Editing in an age of outrage
Ian Buruma MARCH 29 2019
Until recently Jian Ghomeshi, a former CBC broadcaster and rock musician, was not much known outside Canada. I now rather wish it had stayed that way. But last September I decided, as editor of the New York Review of Books, to publish Ghomeshi’s story of his life after he was tried in 2016 on four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking. He said that the three women involved had taken part in sadomasochistic acts willingly. They said otherwise, and more than 20 other women made similar allegations. In court Ghomeshi was acquitted on all counts for lack of sufficient evidence. Months later he issued a public apology to a former colleague in return for the withdrawal of a separate charge of sexual assault, and signed a “peace bond”, pledging to behave himself.
Instead of going to prison, Ghomeshi was punished by being purged from public life. He lost his job, of course, but also became a vilified figure in social media. Perhaps he richly deserved this. Sexual abuse is notoriously hard to prove in court. Public disgrace may well be his just deserts. But since a similar fate has enveloped an increasing number of men, after being exposed for a variety of sexual offences, some more and some less serious than those of which Ghomeshi was accused, I thought that this experience needed to be better understood. It raised questions about how people ought to be penalised. Due process is important, after all. A prison sentence has limits. Public disgrace is open-ended.
I was also intrigued by the story of a man who had everything, and then lost it all. Ghomeshi was a huge media star in Canada. Now, as far as the public is concerned, he only exists as an online villain. So I published his personal account as part of a package about fallen men, which included a piece on Jim Brown, the black American football star, who was once revered as a civil rights activist and one of the greatest athletes of his time, but was recently exposed as a man who behaved violently towards several women.
I knew this was provocative and expected to be criticised, but nonetheless the ferocity of the reaction surprised me. We were accused of promoting a rapist. My own journalistic writings, going back decades, were scrutinised for proof that I was a misogynist. Online petitions were circulated to get me fired from my job. University presses threatened to pull their ads. I also did a clumsy interview over the phone with Slate, in which I said of Ghomeshi: “The exact nature of his behaviour — how much consent was involved — I have no idea, nor is it really my concern.” By this, I meant that I was mainly concerned with what happened later, but it was read as though I had no concern for what had happened to the women, stoking the fires even higher. As a result, the magazine’s owner decided I had to go.
Some of the criticism of Ghomeshi’s piece made sense. I should have insisted that the accusations against him were spelt out in more detail. He omitted the fact that he had caused injury, with reports of one woman suffering a cracked rib, and he didn’t mention the large number of women who had accused him. I could also have made it clear that our intention had not been to exonerate him, let alone to excuse violence against women — I took this for granted, as did two other editors who worked closely on the piece. I shouldn’t have. The voices of his accusers ought to have been considered, as a response to his evasions. Ghomeshi’s fudging made him less convincing as a vehicle for discussing questions of crime and punishment.
Despite these editorial errors, and an ill-considered interview, amplified in social media, I still believe that his story was an important contribution to a discussion worth having. For some of my critics, however, the actual content of the piece was not the main issue. Before the piece was even published, the news was leaked from the office to a sympathetic blogger, and the Twitter storm, mostly from Canada, blew like a hurricane. The critics’ point was that a figure like Ghomeshi had no right to write his personal account in a prestigious liberal journal. A great modern taboo had been broken. The transgression was not that any particular view was defended, but that a person accused of sexual abuses should be heard at all. This was not even a matter for debate. I was reminded by a member of the editorial staff that #MeToo was a movement, and by publishing the piece we were way out of line. We didn’t need nuance, I was told; nuance was considered to be a form of complicity.
I disagreed with some members of my staff, who had argued against running the piece. In my view, an editor should not be afraid of publishing contentious subject-matter; the job is to make people think. There is much talk on American campuses of the need to avoid opinions, or even literary works that might make students feel uncomfortable. But a certain degree of discomfort can help people consider unfamiliar or unorthodox points of view, which is usually salutary.
The transgression was not that any particular view was defended, but that a person accused of sexual abuses should be heard
In fact, the NYRB, never a magazine to follow any particular movement, had published writers who behaved violently before. Norman Mailer had stabbed his wife with a knife. A murderer named Jack Abbott, promoted by Mailer, published his writing in the magazine while still in prison in the 1980s and killed a man almost as soon as he got out. This caused a considerable scandal, particularly as Mailer had lobbied for his release. Some people saw it as the consequence of naive liberal tolerance, and others regarded the admiration for Abbott as a form of literary machismo. But even then, no editor was fired as a result. One might say, of course, that times have changed. One could also say that Mailer, and possibly Abbott, were better writers than Ghomeshi. I would not claim that Ghomeshi is a master stylist. But the quality of a person’s prose should not determine how we judge the writer’s moral character. And moral character, in turn, shouldn’t be the sole determinant in whether the person should or should not be published.
Considering people who have fallen from grace — again, often for very good reasons — it is hard to avoid using religious language. The way out of moral ignominy is to be redeemed. But redemption has to be earned by confession, self-reflection and apology. This is why people caught in a history of sexual misbehaviour usually issue an apology straight away, sometimes a rather slippery one: “If I have offended anyone . . . ,” etc. I was only an offender by proxy, as it were. Nonetheless, I was strongly advised by a senior editor at a famous liberal journal in New York (not the NYRB) to write an apology, so that his “younger editors” would allow me to contribute to that magazine again.
The advice was well-meant, and I took it seriously. But I decided that an apology would be the wrong response, for the following reason. Apologies are the traditional reaction to a moral transgression, when grievous offence is taken. One reason that apologies are now so prevalent is that being offended has become a common reaction to anything one disagrees with. This can pose particular difficulties for an editor of a liberal journal.
