Author: Ophelia Benson

I’m reading Anthony Appiah’s Ethics of Identity. It’s a terrific book. And it keeps startling me by talking about things I’ve been thinking about for years – sometimes down to the smallest detail – such as a particular comment by Martha Nussbaum.

I’ll quote you a bit. Page 40.

The controversy over how to formulate autonomy…immediately lets on to another: whether autonomy…is or ought to be a value in the first place, at least outside the liberal democracies of the West. An availability of options, an endowment with minimal rationality, an absence of coercion: if this is the core of personal autonomy, what could be more anodyne and unexceptionable? And yet…many political theorists write about it as if it were an industrial effluent, something generated by Western modernity and exported, willy-nilly, to hapless denizens of the non-Western world.

Good eh?

For Mill, as we saw, autonomy and diversity were plaited together in his ideal of individuality. For many critics, however, the language of autonomy reflects an arrogant insularity: all that talk of self-fashioning, self-direction, self-authorship suggests a bid to creat the Performance Art Republic, elbowing aside Grandma Walton in order to make the world safe for Karen Finley.

Farther back, on page 26, is where he really startled me.

Mill has been charged with playing favourites among religions, because of his emphasis on the fostering of personal autonomy as an appropriate goal of the state: does this not suggest that strong forms of Calvinism, say, will be contemned?

He startled me there because that is something (as the endnote confirms) that Martha Nussbaum said, that has long puzzled me and that I have talked about here, for instance in this post nearly two years ago. Here’s the mystifying thing she said.

But to claim that freedom of speech promotes truth in metaphysics and morals would be to show disrespect for the idea of reasonable pluralism, and to venture onto a terrain where one is at high risk of showing disrespect to one’s fellow citizens. Mill is totally oblivious to all such considerations. He has none of the delicate regard for other people’s religious doctrines that characterizes the political liberal…In On Liberty he does not hesitate to speak contemptuously of Calvinism as an ‘insidious’ doctrine…One may sympathize…without feeling that he understands the type of mutual respect that is required in a pluralistic society. I agree with Rawls: such respect requires (in the public sphere at least) not showing up the claims of religion as damaging, and not adopting a public conception of truth and objectivity according to which such claims are false.

Well, I don’t agree with Rawls, but I’ve also been trying to get a better grasp on what he meant by it, by for instance throwing caution to the winds and actually reading the relevant part of Political Liberalism. The subject has come up here more than once; George Felis did some helpful explication. But I don’t like it – I don’t see how it can lead to anything other than surrender to the theocrats, who have no truck with ‘delicate regard’ for other people’s religious much less non-religious doctrines. I don’t like it, so I’m pleased to see that Appiah is arguing for another view.

There is one complication about this free expression march, at least to my mind. I suppose that’s why I didn’t flag it up beforehand as much as I could have. I flagged it up some, but not as much as I could have. That’s because it wasn’t specific enough – and that I suppose relates to why I wish Peter hadn’t caved in on the cartoon issue. I didn’t particularly want to cheer on a march for free expression in general, I wanted to cheer on a march for free expression as opposed to religious censorship, or as opposed to toonophobia, or instead of bullying by offended taboo-wielders, or as the alternative to charges of blasphemy and apostasy and heresy and violation of the sacred. I wanted to cheer on a particular march for free expression in the context of coercive religious silencing moves – so I found the title inadequate to convey the subject matter. Then once the subject matter became precisely what was given up at the last minute – it all seemed more confused than ever.

You’re wondering what I mean. Here’s what I mean. What if the march had been for free expression for the BNP, or for Hizb ut-Tahrir? Specifically for one (or both) of them, as opposed to free expression in general. I wouldn’t have gone or wanted to go or urged anyone else to go or advertised it, that’s what. Not in a million years. Because I don’t support them, and have no intention of supporting them. I agree that, with the usual (contested) reservations and stipulations, free expression and free speech are basic goods, are as Juan Golblado says part of the infrastructure; but that doesn’t mean that I actively support particular groups I don’t agree with. So my support for the march for free expression was support for it to the extent that it was about a particular issue that I do agree with and do support.

It’s a case where the legal and the moral run together. I think the toonophobes have not only no legal case for making people shut up, but no moral case either; I think Frattini and the pope and Annan and Straw and the State Department and everyone else who says we ought not to offend people’s religious beliefs is wrong, morally wrong, because I think religions cannot, ought not, must not be binding on people who don’t subscribe to them. I actively (and enthusiastically) support the right to mock and criticize Islam (and Christianity and any other religion), I do not actively (let alone enthusiastically) support the right to say a lot of other kinds of things that are and have to be legal. It was the specific context that would have hauled me to Trafalgar Square in the rain on Saturday if I’d been closer than six thousand miles away (well, a lot closer); if it had been just any old generic march for free expression, I wouldn’t have bothered.

Maryam tells us more about what happened to Reza Moradi at the free speech demonstration. The Washington Post, as I mentioned, reported that he was questioned by the police.

