Pope Francis on Paris Attack - "one who throws insults can expect a 'punch'"

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'm very disappointed.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Wrong board, btw.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'm very disappointed.

Why?  Two wrongs don't make a right, no matter how wrong one of the wrongs may be.

Except that mocking religions isn't "wrong" in any way. It's the right of any person in a secular society, and religions should finally understand it.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'm very disappointed.

Why?  Two wrongs don't make a right, no matter how wrong one of the wrongs may be.

Except that mocking religions isn't "wrong" in any way. It's the right of any person in a secular society, and religions should finally understand it.

There is a difference between mocking and insulting, and too many people fail to comprehend the difference.  In their eagerness to push the boundary between mocking and insulting, Charlie Hedbo often crosses that boundary.  It did so with their latest cover, not because it depicted Mohammed, but because it put words into his mouth.  (They're words he might well have spoken were he alive today, but that's not their call to make.)

There is nothing wrong with insulting religions either. Insulting a religion is not the same as insulting believers.

[Antonio the Sixth]

BTW, I really hope the next Charlie Hebdo features a couple of particularly nasty caricatures of the Pope. That's the kind of response he deserves.

[Antonio the Sixth]

There is nothing wrong with insulting religions either. Insulting a religion is not the same as insulting believers.

You couldn't be more wrong about that, and I feel the same way in regards to non-thiestic religions such as atheism and humanism.  That said, insulting religious leaders is in general not the same as insulting their religion or their followers.  I say in general because in a very real sense, Muhammad, Jesus, Gautama , etc. have transcended being people who are leaders of a religion to becoming symbols of that religion.  That's a distinction that many secularists have difficulty grasping the concept of, let alone acknowledging the validity thereof.

Bullsh*t. Jesus, Muhammad etc. are only sacred figures to believers, but nonbelievers may say whatever they want about them. It's not that secularists don't "get" it. They simply understand that their liberty is not limited by other people's beliefs.

[Antonio the Sixth]

What was the pope supposed to say? 'Blatant hate speech is essential to a free society, let 'er rip surviving Charlie Hebdo people'? As little as anybody short of Julius Streicher deserves to die because of a newspaper they put out, I don't think that would have been a morally responsible reaction. Juvenalian satire going out of its way to offend entire religious groups, in a country where at least some of the religious groups in question are already disadvantaged and marginalized, doesn't feature in legitimate political discourse.

There is nothing hateful about Charlie Hebdo's cartoons. We can argue about the value of mean-spirited sneer and scatological humour in political discourse (and I wouldn't even necessarily disagree with you on that), but the idea that religious symbols should be afforded some kind of special protection against them is disgustingly reactionary.

[Antonio the Sixth]

What was the pope supposed to say? 'Blatant hate speech is essential to a free society, let 'er rip surviving Charlie Hebdo people'? As little as anybody short of Julius Streicher deserves to die because of a newspaper they put out, I don't think that would have been a morally responsible reaction. Juvenalian satire going out of its way to offend entire religious groups, in a country where at least some of the religious groups in question are already disadvantaged and marginalized, doesn't feature in legitimate political discourse.

There is nothing hateful about Charlie Hebdo's cartoons. We can argue about the value of mean-spirited sneer and scatological humour in political discourse (and I wouldn't even necessarily disagree with you on that), but the idea that religious symbols should be afforded some kind of special protection against them is disgustingly reactionary.

Well, then, on this particular issue, call me Joseph de Maistre and pack me off to a hermitage, because the idea that those cartoons 'aren't hateful' strikes me as self-evidently ludicrous.

What differentiates a vulgar cartoon about a religion from, say, a vulgar cartoon about a political view, or about opinion on a movie? Why is the former "hateful" while the others are just expression of a viewpoint?

[Antonio the Sixth]

What differentiates a vulgar cartoon about a religion from, say, a vulgar cartoon about a political view, or about opinion on a movie? Why is the former "hateful" while the others are just expression of a viewpoint?

