CHEESY DANISH – Freedom of speech is not freedom to offend

Summary : Making sense out of the Danish cartoons story starts with an aporia between two equally imperative ethical urges, the empathy with the humiliated and the defense of freedom of speech. But this is the wrong war. The real question is whether we feel that freedom of speech includes or precludes freedom to offend. All justifications for freedom to offend are fake and wrong, and this is enough ground for standing up for a limited conception of freedom of speech. But, because of the offensive nature of freedom of speech, this redefinition can only revolve around the Kantian notion of respect.


THE APORIA AND BEYOND

Two Danish artists did a few cartoons portraying prophet Muhammad in various situations in an obscure local newspaper, the Jyllands-Posten. For as yet undisclosed reasons, this came to make the international headlines. The Muslim world got mildly angry, angry, severely angry. Angry. Threats of violence were made. The Western world called on everyone to “support the Danish”. Reprints of the original cartoons were published everywhere in the Western World. Cartoons about the Holocaust were published in the Muslim world. People died.

An ordinary tale of an enactment of one of the always latent and always circular logics of violence between the East and the West. One connected with values, cultures, rights, freedoms, stances, camps, power plays, antagonistic forces, worldviews. The price of respect. The price of freedom. The price of life. One which makes you think of that old poster back in Vietnam days, where you could see a young soldier shot in the back about to fall, and the caption “Why ?”

But it’s always for something. It’s always about how much you’re ready to pay for what.

For the humiliated against freedom of speech ? For freedom of speech against the humiliated ? A class against a value ? A cherry pie against a picture of Meryl Streep ? In conscience, who can choose between those ? We oppress them. They muzzle us. Plague or cholera ?

This is typically the kind of issue where I understand both sides, can relate to both, sympathize with both, and where I have no ready made, easy, firm stance.

Up to a certain point.

Up to the point where the Western world calls on me for a sacred war for the sacred freedom of speech against the sacred war of the humiliated for the sacred right to be respected. Up to the point where the Western world calls on me for a crusade meant to show these camel jockeys who is right and who is the master. Up to the point where I’m asked to SUPPORT THE DANISH !!!!!!!!!

At this point, I know. At this point, my guts say NO. At this point, I desert this war and I start mine against the freedom to offend.

THEIR WAR, MY WAR

When I call it “mine”, it means that I’m not interested in teaching freedom of speech to those uncivilized loons like we’ve already taught them democracy, nor in asking myself way too easy “objective” rhetorical questions such as “does having one's religion insulted justify death threats ?”

I’m not interested in joining the Muslim camp either. I’m not particularly excited by a mentality which seems to be as arrogantly ethnocentric as the Western one and regards the respect due to its beliefs as way more important than human lives.

And finally I don’t wave the white flag. The conflicts exist and run deep, clashes are healthy and must follow their course. The West is right to defend its freedom of speech, and the East is right to attack freedom to offend – even if the West is wrong to defend freedom to offend and the East is wrong to attack freedom of speech.

At the end of the day and as often, the violent approach is unimaginatively wrong, for the true question is a “Whodunnit”. Who made these obscure cartoons famous ? Who brought them up to an international level ? Who wants to put fat in the fire ? And for what purpose ? The case calls for an investigation. Not for twin Jihads.

So let them work it out. But without me. Stop this train to nowhere and let me out. Let me choose my battlefield. I have my own Western war against all kinds of Western fundamentalisms and supremacisms. Just like I think that it’s up to Muslim thinkers to analyze, evaluate, judge and condemn (or not) the meaning and the degree of relevance of their own fundamentalisms and supremacisms.

And so I have a Western war against the Westerners who believe that freedom of speech equates to freedom to offend, and regard this belief as a lesson to teach the peoples who don’t think so and scream blue murder to let it be known.

THE TEENAGE HOLINESS OF FREEDOM TO OFFEND

Freedom of speech means that you can say whatever you want – supposedly because it’s also what you think. Freedom to offend implies a purpose. It’s about claiming the legitimacy of a transgression in the name of a transcendency or an inner urge whose validity cannot itself proven and whose necessity cannot be checked since it’s precisely beyond the limits of material experience or common law, that is, what can be objectively shared and accepted. Like in the case of civil disobedience, the legitimacy of the freedom to offend is an aporia in the field of knowledge. But not in the field of ethics.