“It’s my freedom, everyone’s freedom, to expose these pictures and encourage everyone to do the same,” said Reza Moradi, 29, a protester who identified himself as an Iranian who has lived in Britain for eight years. Moradi was later questioned by police after someone lodged a complaint regarding the “nature of his placard,” which featured a copy of the Danish cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, a London police spokeswoman said. After a brief, heated exchange with officers, Moradi left the protest on his own and then rejoined the demonstration later.

Questioned by the police for what? For doing something perfectly legal, apparently. And now Maryam says ‘Reza Moradi was told he will be summoned to court for “offending” someone because he carried a placard with the Mohammad caricatures at the March 25 free speech rally’.

So we’ll have to keep an eye on that little item. It might be an idea to start embroidering the ‘Free Reza Moradi’ banners.

We don’t want him locked up; he does good work, which the New Humanist pointed out on March 7.

Here’s how the police explained their plans to ‘The World at One’ last Friday:

World at One: ‘What will happen if people turn up with banners displaying these cartoons showing the prophet Muhammed?’

P’lice: ‘Well first of all can I say that we’ve got no evidence to suggest that will happen, but our policing plan will have a number of measures to take into consideration anything that happens during the day, and clearly if people are turning up and doing anything that might cause concern, harrassment or distress then we have provisions to take action against that.’

World at One: ‘Do the police have a view as a result of the rallies that took place a month ago now on whether those images amount to a provocation to public order?’

P’lice: ‘We will deal with anything that arises on any public order event. Clearly we’ll have provision and we’ll have plans to deal with that. It would be wholly inappropriate to suggest that at this stage what our course of action will be; it will depend on the ambient circumstances for each incident. However you can rest assured that we do have provision to deal with anything that will happen on the day.’

It’s that public order act again, I suppose. It’s not illegal to carry cartoons around, but if they might cause someone to feel perturbed or melancholy or homesick or murderous, ohh well now that’s different. Question that bad man, summon him to court.

There’s a lot of ‘How’s That Again?’ at the moment. There is the half-laughable half-weepable mess of the ‘March for Free Expression’ ha ha for instance. The ‘March for Free Expression’ which had to be renamed at the last minute the ‘March for Free Expression Only as Long as the Free Expression in Question Doesn’t Irritate Anyone Too Much’ – which, you have to admit, is a pretty lame halting stumbling weak-kneed shambling unimpressive unstirring sort of march. More like a ‘Keep on Lying Down for Thoroughly Hedged “Free” Expression’ than a march for anything. You might as well march against a war and have on all the banners ‘Unless You Really Really Want to Of Course’. You might as well march for workers’ rights and add ‘Unless it’s too expensive that is’.

You did see what happened, right? On Thursday, two days before the march and demonstration, Voltaire/Peter Risdon (and props to him for trying, anyway) said – of all things in the world – ‘No Danish cartoons, please’. Umm – okay, but then what’s the march for? What good is it to take a stand for free speech prompted by the cartoon fuss and at the same time say ‘No Danish cartoons, please’?

A lot of commenters at the site are very annoyed. And things at the demonstration itself got…peculiar.

Peter Risdon, an organizer of the March for Free Expression, initially had announced that he would allow protesters to display banners and wear T-shirts depicting those images. On Thursday, however, Risdon asked demonstrators not to show the cartoons out of fear their display would alienate sympathetic Muslims and give credibility to a far-right political group, the British National Party, which has used the cartoons as a rallying cry. “The principle of freedom of expression is used by some as a Trojan horse, as a proxy for racism and Islamophobia,” Risdon wrote in an explanation on the Web site. The decision prompted angry responses on the Web site – and at the march. “It’s my freedom, everyone’s freedom, to expose these pictures and encourage everyone to do the same,” said Reza Moradi, 29, a protester who identified himself as an Iranian who has lived in Britain for eight years. Moradi was later questioned by police after someone lodged a complaint regarding the “nature of his placard,” which featured a copy of the Danish cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, a London police spokeswoman said. After a brief, heated exchange with officers, Moradi left the protest on his own and then rejoined the demonstration later.

Someone lodged a complaint about the nature of his placard, so the police questioned him. Er – isn’t this where we came in? Wasn’t this rather the point?

Time for yet another installment of that long-running series, ‘How’s That Again?’ or What the Oxymoron Said. Sit down, stop whispering, fold your hands, don’t kick the seat.

The scene this time is Afghanistan, where a judge is explaining things to BBC reporter Sanjoy Majumder.

Under the interpretation of Islamic Sharia law on which Afghanistan’s constitution is based, Mr Rahman faces the death penalty unless he reconverts to Islam. “The Prophet Muhammad has said several times that those who convert from Islam should be killed if they refuse to come back,” says Ansarullah Mawlafizada, the trial judge. “Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance, kindness and integrity. That is why we have told him if he regrets what he did, then we will forgive him,” he told the BBC News website.

Brings a tear to the eye, don’t it.