Salman Rushdie’s message about free speech is more urgent than ever

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Back in 2012, Salman Rushdie gave a lecture on censorship to the PEN World Voices Festival. He offered his audience a metaphor. “Consider, if you will, the air,” he began. It is all around us, free, plentiful and, most important, breathable. In the course of the average day, most of us don’t give it a second thought.

Now imagine that the air is controlled by a set of faucets way up in the sky somewhere. And imagine that, one day, someone starts to turn them off. The air becomes thinner and thinner and, here on Earth, we all begin to gasp.

Liberty, said the novelist, is the air that we breathe. In free countries we take it for granted. “And at night, as we fall asleep, we assume we will be free tomorrow, because we are free today.” Once that assumption begins to crumble – once writers and other creative people start to worry what subjects they can choose and what they can say about those subjects – liberty is already half lost.

“If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free. The air supply is turned off and we cannot breathe.”

Spoken a full decade ago, his words seem like prophecy now. Long before the brutal attack on Mr. Rushdie in western New York, the faucets had begun to close. They have been closing in China under the tightening grip of Xi Jinping. They have closed almost completely in Russia since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Even in the free world, the air is getting thin. The Trump cult (what else can we call it?) considers the leader’s word to be sacred and everything else heresy. It attacks the media for stating the facts. It spouts conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, elements of the left demand the silencing of any voices deemed offensive, oppressive or otherwise problematic, throwing a chill over debate even in an open society like Canada’s.

Mr. Rushdie saw it coming. In a recent book of essays, he wrote that we live in a censorious age, in which many people, particularly the young, feel that freedom of expression should be curbed to spare the feelings of disadvantaged groups. “When I hear good people saying such things,” he said, “I feel that the religious worldview is being reborn in the secular world – that old religious apparatus of blasphemy, Inquisition, anathematization, all of that, may be on the way back.”

It was a form of that very apparatus, of course, that issued an edict in 1989 calling for his death because he had written a novel it considered blasphemous. He lived in hiding for years after, a hunted man.

His position on all of this is clear: Don’t back down. “The moment somebody says, ‘yes I believe in free speech, BUT,’ I stop listening,” he said in 2015. “You know: ‘I believe in free speech, but people should behave themselves.’ ‘I believe in free speech, but we shouldn’t upset anybody.’ ‘I believe in free speech but let us not go too far.’ The point about it is the moment you limit free speech, it’s not free speech. The point about it is that it’s free.”

Some people call this free-speech absolutism. I imagine that Mr. Rushdie would plead guilty to that. “The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible,” he said in 2005.

Speech can hurt. Speech can wound. But without it, societies ossify, dogmas take hold, tyrants flourish, corruption spreads. Open debate helps us sort fact from fiction, truth from lies. Only when every belief and statement is open to pointed questioning can we work through our problems and find a way past our disputes.

James Joyce was considered blasphemous for writing Ulysses and Galileo that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. “Originality is dangerous,” Mr. Rushdie said in that 2012 lecture. “It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such entities. It can be shocking, or ugly…”

But if we want the air to remain breathable, we must defend it. That has been his consistent message since that fateful death sentence more than three decades ago. We need it now more than ever.