It’s all his fault for wearing that tight skirt
There’s some nasty stuff around.
From Paul Vallely in the Independent for instance.
Cherished traditions, such as freedom of speech, the alarmists complain, are being surrendered out of political correctness and appeasement…Everywhere have sprung up champions of freedom of expression and crusaders against religious darkness in the name of Western values.
Everywhere? Not really – not in the places for instance where people who sneer about ‘cherished traditions’ have sprung up, for instance. And some of us don’t defend freedom of speech or resist religious darkness ‘in the name of Western values’ at all, we do it for quite non-geographical reasons.
This is not so much a clash of civilisations as one between religious and secular fundamentalists…Take the article in Le Figaro written by the French high-school philosophy teacher Robert Redeker…The problem was that, for good rhetorical measure, he also added that the Koran was “a book of extraordinary violence”. And that the Prophet Mohamed was “a pitiless warlord”, a “murderer of Jews” and “a master of hate”…The trouble with debate carried out in this adolescent fashion is that it obscures rather than enlightens…it is simply gratuitously offensive.
Is it? How does Vallely know it’s gratuitously offensive as opposed to being Redeker’s considered opinion? That’s not obvious to me, at least.
But in many places there is a growing realisation that freedom of expression is not absolute but needs to be governed by a sense of social responsibility.
In the sense of taking note of the potential for riots, arson and murder, and being silent in consequence. Hooray.
That was a refreshing contrast to the hyperbole about art and free speech being “the elixirs of an enlightened society”. Instead of a power struggle, or a test of wills, it opens the way to a more mature approach. Instead of an emotional debate which closes down rational discourse, it is the way to build common values – ones which recognise the inalienable right to freedom of expression but which, at the same time, demand it be exercised in a measured way.
A more mature approach and a more measured way, meaning, shut up about Islam. Creepy stuff.
And there’s Tariq Ramadan, too, as quoted in the Times:
Some Muslims have accused M Redeker of courting trouble for publicity. Tariq Ramadan, a leading university teacher, said: “The philosophy teacher is free to write what he likes in Le Figaro, but he must know what he wanted — he signed a stupidly provocative text.”
A stupidly provocative text. Saying some not obviously false things about the Koran and the prophet is stupidly provocative, and an open request for death threats. Creepy stuff.
And the Guardian’s article on the subject is very nasty: full of ‘it’s all his fault’ tattletale crap, from the headline ‘French philosophy teacher in hiding after attack on Islam’ to the accusatory subhead Writer calls Muhammad ‘mass-murderer of Jews’ to the body of the story:
But the case has divided opinion in France, with some human rights groups and academics condemning the death-threats but at the same time accusing Mr Redeker of deliberately writing a “stupid” and “nauseating” provocation.
It’s all blame the victim all the time. It’s nasty creepy submissive stuff. Some more secular fundamentalism would be welcome.
According to the BBC, Ramadan is ‘a champion of the reform of Islam’. Mostly I was surprised to find that they had been appointed to make such a judgement.
Let me know if you find it online, Arnaud – I want to read it too.
voici:
http://www.fahayek.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1142&Itemid=45
Finally!
If you can read French :
http://www.liberaux.org/index.php?showtopic=28031
Haven’t been able to find an English translation.
The article is no longer available on the original newspaper website.
It’s not that great though…
Not that great is putting it mildly. A mainstream newspaper could only have published it as an act of deliberate provocation. It calls big Mo a ‘master of hate’, and says that Islam ‘exalts violence and hatred’ even in ‘some of its everyday rites’ — parts of the Haj are described as ‘a hysterical crowd flirting with barbarism’, a ‘ritual that nurtures archaic violence’
Alright, I know, ironic, isn’t it, free speech and all that, etc etc, but silly f*cker. Anyone who wrote and published that 3 weeks ago and did not expect to be the subject of death-threats, was living in cloud-cuckoo-land, which leads me to suspect that, for all his current bewailings, this is what he wanted. Maybe it’s proving his point for him. He can’t seriously have expected it to do anything else.
It’s the kind of outburst that would make it very difficult for reasonable Muslim parents, for example, to persuade offspring tempted by jihad that, actually, there are prospects for dialogue and peaceful coexistence. And it gives an instant platform for those who would persuade such followers that, no, stabbing people is best.
