Why bother
Kenan Malik reminds us of the wise and reasonable words of Khomeini when he put out the hit on Rushdie and his accomplices.
[O]n February 14, 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa. “I inform all zealous Muslims of the world,” he proclaimed, “that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents are sentenced to death.”
Note that – not just Rushdie, but also all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents should be murdered by religious zealots. What a nice guy. It’s a shame he never had a chance to meet Torquemada; they would have gotten along so well.
And of course it’s so sensible and fair – that all human beings in the world should be required to say nothing about Islam that fails to meet with Khomeini’s approval, on pain of death. Islam is not incidentally but centrally a set of laws and restrictions and limitations that control the lives of people who are subject to them (people who ‘submit’ to them), but people are not allowed to discuss those laws in a way Khomeini (and his successors) might not approve (and to be safe of course we should understand that as in any way at all, since we don’t know for sure what they do or don’t approve). So an intrusive controlling demanding religion full of sexist laws and arbitrary restrictions must be immune from criticism and discussion, because if we discuss it the wrong way we might be murdered.
[T]he argument at the heart of the anti-Rushdie case – that it is morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures – is now widely accepted. In the 20 years between the publication of The Satanic Verses and the withdrawal of The Jewel of Medina, the fatwa has in effect become internalised. “Self-censorship”, Shabir Akhtar, a British Muslim philosopher, suggested at the height of the Rushdie affair, “is a meaningful demand in a world of varied and passionately held convictions. What Rushdie publishes about Islam is not just his business. It is everyone’s – not least every Muslim’s – business.”
What’s wrong with that idea? Anything?
Yes. What’s wrong with it is the implicit assumption that passionately held convictions deserve – perhaps even have a ‘right’ to? – forebearance and polite silence. But convictions aren’t things that need or ought to have forebearance and polite silence. Convictions that can’t survive the encounter with other convictions probably aren’t worth passionate tenacity; at any rate it isn’t possible to protect them without paralyzing mental life, and a universally paralyzed mental life is not a good thing.
Norm has more.
The liberal principle that we may interfere with the actions of another (only) to prevent harm to others does have its difficulties since, like many other conceptual boundaries, the boundaries of the concept of harm are fuzzy. But the principle, if it is one, that freedom of speech must be curbed to avoid offending people, is manifestly a qualification of the right of free speech that all but destroys the usefulness of the right. For there are no boundaries on what people can be offended by.
Quite. And if you broaden the meaning of ‘harm’ to include ‘offense’ then you make speech and its cognates unable to do what they are centrally for. A thought or an argument or an idea that can’t possibly offend anyone is a very bland mild tame idea, that makes nothing much happen. Ideas like that aren’t worth bothering with. We can’t have ideas that matter without the risk of offending someone.
As John Stuart Mill argued so very eloquently in On Liberty, not only does the free and open exchange of ideas give us the opportunity to exchange erroneous beliefs for new truths, opposition to the free and open exchange of ideas blocks the only possible way we can make that infinitely profitable exchange. Without the ability and freedom to test a claim against all available criticisms and rival claims, we simply have no way at all of determining whether the claim is true. Even when we can think of no criticisms of a favoured claim, Mill argues, we are obliged to play Devil’s advocate and do our best to invent the best possible criticisms to test the claim – because only by standing up to such criticism does a claim deserve to be held with any confidence.
Articles of faith are truth claims embraced in the absence of any supporting evidence, and sometimes even in the face of evidence to the contrary. As such, they cannot stand up to any substantial questioning or criticism – so they must be protected from questioning and criticism at all costs. Individual believers can simply ignore or set aside criticism, or engage in surface-level “questioning” that really doesn’t consider the real possibility of the faith claim’s falsehood: In short, if they bother to participate in any sort of evaluation of their faith claim at all, they at best engage in rationalization – coming up with one-sided pseudo-reasoning in support of their “conclusion” which is actually an assumption, always determined in advance.
