Suffer the Little Children
I wanted to add just a couple of quick things about the Scruton piece on irony and Islam. I like to nail these things down, man.
One, I think Scruton was using the “gratuitous” to have it both ways: placating people who think jokes about “people’s beliefs” should be taboo while still arguing that non-gratuitous jokes are not taboo.
Now of course it is wrong to give gratuitous offence to people of other faiths; it is right to respect people’s beliefs, when these beliefs pose no threat to civil order…
“Gratuitous” is a very flexible word that way. Many people were absolutely certain that Rushdie’s humour in The Satanic Verses was utterly gratuitous, and many people were just as certain that it wasn’t; and so with other jokes, other movies, other plays, other novels, other performances at the Edinburgh fringe, and so on. Scruton may have been doing a spot of CYA there.
And then the bit about suffering –
Ordinary Christians, who suffer a daily diet of ridicule and skepticism, cannot help feeling that Muslims protest too much, and that the wounds, which they ostentatiously display to the world, are largely self-inflicted.
Suffer can easily mean two things there, and actually the less obvious meaning fits better. Suffer means not just endure pain, but simply endure: put up with, take, allow to happen. You can suffer something to happen without being pained by it and without its being painful. I think what he means there is primarily Christians daily put up with ridicule, without making a big fuss about it – rather than, Christians are daily tormented by ridicule. And yet, as I said, it’s tricksy, because it means both, and most people will probably read it the more usual way. But then again maybe it’s not really tricksy, since the two meanings overlap.
There; I’m glad we got that straight.
Me too.
Like I said, for a philosopher, Scrotum doesn’t seem to be able to think straight – even when he’s writing things down.
There’s a simple reason for that, Mr. Tingey. Roger Scruton is not a very good philosopher. Indeed, he is quite a bad one – for exactly the reason OB pointed out in the previous post. One isn’t doing inquiry (philosophical or otherwise) when one decides in advance what the conclusions are, and Scruton seems always to be certain about his conclusions well in advance of their justifications.
There are very many poor philosophers, of course. Scads, really. More bad philosophers than good ones, by anyone’s measure. Of course, philosophers tend to disagree substantially about which other philosophers should be lumped together with the good and the bad, so that “anyone’s measure” phrase is misleading: Everyone does their measuring using different sticks.
That said, some standards are (or ought to be) universal. Taking money from profiteers who peddle addictive poisons to defend their industry is, for example, a decided no-no.