“To try things themselves”: Freedom of Expression in a Democratic Multicultural Polity
Sammy Basu, Ph.D.
“What kind of a God is it that’s upset by a cartoon in Danish?”
Introduction
How should one regard a statement of this sort as a response to the ‘Danish cartoon controversy’? That controversy began, you will recall, when on September 30, 2005, Denmark’s largest circulation newspaper, the Jyllands-Posten, published a brief article on Islam and Western self-censorship, entitled “Muhammeds ansigt” (“The face of Muhammad”). The article, which referred to the difficulties in obtaining an illustrator for a children’s book about Mohammed, was framed by twelve cartoons, drawn by members of the Danish editorial cartoonists’ union, some of whom aspired to depict the Islamic prophet Mohammed. Elements within Danish Muslim communities protested, prompting the republication of the cartoons by newspapers in some fifty countries (though only in very limited ways in the U.S. and U.K.). The circulation of these cartoons, together with three additional crude ones, by the Danish Imams in the Middle East, in turn, sponsored a wider Muslim response in 30 countries from Denmark to Nigeria, of protests, violence, effigy—and embassy-burnings, and death threats, and resulted in an estimated 140 deaths. So should we applaud such a deflationary statement and the cartoons themselves? be amused? encourage such efforts? Or should we deem the statement inflammatory, and the cartoons evidence that something is rotten in the State of Denmark, and hence instead feel the anguish of Islamists maligned for their devout literalism and aniconism? Are such comments and cartoons vital or unfortunate features of public discourse within democratic societies? Is the freedom to engage in such expressions essential or anathema to democratic deliberation in a multicultural society?
It should be noted that the statement in question was made on Bill Moyers’ PBS program, Faith and Reason, in 2006 by one Ahmed Salman Rushdie, a writer not unfamiliar with causing offense.1 Having in 1981 won the Booker Prize for his second novel, Midnight’s Children, Rushdie (together with his translators and publishers) on Valentine’s Day in 1989, went on to be selected by the Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for a fatwa for The Satanic Verses. Protests occurred in eight countries and some forty-five (beginning with India) banned the book. The fatwa survived the death of Khomeini but was officially lifted by the Government of Iran in 1998. By then a dozen individuals associated with publication had been killed. Recently, in July 2007, Rushdie was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for ‘services to literature,’ a decision which Britain’s first Muslim peer, Lord Ahmed, pronounced appalling, and which led to various protests by Islamic communities in Britain. Abroad, the honor also prompted the Iranian Organisation to Commemorate Martyrs of the Muslim World to issue a new reward for Rushdie’s death and one or two Islamic political leaders to do likewise.
The Rushdie Affair and the Danish cartoon controversy highlight some of the complexities in what is at stake when individual freedom of expression collides with respect for multicultural group differences. So, too, do the bombings of September 11, 2001, carrying out Bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of a fatwa on Americans, an expressive albeit iconoclastic act of its own, directed against the White House, the Pentagon, and the ‘symbols of economic might,’ the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
In what follows I will not address legal regimes2 other than to note that there is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech. As a legal matter, we already countenance various sorts of grounds for limiting expression, namely, child pornography, extortion, perjury, contempt of court, fraud, libel and defamation, noise pollution, and so on. Instead, the question taken up here is for the private citizen: what moral considerations ought one to bring to bear in evaluating public expression in liberal-democratic regimes given that the public in question is a ‘multicultural’ one (be it fragile or robust, ancient or new)? To ask the question differently, what sorts of expressions, if any, ought we—liberal-democrats in a multicultural society—to find morally intolerable? Or again, by what criteria would a minority cultural group be morally justified in condemning an expressive act as opposed to merely criticizing, or otherwise conveying their disagreement with it? I am also interested in understanding why humorous expressions sometimes elicit the strongest objections, and also conversely, how or why artistic and humorous expression might claim greater immunity from such criticism, how or why art might be entitled to autonomy, and humor to irreverence.
This paper consists of four parts. First, I try to affix meanings to ‘freedom of expression,’ and ‘multiculturalism,’ before offering examples of the complexities involved. In part two, I worry briefly about the tropes that often figure in standard arguments for and against free speech. Part three is a lengthy elaboration on a historical exemplar of the sort of inspired adhoccery needed today. Finally, in part four, I apply this model and argue that the contemporary democratic and multicultural polity is best construed as a working draft dependent on freedom of expression.
I. What do these words mean?
We might begin by reflecting on what is to count as an act of ‘expression,’ recognizing that ‘speech’ and the ‘word’ are the most paradigmatic of several modes of expression that include the fine arts, performances, installations, and so on. I follow Bahktin in taking the communicated word to be a triadic drama: “The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights …” (1986, 121-2). Put more mundanely, the generic expressive act can be parsed into three elements: ‘intent,’ ‘consequent,’ and ‘content.’ Intent encompasses the author’s intended meaning. Consequent reflects the various reader responses and audience effects that arise. Content refers to the message conveyed in some medium, and is dependent upon the wider linguistic and symbolic context of usage.
