Author: Ophelia Benson

This question does keep coming up. And up, and up. When is free speech free speech and when is it incitement to murder? (That’s only one version of the question, of course. It can be phrased other ways. When is free speech protected as such and when is it not because it is incitement to violence? That’s another version. There are more.)

Scott Jaschik has an article at Inside Higher Ed where the question seems to be in play, although it’s not absolutely clear whether the people involved in the matter actually phrased it that way. It’s also not clear whether that was avoidance or just lack of clarity – confusion, in short.

An adjunct English instructor at Warren Community College in New Jersey resigned a few days ago, after an email he sent to a student who was organizing a pro-war lecture set off a controversy.

Daly’s e-mail said that “real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors and fight for just causes and for people’s needs.” He also wrote to the student, head of the campus chapter of Young America’s Foundation, that “I will continue to expose your right-wing, anti-people politics until groups like yours won’t dare show their face on a college campus.”

Stark enough. Does saying ‘real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors’ constitute free speech – protected, protectable free speech – or does it constitute advocacy of murder? Or are the two the same? Ought advocacy of murder – in certain circumstances, or in any and all circumstances – to be considered free speech and protected as such? And does saying ‘until groups like yours won’t dare show their face’ constitute a threat, or is it clear that he means ‘dare’ in the sense of ‘for fear of shame and embarrassment’ rather than ‘for fear of being attacked’?

In interviews conducted as conservative groups organized a campaign to have him fired, Daly stood by the substance of his e-mail…But Daly said that since she had sent her e-mail from a personal account, and he had replied from a personal account, there was no reason for the college to be involved. He also said in an interview on Sunday that he was not advocating a literal revolt by soldiers, and that he would have replied with a different tone had he realized he was communicating with a student.

Enter mitigating circumstances. He thought he was sending a personal email. Casual conversation is subject to different norms from publication. On the other hand email to strangers perhaps falls somewhere between those two categories. Or perhaps not. Using threatening language to a stranger is different from using it to a friend; whether or not the threat applies to a third party also changes things; whether the more clearly threatening language applies to a distant third party while the more ambiguous language applies to a group that the stranger belongs to, also changes things. Complicated, isn’t it. As the president of WCC said.

Austin called the First Amendment “the most precious freedom all Americans share,” and said that he was “committed to working unceasingly” to protect the freedom of speech of students and faculty members at the college. But he said that he also had an obligation to enforce state laws and college policies “to ensure that all members of our college are free and encouraged to exercise their right to free speech without fear of intimidation or retaliation.”

There seems to be a real knot here, one that it’s hard to cut through. Daly seems to be in trouble (and hence to have resigned his job) merely for something he said in what he thought was a personal email. But the wording of his email was at least arguably somewhat intimidating, and intimidation is not a trivial matter. (Ask any civil rights worker or union organizer.) Threats and intimidation are where free speech law and practice and theory get very, very tricky.

Who’s Deborah Solomon? I don’t know, apart from the fact that she writes for that monument to mediocrity, the New York Times. She says dumb things in this article on Lynne Truss’s new book on rudeness.

To be sure, most people, regardless of the precise elasticity of their flesh, would like to live in a world where everyone respects one another. Yet Americans have always harbored a suspicion of manners, which evoke visions of English history at its most hierarchical and hoity-toity – of dukes, earls, lords and viscounts tripping over one another in phony displays of deference and veneration. Who would want to live with all that kneeling and curtsying, all that monarchy-mandated fawning? Not the American revolutionaries, who believed that a fluid class democracy should subscribe instead to “republican manners” and promptly did away with titles.

Manners evoke visions of hoity-toity hierarchies, of earls and dukes, of kneeling and curtsying? What is she, an idiot? What’s kneeling got to do with anything? What have dukes? Manners is about things like not pushing in front of people, not grabbing things, not making a noise when people are asleep or studying nearby, being grateful when people do something kind, doing something kind yourself now and then, helping people when they need help – it’s about being considerate, and attentive, and observant, and kind, and helpful, as opposed to being selfish and mean and careless and greedy. Dukes and kneeling are neither here nor there. It’s imbecilic to think they are.

In our own time, the belief that manners reinforce social inequalities was key to the upheavals of the 60’s, when the shaggy-haired counterculture broke every rule in Emily Post’s book of etiquette.

What belief? What belief? What belief? What cretin ever believed that? Manners don’t reinforce social inequalities – low wages reinforce social inequalities, along with signs saying ‘Whites Only’ and landlords who don’t rent to coloureds and people who go out on Mississippi back roads at night with guns. Does Deborah Solomon think racial segregation and union-busting are now or have ever been carried on in a polite manner? Does she think the goons who beat up the Reuther brothers did it in a ducal manner? Does she think the white people who expected black people to yield the sidewalk to them were polite about it? Does she think the white folks were polite to Rosa Parks that day? What can she be talking about?

But bad manners are not necessarily all bad. In 1996, in an essay titled “Seduced by Civility,” the critic Benjamin DeMott defended rudeness not only as a basic right but also as a necessary inducement to change and social progress. Indeed, who wouldn’t rather live with incivility – with the curse words in rap songs and the excessive chatting in movie theaters – than with inequality?

