“But why is it that if a Muslim commits murder an entire religion is blamed, if a black person does an entire race is blamed, but as soon as it’s a white male he’s just a random “psycho”? Blaming Islam for the actions of these terrorists is clearly just racism.”
Professor Fincke is right to note that, since the Charlie Hebdo attacks, many commentators have argued that it is racist to blame Islam for attacks committed in its name. As I noted in my last post, the line between anti-religious and racial bigotry is not always easy to draw; two often often go hand in hand (given that racial or ethnic groups often use particular religious traditions as means of establishing and maintaining group identity and solidarity), or one may serve as a mask for the other. Analogies between African-American experience are appropriate here; just as criticism of "Ebonics" (better and more formally known in contemporary scholarly literature as African American Vernacular English) often serves as a mask for anti-black racism, criticism of Islam often serves as a mask for racism against any or all of the various ethnic and national groups originating in predominantly Muslim countries.
That said, it does not seem as clear to me as it does to Professor Fincke, and as it does to many liberal observers, that when a black person commits a crime, his alleged racial characteristics are to blame, but that when a white person commits a crime, her acts are blamed on her individual character or psychological state. An old saw has it that kleptomania is what we call it when a rich person steals things. This saw cuts both ways; it may be used to mean that when rich people steal, society exonerates their actions in ways it does not when poor people steal, or it may be used to mean that the rich are assumed to lack the same level of self-control as the poor. As with class, so too with race--and not surprisingly, as the two have so long been intertwined. It is not uncommon these days for the media and society to blame the supposed inherent racism of whites for crimes that whites commit, rather than their individual moral or psychological inadequacies. The logic here is not entirely different from the belief that blacks (or other people of color) commit crimes because of the "pathologies" of their cultures.
All of that said, Professor Fincke is right to note that we are justified in blaming Islam for terrorism when terrorists cite Islam as the basis for their actions. I can see no good reason to assume that violent acts that perpetrators commit in the name of their faith are "really" about economics, nationalism, or some other force than religion. Nonetheless, I take issue with the notion that the type of religion that cites violence is the "real" Islam (or Christianity, or Hinduism) while versions of the religion that expect their adherents to be peaceable are somehow distorted or watered-down versions of the real things. I have never really understood why atheist thinkers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, who have nothing kind to say about fundamentalist philosophies, are so eager to agree with fundamentalists that the most violent and extreme interpretations of a faith tradition are the "real thing" while progressive religion is something akin to a bad photocopy of it. Moreover, I have never seen what qualifies professed atheists to have an opinion on the matter. As a white person, I do not have a say about what the boundaries of authentic African-American culture are (presuming that authenticity can be established in any culture); this is a discussion African-Americans are entitled to have among themselves, and to interject myself into that discussion would be presumptuous and rude. Religious folk deserve the same respect from people who define themselves as outsiders to their religious traditions.
“No True Muslim Would Be A Terrorist.” Or, its evil cousin, “Muslim terrorists are the true Muslims.”
I dealt with the question of whether there can be "true" and "false" adherents of a particular religious tradition in my last post, and will not repeat those arguments here. I daresay that Professor Finke would object to the idea that there are no true and false liberals, no true and false proponents of racial or gender equality, and no true or false secularists.
What Professor Fincke argues here, however, goes beyond this assertion. He claims that religions are only entitled to evolve in ways that "make for moral improvement rather than moral stagnation or moral regression." All very well and good, but moral improvement and moral regression are both is in the eye of the beholder. And the line between them is not always as neat as Professor Fincke would have us believe. Fincke also chides religious believers for not casting off the shackles of having to justify their evolving moral understandings through reinterpretation of ancient texts. Here too Fincke's understanding of religion suffers from tunnel vision.
The best way to illustrate the problem to take a sample case. As we are discussing Islam, I will take a moral dilemma that pertains both to it and to my own faith tradition, Judaism: the separation of men and women in worship. My knowledge of this topic is mostly from a Jewish perspective, though from a recent viewing of the film Unmosqued, in which the topic of Muslim separation of the sexes at prayer is discussed at length, lead me to believe that in both traditions, the issues raised are similar and that much of what I have to say about this issue in Jewish communities would apply equally to Muslim ones.
Traditionally, Jewish synagogues separated men and women at prayer, and in recent (and not-so-recent--controversy about this required separation has been raging in Jewish communities for over 150 years) times, feminism has forced a re-evaluation of this practice. The issue is complicated by a lack of agreement about the original reasons and intent of separation, or of its purpose and effects in our own time. Would removing the mechitzah (the traditional barrier separating men and women in an Orthodox synagogue), empower women by making it easier for them to participate in the worship service? Or would it dis-empower women, by taking away the opportunity to certain of having a place to pray way from the male gaze, and its tendency to assess women on their dress? Arguments can be, and often are, made either way, by both men and women. Moral progress and moral regression are not always so easily discerned as Fincke would have us believe.
With respect to whether it is better simply to make a great moral leap forward than to seek to square a new moral understanding with ancient texts (or, as Fincke would have it, to force a new moral understanding with the text), the best analogy is to the American constitution. Like the American constitution, a religious tradition seeks to embody an understanding of the cosmos and to promote a system of values. And like American law, it seeks to do so in the context of an ordered community. These facts are easier to see in traditions like Islam and Judaism, which define themselves though law more so than in Christianity, where avoidance of "legalism" has been a goal.
