From philosophersnet.com

To join the debate, see the end of the article.

Something terribly important has been missing from discussions orbiting around the Mohammed cartoons. It's a simple point, but one whose recognition is utterly crucial to the functioning of a healthy democratic society. The avoidance of it is, I'm afraid, even by those libertarians who defend the cartoons' publication, a measure of extent to which theocracy has advanced both in the US and abroad.

What's been missing has been an acknowledgment that blasphemy isn't just something that must be tolerated. It's something that possesses a special political value of its own. Blasphemy, in short, is a good thing. It's something admirable, noble, and, yes, even respectable. Why have we forgotten this?

The dominant response to the cartoons in the corridors of respectable opinion in the West has been a predictable two-track affair organized around craven calculations of interest. One track has laboured to quell the rage, minimize the damage to the struggle against Islamic jihadis , and prevent more violence. The other track has worked to affirm the principles of free expression?in principle.

The result has been something like a defence of the 'right' to publish the cartoons qualified by condemnation of this particular exercise that right. While one has a right to break wind in a crowded elevator, actually doing so is obnoxious.

Sean McCormack, for example, of the U.S. State Department, articulated the dichotomy du jour in this way: "Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images or any other religious belief. But it is important that we also support the rights of individuals to express their freely held views."

More than a few powerful figures, however, have gone even farther, condemning the cartoons outright, rejecting even the idea that people have a right to blaspheme.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw articulated a simple philosophical limit in a characteristically convoluted way: "The right of freedom of speech in all societies and all cultures has to be exercised responsibly and does not extend to an obligation to insult."

Former Presidential nominee Senator John Kerry?well known for throwing away in protest what are for many quasi-sacred war medals?went so far as to compare the cartoons to acts of political violence: "These and other inflammatory images deserve our scorn just as the violence against embassies and military installations are an unacceptable and intolerable form of protest."

Comments like these?qualified and unqualified?are both tragic and dangerous. They exhibit not only a shocking historical ignorance of the brutal repression blasphemers have suffered but also of the hard-fought democratic struggle against it. As formulations of political principle, they do little to protect blasphemy or sustain that struggle. In fact, they threaten both.

It must be stated and stated unequivocally that it's no more improper in healthy democratic discourse to ridicule religious figures and ideas (even core ideas) than it is to criticize and mock (other) politically important figures and ideas. Here's why.

Formally speaking, in democratic discourse there's nothing special about religious doctrines. Like other ideologies, religion instructs and even commands people about what they should value and how they should conduct themselves. And it does so in a powerful and effective way. Ongoing controversies concerning gay marriage, abortion, war, hijab , pornography, and social services offer clear examples of this. Many clerics actually tell their congregations how to vote.

It's simply not acceptable for a participant to enter public debate, have such a powerful effect upon it, and then claim immunity from the sort of treatment to which other participants are subject. As distasteful as it may be to those invested in religious belief, mocking Mohammed, or Moses, or Jesus, is therefore no more improper than mocking Karl Marx or Adam Smith or Rush Limbaugh or Hilary Clinton. The religious can't have it both ways.

Indeed, critical silence entails a kind of improper deference and even subjugation of political opinion. Flemming Rose, the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten , the Danish newspaper that originally published the cartoons, put it succinctly when he wrote: "if a believer demands that I, as a non-believer, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy."

In fact?and here's something many will find particularly hard to swallow?it's important not only that people be free to criticize and mock religion. It's important that they actually do so, from time to time.

Yes, formally, there's nothing special about religion. But those engaged in democratic struggle have long and correctly understood that the content of its doctrine and custom singles religion out as something different. It's for this reason that there's a special amendment (not by accident the first amendment to the US Constitution) prohibiting the establishment of religion but not, for example, socialism.

You see, religion not only enters the public discourse. It does so on the basis of a special claim secular theories don't make (or at least shouldn't make). Religion, unlike secular doctrines, claims that its views are God's views, that its claims are absolutely right, grounded in some transcendent authority. The rest of us are mere human beings, prone to error, conflicts of interest, and foolishness. God and God's views are of course, in a word, superior. The religious never tire of reminding us of this.

Here in Kentucky, for example, when in 2004 theocrats decided to exclude gays, lesbians, and their children from the rights and protections of marriage by amending the state constitution, they nearly covered the commonwealth with signs claiming that theirs was "God's Plan for Marriage." The theocrats prevailed.

So what? So, why does the (purportedly) special basis of religious doctrine warrant giving special value to blasphemy and ridicule and even to an imperative to engage in them? The reason is, as most any Dane will tell you now, that religion plays in a distinctive and powerful way upon people's passions.

Early modern philosophers called this phenomenon "enthusiasm". Today many would call it "zealotry" or "fanaticism". Enlightenment philosophers like David Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, and James Madison recognized the danger enthusiasm presents to the body politic. They understood that it's important to keep its characteristic passions in check in order to prevent theocracy from gaining control of the coercive and punitive powers of the state. Various devices are required to accomplish this prophylactic task.

Blasphemy is just such a device, and an important one. What better than transgressive cartoons, ridicule, humour, and even swearing to inhibit theocracy and its enthusiasms? Blasphemy deflates some of the sanctimonious, holier-than-thou, I'm-absolutely-right attitudes of the religious. It makes religion safer.

It does so by knocking religious authorities off their pedestals, by reminding us that their views (protestations to the contrary) are just those of silly humans, that they're just like the rest of us?that they and their views are equals with us and ours, that they are not our superiors. The US Supreme Court held just this when it affirmed the right of Larry Flint and Hustler magazine to mock Jerry Falwell, despite the reverend's objections.

