Month: February 2006

One thing that occurs to me about this cartoon spat…is that I’ve never actually much liked political cartoons, and this underlines why. I suppose, if I’m going to be completely honest (and I suppose I have to be, don’t I, since I’m always yapping about it), I have to admit that in this sense I may be able to see some point in what the “no need to be offensive” crowd are saying. Only some, mind you, and without all their horrible pious drivel about religious beliefs. I like some political cartoons, the kind that rely on extended strips with plenty of words, like Garry Trudeau’s or Jules Feiffer’s or Marjane Satrapi’s. But the one-panel ones that rely heavily on facial caricature? Not so much. I’ve been pondering this a little, and realizing that’s not particularly surprising. It’s like the difference between someone disagreeing with you by making faces and talking in a silly voice and jumping around, and disagreeing with you by discussing the subject at issue in calm, reasoned language. The first is pretty much always a lot more irritating than the second, and for pretty obvious reasons – the first is just about making fun of you, without properly saying why. Just grimacing and saying ‘Nyah nyah, yer mother wears army boots and you smell bad’ isn’t really instructive, whereas the second approach gets to what it is that is at issue. The second approach is explicit, while the first one is not. Cartoons are all about synechdoche, and synechdoche is fine for some purposes, but for substantive disagreement, it probably isn’t. So the people who talk about caricatures of Jews have a point – caricatures aren’t about reasons, they’re just about ‘we hate you you’re ugly’. That’s not an argument.

So…I think Islam ought to be criticised and reasoned with up one side and down the other, without cease, by as many people as possible – but, for preference, in language, not in mocking pictures.

Which means, I’ve realized with some qualms, that I’m sort of arguing that straightforward rational discussion is better for this kind of thing than satire or ‘art’. I sort of hate to say that! And yet…I think it’s true. The trouble with art is that it can’t explain itself, it can’t reply, its consumers can’t reply to it – it’s just there, given. And it usually doesn’t explain itself in the first place – that’s rather the point of its being art as opposed to an article. Art just isn’t particularly good at making argumentative points; that’s not what it does best, or well. The very ambiguity and room for interpretation that make it art make it also bad at being explicit. It’s extremely hard to argue with the non-explicit. Cartoons don’t really have propositional content. The one with the bomb in the turban, for example – that could mean several things.

Make of that what you will.

Skeptico is observing its first birthday with a teasing post in a satirical (but not mocking, or offensive, or disrespectful, or blasphemous, nononono) vein. Views on why the poultry traversed the highway, in the style of various people – James Randi, our dear friend Sylvia Browne, Deepak Chopra, Prince Chuck, and many more. I’m there, being predictable as usual. [curtsies politely]

Well here’s a new wrinkle. Here’s a new outpost of the global war on secularism and rational thought. Here’s a new battalion of God’s Holy Warriors, a new incursion by the ambassadors of theocracy. Barely post-pubescent White House hacks with shiny new journalism degrees and whole months of experience working on political campaigns, explaining cosmology to the benighted people at NASA and telling them what to say – and that’s just one example.

A week after NASA’s top climate scientist complained that the space agency’s public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming, the agency’s administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a sharply worded statement yesterday calling for “scientific openness” throughout the agency. “It is not the job of public-affairs officers,” Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency’s 19,000 employees, “to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA’s technical staff.”…Other National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists and public-affairs employees came forward this week to say that beyond Dr. Hansen’s case, there were several other instances in which political appointees had sought to control the flow of scientific information from the agency…In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word “theory” after every mention of the Big Bang…

Oh, not that again…

The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the “war room” of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements. In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word “theory” needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang. The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.” It continued: “This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.”