I'm tempted to just say 'because I've moved towards an admittedly and self-consciously traditionalist-conservative position on this specific issue' and leave it at that, but that's not really a legitimate argument so I won't. One left-oriented argument that springs to mind is that, especially in Europe, while Islam obviously isn't itself a race, it's rhetorically racialized in a way that lends itself to economic marginalization and political repression, and so, while criticism is certainly warranted in many instances, it's kind of unseemly to satirize it insofar as satire should punch up rather than punching down--id est, while I'm actually really offended by some of Charlie Hebdo's anti-Christian material, I don't think it's as problematic for them to be putting out as the anti-Muslim stuff.

All I can say about your first point is that this really saddens me. I can only say we are both lucky to not have met half a decade ago, when I was in my fierce anti-clerical phase, because despite our respective goodwill we probably wouldn't have been able to get along at all. It's unfortunate that the drift of your perspective seems to be taking us apart once again.

Your second point (which, due to your presentation of it, I'm not sure if I am supposed to consider it an argument or a pretext) is one I've heard quite often on this forum. It's drawn from the dialectic of "social justice", which, I guess, is the closest thing to a proper ideology that modern American liberalism has been able to produce (and is certainly preferable to the vapid individualism of other American liberals). As a French leftist who was educated in a very different conception of progressivism, this worldview used to puzzle me, but spending a year in San Francisco allowed me to understand it better, and I have espoused some of its tenets.

Still, what I cannot stomach about this perspective its avowed, exacerbated moral relativism. In "social justice" thought (and your post reflects it quite well) it's all about "privilege" and "oppression". Every reflection of the morality of an action or the consequence of a situation is conducted through the lens of these concepts. The division between the "privileged" and the "oppressed" determines everything. Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that social justice views privilege as a binary notion - there has been a lot of great work on the complexity and multidimensionnality of privilege in society. But I'm annoyed by the fact that considering the dynamics of privilege comes at the expense of holding any kind of universal value.

The case of Charlie Hebdo makes this especially obvious. Charlie isn't "racist", anyone with a brain and who actually reads the paper can realize that in fact they're one of the most outspokenly antiracist publications in France. They systematically denounce xenophobic discourse, wherever it comes from, and take the defense of French Arabs/Muslims whenever they are discriminated against. They also happen to not be very fond of religion. They consider religion to be a factor of oppression, so they use satire as a weapon against this oppression. The argument you're making basically means that they should be nicer toward Islam because people who practice it tend to be economically and socially disfavored. But the people of Charlie Hebdo have no reason to make this connection, because, precisely, they have never racialized Islam, and are always careful to distinguish satire of ideas with insults to a group of people. Their struggle is against a vision of society (theocracy and its derivatives), not against one or another segments. Should they drop this principled commitment in the name of strictly material considerations?

Let's put it in another way. When the murderers stormed in the journal's conference room and killed 11 people, who was being oppressed? We can agree that it's the Charlie Hebdo crew. What force was responsible for this oppressive condition? Not a material state of affairs (as the Charlie Hebdo people would count as "privileged" by most metrics), but rather an idea. Oppression is not only a material reality, ideas can, and often are oppressive. Religious fundamentalism is, in itself, oppressive. And you can't combat a universal idea with relativistic notions, you have to develop a principled rebuttal. The Charlie Hebdo massacre is the bloody demonstration that what the journal were doing was noble and right, because until a person can be shot (or flogged, or stoned, etc.) for satirizing religions, satirizing religions will be a way of challenging power.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I would be honored if you did so.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Well wow, I certainly didn't expect so much praise. Thanks all!

[Antonio the Sixth]

Okay, so, uh, about what I was saying earlier.

First of all, I definitely shouldn’t have made a flouncy, insincere retraction of my position like I did.

