I Must Have Misplaced My Glasses
Correction, to something in ‘Lesson Time’. I didn’t notice this until well after I’d posted the comment, so I had a good opportunity to feel surprised and irritated at my own befuddlement. It’s like those games where an extra word is inserted in some familiar bit of doggerel, and we don’t notice it because we see what we expect to see. Only not very much like that, because I should have been paying better attention, seeing as how I was arguing with the content. Thanks to sloppy reading I agreed with an absurdity. Allow me to start again.
Even if an artist had failed to find someone to illustrate a children’s book on the Prophet for fear of reprisals, this does not constitute an attack on freedom of speech. It could be construed as recognition and respect for the sacred taboos of another religion.
Really. Really? Illustrators refusing to illustrate a children’s book on the Prophet for fear of reprisals does not constitute an attack on freedom of speech? It could be construed as recognition and respect for the sacred taboos of another religion? Really? (Now you see why I feel like such an idiot for not noticing that yesterday. [slaps self upside head]) So if people refuse to paint or say or write something for fear of reprisals, that’s not an attack on free speech? That’s odd, because it looks exactly like an attack on free speech. Unfortunately Werbner is right about the second part. It shouldn’t be construed as recognition and respect for the sacred taboos of another religion, but it could be, and can be, and is being. That’s the upturned belly thing. People mouthing pieties about free speech while at the same time ordering everyone not to use it, and pasting the label ‘recognition and respect for the sacred taboos of another religion’ over the whole malodorous mess. We’re living through the very situation Werbner describes: threats against free speech construed as recognition and respect for the sacred taboos of another religion.
OB, I have strong doubts about that story. The illustrator, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
is Kare Bluitgen, who is described as living in an immigrant’s quarter and having immigrant friends. Three artists refused to draw Muhammed not simply because of Theo van Gogh, but, according to the FAZ, because they didn’t want to break the Islamic rule that forbids the prophet’s image.
But the story changes from newspaper to newspaper. The FAZ claims that Bluitgen’s story was overheard at a party. The Washington Post claims that it somehow became known, as well as any number of (unspecified) politically correct attempts to correct anti-Islamic prejudice on the part of scandanavian museums.
Now, if Bluitgen is being sincere, one has to wonder — why didn’t she (or he) look at some of the portraits of Muhammed drawn by Persian miniaturists? What kind of book was this, anyway? Is she living solely among Sunnis?
I think the story is a crock, myself, although nicely designed to make an anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant gesture into a brave, free speech gesture. All of this huffery about the cartoons has degenerated into an orgy of idiocy (topped, of course, by an Iranian paper running cartoons on concentration camps in apparent blithe unawareness that Iranians would be exactly the kind of untermenschen the Nazis would have exterminated — but the lunatics are definitely in charge of that asylum) so it is probably too late to extract any interesting philosophical lessons from it.
However, I’ll throw in my two bits anyway: the notion that all Enlightenment gestures are also non-oppressive gestures doesn’t seem to me to be historically true at all. There’s a story in one of Norman Lewis’ novels. The novel is set in Southern Venezuela in the sixties. A missionary couple has been “given” control of an indian village by the government. The couple is bringing in modern medicine and such. The particular group of Indians has a taboo about the color yellow — they feel it is an evil color, and shun it. So the missionary couple order a truckload of yellow paint, and force the Indians to paint all of the huts in the village yellow.
On the one hand – yellow isn’t an evil color, and this is a triumph for enlightened views.
On the other hand — this is the way to destroy a culture.
I’m not suggesting that the Jyllands-Posten editorial crew was quite as cruel as the missionaries, but that pouncing on the beliefs of a minority in Denmark — one that faces a lot of prejudice — is not exactly a bracing shot of liberation, either.
Oh for christ’s sake, that is so ridiculous. Forcing the Indians to paint all of the huts in the village yellow is not ‘an Enlightenment gesture’! It’s a moronic gesture. And ‘gestures’ aren’t the issue anyway.
