Is censorship acceptable if it is well-meaning? Can changing the content of a writer’s or artist’s work be excused for so-called “woke” ends? The first few months of 2023 have seen these questions debated as publishers have edited out or rewritten “objectionable” content from writers as diverse as Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl to P G Wodehouse and Ian Fleming. The debate between “morality” (or whatever the name given to self-righteous zeal) and free speech will, of course, continue. But the argument for the right to speak and offend has been buttressed by its most prominent champion.
“The idea that James Bond could be made politically correct is almost comical,” Salman Rushdie said, while accepting the Freedom to Publish honour at the British Book Awards earlier this week. Rushdie mentioned state censorship in several non-Western countries, including India, as a problem. However, in the West, things are no better and the attack on free expression is not coming directly from the state: “… here in the US, I have to look at the extraordinary attack on libraries and books for children in schools; the attack on the idea of libraries themselves. It’s quite remarkably alarming, and we need to be very aware of it and fight against it very hard”. Rushdie’s prescription is as simple as it is unheeded: “Don’t try and remake yesterday’s work in the light of today’s attitudes.”
Last year, Rushdie was nearly killed for words he wrote. It is no small thing, then, that he sees the threats to speech today coming from attempts to “bowdlerise” works of writers like Dahl and Fleming by those who claim that political correctness is an excuse to censor. His words — and the price he has paid for them — hold a lesson for those who believe that they are entitled to mutilate works of art: Free speech is worth protecting, even and especially in the face of claims to virtue.
