Does it include the freedom to offend?
Much of the French press reprinted the Danish cartoons last year, no UK newspaper did; Jack Straw ‘called the Europeans’ decision “disrespectful” and said freedom of speech did not mean “open season” on religious taboos.’ Anthony Grayling thinks the UK press should have published the toons, to the shock of a journalist.
Free speech is not a secondary issue but “the fundamental right, from which all other rights flow. Without it, you cannot elect a free parliament or defend yourself in a court of law”. Does it include the freedom to offend?
What a farking stupid question. Of course it does. If free speech doesn’t include the freedom to ‘offend’ it doesn’t include very damn much, does it! If free speech doesn’t include the freedom to ‘offend’ then why bother to use the phrase at all? Why not just replace it with enslaved speech or submissive speech and let it go at that?
Emphatically yes, he says. If political views cannot be protected from a cartoonist’s pen, why should religious views? “It’s the rent that has to be paid in a free society. This is a lesson Muslims have got to learn.” The lesson, he says, is that mocking a belief is quite different from mocking an individual. “Many Muslims take it personally. But it’s not about them personally.”
It’s not about them personally, and the crucial point here is that taking it personally is a really gross attack not just on free speech but on free thought and free inquiry. It’s infantile, it’s narcissistic, and it’s an assault on everyone’s ability and freedom to think openly and freely about large general impersonal significant subjects that must be thought about. That’s especially true given that Islam is a religion with large universalist claims. It prides itself on not being local or parochial or ethnic or national. It’s meant to be for everyone – either as a gift or as an imposition on pain of being unexpectedly blown up or beheaded. Well, if it’s meant to be for everyone, then everyone has to be able to think about it and discuss it, in the same way that everyone has to be able to discuss capitalism and socialism and communism, taxation and law and ethics, markets and universities and courts. We don’t get to take it personally if someone says something critical or mocking about the property tax or Bill Smith University; we don’t get to take it personally and say everyone must shut up because we’re offended.
In the Anglo-Saxon world these are unusual positions for someone who places himself on the left. What’s more, Grayling is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Council for Western-Muslim Understanding. But if one idea runs through his 27 books, many articles, television appearances and a life as a prominent public intellectual, it is the importance of liberty and free speech. If one thing worries him, it is that the West’s secular, liberal tradition is under threat.
These positions are not as unusual as all that in ‘the Anglo-Saxon world’ for someone on the left! They’re not a bit unusual around here, for example – as Anthony knows, even if James Button doesn’t.
[T]he culprit is belief itself. “To believe something in the face of evidence and against reason – to believe something by faith – is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect,” he writes in Against All Gods, published this year.
James Button (like so many people) seems to find that excessive in some way – which is mildly depressing. Does he think that to believe something in the face of evidence and against reason in fact merits respect? Has he thought it through?
OB, the latest Private Eye (Peace Be Upon It) has two comic pops at Prof. Dawkins – one for “shooting fish in a barrel” in his last TV outing (maybe a little, but still necessary!), and another one with exactly the same sentiment as this article – that it’s all a bit harsh, a bit cruel, surely there’s room for some nice wooliness round the edges.
‘Twas most vexing, ‘cos Private Eye’s usually great [:-)], and the second shot was completely misplaced – Dawkins is entirely calm & reasonable, just as Grayling is being.
Ho hum
Oh, and Jack Straw is a horse’s arse. No, really, he is – what we see is merely a clever disguise, with prosthetics that take hours every day to apply…
Well, that’s what I believe anyway, and if you say rude things about my belief, I’ll issue a fatwa against you.
So there.
Do you worry that Jack Straws pander polotics will become the norm as the moslem population grows throughout Europe Andy?
Ok I’m reading the article and the Button pops up with the familiar argument along the lines that “well if people would be just as good without religion then they’d also be just as bad.” Seems reasonable (that’s the appeal, of course – we’re being very reasonable here). But then I think what would justify that inference (being the unreasonable bugger that I am). Only as far as I can see a very impoverished understanding of good and evil according to which they are neatly symmetrical and surely by now we know better than that. But apparently not. And when you’re dealing with impoverished ideas it’s hard to get much traction in an argument. (You end up seeming so unreasonable).
