The Ideology Of Piety

This makes the incident a very pure example of the problemscaused by bad ideologies, and the ideas that lie at their core.

The lesson of the cartoon controversy is not that Islam isoffended; it is not a lesson about Islam at all. Nor is it that the West is'hypocritical', even if that's true. Rather it is that Western culture hasbought into an ideology whose chickens have come home to roost. This neworthodoxy is built on inflated notions of rights and respect, skewed ideas ofinjury and punishment, and the reliance on 'voices' in establishing truth.

Rights

Jeremy Bentham said that rights werenonsense; natural rights, nonsense and stilts. Rights, very carefully defined,can have their uses, but their entrance into the cartoon debate perfectlyexemplifies how rights 'inflation' makes them a mere encumbrance. We are toldthere is a right to free speech.

Where it comes from, no one says. No one ever says, thoughsometimes we may hear it is 'fundamental', which, I suppose means: 'don't ask',or 'I really like this one'. But two -- or billions -- can play this game.Suddenly other rights rise up out of the ground like the warriors Jason fought:rights to offend and rights not to be offended, rights to worship in peace andrights to disturb that peace, rights to fire employees and rights to not to befired -- you name it. And it gets to be a big joke, because everyone realizesthat (a) none of these rights are absolute (b) they must often be 'weighed'against other rights. Well, how the hell do you do that? Check your big boxstores and mail-order catalogues to see if they have any Rights Scales. Becauseas things stand, no one has a clue how to weigh rights against one another, soall the earnest talk of rights is not even hot air -- which has, at least, itsuses.

Respect

In the cartoon debates, rights generallyare invoked on the side of the cartoonists. On the side of the anti-cartoonists,the equivalent is Respect.

In some cases, 'respect' just means 'respecting rights', so weare back at the same vapid nonsense as before. No doubt you should respectpersons in the sense that you should not, by and large, torture or murder or robthem; we knew this before anyone spoke of Respect for Persons. We can just saythat people have a right not to endure such treatment. But then there are thehard cases, when, if you do not inflict pain or kill or steal, the rights ofother persons will be violated. So we are back to 'weighing' the rights of manyagainst few, of one sort against other sorts -- in other words, we are nowhere.

In other cases, Respect for Persons means actually respectingsomething or someone -- persons, cultures, religion. As some moral ideal, thisis a non-starter, and for several reasons.

First, actually respecting someone is a matter of what you feel.People typically don't have much control over their feelings: you have littlechoice about whether you feel respect for, say, George Bush or Saddam Hussein,Oprah or Paris Hilton, Wayne Newton or Sinead O'Connor. So, except in very raresituations, there can be no right or wrong about feeling respect.

Second, it really flies in the face of reality to hold that allpersons or cultures or religions are worthy of respect. Is this supposed to besome absolute truth? What is inconceivable about the notion of a contemptibleperson, culture, or religion? Not long ago, and not only in Western culture, thegreat sin was pride, and self-esteem was considered quite inappropriate to soinsignificant and paltry a thing as a human being. You need not go nearly so farto the surely reasonable idea that some people really haven't done or beenanything of which you should stand in awe.

As for cultures, it seems as if everyoneagrees that some human institutions, attitudes, and practices are pretty awful.They are not all concentrated in one place. Has someone done a balance-sheet toshow that, all over the world and throughout history, the good things aboutcultures always outweigh the bad ones? How was this accomplished? Why haven't weheard about it? If this hasn't happened, why on earth should I assume that anyculture is worthy of respect? And, to return to the first point, how can I beexpected to muster a feeling of respect for all these cultures?

Maybe 'respecting cultures' is just supposed to mean that youshouldn't insult them. If so, why not just say that? Would it be, perhaps, toavoid giving a reason for this supposedly absolute rule? Wouldn't it benice to have a reason, though?

