Globalized, fluid, culturally impure
Katha Pollitt read Johann Hari’s article.
[I]t would be nice to say that the world has learned what happens when freedom of speech and thought is subordinated to religious authority. In fact, the lesson seems to be the opposite: careful, you might hurt the feelings of the faithful. Oh, and they might kill you.
And, as Katha doesn’t go on to say but could have, since you hurt their feelings, it would be your fault if they did kill you.
Here on the American left we tend to see these incidents as gratuitous provocations by insensitive Westerners, and there’s something to that…The problem with that argument is that the same spirit of religious dogmatism backed by violence that shaped the protests against perceived Western insults operates, far more powerfully, in Islamic states–against their own citizens. In Iran and Pakistan, women have been imprisoned for protesting Sharia law. In 2008 Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, a student in Afghanistan, our client state, was sentenced to death for the crime of downloading a report about women’s rights. Even in relatively secular Egypt, blogger Reda Abdel-Rahman was jailed and tortured for calling for an Islam that does not include Sharia.
Well…yes, but…well it’s still worse when those bastard Western secularists do it than it is when the authentic homegrown unWestern authoritarian bullies do it.
Appeals to the hurt feelings of religious people are just a dodge to protect the antidemocratic and retrograde policies of religious states and organizations. We’re all adults; we have to live with unwelcome expression every day. What’s so special about religion that it should be uniquely cocooned? After all, nobody at the UN is suggesting that atheists should be protected from offense–let alone women, gays, leftists or other targets popular with the faithful. What about our feelings? How can it be logical to say that women can’t point out sexism in the Bible or the Koran but clerics can use those texts to declare women inferior, unclean and in need of male control?
It can’t, but that’s okay, because revelation don’t need no stinkin logic.
The clerics fight so hard to control speech because they know they are losing minds and hearts. Twenty years after the Satanic Verses fatwa, it’s more than ever Rushdie’s world – globalized, fluid, culturally impure. The fanatics just live there.
And blow bits of it up at regular intervals. Let’s hope we can hang on to the bulk of the real estate. Long live the culturally impure!
Good post.
I expressed concerns to a mate of mine about the encroachment of these ecclesiastic states and he shrugged and noted that those countries in which they’re dominant have their technological progress retarded (due to their outdated value systems that imprision free thinkers etc) and thus their economic power is limited. The only thing keeping them competetive are their natural resources.
Not sure how America fits into that point of view, though.
No one ever explains why it is just religious feelings which require protecting. Why is it okay to hurt someone’s feelings by criticizing their favourite author, singer, film, political party, football team, etc, but not to hurt their feelings by criticizing their religion?
Once in a blue moon someone does take a stab at explaining that. It’s some sort of wool about how religion is a ‘deep’ ‘profound’ ‘precious’ part of a person’s identity. Martha Nussbaum specializes in this kind of rhubarb.
Oh yeah – I often think these things are worked up. Worked up feelings can end up being genuine (in some sense of that slippery word) but they’re still worked up.
Kind of like The Big Lie? Tell yourself you’re offended enough times and maybe you start believing it? Kinda like saying God exists…
Certainly. Being offended is just the kind of thing that can be worked up in that way. I know it is in my case, and I’m pretty sure I’m not unusual there.
Yay Katha Pollitt for saying this: “We’re all adults; we have to live with unwelcome expression every day. What’s so special about religion that it should be uniquely cocooned?”
Yay Ophelia for the post.
This business is twisted. About ten years ago I started to notice offended Christians when I moved to Nebraska. (Previously my Jehovah’s Witness family members had the sense know that their nonsense was not of interest to the rest of us. So they didn’t bother to pretend to have hurt feelings. They just followed the rules my mother laid down, i.e. check your Awake magazines etc. at the door). From my lovely foggy California bubble I hadn’t paid much attention but over in the prairies the offended ones were all over the place.
After several years of careful observation I decided that it went beyond offended. I think, in response to the threat of losing their dominant cult status, as Eric suggests, they had to start acting out. They pout and their eyes well with tears and they pretend to be victims, then proceed to invent all kinds of crap that they then force on the rest of us – sub-human status for women, abstinence education, so-called traditional marriage, the list goes on and as Salil Tripathi gently put it “the possibility of such disputes is endless.” I think it’s worthwhile to point out that xtians and muslims are not endangered species. No coddling or cocooning is needed. Their (mostly) male leaders already get to run the show in most of the places where they are established. Do they think we will forget that fact if they distract us with their puffed-up pretend hurt feelings?
And, as always, I am stumped. If a religion is so great and powerful and such a force for compassion and goodness what the hell is there to worry about? Why not be content to know that I will end up barbecued in some hell? I’m as nasty as the next guy, and being a smarmy I-told-you-so know-it-all who gets to sneer at anyone who is heading for The Big Fall from Grace is good enough for me!
Not to mention if God is so Big and Special and Powerful then why is God so vulnerable to ‘insult’ and ‘offense’ and ‘blasphemy’ and all the rest of it? Why can’t God just take it in stride? Or rather why don’t God’s fans realize that the kind of God they believe in would probably manage to take it in stride? (Except of course that they believe in a neurotically vindictive jealous god as well as a benevolent loving god, just to frustrate annoying questions like these.)
Yes, that’s the part I don’t get. If you truly have faith in a benevolent and omnipotent god, what’s the worry? Why does She need defending, especially from the likes of me?
Ironically this is why theists who are actually solid and comfortable in their beliefs don’t bother me much–they don’t feel the need to take “offense” at stuff. It’s the insecure theists who bug the hell out of me, and I suspect they’re insecure because they have a lot of doubt.
I think some of the insecure theists are no kind of theist. Instead they are empty human shells who need to make stuff up to justify the bad behavior they want to do and the nonsense they want to spout. They might not be reflective or thoughtful enough to have doubt.