Satanic Verses, Vampiric Ideas

A reminder in today’s New York Times about the challenges posed by freedom of speech:

I was surprised to read in Bill Keller’s column this morning that the author Salman Rushdie chose to live in America over other democratic countries because he “reveres … the freedom, not so protected in other Western democracies, to say hateful, racist, blasphemous things.”

He reveres the freedom to say hateful and racist things? “Blasphemous” makes sense, but at first the other two adjectives confused me. I understood the protection of bigoted speech to be an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of speech being free. But Rushdie’s well-worded explanation settled some questions about freedom of speech that I’ve had for a while:

“Terrible ideas, reprehensible ideas, do not disappear if you ban them. They acquire a kind of glamour of taboo. In the harsh light of day, they are out there and, like vampires, they die in the sunlight.”

The American experiment, often not engaged in wholeheartedly, includes a fair amount of Thoreau-style self-government: rather than policing speech, the U.S. system expects an active, conscientious public to decry bad ideas and words. The ideal is a meritocracy of words, of orators. If evil words persist in floating to the top of the public consciousness, seeming to work some mysterious power over people, the only failure is on the part of the citizenry.