Cartoons and common sense

I agree, Parasomnium.It's important to keep in mind, as a secular Muslim commented on NPR the other day, that you can purchase portraits of the Prophet in Middle Eastern markets. We are witnessing not only a great deal of violent hatred but considerable dissembling and hypocrisy.The fact that Muslim clerics circulated pamphlets with depictions of the prophet as a pedophile and a pig, conflating them with the Danish cartoons, is telling: much of the religous hierarchy in the Muslim world wants to promote this "culture war."While I would not create or publish these images, I do defend another's right to do so vigorously. The freedom to parody or satirize people and institutions of power is a fundamental right of speech in the West. We should not surrender it.My gravest concern is with the apologists--Vatican and American--who insist it is wrong to offend another's religious belief. This is an extremely dangerous idea. My right to speak does not end at the limits of another's preference not to be offended, and those in the West who suggest it should end there likely have some agenda beyond a concern for Islam.I would give the same advice to Muslims that I give to conservative Christians who want to control sexual, political, or religious content in the mass media: If you don't like what you see, don't buy the paper.This message has been edited by Omnivorous, 02-05-2006 05:59 PM

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It does seem odd to defend the violent actions of a mob as reasonable in any context.I wouldn't argue that Islam, per se, is responsible for unreasonable violence in the sense that its doctrines and tenets inevitably lead to violence, any more than I would argue that about violent Christians, Jews, or Buddhists (yes, there have been quite violent Buddhists, e.g., the monasteries in China that warred with the imperial throne for power centuries ago).It needs to be pointed out that most Muslim clerics denounce the violence and point out that it violates the doctrines of Islam: the mobs are not acting reasonably within their own religion's tenets of morality and ethics.There are many complicating factors here: racism in the West, the colonial baggage that the West carries (both in terms of its own attitudes and the vast reservoir of anger and resentment colonialism created), the history of post-colonial Middle Eastern interventions by the West, etc.I recall leaving Asia to visit family in the U.S. during the Iranian "hostage crisis." I nearly came to blows several times as a consequence of pointing out that it was absurd to condemn the Iranians for not observing international diplomatic norms without also condemning the U.S. CIA, which had engineered a coup d'etat against the elected Iranian president and installed the dictatorial shah in his place.The coup was wrong, the hostage taking was wrong: one had to understand both to understand either, but both were still wrong.I embrace cultural and moral relativism. But the borders of relativity can be drawn at violent harm to another for reasons other than self-defense.I don't condemn Christianity or Judaism for violent Christian or Jewish mobs; I don't condemn Islam for violent Muslim mobs--though I note the frequency with which organized religion seems to encourage the eruption of violence in general.But I do condemn violent mobs; I know of no culture that finds them reasonable within its own belief system.To me, the most relevant aspect of this current fiasco is the influence of politicized fundamentalists; national and regional religious and cultural sensitivities are being deliberately inflamed by clerics who have mixed religion and politics. We have similar problems in the West though so far they are differently manifested.If Muslim culture claims a taboo against certain expressions, then it is valid for them to enforce that taboo within Muslim culture; Western democracies claim near absolute freedom of expression and that is valid within Western cultures.Can one claim reasonableness for mob violence self-justified by cultural difference, esp. cultural difference expressed in another nation? I don't see how.This message has been edited by Omnivorous, 02-06-2006 09:51 AM

