SPEAKING FREELY
The misplaced defense of free speech
By Aseem Shrivastava
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of
thought which they seldom use." - 19th-century Danish Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard
A mature sense of humor must be founded on the capacity to laugh at oneself,
for it is by worlds easier to make a laughing-stock of others, especially when
one persists in remaining ignorant of their sensibilities. This can become
seriously
dangerous and lead to some absurd consequences when done in public.
This is the lesson one may draw from the events sparked by the publication of a
series of frivolous cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper.
There are some other lessons that can be learned, but first a brief excursion
into some not-so-popular strands of Western philosophy will be necessary to
expose some of the elementary confusions regarding faith and reason that
pervade popular discourse.
Is God really dead?
Since Friedrich Nietzsche made the oft-quoted but widely misunderstood remark
about "the death of God" in the late 19th century, atheism has become part of
intellectual orthodoxy in the West. It is not merely fashionable to be an
atheist today. It may also indicate spiritual sloth and intellectual laziness,
for blind believers in material progress and the church of technology need not
take the trouble of examining the underlying philosophical underpinnings and
prejudices of their own thinking, not to speak of the conspicuous absence of
spiritual values. Nobody born in the West during the last century needs to
waste any time in doubting any more whether God exists or not. It has been
scientifically "proved" that there is no God. Such is the atheistic faith,
if I may be permitted a malapropism.
In fact, no such thing has ever been proved in the history of human thought.
The two things hardest for human beings to prove are those for which there is
no proof and those for which there might be too much! It has been as difficult
to show God's existence as it has been to disprove the hypothesis. Absence of
evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence.
When it comes to divine matters, all that human thought has been able to
persuade others of are probabilities. Thus the French philosopher Blaise Pascal
argued forcefully in the 17th century that if one was uncertain about the
existence of God, it was far wiser to bet on (and believe in) his existence, at
the cost of sacrificing some pleasures, than to deny a possible great fact (and
carry on with a blind way of life) for which one may suffer "eternal
damnation".
Interestingly, the 19th-century Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, quoted at the
start of this article, was an avowed Christian. However, he expressed his
criticism of the established Lutheran Church of his day when he distinguished
himself from "Sunday Christians". Importantly, he suggested that reason cannot
decide the matter of God's existence. Why? Because if the fact was that God did
not exist and one tried to prove his existence, it would be impossible to do so
and, on the other hand, if God did in fact exist, our attempt would be all too
foolish! A bit like painting the sky blue.
Thus belief in God's existence involved a "leap of faith". But faith was not,
for Kierkegaard, a foul word. It was not inconsistent with the use of reason
(as his many books demonstrate) and nor was it a superstition. On the contrary,
"faith is the highest passion in a human being", he wrote in his book Fear and
Trembling.
The irony, in light of recent events in Denmark, could not be starker.
In modern Western intellectual sensibility the reigning mainstream view, which
informs most of the response in the Western media to the events emanating from
the publication of the cartoons of Mohammed, is that science and reason have
for a long time now overwhelmed religion as a basis for a world view and can
and have replaced it.
Progress is, among other things, understood as the transition from religious to
scientific societies. (Let us abstract, for the time being, from the massive
church-going population of the United States that wanted only "intelligent
design" to be taught in schools.) This is taken very widely as an article of
faith in the popular mind of the West.
Such a view is just what Kierkegaard spent much of his life criticizing. With
Pascal, two centuries before him, Kierkegaard argued that there were
metaphysical truths that reason could only express, but never discover, that
"the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of", as Pascal so pithily
expressed it. For these two thinkers, both reason and faith were indispensable.
There was no choice to be made between the two, if one knew the place of each.
It is safe to argue that present-day Western societies with their ruling ethos
of material values, their willing embrace and imposition of compulsive
consumerism (on the rest of the world), not to speak of the resulting
narcissism, nihilism, the trivialization of spiritual values, and a total loss
of faith in anything not centered on (privileged) humanity and its limited
anthropocentric vision, would have terrified and ruined the digestion of
such thinkers as Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
That is the extent to which Western culture is today in treason against some of
the highest values of its own past.
It also bears mention that the history of Islamic societies, in which (to take
just a few examples) mathematicians such as Omar Khayyam and Abu Hamid
al-Ghazali found no contradiction between their religion and their reason, and
in which tolerance of religious and intellectual freedom was in many cultures
the very hallmark of good governance, is quite different from that of those
periods of European history when true thinkers and skeptics, like Giordano
Bruno, were burned at the stake. I point this out only to suggest that anxious
extrapolations from the European experience of religion to that of others is
free neither of prejudice nor of dangers.
Now, after that little philosophical preamble, we may approach the meaning of
the events set in motion by the publication of those cartoons in a Danish
newspaper three months ago.
Freedom of expression?
Is it so hard to make sense of the upset caused by the cartoons to so many
Muslims across the world? If so, Palestinian writer Remi Kanazi may be of help:
"Picture this: a cartoon of Jesus, with his pants down, smiling, raping a
little boy. The caption above it reads 'Got Catholicism'?" Or how about a
picture of a rabbi with blood dripping from his mouth after bludgeoning a small
Palestinian boy with a knife shaped like the Star of David - the caption reads,
"The devil's chosen ones."