Like the American constitution, the Torah and the Quran were written down--whether as direct dictation from God as fundamentalists would believe, or as the best human approximation of a divine will that is never fully comprehensible, as religious liberals (and I) would believe--by particular people at particular times and places. Parts of these texts are vague and present wiggle room for interpretation; others do not. For example, the Supreme Court has argued endlessly over the limits of the federal government's powers to regulate commerce "among the several states"; it has not argued endlessly over whether states with large populations are entitled to send more senators to the Senate, because the Constitution undeniably says that each state, regardless of population, is entitled to send only two. Even loose constructionists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor will not argue that California is entitled to more senators than Wyoming, because there simply is no plausible interpretation of the Constitution as we have it that would allow this construction. Does relying on an "ancient text" impede moral progress (as defined by those who see the current law governing the composition of the Senate as undemocratic) in this instance? Perhaps. But the alternative is to invite chaos.
Moreover, Fincke ignores that in my instances, the religiously faithful actually do engage in a kind of radical repair of their religious beliefs that is, in many ways, similar to the way the American people can amend the Constitution in order to further democratic progress. A case in point is the manner in which Jewish law has undergone repair over the centuries to ensure that the balance of power between debtors and creditors does not get too far out of hand in either direction. A specific requirement of the Torah that all debts be cancelled every seven years--a law originally meant to prevent the poor from being locked in a never-ending cycle of debt--was abandoned by rabbinical tradition, not in the interests of the rich, but in the interests of the poor, to ensure that the poor would not be refused loans by lenders who worried that they would not be repaid within seven years. Amendments to specifics of the law of debt have sometimes been justified not on interpretations of the text but on the grounds that they are a necessary tikkun, or repair, of the Law of Moses, necessary to ensure that the entirely of the law does not lose its moral credibility and authority.
Is this system sometimes slow in correcting a real or perceived injustice? Yes. But it also has the blessing of not throwing a community into anarchy. Whether in a nation or a religion, this is a good thing.
Monday, February 9, 2015
Friday, February 6, 2015
Charlie Hebdo and Professor Fincke, Part Quatre
“How can you be racists to Muslims if they’re not a race?”
Much confusion seems to exist these days about just what the word "racism" denotes. To probably the majority of people familiar with the word (which would include virtually everyone with access to Western media old enough to crawl), racism denotes primarily a prejudice against a group of people based on its skin color or ethnicity. More recently, the term has been extended by some academics and anti-racism activists to encompass systems of advantage based on skin color or ethnicity, even where overt prejudicial attitudes have declined (hence the phrase "racism without racists"). Fincke has raised the important question of whether anti-Muslim prejudice can be termed "racism".
Well, it depends. To the extent that many in the West erroneously conflate Arab or Middle Eastern identity with the religion of Islam, a veneer of anti-Muslim prejudice may well serve as a cover for what is really anti-Arab racism. But hatred of Muslims that extends to all Muslims regardless of race or skin color, as Muslims, cannot be called racism, and more than hatred of women as women can be called racism--though it certainly is an execrable form of bigotry.
That said, Fincke devotes most of his discussion of this issue of the question of whether criticism of Islam's supposed culture of violence, which ignores the history of violence and genocide perpetrated in the name of other religious traditions, can be termed racism. As wrongheaded as it is to criticize another religious tradition of things one's own is equally guilty of, I would again have to say no: it does not constitute prejudice based on ethnicity or skin color. Such cognitive distortions seem to me to be part of the human experience, at the level of the individual, the tribe, the nation, the faith. Virtually all people have the tendency to notice the sins of others while forgetting their own. So common is this phenomenon that psychology has even developed a name--Fundamental Attribution Error--to denote the tendency to ascribe other peoples' or groups' actions to their character while attributing one's own or one's group's actions to one's circumstances. Self-deception is as old as humanity itself. I doubt that some new dawn of irreligion will bring it to an end.
“Almost no Muslims support assaults on conscience so it’s unfair to blame Islam itself for theocracy or terrorism.”
Fincke seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. This is the only conclusion I can reach on his decision to place this meme about Islam and the Charlie Hebdo attacks immediately following the discussion I outlined in the paragraph above. It is wrong for non-Muslims to claim that Islam is inherently violent--except that Fincke trots out polling statistics from varying Muslim countries to show that a large proportion of the world's Muslims support punishment for blasphemy against Islam and even the death penalty for apostasy. It seems too obvious to ask what similar polls of Christians in Albania or Arkansas would say about support for the death penalty for apostasy from Christianity.
The question of whether Islam as a whole can be blamed for assaults on nonbelievers' consciences committed in its name cannot be separated from a question Fincke takes up later in his post--whether there exists any distinction between "true" and "false" believers of a religion. Religion seems to be the only form of voluntaristic identity for which a person's claim to belong or to adhere must be taken at face value. We don't doubt that there are true and false environmentalists, true and false feminists, true and false devotees of the philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche. Yet somehow a widely prevailing anti-religious discourse insists that there are no true and false Christians, true and false Jews, or true and false Islams. Both the Ku Klux Klan and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have claimed to be true exponents of Americanism (for many years, the Klan even used the slogan "100% Americanism"). Few secularists in America or elsewhere would go so far as to argue that both of their claims must be taken at face value and that all who claim to believe in "the American way of life" (however defined) must have their claim accepted by others. Why a different standard applies when assessing claims of true and false adherence to a religion is beyond my comprehension.