Later philosophers like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault complemented the Enlightenment critique of enthusiasm by calling our attention to the way various concepts serve the interests of power. Considered in these terms, it's easy to see why ideas related to the 'sacred' and the 'blasphemous' are so attractive and so fiercely defended. With them one can tell people what to think and how to live with the greatest authority while simultaneously establishing immunity from criticism.

The dark side of all this, of course, is the legitimating of violent reprisals against those who don't respond with submission to the demand that everyone honour and respect what the religious designate as 'sacred'. (Submission is, of course, the very meaning of the word 'Islam'.) Upon claims to absolute goodness follow the condemnation of ideas and practices at odds with them as absolutely evil. Just as you can't have virgins without whores, you can't have the saved without the damned. Enforcing respect for the sacred requires, almost as a logical necessity, identifying infidels and advancing a regime of punishment against them.

The religious concept of the 'sacred', then, is fraught with dangerous potential for being deployed as a political technology, as an instrument of power. Like the bomb one of the cartoons depicted nestled in Mohammed's turban, the concept of the sacred functions as a weapon.

Ridiculing cartoons and blasphemy, by contrast, can serve as trenchant instruments for dissecting, dismantling and defusing it that bomb. Forget Jesus. WWLBD--what would Lenny Bruce do?

The dangerous position advanced by critics of the Mohammed cartoons would make comedians' critical rants about religion violations of 'legitimate' free speech. And vicious reprisals against them would be, accordingly, legitimated. (Of course, rants mocking socialists and feminists and environmentalists would remain not only permissible but also funny). Atheistic publications could become subject to prosecution as "hate speech" or "slander". It's certainly does take much imagination to see evolutionary theory being characterized as an offensive attack on religious belief.

Mine is, of course, a slippery slope argument. But in this case, I fear, the slope is real. One only need remember Galileo (prosecuted for holding that the Earth's not the centre), Diderot (imprisoned for holding that there's no purpose to the universe), Thomas Aikenhead (hanged for mocking the trinity) and the Chevlier de la Barre (tortured and burned for not paying the proper respect to a religious procession) to see what we in the West were capable of doing to blasphemers before Enlightenment values took hold.

Frighteningly, the claims about free speech made by those like John Kerry and Jack Straw are consistent with the prosecution of Galileo, Diderot, la Barre, and Aikenhead?not to mention Scopes. Do we really want to go there?again?

It's hard for the religious to understand this, but there are those among us who think most religion not only generally false but also in many ways immoral and detrimental to our society. We critics may not be right in this, but as part of democratic discourse ours is a legitimate and important position.

In a democracy, no one should be compelled respect what he or she believes to be false, immoral, and socially pernicious. And advocates for different, competing ideas about morality, the good, and the perhaps even the 'sacred' ought to be heard.

For myself, I think the views of atheist Albert Camus morally superior to those of Jesus. I'll go with John Muir over Mohammed any time. Godless Simone de Beauvior is to me far more respectable to me than Moses. I'll take Angela Y Davis over the Virgin Mary, hands down.

I consider the Grand Canyon more 'sacred' than Mecca. I value Cumberland Island more than the Vatican, any day of the week. The Cuillin Mountains in Scotland are far more important to me than the Temple Mount. In fact, I'd see every holy book and image in the world covered in excrement before I'd see Nick Berg decapitated or Iraqi detainees tortured by American soldiers. And you know what? I think God (if there is a God) sees it that way, too.

Why have so many missed this? My error theory is that many regard defending the cartoons as somehow uncomfortably close to defending racism, anti-Islamic bigotry, and imperialism. But there's real difference between racist slurs and the mockery of religion, between supporting the imperialist domination of Islamic peoples and opposing the theocratic Muslim assaults. It's for this reason that, as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has shown, blasphemous atheists in the Balkans have offered flesh-and-blood Muslims better protection than those who condemn the cartoons out of respect for religion.

Religions, at least the relevant religions here, are creeds, doctrines, beliefs systems, and institutions. Racial endowments are not (even given that conceptions of race are in part politically determined). Although frequently hate speech does pose as blasphemy, blasphemy and the mockery of religious figures are not themselves forms of hate speech. Mocking a doctrine and the promulgators of that doctrine is simply not the same as mocking people for their intrinsic qualities (real or imagined).

The case of Jews, of course, is a bit different, since Jewishness can be either an ethnicity or a set of religious doctrines and practices. But neither Islam nor Christianity makes claim to an ethnicity. Indeed, they both emphatically deny it and hold their doctrines to be universal.

Resistance to racism, religious intolerance, and imperialism is terribly important, especially today. But resisting them should not occlude the importance of resisting theocracy and authoritarianism, too. Those who support a democratic society must take care not only to honour its traditions of subverting bigotry, racism, and imperialism. We must also, as leftists, do what we've done countless times in the past, defend and stand in clear solidarity with those who are being attacked by theocrats. As part of our defence and solidarity, it's crucial that we publicly affirm the value of blasphemy, including the mockery of religious figures like Mohammed. Muslims who value free expression and democracy will understand this, just as those among the rest of us who value democracy and who submit our own beliefs to ridicule do?God damn it!



Disgaree? Got something to add? Join the debate. Peter Fosl will be replying to three of the best responses posted to this article received by 16th May. To increase the chances of yours being picked, please address specific arguments made in the article: it is better to deal with one key point well than reply to as many as possible. We suggest you compose your reply off-line and then return here to post it when it's complete. Keep your replies to 600 words maximum, and less is even better. Email: jerry@philosophers.co.uk with your responses.

Comment on this article here.