Kanazi points out that there is probably a minority of free-speech advocates in
the West who will accept such cartoons as within the law, if not within
decency. But he is right to speculate reasonably that there will be public
outrage, most media outlets would not pick them up and advertisers would soon
pull out of those that did. A cartoon depicting a bomb-hurling Jesus, when
the Irish Republican Army was setting Belfast ablaze, would have been greeted
with revulsion and indignant censure.
Why is it so hard to understand that there are millions of people living today
who still have not lost their faith, who are not prey to wealthy nihilism and
its frivolous excesses, who still run their lives along disciplined religious
lines? Why must it be assumed, in light of what the best religious thinkers in
the West have themselves pointed out, that people with faith are necessarily
unreasonable and superstitious? Couldn't a case be made that precisely those
without any faith in any value, or principle, or god (except power and wealth)
would be unreasonable?
Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen says that he cannot apologize for
his country's free press.
Free press? How come we hear so little from the same free press about European
governments helping the US ferry people - on no fewer than 800 flights over
four years, according to Amnesty International - to be tortured in places where
it is legal to do so? How is it that nobody in the European free press is
talking much about the fact that Iran stopped any further discussion of its
nuclear program because the three EU leaders who were parleying with them
reneged on their side of the bargain, by not ensuring Iran security in the
event of a foreign invasion?
We hear nothing from the free press about the fact that the success of Hamas in
the recent elections may have more to do with its schools and health clinics
for beleaguered Palestinian communities (while the generous "international
community" has abandoned them) than with its purported Islamic fundamentalism.
The "free" media in the West do not bother to investigate the events of
September 11, 2001, or allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency
itself may have been involved in the Bali bombings of 2002. It does not make
any demands of the Bush administration to release the more than 1,700 pictures
and videos of tortures and humiliations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo that the
Pentagon has kept away from the public eye.
We have to hear from bloggers on the Internet about the US forces in Iraq
kidnapping women and girls related to suspected insurgents. Needless to
mention, no dead American soldiers are shown on the TV screens of the Western
media (though there is no bar on showing those killed by suicide bombers in
Baghdad). How often is it remembered, not to speak of responsibility taken for
the fact, that genocidal UN sanctions prosecuted by the West killed more than a
million innocent people in Iraq in the 1990s? The free media in the West keep
secret from the public the fact that the US has for years given asylum to
proven terrorists such as Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada, wanted by Latin
American governments for blowing up planes and suchlike. They are exempt from
the "war on terror".
Above all, the media do little to ask for the impeachment of the consummate
liars and mass-murderers who occupy elected positions in more than one Western
democracy today, even as they pretend to teach lessons in political morals to
less fortunate countries.
Free press? Or cowardly media eager to please the wealthy masters?
European cowardice has reached such abysmal depths that the media do not even
have a nose for European interests anymore, if they are at odds with those of
the Americans. How many times have we heard the European media point out that
the Americans and the British have gone to Iraq (and are now going to Iran)
looking for oil? We are encouraged to think that the Americans are so
principled that they would have been as willing to shed the blood of their
young men to bring freedom to a broccoli-growing tyranny in the South Pacific.
To gain monopolistic control of the oil supply of economic competitors such as
Japan, China and the Europena Union has been the little-analyzed, overwhelming
reason for the invasion of Iraq (and why Americans will never leave that
country unless and until their own citizens demand it) and the forthcoming
attack on Iran. But free Europeans prefer to look the other way. And deep in
their hearts they know that their silence is a lie.
The dangers of cultural solipsism
To philosophers, solipsism is the view that the only thing in existence of
which one can be sure is oneself. From here to relegating others to the far
corners of one's imagination is but a short step, especially when one has the
power to control their realities, for then one can subject them at will to
one's illusions. What fun! If a lot of people in a certain culture fall into
the habit of doing this, one is entitled to speak of cultural solipsism.
It is often heard in Europe (less often in the United States) nowadays that
immigrants – and Muslims more than others – are destroying the age-old culture
of the West. It is true that Western culture has seen far more happy times,
when the meaning of life was not lost. However, if truth be acknowledged,
nobody has robbed Europe of its culture and its heritage as effectively as the
organized greed of multinational corporations.
It is they, with their agendas for endless growth and prosperity
(self-enrichment), who have enslaved everyone in their jobs (when they are
lucky to have one), who have made people too busy to dance, sing and create
culture. It is they who have sought cheap labor from North Africa, the Middle
East and many poor parts of the world, often sending headhunters to these
countries looking for workers cheaper than their own. It is they who have
brought on the more or less rapid unraveling of the welfare state, robbing the
working classes of the benefits of public services while levying more taxes
from them (while reducing those that the rich pay), making them work harder,
and pushing for an increase in the age for retirement. Much of this is meant to
meet the competition from East Asia, especially totalitarian China, which was
introduced to capitalism by president Richard Nixon and secretary of state
Henry Kissinger back in the mid-1970s.
