The Cartoon Pandemonium:
Is Dialogue Even Possible?
by
Joseph P. Lawrence
Now that violence has erupted over the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, a detached philosophical perspective becomes more urgently needed than ever – yet undoubtedly more difficult to hear.
All that anyone wants to know at this point is which side one is on. Yet to take sides, at least with the gesture of certainty that means that the other side can no longer be heard, is not only unproductive, but it replicates the very act that triggered this entire debacle. If Islam forbids images of God and of his Prophet, it does so in the realization that images are either idols that invite worship or caricatures that invite ridicule: in both cases they obstruct access to the Divinity that towers above image.
The double command against idolatry and blasphemy has its philosophical correlate: ideological commitments keep us from respecting the viewpoint of our opponent, with the result that opinions (which are very much ours) gets substituted for the truth (to which we can only aspire). Once one treats one’s own viewpoint as if it were divinely sanctioned, one has already lost oneself in hate. The very Word of God is not God Himself (“There is no god but God”) but only a path that leads to Him. This is why all Scriptures and all Prophets must be respected. For making precisely this clear to me (a Christian), I deliver my thanks to the Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him).
But, this much said, it will appear that I have taken sides. After all, the furor began with a deliberate provocation. It is not simply that Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten violated Islam’s ban on images of the Prophet. There would have been nothing wrong with that alone, since the ban obviously does not extend to non-Muslims. The problem is not the violation as such, but the fact that the images were deliberately hateful. They were meant to provoke Muslims into a violent response so that their enemies could say, in effect, “see what awful fanatics they are.”
It is not only that we know who started this, but we also know more than that. Every newspaper which republished the pictures, not in the spirit of reporting the news (this would have been acceptable), but in the spirit of “defending the principle of freedom of the press,” has done something doubly wrong. First of all, it has joined in the taunting (“see, they don’t even understand our most sacred rights”). More seriously, however, any such newspaper has debased the very principle it purports to defend. For the freedom of press that was devised not as a license for the powerful to prey on the powerless (or for the majority to gang up on minorities), but instead as the opposite. As a sacred principle, freedom of the press is meant to assure the right of the powerless to speak truth to power. What is being protected, in other words, is that freedom of dissent that stands at the core of any healthy democracy, that is, any democracy that is sensitive to the fact that, because power corrupts, power must always be limited.
In other words, freedom of the press cannot be interpreted as it was in the Germany of the 1930s – as the freedom of Nazis to use Jew-baiting to create the lynch-mob mentality that gave a ruthless dictator his “democratic” sanction. That the same thing holds for Muslim countries should go without saying, and here legitimate critique has come from the side of Europe. In the United States, we face something similar in the guise of rightwing “talk-radio” hosts such as Rush Limbaugh. They hide behind the idea of a free press to support unlimited power for Bush and Cheney, while at the same time ridiculing in the most demeaning ways poor people in America, any minority that dares to complain about injustice, and, yes, the entire Islamic world, which they prefer to view through the lens of terrorism, in order to create the illusion of a world cleanly divided between good and evil. What they are able to exploit is the fact that a secular society has no obstacle to place against hate speech more robust than a vapid and mechanical political correctness that is all too easy to lampoon since the authority of divine command has been stripped out of it. Unfortunately, once political correctness (“don’t ridicule minorities”) has been brushed aside what we are too often left with is the politics of hate. This is at best an unfortunate (and potentially catastrophic) consequence of the principle of free expression. By no means does it represent its proper intent. By no means does it justify any “show of support” for the hatemonger.
The image of American talk-radio, insofar as it presents the spectacle of fundamentalist religion raging against fundamentalist religion, is not entirely helpful in the present context. For with the publication of the caricatures in Europe, the battle lines have been drastically redrawn. Instead of witnessing competing claims that “God is on our side,” we find ourselves looking at something that appears to be entirely different: the clash between religion and the secular order.
And yet the shift is not as radical as it might seem. Remarkably enough, historically secularism has a religious basis in the very intuition that first gave rise to the command against idolatry. On an intellectual plane, this is where dialogue can begin. The Protestant Reformation grew out of a sense that Christians had progressively lost the spirit of Christianity by making an idol of their own Church. Separation of church and state was a way of acknowledging both the transcendence of God and the free spirit of thought and inquiry that spring out of the recognition that God Himself stands sublimely above even our best representations of what or who He might be. It is wrong to contrast freedom of expression with freedom of religion, as so many commentators have done during the last several days. For the “expression” that has to be protected is at bottom religious expression – even when it appears in the guise of an atheistic denial of God.