Much confusion seems to exist these days about just what the word "racism" denotes. To probably the majority of people familiar with the word (which would include virtually everyone with access to Western media old enough to crawl), racism denotes primarily a prejudice against a group of people based on its skin color or ethnicity. More recently, the term has been extended by some academics and anti-racism activists to encompass systems of advantage based on skin color or ethnicity, even where overt prejudicial attitudes have declined (hence the phrase "racism without racists"). Fincke has raised the important question of whether anti-Muslim prejudice can be termed "racism".
Well, it depends. To the extent that many in the West erroneously conflate Arab or Middle Eastern identity with the religion of Islam, a veneer of anti-Muslim prejudice may well serve as a cover for what is really anti-Arab racism. But hatred of Muslims that extends to all Muslims regardless of race or skin color, as Muslims, cannot be called racism, and more than hatred of women as women can be called racism--though it certainly is an execrable form of bigotry.
That said, Fincke devotes most of his discussion of this issue of the question of whether criticism of Islam's supposed culture of violence, which ignores the history of violence and genocide perpetrated in the name of other religious traditions, can be termed racism. As wrongheaded as it is to criticize another religious tradition of things one's own is equally guilty of, I would again have to say no: it does not constitute prejudice based on ethnicity or skin color. Such cognitive distortions seem to me to be part of the human experience, at the level of the individual, the tribe, the nation, the faith. Virtually all people have the tendency to notice the sins of others while forgetting their own. So common is this phenomenon that psychology has even developed a name--Fundamental Attribution Error--to denote the tendency to ascribe other peoples' or groups' actions to their character while attributing one's own or one's group's actions to one's circumstances. Self-deception is as old as humanity itself. I doubt that some new dawn of irreligion will bring it to an end.
“Almost no Muslims support assaults on conscience so it’s unfair to blame Islam itself for theocracy or terrorism.”
Fincke seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. This is the only conclusion I can reach on his decision to place this meme about Islam and the Charlie Hebdo attacks immediately following the discussion I outlined in the paragraph above. It is wrong for non-Muslims to claim that Islam is inherently violent--except that Fincke trots out polling statistics from varying Muslim countries to show that a large proportion of the world's Muslims support punishment for blasphemy against Islam and even the death penalty for apostasy. It seems too obvious to ask what similar polls of Christians in Albania or Arkansas would say about support for the death penalty for apostasy from Christianity.
The question of whether Islam as a whole can be blamed for assaults on nonbelievers' consciences committed in its name cannot be separated from a question Fincke takes up later in his post--whether there exists any distinction between "true" and "false" believers of a religion. Religion seems to be the only form of voluntaristic identity for which a person's claim to belong or to adhere must be taken at face value. We don't doubt that there are true and false environmentalists, true and false feminists, true and false devotees of the philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche. Yet somehow a widely prevailing anti-religious discourse insists that there are no true and false Christians, true and false Jews, or true and false Islams. Both the Ku Klux Klan and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have claimed to be true exponents of Americanism (for many years, the Klan even used the slogan "100% Americanism"). Few secularists in America or elsewhere would go so far as to argue that both of their claims must be taken at face value and that all who claim to believe in "the American way of life" (however defined) must have their claim accepted by others. Why a different standard applies when assessing claims of true and false adherence to a religion is beyond my comprehension.
Friday, January 30, 2015
Charlie Hebdo and Professor Fincke, Part Trois
“I refuse to say ‘Je Suis Charlie’ because I don’t do the offensive things they do.”
As have covered this question in a previous blog post, at least as far as I myself am concerned, there is little for me to add here, except to take exception to Professor Fincke's assertion that those of us who refuse to say "Je Suis Charlie" possess a "self-righteous lack of introspectiveness." How exactly would Professor Fincke propose to measure the introspectiveness of millions of people he hasn't met? Is it not possible that people with whom one disagrees, even vehemently, may be just as introspective as one is oneself?
More to the point,is introspection necessarily a virtue in this case? Secularists in the West often know far too little about the religious traditions they criticize both in other parts of the world and even in their own. Fincke's own repetition of the ills of slavery, misogyny, narrow tribalism, violence, and homophobia the Abrahamic faiths supposedly bequeathed to the world ignores the definition of "sacred text" believers in these faiths actually use. For Jews, holiness rests not only in the Torah, which on its surface seems to support the continued existence of slavery, but also in an accumulated rabbinical tradition spanning centuries that ended slavery once and for all centuries before abolitionism emerged as a social and political movement in the late eighteenth century. Similarly, for Muslims, the Quran is supplemented with and interpreted by the Hadith--interpretations, teachings, and sayings that go back to the Prophet--without which the Quran cannot be fully comprehended. What offends religious Jews and Muslims about the kinds of cartoons Charlie Hebdo publishes of religious figures is that they do not simply mock us personally--we are thick-skinned enough to take that--but at the way they distort and oversimplify traditions so broad that they ought to be, and often have been, conceived of as civilizations rather than mere religions. Indeed, these traditions encompass so much of life that only in relatively recent centuries has anyone attempted to wall them off into a small box called "religion".