There were vehement objections to passages in the piece about Jim Brown, for example. After retiring from his sport in the 1960s, the former American footballer, while continuing his political activism, led a rather dissolute existence as a minor movie star in Hollywood. An ironic description of his party life was decried by one of the editors as “a celebration of the victimhood of women”. It might “offend our readers”. When I said that it wasn’t our role to protect our readers from possible offence, I was told that this was exactly what our role should be.
Jian Ghomeshi leaves a Toronto court in 2016 before his acquittal over multiple counts of sexual assault © Reuters Apologies are not always enough to end social and professional ostracism. Which is perhaps why they play only a small part in western law. Sanctions have to be more sharply defined and have distinct limits. The demand for apologies in our present culture has more in common with the way law is practised in East Asian countries, with a Confucian tradition, where apologies play a major role, as do written confessions. It is not enough to be materially penalised; the accused has to prove that he or she has repented. An inner transformation is called for.
Something like this is happening in the west today, especially in the US. The discussion about race, as the African-American academic John McWhorter pointed out in a recent issue of Atlantic magazine, has taken on a quasi-religious tone. Whites can only gain “moral absolution”, in his words, by eternally attesting to their white privilege, as a version of original sin. The soundness of people’s opinions has to be carefully monitored. Views deemed “problematic” are quickly denounced as forms of blasphemy.
What is true about anti-racism is equally true of movements against sexism or against any other form of hateful prejudice. A change in outward behaviour is not enough. Or, rather, people assume that behaviour will only change once an inner transformation has taken place. I suspect there is a strong Protestant element in this. Public confession is typically a Protestant tradition; Catholics prefer to fess up in the privacy of the confessional.
McWhorter is sceptical about this religious type of activism. It “hinges on feigning claims of injury, on magnifying indignation in a trip-wire fashion, and on fostering a Manichaean, us-versus-the-pigs perspective on humanity out of Lord of the Flies”. There is another risk, too, when moral righteousness overrides all other concerns, especially in intellectual and political life. It can stifle the freedom of expression. The problem is by no means confined to “political correctness”, which conservatives like to blame for all our current ills.
About a dozen years ago, the Dutch-Somali activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali became the catalyst for a heated debate about the way we should discuss Islam. In her view, the west was at war with Islam. Terrorism did not simply exploit the religion; it was at the very core of it. She wrote the script for a short film, entitled Submission, directed by Theo van Gogh, that many Muslims considered blasphemous. Partly as a result of this film, Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist extremist. I wrote a book about this, entitled Murder in Amsterdam. Supporters of Hirsi Ali argued at the time that freedom of speech could not exist without the right to offend. She was even compared to Voltaire, who famously ridiculed the Catholic Church.
Even though I was sympathetic to Hirsi Ali, I had some reservations about her moral absolutism (“war against Islam”), for which I was much criticised. My book was read as a defence of Islamist terrorism. As is true in our current stage of extreme polarisation, “nuance” tended to disappear from the discussion: either you were for Hirsi Ali or you were an enemy of free speech. But this missed some important points. First of all, Voltaire was challenging one of the most powerful institutions in France. Muslims in the west are a vulnerable minority. Free speech is often claimed as a right of the powerful to abuse the weak. After all, La libre parole (“The Free Word”) was the title of one of the most ferociously anti-Semitic French journals at the time of the Dreyfus trial.
Another thing many commentators failed to recognise was the distinction between offending and insulting. The former can be the consequence of an honest view that some people might find offensive. The latter is a hostile act. Offence is taken. Insult is given. There is no excuse in civilised discourse for insult. But offence is sometimes inevitable. Some of the most famous writers and critics — Christopher Hitchens, for instance, or Gore Vidal, who both wrote for the NYRB — were often offensive.
Moreover, free speech can never be absolute. Too much depends on who says what, when and to whom. Common courtesy also puts limits on what we say and under what circumstances. Members of a minority can make jokes about themselves more readily than outsiders can. A novelist or film-maker can express the darker side of human behaviour in ways that a diplomat, say, or a university president cannot, at least not in public. A stand-up comedian can be more outrageous than a politician.
One thing that makes our times so disturbing is that the usual rules in public life no longer apply. The US president can voice or tweet insults as much as he likes, whereas stand-up comedians are held to such rigid standards, that offence, let alone insult, can derail a career.
Social media has greatly complicated intellectual life, and therefore editorial decisions
So where does that leave a magazine editor? And what lesson should we draw from the storm over Ghomeshi’s article? An editor of a serious publication is not as bound to the normal rules of propriety as a politician, but has to be a bit more cautious than a stand-up comedian. I came of age in the late 1960s when a certain amount of provocation was not only more permissible than it is now but actually considered a virtue (this was the time when the NYRB published instructions on how to construct a Molotov cocktail; a lapse of judgment, however, that was quickly recognised even then).
The influence of social media has greatly complicated intellectual life, and therefore editorial decisions. The NYRB has long been well-known for its letter columns, where the famous and even the notorious exchanged views with a ferocity that has entertained generations of readers. Some of this was academic preening, and literary showing-off, but there was also genuine debate. Like all serious publications, editors would filter out gratuitous malice and utter nonsense. This is not true of the Twittersphere, which is often ad-hominem, intimidating and unhinged. As a result, debate can be stifled, because people fear the wrath of the mob.
In publishing Ghomeshi’s article, I misread the force of the zeitgeist and ran into the trip-wire that magnified indignation. I acknowledge that I should have been more careful in the editing. But I still think the intensity of the reaction has been alarming and is detrimental to the freedom of expression. Editors should be able to take risks. Denunciation, instead of debate, will result in a kind of fearful conformity. Too much anxiety about defying the zeitgeist will have a stultifying effect on public discourse. Zeitgeists change. Silencing people we don’t like will make it easier for others to silence the people we do.
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