It is not the contention of this writer that Muslim communities are paragons of
justice. Very far from it, in fact. If one looks around the world one is
immediately struck by the routine oppression of societies like Saudi Arabia or
Egypt, among others. However, there is plenty of oppression within Western
societies too, not to forget the injustices inflicted by the West on the rest
of the world.
If we are to survive globalization, communities of remarkably varied
backgrounds and unequal histories have to learn to co-exist and understand
themselves and each other. Most important, they have to diagnose their own ills
honestly. This cannot be achieved even minimally if economically and militarily
powerful Western societies continue to live in a culturally solipsistic
universe in which others are mere figments of the imagination, fit for war
games when they are at a distance, and the butt of racist jokes, even when they
are neighbors. Far from such brutality and vulgarity, ruthless self-criticism
has to be recalled as the very touchstone of democracy. It is in this context
that genuine political opposition and a free media take their significance.
Western societies are duty-bound to examine themselves and their pasts in
relation to others. That colonialism, imperialism and the concomitant racism
have played and continue to play a huge part in the formation of the identities
of everyone living today - whether they are Westerners or not - is
not a theory but facts that any self-respecting scholarship acknowledges. That
these facts of history inevitably color perceptions even today cannot be
doubted. Only cultivated or intentional ignorance, led by state and media
propaganda, can hide them.
The realities of others are also no less imperative to discover if one is to
know one's own reality honestly. To surrender to parochial instincts, that too
in the name of higher values, such as freedom of expression, is not only to
ensnare oneself in further illusions, but to endanger today the very survival
of human civilization as we know it. If the West were culturally less
solipsistic it would not have found it hard to respect the sentiments of a
billion-strong community that has stayed true to a key tenet of its faith: that
the image of God, and of the Prophet, cannot be drawn. Even from a secular but
skeptical point of view it may be wondered as to who could draw a picture of a
human being whose image has never been recorded. In a similar vein, pantheists
have argued that if God is everywhere, who could possibly draw an image of
him/her/it?
If the realities of the lives of others are not respected and understood
minimally (presumably a hallmark of civilization), the "clash of civilizations"
(more accurately, the clash of barbarisms) will become all too tragically real.
Thus it is absolutely necessary to imagine how it feels to be an Iraqi mother,
all children lost to US bombs, whose husband has lost his job (because the
factory where he worked was bombed) and now wants to help the insurgents throw
the Americans out of Iraq.
Or to conceive how people on the streets of Tehran feel after European leaders
have betrayed them, leaving them quite exposed to attacks by US or Israeli
bombers. Without extending our imagination in these directions, one will fail
to understand and alleviate the despair that people exposed to the military
might of the West feel today. In the process, the despair will be aggravated
with consequences all too foreseeable.
Can Europe recall its own culture?
When the arteries of human thought are prey to indoctrinated herd instincts
under the tutelage of the big-brother state, how much freedom is there left to
defend?
Freedom is to know the balance between silence and speech, to know when and
about what to speak in public, not to rave and rant at will, not caring for the
sensitivities of others. Hate-mongering is not freedom of speech. In a world
situation fraught with potentially fatal geopolitical tensions generated around
Islam by Western powers, it may easily become the kickoff for a terminal world
war. It also demonstrates irresponsible journalism, atrophying under the force
of the commercial imperative that compels it to confuse newspaper with
tabloid.
The reader is urged to go back to the beginning of this article and read the
quotation from Kierkegaard once again. He emphasizes thought over speech. In
book after book Kierkegaard bemoaned the absence of contemplation in modern
life, criticizing, among other things, the numbing effect of technology and
commerce.
If one is able to think one's thoughts freely, one would not partake of
vulgarity, or imagine that one's own freedom can be earned at the cost of that
of others. One would never mistake power for freedom. The former is a zero-sum
game, the latter is not, for it implies that the freedom of each is contingent
on the freedom of all.
To have freedom of speech in a time of remarkable censorship and relentless
thought control exercised by the powerful Western media on behalf of their
corporate interests is a recipe for certain disaster. This is certainly one of
the lessons to be learned.
It also demonstrates how dangerous illusions of freedom, when it is confused
with power, are. The cartoons of Mohammed are thoughtless and vulgar, and only
serve to show the absence of inner freedom in the so-called free societies of
the modern world. For European newspapers outside Denmark to have reprinted the
cartoons after three months (when the matter had not really had much effect
outside Denmark until last week) is a sign of an infantile disorder in the
public discourse of the West, not to speak of a terrifying cultural bankruptcy.
The disease has now traveled westward from the US. It demonstrates the growing
immaturity of a decadent polity. The 18th-century Enlightenment is but a
shriveled memory, prey to Mammon.
Now how well do Danes know their cultural past, if the thoughts of their finest
thinker sound alien to them today? And are Muslims to be blamed if Westerners
have themselves allowed the commerce of decadent capitalism to make them forget
some of best features of their intellectual heritage?
Aseem Shrivastava is an independent writer. He can be reached at
aseem62@yahoo.com .
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers
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