Antonio, I'm...really not used to being accused of moral relativism, so I'm not sure how I can respond to that very well-argued and beautifully-written post except to say that I certainly don't consider analysis of issues and allocation of resources in terms of oppression axes a relativistic value. I think it needs to be remembered that groups who are at one end of the gun barrel in one way can be at the other end of it in another—there is obviously oppression going on within the Islamic world and presumably within the Muslim minority in France as well—the idea that 'everything a disadvantaged minority does to its own members is above criticism' is not one that I'm (intentionally) advocating at all. (So, since it's not as if there's some sort of universal hard and fast binary of 'these people are oppressed, these people are oppressive', we do have to hold some sort of values outside of that framework. What the values outside of that framework that I hold tell me, though, is that the framework is necessary to take into account and is rich in moral implication.) What I am arguing is that I don't think it's altogether appropriate for people very high up in the league tables, so to speak, to exercise some sort of weird noblesse oblige in using ridicule or satire to intervene in the power dynamics between those lower down.

I think in situations in which material oppression is going in one direction and ideological oppression is going in another (which, yes, is a reasonable characterization of the situation here) it’s my general preference to take the side of those experiencing the former. Call it Marxist influence—I’d certainly rather cop to that than to bog-standard American liberal ‘social justice’ thinking. The takeaway, the historical example that has most influenced my views on what happens when oppression flows back and forth, and how that relates to the concept of revolutionary violence, is probably the history of 下克上 gekokujō as an idea. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was one of the best and most revolutionary concepts in Japanese political history. In the twentieth, it was one of the worst.

What I concede might be going on here—and I think afleitch has verged on exposing this by pointing out that I don’t actually have the best command of French—is that I may have developed a misapprehension of what Charlie Hebdo is all about based on what Inks might call my ‘anti-anti-clerical’ views and my tendency to believe the worst about people or publications that seem like they might be racializing antireligious arguments (which I would hope most of us can agree is something that occurs from time to time and is a real problem when it does). I'm never going to view vituperative attacks on people's religious views in a positive light but, with regards to why, if it is the case that I've misapprehended this then we're back to the conservative side of my views on the issue, which I don't think is really something I'm comfortable attempting to defend cogently in a public thread at this particular remove (we can discuss it via PM if you have any interest in hearing about it).

I hope to make it clear that said anti-anti-clerical views are not the same as just blindly supporting whatever religious order I perceive would be best for me or for my other values. In my capacity as a trans person I would probably fare a lot better under a traditionalist Muslim regime than under a traditionalist Christian one, and better in some varieties of traditionalist Muslim regime than in some varieties of modern Western democracy! In my capacity as a lesbian…not so much.

Let Memphis be the jerk he is - as for me, if you have any objection to what I said, I am glad to hear about them.

I knew that bringing up moral relativism would be somewhat controversial because, in abstract terms, we share the same aversion toward it. My intention wasn't to outright accuse you of holding a relativistic viewpoint, but rather to point out that you were borrowing an argument that could easily lend itself to it. You are right that "analysis of issues and allocation of resources in terms of oppression axes" (a concept that I shortened and will continue to shorten as "social justice", since I think it fits quite well) isn't necessarily, or isn't entirely a morally relativistic school of thought. The main categorical imperative of social justice is contained in the phrase "check your privilege". It's often derided even in liberal milieu, but I personally fully embrace it. The way I see it, "check your privilege" means "be aware of the injustices of society; realize that you might benefit from them; see the way in which other people suffer from it; take that into account when passing a judgment on their actions or character; deconstruct the way in which your own views are biased by these oppressive mechanisms". It is a powerful and useful guide to being a real progressive (and a decent person as well).