So I’m wondering: how do those of us who understand the harm religion does put this across in a pervasive way (in public debate) without opening ourselves to the charge of inconsistency? What I want to say is that religion is a very effective mechanism for blinding ourselves to the real interests of others (hence the asymetry)but I wish I had handy image (a la Russell’s teapot or the flying spaghetti monster) to help me say it. (Thus appearing terribly witty and clever and not at all unreasonable).
Any ideas anyone?
The freedom to offend is not the same as a duty to offend, or even a duty to go out of your way to exercise the freedom to offend.
I am dubious about AC Grayling’s (reported) claim that any paper “ought to” have republished the cartoons. The argument that they should because people could then make up their own minds doesn’t really wash since the cartoons were widely available on the internet.
Francis Boyle – good question, but I don’t have a good answer.
Kind of like OB says – Islam is after us, by definition, and like any proselytising religion, it assumes the freedom to say, ‘join us! [or burn in Hell… etc etc etc]’ We should have the freedom to say ‘F*** off, you loonies’.
Francis, aren’t you on the way back to the classic quote ‘it takes religion to make good people do bad things…’ [Not that I think that’s entirely true, or rather not exclusively so – lots of bad things were done to the insane in the name of science by good people trying to cure them, for example…]
If, as an atheist, I want to do ‘good’ what mechanisms do I have to decide what is ‘good’? Pretty much just the old Golden Rule. If I were hungry, what would I want? Food. If I were cold what would I want? Shelter. If I were insane what would I want? A cure. And if that cure were painful, would I still want it? Yes. (Assuming it is my ‘sane’ self making the decisions.)
It may be that through ignorance or accident the intended good has unintended consequences, but the intention is fairly uncomplicated.
If I were religious, however, the Golden Rule is supplemented – often superceded – by a second mechanism; what does my religion tell me God wants?
So if, for example, a friend comes out as gay, then the Golden Rule says I should buy him a drink, congratulate him on his decision and compliment him on his new shirt. That’s what I’d want. If I were religious (depending on the variant) I might well believe that the ‘good’ involved arranging for his public execution. I would not need to rationalise that this would somehow be to his benefit, as it has been sanctioned as ‘good’ by an unimpeachable authority.
On the other hand, if (as an atheist) I want to do someone an ill turn I must recognise that my motives are revenge, malice, fear, envy, etc. Nowhere to hide from that.(Unless I had surrendered my conscience to a trans-human entity such as ‘The State’ or ‘The Party’ or ‘The Cause’. I guess you could do that and still be an atheist, although I would doubt if you could call yourself a rationalist.)
If I were religious I would have the convenient alibi that God wants this individual or group to suffer, so whatever I do to them is still ‘good’.
If, for example, my spouse had an affair, I might want revenge but would have to accept that I was motivated by jealousy, possessiveness, anger, vanity, etc. I would not have the option of turning the the relevant page on adultery and arranging a stoning while filled with the pious glow of doing ‘good’.
Whatever I do as a rational atheist, for good or ill, the buck stops here. With religion, I would have the trump card of ‘godsez’.
It’s not even slightly true that it takes religion to make good people do bad things. Any form of authority will do. See Milgram.
See Zimbardo, too. Good point.
On an earlier point though –
“The freedom to offend is not the same as a duty to offend, or even a duty to go out of your way to exercise the freedom to offend.
I am dubious about AC Grayling’s (reported) claim that any paper “ought to” have republished the cartoons.”
True, the freedom to offend is not the same as a duty to offend, but in a particular context it may be the case that there is something like a duty to offend – there may be good reasons to take the risk of ‘offending’ people who are using precisely their hair-trigger ‘offended’ response as a way to prevent people from saying things that need to be said. I think that’s the context in which Grayling’s ‘ought’ was operating – I think that’s what he had in mind.
