Orhan Pamuk in The New Yorker
It is immensely sorrowing to read Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's assessment, first, of the charges that he is facing (as I write) in an Istanbul courtroom, but beyond that, of the pressures that have inspired a prosecutor to bring those charges against him. Mr Pamuk, having told a Swiss newspaper last February that millions of Armenians lost their lives in Turkey during World War I and that what bothers him most about this is that the subject is taboo in Turkey (and, apparently, for Turks everywhere), is on trial for having "publicly denigrated Turkish character." He traces the animus behind his indictment to the rise of a Westernizing middle class that attempts to hold on to the allegiance of a traditionalist population by "brandishing a virulent and intolerant nationalism." He sees the same phenomenon - the persecution of artists and writers by otherwise cosmopolitan elites - in India and China.
Mr Pamuk's thesis is sound, but not exhaustive. Checking The New York Times's site for late news of his trial (there wasn't any), I was reminded of events in Britain, where Islamic groups have shut down at least one play that criticizes traditional gender roles and where artists are upset about the new crime of "glorifying terrorism." As for us - US - "virulent nationalism" is Rush Limbaugh's stock in trade. The problem is bigger than Turkey, bigger than the developing world, bigger than all of us. We're in an awful muddle.
Looking back at the Enlightenment, we can see it for the elitist project that it was. Ordinary people simply didn't count, in the eighteenth century, except as mobs to be feared and controlled. In time, wealth and education would spread throughout the land, and mobs would simply evaporate, leaving a residue of thinking men and women. This is still a dream today, but implementation has grown increasingly ramshackle. Where once a program of teaching Enlightenment values was at the core of every American high school outside of the South, school boards now see to it that community values, whatever they might be, are taught instead. This is simply another form of not teaching anything.
The Enlightenment was a prestige project. Much of its initial funding came from self-interested aristocrats, and in time two of Europe's greatest despots became sponsors. Writers were not squeamish about accepting such support. I may be naive, but I believe that most of today's serious writers would feel dreadfully compromised about living on grants from the aristocrats of today - the managers of large corporations. But most of today's creative political thinking is conducted very much on that footing, in think tanks across the ideological spectrum. We can be happy that no one has pointed to their activities as constituting a new enlightenment, but I suspect that they are indeed engaged in the important job of refashioning such Enlightenment principles as now make up the American political tradition. Sadly, they're writing very much as the philosophes did - for the attention of a very small readership. The broad general public couldn't care less about what they're doing, and this gives each faction abundant wiggle room for misleading statistics and tendentious argument. In the marketplace of ideas, we are doing very little to improve the quality of the market itself. The goods on offer can hardly benefit from this neglect.
Orhan Pamuk is an Istanbullu, a man of Istanbul. He may be the greatest novelist of our time - he is at least a worthy heir of Dostoevsky, and I don't see many of them on the scene - but he is also a man who wrestles with his roots, with his rootedness itself. Is he a Turk? What would that mean? Insofar as it means denying that millions of Armenians perished during World War I, then, no, he is not a Turk. But that's precisely what he wants to change about "being Turkish."
I already knew that my case was a matter worthy of discussion in both Turkey and the outside world. This was partly because I believed that what stained a country's "honor" was not the discussion of the black spots in its history but the impossibility of any discussion at all. But it was also because I believed that in today's Turkey the prohibition against discussing the Ottoman Armenians was a prohibition against freedom of expression, and that the two matters were inextricably linked. Comforted as I was by the interest in my predicament and by the generous gestures of support, there were also times when I felt uneasy about finding myself caught between my country and the rest of the world.
It is important, here, not to rail on about "Turkey!" as Mr Orhan's oppressor. His oppressors are opportunists with other agendas. Turkey itself is a nation like any other, under the control of more or less virtuous people. Whatever happens to Mr Pamuk, we should do what we can to strengthen the influence of the more rather than the less virtuous in Turkey and elsewhere. And we can start, Mr Pamuk advises us, right here:
As tomorrow's novelists prepare to narrate the private lives of the new élites, they are no doubt expecting the West to criticize the limits that their states place on freedom of expression. But these days the lies about the war in Iraq and the reports of secret CIA prisons have so damaged the West's credibility in Turkey and in other nations that it is more and more difficult for people like me to make the case for true Western democracy in my part of the world.
(Hats off to New Yorker editor David Remnick for giving Mr Orhan's apologia the magazine's pride of place.)
