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Art and Philosophy

Sociology is not philosophy. And social criticism is quite easily criticism of straw scarecrows, lifeless creations of bigotry, a caricature of religion in this case, as strident speech often is.

Foreword to Events of 2006 (2015)

My reverence for free speech is unreserved, both the freedom to express offensive ideas and the freedom to criticise offensive ideas. (Libel is a civil, not a criminal offense, in a civil world.) Every alternative sets up an authoritarian censorship, but speech that does not give offense is not free (because it has no need to be: no law is needed to protect speech that no one finds offensive), and it is precisely what is judged to be offensive that will be prohibited. Free communities do not censor speech; censoring speech is what unfree communities do. Solzhenitsyn tells the story of a little boy who said, "Everyone should be free to say anything." And that is what philosophy says. The little boy's companions beat him up, and this too sometimes happens to philosophers.

Tolerance of freedom of conscience was not generally accepted before the Enlightenment (Locke's Letter on Tolerance is a beginning), although freedom of speech is our inheritance from the ancient Athenians (Plato, Gorgias 461e). And religious tolerance came as a very bloody lesson for European Civilization to learn.

Judged from a Christian point of view, insulting what your neighbor holds sacred clearly is not being faithful to the commandment to "love thy neighbor as thyself" (Matthew 22.39). It clearly is also not an act of religious tolerance.

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Art and Philosophy

I find this in the Western press (February 2006): "cartoons satirising" (BBC), "negative caricatures" (CNN), "blasphemous" (New Zealand Herald). The press as art critic. Who is to decide what is negative, what is caricature, what is blasphemous?

Art should, if the artist wishes, be provocative: it should make you think -- it should make you think for yourself. And it should never apologize for that.

Dogmatic religious critics are right: freedom of speech and freedom of expression are secular values. They are not religious values; they exist despite the historical opposition of religions. If they had never been exercised with courage, they would not now exist in Europe (or in its Enlightenment child in America, where speech and expression are most free), would not now be classified as human rights (as they are by Article 19 of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)).

In art freedom of expression does the same work as freedom of speech in philosophy: it makes you think. That is a connection between art and philosophy.

"What is tolerance?"

It was impossible not to respond to this situation (Denmark, February 2006) -- because in it philosophy itself is under attack.

"What is tolerance?" That form of expression sounds as if we were asking about some "thing in itself". Whereas all that is being -- and all that can be -- asked for is a definition of the word 'tolerance'.

It is 'tolerance' to allow others to practice their religion. It is not tolerance to also participate in their practices; that is instead indulgence, something shown to a child. And to insist on it is 'religious intolerance'.

The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten should not have apologized either for posting the drawings or for the offense the drawings caused, because it had nothing to apologize for -- because it had done nothing wrong. The cartoons had been drawn as a protest against the fact that the author of a children's book about the life of Islam's prophet Mohammed could not find an artist who was not afraid to illustrate it for her.

The rioters were for the most part poor people who have very little except their religion to cling to as the source of meaning and dignity in their lives. (It is the demagogues who brought the images from a Danish publication -- published in the West for Western readers -- to the attention of poor and uneducated people who didn't even know where Denmark is on the map or what the Danish flag looks like, who must apologize for the riots.) And everyone should be sensitive and considerate of that. And, indeed, it is at the very heart of religious tolerance, which was the lesson Europe had learned from its long and bloody wars of religious intolerance, to avoid causing offense. But only if that is voluntary.

Understanding versus Agreement

You don't want me to understand you; you want me to agree with you -- and by 'agree' you mean 'obey' you. But I don't agree with you. I am not willing to surrender my freedom of speech and expression in order to placate dogmatic people who want to control other people. And you, on the other hand, will not agree to stop demanding that I do.

Islam, as it is practiced in most places (and where it does not even allow a Moslem to abjure Islam), has never learned to distinguish dogma from truth, authority from free inquiry (or thinking about things for yourself). It has never accepted freedom of conscience as the post-Enlightenment West has (or at least the educated part of it has). As things stand at present, this makes for a parting of the ways.