The ‘offended’ response is working as a form of prior restraint, and I think, and I believe Grayling does too, that that ought to be resisted.
Yes, there may be good reasons to choose to offend people who are using the hair-trigger “offended” response, but I still think that’s a different thing from saying that it’s a duty. Maybe Grayling was just saying that if he was the editor of a newspaper, he would have re-published, and I am implying the idea of a duty.
I might feel differently about it if I couldn’t imagine very well the sort of duty that (at least some of) the editors in question felt not to put their staff at risk of harm. Were I an editor, I would be extremely torn between doing what I thought right in respect of freedom of speech and doing what I thought right in respect of my responsibilities to my staff.
I would hazard a guess that Grayling is thinking of a newpaper as a sort of black box, not as a collection of human beings.
Richard,
No.
Hmm…but Grayling didn’t in fact say it was a duty, at least not in that interview. The interviewer said ‘He believes the press should have published the cartoons’ – a paraphrase rather than a direct quotation; notice he doesn’t have “The press should have published” in quotation marks and thus directly attributed to Grayling. Anyway the word duty doesn’t appear anywhere in the piece.
I agree about the harm to staff problem – but that’s a different reason from the ‘offended’ one, and the interviewer’s questions seem to be all about ‘offense’ rather than potential danger to staff. That was true at the time, too – there was a great deal of burbling about offense and respect, while very few editors or publishers simply said ‘we don’t want our building or our employees to get torched’ – although I think at least one did, come to think of it. I think at least one editor was blunt and honest enough to say something like ‘I want to publish them but won’t because it’s too damn dangerous.’ (Does anyone remember who that was?)
That’s much less pernicious, I think, because it’s so clearly a bad thing, whereas ‘respect’ for ‘offense’ seems like a very good thing to a lot of people.
Don how can you be a rational atheist? ruling out the posibility of god(something we can never know if it exists or not)does not seem that rational to me.
*sigh*… Lots of people believe in fairies, crystal harmonic powers, ley-lines and alien rectal probes… Is it necessary to pretend to share their beliefs, too, in order to maintain a ‘rational’ perspective?
A theistic ‘god’ is an anthropomorphic projection, with all the attributes of a stage magician [or a primitive shaman, funnily enough, wonder why that is?] Being ‘a-theistic’ is nothing more than common sense, in the face of a 13-billion-year-old universe, whose most prolific and adaptable inhabitants seem to be viruses…
Yes the Private Eye stuff was crap.
They routinely take shots at Dawkins and other unbelievers. But strangely they didn’t publish the Motoons. Shome mishtake shurely?
Private Eye is home to Francis Wheen, author of the excellent “How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions”
“I think at least one editor was blunt and honest enough to say something like ‘I want to publish them but won’t because it’s too damn dangerous.'”
(Does anyone remember who that was?)
OB: “New York Times editor Bill Keller said that he and his staff concluded after a “long and vigorous debate” that publishing the cartoon would be “perceived as a particularly deliberate insult” by Muslims. “Like any decision to withhold elements of a story, this was neither easy nor entirely satisfying, but it feels like the right thing to do.”
Other high profile American media sources gave similar opinions as above on the controversial cartoons. Cut and paste the following: > Boker tov, Boulder!: January 8, 2006 – January 14, 2006 <
I get the feeling Hislop’s a soft touch on religion. Ween is always spot on though.
“Mumbo-jumbo” was a curate’s egg. I seem to recall some extremely weird bits about Thatcher.
Richard – the term “atheist” does not necessarily connote unshakeable confidence in there being no God – indeed no scientist could reasonably adopt that position. It also includes those who are rationally confident on the issue. Dawkins (for instance, in The God Delusion) sets up a scale where 1 is unshakeably convinced believer and 7 is unshakeably convinced unbeliever, and says that he himself is a 6 (or I have seen 6 point something quoted).
“However many hens sit on however many eggs for however long, …” 6.66? :-)!
Richard, atheism doesn’t entail ruling out the existence of god, as you ought to know by now from reading B&W. Non-belief in X is not the same thing as ruling out the existence of X.
