but that now there are many competing ways to convey information and the “garbage” they carry “grows exponentially.”
Speaking at Chico State University in California, Rushdie did not mince his words at what he sees as trash filling the space of public discourse.
Rushdie said that two centuries ago in Charles Dickens’ time, the novel served as something that “brought the news,” telling in a human way what is going on in a part of the world.
Rushdie said Dickens’ novel “Nicholas Nickleby” brought outrage, and later reform for the way that poor children were educated in Northern England.
In the United States, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” published in 1852, sparked the anti-slavery movement, he said.
But over time, many other ways of “bringing the news” developed, the Oroville Mercury Register reported Rushdie as saying.
Today, there are too many ways to bring the news and there is an emptiness and hollowness as the “garbage grows exponentially,” Rushdie said.
He rattled off contemporary examples, including Paris Hilton and Tiger Woods. He asked “if someone can explain to me what Kim Kardashian does for a living.”
He also spoke of the demise of investigative reporting in the electronic age, without the financial support print journalism once had. The Internet does not support sending multiple journalists across the globe. Instead, there is one reporter and multitudes of commentaries, Rushdie said.
“The people who benefit if newspapers die are the people with power,” he said, when there are not journalists being watchful of their actions.
This brings back the power of books, he said. Books like the “Kite Runner,” by Afghan Khalid Hosseini, and “Zeitoun” by Dave Eggers “show us what the news can’t show us.” These works show us the “lived experience of the world.”
Man is the only creature that tells its story as a way of understanding itself. Every family has stories, he said. As people are born, or join the family, they learn the family stories. Nations also have stories.
Any attempt to tell the stories may anger some, he said, hinting at his own experience with “The Satanic Verses,” which prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatva calling for his execution in 1989. But being able to tell the story freely is the value of the art form.
The artist, tries to increase, in some small amount, what we can understand. “The effort to expand can’t be done from a safe room,” Rushdie said. “To push the boundaries you have to go to the edge and push. When an artist goes to the frontier and past, they find very powerful forces pushing back.”
Rushdie talked about “The Satanic Verses.” Someone with a satirical mind finds it easier “to know what he is against,” he said. “After that time [the death threat], I had to think what I was for. The question of what you are for is more difficult.”
The answer is in free speech, and a society that makes that possible, he said.
During the question period, a man asked about the use of social media in the uprisings called “the Arab Spring.”
“I do not believe this was a Facebook revolution,” Rushdie said. The uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia were “old-fashioned revolutions.” Religion was not important, it was jobs and freedom that mobilized people, he said. Facebook told people where to gather, but the movement did not begin there.