[Mb-civic] Preserve values in cartoons war - Robert Kuttner - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Preserve values in cartoons war

By Robert Kuttner  |  February 11, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

READING ABOUT the escalating war of the cartoons and the deeper clash of 
faith versus reason, I recalled the wisdom of the British philosopher 
Edmund Burke.

In March 1775, as King George grew more determined to punish uppity 
colonists in America, Burke gave an impassioned speech in the House of 
Commons, urging restraint.

''The question with me," said Burke, ''is not whether you have a right 
to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to 
make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what 
humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do."

Did Europe's newspapers have the right to print cartoons ridiculing the 
Prophet Mohammed? Certainly. That's free speech. Was it a wise thing to 
do? Probably not.

Of course, in an open society, these decisions are not made by a 
government cultural czar. They reflect norms of what is sensible and 
decent. And anyone is free to break those norms. But they are worth 
upholding. In the United States, though we cherish free speech, 
mainstream media no longer play into religious and racial stereotypes, 
and that is a huge gain for tolerance and civility.

Before World War II, cartoons, radio broadcasts, and the popular culture 
freely used coarse ethnic stereotypes. After Hitler, the mainstream 
press was shamed into dropping anti-Semitic stereotypes. It took another 
generation, until the civil rights revolution, before Amos 'n' Andy, 
blackface, and crude racial jokes dissipated. Gays got ridiculed for yet 
another generation.

It's too easy just to dismiss this respectfulness as nothing but silly 
''political correctness." The greater acceptance of religious and 
cultural minorities has made America a more civil place, and has 
increased our tolerance for difference. But that civility is now under 
assault from several forces.

For starters, the mainstream media no longer is keeper of norms. If you 
can't find hate-mongering in your local paper, just look to the 
Internet. And Fox News has little respect for the norm that the 
respectable media doesn't do anti-Semitism anymore, with Fox's trumped 
up campaign against an imagined ''war against Christmas" -- most of 
whose offenders just happen to be Jews.

It gets even more complicated because, in the stew of American pop 
culture, members of persecuted groups -- as far back as Lenny Bruce and 
Richard Pryor -- sometimes deliberately play off stereotypes, for shock 
or irony. But epithets sometimes used ironically by members of minority 
groups remain slurs in the mouths of nonmembers.

Let's face it -- Muslims have not been admitted to the community of 
people whom it's not OK to ridicule. And you can hardly blame Europeans 
for being upset about Muslim immigrants in their midst who don't share 
Europeans' norms of civil society.

But that doesn't make it smart to fan the flames. Otherwise, to quote 
another Enlightenment philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, we invite ''a war of 
each against all."

In a sense, the rioting in parts of Europe is ''blowback" from European 
colonialism. France colonized North Africa, and engaged in the pretense 
that its colonial subjects were Frenchmen. Immigration by Arabs to 
metropolitan France, however, was not followed by true integration into 
French life. Two generations later, sullen resentment is the legacy.

If the West stands for civility and tolerance and the West fears radical 
Islamists would undermine Enlightenment values with fanaticism, we need 
to be truer to our own professed values. One such value is free speech, 
but other Enlightenment values are civility and free rational inquiry. 
The West has to be careful lest it destroy what it most cherishes in the 
course of asserting Western values against those who threaten them.

The other day, New York Times columnist David Brooks piously contrasted 
the enlightened West versus the Islamists: ''Our mindset is progressive 
and rational. Your mindset is pre-Enlightenment and mythological."

He could have been describing George W. Bush. With his pandering to 
Biblical literalists and his support for a war on science when science 
clashes with professed religious faith, Bush is the first 
pre-Enlightenment US president. Radical Islam may be more crude in its 
tactics, but one form of religious fundamentalism only foments another.

Enlightenment values, of reason, democracy, civility, and the 
coexistence of religious and cultural pluralism, are our most precious 
legacy as a society. In defending ourselves, militarily and culturally, 
against forces that would repeal the Enlightenment in favor of dogma, 
let's not become what we abhor.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/11/preserve_values_in_cartoons_war/
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