Eh…what? Those are the choices? Those are the only alternatives? You can have civility, or you can have equality, but you can’t have both. The one displaces the other. Kind of like the way you can be on top of Mt Everest or you can be in Fulham but you can’t be in both places. But – why would that be? Why would it be at all, even a little bit? Why would it be even microscopically true? Why wouldn’t it in fact be the opposite of the truth? Why isn’t it far more likely that equality goes with the idea that everyone should be treated politely, not just the rich or the white or the elaborately-dressed? Because…the same idea works if everyone is treated rudely? Is that it? Is that the idea? If so, it’s a hateful idea. To repeat – manners aren’t just some posh frill, they’re not about spoons, they’re about treating people decently. They’re basic. Arguably the same idea is behind manners as is behind equality – simply that people should be treated decently. Treating people badly on principle is not a good plan; I’m against it.

In her new book, Truss remains mostly silent on the subject, forgoing social analysis in favor of groaning about the status quo.

Forgoing social analysis. Of the kind you just did? That kind of social anlysis? Gee, I wonder why.

And finally – as she winds things up – the coup de grâce.

For what are manners, anyhow, but a distancing device, a mechanism for widening the spaces between people?

How true! How true, how wise, how deep. What, indeed, are manners, anyhow, but a way of shoving people back as hard as you can. Yes sir. The way to pull people close to you and give them a great big fuzzy hug is to run over them as they cross the street, push them when you want to get past, elbow them aside when you’re in a hurry, park your car in the middle of the sidewalk and then laugh when they fall down as they try to maneuver around it in the ice and snow, blow smoke in their faces, bump into them in crowded shops and then call them names for being in your way – and so on. Yes indeed – there’s intimacy for you, there’s closeness and trust and narrowing the spaces between people.

I tell you what – I just crossed Deborah Solomon’s name off the guest list for my next dinner party. Thank you.

Voltaire. The Philosophical Dictionary. Good read.

What can be said in answer to a man who says he will rather obey God than men, and who consequently feels certain of meriting heaven by cutting your throat? When once fanaticism has gangrened the brain of any man the disease may be regarded as nearly incurable. I have seen Convulsionaries who, while speaking of the miracles of St. Paris, gradually worked themselves up to higher and more vehement degrees of agitation till their eyes became inflamed, their whole frames shook, their countenances became distorted by rage, and had any man contradicted them he would inevitably have been murdered.

Sound familiar at all?

There is no other remedy for this epidemical malady than that spirit of philosophy, which, extending itself from one to another, at length civilizes and softens the manners of men and prevents the access of the disease. For when the disorder has made any progress, we should, without loss of time, fly from the seat of it, and wait till the air has become purified from contagion. Law and religion are not completely efficient against the spiritual pestilence. Religion, indeed, so far from affording proper nutriment to the minds of patients laboring under this infectious and infernal distemper, is converted, by the diseased process of their minds, into poison. These malignant devotees have incessantly before their eyes the example of Ehud, who assassinated the king of Eglon; of Judith, who cut off the head of Holofernes while in bed with him; of Samuel, hewing in pieces King Agag; of Jehoiada the priest, who murdered his queen at the horse-gate. They do not perceive that these instances, which are respectable in antiquity, are in the present day abominable. They derive their fury from religion, decidedly as religion condemns it.

The ‘respectable in antiquity’ thing is irony. Very Gibbonesque – which is to say, Gibbon’s irony was very Voltairean. Gibbon is a good read too.

Time for some heavy-duty mocking and sneering. At the Guardian’s ‘Islam Awareness Week’, for a start.

Religious hate crime is on the increase in the UK, according to the latest Crown Prosecution Service statistics – a worrying trend that the government is attempting to tackle in its Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which creates the new offence of incitement to religious hatred…Much of the Islamophobia experienced by young British Muslims is the result of a legacy of ignorance about the beliefs and practices of Islam.

No doubt. But, sadly, some of it – depending on how the Guardian is defining ‘Islamophobia,’ of course – could also be the result of knowledge about some of the beliefs and practices of Islam. Especially if by ‘Islamophobia’ the Guardian means simply dislike or disapprobation of some of the beliefs and practices of Islam, that could well be the result of knowledge rather than ignorance. This article seems to assume that more knowledge of beliefs and practices of Islam will necessarily lead to increased admiration of them. But that is merely an assumption.

The article points us toward this site where we find this lovely page on ‘Family Life’.

It is usual for the men to meet at cafes or meeting places and women to meet together at one of their homes. It is rare for men and women to meet publicly. In the home visitors will be met by the man of the house, women stay in the background.

Ah. In other words, it is usual for men to be able to go out in the world and to go wherever they like, and it is usual for women to be confined at home. Men act like grown-up people, women act like stupid frightened children. That is usual.

On the seventh day of a baby’s life his or her hair will be shaved off and the equivalent weight of gold given to the poor. An offering follows. Two sheep if it is a boy and one if it is a girl.

Because, of course, a boy is worth twice as much as a girl. Obviously.