Is that staggering, or what?! It’s not NASA’s place to make a ‘declaration’ about the ‘existence’ of the universe (does Deutsch want to deny the existence of the universe? Is he plotting some kind of quasi-Berkeleyian move? Or did he mean to say ‘origin’ and then get confused?) that discounts intelligent design by a creator! Shades of Kansas and its exciting new science curriculum that has been rewritten in order not to rule out supernatural explanations; shades of the dear clever Dover school board that got its head handed to it first by the electorate and then by Judge Jones; only more so, if only because of the breathtaking conceit – even, dare I say, arrogance. Remember that fool Haggard lecturing Dawkins – ‘But please, don’t be arrogant’ – right after inadvertently revealing his own entire ignorance of evolution coupled with his eagerness to set a zoologist straight on the subject? This is like that. Or like that combined with The Adventures of Brownie in New Orleans, or those two combined with Dennis the Menace or Home Alone. A youthful hack with a political-reward job tells people at NASA what’s what about the Big Bang! And tells them they’re not allowed to ‘discount’ intelligent design by a creator! And then comes right out and says it’s a religious issue! I’d better stop before I run out of exclamation points – but you must admit, it is quite something. I keep shaking my head in disbelief – it is not NASA’s place. It is not NASA’s place! Oy veh.

PZ comments at Pharyngula. So does Phil at Bad Astronomy.

More. It keeps getting worse and worse and worse, as more people drop to the ground and display their pale soft bellies beseechingly, all the while crooning melodic horseshit about their profound respect for free speech as long as no one ever actually uses it for anything.

The Guardian.

The Guardian believes uncompromisingly in freedom of expression, but not in any duty to gratuitously offend…To directly associate the founder of one of the world’s three great monotheistic religions with terrorist violence – the unmistakable meaning of the most explicit of these cartoons – is wrong, even if the intention was satirical rather than blasphemous.

Freedom of expression, huh huh huh, but don’t go gratuitously offending now. Don’t offend unless somebody gives you a lot of money for it, and it’s absolutely safe to do so, and no one will be offended except one very small dull ineffectual person that no one pays any attention to. And what’s this crap about ‘one of the world’s three great monotheistic religions’? What’s so great about it? What’s so great about any of them? Why are we expected to grovel before them and defer to them and refrain from saying anything disrespectful or accusing about any of their ‘founders’?

In this country concerns about Islamophobia have been accompanied by increased sensitivity to the feelings of Muslims…The extraordinary unanimity of the British press in refraining from publishing the drawings – in contrast to the Nordic countries, Germany, Spain and France – speaks volumes. John Stuart Mill is a better guide to this issue than Voltaire.

‘Increased sensitivity’ resulting in increased social pressure to shut up shut up shut up – to refrain from ever under any circumstances saying anything skeptical or critical about Islam. Increased sensitivity is not always an unmixed blessing.

To be fair, the leader gets better after that, but that’s a remarkably bad beginning, I think.

For refreshment, turn to Ibn Warraq – who also cites Mill, but with an implication contrary to the Guardian’s.

The great British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, “Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being ‘pushed to an extreme’; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.” The cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten raise the most important question of our times: freedom of expression. Are we in the west going to cave into pressure from societies with a medieval mindset, or are we going to defend our most precious freedom — freedom of expression, a freedom for which thousands of people sacrificed their lives? A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend…Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest.

Matthew Parris in the Times also refreshes.

I’m afraid we really do have to decide whether the demand is reasonable. I do not think it is. I am not a Muslim. Nor am I a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu. Now it’s very easy to murmur “I am not a Muslim/Christian/Jew/Hindu” as though not being something was terribly inoffensive – a sin, at worst, of omission; a way of avoiding an argument – the suggestion, perhaps, that “your” religion may be “true for you” but, as for me, I’ll sit this one out. But let us not duck what that “I do not believe” really means. It means I do not believe that there is one God, Allah, or that Muhammad is His Prophet. It means I do not believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, or that no man cometh to the Father except by Him…In my opinion these views are profoundly mistaken, and those who subscribe to them are under a serious misapprehension on a most important matter. Not only are their views not true for me: they are not true for them. They are not true for anyone. They are wrong.

Just so. And since they are wrong, we should not be expected to obey them or defer to them. And yet it is only these wrong views that we are expected to defer to and be ‘sensitive’ about. Robust views that have some contact with the real world are expected to take care of themselves; it’s the mistaken ones that race around screaming for respect.

