PEN America and the authoritarian spirit
For writers living under an authoritarian regime, the price of intellectual independence is clear—censorship, prison, exile—but so is its value. They are compelled to understand inner freedom as the essential condition for doing their work. Their determination to say what the state doesn’t want to hear gives them a sense of connection with one another, a community of writers, even if it happens underground. But authoritarianism is not just a form of government where leaders jut out their chins, jackbooted police march around with batons, and jails fill up with dissidents. It’s also a habit of mind, marked by impatience with complexity, intolerance of dissent, readiness to coerce agreement. The authoritarian spirit can infect democracies that have long traditions of freedom, but it uses weapons other than state power. The main one is public opinion.
Perversely, the same community that gives writers in repressive regimes the courage to say what the state doesn’t want to hear can, in a free society, become a tool of conformity and social coercion. In some ways, the threat of ostracism from your group is harder to resist than the threat of legal punishment from the state, because it undermines your sense of identity and belonging, your self-worth. Torture and prison are not the only ways to compel people to act against their own values and say what they don’t believe. The pressure to conform and the fear of being cast out have caused an entire political party to prostrate itself before Donald Trump. The authoritarian spirit seems capable of taking root in almost anyone, anywhere—at a MAGA rally, in a college classroom, even among a group of writers.
The organization PEN was founded more than a century ago to provide an international community of support for embattled writers. Today PEN’s American chapter is in crisis, because a group of writers has chosen to turn their community against the organization.
Last week a boycott forced PEN America to cancel its annual World Voices literary festival. The boycott’s leaders included authors of best-selling books and winners of prestigious fellowships and prizes—Naomi Klein, Lorrie Moore, Hari Kunzru, Michelle Alexander, and others. According to someone with intimate knowledge of the boycott, its pressure campaign, carried out strategically through online attacks and direct personal messages, was “merciless.