Should we respect religion, then? When something contemptible isdone in the name of religion, we invariably hear something like 'this is notChristianity', 'this is not Hinduism' or 'this is not Islam'. Is that so? Here's a way of finding out.Pick up a good dictionary or encyclopedia and look up the religion. It will tellyou, in a sentence or two, what all members of that religion are taken tobelieve, and it will come to very little -- for example, that Jesus Christ isthe son of God, that he died on the Cross for our sins, or that there is oneGod, and Mohammed is his prophet. Any practice consistent with those few verybasic beliefs can be part of that religion -- all it takes is for someone whoholds those beliefs to incorporate those practices into their faith. Indeed, tosay that these practices 'are not Islam' or 'are not Christianity' is just thesort of dogmatism that people who say these things pretend to avoid. By thisreasonable measure, all religions contain much that is contemptible. Why thenshould any of them be 'respected'?

Respect is not a duty; it is not even desirable in many cases.Where 'respect' means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving themfrom their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn't do those things even topeople you hold in contempt. To call this sort of restraint 'respect' is todisguise clear moral values in gummy slush.

Injury

The bogus value of respect now looms so large in North Americanculture that virtually every high school code of ethics refers to it. But theideology of respect cannot itself cut much ice, because you need to know what todo when you encounter disrespect. If disrespect is such a big deal,shouldn't we be able to see the damage? The question gets answered with new,expanded concepts of injury. Simply to be in the presence of 'offensive'material, like pinups, is not merely annoying; it is damaging to the mind. Thesight of Janet Jackson's breast is said to have caused damage to millions, anddrew the largest fine, $550,000, ever levied against a television broadcaster.The creation of 'atmospheres' is injurious. When someone is convicted of anoffense, victim impact statements may help to determine whether or for how longsomeone goes to jail, where the psychological injuries won't count and thephysical ones will go unrecorded, let alone punished. Unkind words, construed asemotional abuse, can create serious legal liabilities. Murky ideals lead topreviously undiscovered harms.

Evidence

With the increasing importance of elusive ideals such as respectand elusive injuries to those 'respected', the very concept of evidence is onthe ropes. That someone says they feel bad is taken to be proof that they feelbad. That some says their identity has been damaged, or outraged, is proof thatthis mysterious injury has afflicted them. That someone says an experience hasruined their life proves that their life is ruined, and by that experience.Courts of law have acquired unexpected abilities to determine such subtleties aswhen an image is degrading. Written materials are said to incite hate; no oneeven thinks to ask whether anyone has actually come to hate something as aresult of reading those materials. The question of whether any of thissupposedly incited hate actually leads to injuries, in the old-fashioned sense,never arises. 'Communities', whose existence is established by the mereassertion that they exist, are known to suffer injuries on the basis of mereassertions coming from someone who merely claims to be, or is claimed to be, a'member' or 'leader'.

Worse than this, degraded notions of evidence have rehabilitateddangerous ethnic myths. The 19th century notion of a 'people' has somehow becomeanthropological and historical fact. The people is the Volk, and the connectionwith Nazism is a matter of historical record. If a particular Volk is infashion, their assertions come to determine historical record and evenscientific fact. If they say they have inhabited an area for 20,000 years, theyhave done so, whether or not there is any evidence that anyone living today cantrace their descent back to any Paleolithic ancestor. If a spirit is said toinhabit a river or lake -- anyone who listens to 'good' radio will hear thisdozens of times a year -- then, by gum, that's the truth. If the Gods of theland are said to be angry, there are such Gods, who are angry. Assertions bysomeone who commands Respect are known, from the fact that they are asserted, tobe true. And the fact that a People really, really feels close to some landproves their right to that land. To doubt any of this would, after all, bedisrespectful.

Degraded standards of proof invites killing on instinct. Nowthere are Bad Guys and, just by looking at them, we know who they are. When itcomes to fighting crime, or policing the Middle East, appearance or suspicionsuffices for conviction, and conviction for punishment.

Punishment and Wrong

What with cloudy moralities, rights inflation, elusive injuriesand Neanderthal notions of evidence, there is no longer much sense of thedifference between what is wrong and what is, or ought to be, forbidden and, inconsequence, punishable. Obscenity, lechery, sacrilege blasphemy, desecration,insults, sometimes even rudeness or disrespect are considered permissible onlyif they are morally defensible. If I ought not to be treated a certain way,instantly I have an important Right not to be so treated, and others are notmerely in the wrong for treating me so: they are also to be punished. Socertainly, if I ought not to insult a Community, the presumed members of theCommunity must have rights not to be insulted, and I should be punished forinsulting them. The punishment may be jail time or 'merely' dismissal from yourjob, but it is punishment all the same.

