Empathy from the dead

NEW YORK — It only took a 100 years or so, but the world is finally getting a piece of Mark Twain’s mind on the subject of free expression and whether it’s safer for your words to be expressed after you’re dead.

“Free speech is the privilege of the dead, the monopoly of the dead. They can speak their honest minds without offending,” Twain observed in “The Privilege of the Grave,” an essay written in 1905, and long unpublished, that appears in the Dec. 22 issue of The New Yorker.

"The living person is not really without this privilege- strictly speaking- but as he posesses it merely as an empty formality, it cannot be seriously regarded as an actual posession. As an active privilege, [free speech] ranks with the privilege of committing murder: We may exercise it if we are willing to take the consequences. Murder is forbidden both in form and in fact. Free speech is granted in form but forbidden in fact. By the common estimate, both are crimes and are held in deep odium by all civilized peoples. Murder is sometimes punished; free speech, always — when committed, which is seldom. There are not fewer than five thousand murders to one (unpopular) free utterance. There is justification for this reluctance to utter unpopular opinions: the cost of utterance is too heavy; it can ruin a man in his business, it can lose him friends, it can subject him to public insult and abuse, it can ostracize his unoffending family, and make his house a despised and unvisited solitude. An unpopular opinion concerning politics or religion lies concealed in the breast of every man; in many cases not only one sample, but several. The more intelligent the man, the larger the freightage of this kind of opinions he carries, and keeps to himself."

Collateral damage to the "unoffending family" is ultimately why I stopped writing a weekly column in our local newspaper, though I certainly endured my share of public insult and abuse- although I'd endure that to my dying day whenever I knew I was in the right because I'd researched what I wrote and confirmed it with a variety of independent sources. Generally, if they were genuine friends, people who disagree with me tended to ignore me, forgive me, or listen to me with an open mind long enough that we could come to some sort of compromise.

Reading Twain's essay at least helped me realize that what I experienced is universal to anyone who speaks (or writes) their mind "freely." Pick up a copy of the Dec. 22&29, 2008 "Winter Fiction Issue" of the New Yorker to read Twain's full essay. It is well worth the $4.99, at least that's MY opinion, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who'd think I'm a jerk for saying so.