Other tendencies in social justice, however, clearly verge toward moral relativism - and  in my opinion, this includes some of the notions you have put forward here. Despite the qualifications you have given to your stance, it still comes down to the idea that a universal principle (anticlericalism) should be applied according to different standards depending on the material conditions of the believers of a particular religion. I don't see how this notion can be reconciled with a universal principle. It's certainly not contained in the "check your privilege" imperative, which only condemns ideas who play an active role in sustaining material oppression. You cannot honestly accuse anticlericalism itself of being part of the ideological construct that sustains the oppression of Arab immigrants in Europe (the way, for example, gender-essentialism is a construct that sustains patriarchy).

The key point, ultimately, is your assertion that "material oppression is going in one direction and ideological oppression is going in another". I don't actually believe that's the case here, because, in fact, material oppression is altogether irrelevant to this issue. As I already said, when Charlie Hebdo weighs in the debate on ethnic issues, it always takes the side of the oppressed. But when it talks about Mohammed and Jesus, it sees them through the same lens because they are all, in the end, the same thing. They certainly don't "exercise some sort of weird noblesse oblige in using ridicule or satire to intervene in the power dynamics between those lower down", because their goal is to fight against what they see as a universally oppressive force, regardless of material context. The only way their drawings could be oppressive is if they made this connection between Islam as a religion and French Arabs. Your third paragraph seems to concede that, if this connection isn't made, your argument doesn't stand. If so, we might not actually be in disagreement (anti-anti-clericalism aside).

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'll take Pope Francis' take on this issue over Bill Maher's any day. I'm not sure how an abstract, nebulous notion like "freedom of speech" is supposed to negate the far more visceral "I'm going to kill you for what you said about me" reaction. Obviously, the perpetrators of such an offense must be punished, but insulting people for a living is a very, very dangerous career. I'm not particularly sympathetic to the circus performer who sticks his mouth into a lion's maw and has it bitten off.

So you assess the morality of a principle based on the degree to which it takes its roots in a "visceral" reaction? Congratulations, you have just undone civilization.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Antonio: With regards to the last paragraph of your response to my post: I'm inclined to maintain a stance of continued skepticism about whether or not Charlie Hebdo--or any publication coming out of a social environment like the (relative) mainstream of modern European society, really--can fully live up to its self-confessed standards and principles in that regard (not racializing religious arguments, treating different religions with some degree of moral equivalency regardless of the social standing of their adherents--leaving aside entirely for the moment the fact that I think it's stupid and myopic to attempt to treat different religions as morally equivalent or parts of the same 'universally oppressive force' or whatever anyway*). However you're obviously better-informed on what Charlie Hebdo's self-confessed standards and principles actually are in the first place, so...yes, I think the anti-anti-clericalism is what's really worth discussing more here, and I'll respond to your PM about that soon, and maybe post some of it in this thread too if I think I come up with any particularly good arguments or turns of phrase.

*Ask me about my thoughts on the different 'vehicles' of Buddhism some time!

This might sound really pretentious and lend itself to a snarky retort, but if someone from "a social environment like the (relative) mainstream of modern European society" is not able to uphold these values, who else would possibly be? There are many legitimate critics that can be made to modern European civilization, but I think that it would be nice if we left-wingers could acknowledge, in a circumstance like this, that there is some good to it. And that, chief among this good, was its ability to develop universal ideals of tolerance and fight against its own prejudice. I think that, in a comparative perspective, Europe has done a fairly decent job, at least from the 1960s onward.

Now, broad generalizations aside, the cartoonists and writers of Charlie Hebdo are progressives who hold these universalistic values particularly dear. The journal basically exists to uphold these values, of which anti-clericalism is a key component. Saying that they failed at treating individuals equally regardless of their race or religion is like saying that they failed at their entire purpose. I will let you be the judge of whether this is the case (after all, some on this forum have expressed the opposite opinion based on the cartoons they've seen), but as a frequent reader of Charlie Hebdo, I think you are mistaken. 90% of their religious caricatures (including, by far, their dirtiest ones) are directed toward Catholicism, anyway.

I look forward to debating that second issue with you.