And your analogy leaves a great deal out. Yellow paint is inert; yellow paint doesn’t do anything; there is no reason to make an issue of yellow paint (and if there were, that would obviously not be the way to do it). The same is not true of religion.
I am by now convinced that all the non-Muslims who have accepted that the cartoons are offensive and racist and moronic gestures on a par to fooling a Muslim into eating pork and drink beer or something, did so *because* of the mayhem that erupted afterwards.
I have a feeling that, had they had a chance to see those cartoons before the madness started, no one would have deemed them worthy of even a “hmm, that’s a bit harsh isn’t it”. At least, unless they’d never seen any editorial cartoons in any papers ever.
In fact, I’m not sure even Muslims themselves would have considered them so offensive — proof is, it took three more faked cartoons that were truly nasty and moronic to whip up all the righteous rage. (Also because, if you actually look at all the cartoons, some of them are satirising danish politicians; the self-censoring cartoonist situation; the author of the Mohammed book, depicted as pursuing a publicity stunt; plus, the editors of the paper itself. All references that would have been lost on anyone but the Danes!).
So even the imam who “received” those extra cartoons “anonymously” and then showed them around the ME claiming they were from the J-P KNEW the 12 originals weren’t enough to start a proper shitstorm over.
Nina, yeah – and that’s how it worked with the Rushdie affair, too. I suppose the thinking (or ‘thinking’) is: look at all the mayhem. Gosh. The people causing the mayhem must be really upset. Therefore – they must be upset for a good reason, therefore we had best act accordingly.
Of course all one has to do is substitute a few terms in order to see how absurd it is – but the people who ‘think’ that never do the substitution.
And Roger – another thing, and then another. 1) That was a story. What’s a story got to do with anything? You can’t offer as evidence of what’s ‘historically true’ about ‘Enlightenment gestures’ a fiction about a couple of fools. 2) The problem with what Werbner said doesn’t depend on the truth of the account of the Danish cartoons – the problem is in what she said, which could be a mere hypothetical.
Roger – the fog of the web. The story according to Newsnight (BBC UK), which is of course not 100% perfect, but usually pretty professional, is that it was initially the author’s publishers who contacted the paper. That is easy enough to verify for a well-drilled news team, I would guess. Phone call or two.
Also. Please – “Story”. “Novel”. “Missionaries in South America”.
Not the most rigorous platform for displaying the dark side of enlightenment values. Unless one is a relativist pomo, in which case it’s as true as anything else. But then, the postulate that the world is kept moving round by evil space-bats would be another valid possibility in that non-Eurocentric universe.
I whole-heartdedly apologise for any emotional hurt or disrespect suffered or felt to be suffered by Space-Bats, their friends or relatives or co-workers. Of course you exist.
Jack Straw
Of course, fictional as it may be, that story does point to one of the great problems of the West’s ‘Enlightenment’ heritage, which is that it has been as good a stick as anything else with which to beat down on ‘ignorant natives’. When the British brought the enlightened science of free-market economics to mid-C19 India, they actually made it illegal for the wealthy to make charitable donations of food to the poor, in case it affected the ‘natural’ market mechanisms — Anti-Charitable Contributions Act, 1877 [ain’t that a kicker of a name?]
With friends like the Victorians, Western rationalism hardly needs enemies… Of course, it was all a long time ago, and in another place, but as Salman Rushdie put it, the trouble with the British is that all their history happened somewhere else…
I’m still sticking up for Enlightenment, of course, just not the big stick version.
Dave – in fairness it was as much the White Man’s burden idealogues running the colonies with racist religious missionaries who stomped the indigenous victims as much as Adam Smith’s acolytes. They were a pretty religious lot, all said…
Oh yeah, but that’s just it — science and progress were assimilated seamlessly with religion and providence, and of course as the century progressed with social Darwinism and eugenic theory…
The fault-line between religion and science, I suppose, did turn out not to be so seamless in the end, but for those not prepared to be too consistent about these things, God, progress and Rnglishness were virtually the same thing c. 1900…
sorry, can’t type ‘Englishness’, Friday afternoon…
Of course it was a story. I chose it because it exemplified the theme I was talking about — it is a standard philosophical trope (see Cave, Ring of Gyges, Molyneaux problem, etc.)