And yes, he should have been able to say it, but should isn’t could.
Cue outbursts of ‘dhimmitude’,
‘Eurabia’, ‘clash of civilisations’, ‘get your arse in the air for Allah now’.
It calls the Pope a ‘master of hate’, and says that Catholicism ‘exalts violence and hatred’ even in ‘some of its everyday rites’ — parts of the mass are described as ‘a hysterical crowd flirting with canabalism, a ‘ritual that nurtures archaic violence’.
Funny, a few small changes and it looks like the the sort of polemic that any mainstream British newspaper would happily publish (especially the guardian or the Indy, I would have thought). Mr Dawkins might even feel moved to say something like it on TV. And yet, we don’t consider it an outrageous provocation.
‘The French Human Rights League criticised Mr Redeker’s “nauseating” ideas and “hateful discourse” while condemning the threats against him. “You don’t fight the ideas expressed by Mr Redeker by turning him into a victim,” it said.’
Blimey, this para from the Graun article is shocking. ‘Turning him into a victim’? He is a victim. How pusillaniomous can we get. How can a ‘Human Rights league’ be so easily confused about whose Human Rights are being abused?
The bit of this pathetic article that I was most confused by was his coverage of the ‘Idomeneo’ incident. Having suggested that they should have toned the whole thing down out of ‘respect’ he then goes on to note that local Muslim leaders wanted it to go ahead uncut and the local imam wanted to go and see it.
So what is his point exactly?
There’s a reasonable translation here. No, it’s not a great article, but there we are.
“The most nauseating racism I know of today is the belief that people’s skin colour determines their temper and their ability to reason.”
What’s that supposed to mean? Are you seriously confusing religion with race? Have you not understood that I was suggesting there might be differences *even between parents and children* in such matters?
Did anything I said suggest that it was *right* for the cretin Redeker to be threatened with death? I said it was *predictable*, with an almost 100% certainty, and that therefore such a predictable reaction ought to be considered in judging his motives, and the virtue of his position. Perhaps he is a very brave man, but if so, he is making a lot of noise now about how inadequate the protection he has been offered is.
It is tragic and wrong that he has been threatened with death, tragic and wrong that others have died for similar reasons. But is it right to make statements in order to provoke further death-threats? Is it constructive? Does it help anyone? Is it ever going to be a way past this vast and vile cultural car-crash?
Anyone who wrote and published that 3 weeks ago and did not expect to be the subject of death-threats, was living in cloud-cuckoo-land, which leads me to suspect that, for all his current bewailings, this is what he wanted. Maybe it’s proving his point for him. He can’t seriously have expected it to do anything else.
Well, I would be in cloud-cuckoo land if I ate my cake and expected to still have it – but it doesn’t mean that by eating my cake I actively desire to be down one cake. So it’s not like we can automatically infer consent nor, furthermore, that everything’s OK here – that a kind of natural justice has run its course; if that’s what was being implied. But either way, in reading the article I was amazed by just how softcore it all was. I don’t think I’d have expected anything this extreme for that kind of piece. If that is the sort of stuff you have to go into hiding for – how scary.
It’s the kind of outburst that would make it very difficult for reasonable Muslim parents, for example, to persuade offspring tempted by jihad that, actually, there are prospects for dialogue and peaceful coexistence. And it gives an instant platform for those who would persuade such followers that, no, stabbing people is best.
I’m not all that sure that demoralisation and alienation due to being unable to see a way to peacefully coexist really is what tempts young people towards jihadism – but even if it were, all this does is simply moves the discussion away from one of free speech and onto one of what might be a more pragmatic way in which to criticise Islam (if you really have to).
Incidentally, I think the ‘Western values’ to which Paul Valley referred are values such as freedom of speech, equal rights, etc… Perhaps ‘Enlightenment values’ would have been a less prejudicial term, but I don’t think he was far off.
There’s no need to get defensive about being ‘crusaders against religious darkness in the name of Western values’, though – these particular values are damn good ones. I’d rather be associated with such a ‘crusade’ than with renunciating such values as Valley seems to be urging us to do.
Did anything I said suggest that it was *right* for the cretin Redeker to be threatened with death? I said it was *predictable*, with an almost 100% certainty, and that therefore such a predictable reaction ought to be considered in judging his motives, and the virtue of his position. Perhaps he is a very brave man, but if so, he is making a lot of noise now about how inadequate the protection he has been offered is.