Piety

Taken together, and despite the secular,even left-wing contribution to these developments, official Western culture hasbecome a culture of piety. It traffics first and foremost in the Unseen, inrespect, in rights, in mysterious injuries, communities and offences, whoseexistence is founded in faith -- faith in That Which is to Be Respected --rather that even the most elementary, the most minimally rational forms ofreason. Respect, the foremost value of this culture, translates into behavior asreverence. Disrespect, its foremost sin, becomes punishable.

Suppose, for example, someone displays pictures which insultyour life-style, way or life, or cherished beliefs. Suppose these pictures makemake you feel you are hated, whether or not anyone can trace somecausal link between those pictures and hate, whether or not the hate does youany but mysteriously internal harm -- perhaps you feel your identityis under assault. Displaying the pictures is now not merely objectionable. It isprofoundly immoral, because it is disrespect. What society considers profoundlyimmoral, it is now likely to consider criminal as well. Displaying the picturesis probably a hate crime. It might well be emotional abuse, punishable indomestic contexts.

This must all sound familiar. I cannot say whether the officialWestern culture of piety, enthusiastically promoted worldwide, played a role inthe reaction to the cartoons. I do know that Western piety has left the Westwithout a leg to stand on in this dispute. It is no good trumpeting rights offree expression, because these rights are now supposed to have nebulous butsevere limitations. From the moment Western countries started criminalisingtopless posters in locker rooms, hate speech, emotional abuse and many othersins of impurity, free expression was at the mercy of Western piety. It cannotbe invoked against piety of another sort.

The point here is not that the West is hypocritical. Maybe itis; maybe it is just inconsistent: who cares? Hypocrisy is among the mostharmless of sins; indeed that it has become such a fetish is one more indicationof a culture of piety. The point is rather than the West has put ideologicalweapons in the hands of those it now wants to repel, and thrown away the weaponsthat might have proved useful in such an effort. The most basic notions of therule of law -- that you should not be punished for what you cannot help, likethe feelings you have, that no one should be expected to obey laws so vague thatthe criteria of obedience are mysterious -- were thrown away years ago. Theycannot be picked out of the trashcan and held up as shiny Western ideals justbecause it is now convenient to do so.

The cartoon dispute should show the West that it has to make achoice. It can abandon the culture of piety, and go back to defending real civilliberties. It can go back to judging real crimes by real standards of evidence.It can turn its attention to real, vulgar, observable, concrete human needs --like decent food, clothing, and shelter -- rather than chase the wild elusivebutterfly of respect. Or it can keep up with its piety -- but then it cannotcomplain when others do the same.

Finally, though many commentators havejuxtaposed Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, it might be more instructive tojuxtapose Islamic fundamentalism and political correctness.

Both arose from the ashes of an effective secular left: the leftthat was suppressed all over the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, and thekiddie left that imploded as the Vietnam war drew to a close. Both gave up oneffecting a real change in the material conditions of their societies and gavethemselves over to carping, otherwise known as a critique of prevalentlife-styles and 'hypocritical' policies. Both quickly discovered thatgovernments or ruling elites found these life-style goals and displays ofsincerity much more pleasing than attempts at radical change: better toinculcate respect and piety than to worry about trying to eliminate poverty andother social atrocities. So both found that their ideologies becamesemi-official, adopted by governments for their convenience and gently rebukedif things 'went too far'. Now we have smug professional Islamists who preachrespect, and smug baby boomers who bask in their Sixties war stories as theyremember the days when they invented the idea that respect was progressive.

Islamist culture and the culture of respect now reign withcomplacent authority, incredibly sensitive to everything that doesn't matter,and incredibly insensitive to what does. With all the supposed concern for 'theoppressed', no one sticks their neck out for these people. There are stillleftists, as there are still fundamentalists, who genuinely care about realinjustice; they are an isolated lot. The ideology of respect has decreed thatpiety trumps justice. Changing that priority will not be easy.

Michael Neumann is theauthor of TheCase Against Israel.