Cutting through the babble of well-meaning souls who like to speak of the “community” of belief among “people of faith”, this must also be what the Muslim is saying to the Christian, Jew or Hindu; or what the Christian must be saying to the Jew, Hindu or Muslim. These faiths make demands and assert truths that are not compatible with the demands and truths of other faiths. To assert one must be to deny the others…People of faith and people of none cannot escape attaching themselves to claims that are inherently offensive – and at the deepest level – to other people. But offence implicitly offered, and offence actually taken, are two different matters.

And if we embark on this course of threats and arson, firings and imprisonment, beatings and killings, every time anyone is offended by anything – why, it will be hardly any time at all before there is nothing left of this particular species but six and a half billion rotting corpses. So let’s not do that.

Back to the real world, where cartoons ‘are’ representations of Mohammed – some depressing oxymoronism from Jack Straw. Of course we respect free speech, but you can’t say that; of course everyone has a right to free speech, but no one can insult religion. Well which is it, bub? It ain’t both! I’m not a free speech absolutist, as I’ve said many times, but this idea that free speech is okay as long as it doesn’t offend anyone is sheer jam tomorrow. If we can’t say anything that might offend someone, our speech is pretty damn restricted, isn’t it!

Speaking after talks with the Sudanese foreign minister, Mr Straw said: “There is freedom of speech, we all respect that. But there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory. I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been insulting, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong. There are taboos in every religion. It is not the case that there is open season in respect of all aspects of Christian rites and rituals in the name of free speech.

Oh? Really? What does he mean? That it’s illegal to say ‘offensive’ things about some aspects of Christian rites and rituals? (Perhaps he’s thinking of the dear blasphemy law.) Does he mean that if one says ‘offensive’ things about some aspects of Christian rites and rituals, the result will be violent riots and death threats, and that that’s a good thing? If neither of those, what does he mean? What, exactly, does he mean?

Nor is it the case that there is open season in respect of rights and rituals of the Jewish religion, the Hindu religion, the Sikh religion. It should not be the case in respect of the Islamic religion either. We have to be very careful about showing the proper respect in this situation.

Do we? Why? And why doesn’t that work the other way? Why don’t people who want to prevent free speech on the subject of religion have to be very careful about showing the proper respect for our beliefs? Because we don’t chant ‘”7/7 is on its way” while also waving placards and burning flags, during a march through London to the Danish, French and German embassies’? Because we don’t threaten to blow up 57 random people as revenge for our feeling offended?

More bullying oxymoronism, this sample from Bunglawala.

UK Muslims have denied that the reaction to the cartoons’ reproduction has been a threat to freedom of speech. It was a “question of exercising good judgement”, said Inayat Bunglawala, from the Muslim Council of Britain…”Of course Europe has the right to freedom of speech, and of course newspapers have the right to publish offensive cartoons. This was really a question about exercising good judgment,” he said. “Knowing full well the nature of these cartoons, they were offensive, deeply offensive to millions of Muslims, these newspaper editors should have exercised better judgment.”

But of course Europe has the right to freedom of speech, and of course the reaction to the cartoons is not a threat to freedom of speech. How silly! Of course you can have your pesky freedom of speech! You just can’t say anything we don’t like, that’s all! What is the big stinking deal?

That is a really massively irritating trope – that saying you can have free speech and then instantly saying the opposite, in the very same breath. At leas they could have the honesty to say what they mean – ‘No, you can’t have free speech, because you say things we don’t like, so you have to shut up. And shut up about your free speech, too.’

I’ve had exactly the same thought Mediawatchwatch has had – remembering Stephen Fry at the Hay Festival last summer, talking with Hitchens, talking about the two words that have taken on a creepy resonance (and I knew what they were before he said them), ‘offended’ and ‘respect’. And I can hear him saying what Mediawatchwatch quotes him saying – ‘So you’re offended. So fucking what?’