They are expected to work hard in school, can be treated quite strictly, (especially the girls), and expected to spend time with their families.

A sinister note.

Arranged marriages are usual with in a muslim community. Most young people are happy that their parents will make a good choice for them.

Ah. Asked them, have you? Asked, especially, the women? Asked them with no men present? (No, of course not, because you can’t, so that’s out.) How exactly do you know, then? And why do you even think it’s likely?

It is very unusual for a Muslim man to have more than one wife. He is able to have up to four but he must be able to provide fairly and equally for all of them. Occasionally it might happen that if a Muslim man’s wife cannot have children or she becomes very ill and needs looking after, then the man will take a second wife but it is not common.

Oh is that how it works! Occasionally if a woman becomes very ill, her husband will take a second wife to look after the first one – I see! I didn’t realize that. What a charming custom. One wonders what the second wife gets out of it, but it’s certainly nice for the first one.

Once a Muslim lady become a wife her first responsibility is to look after the home and family.

And of course because of the arranged marriage thing, along with the being worth only one sheep instead of two thing, and the not being allowed to go out thing, a Muslim lady doesn’t really have the option of not marrying at all, so if she happens to be a person who doesn’t in fact want to look after a home and family, well that’s just too fucking bad, isn’t it.

Divorce is not really acceptable to Muslims. It is considered to be the worst possible occurrence, it is distasteful and only allowed only in extreme circumstances though of course it is a legal option even if not a cultural one. If she is divorced a woman becomes the responsibility of the men in her family.

And on those vanishingly rare occasions when divorce does happen, it is made beautifully easy because the man has only to recite the talaq three times and hey presto that is the divorce. (This rule does not apply to the woman.) The men in the family of a divorced woman are not always best pleased to see her, and are sometimes apt to kill her in a fit of temper when they think she might have done something to their honour by being a divorced woman. If she doesn’t have any men in her family, she starves, of course. And quite right too.

So there you are, children; now all your nasty Islamophobia will go away, won’t it. A little knowledge works wonders.

Hey, happy anniversary, Origin of Species. It was published on this date in 1859.

Susan Jacoby writes in Mother Jones:

When the Supreme Court…ordered two Kentucky counties to dismantle courthouse displays of the Ten Commandments, Justice Antonin Scalia declared that the Court majority was wrong because the nation’s historical practices clearly indicate that the Constitution permits “disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.” The Constitution permits no such thing: It has nothing to say about God, gods, or any form of belief or nonbelief – apart from its absolute prohibition, in Article 6, against any religious test for public office and the First Amendment’s familiar declaration that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” From reading Scalia, a Martian (or polytheist) might infer that the establishment clause actually concludes with the phrase “free exercise thereof – as long as the faithful worship one God whose eye is on the sparrow.” The justice’s impassioned dissent…is a revealing portrait of the historical revisionism at the heart of the Christian conservative campaign to convince Americans that the separation of church and state is nothing more than a lie of the secularist left.

Yet another reason truth matters. Historical revisionism is a fine thing – it is, as Eric Foner points out, what historians do – if it gets things right, but if it gets them wrong, it’s horrid. The kind that tells the truth about what happened at Nanjing and Auschwitz, in Armenia and Bosnia, is good; the kind that tells lies about it is bad. It’s no good pretending there is no difference, or that the difference doesn’t matter.

The revisionist script goes something like this: The founders were devout men who based their new government on Christian teaching (the religiously correct invariably use the term “Judeo-Christian”); they were unconcerned about religious interference with government and cared only about government interference with religion; and, last but not least, there was no tension between secularism and religion in the nation’s halcyon early decades, because everyone accepted God as the source of civic authority.

That bit about caring only about government interference with religion, not religious interference with government, is why we so often hear that fatuous (and ominous, and irritating) parrot-cry that Joe Lieberman is so fond of: ‘The founders gave us freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.’ Well at least that has the virtue of honesty – at least we know where we are with that. No, you don’t get to have freedom from religion, the government can force it on you if it feels like it. Sit still and be quiet.

Confronted with the Constitution’s silence on divine authority, revisionists repeatedly fall back on the specious argument that since everyone took God’s omnipotence for granted in the 18th century, there was no need for the framers to make a special point of mentioning the deity. If that were true, there would have been no bitter debates in the states about the nonreligious language of the Constitution…It is ludicrous to suggest that men as precise in their use of words as Adams and Madison would, perhaps in their haste to get home to their wives, have simply forgotten to mention God.

Besides which it’s not even true that everyone took God’s omnipotence for granted in the 18th century. There have always been atheists, and there were more of them than hitherto usual in the 18th century.

Arguments relying on custom, bolstered by personal religious belief, have great potency when presented to a public with a shaky grasp of even the most fundamental facts of American history…”Oh! Lord!” Adams complained in 1817 to his old friend and rival Jefferson. “Do you think that a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America? Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical Strifes in Maryland, Pensilvania, New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could they would.” If they could they would. Wherever and whenever they could, they did – and that is why the revolutionary generation bequeathed the unique gift of a secular Constitution to future Americans.

Let’s hope we can hang on to it.