[Gets more interesting as it develops. It's kind of hard to believe it was written by the same guy who wrote an evolutionary psyche book.]
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/opinion/17Wright.html
The New York Times
February 17, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
The Silent Treatment
By ROBERT WRIGHT
THE American left and right don't agree on much, but weeks of
demonstrations and embassy burnings have pushed them toward
convergence on one point: there is, if not a clash of civilizations,
at least a very big gap between the "Western world" and the "Muslim
world." When you get beyond this consensus the cultural chasm
consensus and ask what to do about the problem, there is less
agreement. After all, chasms are hard to bridge.
Fortunately, this chasm's size is being exaggerated. The Muslim uproar
over those Danish cartoons isn't as alien to American culture as we
like to think. Once you see this, a benign and quintessentially
American response comes into view.
Even many Americans who condemn the cartoon's publication accept the
premise that the now-famous Danish newspaper editor set out to
demonstrate: in the West we don't generally let interest groups
intimidate us into what he called "self-censorship."
What nonsense. Editors at mainstream American media outlets delete
lots of words, sentences and images to avoid offending interest
groups, especially ethnic and religious ones. It's hard to cite
examples since, by definition, they don't appear. But use your
imagination.
Hugh Hewitt, a conservative blogger and evangelical Christian, came up
with an apt comparison to the Muhammad cartoon: "a cartoon of Christ's
crown of thorns transformed into sticks of TNT after an abortion
clinic bombing." As Mr. Hewitt noted, that cartoon would offend many
American Christians. That's one reason you haven't seen its like in a
mainstream American newspaper.
Or, apparently, in many mainstream Danish newspapers. The paper that
published the Muhammad cartoon, it turns out, had earlier rejected
cartoons of Christ because, as the Sunday editor explained in an
e-mail to the cartoonist who submitted them, they would provoke an
outcry.
Defenders of the "chasm" thesis might reply that Western editors
practice self-censorship to avoid cancelled subscriptions, picket
lines or advertising boycotts, not death. Indeed, what forged the
chasm consensus, convincing many Americans that the "Muslim world"
might as well be another planet, is the image of hair-trigger
violence: a few irreverent drawings appear and embassies go up in
flames.
But the more we learn about this episode, the less it looks like
spontaneous combustion. The initial Muslim response to the cartoons
was not violence, but small demonstrations in Denmark along with a
lobbying campaign by Danish Muslims that cranked on for months without
making it onto the world's radar screen.
Only after these activists were snubbed by Danish politicians and
found synergy with powerful politicians in Muslim states did big
demonstrations ensue. Some of the demonstrations turned violent, but
much of the violence seems to have been orchestrated by state
governments, terrorist groups and other cynical political actors.
Besides, who said there's no American tradition of using violence to
make a point? Remember the urban riots of the 1960's, starting with
the Watts riot of 1965, in which 34 people were killed? The St. Louis
Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson, in his 1968 book "From Ghetto to Glory,"
compared the riots to a "brushback pitch" a pitch thrown near a
batter's head to keep him from crowding the plate, a way of conveying
that the pitcher needs more space.
In the wake of the rioting, blacks got more space. The National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been protesting
broadcast of the "Amos 'n' Andy" show, with its cast of shiftless and
conniving blacks, since the 1950's, but only in 1966 did CBS withdraw
reruns from distribution. There's no way to establish a causal link,
but there's little doubt that the riots of the 1960's heightened
sensitivity to grievances about the portrayal of blacks in the media.
(Translation: heightened self-censorship.)
Amid the cartoon protests, some conservative blogs have warned that
addressing grievances expressed violently is a form of "appeasement,"
and will only bring more violence and weaken Western values. But
"appeasement" didn't work that way in the 1960's. The Kerner
Commission, set up by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 to study the
riots, recommended increased attention to the problems of poverty, job
and housing discrimination, and unequal education attention that was
forthcoming and that didn't exactly spawn decades of race riots.