Well, OK, fine, but it might be worth noting then that the relevant issue here is not the virtues, motivations, courage or lack thereof of one Robert Redeker. And while they may well be very valid subjects in their own rights, introducing them into this kind of discussion is always going to be simply changing the subject at best, but more likely, an allusion to some level of justification at worst.
Mind you, I do think this Redeker sounds a bit of a pillock – and that this is a publicity stunt for his new book – bet it sells a few extra copies…
True enough!
This, as Eddie Izzard might say, sounds like a “cake or death” question. But “to be down one cake” means “to own one less cake”.
I *know* what you meant, I just didn’t think it made any sense — How can you eat your cake and not want it to be gone, as I suggested, unless someone forced it down you? Eating, like writing, is an act of will. And how can Redeker write what he did, for publication, in an inflamed public environment, and not *want*, in some sense, the pretty-damn-inevitable-if-crappy-and-unjustifiable consequence?
Being the pillock you and outeast agree he is might let him off on grounds of stupidity, but probably not.
Look, the article was in the Indy. It’s not as though it’s a serious paper any more.
What kind of journo wants to write for the Indy these days, anyway?
Well, just because you eat a cake it doesn’t mean you want to lose that cake – it simply means you want to eat it more than you want to own it.
Idomeneo – “Muslim leaders wanted it to go ‘a head uncut'”
I like that.
Dave wrote:
>It’s the kind of outburst that would make it very difficult for reasonable Muslim parents, for example, to persuade offspring tempted by jihad that, actually, there are prospects for dialogue and peaceful coexistence.< There are *always* going to be some people who express their views in an extreme or provocative way – about just about everything one can think of. If such expressions are taken by an appreciable number of young Muslims to preclude the possibility of reasonable dialogue between people holding less extreme positions then there really is no hope. If the occasional *extreme* expression of anti-Islam views is liable to tempt young British Muslims towards violent jihad, the problem surely lies within those tempted (and the kind of dogmas – religious and political – they tend to embrace) rather than with the fact that in a free society extreme views are occasionally expressed. (And as we see from the article in question, what many of us regard as excessive restraint doesn’t stop someone or other pushing the boundaries.) I think it’s instructive to try the notion in the context of an equivalent extreme statement about the role of Jews in history: “It’s the kind of outburst that would make it difficult for reasonable Jewish parents, for example, to persuade offspring tempted to respond with violence that there is any prospect of Jews living peaceably in this society.” Somehow it doesn’t work.
“Softcore, BTW? About the only thing he didn’t do was use the word ‘paedophile’ about you-know-who.”
But what he said is not obviously false. It’s blunt, it’s critical, but it’s not mere abuse, and it’s not obviously false. Yet, apparently, he’s a bad bad bad boy for saying it. This is nasty, depressing, submissive stuff. Very reminiscent of February 1989 in fact.
“If such expressions are taken by an appreciable number of young Muslims to preclude the possibility of reasonable dialogue between people holding less extreme positions then there really is no hope. If the occasional *extreme* expression of anti-Islam views is liable to tempt young British Muslims towards violent jihad, the problem surely lies within those tempted (and the kind of dogmas – religious and political – they tend to embrace) rather than with the fact that in a free society extreme views are occasionally expressed.”
That’s only valid up to a point. Once again, in France at least, such opinions (loosely qualified as “homophobic”) most of the time are only expressed as a camouflage for more racists (and often rabidly so) views. Obviously it’s not the case with all of society – at least not anymore, a lot of progress has been made since I grew up in the seventies, progress alas partially occulted by the rise of the Front National – and probably not with the idiotic Redeker, but the problem is still there, and obvious, if you are a member of the ethnic minority in question. There is no hope of a “reasonable dialogue” here. It is extremely sad because both the theoretical approach of the French republic – integration through education – and the willingness of the initial immigrant population to amalgam themselves in French society (notably because they were, as Muslims go, already quite secularised) where set to make a success of it. It was all torpedoed by the ambient racism in that society and by the lack of political will to address it.
At least in the UK, where I live now, even if the political approach was wrong (namely a lack of pressure put on the immigrant population to integrate), there was and is, from both government and businesses, a real will not to tolerate this kind of behaviour.
