Cartoon Profanity

Thank you Andres Serrano for Piss Christ; thank you Robert Mapplethorpe for Feces Madonna. We thank you for freeing us from our oppressive traditions so that we may work ourselves into the brave new world of secular modernity.

At least that is what the Weekly Standard’s Reuel Marc Gerecht wants conservatives to learn from the publication of the Danish Jyllands-Posten cartoons inflaming Islamic sensibilities. “Like Christendom before it, the Muslim Middle East will have to work out its relation to modernity,” the neocon intelligence expert explains. Indeed, “We should also not neglect to defend vigorously Christian, Muslim or Jewish satirists, be they clever, banal, or ugly, wherever they may be found.”

The editors of National Review, consistent with their more moderate nature, recognize that “decent” men “normally” go out of their way to avoid giving offense over religion but, except in the case of government funding of the sacrilege—where they say “taxpayers have a legitimate gripe”—they still recommend ignoring the “satirists” of religion, claiming that “no free society concerns itself with opinions that one may read or not as one likes.”

Excuse me, but why should people not be concerned about the Serranos and Mapplethorpes of the world and reserve the right to be offended by their profanity regardless of whether one can avoid the images they create or not, especially in a day the media will broadcast such messages so widely that they will be impossible to ignore? That government tax money supports such offenses only magnifies the insult and allows some governmental response, but subsidies are not necessary to legitimate fervent responses. Yes, the Muslin violent riots, burning of embassies and killing of peoples are terribly wrong but why is a controlled, non-violent sense of moral outrage inappropriate? The one good result of Serrano-type “sarcasm” is that it makes believers remember why some things are sacred.

The cartoon controversy provokes the strangest reactions. NR contributing editor Jonah Goldberg goes to the other extreme, condemning these “conservatives” (presumably including his own editors) for adhering to the “commandment, Thou shall never bash religion,” calling this belief a form of political correctness. He defends the cartoons as “fundamentally accurate,” proving that Islam has “a massive chip on its shoulder.” But his response to the rioters revealed a chip on his own, threatening: “we don’t put up with violence and arson in response to speech.” He says we should react as did colonial British general Charles James Napier in response to Indian suttee, when he set up gallows next to the pyres and declared: “We hang people who burn women,” presumably today threatening the whole Muslim world if they react violently to our religious satire, even if it is not brutality against us.

Conservative satirist P.J. O’Rourke perhaps understands his profession best. “What sort of reaction did Jyllands-Posten expect to its comic strip,” he asks? “Europeans consider Americans stupid but if the Washington Post printed a cartoon showing Martin Luther King in a Sambo get-up, [its publisher] Don Graham would know what happens next.” That they did not know “illustrates the state of European thought,” which should understand that ideas have consequences, especially considering it has unleashed “nationalism, colonialism, Marxism, Anti-Semitism, Freudian analysis and the social welfare state” upon the world with all of their resulting violence and social disorder.

George Will notes that it is against the law to use “hate speech,” or to deny the Holocaust, in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland and even in America “hate crimes” and speech codes are widespread. O’Rourke notes that these do in a milder way what the Muslim demonstrators are trying to do the Danes, suppress their speech, only through state coercion rather than the mob. Austria just sentenced the silly author David Irving to three years in prison for “gross understatement” of the Nazi atrocities and Britain suspended the mayor of London for similar nonsense. Still, “In America, the worst kind of people can shoot their mouths off,” O’Rourke insists but he adds “And they can get shot.” Ideas do have consequences even in the most modern of the modern world.

Bashing religion is not politically incorrect but is extremely dangerous. As surprising as moderns find the fact, most people care deeply about their religious beliefs. Would minding one’s own business and not inflaming others’ sensibilities be totally inappropriate? William F. Buckley Jr. once described Eleanor Roosevelt as viewing the whole world as one vast slum simply requiring the nanny state ministering of liberal do-gooder to put it all right. The Danish editors were going to teach these true believers a lesson in modern secularism and they succeeded. The European lecture on free speech regarding Mohamed’s image cost hundreds of deaths worldwide and perhaps even helped stimulate an attack on the Askariya Shiite Golden Dome shrine in Samarra, taking 1,000 more lives and possibly setting the stage for civil war in critical Iraq.

Secularism especially cannot stand against religion in Islam, as the elections in Iraq, Egypt, Algeria and especially Palestine prove beyond a doubt. It is not that modernists should not understand since they react as vigorously when the tenants of their secular religion are attacked. A review by the American Enterprise Institute’s Christopher Levenick (providentially appearing in NR’s same issue)--of Rodney Stark’s new book, The Victory of Reason--makes the point very nicely. Stark challenges the modernist dogma that the 16th Century’s supposedly secular Enlightenment was responsible for modernism, reason, science and rational economics. He does this on the reasonable basis that all of these rose in the West well before the 16th Century, indeed a half-millennium or so earlier. He instead argues, mischievously but factually, that it was medieval Christianity, through its rationalization of theology, philosophy, science and business practices in the monasteries and cities that provided the takeoff for these values and institutions.

Levenick says his major problem is that Stark’s “silence regarding the massive contributions of Jews to science, politics and capitalism is simply inexplicable.” Hello, Stark’s whole point was that these developed beginning in 10th Century Europe under Christian rationalizing over theology and daily living and nowhere else--well before Voltaire and his 17th Century friends created the myth of the secular Enlightenment (which Stark demonstrates in another book was actually led by religious scientists). As Charles Murray’s meticulous study of science over world history makes clear, Jews do not ascend to their leadership position until the 19th Century, when their contribution became massive. But Jews simply were not in a position to contribute before then due to exclusion laws and their own religious segregation. The medieval “first scientific and industrial revolution” thus was solely under the influence of Christendom and was not displaced until challenged by the divine right of kings and religious upheavals rising in the 15th Century.

Now Stark may be wrong but the rational way to challenge him is to question his facts. Unfortunately for the critics, they are difficult to challenge because they are well and exhaustively documented. Levenick admits there is “something quite profound” about the fact that scientific thinking only arose under Christianity and that the enraged reaction of those like The New Republic reviewer proves his critics do not want to face this fact. The reviewer called Stark’s book the “worst book by a social scientist I have ever read,” proving the great danger of provoking religious passion among secularists. Even Lavenick, however, concludes that Stark’s is a “monocausal explanation” and therefore incomplete, presumably even if there was only one historical cause.

There is a reason conservatives fear provoking religious passions. People can suffer and get killed, and do, especially when insulting a billion very religious believers. Social understandings to avoid inflaming sensibilities are critical to peaceful societies. Besides being morally proper, self interest requires this understanding. As Dennis Prager suggests in this issue, Christian understanding of Jewish fears is crucial to the U.S. World Muslim reaction to the cartoons led to violent reactions specifically against Christians in Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and elsewhere costing hundreds of lives. It was fear of reaction against Chaldean Christians that led John Paul II to warn against the invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately, he has been proven right as the survivors have left in droves—and primarily for Syria of all places!

The Western tradition also requires one to speak out on occasion, especially in the face of injustice. But making fun simply because the tradition allows free speech is terribly misguided. To complain as William Bennett does that only three U.S. newspapers met their “duty” under the First Amendment to publish the cartoons goes beyond silliness. It is fine for Westerners safe in their redoubt to broadcast their righteousness but innocent people bear the costs, in the hundreds and thousands. Civility has always been a Western virtue and there is no reason it cannot be compatible with honest discussion. Telling the truth is an obligation but doing it softly is both right and more effective.

Donald Devine, Editor.

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