For Joe Rogan’s Would-Be Cancelers, the Censorship Is Beside the Point

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, February 08, 2022

 

A question that I never expected to ask: What do Harper Lee and Joe Rogan have in common?

 

When it comes to banning books, the would-be censors offer a couple of distinct arguments. One of those is a case based on danger, an argument that certain words or images are harmful per se or that they contribute to a cultural situation that is dangerous. When progressives call for the removal of To Kill a Mockingbird or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from libraries and curricula, the most common complaint (though not the only one) is that the racial slurs in those books may cause students stress, from which they must be protected. A related complaint, made against figures such as Joe Rogan (and your favorite correspondent) is that their words or ideas present a danger to the general public or to certain vulnerable populations such as transsexuals. It should be noted that while this argument is usually deployed in the service of some program of limited suppression, such as removing a book from a library or forcing a controversial figure off of Spotify, it is as good an argument for a more general program of formal censorship. We see relatively little of that in the United States, thanks to the First Amendment — partisans of the “living Constitution” should think about why it is that we write our laws down to begin with. But in countries with less-robust free-speech protections, these arguments support campaigns of general or targeted censorship: In the United Kingdom, government officials already are looking at ways to punish Netflix for Jimmy Carr’s jokes, while in Austria you can go to prison for selling a prohibited political book.

 

The danger-based argument does not hold up to very much scrutiny. For one thing, the supposed dangers of works such as To Kill a Mockingbird are either entirely invented or grossly exaggerated. Of course, some students will experience discomfort reading the great novels — such discomfort is a symptom of education in progress. Education is dangerous — but not in the way these teacup totalitarians suppose.

 

But even if we conceded that some kind of danger exists, the kind of suppression offered as a remedy — “de-platforming” in the United States, ordinary censorship elsewhere — is not likely to accomplish very much. Joe Rogan isn’t a big deal because he is on Spotify; he is on Spotify because he is a big deal — a fact that is plain enough to Spotify’s executives and shareholders. Simply removing Rogan from Spotify would not mitigate the supposed danger. A formal program of genuine censorship might succeed in shrinking Rogan’s cultural footprint, but probably not by very much. European efforts to exclude or suppress certain kinds of nationalist political tendencies did not keep such figures as Jörg Haider out of power, and if anything the kind of Nazi-inflected politics that practitioners of streitbare Demokratie mean to stamp out remain more of a force in Europe than in the relatively open and liberal United States, where neo-Nazis are free to form political parties and publish whatever they like. The Catholic Church in the 17th century enjoyed expansive theoretical powers of censorship, but even with these it did not succeed in depriving the world of the works of Galileo, which were smuggled to Amsterdam for publication when they could not be brought out in Italy.

 

The practical virtues of the relatively open American system should be obvious enough, most of all to the Europeans, who enjoy liberalism and democracy in large part because of a liberal-democratic post-war order imposed on the continent, directly and indirectly, by the United States. The European Union may be a “regulatory superpower,” but it operates mainly in reaction to the innovation of U.S.-based companies such as Facebook and Google, because there isn’t one comparable European firm that anybody could be bothered to notice. But there isn’t anything in the water of the San Francisco Bay that causes the United States to be more dynamic and innovative; we have a relatively open society because we have chosen to have one, with all the benefits that go along with it — and the burdens, too, one of which is that the sensitive souls among us must endure a cultural situation in which Joe Rogan is permitted to speak and to thrive.

 

It is worth appreciating that many of the arguments against targeted authors or works stray far from the supposed danger of allowing this or that word to be read or spoken and veer quite deeply into literary criticism. One of the arguments offered against To Kill a Mockingbird has been that it is a “white savior” story. To oppose a work based on obscenities or racial slurs is one thing, but to oppose it on the basis of plot construction is another thing entirely.

 

That efforts to put up a barbed-wire fence around Harper Lee or silence Joe Rogan are unlikely to have any practical effect is probably beside the point. While the would-be suppressors and censors would be all too happy if Rogan were well and truly silenced, or if it became practically impossible to buy certain works of Mark Twain or Dr. Seuss, or if those offensive Tintin comics were all seized and burnt, it is the symbolic rather than the practical aspects of exclusion and suppression that motivate the thought police. Rogan is today a more important and more prominent figure than he was 30 days ago, Bari Weiss was elevated and amplified by the idiotic campaign against her work at the New York Times, and even Harper Lee — that most plain vanilla of liberal moralists — has acquired in her literary afterlife a little bit of revivifying outlaw energy. These illiberal exercises in moral hygiene do not require effective practical results to satisfy the moral appetite to which they speak. It is important always to keep in mind that on this issue, we are not in the main dealing with very serious people — this is not the work of a new Inquisition, but the work of mentally stunted hysterics stuck in a permanent moral adolescence. For that sort of fanatical imbecile, the symbolic branding is sufficient.

 

What is going on here could best be understood by reading another controversial book, for as long as it is still permitted: The Scarlet Letter.