Freedom of Choice or Censorship?

My choices!

I won’t hide my main point until the end today. Here it is: Your freedom of choice does not cancel out mine, and my discretionary decisions are not censorship.

This isn’t the first time I’ve addressed the question of censorship, but it keeps coming up, the latest brouhaha in the publishing industry a $.25 million advance to a young memoirist, Milo Yiannopolis, an editor at Breitbart News. The author describes himself as a “free speech fundamentalist,” but many writers, editors, and publishers are shocked that Simon & Schuster would choose to promote what they regard as “hate speech” and are calling for a boycott. No, say defenders of Yiannopolis and Simon & Schuster, the publisher is simply standing up for freedom of expression and should not be criticized, let alone boycotted.

Here is the anti-boycott position: The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC, not to be confused with the Northport Community Arts Center!) worries that calls for a boycott of Simon & Schuster will lead to censorship. NCAC’s executive director says,

We know of instances in which books that contain certain kinds of content have been shelved, deferred, redacted, edited deeply to remove content that people might object to.

Another point of the view is represented by the head of a small independent publisher, Melville House. In Dennis Johnson’s words,

No one is saying [to the author] ‘you have no right to be published.’ ... What they’re saying is, ‘we’re shocked and outraged that you [the publisher] would stoop so low....

For more on the story, see full article here.

At the heart of the disagreement are these questions: Does a boycott constitute censorship? Or does it somehow lead – maybe -- to censorship, and if so is a boycott an infringement of an author’s and/or publisher’s freedom of speech?

Here’s how I see it:

1) Freedom to express my views, whether in speech or in writing, does not obligate anyone else to publish them. I am free to publish at my own expense and to distribute as best I can, or I can try to persuade a publisher to take on the job.

2) A publishing house is free to select among submitted manuscripts those it chooses to publish. (The majority of submissions will be rejected. Everybody wants to be “an author,” or so it sometimes seems, but the world just doesn’t need that many “books.”) Publishers’ decision does not obligate bookstore owners or the general public to buy any particular book.

The two preceding paragraphs should make clear a symmetry of freedom, in that a writer’s freedom does not cancel out the freedom of a publisher, nor does a publisher’s freedom cancel out that of wholesale or retail customers.

Turn now to the question of a boycott.

(3) As I see it, in choosing to join a boycott I exercise together my freedoms of speech and of association. A boycott puts the power of numbers and money on both sides of the table, rather than leaving all the weight only on one side.

I could, of course, choose simply to refrain from purchasing a particular product, be it a book or anything else, and say nothing to anyone about my decision or the reasons behind it, but my quiet, individual, sure-to-be-overlooked non-purchase will never bring about change in corporate behavior. When individuals take a stand together, likelihood increases that their voices will be heard. A study (cited in recent New Yorker column by James Suroweicki) that came out of the Kellogg School of Management showed that boycotts affected corporate stock prices for every day they were in effect and that over a third of boycotted companies changed their behavior as a result.

According to Wikipedia, Simon & Schuster publishes 2,000 titles a year under its various imprints. The publishing house was acquired by Gulf & Western in 1976 and since then has bought up many other publishing companies, with complicated connections to and holdings in television (they are now part of CBS) and educational products. Threshold Editions, their “conservative” imprint was launched in 2006. (Please note that “conservative” no longer means what it used to mean.) It is under this imprint that the Yiannopolos book will appear.

Big publishing is big business. Make no mistake. Simon & Schuster has approximately 1300 employees worldwide and makes millions annual in profits. CEO Carolyn Reidy cites, among factors for the company’s rising profits in 2015, that books for which high advances were paid “performed well.” No publisher hands over a quarter-million-advance without expectations of huge profit.

Small, independent publishers and bookstores operate within very different parameters. Staying in business, which means staying in the black, is always a focus, but we are not beholden to shareholders. (Get serious! If maximizing profits were our sole concern, none of us would be in this business at all!) But that’s not to say our choices are easily made. Most writers and booksellers already live on a precarious financial edge. We don’t have to make shareholders happy, but we do need to buy groceries, heat our homes, and occasionally see a doctor. And somehow we do it without gargantuan salaries, pensions, or "safety nets," many of us without even a guaranteed minimum wage.

As a reader, a bookseller, and a bookstore owner, I am proud to be one of a like-minded legion, each of us carrying a torch for cultural values that go beyond the almighty dollar.

Look at it this way: If there’s nothing wrong with the wealthy joining together in publicly traded corporations to increase their wealth, to buy influence, and to shape the country's future to their wishes, how could it be wrong for those of us in the trenches to join together to exert whatever influence we can to shape the world we want to see for our children and grandchildren?

If the government forbids publication or sales or a book, that is censorship. 

If a publisher decides not to publish, that is discretion. It is an exercise of freedom. 

