‘An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West’: A Comedian Makes the Case for Free Speech
A review of ‘An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West’, by Konstantin Kisin; Constable, 2022.
In one of Konstantin Kisin’s first memories, his mother is rebuking him for drinking milk from the bottle. It is not because she deemed this uncivilised, or unhealthy, or messy. It is because, in communist Russia, such an act meant the rest of the family went hungry. And so when Kisin was sent to England to attend school in Bristol, he did not the freedom and safety that is our birthright for granted.
There is a fairly rich tradition of people who have lived under socialism becoming champions of the West. Ayn Rand affirmed individualism and capitalism (to a fault, in my view). Solzhenitsyn defended and affirmed the Judeo-Christian values in which Western life is rooted. Nabokov was a convinced classical liberal who had to flee first the Bolsheviks and then the Nazis. In recent times, Garry Kasparov, the chess-master, has been a loud and consistent critic of Russia who has defended human rights and other Western inventions. We could also mention Czesław Miłosz, who was not a Russian but a Pole who lived under Soviet rule in Warsaw, and whose Captive Mind is, in my view, the most thoughtful and sensitive depiction of Soviet culture. (Miłosz is interesting because he affirms Western culture by affirming the validity and indeed desirability of paradox and imperfection, which the Soviet mind could not handle.)
Solzhenitsyn defended and affirmed the Judeo-Christian values in which Western life is rooted.
Kisin is a comedian by trade and one of the hosts of Triggernometry, a podcast whose guests span the political spectrum but share an appreciation for free speech. Comedians are always liable to find their work harder when accepted rules around language change, especially when those rules seem to be changing quickly and not by consensus, and when the price of dissent is concrete and commercial. Free speech is, by necessity, then, Kisin’s main area of focus. He cites George Carlin, who he regards as perhaps the greatest comedian of all time: ‘I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.’ I think Orwell put it best in his 1945 essay ‘Funny, But Not Vulgar’: ‘Every joke is a tiny revolution.’ (It is worth noting that in that essay, Orwell was attacking comedians who he saw as too kindhearted to be funny.) Kisin also suggests that comedians are much funnier in WhatsApp groups and green rooms than they are on the stage, since even those broadly sympathetic with the assumptions underpinning what Kisin calls ‘woke ideology’ (I think the term ‘woke’ is too vague to have much meaning by this point, but you see what Kisin is driving at) nonetheless feel they are treading on eggshells. He approvingly mentions Comedy Unleashed, a pro-free speech comedy project, and laments the way it has been alleged to be ‘right wing’ for this reason.
What is interesting is that Kisin considers himself at odds with the modern political left, then it is odd that he is so defensive about being called right wing. Needless to say there are some real cranks across the political spectrum, but if right wing means small-c conservative — ie, in favour of holding on to what you care about, mindful that it is hard to build, easy to destroy, and that all societal change has unintended consequences — then why the defensiveness? Secondly, if Kisin does want to conserve free speech, and others do not, then he is (at least on that issue) on the right, or allied with it. It seems to me that by taking offence at the suggestion, he is already giving away ground. Because at least by implication, he is suggesting that right wing means ‘bad’. (Having said this, I recognise there are other ways to understand terms like left and right, which is one reason Iain McGilchrist and others think they should be superannuated.)
if Kisin does want to conserve free speech, and others do not, then he is (at least on that issue) on the right, or allied with it.
Being a comedian, Kisin is quite amusing, if not (in my view) laugh-out-loud funny. Even if his jokes don’t always land, his humour does stop his polemic from becoming too earnest, which would be painfully ironic given his theme. Most vexing is his use of text speak (‘FYI’, etc.), which (here’s a conservative point for you!) I think is just appalling English. What comes across strongly throughout is that he clearly cares very much about the direction in which the West is moving. His paternal grandmother was born in a Gulag. His free-thinking grandfather was snitched on by the humourless Soviet authorities by one of his own friends. He himself grew up in grim and grey conditions. And when he was asked before a gig to sign a waiver promising he would not say something that might upset someone, he refused point blank to do it. I think this is admirable. He practises what he preaches.
He touches on themes other than free speech: Western guilt for slavery (slavery is a common feature of human history, he argues), and capitalism (not great, but better than the alternative and able to be softened through distribution and social safety nets). But attacks on free speech are very much his bêtes noires. And I am, more or less, in agreement with him. The point that Karl Popper makes in his Open Society is that whether or not you think it is good or bad for the West to be self-critical, to challenge its assumptions, to grapple with its role in slavery (for instance) or to question the humanity of capitalism, you need free speech to make your point. I would add to this that I am not entirely sure who we all think has the wisdom and the virtue to tell the rest of us what we can and cannot say (and so, as Orwell teaches us, what we can and cannot think). And — moreover — I would like to think good manners and common decency prevent most of us from being cruel or uncharitable anyway.
In any case, this is a good book, and a short one.
