February 9, 2006
POST-MODERN DRIVEL
All right, I insulted Americans – but they are not planning to behead me (Anatole Kaletsky, The Times, February 8th, 2006)
This brings me to the third and most important distinction that Americans seem to understand much better than we in Europe. This is the distinction between religion and other beliefs. Why should religions be entitled to legal protection from “insults” and “attacks”? Would anyone suggest that communists and fascists or, for that matter, Tories and social democrats, should be protected from insults? Yet the first two of these movements were all-embracing secular religions and their believers, who numbered in the hundreds of millions, believed in them every bit as passionately as Christians, Jews and Muslims believe in their religions.Far from commanding any special respect or protection from the State, religions must be exposed to relentless criticism, like all non-rational traditions and beliefs. Some religions will survive this contest between tradition and modernity, between reason and revelation, as Christianity, Judaism and Islam have done for centuries. Others, such as Marxism and Scientology, will fall by the wayside. In America, the Constitution, with its prohibition against the establishment of any state religion and its absolute defence of free speech, demands a robust competition between faith and reason and among the religions themselves. And in the end, as America’s surprising piety clearly shows, it is not just society but also religion that emerges stronger from the refiner’s fire of competition, criticism and even insult.
Well, sure. We all know how criticism and insult of Judaism in the thirties left it stronger and more vibrant. Time was when the cause of free speech was grounded in the argument that officially-imposed orthodoxies lead inevitably to oppression and injustice. Now it seems that mocking insults of another’s faith are actually ahelping hands detractors offer to nudge the faithful onwards and upwards in ever greater numbers and strength. On this theory, the relative health of American Christianity is explained not by the energy, fidelity and piety of its adherents, but by Piss-Christ.
Popper piffle.
Posted by: Luciferous at February 9, 2006 5:56 PMSo in other words, Peter, you agree to the proposition that insulting religion X tends to weaken religion X. Well, lay on then, says I. Why are you so solicitous of Islam if you don't believe in it?
Posted by: joe shropshire at February 9, 2006 6:08 PMWell, joe, there are so many ways to try and answer that, but for now it will just have to suffice to say that I will go to my grave wondering why you think this is about being solicitous of Islam.
Posted by: Peter B at February 9, 2006 7:18 PMOJ is wrong.
Kaletsky's argument is simply that if a belief has merit, then its adherents will marshal them. Truly ridiculous beliefs cannot withstand scrutiny. Incidentally, pagan criticisms of Christianity lead to the school of apologists that made the case for Christ even today.
If all the Nazi's did was mock the Jews, they'd hardly be a threat. The tyranny began not because Nazis drew crude cartoons of Jews, but when they took power and disallowed freedom of speech to mock the Nazis.
The Weimar Republic was flawed in many ways. To single out Nazi newspapers is to ignore the real reasons why it failed - the failure of the military, courts, and German conservatives to support the rule of law, the flourishing of paramilitaries and political violence that it allowed, and the bizarre political intrigues that unlikely catapulted Hitler into the Chancellery in January 1933.
Bad taste and vulgarity can be disapproved of and discouraged without resorting to the force of government. If you make certain ideas immune to criticism the govt will eventually become despotic enforcing that. To desire censorship of those against or mocking your opinion is to admit that you find your views too weak to stand scrutiny.
Posted by: Chris Durnell at February 9, 2006 7:19 PMUm, well, Peter, because of your several posts and comments, this one included, both here and over at the Daily Duck, where you take up Islam's cudgels in the cartoon fracas. One hesitates quite to come out and call you objectively pro-headchopper but it's getting harder and harder not to.
Posted by: joe shropshire at February 9, 2006 7:30 PMPeter,
The criticism of Christian anti-semitism in the 30s made Christianity a better religion. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger, as they say.
Is the Southern Baptist faith better or weaker now than in 1860 because of the Civil War and the decades of rightly aimed censure of their support for Jim Crow?
Posted by: Robert Duquette at February 9, 2006 7:40 PMRobert - Since there was very little Christian anti-Semitism, but a great deal of atheist anti-Semitism, criticism of Christian anti-Semitism probably had little relevance to events of the 1930s.
Posted by: pj at February 9, 2006 7:52 PMpj
There was a whole lot of Christian antisemitism in Minneapolis in the 1930's.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at February 9, 2006 8:10 PMRobert - Nothing on that page tells us who in Minnesota was anti-Semitic -- whether it was Christians or non-Christians -- nor who was defending the Jews.
Posted by: pj at February 9, 2006 9:15 PMAll you have to do is ask what we Christian Americans did to those two rival religions. Were we tolerant of facism and communism? Are we tolerant of their bedfellows, Freudianism and Darwinism? All are dead letters and we killed them.
Posted by: oj at February 9, 2006 10:42 PMPj:
My thoughts exactly, but then it struck me Robert may be a convert to the Harry theory of history that says anything bad that happened before he was born was the fault of Christianity.
Posted by: Peter B at February 10, 2006 6:24 AMI thought the problem in the 1930s was lack of criticism of Nazis.
Posted by: Joseph Hertzlinger at February 10, 2006 2:33 PM