By the same token, a boycott is the exercise of freedom by a different segment of society. Deny the right to boycott, and you deny freedom itself. I don't think Martin Luther King, Jr., would have any trouble understanding collective action.

Intrepid We Are Still and Tilting at Windmills

In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind. -      Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Our intrepid Ulysses group met at the home of our Fearless Leader the other evening for the first time this season to discuss the first 400 pages of Cervantes’ masterpiece. Our FL had persuaded us last winter that we could cover the work in only three sessions rather than four, biting off almost half at our first meeting, since “we’ll have all winter to read it.” Well, intrepid we may be, but most of us did not join Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for their adventures until well into April, and most found 400 pages daunting. The book is funny, pace a quick tempo, the many stories in it amusing – and yet, as one group member said, “there are too many words.” Too many pages. The writer rambled on and on far too long.

I defended Cervantes. He had, after all, written much of the book in prison, and what else did he have to do? Another group member strengthened the defense: Since another writer had published what purported to be a continuation of Don Quixote, the true author was no doubt at pains to bring his version to the public as expeditiously as possible, putting editing very low on his list of priorities.

This morning I’m rethinking the whole business of the book’s length. For those with leisure to read in the early seventeenth century, it is probable that no book could be too long. At this time in history, didn’t people pay “visits” to one another that lasted for months or even years? That, anyway, is something for me to ponder further; meanwhile, a couple group members have settled the question by giving themselves permission to read some bits and skip other bits. That way, they can enjoy the writing and the characters without turning the reading into a chore.

The truth is that when his mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought any lunatic in the world ever had, which was that it seemed reasonable and necessary to him, both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse to seek adventures and engage in everything he had read that knights errant engaged in, righting all manner of wrongs and, by seizing the opportunity and placing himself in danger and ending those wrongs, winning eternal renown and everlasting fame.

A word of truth from my own life: Until beginning the reading of this book (we are reading the Edith Grossman translation, by the way), my only acquaintance of the character of Don Quixote came from cartoon depictions, the phrase “tilting at windmills,” and that song “The Impossible Dream” from the musical version of the story, “Man of La Mancha.” And I never saw or heard or read the musical libretto, either, so my acquaintance of the stage character comes only from the song.

Thus I was taken aback by Don Quixote’s desire for fame, as if public acclaim were the only reason to go about righting wrongs. He has quite a temper, too. Even when not enraged, he can be surprisingly irritable. That is, I was surprised at this trait in his character. Sancho Panza’s motive is more common. He agrees to be the squire of the Knight of the Sorrowful Face in hopes of becoming wealthy, and he endures many beatings and other indignities with this end always in mind.

Sancho is not, however, a complete patsy. One of my favorite parts of the story so far came in Chapter XXV, where he protests against the embargo Don Quixote put on his speech. Deciding that the relationship had become more familiar than was proper, Don Quixote had forbidden Sancho to talk, and for a while the squire held his peace, but finally the restriction was too much for him.

“Señor Don Quixote, our grace should give me your blessing and let me leave, because now I want to go back to my house and my wife and children, for with them, at least, I’ll talk and speak all I want; your grace wanting me to go with you through these deserted places by day and by night without talking whenever I feel like it is like burying me alive....”

His master relents, and the two return to familiarity, shared delusion, and occasional verbal abuse of one another when things go wrong.

One important feature of this work of literature is its stories-within-stories structure. The main narrative tells the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but other characters they encounter along the way have stories of their own to tell, and the main narrative is set aside time after time, often for several chapters, while a secondary character’s story is recounted. At first it seems that both the adventures and the secondary stories will simply follow one another in an endless, unrelated series. Mercifully, such is not the case. Characters from earlier adventures and stories reappear in later chapters, joining the main narrative as the two adventurers collect more and more fellow travelers. Fellow travelers but not fellow believers. Except for Sancho, the others are so far from buying into the knight’s vision that they have plotted together to return him safely home.

And there we left them last night, with a little over half the book to read and two more meetings in which to discuss the story, the author, and how to read this work and others.

David and I watched a documentary recently about a man attempting to right what he saw as the world’s most dangerous wrong. “The Island President” is a movie I recommend, both for its central figure and for the fight he waged. P.S. 5/9: At the end of the movie, we learn that the president resigned. I wanted to know what he did and what happened to him after his presidency, and here is the answer I found. 

I’m not nearly as convinced by the Texas blogger who claims that her cause is the defense of free speech. From what little I’ve heard of the story, her way of mounting a “defense” was clearly inflammatory. Was it also a bid for public attention, attention more for her than for her avowed cause? I’ll have to look into this further, but right now I’m just sorry that lives were put at risk and that simple respect and good manners have come to be seen by too many around the world as enemies of free speech. It doesn’t have to be this way. That I truly believe.

At the same time, it's spring, and the woodland wildflowers are in bloom, and they are beautiful. But can I help it if reading Don Quixote has influenced even how I see the flowers?