But as powerful as the human capacity to rationalize may be, it is no guarantee: Sometimes people abandon faith claims when confronted with hard questions and criticisms. It certainly isn’t the normal course of affairs, but it happens sometimes. And since the faith beliefs of some people are sometimes vulnerable to hard questions and criticisms, the more exposure to questions and criticisms that believers are exposed to, the greater the risk must be. The individuals and institutions which benefit most from the faith of the faithful – and I can just as easily include the political leaders of the ideological faithful along with the cardinals and pastors and imams and gurus of the religious faithful – they all have a powerful vested interest in protecting the flock they fleece from potentially faith-damaging questions and criticisms. Their social position, their material wealth, their unearned authority all depend on the faithful keeping the faith, so they seek to block the free and open exchange of ideas by whatever means available to them. The claim of grave offense is just one of the tricks they use to stifle the free and open exchange of ideas – and hardly a new trick at that: Mill specifically considered and dissected the objection that some ideas are just too offensive to be discussed freely in the argument for free speech I started by citing – which he wrote some 150 years ago.
La plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Not, mind you, that I don’t think it bears repeating. Or I wouldn’t have trotted out Mill’s On Liberty yet again. ;-)
I see that in today’s Guardian there’s a letter from one Charlie Gere arguing that there is no such thing as free speech. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/oct/01/civilliberties
I note that Dr. Gere is the Reader in New Media Research and Director of the Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster University.
Why am I not surprised?
Charlie’s new media work involves the production and reproduction of images, which is forbidden by some religions.
And imagine if one of his students accidentally Googled or PhotoShopped an image of the prophet.
Would Charlie accept that he should abandon his career to avoid offending the religious?
Of course nobody actually thinks that all passionately held convictions deserve forebearance and polite silence. Nobody thinks, for example, that the passionately held convictions of a racist or a stalinist or a cricket fan or a heavy metal fan should be treated in this way. It is just religions that are supposed to get the kid gloves treatment. Actually it’s probably just some religions. It is probably okay to mock the Church of England or the Methodists. It is just the more ‘touchy’ religions that are supposed to get forebearance and polite silence.
I would like to take this opportunity to put in a plug for Zoroastrianism.
“Followers of Zoroastrian [sic] do not denounce other religions, and after initiation a Zarathushti is free to choose the religion he or she considers the best.”
(More at http://www.zoroastrians.info/faq/what.jsp )
So I take it that Zoroastrianism is a bit like an operating system for a computer. Once that is loaded, then any other program/s, memes etc you like can be loaded in on top of it.
Thus I take it, once a Zoroastrian, one can become a Christian, a Muslim or (get this) both a Christian and a Muslim, while being fundamentally at OS level a Zoroastrian.
Being perhaps the oldest monotheistic religion, and native to Iran, Zoroastrianism is one of the few religions tolerated by the mullahs who presently run Iran. Could possibly be handy for those Iranians seeking an escape hatch from Islam. “You see, Ayatollah, I am not just a Muslim; I am also a Zoroastrian. When I am practising my devout Islam, then I agree with you: fatwahs all round. But that is only on Tuesday evenings and Friday mornings. For I also ‘appreciate good thoughts, good words, and good deeds. I appreciate the good religion of worshipping omniscient God, which overthrow yokes yet sheaths swords, teaches self-reliance and is righteous,’ all of which I got off the aforementioned website.
“And right now I’m overthrowing as many yokes as I can find, and also sheathing a bloody lot of swords. Righteously, mind. And self-reliantly. This I do the rest of the week, except on Tuesday evenings and Friday mornings, when I’m a Muslim.”
In the modern Iranian context, the very essence of enlightenment.
