In his editorial, Matt DiBlasi calls Evan’s “an opinion with some valid points.” He represents some of Carp’s claims with an eye to making them seem more plausible. Yet, even this less overtly outrageous commentary on the recent violence is deeply flawed.
DiBlasi’s begins with an evaluation: “there is no excuse for the violent reactions by some Muslims.” Yet, before we judge whether the violent reactions were excusable or inexcusable, shouldn’t we attempt to understand why there were violent reactions in the first place? Such an understanding cannot be taken for granted, when the events under discussion took place in a radically different cultural, political, and economic context from the one with which we are familiar. It is just such an understanding that is assumed by both Carp and DiBlasi. Given that neither of these two, nor anyone that I know in the Wesleyan community has the ability to immediately affect anything that is going on, and given that we have more time and resources for reflection than almost anyone in the world, shouldn’t we stay longer with the moment of understanding?
DiBlasi blindly submits the actions of protesters across the world to a rubric of moral evaluation that needs serious qualifications and re-interpretations before it can be meaningfully applied. As is common in the public discourse surrounding these events, he ignores the differences between the moral-political nexuses and life conditions of his own society and of those in which the actions under discussion took place (I will explain what I mean by this further below). This leads him, as it has led many others, to fundamentally misjudge the moral salience of his own concerns, relative to those which must have preoccupied the protesters. DiBlasi ingenuously draws an analogy between the actions of the protesters and those he imagines he would take in what he imagines to be a similar situation. We have here a poignant example of a probably well-meaning Christian liberal attempting to use his own experience and intuitions to guide him in his evaluations of actions in far-removed contexts. What’s lacking is the willingness or the ability to take seriously the moral intuitions of others – namely Muslims – without which a reasonable moral judgment is impossible. Admittedly, most people raised in Western societies have very limited access to those intuitions, and there are great obstacles to their being able to take them seriously. Those few interactions that people in the United States and Europe have with Muslims are distorted by asymmetrical power relations and accumulated misunderstandings.
Though DiBlasi considers the situation he imagines himself in (to be analogous to the one which protesting Muslims face), this is simply not true. The areas of the Muslim world where the rioting was predominantly located have been eviscerated by Western colonial powers. Strife, poverty, and insecurity prevail. For many, life is a day-to-day struggle for survival. Law is desperately needed. The U.S. has the Constitution. The populace of most countries where there were violent acts is under the thumb of oppressive dictatorships; all these countries have a history of intervention by the West which has deeply marred the social and political climate. Where their governments are incapable of providing it, Muslims have turned to Islam in search of law and security. The Prophet Muhammad, one of the foremost symbols of that law and the force of social authority personified, is rendered all-the-more poignant in the present by the elusiveness of order in the nations in question. Thus, for many Muslims, to show contempt for the Prophet is to show contempt for law and order–a crime which no society leaves unpunished. The cultural and historical legacy of Islam has generally been suppressed, and its achievements ignored, where “modernization” has been attempted in the Middle East. Every such attempt has involved the use of means which contradicted the ends, and most have resulted in political absurdities. Thus, political order and religious belief remain largely intertwined, just as they were in the West before the liberal revolutions. The legitimacy of this intertwinement cannot be evaluated for Islam the same way it is in the history of Christendom and, moreover, it is beside the point here. DiBlasi, I’m sure you take your religious beliefs very seriously. But in your society, such beliefs have been systematically extricated from matters of basic political order. This is not the case for the societies where violent protests occurred. Whether or not you approve of it, the fact prevails and changes the meaning of every action. Moreover, as I pointed out earlier, the struggle for basic security is not very meaningful to you, as you live in the most affluent society in human history. It is of primary concern for most people in the Middle East. Violence and suffering are not distant specters, but daily reality. Though PR management is inevitably a concern for the powerful, these protesters were worried about more than “giving cartoonists something else to satirize.”
It’s true that many called for censorship or government action against the newspapers that published the cartoons. Of course, the free press is among the most valuable of our political institutions and must be defended. But social “deregulation” at the political level will only work if society takes upon itself the task of maintaining norms of conduct. It will only work if debate about what’s right is not restricted to debate about what’s legal. There are various forms of action that can be taken to defend or advocate social norms, and protest is one of them. One can morally condemn the promotion of bigotry without calling for a legal prohibition against it.
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