Thanks, Marie-Therese, but I know of lots of editors who talked about insult and offense and so on; I was wondering who (if anyone) said simply ‘we’re not going to publish the cartoons because we don’t want to put our staff at risk.’ I’m pretty sure someone did say that…but I don’t know who it was about what paper.
Thanks, potentilla, I was looking for that quote (my daughter absconded to uni with my copy of TGD – and WTM & Freedom Evolves, not to mention my Nina Simone cd’s…).
Dawkins also says that he has never met a 7, but there is no shortage of 1’s.
The claim of atheistic certainty is very common and is usually followed by ‘So you are really an agnostic’. I try to use the term ‘non-theist’ to help the distinction, but sometimes forget.
Richard, let me put it like this; if someone were to say to you ‘The woods behind my house are inhabited by dragons’ you would ask for evidence before accepting the claim. If the person responded that these are invisible dragons which leave no trace, are undetectable by any device, and that his sole basis for the claim is that he was told this as a child and would be devastated were it not true, you would have to concede that there is no way to absolutely disprove the claim. But your level of belief in that claim would be effectively nil.
If he then went on to claim that, as Keeper of the Invisible Dragons he should be tax exempt, should be addressed in a special, respectful way, and have special privileges when it came to legislative decisions, then you might well feel he was pushing his luck.
But you still could not disprove the dragons. Are you agnostic about the dragons?
No, if someone told Richard ‘The woods behind my house are inhabited by dragons,’ Richard would say ‘Whatever you do, don’t get them vaccinated.’
“‘we’re not going to publish the cartoons because we don’t want to put our staff at risk”.
OB,
“And finally, an honest one from the Boston Phoenix:
“Out of fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. This is, frankly, our primary reason for not publishing any of the images in question. Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year publishing history.”
Would this be the paper in question?
Richard, between you and me and B&W commentariat the woods behind OB’s house are inhabited by Dragon’s. Pray,Please do tell us what have you to say for yourself on this one? :-)!
I am agnostic on dragon vacination.
Ah – I don’t think I saw that one, Marie-Therese, but it’s a beautiful example. Exactly what I had in mind. Thanks for finding it!
The Canadian Western Standard was the only mainstream media organ in Canada to publish the Danish cartoons. The paper earned the respect of many other journalists in Canada who envied its independence of mind. According to a COMPAS poll 70% of Canada’s working journalists supported its decision to publish the cartoons. It eventually landed itself in the soup with a complaint made to the Human rights Commission from a Calgary [Calvary] Muslim.
dirigible –
Being fair to the fortnightly outpouring of sanity that is Private Eye, they also take regular potshots at every variety of theism.
You’re right that they didn’t publish the motoons – I believe Hislop made statements similar to the previously-mentioned “endangering of staff” reason at the time – but they’ve certainly not refrained from sticking the boot into Islamism since then.
The Dawkins stuff they did wasn’t exactly “crap”, just heavy-handed – although there WAS the snide little inference that he was ignoring contradictory research – that was pretty poor.
Has anyone else read the latest Eye, btw? Just wondered…
Don great answer,I am not sure all these fairy and dragon analogys that atheists trot out realy work for this reason,the existance of the universe opens up at least the posibility of divine creation.
That’s a meaningless statement Richard. What does ‘opens up the possibility’ mean? Nothing about the woods behind OB’s house closes off the possibility of invisible, ethereal dragons, does it?
Not quite fair, outeast – Ophelia doesn’t (so far as I know) have a so far inexplicable problem to which dragon neighbours could be an (unstaisfactory) answer.
Richard, there is also a difference between being a theist (believing in the sort of personal benevolent god in the big monotheistic religions) and being a deist (believing in some sort of higher power but not one that takes a personal interest in the activities of human beings).
(I dislike Private Eye, because I don’t it bothers enough about the truth or otherwise of its attacks, it’s just blanket cynical and anti-everything. I admit this may be due to having heard Richard Ingrams speak in an informal setting many years ago).