Fincke is perhaps on more solid ground when he criticizes the cries of "context" from religious pluralists who argue for a more nuanced understanding of scriptural passages that seem to condone evil, while ignoring the context of the Charlie Hebdo pictures that merely "play in bigoted tropes". But context often gets lost when works from one culture are consumed by another, as happens with ever-increasing speed in a world of wireless phones and computers. What is satirical in its home context may not appear so to people a world away, and yet people from a world away may now be as close as next door.
As have covered this question in a previous blog post, at least as far as I myself am concerned, there is little for me to add here, except to take exception to Professor Fincke's assertion that those of us who refuse to say "Je Suis Charlie" possess a "self-righteous lack of introspectiveness." How exactly would Professor Fincke propose to measure the introspectiveness of millions of people he hasn't met? Is it not possible that people with whom one disagrees, even vehemently, may be just as introspective as one is oneself?
More to the point,is introspection necessarily a virtue in this case? Secularists in the West often know far too little about the religious traditions they criticize both in other parts of the world and even in their own. Fincke's own repetition of the ills of slavery, misogyny, narrow tribalism, violence, and homophobia the Abrahamic faiths supposedly bequeathed to the world ignores the definition of "sacred text" believers in these faiths actually use. For Jews, holiness rests not only in the Torah, which on its surface seems to support the continued existence of slavery, but also in an accumulated rabbinical tradition spanning centuries that ended slavery once and for all centuries before abolitionism emerged as a social and political movement in the late eighteenth century. Similarly, for Muslims, the Quran is supplemented with and interpreted by the Hadith--interpretations, teachings, and sayings that go back to the Prophet--without which the Quran cannot be fully comprehended. What offends religious Jews and Muslims about the kinds of cartoons Charlie Hebdo publishes of religious figures is that they do not simply mock us personally--we are thick-skinned enough to take that--but at the way they distort and oversimplify traditions so broad that they ought to be, and often have been, conceived of as civilizations rather than mere religions. Indeed, these traditions encompass so much of life that only in relatively recent centuries has anyone attempted to wall them off into a small box called "religion".
Fincke is perhaps on more solid ground when he criticizes the cries of "context" from religious pluralists who argue for a more nuanced understanding of scriptural passages that seem to condone evil, while ignoring the context of the Charlie Hebdo pictures that merely "play in bigoted tropes". But context often gets lost when works from one culture are consumed by another, as happens with ever-increasing speed in a world of wireless phones and computers. What is satirical in its home context may not appear so to people a world away, and yet people from a world away may now be as close as next door.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Charlie Hebdo and Professor Fincke, Part Deux
“Freedom of speech shouldn’t give you the right to insult people’s religions.”
Since the Charlie Hebdo attack, such figures as Pope Francis have come out with the argument that freedom of speech does not encompass the right to criticize other people's religions or to engage in what another faith considers blasphemous. Fincke is right to point out that freedom of speech not only does but must encompass this right. If racially or ethnically offensive hate speech receives protection in a free country, so too much speech that is offensive to people on religious grounds.
That said, to defend a legal or constitutional right to engage in offensive speech is not the same thing as to say that such speech is in and of itself right. Moreover, in both racial and religious contexts (which, in the case of the depiction of Muslims in Western media, often overlap), the line between offensive speech and an outright threat cannot always be drawn with certainty.
Let us take one example more familiar to American audiences: the practice of cross-burning by the Ku Klux Klan. Cross burning is clearly offensive to African-Americans in the United States in no small part because of its frequent use as an intimidation tactic. The extent to which the practice is constitutionally protected depends a great deal on the circumstances in which a cross is burned. When the Klan (or other hate groups) place a cross on someone's lawn in order to intimidate him or her into accepting white supremacy, this is not "speech" but merely a threat, does not receive constitutional protection, is rightly regarded by most Americans today as odious. When performed as part of Klan ceremonies, away from the eyes of people who would perceive it as a threat, cross burning has received, and should receive, constitutional protection.
But is there a middle ground between these two situations? And if so, what should be done in such instances? What would we make of it if a local Klan group decided to put a burning across atop a car and parade through town with it? One could not call this an act of intimidation against a specific individual in the same manner as a cross burning on someone's lawn, but intimidation is nonetheless the clear message of such an act: its message is "Blacks, and supporters of Black people's rights, beware." I would argue that such conduct does not constitute speech and does not merit constitutional protection; one does not have a right to intimidate a whole class of people any more than one has a right to intimidate an individual.
How does this apply to the situation of Muslims who see cartoons as offensive as those recently printed in Charlie Hebdo? To many Muslims, grotesque depictions of the Prophet Mohammed are not simply mockery of their religious beliefs but attacks upon them. Their purpose is viewed not merely as satirizing religious figures but as an attempt to make all Muslims seem narrow-minded, backward, bigoted, Other, and by extension to make exclusion of Muslims from the body politic seem justifiable. Charlie Hebdo has published cartoons satirizing Mohammed in the context of a wider French and European culture that has seen a spike of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in recent years. Controversies concerning the wearing of the veil in French public schools are the obvious case in point. While French secularists may see laws prohibiting religious garments in schools as necessary to protect a cherished principle of laicite, France's Muslims see the same laws--often selectively applied only against them--as attacks on their ethnic identities and, in the case of female students donning the veil, as attacks on their notions of modesty. This context makes the line between insult of a religion's belief or of major religious figures and advocacy of discrimination against a religion's adherents much harder to draw.