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I see, iano, that I was mistaken in thinking you were asserting your own beliefs in this thread; rather, you are attempting to hoist mine by their own petard. Fair enough, and I'm relieved to see that that is so.You have ascribed to me an extreme form of moral relativism which you derive chiefly from my stand on evolution and my agnosticism. Further, you insist that your beliefs--the need for an "objective" (i.e., supernatural) source for a moral ground--leaves no room for any other form of moral relativism. The logical result, you claim, is that moral relativism necessarily collapses into the chaos of every man for himself.But that is not, in fact, the position I hold, and I think my posts in this thread make at least that much clear. Nor is it logically necessary that moral relativism must collapse into moral chaos.You earlier used the example of a lion, asking if one could reasonably "blame" the lion for its predatory nature and actions. Of course not: lions have not negotiated a moral, cultural, or political compact with us. The nations of the Middle East have.Evolution is a good place to start. We evolved as social animals, and the process of defining moral standards has also been social. The rough outlines of the moral values you claim can only exist in the framework of the supernatural, in fact, predate any belief you would recognize as a valid religion. The commonality of many moral values around the world testify to the authentic "objective" ground of morality: the common conditions we find ourselves in and the common interests we share as individuals and as groups.Our closest primate cousins do recognize the dominance of the fittest or strongest individual, but they also practice a pragmatic morality: cheaters in mutualism are punished, thieves are resisted and punished, the troop bands together to expunge excessively aggressive leaders, etc.In our case, language and a greater intelligence have permitted considerable refinement. From our own natural, primitive state of might-makes-right, we developed norms that promote social cohesion and order, thus improving each individual's fitness by removing threats to all. Once political culture reached a level beyond the chiefdom, we began to evolve intercultural foundations that served a wider range of participants.One might think, based on your message, that no agreement had been reached on the issues at hand. But we do, in fact, have an extensive set of multinational treaties and charters that spell out such subtleties as the unacceptability of allowing violent mobs to attack members of another signatory's population, precisely because of the (near) universal recognition that a bright line can be drawn between violence resorted to in self-defense and its more aggressive forms.Only a few years ago the high seas were considered a no-man's land by nearly every nation; that has changed dramatically, and not at the hand of a supernatural lawgiver, but at the mind and hand of humankind.It is true that we must create our own values; humanity has spent millennia doing just that. That there is no supernatural lawgiver does not mean that we have not developed our own moral laws, negotiated through painful experience and the recognition of both common and competing interests.At present cultural and moral relativism need be most engaged at international levels, where large groups who have already negotiated their own compacts interact with other large groups with differing compacts. As I pointed out above, many of the inevitable tensions and frictions have been addressed by multinational treaties and charters; imperfectly, of course, but addressed nonetheless. There remain, of course, tensions and frictions within national boundaries--the moral compacts within nations are also constantly in evolutionary flux--but less so than international compacts because each of these intranational groups have generally been at it longer, and their populations are more homogenous in outlook.My own moral relativism builds on the human and humane golden rule--not the dictate of a God--to conclude that deliberate, violent harm done to another for reasons other than self-defense is wrong. The past few centuries have witnessed that belief come closer and closer to a moral bedrock for all humanity. I'm proud of us for that.In nearly every nation, the remaining contentiousness about their respective moral compact has focused closest on finer-grained issues: for example, I believe I enjoy an individual sovereignty of consciousness, and I may do what I please with it as long as I harm no others. That is my subjective moral belief, but I also accept the larger moral law that violent resistance to my culture's attempt to impose its compact upon my behavior would be immoral; to further complicate the issue, I believe that subjecting me to violent punishment for acting on my belief would be immoral. Navigating such complexities as individuals and groups is how we participate in the evolution of morality.We have moral laws. Yes, we made them up, but we made them up and tested them against the world we find ourselves in--and we found them good. Perhaps it is the religious who most threaten those hard-won laws and what peaceful order they provide us, for their certainty threatens imposition on the unbeliever, and when the believers' faith falters, their morality has no anchor.This message has been edited by Omnivorous, 02-06-2006 01:14 PMThis message has been edited by Omnivorous, 02-06-2006 01:18 PMThis message has been edited by Omnivorous, 02-06-2006 01:19 PM

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Not so--you are playing fast and loose with the meaning of reasonableness, which at its heart premises reason. While one must perforce act on the basis of one's own beliefs, one is not acting reasonably when one is not acting rationally.The essence of the charge of unreaonableness in this thread, as I understand it, is that the rioters are acting irrationally, against their own interests and in contravention of their own stated beliefs.I would lay the same charge against Christian clinic bombers, the Isareli treatment of Palestinians, etc. One does not have to single out Muslims to find the current mob violence unreasonable.This message has been edited by Omnivorous, 02-06-2006 02:50 PM

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Of course you are. Your absolute lodestar would let you take no other tack.As you formulate your reply, keep in mind that the rioters, like you, are moral absolutists.I am still looking for historical instances of moral relativists rioting to protest the beliefs of others. Perhaps you can give me some help there as well.

