he 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 civilisations, 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
email to the cartoonist who submitted them, they would provoke an outcry.
Defenders of the "chasm" thesis might reply that western
editors practise 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 1960s, 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 1950s 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 1960s 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 1960s. 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 recognised 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 long-standing 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 offence to
religious sensibilities won’t be enough. Still, the offence 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 multi-ethnic and multi-religious
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 1960s, 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 practise it in the
moral realm. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable but worse things are
imaginable.