End of rant. I just wanted to point out that the situation in France cannot be read in the same way you would in the UK for instance.
For ‘homophobic’ read ‘Islamophobic’?
Thanks Arnaud. French input highly useful.
Jean-Charles Brisard has a series of articles on Tariq Ramadan at the Terror Finance Blog: http://www.terrorfinance.org/the_terror_finance_blog/2006/10/tariq_ramadan_s.html
Allen: yes, but…. That is not the situation, is it? The jihadist threat, to put it that way, is real. It’s a Bad Thing, but naming it thus is not going to make it go away. Likewise, being rude about Islam, even if we might agree that such rudeness has a basis in fact, is not helpful. There are many people out there who would, I fear, like nothing better than to organise a confrontation between Islam and ‘the West’ that would solve the matter once and for all. Maybe that will happen. If it does, we can be assured that it will need to be a conflict on a scale that we have not seen in Europe since 1945. Unless there is a magic wand available that I am not aware of. I think if there were someone would have waved it by now. Meanwhile, in the hope that in fact some form of reasonable life can be preserved from the coming maelstrom, I think it would help if deliberately provocative statements were avoided. Perhaps I am wrong. In the meantime it displeases me to see it argued, in effect, that a cretin like Redeker can become legitimised by virtue of being threatened.
Arnaud – the racsism that provoked the riots in November 05 was plain to me – I assume you are a native of that country – do you feel there to be a sense in which the harsh racial economics of les banliues has been hijacked by a number of interested parties, from Islamists crying wolf, to whacko libertarians selling books?
There were racial attacks in Northern England, culminating in a riot in recent years – all of it stemming from skin colour prejudices since the 50s. Since 7/7 the abuse from the increasingly popular far right here has become focussed on ‘Islam’, and in this sense casual but entrenched racism in the UK continues with renewed vigour; you can hear it eveywhere, and the words ‘muslem’ and ‘immigrant’ have replaced ‘nigger’ and ‘paddy’.
I do wonder why the press that appeals to centre/liberal sensibilities so often presents the problem as one of theological and philosophical points, where universal rights campaigners are paraded as colonialist thugs when the reality is that real thugs and boot boys are picking on Pakistani and Bangladeshi lads all over England, and the Asian youth have been used by politically motivated Imams to empower their church:
“The French council for imams, the biggest umbrella body for Muslim imams in France, was established in April 1992 with the ultimate goal of closing Muslim ranks”
http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2005-01/22/article04.shtml
Paul Vallely cites them in his closing remarks
“The liberty of expression is invoked every time someone wants to stigmatise Islam. There is a climate of Islamophobia in France.”
But has he checked what their political stance and strategy is ? After criticisng the press for only ever going after the ‘wild men’ rather than moderates, he pitches in with this, and the endless slanging continues.
Dave, if ‘rudeness is not helpful’, why do you keep referring to Redeker as a ‘cretin’? Intemperate language, no?
Cartoons, invective, arguments couched in sober prose or impassioned babble… all need to continue. That’s the variety of life, the refusal to be silenced whether by imams or priests or rabbis or (re the Idomeneo production) fundamentalist Poseidonists.
I think Dave has this one about right. Whether such freedoms are force-fed by stealth bombers or by arrogant loud-mouths, the outcomes are similarly counterproductive.
This is not to say the alarm is unfounded. There may be a few seats in the dress circle beginning to smoulder – but even now the full cry of ‘Fire’ might not be the most sensible way of dealing with it.
“ones which recognise the inalienable right to freedom of expression but which, at the same time, demand it be exercised in a measured way.”
Freedom of speech is a paper tiger if it must be exercised in a “measured way”. Who decides what a “measured way” is? Presumably the public ( unless we are going to be “measured” about democracy as well). If only speech which is considered in some sense ‘reasonable’ is permitted then there is no real right to free speech whatsoever because ever society has permitted what it considers ‘reasonable’ speech. For freedom of speech to be anything more than so much chaff therefore it must be permissable to exercise it in a way that is not “measured”.
For a right to be worth mentioning it must permit behaviour percieved by many to be unreasonable or forbid behaviour frequently thought of as reasonable ( like cruel or unusual punishment and holding people indefinitely without a fair trial, something, a right, by the way, I am disappointed Butterflies and Wheels has not done more to protest in the last few days if I may be so blunt).
