“It is in fact because of their power that we must protect them.”
PEN America, the venerable organization formed in New York in 1922 as a sister group to PEN International to champion both literary fellowship and freedom of expression, marked its centennial with a symposium at the New-York Historical Society.
The event turned out to have a stark and somber symbolism no one had anticipated
The culture wars are vast and multilayered, and even a three-hour event is going to leave some important aspects of it un- or underdiscussed. During the Q&A, I asked (via notecard) about the library wars: While they unquestionably involve some genuinely authoritarian behavior on the right, is “book ban” too broad and simple a label for actions that may involve simply removing a book from a “recommended reading” list, dropping it from a school curriculum, or limiting access to age-inappropriate material? Nossel answered my question and acknowledged that age-appropriateness could be a legitimate concern, but the conversation that followed did little to clarify distinctions between different kinds of restrictions. (A particularly troubling effort in Virginia sought to find two LGBT-themed books in violation of state obscenity laws and to block bookstores from selling them to minors; but that suit was tossed by a judge at the end of August.)
Likewise, the discussion of “cancel culture” and self-censorship left many unexplored questions: Where does one draw the line, for example, between criticism and harassment or even “cancellation”?
All in all, the PEN America evening was probably the best event I have seen so far on the culture wars around free speech. If there’s a takeaway from it, it’s that to speak of authoritarian tendencies and threats to speech and expression on both the left and the right is not “bothsidesism,” conservative deflection, or the anxiety of white and male privilege assailed by diverse voices. It’s simply a response to a concerning reality.