When two principles [-- in this case, obedience (submission) versus freedom --] really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. (OC § 611)

Reason can only reconcile the reasonable, not those who believe there is something higher than reason. If Islam, as it is practiced in most places, cannot agree to tolerate the secular -- i.e. the philosophical -- West, and if the people of the West remain true to the hard-won freedom values of their own civilization, not losing their confidence in reason, then the consequence will be something that only fools can desire: war (and if the result is not the same as at Marathon and Lepanto, Western humanity will enter another dark age).

Philosophy, however, is not at war with Islam -- or with any other religion (for the Hindus, Jews, Buddhists and Christians of backward societies can be just as intolerant) -- but only with the intolerance that poverty and lack of education, often infused with nationalism, foster. If the level of education rises in the Islamic world of the East, then, as it did in the formerly (at least nominal) Christian world of the West, so too may tolerance and freedom of conscience.

But is silencing speech also silencing thought?

[Note about Palestine: a personal disclaimer. Note also that the following are language and philosophy remarks -- not political polemic.]

Talking about the following is baying at the moon, but "questioning everything" is very often that way, as is a hatred of lies. And there is this as well --

Open your mouth for the dumb, for the rights of all who are left desolate. (Proverbs 31.8)

According to the U.S. State Department:

Contemporary examples of antisemitism ... could, taking into account the overall context, include ...

Which is it? Is there a Jewish religion (Judaism) or is there a "Jewish people" whose state is Israel? Is there only a religion or is there both a religion and a "people", or is Judaism itself a national identity ideology? If there is not a non-religious Jewish people, then can there be "secular Jews" (as Albert Einstein called himself)?

If the prime minister of Israel demands the expulsion of 42,000 Eritrean and Sudanese refugees because they are not Jews and therefore undermine the status of Jews as the majority in Israel (and therefore as its "democratic" rulers), is that not "a racist endeavor"? (The inhabitants of the state of Italy are Italians regardless of whether their parents were born in Italy or in Africa -- there is no Italian race, not even black or white.) And is suggesting that it is "a racist endeavor" an act of "antisemitism" according to the U.S. Department of State?

When language is tortured like this, what does it mean, i.e. not only what is the language's meaning, but what does using language this way amount to?

Political Zionism

A lot of the trouble lies in our way of talking about countries doing this or that rather than of the powerful of those countries doing this or that. Not all Israelis are political Zionists, certainly not the one fifth who are Palestinians (much less the 750,000 Palestinians who were expelled from their homes by the Zionist Jews and now live with their children and grandchildren as displaced persons), nor are all Israeli Jews, much less all Jews, advocates of political Zionism (or of the religious Zionism that now controls the government Israel's land policies). And so it would be clearer if instead of saying "Israel" we said "the rulers of Israel" or even "Israel's Zionist Jews". It would also be clearer if Israel were not called "the Jewish state" rather than "a state for Jews", because the first form of expression implies that the "ideals" of Israel's rulers are the ideals of all Jewish people.

"Jewish state" -- this identifies political Zionism with "semitism", so that those who attack Jews in Europe think they are instead attacking Zionists. And it is the political Zionists, both Jewish and Christian, who are responsible for this increase in "antisemitic" attacks by people who have not learned to make distinctions.

It is political Zionism itself that is antisemitic, in my view. Political Zionism, which is a national identity ideology, an apartheid (or racist by any other name) project, is antisemitism because it is a denial and rejection of the highest development of Jewish thought, namely Jesus' insight that the kingdom of God belongs, not to a nation or race of people, but to those, and only to those, who do God's will, which is to love God with all one's heart and to love one's neighbor as one loves oneself in a neighborhood without borders, as the story of the merciful Samaritan, who asks no questions about the man he helps, shows us who our neighbor is (Luke 10.25-37).

