Oh, and another thing

Things Your Humble Blogger thinks are being missed about this whole cartoon inspired violence business. Well, not missed, as I’m sure there are people making these points, but shall I say insufficiently emphasized.

• I do not get to decide what other people find offensive. It is incumbent on me (if I want to understand the universe better than I do, and particularly if I want to navigate it better than I do) to learn things in order to find out why people are offended by some things and not by others. It is generally a good idea not to offend people by accident, as the results are unpredictable, and the best guard against accidentally offending people is knowledge. However, if all my knowledge tells my that somebody ought not to be offended by something, and that person is offended, then my knowledge is incomplete. In other words, all the conversation about whether people ought to have been offended, and how offended they ought to have been, misses the point. They were as offended as they were, and that’s how offensive the offense was.
• Given that, the whole project was deliberately offensive, and extremely so. This was not a case where anybody should be surprised either at the fact of offense or the level of offense. OK, this hasn’t been missed, so I’ll lump it in with the other thing that hasn’t been missed, which is that offense is no justification for violence. However offended you are, by whatever, don’t throw rocks. OK? Similarly, if you tell somebody to fuck themselves, and they throw rocks at you, you have the right to be upset, but not surprised.
• The underlying political situation is that some leaders of the Muslim world want a pan-Islamic community united in opposition to The West (and, ultimately, all non-Muslims, or so it seems to YHB). One effective tool for this is an overwhelming sense that, as the Prime Minister of Malaysia put it a couple of years ago, “We are all Muslims. We are all oppressed. We are all being humiliated.” We can discuss the extent to which this is true, but my point is that people are not saying it because it is true, but to extend political power in order to create that pan-Islamic community (and, presumably further extend political power, but that is neither here nor there). Thus, in terms of predicting response to actions, it’s a good idea to keep in mind that there are very touchy people out there, with big microphones, who spend their time looking for things at which to take offense, to give them more fuel for their particular fire.
• Not all of the people using this tool are dishonest but (inevitably) some of them are. Therefore, not only will you be held to account for what you say, but for what you did not say, at least up to the extent that you have made it plausible that you said what you did not say. This is the lesson of the phony Danish cartoons included with the real ones. This is the lesson of the riots over our boys allegedly pissing on the Koran. This is the lesson of the common knowledge on the proverbial Islamic street (or so I’ve read) that we brought Mossad into Abu Ghraib to do our torturing. This is not an excuse for those who are lying, but a reminder that you have the right to be upset, but not surprised. It’s a natural consequence of marrying Caesar, that you become Caesar’s wife, and everybody is married to one Caesar or another.
• Neither the use of what is effectively remnant theology or dishonesty in persuasion are unique to Moslem leaders. The Danes have been told, by political leaders and journalists and rabble-rousers, at home and abroad, that they are being oppressed and humiliated, that Europe is under siege, that soon they will no longer be able to be proud Danes in proud Denmark, but will have to tiptoe humbly behind the fierce Saracen. Some of the people who say that are Americans. And, of course, Americans say it about ourselves, that we (usually for white, traditionalist, rural or suburban, exclusionist and exceptionalist values of we, but certainly not always) are all being humiliated and oppressed. We are often told lies in the specifics of that, and we often believe them, passing around our own versions of the phony cartoons.
• When it comes to printing material that can actually cause harm, that is, truly incendiary stuff such as the cartoons in question, or (depending on one’s views) things like pornography, racist propaganda, supremacist tracts and treason, there are generally three points of view, reflecting more the mindset of the viewer than a political philosophy or ideology. The first is that such material should be suppressed, and to point at its publication as an example of the looseness of the state/society, and to attempt to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening again. The second is that we must, reluctantly, allow such material to be published, but that we should spend a lot of energy denouncing it, and to dwell on the unfortunate fact of its publication and its attendant problems. The third is that the publication of such material is in fact a triumph, as bad as the material may be, simply because its existence underscores freedom of press and (more important) of thought, that such freedom is far more important than any dire consequences of publication, and that such freedom is, in fact, dependent on more than just the theoretical publication of awful things but the actual publication of awful things.

  I should go into this in more detail, sometime, but I waver between the second and third camps. Sometimes, my fondness for variety and novelty push me into the third camp, the camp that (I think) operates from a fear that any narrowing of the public discourse will lead to more narrowing, and that the result will be less novelty and variety, not to mention suppression of things that are Good Things, independent of their novelty and variety, such as (depending on one’s views) things like pornography, racist propaganda, supremacist tracts and treason. At the moment, my more sober side is inclined to the second view, that accepts, as it were, freedom of speech as the cost of having freedom of speech. This is the view that (I think) Puts Cruelty First, as we’ve discussed in the past; this is an outcome-focused view that puts the focus on the victims of the violence, both the rabble being roused and the rubble that the rabble rouses, and wants to find some way to prevent further violence, not so much worried about who is to blame, but how can we make better choices, so we don’t have quite so much blame later. And you know, for all I reject the first view utterly, as my anti-authoritarian soul recoils from such high-handed methods, I do understand it, dimly, as another ends-based approach, that could well appear attractively safe.

Well, and enough rambling. Sorry about the limited posting these days, Gentle Readers all, but Your Humble Blogger has other typing to do, and am taking my leisure from that in less wrist-intensive, less repetitively-stressful activities. I’m still here, and still well and all, but posting will be light for another few days, I’d suspect.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.