But any way, great parsing.
I came off as a a jerk in the last part of that comment, sorry. But I am geninuely bemused, why hasn’t B&W done more to protest the passing of the great writ?
Arnaud : “we are touching on the limits of free speech: when the concept as it applies legitimately in the domain of ideas is used to revendicate the right to racial hate mongering.”
How often does it have to be said? Islam is a religion, and thus a choice. ‘Muslim’ is not a racial category.
Frank, replace ‘Islam’ with ‘Judaism’, ‘Muslim’ with ‘Jew’, same argument? But we know that ‘Jew’ is a racial term — and indeed, in the wrong tone of voice, a racial epithet.
And Timothy, there is, therefore, as you say, no right to free speech. I am not allowed, by law, to call someone a f*cking c*nt in the street, it is a breach of the peace. If I wrote a letter to someone calling them a f*cking n*gger I would be committing at least one and probably two criminal offences. I am not allowed to comment openly on the sexual attractiveness of my colleagues in such a way as they might find uncomfortable. Need I go on?
A realm where freedom of speech is absolute, without fear of physical retaliation or legal constraint, is only possible somewhere like the blogosphere. And there, it seems to me, it has led not to a utopia, but to a morass of screeching hatreds. One need only peruse the Guardian’s CiF site to see that.
BTW, on the whole ‘freedom’ thing generally this week, read Garrison Keillor:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100506P.shtml
Dave, there may be no absolute right to free speech but there is some right, allbeit circumscribed. You may move in extremely polite circles but some of us are not infrequently labelled with expletives, and I can assure you that we do not call the police every time someone says or shouts “You stupid c**t”. Some of us even entertain our own fallibility.
I repeat what I said, those are concrete examples of speech-acts it is illegal to perform in the UK. I never said people didn’t do them, I said they weren’t allowed to. People aren’t allowed to kill each other, either. Or indeed, to smack someone in the mouth if they call them a rude name. Or, for that matter, to exceed the posted speed-limit on the public highway. Still happens, but it doesn’t make it a right.
As for entertaining fallibility, well, some people’s is more entertaining than others. Still, I know I’m right. That’s one of the rights of the blogosphere, isn’t it, to be right all the time?
Dave : “replace ‘Islam’ with ‘Judaism’, ‘Muslim’ with ‘Jew’, same argument?”
Yes, same argument. There will always be people who misrepresent, twist, indeed misunderstand. That’s unavoidable.
So one cannot make a fiery denunciation of the religion of Islam, because that might be read as an attack on all Muslim people, and one cannot make a fiery denunciation of the Israeli government because that might be read as an attack on all Jewish people? (And so on.)
The alternative is self-censorship, the muffling of debate, and silence. Sounds terrific.
My late mother, who like mothers everywhere was probably right, used to say there was no point in being dead right, (if it meant being both).
Umm, no, apparently one cannot, in either case, without becoming the subject of vilification, and possibly worse. Which is dreadful. What are you going to do about it? As for me, I’ll just quote myself:
“There are many people out there who would, I fear, like nothing better than to organise a confrontation between Islam and ‘the West’ that would solve the matter once and for all. Maybe that will happen. If it does, we can be assured that it will need to be a conflict on a scale that we have not seen in Europe since 1945. Unless there is a magic wand available that I am not aware of. I think if there were someone would have waved it by now. Meanwhile, in the hope that in fact some form of reasonable life can be preserved from the coming maelstrom, I think it would help if deliberately provocative statements were avoided. Perhaps I am wrong.”
If we cannot make deliberately provocative statements about primitive and damaging ideologies then the life that is preserved from the coming maelstrom may be many things, but it will not be reasonable.
And after you have deliberately provoked, what happens? What’s the up-side? How’s it good, apart from you getting it off your chest? As I said above, the real world is not the blogosphere. Out there people get hurt. Out there, attacking ‘Islam’ is now a favourite pastime of the kind of fascist that I sincerely hope you aren’t. Whoop-de-doo, what a result for free speech and liberal values. If you think nothing can be done by remaining reasonable, if you are convinced that an apocalyptic confrontation is inevitable, then go for it, that’s your choice, but you’re taking me, everyone I know, everyone I don’t know, with you. So thanks, from all of us.