One of the cartoons, by Arne Sorensen, shows the cartoonist drawing a neutral portrait of the Prophet while sweating with fear. This cartoon defends the freedom to offend as cleverly as it will ever be. It suggests how mad are the Muslims (and how wise the Westerners) by showing that even a neutral drawing is dangerous with these bigots. Who cares if the Muslims DON’T WANT their Prophet to be drawn AT ALL. That’s just their ignorant, loony fanaticism. Who cares if one may wonder endlessly about the point of drawing a portrait without any intention nor message. That’s just our selfless, courageous enlightenment.

Well, this cartoon describes exactly, with admirable precision, that heroic, mystical, quasi-fanatical spirit of transgression : the cartoonist draws BECAUSE it will offend, and for no other purpose. He affirms the holiness of transgression. He feels like a real little crusader of the freedom of empty speech.

But can freedom of speech ever be empty ? Isn’t it sacred in itself, indeed ? Isn’t this drawing at the core of all the works of art that ever said no to any kind of abusive power, any kind of bigoted terrorism ? Is this cartoonist Salman Rushdie, Theo Van Gogh, Michael Moore ? Or just a retarded and arrogant teenager who watches too much of “Jackass” and needs to grow up before he causes some people’s deaths or his own ?

My guess is that the cartoonist would certainly like to see himself as the former. In my view, however, the latter is closer to the truth. No, there is no continuity from this guy who affirms his right to be deliberately disrespectful and hurtful at the peril of his life and others’ to the artists who affirm their hope in the supremacy of thought, intelligence, courage and art over all terrors at the risk of their lives… and their lives only. There is a continuity from this guy who affirms his right to be deliberately disrespectful and hurtful in the face of danger to any brain-dead teenager doing some drunk driving at full speed on the highway to get himself some identity, sensations and his idea of his pack’s admiration. What is admirable in a transgression is not the transgression. It’s how and why you transgress.

Offensiveness is the word which describes a disagreement in worldviews between the potential offender and the potential offended, where the former denies the specificities in character of the significances held as sacred by the latter. An offense in the modern sense of the word is the result of a violation of these sensitive significances in the name of a presumed supremacy of the offender’s worldview. If it’s deliberate, and if it’s directed at a long humiliated populace whose anger is latent, it’s verging on symbolic imperialism and the heroic cartoonist shouldn’t be too surprised by the quality and level of hatred that he causes.

I don’t grant the freedom to offend. It’s not freedom of speech. It’s the freedom to touch the touchy, to humiliate the humiliated, to hurt the vulnerable. It’s not talk, it’s act. It’s not expression, it’s aggression.

FOR THE CREATION OF AN “OFFENSIVE WARD”

But all the difficulty lies in first defining an offense and second responding to it. Is an offense anything that any applicant underdog can, could or might claim as such ? That was the original postulate of the “politically correct” spirit. It quickly deteriorated into a kind of insipid Newspeak, as sincere and truthful as socialist art, and generated a depressing, unhealthy and sadly predictable brand of terrorism from the oppressed minorities more eager to use their victimization as a terrorist weapon of unrequited empowerment against their own benefactors than to explore new areas of equality and mutual respect.

No, an offense can only be defined by the law… and has been from the beginning.

The word "offense" has a highly significant history indeed. It’s much older than the still recent concept of freedom of speech and had originally nothing to do with it, nor with speech itself from that matter. It describes an action. Meaning etymologically “a blow at” (from Latin ob "against", and fendere "to strike") an “offense” was in the Middle Ages a breach of the law, a pure transgression. But not a subjective transgression committed against a subjective offense, an unlawful one which resulted mechanically in a legal punishment. It quickly evolved into a derived sense of “unethical act” and more recently into its current subjective meaning of "something hurtful".

At any rate, an offense is etymologically a crime and not an unpleasant way to use freedom of speech. So what's regarded as unpleasant ways to use freedom of speech might very well be crimes too in certain cases. An offense is located right at the border between talk and action. I believe this line to be both dim and real - and undetermined as yet.

Speech is limited only when the legislator realizes that it causes harm. Speech is limited when he realizes how close it is to action. I won’t attempt here to determine what offenses should be forbidden and how they should be punished : it would be too much of a digression. I only postulate their existence in an area of compulsory respect.

THE OFFENSIVE NATURE OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH

However, if “Support the Danish” is surely nothing more than a conceited, misused and arrogant substitution of freedom to offend for freedom of speech, is it possible to be for freedom of speech without also being – willy nilly – for the freedom to offend ?

All in all, I doubt it.

I’m not so much afraid of censorship (which already works just fine in our society under different forms, thank you) as I am of the double impossibility to tell for sure an irresponsible moron from a misunderstood or revolutionary thinker or artist and to foresee the actual fate of an offense, even defined and acknowledged as such.