In the end, one can affirm the principle of freedom of speech while maintaining that some instances of speech are grotesque, gratuitously insulting, and unworthy of responsible and enlightened discourse. To say so is not to give in to terrorism.
“Even if we should honor the legal right to blaspheme, it’s still morally inappropriate for being so disrespectful.”
This argument--substantially similar to the one I made in the above entry--has come to be a focus of discourse around the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Fincke deals with it by arguing, in essence, that the right to satirize is sacrosanct--that they "play a vital role in puncturing the air of reverence around religious figures." Comedy and satire do not have a moral obligation to avoid the topic of religion altogether, but the line between satire of a religious figure and demonization of an entire religious tradition is blurry at best. Where does satirizing racism, sexism, or Islamophobia end and engaging in actual racism, sexism, or Islamophobia begin?
Since the Charlie Hebdo attack, such figures as Pope Francis have come out with the argument that freedom of speech does not encompass the right to criticize other people's religions or to engage in what another faith considers blasphemous. Fincke is right to point out that freedom of speech not only does but must encompass this right. If racially or ethnically offensive hate speech receives protection in a free country, so too much speech that is offensive to people on religious grounds.
That said, to defend a legal or constitutional right to engage in offensive speech is not the same thing as to say that such speech is in and of itself right. Moreover, in both racial and religious contexts (which, in the case of the depiction of Muslims in Western media, often overlap), the line between offensive speech and an outright threat cannot always be drawn with certainty.
Let us take one example more familiar to American audiences: the practice of cross-burning by the Ku Klux Klan. Cross burning is clearly offensive to African-Americans in the United States in no small part because of its frequent use as an intimidation tactic. The extent to which the practice is constitutionally protected depends a great deal on the circumstances in which a cross is burned. When the Klan (or other hate groups) place a cross on someone's lawn in order to intimidate him or her into accepting white supremacy, this is not "speech" but merely a threat, does not receive constitutional protection, is rightly regarded by most Americans today as odious. When performed as part of Klan ceremonies, away from the eyes of people who would perceive it as a threat, cross burning has received, and should receive, constitutional protection.
But is there a middle ground between these two situations? And if so, what should be done in such instances? What would we make of it if a local Klan group decided to put a burning across atop a car and parade through town with it? One could not call this an act of intimidation against a specific individual in the same manner as a cross burning on someone's lawn, but intimidation is nonetheless the clear message of such an act: its message is "Blacks, and supporters of Black people's rights, beware." I would argue that such conduct does not constitute speech and does not merit constitutional protection; one does not have a right to intimidate a whole class of people any more than one has a right to intimidate an individual.
How does this apply to the situation of Muslims who see cartoons as offensive as those recently printed in Charlie Hebdo? To many Muslims, grotesque depictions of the Prophet Mohammed are not simply mockery of their religious beliefs but attacks upon them. Their purpose is viewed not merely as satirizing religious figures but as an attempt to make all Muslims seem narrow-minded, backward, bigoted, Other, and by extension to make exclusion of Muslims from the body politic seem justifiable. Charlie Hebdo has published cartoons satirizing Mohammed in the context of a wider French and European culture that has seen a spike of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in recent years. Controversies concerning the wearing of the veil in French public schools are the obvious case in point. While French secularists may see laws prohibiting religious garments in schools as necessary to protect a cherished principle of laicite, France's Muslims see the same laws--often selectively applied only against them--as attacks on their ethnic identities and, in the case of female students donning the veil, as attacks on their notions of modesty. This context makes the line between insult of a religion's belief or of major religious figures and advocacy of discrimination against a religion's adherents much harder to draw.
In the end, one can affirm the principle of freedom of speech while maintaining that some instances of speech are grotesque, gratuitously insulting, and unworthy of responsible and enlightened discourse. To say so is not to give in to terrorism.
“Even if we should honor the legal right to blaspheme, it’s still morally inappropriate for being so disrespectful.”
This argument--substantially similar to the one I made in the above entry--has come to be a focus of discourse around the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Fincke deals with it by arguing, in essence, that the right to satirize is sacrosanct--that they "play a vital role in puncturing the air of reverence around religious figures." Comedy and satire do not have a moral obligation to avoid the topic of religion altogether, but the line between satire of a religious figure and demonization of an entire religious tradition is blurry at best. Where does satirizing racism, sexism, or Islamophobia end and engaging in actual racism, sexism, or Islamophobia begin?
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Charlie Hebdo and Professor Fincke
The recent attacks on French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo have tended to push other stories concerning religion and world affairs into the background. Much of the discourse around the Charlie Hebdo slayings has centered around questions of the media's responsibility in to the attacks, to the point that the media coverage of the attacks has become a news story in and of itself. Recently, professor or religion, history, and philosophy Daniel Fincke has posted on his blog Camels with Hammers his responses to what he sees at sixteen of the worst memes to surface in the wake of Charlie Hebdo. Fincke's perspective is atheistic and vigorous in its defense of freedom of expression. Nonetheless, I feel that his points merit some discussion, and in some cases, dissent. So I am devoting some blog postings to discussions of these memes, dealing with one or two per post.
