British journalist and author Nick Cohen’s credo can be summed by these sentences: “Challenge involves offence. Stop offending and the world stands still.”
Subtitled, Censorship in an Age of Freedom, this book is divided into three sections, dealing with religion, business, and government, for a total of seven chapters.
Cohen’s topic include Manufacturing Offence, The Cult of the Supreme Manager, and The Internet and the Revolution.
Since our society generally lags 20 to 30 years behind the metropole, much of what Cohen treats with, while not extant now, has already planted seeds here.
For example, he writes: “The 1960s generation brought an end to the deference shown to democratic leaders and established institutions.
Many found its irreverence shocking, but no matter. The job of artists, intellectuals and journalists became to satirise and expose; to be the transgressive and edgy critics of authority.”
The Trinidadian corollary is the calypso of the 1930s, still true to its roots in the 1960s.
Cohen notes: “Although the fashion for relativism was growing in Western universities in the 1980s, leftish academics did not say we had no right to offend the cultures of racists, misogynists and homophobes, and demand we ‘respect’ their ‘equally valid’ contributions to a diverse society. Even they knew that reform is impossible without challenging established cultures.”
But then Cohen, dealing with the Salman Rushdie fatwa and the response of Western liberals, goes on: “Academics were forever berating dead white males for their failure to conform to exacting modern standards, but stayed silent as murderers threatened the basic standards of intellectual life...Oppression is what we do in the West. What they do in the Middle East is ‘their culture’.”
The corollary of that silence here would be the lack of response from UWI academics and newspaper columnists about the ongoing collapse in neighbouring Venezuela, even as trade unionists here voice support for it in using Cold War propaganda terminology, as well as calypsonians as a body becoming PNM mouthpieces.
Cohen writes: “Argument involves the true respect that comes from treating others as adults who can cope with challenging ideas and expecting them to treat you with a similar courtesy.”
Critics here, however, either respond not at all or do so in ad hominem terms. But, Cohen argues, “Religion and politics are too important and dangerous to risk handling with kid gloves.”
Thus, even as citizens become increasingly concerned about religious fundamentalism being a factor in terrorism, gang warfare and child marriage, silence or tact remain the standard response among the estates of the State.
But, Cohen writes: “Religious freedom—including freedom from religion—requires freedom of speech.
“Restrict freedom of speech, and Christians can persecute Muslims and Jews for denying that Jesus was the son of God. Muslims can persecute Jews and Christians for denying that Muhammad was God’s messenger...And every religion can persecute free-thinkers.”
He concludes, counter-intuitively: “Respect for religion is the opposite of religious tolerance, because it allows the intolerant to impose their will on others.”
Cohen’s book outlines the errors developed nations have made in dealing with free speech issues.
It thus serves as a policy guide for our country to deal with the same issues before they overwhelm us.
Review by
KEVIN BALDEOSINGH
BOOK INFO
You Can’t Read This Book
Nick Cohen
Fourth Estate, 2012
ASIN: B005UEXHC4; 330 pages.