Yes, there is a lot of web fog about this. Now it is the publishers of the book who contacted the Jyllands-Posten editorial crew. That makes at least a little more sense, for as the Wall Street Journal op ed page showed, yesterday, there are plenty of images of Muhammed in Shi’ite culture.
But what of the great fear, the trembling experienced when considering Moslems in Denmark? Out of curiosity, I went to factiva to see what, exactly, happened in Denmark in 2005.
Here’s a simple chronology:
1. January, 2005 — 100 tombstones in a Moslem cemetary vandalized.
2. April, 2005. Queen Margarethe II called on her country to show its opposition to Islam.
3. Summer, 2005. The DPP candidate for mayor of Copenhagen publishes enlightening material on her website about Islam – like Muslim young men think they have a right to rape Christian women.
4. August. A rightwing radio talk show host thoughtfully offered two possibilities for Muslims in Europe. They could either be peacefully expelled, or they could be exterminated.
5. September. Jyllends-Posten publishes its cartoons of Muhammed.
Perhaps OB is right, and I’m just lost in my goody goody anthropology ethos of weakness and “respect.” Somehow, though, I don’t get the vibe that Denmark was a hotbed of censored beliefs vis a vis Islam.
And ps — re the story from Lewis. It would be boring and take up way too much space, but a nice instance of the convergence of “liberal” (in the 19th century sense) interest and Protestant missionary activity can be found in Guatamala. Starting in the 1870s, when a liberal, anti-clerical regime came into power, the government encouraged Protestant missionaries and discouraged the Catholic church. Why? Because the Catholic Church was protective of communal land held by the indians — about 75 percent of the population — and the government wanted to expropriate that land and sell it to mostly foreign companies like United Fruit and German coffee bean growers. Protestants were considered different than the Catholics — more individualistic, more work ethic oriented. The notion was to uproot the old, slothful Indian culture and integrate it into civilized, urban culture, where Indians could provide cheap labor. Rios Montt, the man who presided over the massacres in Guatamala in the 1980s, revived this policy.
Roger, your story followed immediately the sentence “the notion that all Enlightenment gestures are also non-oppressive gestures doesn’t seem to me to be historically true at all.” The obvious inference was that your story was some sort of evidence for that assertion.
The Guatamala instance, however, is another matter. Yes, Enlightenment ideas (virtues, values) can serve capitalism, free marketism, and coercive methods of transition to same. Agreed. (But then what? Does that make, say, religion more appealing or useful? At least Entmt ideas are open to argument, which religious ideas are not. At least Enltmt ideas include the ability to alter and adjust them according to need.)
No, I don’t disagree with that, I just said as much. At least I thought I did.
Roger, a somewhat elegant riposte to my sarcy invective. Damn. Anyway, what left-liberal politics should be concerned with is keeping the core principles at its heart, namely equality of rights and opportunity and the economic, educational, employment and health principles that affect those rights. US foreign policy (and it instruments of torture, levels of corruption, approach towards the Kyoto etc) pisses everyone I know off. Blair’s govt. are seen to say far too little of any substance on these matters.
An age of hollow, mawkish and inward looking anxiety has dawned, we are weakened by media illusions and unnecessary self-doubts. I get sorely miffed when the focus of what’s left of the political will in this country (UK) is hijacked by a few fundamentalists and then the mouth-breathing unquestioning media big it up as a Really Important Issue. It’s such a phony war this clash of civilizations thing. What we really have is this: America, currently run by billionaires, is campaigning around the word – in breach of a GoP tradition of isolationism – thoroughly abusing and subverting the word democracy in its pursuit of its real agenda of utter globalization of markets and its own billionaires’ preeminence therein. This means taking on China, keeping Russia impoverished like a perma-frosted Africa, and making an enormous – enormous – killing in Iraq and wherever else they show up in the Mid East. Just go look at what General Electric own now. What they don’t own North , South, East or West of Baghdad couldn’t be sold on eBay to a pack of Etonian retards. That’s the US we’re offended by. Not all Americans offend us. Not American Culture. Not its jazz, its modern composers, its paintings, its literature, its thinkers or its philosophers. Not its folk music. Not its pioneering, campaigning, liberated women. Why the f@ck should they take the rap for that kazooing imbecile in the Oval Office and his pack of uber-rich Darth Mauls ? It sickens me.