Thanks, Geoff Coupe, for the link to Charlie Gere’s confused rant. Definitely worth a read. Especially for this: “The issue with [Aisha – Jewel of Medina] and other [books] that have offended Muslims, including The Satanic Verses, is that their publication is liable to give Muslims the possibly correct impression that a culture riddled with its own shibboleths, taboos and areas of interdiction does not consider it a problem to offend their sensitivities, not least by trivialising their religion and their culture in works of fiction. This is far worse than being anti-Muslim. It treats Muslim sensitivities as being beneath consideration. No wonder they are angry.”
Charlie speaks with a fair level of authority here, tempting me to the conclusion that he has actually read the torpedoed book he refers to. I wouldn’t mind reading it too.
Do you suppose that if I wrote to him and asked him nicely, he would tell me where he got hold of his copy?
Yes, the religious often contend that it is the sheer strength and depth of their belief (‘I really, really believe in God so it must exist’) that affords them immunity from questioning, let alone criticism or even ridicule. But, surely, Muslims,and other believers, would condemn, criticise or ridicule, for example, those zealots who lived in South America not so long ago, and sacrificed children as part of their submission to their god. They, too, really, really believed deeply and sincerely. Ergo, they are immune from criticism etc. Personally, I have no desire to offend muslims, christians or another creed, and I certainly do not wish to be rude or offensive in my criticisms of their religion (though I believe that I have the right to be so), but these people have to understand that atheists, like myself, deeply, deeply disbelieve in what to us is literal nonsense, and have every right to express our views. There is a difference though…where are the humanist death squads, the atheist bombing campaigns, the secular fatwas? Looking coldly from outside of this world, what would an unbiased observer think of the effects of religion? Sorry to quote an old chestnut, but it IS true that only relgion can make good people do really bad things.
G. Tingey – I followed your link to Howse’s article.
It was fun seeing the responses in their comments. Almost worth wading through the disgusting article itself.
There is a difference though…where are the humanist death squads, the atheist bombing campaigns, the secular fatwas?
derek: Not currently present in most of the world, but an apologist would argue that totalitarian Marxist states (and certainly the French revolutionaries) did engage in activities that meet this definition.
Yeah, Brian, but an apologist will say any ol’ bullshit nonsense to advance their ideological agenda. That’s kind of the definition of “apologist,” innit?
Bob-B said:
Of course, it’s worth pointing out that there was a time and place when Stalinist opinions were very much treated as sacrosanct, and expressing criticism was not just socially disapproved of, but liable to get you sent to a gulag or executed outright. Polite silence was altogether wiser, da? It’s all about who has power grounded in faith and wants to protect it. I doubt the Zoroastrians were as ecumenical and all-embracing back when the original Persian Empire was a going concern, either.
Which leaves me with the horrible thought: What if the cricket fundamentalists ever come to power? Will I be in mortal danger for expressing my opinion that cricket is perhaps the most boring activity ever watched by sporting fans? (Well, second most boring. People actually watch golf tournaments, I’m told…)
Ophelia please can you fisk Gere’s nonsense in a post. It’s an almost Sokal-spoof-perfect example of smug flagellant moral relativism. :-)
It seems to me that the real problem with deep (fundamental) religious faith can be summed up in one word; certainty. No humanist/rationalist/positivist can or will ever say ‘I am absolutely certain I am right, therefore YOU are wrong, therefore I need to punish you for being wrong’. Try starting a discussion with a devout believer with these words; ‘I admit that I COULD be wrong about God etc etc. Will you start from the same premise?’ This is one reason (NOT the main one!) why a humanist is never motivated to FORCE his/her views on others. As Huxley said (OK, I paraphrase),’We have to hold our views (about knowable things) lightly, and be prepared to change them in the light of evidence and reason’. That’s a much less comfortable position than certainty, but a less potentially dangerous one. And, in reply to an earlier response, do you really believe that the French revolutionaries were fuelled by atheism? Where is the evidence for this? Weren’t most of the people who were beheaded the aristocracy rather than the clergy????
Oh yes, I meant to tease Gere, and then didn’t get around to it. I’ll have to do that. One does get an overpowering impression (or smell) of recycled Fishism.
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