When the response to cartoons is murder, we shouldn’t be talking about the cartoons
In recent months, we have seen the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Muhammad that prompted the murder of several of their employees in 2015 spur renewed reprisals, such as the knife attack on two individuals outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo, and the beheading of a French school teacher, Samuel Paty, for the “crime” of showing the cartoons to his students in an effort to spur debate about the subject of free speech.
It is shocking to me to see how many people have decided that the most important thing they could be focusing on, in the context of these events, is the offensiveness of the cartoons.
Yes — though humor is sometimes capable of delivering a critique that would not hit home if delivered in another way — I agree that those who attempt to use satire as a way of making a point frequently end up misrepresenting the beliefs that they purport to criticize or being needlessly offensive and that this approach is often less than optimal if not downright counter-productive. Worse still are cases where people are not even trying to make a good faith point but are only trying to humiliate or demean other people and their beliefs.
But, when the offensiveness of such commentary on other people’s beliefs is placed next to the “offense” of murder, this should be, to us, a comparison like that of the difference in brightness between a candle and the noon-day sun. The offensiveness of the worst possible cartoon is so utterly different in magnitude and even kind from that of murder, that as the light of the sun completely overwhelms the influence of a candle so too should the magnitude of murder so greatly outweigh any concern about cartoons as to occupy the whole of our moral outrage.
It is not enough to say, as did the Sheik of Al-Azhar, that “as a Muslim and the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, I declare that Islam, its teachings and its Prophet are innocent of this wicked terrorist crime” — a primarily defensive repudiation of the killing of Samuel Paty it must be noted — when you follow it up by saying “at the same time, I emphasize that insulting religions and attacking their sacred symbols under the banner of freedom of expression is an intellectual double standard and an open invitation to hatred” The inclusion of the latter message in the same statement as the former places the insulting nature of a cartoon on equal footing with that of a man’s murder, demonstrating a horrific level of obtuseness to just where it is that our opprobrium should be focused at this time.
This coming from a Muslim and, to a lesser extent, Pope Francis who spoke in a similar way about the original murders in 2015, is at least somewhat comprehensible given their biases even though it is indefensible given the contrast between the offenses before us, but someone like the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, certainly should know better. Instead, in the context of current events, he chose to respond to questions about the right to show caricatures of Muhammed by saying that “freedom of expression is not without limits”, “We do not have the right for example to shout fire in a movie theater crowded with people, there are always limits”. Revealing a morally tone-deaf attitude toward the current situation.
And he’s not alone. I have seen many people in western civilizations, including secularists, make comments on social media that demonstrate that their moral compass is similarly blinkered.
Making matters still worse is the fact that the tacit message in such statements — that freedom of speech should not include the freedom to offend — is not only a morally confused response to the present circumstances, but it undermines and threatens to tear down one of the most important social agreements that makes it possible for the widest range of people to live together peaceably. Namely, our freedom of speech.
Central to the confusion that I am addressing, seems to be a failure to discern the difference between asking what is a fair response to a given situation and asking what a government and the rest of society should allow. These are very different questions because while the latter question must address the same concerns as the former it must also address many more.
For example, I might conclude that a murderer deserves the death penalty because of the nature of his crime and yet also conclude that we must not use the death penalty because of the risk of killing people who were wrongly convicted and the potential for such power to be abused by the state. To one way of thinking, these statements — that a murderer deserves to be killed and that they should not be — might appear to contradict each other but they are, in fact, wholly compatible because they are speaking to the responsibilities of different actors. The murderer, in the first case, and the public via the governance of law in the second.
Similarly, applying these questions to the matter of free speech should, even in cases where we believe that an individual’s given use of speech is morally wrong, usually lead us to conclude that we, the public, are, nevertheless morally obligated to allow it.
Why is this? Because our ability to create a society in which people with widely divergent views can coexist and prosper together in peace is not only dependent on our ability to appreciate and respect the differences of our fellow citizens. Nor is the addition of our ability to tolerate them even when we find their views or way of life repugnant sufficient. Our ability to create such a society also depends on us being willing to challenge each other’s ideas and way of life. It depends on there being enough of us who are willing to say things that we alone believe to be true even if others will find our views or way of expressing them offensive because our willingness to speak at such risk is the engine of change that enables us to improve every aspect of society. Without such exercise of speech, women would not have acquired the right to vote, African Americans would still be in chains, homosexuals would still be subjected to state-sanctioned conversion therapies, and we would still think that the sun orbits the earth.
The cultural mooring of our ability to say things that inspire vitriolic responses and yet are true and the seed of valuable changes, came under a real, practical, threat as a result of the Charlie Hebdo murders, which terrorized many people into silencing themselves on certain topics lest they end up dead too.
It is, therefore, not merely permissible but important that we support the re-publication of those cartoons, regardless of how much we might personally dislike the approach to public discourse they represent, in order to defend our shared right — here exercised by Charlie Hebdo — to say whatever it is that we think is important for us to say. Their republication encourages us all, by example, to be courageous in exercising this right and responsibility but more to the point: their republication and the French government’s decision to project them onto the walls of their government buildings in response to the murder of Samuel Paty, sends this message to those who feel the impulse to use violence to control the rest of us — that they must find another, more peaceable, way to create a world they want to live in. It tells them that “you can argue with us, implore us, or deride us, but no — we will not be terrorized into conforming our speech so as to make you comfortable.”
Should we personally try to avoid unnecessary or unproductive forms of offense? Yes. Should we criticize those whom we deem to have failed to do so? Yes. But, if we are to err, it should be on the side of tolerating speech we find repugnant rather than shutting it down, lest we cripple our ability to perform social course-corrections, and, if we are to criticize speech, it should not be at the expense of properly condemning outsized responses to it.
If you want to protect your own right to both hold and share the opinions that you have, then you need to protect the right of the Charlie Hebdos of the world to publish their cartoons, for, to somebody, we are all Charlie.