On the other hand, we have, as Nick Cohen accurately puts it today in the Observer, “… not a clash of civilizations but a civil war within the Islamic world between theocratic reaction and the beleaguered forces of liberty and modernity.” What worse fate to befall the trades-unionists, women and minority rights workers and protesters of, say Iran, than to see their colleagues in Europe give ground to the fundamentalists somehow as a matter of fairness, while stupid slogans such as “Islamophobia is the New Anti-Semitism” are banded about by educated people who should know a lot better, taking up otherwise perfectly useful columns inches ?
There are therefore two conflicts going on world-wide, one fought brainlessly in the name of a brainless market, the other waged in the name of a Caliphate whose time is gone. We liberals need to get with it and learn that we don’t have to pal up with one side in this phony global conflict just because we profoundly disagree with the other. As you say – “They’ve protested the newspaper with posters, and then gotten on with their lives.” I suspect there are less rotten forces in action in Denmark than you, but, nevertheless, Good. Now lets all do it.
And roger – suffice to say, ‘Enlightenment values’ are being attacked and sorely misrepresented by actors on both fronts, for self-serving reasons. Their intrinsic usefulness to civilisation on this planet need not be argued over excesively though – it’s a bit like debating whether electricity was a good move.
Roger – Yes, fair enough, and well argued. It does seem pretty futile. This isn’t all just about trans-atlantic neocons and swastica-wearing imbeciles in Scandinavia though.
Also, I wouldn never accuse Cohen of being a neocon although plenty do; I’m sure he can fight his own battles though.
This bit puzzled me though “At the same time, in Europe, every time some troglodyte emits some baiting remark about Muslims, it is greeted as finally a blow struck for secular values.” Who? Where? When ? Rowan Atkinson ? Dawkins ? Perplexed. One daft and schoolboy-ish regional editorial decision does not make a campaign. The only remarks I tend to see or hear (perhaps I just block out the nasty neanderthall right-wing retards elswhere, but hey what’s new) are the exhasperated ones when an unpleaseent but influential minority from of a Wahabist mind-set, demand that our laws and behaviours are changed for the sake of ‘their’ autocratic view of ‘our’ rights and the laws that protect them. Any resistance to this bullying is met with the accusation of racisim, or anti- Islamicism. Worse, this daft flummery is then given legs by hand-wringing lierals who should know better. This ‘anti-western’ wrath is not triggered by the Iraq catastrophe, as many over-simplistic an argument has it. But you’re damn right – these autocrats represent a tiny minority over Europe. Most Muslems living in Europe coulnd’t give a rats arse for the Caliphate or the embarrassment of flag burning bozos hitting the streets of Luton ordering everyone to place the Uma before Western Democracy. Frankly though I do wish the whole thing would go away. We’ve enough to sort out as a species with global warming…
It’s the old squeaky wheel thing, the old loudest voices thing. The Caliphate-lovers do the loudest shouting, so they get attention, while the people who couldn’t give a rats arse for the Caliphate don’t get attention. Sometimes the loudest shouting thing is good (Civil Rights movement, feminism, gay rights, unions, etc etc) but sometimes it’s a dang nightmare.
There’s a nasty synergy between the Caliphate-lovers (hey, I like that term) and the Muslim haters. They amplify each other, since they each benefit from that game.
Can anyone (cue sinister music) say “CIA”? Isn’t it convenient-Muslim hatred and hatred of Muslims being whipped up just when the war drums are beating?
Of course, the Porter Goss CIA is too ham-fisted incompetent to run something like this, but…