So said an irate Private Eye reader
“[T]he “witless, gutless buggers wouldn’t dare mock Islam”, an observation later vindicated when the magazine declined to publish the Danish Mohammed cartoons for fear of firebombs.”
I used to have a high opinion of Private Eye until I saw an article in there on something I was actually closely involved in.
Then I came to realise that, some of the time at least, they are being unduly negative and going out of their way to make public authorities (among others) look corrupt and incompetent when a bit of basic research would have shown that there really was no sinister underhand motive, no conspiracy – just a problem that seemed to be beyond anyone’s wits to solve.
Its since left me sceptical about much else that they print, although I do respect the fact that they cover stories everyone else ignores (the criminal amounts spent by the Government on consultants, for one)
On the contrary, Potentilla, it’s perfectly fair! If Richard had limited his comment to ‘creator’ per se your point might hold, but divinity is not required. Indeed, as candidates for the role of creator those pesky invisible dragons are just as valid as any hypothesized god: I think it would only take a short time to rough out an invisible-dragon-based mythology that would be more consistent (both internally and with the world) than most creation myths. And, of course, equally unfalsifiable:)
Po what word would you use to describe someone who dosnt believe in a deity,serious question?
Ri, the only word English available is “atheist”. Unfortunately, that means both “is pretty sure that there is not god but remains open to new evidence” and “is totally convinced there is no god no matter what”. So if you want to say anything exact about the matter, you have to use more than one word.
It’s a failing of English. Some people say “weak atheist” and “strong atheist” but it doesn’t work very well because “weak” sounds pejorative. I once coined Atheist 1 and Atheist 2 which solved that problem, but caused another in that it’s hard to remember which is meant to be which.
I like Dawkins’ scale, partly because it is continuous, not binary. Maybe we could all start saying “I’m a six-and-a-half atheist”.
“I’m a six-and-a-half atheist” If you were to X that by 2 = it would make you and your other half two baker atheists. # Oh, one a penny, etc.. :-)!
Six and a half out of seven? Bah! I’m like Ivory soap. Anything less than 99.44% is weak.
I’ll tell you something else we need – a word for an atheist who is pretty certain that we don’t have any good reason for believing a God of the usual kind exists, without being or claiming to be certain that no God exists.
Thanks Potentilla(didnt mean to shorten your name)the best I could think of was non deist but that dosnt cut it either,this sort of ambiguity is probably why the topic is argued so often round here. Agnostic seems so much easier and less subject to misinterpretation.
English quite often borrows words from other languages (like blitzkreig) is that posible here?
But 99.44% is too long to say. I was rounding to 3 sf. Maybe 6.9?
“Ivory atheist”? Would probably get mixed up with racial politics. “Soapy atheist”? Perhaps not.
O – “agnodeist atheist”. Well, it would at least mean that people didn’t make assumptions about what you meant. “Agnodeist 6.9 atheist” to be really exact.
I wondered about borrowing from another langauge too, but I don’t speak one well enough.
“Ivory atheist.” I like that. Sounds even better in Spanish — ateo (atea for a female) de marfil. I wouldn’t mind rounding down to 99%, but that’s as low as I would go.
I think a good question to be answered is, “What are the odds that you’ll ever find out, either before or after your death, that there actually is a god?” I’d say maybe one in a million.
Ivory – hm – I’m a former elephant keeper, so the word doesn’t mean soap to me, it has much horrider associations.
I think I’m a ‘how do you know?’ atheist; or, more rudely, a ‘how do you know?’ atheist.
Ri – as Gaeilge = King. How about that Richard the Lionheart. As for Po, ha ha no comment. :-)!
OB, let’s just imagine that the ivory is from long-lived elephants that died natural deaths. (Personally, I don’t care if my teeth are used as dice after my death.)
Potentilla I think you have nailed it with agnodeist-atheist its not to awkward to say and it answers all,I dont think the scale number is needed,it would also stop all those anoying types that hang round b and w from making so you rule out the existence of god and call yourself rational comments!it might sound more sophisticated if it was in another language though?