There’s a problem identifying – in advance – what counts as a ‘provocation’. (Let’s ignore the ‘deliberate’ part for a moment.)
Jack Straw has just ‘enraged’ the usual suspects with a calmly argued local newspaper article on the full veil. John Reid suggested reasonably that parents might want to look out for signs of pathological violence in their children. The Danish cartoons were pretty anodyne.
Whipped-up expressions of rage and offence are not confined to (for example) Redeker’s type of invective. No mild murmur of criticism is possible without ‘provoking’ those who choose to be provoked.
Timothy,
“But I am geninuely bemused, why hasn’t B&W done more to protest the passing of the great writ?”
Well, there are items in News. But there have been a lot of other News items lately, so perhaps they don’t stand out. But they’re there.
By the way – outeast, I meant to comment on this yesterday but forgot –
“There’s no need to get defensive about being ‘crusaders against religious darkness in the name of Western values’, though – these particular values are damn good ones.”
It’s the ‘Western’ label that I quarrel with. I flatly disagree that they are particularly ‘Western’, and I don’t want to argue for them on geographic or local grounds, I want to argue for them precisely because (and to the extent that) they are universalizable. I think ‘Western’ is a bad (and often absent-minded) shorthand for secular or liberal or both.
OB nobody will argue with that, but they might question your emphasis on the ‘western’ label when most of the foregoing and perhaps the issue at large is in captured that other word ‘crusade’?
This is all about an approach and a method so that getting there (your ‘universalizable’ bit) avoids (the illusion of) coercion, even conflict and is achieved by example and persuausion. None of this is best delegated to bulls in chinashops. You can be a long time dead right.
You can feign rage and frustration at my chosing to comment on what you didn’t say, and yes you have a point, but the problem here is that while the cleverclogs of this world can ‘sigh’ and move on to another day in blogshere, for the less articulate, such outlets do not exist and such frustration finds other nastier outlets. It surely behooves the wordsmiths to know when to button their beaks?
I’m not feigning anything, and that wasn’t rage, it was irritation – because yes, I do have a point: I think it’s pretty obvious that if I repudiate the ‘Western’ idea I’m not likely to embrace the ‘crusade’ aspect.
‘It surely behooves the wordsmiths to know when to button their beaks?’
Okay, charlie, spell it out for me: when exactly should I (according to you) shut up? And for that matter what the hell is your point? That because the less articulate who aren’t cleverclogs find nastier outlets for their frustration, therefore wordsmiths should know when to shut up? There’s something missing there – I don’t get the logic.
Firstly, my comment is neither aimed at you nor B&W particularly being rather more peripheral than say those who compose newspaper headlines or comment, or hold political office, but common sense seems lacking in a volatile situaion that some from both sides maybe intent on inflaming. Dave above has saved me going into this any further. Of course such freedoms are important and B&W has its part to play, but do we want veils of ignorance ending in vales of tears when temperance might be a wiser counsel? You may disagree on the volatility.
Dave will, I hope, be pleased to hear that I do not regard myself as a fascist. I do regard myself as the kind of liberal who gets pissed off when people who seem to be extremely authoritarian and dogmatic insist that their right to take offence trumps my right to criticise. Let’s all keep as quiet and temperate as little mice and then we shall see who the fascists really are. Anyone taking bets?
Two interesting texts exist concerning Ramadan.
‘Frère Tariq’ Caroline Fourest. (Grasset) 2004
and’Tariq Ramadan dévoilé ‘ Lionel Favrot; Lyon Mag’ 2004.
I suspect that an acquaintance with the facts detailed therein may help to explain the the agenda of Hassan Al Banna’s grandson.
Here we go again.
Islam is a religion.
All religions kill, enslave and torture.
All Religions are balckmail.
Here we see a classic example of religious blackmail.
The christians used to behave like this, and some are trying to again, now that the muslims have shown that they can get away with it ……
OB
Sorry for getting back to your response so late – I’ve been off work.
