Last Saturday, just after the attack on Salman Rushdie in New York state, a theatre in Edinburgh cancelled the second of two shows at the Fringe Festival by the comedian Jerry Sadowitz. It did so, it claimed, because many members of the audience at the previous night’s performance “felt uncomfortable and unsafe to remain in the venue”.
An awful lot of people seem strongly to believe two things at once. On the one hand, they think that Rushdie has a right to publish what he wants, even if hundreds of millions of Muslims claim to be deeply offended by it. And, on the other, think that someone like Sadowitz has no right to make anyone feel “uncomfortable and unsafe”.
The right to free expression will be defended against “wokeness”, so long as it is not used to say anything disobliging about, say, the history of slavery or the stupidity of Brexit. When this double standard is so deeply embedded in public life, it is no wonder that many people find it hard to think in a consistent way about freedom of expression.
Or think of arguably the most influential piece of journalism in modern Ireland, Mary Raftery’s States of Fear films for RTÉ on the horrors of the industrial school system. If you felt safe and comfortable watching them, you were probably a psychopath. We choose to expose ourselves to the possibility of being profoundly unsettled, maybe disgusted, maybe even outraged
Wow, superb article.