Wait, hold on – something has just crossed my tiny mind. These cartoons – that are so ‘offensive’ because they are cartoons of Mohammed – how do the people who are so offended know they are cartoons of Mohammed? There aren’t, like, photographs of him, right? Not to mention the fact that it’s a no-no to make pictures of him anyway, so that if there were photos of him, they’d all have been thrown away by now. But surely it’s much more likely that they weren’t taken in the first place, and that drawings, paintings, watercolours, engravings, etchings, and silhouettes were not made either. And even if they had been they’d probably be pretty dilapidated by now. Pretty crumbly and curly at the edges and faded – at best. And then who knows how accurate the artists would have been, if they had taken any likenesses, which they probably didn’t, on account of how it was taboo (as we keep being reminded, because we’re so likely to forget, with all this shouting going on)? So – let’s face it – nobody knows what the guy looked like. It was fourteen hundred years ago after all. It’s like Jesus. People think they know what he looked like, but they don’t really – they know what Raphael and Rembrandt and people like that thought he looked like. But they didn’t know, see, so that doesn’t help. There’s not, like, an unbroken chain of accurate portrayals of Jesus going all the way back to 35 CE, is there. Same deal with the prophet. Nobody knows what the guy looked like. No idea. Now I know what you’re thinking – well he looked like the cartoons! Mediterranean, bearded, kind of burly (because he was a powerful guy), kind of impressive-looking, a mensch – dark hair, big features – kind of like – oh, Anthony Quinn, say. Well no doubt you’re right, but I have to tell you, we don’t actually know that. Seriously. Nobody does. (Don’t forget the taboo thing.)

So what I’m wondering is, why on earth do all these offended people think the cartoons are of Mohammed? Because the cartoonists said so? Because they have, like, ‘Mohammed’ scribbled somewhere along the edge or on the bottom? Because of the pose and the turban? Well – that’s not much of a reason! I can do that! I can draw a picture of a dog or a cat or a bag of carrots or a teapot (no, not the one that orbits the sun, a different one) and say it’s a drawing of Mohammed, but what good does that do? Me just saying it’s Mohammed doesn’t make it Mohammed, does it. So why does a cartoonist saying it’s Mohammed make it Mohammed?

Now that I’ve had my fun, that’s actually a serious question, as well as a mocking one. Really – why do all the offended people accept that the cartoons are of Mohammed? Because a bunch of non-Muslim Danish cartoonists say they are? But how would they know? And what are they, magic? They can transform a drawing of some generic bearded guy in a turban into a representation of a specific person who died fourteen centuries ago? How? By saying so, by writing his name underneath, by the context of the jokes. But that still doesn’t make the cartoons cartoons of the actual Mohammed – not for people who just don’t accept that that’s what they are. Why don’t all the infuriated Muslims just laugh and shrug and ignore the whole thing? Why don’t they just say ‘those goofy Danish cartoonists, pretending they’ve drawn pictures of Mohammed – like they have any idea what he looked like. I’m so sure’? Why don’t they just say ‘you guys don’t know what Mohammed looked like any more than we do, and probably less (because we have this like inner intuition, which is denied to non-Muslims), so dream on – draw your stupid little pictures if you want to, we don’t care, it’s nothing to do with us’?

Actually the whole taboo is empty, it’s a taboo without a referent. It’s like a taboo on walking on water, or a taboo on sleeping on the wing of a jet plane when it’s in flight. Nobody can make a representation of Mohammed, it’s quite, quite impossible – so why worry about it? Just making representations of a man and naming them Mohammed doesn’t make them Mohammed – so why on earth worry about it?

Because the cartoons were a provocation, were meant to offend, and so on and so on. Hmm. Not really. The shouting is all about the guy himself, and how terribly terribly forbidden it all is. So – why don’t they just wake up and realize that those cartoons are not Mohammed, not in any way, because they can’t be? Why not just laugh at the pretensions of cartoonists and forget all about it?

This occurred to me while looking at the cartoons on Groep Wilders’s blog. Surely it must have occurred to a lot of people. Those are just lines on paper. We all have to buy into the idea that they are cartoons of Mohammed; otherwise they just stay lines on paper. Why buy into the idea if you don’t like it then? Very odd, people are – we believe our own lies.