You say “It’s the ‘Western’ label that I quarrel with. I flatly disagree that they are particularly ‘Western’…”
See, this is the claim I’ve never quite ‘got’. As I said, ‘Western’ could be replaced with ‘Enlightenment’ (the geographical thing is hooey)…
…but then there’s that strange idea of ‘universalization’. Clearly you don’t mean that they are universal values, because otherwise you’d have said that; quite clearly, too, they are values that are not shared by the majority of our fellow travellers on this gobbet of dirt. So what does this ‘universalization’ entail? A post hoc rationalization arguing for the universal adoption of those values? That’s all it seems to be to me. Unless you mean simply on a pragmatic level – that freedom of speech, say, can be extended to everyone regardless of creed, where the special status afforded followers of a god cannot? But how does that change the historical fact of these values being developments of the ‘Western’ and ‘Enlightenment’ heritage?
As I said, I defend values such as equal rights, freedom of speech etc etc and consider this set of values to be better than those offered by religions; however, I think it’s clear that these are my cultural legacy; they are ‘Western’ or ‘Enlightenment’ values – I may shy away from framing them as such in order to make my advocacy thereof more palatable to anti-Westerners, but that doesn’t change history.
outeast,
Well one item is that I don’t know nearly enough about Asian, African, etc history to know that ideas such as equal rights and freedom of speech were entirely non-existent and inconceivable anywhere anytime other than 18th century Europe – and I do know enough about pre-18th century European history to suspect that there were at least rudimentary stirrings of such ideas elsewhere. Call it postcolonial guilt if you like, but I do think it’s presumptuous and a little blind to assume that, for instance, equal rights is such an alien idea that it occurred to no one outside Europe. Just for one thing, Montaigne got his ideas of an egalitarian utopian world from accounts of the new world; for another, Thomas More’s utopia was (partly) egalitarian; for another, peasant rebellions obviously relied on some form of ideas of equal rights, which makes it seem not unreasonable to extrapolate to peasants in other continents.
And then apart from that, they’re certainly not Western or Enlightenment values now, because they done spread. Just ask Amartya Sen.
The Thomas More bit is unclear. My point was that if he could have such thoughts in a conspicuously unegalitarian time and place, so could other people in other unegalitarian times and places. I think the idea of equal rights is not so arcane and weird and unthinkable that it never crossed anyone’s mind until it crossed that of some 18th C French guys.
(Diggers, Levellers, etc; the Wife of Bath; Medea; etc etc etc.)
Hm, I think there’s a bit of a straw man here since I certainly was not suggesting ‘that ideas such as equal rights and freedom of speech were entirely non-existent and inconceivable anywhere anytime other than 18th century Europe’; so far as I know, though, the establishment of secured and universal rights is something that has only grown out of the European Enlightenment tradition (with, obviously, the archetype for the establishment thereof being found in the US constitution).
Of course ‘they done spread’; the extent to which they’ve been assimilated elsewhere is limited, though, and in much of the world they continue to be regarded (and often derided) as Western imports. Just ask Amartya Sen:)
You talk of ‘rudimentary stirrings’, ‘some form of ideas of equal rights’, etc etc. I think this hides one very critical point: there have been many, many framings of some sort of (usually partial) equality but these have AFAIK generally (not uniquely, but largely) been framed in a religious perspective – hence the Hussites, the Fransiscans, arguably Buddhism etc. Our modern framing of rights is secular, and that is something distincively Western Enlightenment.
I suppose it’s that modern framing thing that’s the point.
Okay; I see what you’re saying.
Framed in a religious perspective – possibly, at least at the official level. But I doubt it at the popular level. People on the bottom, not surprisingly, think of equal rights, and that thinking doesn’t make it into the official record or framing.
Maybe I’m being dishonest or politically manipulative or evasive about this – but I don’t think so. I don’t like insisting on the putative Western Enlightenment provenance of the idea, for a lot of reasons – maybe mostly just that it sounds repellently smug. If it reflects historical truth perhaps that ought not to matter, but I’m sufficiently unconvinced that the history is quite that simple and clear-cut to think so.
I wish I could really believe that “People on the bottom … think of equal rights” – my sense is that generally they only think about evening out those injustices that disadvantage them, and are less concerned with extending the same effort to defend the equality of others (yes, of course there are multiple notable exceptions but I am generalizing).
Anyway, I am not trying to pick a fight over this – as you rightly say, in this instance it come down to what is “historical truth” and I am not about to set myself up as an expert in the historical taxonomy of the philosophy of rights:)