1. “Why are people insisting we show the images? We can stand up for free speech without approving of or republishing images we disagree with.”
Fincke, and many others, have argued that it is cowardly for news outlets to refuse to republish the satirical cartoon in Charlie Hebdo that led Al Qaeda of Yemen to kill Hebdo's journalists. Those who make this argument claim both that failure to republish these cartoons is irresponsible journalism at best and giving in to terrorism at worst.
It is certainly within the purview of news organizations to republish the cartoons, but I think many news outlets have been wise not to. Last week, Judy Woodruff of the PBS News Hour made the best case against showing the cartoons on air by noting the network's policies with respect to foul language and racially offensive epithets. The network chooses to maintain certain standards of civility on air, and in those interests bans, or at least severely curtails, the use of such words. I doubt many people would argue that the media are irresponsible when, in the course of reporting on a politicians use of a racial epithet, they choose not to use the epithet itself. Woodruff also noted that the cartoons in question are readily available on the internet and that interested viewers could find them at their leisure, without PBS's having to air pictures of them.
It is not giving in to extremist Muslim terrorism when networks choose to accord to Islam the same standards of civility they give to racial or ethnic groups, or to non-Muslim religious groups. While freedom of speech may allow for the publication of uncivil speech or writing, the media are not required to echo such incivility to infinity.
2. “Charlie Hebdo’s murdered staff aren’t heroes and martyrs. They were just insulting marginalized people and disrespecting religion.”
To deal with this meme, one must first start with a working definition of what it means to a martyr. A martyr can be understood as someone who suffers, even to the point of death, for a cause, whether wittingly or unwittingly, or it can be understood more narrowly only as someone who does so wittingly. While the writers and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo may or may not have been aware that publishing these cartoons was like drawing a target on their backs, it is doubtful that their main motivation in publishing was to court martyrdom for the cause of freedom of expression. It is far more likely that their aim was lucre and notoriety. It does nothing good either for the cause of freedom of speech or for the full integration of Muslims into the social order of the west, which prizes freedom of speech, to make martyrs of Charlie Hebdo's journalists.
.
1. “Why are people insisting we show the images? We can stand up for free speech without approving of or republishing images we disagree with.”
Fincke, and many others, have argued that it is cowardly for news outlets to refuse to republish the satirical cartoon in Charlie Hebdo that led Al Qaeda of Yemen to kill Hebdo's journalists. Those who make this argument claim both that failure to republish these cartoons is irresponsible journalism at best and giving in to terrorism at worst.
It is certainly within the purview of news organizations to republish the cartoons, but I think many news outlets have been wise not to. Last week, Judy Woodruff of the PBS News Hour made the best case against showing the cartoons on air by noting the network's policies with respect to foul language and racially offensive epithets. The network chooses to maintain certain standards of civility on air, and in those interests bans, or at least severely curtails, the use of such words. I doubt many people would argue that the media are irresponsible when, in the course of reporting on a politicians use of a racial epithet, they choose not to use the epithet itself. Woodruff also noted that the cartoons in question are readily available on the internet and that interested viewers could find them at their leisure, without PBS's having to air pictures of them.
It is not giving in to extremist Muslim terrorism when networks choose to accord to Islam the same standards of civility they give to racial or ethnic groups, or to non-Muslim religious groups. While freedom of speech may allow for the publication of uncivil speech or writing, the media are not required to echo such incivility to infinity.
2. “Charlie Hebdo’s murdered staff aren’t heroes and martyrs. They were just insulting marginalized people and disrespecting religion.”
To deal with this meme, one must first start with a working definition of what it means to a martyr. A martyr can be understood as someone who suffers, even to the point of death, for a cause, whether wittingly or unwittingly, or it can be understood more narrowly only as someone who does so wittingly. While the writers and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo may or may not have been aware that publishing these cartoons was like drawing a target on their backs, it is doubtful that their main motivation in publishing was to court martyrdom for the cause of freedom of expression. It is far more likely that their aim was lucre and notoriety. It does nothing good either for the cause of freedom of speech or for the full integration of Muslims into the social order of the west, which prizes freedom of speech, to make martyrs of Charlie Hebdo's journalists.
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Thursday, January 15, 2015
Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie
Je ne suis pas Charlie.
There. I said it. I imagine lightning bolts from liberals are likely to rain down on me, attacking my commitment to free expression.
But the fact remains, I am not Charlie Hebdo. Setting aside the obvious fact that Charlie Hebdo is not a person--and therefore not someone I could potentially be or not be--I find this modern trend of identifying with victims of violence by taking to the streets and claiming to be them as ineffective as it is offensive. I am sorry for Trayvon Martin's family, and I think the failure of our justice system to convict George Zimmerman is an outrage, but I am not Trayvon Martin. I do not possess his particular set of circumstances, his particular outlook on the world, his particular genes and tastes in food and music.