An insult is offensive. An unusual or unpopular stance is often regarded as such too. Worse : in a disturbing fashion, they sometimes carry the same message with a difference only in the level of intelligence involved and the intention to harm or to help.

For example, in his “Chronicles of Dissent”, Noam Chomsky made several statements that could only be taken as severely offensive by a majority of Jews : that Israelis of Ashkenazic origin absorbed German racial attitudes while sharing the same country was one of them. Why was it so unbearable ? First, because it was true and backed by a stance often verified in sociology : assimilation makes you share the worldview of the dominant culture. But also because this very commonly observed truth is nearly impossible to unravel from the vilest and most vitriolic forms of anti-Semitic slander used to discredit Zionism and question the very existence of Israel.

Without freedom to offend, the offenders couldn’t speak. But neither could the unpopular truths tellers, the bad news bringers and the weirdos of all kinds I’m afraid. “Truth hurts”, the truth and the hurt, isn’t it part of the problem about the freedom to offend ? Yes, and “not only truth hurts” is the rest of it…

As a consequence of the severe intrications in stances and the considerable variations in worth of the original offenses, it is just as impossible to tell the good from the bad in their consequences. If truth hurts, isn’t the hurt necessary ? But if the hurt isn’t truthful, isn’t it slanderous, degrading and always likely to deteriorate into incitement and hate crime ?

Offense is the phallic dimension of freedom of speech. Without it, freedom of speech is castrated. But then a penis can be used for pleasure, procreation or violence, and society has more or less persuaded us to drop the violent bit without castrating us. Is it really so hard to imagine the possibility of a similar process in more symbolic dimensions ?

FOR THE INSCRIPTION OF RESPECT

When I position myself against the freedom to offend and for the creation of an “offensive ward” in law, what I seek is less the punishment of the offenders than the inscription of the crime of disrespect somewhere, somehow. For the older I get, the more I realize that all you need is – not love, but respect.

That thing Black woman Aretha Franklin begged for in such a soulful, proud and determined fashion in 1967. That thing that all of the oppressed crave for, knowingly or not. That thing that makes us “step back and look again” (that’s the etymology, “re-spectare”) in care and caution. That vital distance which forbids fusion (“my mainstream is not your difference”), allows empathy (“I look at you and see your pain”) and when all is said and done is the condition for any progress and humanity’s very survival.

That thing without which we are things. That thing without which there is no disrespect, only bad manners, resentment, and war.

High school level really. Like, be aware of what you do and say, and how it really does affect others. The kind of campaign which shows a drawing of a little boy crying with the caption “Put-downs hurt.” To be put beside the cartoon not of the Prophet with a bomb in place of a brain.

I once demanded respect for something, and someone objected that respect wasn’t something you could demand. It’s true. You can’t demand respect. But you should be able to. You can’t, only because it isn’t done. You can’t, only because we’ve gone way too far in the loss of our sense of the sacred. You can’t, only because we’re way too proud of our Western tolerance and our Western ability to take the abuse, all the abuse, any abuse in the name of tolerance, to understand the meaning and the importance of NOT condoning it. Well, the Eastern loons understand that. They may not understand free speech, they may not understand tolerance, they may not even understand humanism, but they do understand honor, respect, reverence, and other such things that we have forgotten, strayed from and don’t sell in our Western supermarkets.

Respect and self-respect have primarily been brought to humanity and elaborated as concepts by Eastern philosophy, but their ubiquity and significance in a multiplicity of contexts (among which justice and equality, injustice and oppression, moral and political rights and duties, cultural diversity and toleration, punishment and political violence) exist in our culture and are only waiting to be valued. Philosophers have been emphasizing these two concepts and strived to show how interrelated they are. Some theories, from Kant and onwards, treat them as the very essence of morality and the foundation of all other moral duties and obligations.

Kant was the first Western philosopher to put respect for persons, including oneself, at the very center of moral theory, and his insistence that persons are ends in themselves with an absolute dignity who must always be respected has become a core ideal of modern humanism and political liberalism. It’s time for the West, who teaches so many things, so well, to so many people, to learn that lesson.

I don’t want to restrict freedom of thought while restricting freedom to insult. But freedom of speech lies somewhere in between, and freedom of thought is threatened by much worse than the inscription in law of a legislation of respect. Such unwanted side effects may be part of the price to pay to bring back a sense of the meaning of a word the Western world has completely lost touch with.

Respect. Just a little bit.