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Could you be more specific, robin? It seems to me that 60s protests were mostly about the U.S. waging war on other nations--in some cases, a war that was illegal by U.S. law (e.g., incursions into Cambodia)--not about the beliefs of other nations or even the beliefs of other Americans.I participated in many demonstrations during the sixties, and as I recall, most of the riotous actions were taken by the police.(smilie repressed in your honor)

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True enough, I suppose, but I would say we were protesting the acts of unjust war by our government, not the belief in their correctness by other citizens.The Muslim rioters insist that blasphemous speech is action; I suppose many of the faiths "of the Book" would assert that blasphemous belief is action as well. I find neither belief reasonable.

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Yaro, as a personal favor to me, would you consider changing your avatar image?I think you've seen enough of me here at EvC to know how strongly I feel about freedom of speech. I fully support your right to speak and display your opinion as you see fit. Here is a link to the beginning of my brief, recent exchange with IANAT.I ask you in the name of peace to change your avatar image.Please?Thank you for any consideration you can give to my request.This message has been edited by Omnivorous, 02-09-2006 12:48 PM

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Please forgive this off-topic message, O Elder Admins: FN, e-mail me if you want to continue this discussion, so we won't derail this thread full of cartoons and, uh, common sense. My address is in my profile. I'm not much of a Buddhist teacher, though I don't mind sharing my experiences.I was fortunate to enjoy an extraordinary opportunity, FN, but I was not a monk.I enjoyed a close friendship with an ROK (Republic of Korea/South Korea) special forces colonel who was attached to our unit. We had managed to stay alive together in another place before being deployed to Seoul. I called him Bruce Lee; he called me John Wayne.One night we visited an old moon-viewing pavilion together, where the nobles of ancient Korea would float bamboo cups of rice wine in a circular stream, the game being that you composed a line of poetry just as you started the cup floating away, and the next person in the circle had to have composed an appropriate next line by the time the cup arrived, then drink it, refill it, and send it on its way again; by the time everyone had taken a turn, a poem of complex form was complete.Neither his English nor my Korean were good enough to make a single-language poem, so we challenged each other with lines from Beatle songs instead. The stream had long since gone dry, so we changed the rules so that he sang a line or so from a Beatles tune, then emptied the cup. By the time he had emptied the cup and refilled it, I would have to be ready to sing the next line.Once we worked our way through a song, we'd sing the whole thing together. As you can imagine, this got harder the longer the game went on (though the singing seemed to get better), and some of our songs were strange hybrids of many Beatles tunes; a bit of the Stones may have snuck in here and there as well...Anyway, that night Col. Lee spoke of his plan to retire to a monastery in the mountains for the life of contemplation and meditation he would have preferred, though he was an accomplished warrior, in terms of both traditional martial arts and modern tactics. I expressed my envy; he invited me to join him there for an extended retreat when we were both civilians again.Eventually I did just that, and I was able to remain there most of a year before other obligations took me away.Although I tried to adopt the rigors of an initiate's training as best I could, the older monks understood my limitations and gave me lots of special consideration.They taught me to sit still, to clear my mind of thoughts and attachments, to distance myself from pain and discomfort (something I already had a knack for), to let anger go (somewhat)...I learned a little bit of martial arts--mostly how to get hit hard by younger, more highly trained men and boys without feeling too bad about it. I learned that my strengths as a fighter were an extremely hard head, heavy fists, and a high pain threshold: their advice was to ignore self-defense, something I didn't do well, anyway, and strike to win as soon as possible.I learned that my way is not the way of the monastery, but also that there is a way that carries the monastery within--a way to act in the world that is not entirely of the world, a way to both move and be still, focused action that is not attached to outcome: a detachment that is not passionless, an empty-mindedness that is not dull.It is this way that produces the wonderful calligraphy and landscape scrolls of the Zen artists, both spontaneous and disciplined, and the gorgeously, perfectly asymmetrical ceramics. It is the source of "Zen and the Art of Tennis," (or something like that) a faddish book of some years back, which advised players to get out of their own way and trust their reflexes and training.I learned to value peace, and I learned to believe it was possible for me.

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