But I have a deeper reason for saying that I am not Charlie. Before the attacks, Charlie Hebdo had a circulation of around 60,000; National Public Radio announced yesterday that a print run of 3,000,000 was expected for its first post-attack issue. While this clearly shows that terrorist attacks can have the opposite effect of the one intended, it does not show that rushing to the side of purveyors of religious disrespect is the best way of either preserving freedom of speech or of countering the threat of fundamentalist forms of Islam. Indeed, the more liberals in the West proclaim that they are Charlie, the more embattled the likes of Al Qaeada of Yemen--who claimed responsibility for the attacks yesterday--are likely to feel. Fundamentalist religion of all stripes thrives on its adherents' sense of being embattled against a modernity that threatens to overwhelm their faith. This is why chants and hashtags proclaiming "Je Suis Charlie" are unlikely to be effective; such claims can only work with people who place values of avoiding harm to others above those of doing nothing to undermine authority. But fundamentalist religion, of whatever faith tradition, makes the opposite choice. Arguing for, or proclaiming, the values of free expression will do nothing to soften the ire or change the behavior of those who dot share that value.
How then is the problem of violent fundamentalist Islam to be dealt with? I would contend through education. The slide in religious literacy--not just belief and practice, but basic literacy--that has marked modernity must be halted. I am not suggesting a return to mandatory devotional Bible reading in public schools, but of mandatory courses in World Religions. The more students are forced to understand and contend with differing faiths and worldviews, the less likely they are to engage in the kind of immaturity Charlie Hebdo showed in its cartoons; the more they are able to see people of different or no religion as people, the less likely they are to seek violent retribution to religious slights.
And this is where blogs like mine can make a difference.
There. I said it. I imagine lightning bolts from liberals are likely to rain down on me, attacking my commitment to free expression.
But the fact remains, I am not Charlie Hebdo. Setting aside the obvious fact that Charlie Hebdo is not a person--and therefore not someone I could potentially be or not be--I find this modern trend of identifying with victims of violence by taking to the streets and claiming to be them as ineffective as it is offensive. I am sorry for Trayvon Martin's family, and I think the failure of our justice system to convict George Zimmerman is an outrage, but I am not Trayvon Martin. I do not possess his particular set of circumstances, his particular outlook on the world, his particular genes and tastes in food and music.
But I have a deeper reason for saying that I am not Charlie. Before the attacks, Charlie Hebdo had a circulation of around 60,000; National Public Radio announced yesterday that a print run of 3,000,000 was expected for its first post-attack issue. While this clearly shows that terrorist attacks can have the opposite effect of the one intended, it does not show that rushing to the side of purveyors of religious disrespect is the best way of either preserving freedom of speech or of countering the threat of fundamentalist forms of Islam. Indeed, the more liberals in the West proclaim that they are Charlie, the more embattled the likes of Al Qaeada of Yemen--who claimed responsibility for the attacks yesterday--are likely to feel. Fundamentalist religion of all stripes thrives on its adherents' sense of being embattled against a modernity that threatens to overwhelm their faith. This is why chants and hashtags proclaiming "Je Suis Charlie" are unlikely to be effective; such claims can only work with people who place values of avoiding harm to others above those of doing nothing to undermine authority. But fundamentalist religion, of whatever faith tradition, makes the opposite choice. Arguing for, or proclaiming, the values of free expression will do nothing to soften the ire or change the behavior of those who dot share that value.
How then is the problem of violent fundamentalist Islam to be dealt with? I would contend through education. The slide in religious literacy--not just belief and practice, but basic literacy--that has marked modernity must be halted. I am not suggesting a return to mandatory devotional Bible reading in public schools, but of mandatory courses in World Religions. The more students are forced to understand and contend with differing faiths and worldviews, the less likely they are to engage in the kind of immaturity Charlie Hebdo showed in its cartoons; the more they are able to see people of different or no religion as people, the less likely they are to seek violent retribution to religious slights.
And this is where blogs like mine can make a difference.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
How Many Klingons Can Pray Toward Mecca?
Sometimes, a story becomes so useful to people with a philosophical or ideological axe to grind that it manages to continue in circulation no matter how unbelievable it may seem and no matter how thoroughly and repeatedly it has been disproven. The best case in point is the much-repeated rumor that the phrase "rule of thumb" derives from an archaic English law allowed a man to beat his wife as long as he used a stick no thicker than her thumb, an idea first bandied about by feminists in the 1970s. In the sphere of religion, the best example of this phenomenon is the widespread but misinformed belief that Scholastic theologians used to sit around debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (Thomas Aquinas did in fact discuss whether several angels can occupy the same space in his Summa Theologica, but this was in the context of a discussion of what it meant for angels to be incorporeal). This particular belief about the Scholastics circulates, I believe, because it serves the ends of people who need to stereotype religious leaders as hairsplitting harebrains out of touch with the real world. So it does not surprise me that in recent years, people intent on arguing that religious people are out of their minds have started hypothesizing about what would happen if people concerned with otherworldly matters had to face the existence of other kinds of creatures who are from beyond our world in a more concrete way.
