Fact and Fiction

Whence comes the epistemic certainty of PEN's activist members?

Emil Nolde, Sonnenblumen, Abend II, 1944, oil on canvas, 26.5 x 36.38 inches (source)

I haven’t been studying PEN America long enough to evaluate The Atlantic’s recent headline that the organization is “fighting for its life,” but it is beleaguered. Under pressure from activist members, it has had to cancel its annual award ceremony and its World Voices Festival. The activists are of the position that deplatforming Jewish speakers and, failing that, preventing them from being heard by shouting them down is free speech. Their latest open letter to PEN makes this astonishing claim:

PEN America states that “the core” of its mission is to “support the right to disagree.” But among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.

PEN replied:

Words matter and this letter deserves close scrutiny for its alarming language and characterizations. The perspective that “there is no disagreement” and that there are among us final arbiters of “fact and fiction” reads to us as a demand to foreclose dialogue in the name of intellectual conformity, and one at odds with the PEN Charter and what we stand for as an organization.

It’s also at odds with art. Racists are sometimes capable of good art. Emil Nolde, a favorite painter of mine, was an unrepentant Nazi. But the racism of the signatories of the open letter seems of another sort. It’s one thing to have revolting convictions. It’s another to have none except those that the political moment demands. Lionel Shriver:

Although our occupation is more at risk from censorship than most, we’re all too capable of perversely embracing suppressive viewpoints that violate our own interest. We’re paid not only to write but to think, yet we don’t think; we listen keenly for whatever tune is playing in our fellow travelers’ AirPods and whistle along. Apparently, we’re no more creative than the average bear, and as soon as the memo goes out, we’ll chant along with the kiddies camped at Columbia University, “from the river to the sea!” whatever that means. We’ll obediently switch out one cause for another whenever we’re told, as nimbly as using “find and replace” in Microsoft Word.

We’re cowards, conformists, and copycats. Real freedom of expression is too scary; we’d rather hide in a crowd whose keffiyeh-masked members all shout the same thing.

Force me to bet on an artistic contest between a racist and a coward, and I’ll pick the racist. “Talent is luck,” said Woody Allen. “The important thing in life is courage.” For the creative types who are racists because they are cowards, such as the signatories of the open letter to PEN America, there is no hope of producing worthwhile art. No doubt, whatever art cropped up as they typed out their drafts, they backspaced into oblivion. “Can’t write that,” they lied to themselves.

There is fact and fiction, proclaimed the signatories, then labeled the fiction fact. Why bother with the literature of those who can fool themselves into bigoted imbecility? Mencken, from the indispensable Minority Report:

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.”

If PEN America doesn’t survive this revolt, it would be an honorable death. Let the activists form a new organization dedicated to policing acceptable opinions among its members. See if anyone joins.

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