Notes in the Margins: Kierkegaard's Clowns and Censorship
In the fifteenth installment of "Notes in the Margins", Roberts gives his opinion on the recent drama between Neil Young and Joe Rogan, noting it is equivalent to a pie fight between clowns.
It is a trite phenomenon in our global village to quote Kierkegaard; it is never done correctly, nor is the context ever considered. But, global village as we are, we are bound to have many village idiots. In fact, idiocy surpasses COVID as our most major epidemic.
But with the current fight between Neil Young, Joe Rogan, and Spotify, one feels a desire to be trite and recall Kierkegaard's admonishment of his fellow creatures in Either/Or, where he writes:
"How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech."
I have reason to suspect that the only reason anyone knows of this quote is because, in most editions of Either/Or, this quote appears on page one of Diapsalmata, third paragraph down. You don't expect the readers of today, a sorry lot if there ever was one, to go any further. Part 1, and for that matter page one, are not the only parts of books, dear reader.
But the quote, for whatever triteness we treat it with, will return on the quote-mill that we have, used by the half-wits and the imperious--or, to use our odd linguistics, the influencers and the grifters--to justify their opinions on the events surrounding Neil Young's ultimatum to Spotify, who has been joined by Joni Mitchell.
On one side, limp handed liberals will give Neil Young all their love, giving him pats on the head for being a celebrity with 'the courage' to move his music off Spotify. Any questions about censorship, freedom of speech, or anything of the sort will be ignored or, at worst, ridiculed as a latent Trumpism. They will cycle out quotes about moral responsibility, about the goodness of using your influence for what is right, about 'being on the right side of history'. Every time someone evokes 'the right side of history' as an argument, a liberal gets their wings. And we should encourage them to the edge of tall buildings, so they might test out how high they can fly on the rightness of their side of history. Perhaps, backflip on the way down.
On the other side, there will be--and has already begun to be--an Orwellian meltdown. The boot is on my face! these defenders of free speech will cry out. The idea--if you can call it an idea and not a brain fart--of free speech and censorship will be spoken in reverent tones. They will mindlessly quote Orwell's 1984, they will evoke Joe Rogan as some kind of hero, or they will say 'I don't like Joe Rogan, but…" and then they will speak with increasing difficulty about what freedom of speech means to them. It is hard to talk about what you mean and to mean what you say, when you don't know what your words mean outside of how they pet and soothe your amygdala.
Is this episode censorship? No. It is celebrity gamesmanship; Neil Young gave Spotify an ultimatum and they chose against his request. The reason that Young gave, vaccine misinformation, may be true but hardly matters. In other words, this is your classic case of celebrity angling, a spat over nothing that only means a lot to some people, which has been turned into something "scary". No one was censored. It is a low grade culture war for the incurably political.
***
What about this, exactly, is important? Removing music from an exploitative company does not help with misinformation. Were Young successful and Rogan was removed, Rogan can use any other platform he wants. Further, Rogan is not the only source of misinformation; at this moment, even the CDC is not all that reliable, bending and twisting their rules to meet the stern Protestant standards of our degrading capitalist system. What Rogan is doing is wrong, but this is not the way to approach it. A Grade F hissy fit does nothing.
At the same time, to defenders of Rogan, let me be clear--if I must, I will break out the crayons and index cards, maybe throw in a little glitter glue--you are not being censored. From your propensity to burn Nike clothing to your weird, neurotic response to everything from M&M's changing their shoes to your protests in the middle of a pandemic to be allowed to get your hair cut, you are not principled fighters for freedom, you are consumers who believe oppression is a lifestyle that can be donned, like one of your backwards worn hats. The cry of 'freedom' from the likes of these yokels is little more than a cri de coeur, a whimper in the face of a changing situation. You're avatars of apocryphal atavism, consumers who wish for nothing more than to be allowed to rot right alongside the society you live in, as long as your 'traditions' are not rattled.
To all free speech absolutists, I say that I am on your side, but I am not with you. You are never honest about your own position, or you are too ignorant to be honest. When you support free speech in America, you must begin from the position that America has never had freedom of speech. The 1st Amendment, since even the time of the acceptance of our Constitution, has been twisted and gnarled into an unrecognizable feature of the American ship of fools. The rattlesnake used to represent "liberty" as a movement in America has been shot, stuffed, twisted, and de-fanged. It is a relic to an idea that was shot on sight.
