This week, I have been thinking a lot about violence.
As I followed with terror and great relief the reporting on Salman Rushdie’s stabbing, his being placed on a ventilator, and finally, his removal from the ventilator as he began the slow road to recovery, I thought about how this intensely violent act was all as a result of a novel.
I have been thinking a lot about how a 24-year-old man acted on a threatening offer of $3.3 million that was extended nearly a decade before he was born. The more I pondered these events, the more I began to draw connections to a more widespread flooding of the pipeline from words to violence. As students on campus continue to chant the slogans of “silence is violence” while they simultaneously decry language as a form of violence, the number of actually violent incidents justified by fringe and formerly fringe ideologies has increased. No longer confined to the realms of organized terrorism, we are now seeing violence carried out as the extension of online conversations, firmly held beliefs, and at times what appear to be whims. But our delineations between what is actually violence and what is not is slipping away, particularly in progressive circles and on campuses.
I understand anger, not just anger at those who have wronged us personally, but anger against those whose ideas and positions conflict with ours at the most fundamental level. I struggle on occasion to restrain myself from diving into the sea of vitriol in the comments section on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. I understand the seethe of loathing that can build inside you the longer you dwell on a bad interaction. But I cannot understand taking that next step. I fail to grasp that climactic moment when we go from words to violence. Because it does seem that with dizzying frequency, people are moved to violence. And this real violence is not the same as the words that challenge us and the way we would like things to be.
I cannot help but think that the failure to distinguish between words and acts of violence plays at least some small role in this phenomenon. Once it has been declared, as it so often was in discussions I witnessed in various campus forums, that language which can be categorized as aggressive, forceful, or simply contrarian is the same as an act of violence, the threat of real physical violence extending from this speech becomes sanitized.
When Salman Rushdie wrote the Satanic Verses, he engaged in “wrong-think”, to borrow a term from Bari Weiss. He wrote something that challenged his readers, and to some was provocative and offensive. But he did not commit an act of violence against anyone. While it may seem self-evident in this instance that there is a difference between writing the Satanic Verses and receiving a knife in the neck, we frequently fail to make this distinction, particularly for those of us who have only recently left behind our campus days.
This is not to say that language cannot be harmful or dangerous. Language is one of, if not the, most power tools we have to affect our lives and our world, which can include using language to incite violence and cause irreparable damage to others. But we need to understand the difference. There is a necessary distinction between words that challenge and anger us, threats of violence, and physical acts of violence.
Too often, I see accusations of violence thrown about when our ideas are challenged. But the more we blur the lines between what is and is not an act of violence, the more we chill our intellectual spaces, and importantly, the more likely we are to justify physical acts of violence like the attack on Salman Rushdie or the Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015 as being merely an extension of our Twitter reply to ideas that offend us. And they are not the same. Words are powerful, but they are not violence.
The attack on Salman Rushdie could easily have cost him his life - this was the clear intention of his attacker. Having our ideas challenged is not a form of violence against us, nor should it be equated with the real violence we see in the world.