The Move to Eradicate Disagreement
Discovering a point of agreement with a colleague is always alarming. The Atlantic wants more readers rather than fewer, after all, and agreement is poisonous for a subscription base, just as it is for intellectual culture. But here we are: Adam Serwer, in a counterargument to Caitlin Flanagan’s essay and my essay after last month’s attack on Salman Rushdie, agrees that the attack was ghastly and an assault on free speech. Luckily he disagrees with us on everything else, in particular the association Flanagan and I drew between censorious attitudes in the United States and the rather more lethal censoriousness in Iran.
“Americans simply do not live under anything resembling the kind of repression in which people are killed for blasphemy with state or popular support,” But there are ways to suppress free thought, other than with a knife to the eyeball of a novelist, or with laws that limit what can be said in schools. Like many others, he is willing to fight for speech against threats of government coercion. But when the threats come from other sources, he leaps out of the trenches and leaves Flanagan and me fixing our bayonets alone.