This week, theweek.com published an opinion piece by David A. Weintraub speculating on what will happen to our religious beliefs when human beings make contact with sentient life forms on other planets. Setting aside Weintraub's misuse of the word "sentient" (cats and dogs are sentient beings as much as humans are--though I suspect Weintraub is not terribly concerned about our contacting a cosmological canine), Weintraub's assessment of what will happen when humans encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life is shot through with absurdities that ignore the past and present realities of the traditions he examines. To whit:
Weintraub asserts that Christians will have to deal with the question of whether there can be intelligent life that is not susceptible to original sin and thus of whether Jesus is the savior only of humankind. While noting that there is no answer this question that currently satisfies all Christians (not surprising, since even belief in the Trinity is not held by all self-defined Christians), Weintraub ignores that Christianity has dealt with this question before, when Christianity had to face the question of whether Native Americans were fully human. There is no reason to suppose that the Church would reach a different conclusion about intelligent extraterrestrials--though as with the Native Americans, it might take a lot of time, a lot of sorting out of conflicting reports about these extraterrestrials, and a lot of contact before the question became settled.
As humorous as this question is, Weintraub is at his most hilarious when he speculates about how Muslims on another planet will manage to pray five times a day in the direction of Mecca on a planet light years from earth, where determining the direction of prayer would be difficult. In fact, rabbis have had to deal with similar questions. Traditional Judaism requires the faithful to pray three times a day--at sunrise, in the afternoon, and at sunset--in the direction of Jerusalem. Rabbis have fielded questions from Jewish astronauts about how they should handle their prayers in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the sun does not set for part of the year, and in outer space, where the sun neither rises nor sets. Muslims have also long dealt with the question of what to do when the direction of prayer cannot be determined--not surprisingly for a religion born in the Arabian desert, where traveling Muslims could easily find themselves lost. In fact, the astrolabe, one of the Islamic world's great contributions to the Age of Exploration, was developed not to help sailors lost at sea, but to help the Muslim faithful figure out how to pray toward Mecca when they were in the middle of nowhere.
Weintraub is on firmer ground when he posits that, after the discovery of extraterrestrial life, adherents of many faiths will have to ponder whether their God is the God only of earth or of the entire universe, but this is also a question religious traditions have had to ask before; indeed, the question has been asked every time one faith has come into contact with another. If history is any guide, Weintraub is right that the experience will be discomfiting at first, but not that it will be disruptive. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all survived the shock of having to determine whether they were particularistic faiths meant for particular groups of people, or messages meant for all of humanity. If the accepted definition of "humanity" comes to include intelligent life forms from other planets, there is no reason to suppose the myriad faith of mankind will not survive.
And they will do so with a clear answer as to how Muslims on Klingon can pray toward Mecca.
This week, theweek.com published an opinion piece by David A. Weintraub speculating on what will happen to our religious beliefs when human beings make contact with sentient life forms on other planets. Setting aside Weintraub's misuse of the word "sentient" (cats and dogs are sentient beings as much as humans are--though I suspect Weintraub is not terribly concerned about our contacting a cosmological canine), Weintraub's assessment of what will happen when humans encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life is shot through with absurdities that ignore the past and present realities of the traditions he examines. To whit:
Weintraub asserts that Christians will have to deal with the question of whether there can be intelligent life that is not susceptible to original sin and thus of whether Jesus is the savior only of humankind. While noting that there is no answer this question that currently satisfies all Christians (not surprising, since even belief in the Trinity is not held by all self-defined Christians), Weintraub ignores that Christianity has dealt with this question before, when Christianity had to face the question of whether Native Americans were fully human. There is no reason to suppose that the Church would reach a different conclusion about intelligent extraterrestrials--though as with the Native Americans, it might take a lot of time, a lot of sorting out of conflicting reports about these extraterrestrials, and a lot of contact before the question became settled.
As humorous as this question is, Weintraub is at his most hilarious when he speculates about how Muslims on another planet will manage to pray five times a day in the direction of Mecca on a planet light years from earth, where determining the direction of prayer would be difficult. In fact, rabbis have had to deal with similar questions. Traditional Judaism requires the faithful to pray three times a day--at sunrise, in the afternoon, and at sunset--in the direction of Jerusalem. Rabbis have fielded questions from Jewish astronauts about how they should handle their prayers in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the sun does not set for part of the year, and in outer space, where the sun neither rises nor sets. Muslims have also long dealt with the question of what to do when the direction of prayer cannot be determined--not surprisingly for a religion born in the Arabian desert, where traveling Muslims could easily find themselves lost. In fact, the astrolabe, one of the Islamic world's great contributions to the Age of Exploration, was developed not to help sailors lost at sea, but to help the Muslim faithful figure out how to pray toward Mecca when they were in the middle of nowhere.
Weintraub is on firmer ground when he posits that, after the discovery of extraterrestrial life, adherents of many faiths will have to ponder whether their God is the God only of earth or of the entire universe, but this is also a question religious traditions have had to ask before; indeed, the question has been asked every time one faith has come into contact with another. If history is any guide, Weintraub is right that the experience will be discomfiting at first, but not that it will be disruptive. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all survived the shock of having to determine whether they were particularistic faiths meant for particular groups of people, or messages meant for all of humanity. If the accepted definition of "humanity" comes to include intelligent life forms from other planets, there is no reason to suppose the myriad faith of mankind will not survive.
And they will do so with a clear answer as to how Muslims on Klingon can pray toward Mecca.
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