the question for artists is, do we want to constrict or expand? Do we want a liberal society, or an illiberal one? Do we want a society where questioning is encouraged, or where artists have to hide their drawings in holes in the wall? You cannot predict or dictate what an artist is going to need to say about his or her time. A culture does so at its own peril.
This is why I have always been a staunch advocate for freedom of speech with very few limits. Artists must fight for freedom of expression, because we must not seek to defend corrupt institutions for their own sake. We must maintain our position on the margin, outside of the institutions, as a conscience that keeps the door open for those who walk with us and after us, and even those who went before us but now find their way blocked by censors with well-meaning language.
As artists, we must cease protecting the establishment culture and defending institutions which have been captured. Who are we allowing to set the rules of engagement for artists? I speak as an artist who is aware of the long history and importance of dissidence in times of totalizing structures. In the next several episodes, we will talk about dissent and dissident artists, banned books, and the tension between an artist’s personal character and the work they create.
The bottom line is this: Censorship is the opposite of love. I truly believe that loving my neighbor as myself is the value that will help me to keep that foot in the door so that my neighbor can walk into a world opening with possibility, instead of closing in on itself.
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