“I mean that writers are now expected to identify with a community and to write as its representatives. In a way, this is the opposite of writing to reach other people. When we open a book or click on an article, the first thing we want to know is which group the writer belongs to. The group might be a political faction, an ethnicity or a sexuality, a literary clique. The answer makes reading a lot simpler. It tells us what to expect from the writer’s work, and even what to think of it. Groups save us a lot of trouble by doing our thinking for us.
As for the notion of standing on your own, it’s no longer considered honorable or desirable. It makes you suspect, if not ridiculous. If you haven’t got a community behind you, vouching for you, cheering you on, mobbing your adversaries and slaying them, then who are you? A mere detached sliver of a writing self, always vulnerable to being punished for your independence by one group or another, or, even worse, ignored.
As Charlie Hebdo showed, free speech, which is the foundation of every writer’s work, can be tough going.
It’s true that the president calls journalists “enemies of the American people,” and it’s not an easy time to be one, but we’re still free to investigate him. Michael Moore and Robert De Niro can fantasize aloud about punching Donald Trump in the face or hitting him with a bag of excrement, and the only consequence is an online fuss.
The fear is more subtle and, in a way, more crippling. It’s the fear of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. It’s the fear of landing on the wrong side of whatever group matters to you. An orthodoxy enforced by social pressure can be more powerful than official ideology, because popular outrage has more weight than the party line.
A friend of mine once heard from a New York publisher that his manuscript was unacceptable because it went against a “consensus” on the subject of race. The idea that publishers exist exactly to shatter a consensus, to provoke new thoughts, to make readers uncomfortable and even unhappy—this idea seemed to have gone dormant at the many houses where my friend’s manuscript was running into trouble.
Fear breeds self-censorship, and self-censorship is more insidious than the state-imposed kind, because it’s a surer way of killing the impulse to think, which requires an unfettered mind. A writer can still write while hiding from the thought police. But a writer who carries the thought police around in his head, who always feels compelled to ask: Can I say this? Do I have a right? Is my terminology correct? Will my allies get angry? Will it help my enemies? Could it get me ratioed on Twitter?—that writer’s words will soon become lifeless. A writer who’s afraid to tell people what they don’t want to hear has chosen the wrong trade.
My students were talented and hardworking, but I kept running into a problem: They always wanted to write from a position of moral certainty.
I told my students that good writing never comes from the display of virtue. But I could see that they were skeptical, as if I were encouraging them deliberately to botch a job interview. They were attracted to subjects about which they’d already made up their minds.
The greatest enemy of writing today might be despair.”
The Atlantic is een van de weinige Amerikaanse al dan niet progressieve legacy media waarin ook nog gewoon goede serieus leesbare artikelen worden geplaatst. Het soort artikelen waarin je niet na een paar zinnen al helemaal kapotgaat aan ronkend cliché-moralistisch anti-Trump-gejammer. Kom daar eens om bij linkse SJW-drambladen als Newsweek, Rolling Stone of (oh the horror) The New Yorker.
George Packer, winnaar van de Christopher Hitchens prijs 2019, is één van die The Atlantic-schrijvers waar het magazine die echt goede artikelen aan heeft te danken. Zoals dit artikel waaruit bovenstaande quotes afkomstig zijn.
Of dit artikel. Of dit artikel. Etc.