Like having more than one alibi, having too many meanings is worse than having no meaning (The word 'antisemite' is infinitely plastic. It can be stretched to fit anyone and anything; one size fits all, really.)

On the other hand, it does seem that the word 'antisemitism' is a word that in our time is without any clear meaning -- because it is allowed to mean too many different things; as an instrument it is as blunt as a blanket. Time may have been when by 'antisemitism' was meant 'an uncompromising animosity or even hatred towards Jews or the Jewish people collectively' and not 'a reasoned opposition to the ideologies of either Judaism or political Zionism'. But in the English-speaking world that distinction seems lost, and being opposed to political Zionism is equivalent to being an abolitionist in the South under slavery or later being a desegregationist anywhere in the United States: then one was dismissed as a "n-lover", and maybe now one would be called a "w-lover" -- if the word 'antisemite' were not effective for directing attention away from the wronged (the native population of Palestine and the Sudanese and Eritrean refugees) towards the wrong-doer, whose only real "wrong-doing", as the word 'antisemite' suggests, is being Jewish. (When is apartheid not really apartheid -- when it is political Zionism?) And the word 'antisemitism' is of course only one step away from the word 'Nazi' (Indeed, a sociology professor at Holy Cross College, Massachusetts, escalated his rhetorical attack against Fr. Michael Prior of St. Mary's College, Surrey University, with just that distorted language).

Opponents of political Zionism are in some places free to express opinions, just as political Zionists are also free -- and sufficiently powerful -- to dehumanize, financially bankrupt and marginalize those who express such opinions, not by refuting those opinions (Plato, Gorgias 458a-b), but simply by calling those people a name, as if a Jewish person could never be opposed because of what he does rather than because of who he is. Labels are powerful tools [weapons]. They can be used to silence speech. But can they also be used to control [limit] what a human being is capable of thinking (Orwell, 1984)?

Well, an example of just that is the strange ideology of Christian Evangelical Zionism ("Falwellism", although it was invented by William Hechler, who pressed Theodor Herzl to make Palestine the place of his future "state for Jews") which sees the "restoration" of the Jews to "the land of Israel" as the fulfillment of the Bible's prophesies about the "end days" and the "second coming of Christ", quite oblivious to the different types of story-telling in the Bible; comparable would be reading Jesus' parables as if they were history lessons ("Where did that family live, in which town and street? I think I knew that prodigal son and his father" [Luke 15.11]). Literalism is a use of language that limits [restricts] thought (Orwell's Big Brother should have had something similar).

And that restriction is dangerous (although anyone who is unable to believe that there are people who take religious belief seriously by acting in accord with it will not understand that it is) because if the political Zionist state is God's will, as is the belief of the U.S. president and his advisors (and all other followers of the founder of Liberty University), then any organization or government (Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iraq, Libya, Syria, BDS), indeed the Palestinian people themselves, and any individual human being that opposes political Zionism is acting contrary to God's will, i.e. it is doing the work of the devil, and therefore must be destroyed. That ideology is similar to the ideology of "Islamic State". (Neither is the Christianity I know, nor the Islam I know, both of which teach to love God, who is everything good and true, with one's whole heart and to love one's neighbor, who is every human being without distinction, as oneself, to forgive and seek reconciliation, be merciful and make peace. I cannot see any difference between worshipping the god of Deuteronomy 7.1-6, a god who demands not only the dispossession of a native population of its home, not mere "ethic cleansing", but actual genocide both physical and cultural, and worshipping the devil: if God demands that, then what would the devil demand -- if that is the Word of God then what would the word of the devil be!)

Further "obfuscation by means of full-stop" is the phrase 'Israel's right to exist'. The moral right? Only if "morality comes from the barrel of a gun" (The complement or corollary of that phrase is that, due to its inferior fire power, the native population of Palestine does not have the right to exist).

(Of course, the thing is that if Israel were the Dutch state in Palestine, no one would be defending it who did not also defend Apartheid South Africa. Indeed, it would no longer exist. Why it would be different for the Jewish state in Palestine is not a question about language.)

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