A comment by Rui Camacho in Portugal’s Jornal de Noticias unintentionally betrays what is at issue here: “Fanatics may burn the Danish flag because they don’t like a few drawings, but not here, not in Europe, not under the Western firmament.” While taking the moral high road (“we will allow you to burn the Danish flag in your own country just as you should have allowed us to draw cartoons of Mohammed in Denmark”), Camacho betrays the fact that even secular Europe is still entangled in the religious problematic, what might be called the dialectic of idolatry. Where people aren’t tempted to worship gods or holy books, they worship power and money, making holy objects of such things as flags.
In a now secularized Europe there are few people who would deny that Christian fanaticism was the root of centuries of slaughter and warfare, that entire peoples were brutally savaged in the name of rescuing them from savagery. This comes very close to what it means to be secular, to have recognized in religion the source of strife and war. Yet, just as little as the believing Christian will acknowledge what to the non-believer seems obvious, the secular European refuses to reflect on the fact that the nationalism unleashed by secular modernity gave us a history of bloodshed (including two devastating world wars) every bit as savage as what occurred before it. The dynamic is still the same. In an earlier epoch, the crusading Christian made an idol of his own religion, instead of regarding it as a vehicle to the Divine (worth neither more nor less than half a dozen other vehicles). In his very conviction that he alone embodied the good, he fell into the evil of believing that everything outside him was evil. Unfortunately, the secular European does something similar when he construes himself as finally having overcome the anathema of such idolatry completely, attaining thereby the lofty goal of tolerance. He envisions himself as the uniquely moral man. History has shown that this is a dangerous place to stand. Even the nihilist, who purports to believe in nothing whatsoever, can still go marching off to war, waving a flag.
Defeating idolatry is difficult. The importance of reminding ourselves that “there is no god but God” is that, attached as we are to this world, we naturally gravitate towards idols. This is universally true, regardless of the purity of our highest religious expressions. Monotheism has been around for a long time and it still hasn’t accomplished the goal of establishing global peace by shifting humanity’s gaze from its idols to its God. Residual tribalism continues, echoing in the chant that we, not you, have truth totally on our side. Sinners abound in any society, regardless of religion or creed.
It is so easy to blame human failing on religion itself. Given the intransigency of our tendency toward idolatry, holy scriptures are defined by a riddle: every sentence about divine love is always evenly balanced by a sentence about divine wrath (“God punishes whom He pleases”). Thus every scripture but one’s own seems to be a recipe for the violence of holy war. Even Jesus, the meek one, chose the violent (and at times treacherous) Peter over his beloved John, when it came to founding his Church.
What is essential is that we see clearly why our own version of the holy Word appears to be exceptional: only in the actual living of such a Word are we able to discover love where it seems to be most absent: in the severity of God’s justice. For behind our sufferings and humiliations, we discern finally the will of God, who, beyond the possibility of any human understanding, has let them be. Anyone who lives outside the Word sees only a God, angry and wrathful, demanding constantly that the idolatrous ones be punished. But when it is we ourselves who are so punished, and have been raised to thank the infinite mercy of the Mighty One who so utterly and completely cares for us, it all looks different. The Christian accepts the sword in Peter’s hand, but reviles the sword in the hand of Mohammed. The secularist hates the sword of any religion, but retains the sword of justice, which, unbeknownst to him, was bequeathed through religion.
It is, of course, always the same sword, the sword of human folly, in which we can recognize the gift of God, who lets us alone with our folly for the best of reasons. Inscribed, we are told, on the Throne of God, are the words: “Verily My Mercy and Compassion precede my Wrath.” To understand this is to experience the peace of God, whence earthly battles simply fall away. The command not to resist evil (“to turn the other cheek”) finally trumps the command to resist evil. This is not the assurance of one religion over another, but the assurance of religion as such. For it says nothing more than that God can take care of us better than we can ever take care of ourselves.
Joseph P. Lawrence
Professor of Philosophy
College of the Holy Cross
Worcester, Massachusetts
USA
02.16.2006
http://www.zaman.com/?bl=commentary&alt=&trh=20060303&hn=29843