The commission recognized the difference between what triggers an
uproar (how police handle a traffic stop in Watts) and what fuels it
(discrimination, poverty, etc.). This recognition has been sparse amid
the cartoon uproar, as Americans fixate on the question of how a
single drawing could inflame millions.
Answer: depends on which million you're talking about. In Gaza much of
the actual fuel came from tensions with Israelis, in Iran some
fundamentalists nursed longstanding anti-Americanism, in Pakistan
opposition to the pro-Western ruling regime played a role, and so on.
This diversity of rage, and of underlying grievance, complicates the
challenge. Apparently refraining from obvious offense to religious
sensibilities won't be enough. Still, the offense in question is a
crystalline symbol of the overall challenge, because so many of the
grievances coalesce in a sense that Muslims aren't respected by the
affluent, powerful West (just as rioting American blacks felt they
weren't respected by affluent, powerful whites). A cartoon that
disrespects Islam by ridiculing Muhammad is both trigger and extremely
high-octane fuel.
None of this is to say that there aren't big differences between
American culture and culture in many Muslim parts of the world. In a
way, that's the point: some differences are so big, and the job of
shrinking them so daunting, that we can't afford to be unclear on what
the biggest differences are.
What isn't a big difference is the Muslim demand for self-censorship
by major media outlets. That kind of self-censorship is not just an
American tradition, but a tradition that has helped make America one
of the most harmonious multiethnic and multireligious societies in the
history of the world.
So why not take the model that has worked in America and apply it
globally? Namely: Yes, you are legally free to publish just about
anything, but if you publish things that gratuitously offend ethnic or
religious groups, you will earn the scorn of enlightened people
everywhere. With freedom comes responsibility.
Of course, it's a two-way street. As Westerners try to attune
themselves to the sensitivities of Muslims, Muslims need to respect
the sensitivities of, for example, Jews. But it's going to be hard for
Westerners to sell Muslims on this symmetrical principle while
flagrantly violating it themselves. That Danish newspaper editor,
along with his American defenders, is complicating the fight against
anti-Semitism.
Some Westerners say there's no symmetry here that cartoons about the
Holocaust are more offensive than cartoons about Muhammad. And,
indeed, to us secularists it may seem clear that joking about the
murder of millions of people is worse than mocking a God whose
existence is disputed.
BUT one key to the American formula for peaceful coexistence is to
avoid such arguments to let each group decide what it finds most
offensive, so long as the implied taboo isn't too onerous. We ask only
that the offended group in turn respect the verdicts of other groups
about what they find most offensive. Obviously, anti-Semitic and other
hateful cartoons won't be eliminated overnight. (In the age of the
Internet, no form of hate speech will be eliminated, period; the
argument is about what appears in mainstream outlets that are granted
legitimacy by nations and peoples.)
But the American experience suggests that steadfast self-restraint can
bring progress. In the 1960's, the Nation of Islam was gaining
momentum as its leader, Elijah Muhammad, called whites "blue-eyed
devils" who were about to be exterminated in keeping with Allah's
will. The Nation of Islam has since dropped in prominence and, anyway,
has dropped that doctrine from its talking points. Peace prevails in
America, and one thing that keeps it is strict self-censorship.
And not just by media outlets. Most Americans tread lightly in
discussing ethnicity and religion, and we do it so habitually that
it's nearly unconscious. Some might call this dishonest, and maybe it
is, but it also holds moral truth: until you've walked in the shoes of
other people, you can't really grasp their frustrations and
resentments, and you can't really know what would and wouldn't offend
you if you were part of their crowd.
The Danish editor's confusion was to conflate censorship and
self-censorship. Not only are they not the same thing the latter is
what allows us to live in a spectacularly diverse society without the
former; to keep censorship out of the legal realm, we practice it in
the moral realm. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable, but worse things
are imaginable.
Robert Wright, the author of "The Moral Animal," is a senior fellow at
the New America Foundation.
* Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company