Ayn Rand and the Charlie Hebdo Connection

My niece’s class discussion on free speech concluded that free speech does not mean limitless power to hurt. It’s understandable for school or college kids to come to such conclusions. After all, that sounds so reasonable.

But, and this is a huge ‘but’, in the real world, the immediate question we have to consider is who decides that limit? Can there even be a single rule to demarcate that line? And if not, would we have different limits for different groups/topics? Would such differences in limits then trigger accusations of bias, caring about some and ignoring the rest? If those accusations get ignored for too long, would it trigger a backlash later? Is the implementation so impractical that we will just tie ourselves in knots? If it was me, I would have set up Round 2 of that class discussion with these questions!

At least kids can be excused on their stance because of their idealism, inexperience and lack of practical world scenarios. But adults, what’s their excuse? Like take what Devdutt Patnaik recently wrote:

“The intellectual can hurt with his/her words. The soldier can hurt with his/her weapons. We live in the world where the former is acceptable, even encouraged. The latter is not…I, the intellectual, have the right to provoke; but you, the barbarian who only knows to wield violence, have no right to get provoked and respond the only way you know how to. If you do get provoked, you have to respond in my language, not yours, brain not brawn, because the brain is superior. I, the intellectual Brahmin, make the rules. ”

Before I comment on that, here are a couple of lines by Teju Cole:

“(In the Middle East), the punishment for journalists who “insult Islam” is flogging…We should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.”

Let me respond. Patnaik talks like a kid. Try this thought experiment. Let’s throw out the “intellectual Brahmin” rules and play this game. So violence as a response would be acceptable after a certain number/nature of non-violent provocations. Again, who decides that number/nature? What’s the acceptable limit for wife-beaters? Or let’s back up a bit: can we criticize anything at all? Wouldn’t any criticism anger at least one human on the planet? What’s the cutoff number? It is a percentage of the population? Or an absolute number? Who takes such polls? Who pays for the polls? Who ensures the polls are representative? But let not such practical questions deter the likes of Patnaik.

Cole’s point is so dumb that the guy is either an idiot or willfully provocative. I’ll assume the former (you can’t do anything with the latter) and respond. Hey Cole, two differences about the flogging of journalists in Islamic countries:

1)      It’s their goddamn country; they can do whatever they want. They need not play by our “intellectual Brahmin” rules within their borders. Charlie Hebdo happened in Paris: it is an imposition of Sharia rules. So are “intellectual Brahmin” rules wrong while Sharia rules are right?

2)     Flogging, while abhorrent to me, is not the same as murder. Murder, in case Cole was living in a cave, is what happened in Paris.

When I read Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead back in college, the guy who evoked the maximum revulsion in me was Ellsworth Toohey. Towards the end, like all good villains, he will make a grand speech bragging about what he did:

“Say that reason is limited. That there’s something above it. What? You don’t have to be too clear about it either. The field’s inexhaustible. ‘Instinct’ – ‘Feeling’ – ‘Revelation’ – ‘Divine Intuition’ – ‘Dialectic Materialism’. If you get caught at some crucial point and someone tells you doctrine doesn’t make sense – you’re ready for him. You tell him there’s something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you have it deuces wild. Anything goes in any manner you wish whenever you need it.”

Patnaik and Cole are the real world Toohey’s of the world today. It’s deuces wild and anything goes in any manner they wish.