And nothing about this celebrity catfight. The Roman Republic continued to decline, even as Clodius and Cicero threw their accusations at each other. The spat of musician and podcaster does little to stop the direction of the ship of fools to the waterfall ahead.
***
If either of these cultural warriors would like to have something to actually fight, go to McMinn County in Tennessee, the asscrack of Midwestern bumpkinism in this godforsaken country, and fight against the ban on Maus by Art Spiegelman. It should be of no surprise that this county is little more than a half hour drive away from Dayton, Tennessee, where those who are well-read on their history will remember is where the infamous 1925 Scopes Trial took place. Coincidence? I think not.
The problem is, this is a book that would make both groups of these virtual milksops uncomfortable. Why? Because it is not simple. It is not clear. Neither side is 'safe'; on one side you support using this book to teach about the Holocaust, but you also support the nude drawings of anthropomorphic mice and the depiction of death and hangings in a book that has all the looks of a child's story--or, if you're conservative, a book by Candance Owens. On the other side, you must be against a book about the Holocaust, but you must also feel the need to trot out that worn out excuse, used by puritans since the very day after their founders sired their first offspring, against the advice of their Good Lord: you must censor the books 'for the children'. Both a defense of the Holocaust and a defense of that ever elusive 'innocence' of children are popular calling cards of the culture warrior, and to have them opposed, and both on the same side as unseemly--or in the case of the ban, down right cruel--notions is something that confuses our outrage activists. In our world, activism is trotted out when things are safe; that is, when the line between your prejudices and their prejudices is clear. One is 'courageous' and 'takes a stand' only when the paysage moralisé is flat.
Consider something like abortion; this is a right that is truly under threat in our country, and it is also an easy thing to protest about; either your are pro-choice or pro-life. It is easy for both sides of the discussion; a conservative can stand before their fellow yokels and proclaim their love of fetuses, crammed in the bodies of the women they wish to exploit, and thus they cannot let them be killed. A liberal can stand against this, before their bien-pensants, and declare that a woman has every right to rid themselves of the embryo, fetus, or child because it is 'their body, their choice'. Each side has its slogans, which they notch like drunken archers and shower over the clear line that separates their ideas. To ask deeper questions, to consider things on any other level, is heresy. Sing with the chorus, or be silent.
This is the case of the Rogan-Young spat, it is just individualized. You are either in support of a man who likes brain pills and smokes weed with his guests, or an older artist who has a praiseworthy history of taking a stand against fossil fuel companies, the Bush Administration and its War on Terror, and various philanthropy efforts. For me, the choice is easy; Neil Young, obviously. But the assumed goodness or nobility of Young himself does not, in any way, change the situation itself, which when understood clearly shows a middling, meager act in the face of a system that is indifferent to such acts. As a personal decision, if we see this as Young disassociating because he cannot bear the hypocrisy, then we can truly congratulate it, in much the way we congratulate a friend on having a baby; with feigned praise for the prosaic. But let's not try to turn this into anything more than that; Snowden is in exile, Assange is rotting in prison, and many other dissidents who do actual work fighting the system are out there. This is nothing, no matter how it gleams in the spectacle.
***
I thought of ending this with the second-most famous quote from Either/Or, about the clown on stage, telling everyone about the end of the world. Just as trite, in this case it is useless. We cannot tell who the clowns are, and who aren't; not anymore. It is also a quote within the several pages of Kierkegaard's book, and I thought it better to quote a different place, in this wonderful book:
"Yes, recollection, but not in the way you so much love it, this mixture of poesy and truth, but the serious and faithful recollection of conscience. Take care that it does not unroll a personal record, not indeed of genuine crimes, but of wasted possibilities, phantom-images which it will be impossible for you to chase away. You are still young, the suppleness of your spirit is becoming to youth and amuses the eye for a while. One is struck at the sight of a clown whose joints are so pliant as to repeal the necessity of human gait and posture. That, spiritually speaking, is how you are, you can just as well stand on your head as your feet, for you everything is possible and with this possibility you can surprise others and yourself. But it is unhealthy, and for the sake of your own peace of mind I beg you to watch out that your advantage does not become a curse. No one convinced of something can turn himself and everything else upside down at will in this manner. I am warning you, therefore, not about the world but about yourself and I am warning the world about you."
What a descriptor of the state of activism in America: clowns with joints so pliant that they lack the need to posture. They'll support or oppose anything, standing on their heads as much as on their feet. And we have to warn the world about them, since all of their self-care is just self-deception so they might ignore the warning about themselves.