With the full process of communication in mind, what is meant by ‘freedom of expression?’ I do not think it is merely being free to express or to speak, nor also being able to act on the intent to do so. Human beings are literally free to speak under all sorts of circumstances, provided they have vocal chords and a tongue, including being alone, in the shower, in prison, and so on. Freedom of speech, in the sense that matters to us, in a liberal democracy, as the freedom to engage in potentially meaningful communicative acts, also places requirements on both the content, namely that the speaker have a real possibility of being meaningful because they have access to the available languages and media, and the effect, namely that some among the potential audience are willing to listen and to try to understand.
What is multiculturalism? A multicultural society, as an empirical and demographic matter, is one in which a majority culture shares jurisdictional space with indigenous groups, subsumed minority cultures, and/or recent immigrants, some or all of whom may bear the historical consequences of domestic subjugation, colonialism, displacement by war, and globalization. When liberal-democrats express a willingness to affirm multiculturalism, what is it that they are affirming? We might, drawing on Fish (1997), O’Neill (1999) and others, distinguish the following variants of prescriptive multiculturalism: ‘sentimental,’ ‘boutique,’ ‘weak,’ ‘strong,’ ‘very strong,’ and ‘really very strong.’ Sentimental multiculturalism hopes that we really can all just get along on all matters, even the most fundamental ones, all of the time. Boutique multiculturalism involves aesthetic sampling but little else of what are the mostly pleasant but, finally, incidental differences between people otherwise united by shared capacities for ‘rational choice.’ Weak multiculturalism calls for secondary forms of inclusion such as curricular expansion, but little direct transformation of status quo norms. Strong multiculturalism maintains that cultural groups ought to be given enough room in public to act unmolested on their own distinct conceptions, even if this involves expressions critical of secular liberal capitalist norms (though presumably not of other cultural groups). Very strong multiculturalism is strong multiculturalism, as above, that also allows groups to express their disapproval of other groups. Really very strong multiculturalism defiantly requires differential citizenship rights for multiple cultural groups that are out of power including even those that make explicit that, given the opportunity to wield political power, they would be mono-cultural, suppress difference, and deny citizenship on the grounds that they are sullied (in their own eyes) by the stain of others left dirty, if not damned (in the eyes of God) for permitting others to remain defiled.
As such, to which of the three parts of an expressive act might limiting moral criteria on multicultural grounds be affixed? Some would argue that if speech is to be limited it is because of the morally dubious intentions of the speaker. The problem with using intent as the basis for delimiting expression is the lack of access to the allegedly negative subjective states of the author. Conversely, the author’s claim that his or her expression is benign, or ‘only aesthetic’ or ‘only joking’ cannot be clearly verified, may be disingenuously manipulated, retrospectively invoked, and so on. Consider the following examples, presented chronologically rather than in any necessarily moral order.
In response to the temporary ban of the Nazi Party in 1927, Joseph Goebbels in his Der Angriff (The Attack), sought to discredit Berlin’s Deputy Police Chief, a war hero but a Jew, Dr. Bernhard Weiss, in part by effectively dubbing and depicting Weiss as an ‘Isidor,’ a pejorative nick-name and hence staple of anti-Semitic mockery of the day (Bering 1993). However, Weiss’s libel suits were unsuccessful because Goebbels argued that Weiss was, in fact, Jewish and that what was objectionable was only cartoons and that he was, in any case, ‘only joking’.
Rushdie (2003, 66), a self-described “writer with satirical intentions,” nonetheless maintains that his Satanic Verses is not a satirical denunciation of Islam but rather a series of reflections on metamorphosis, migration, and how newness enters the world (188).
Flemming Rose, though culture editor of a politically conservative newspaper often critical of immigration policies, nonetheless maintains that his cartoon article was not intended to be gratuitously provocative, but rather an exercise in egalitarian politics to generate debate:
We have a tradition of satire when dealing with the royal family and other public figures, and that was reflected in the cartoons. The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding, Muslims (Rose 2006).
The producers of the ‘Bumfights’ videos, in which nominally paid drunken homeless men fight and humiliate one another in front of cameras, insist on the website that sells this apparently popular and lucrative footage that:
The purpose of these videos, through satire and sensationalism, is to call attention to the global epidemics of poverty, violence, addiction, and lack of education. Fighting and violence of any form is ignorant and pathetic. Although the images we capture are often shocking, we do not believe these aspects of society should be kept hidden or ignored. You’ll see grown men trade blows on the streets, chick fights, stunts, sick pranks, crime caught on tape, crackheads, supermodels, and the most hardcore ruckus ever filmed. But please do not miss the point of these videos! Educate yourself. Help those who are less fortunate. Spread love not hate.3
Three students at Willamette University, a small Pacific Northwest college, organize an off-campus Halloween party with the theme “the most offensive party ever,” at which attendees (some of whom are minority and/or otherwise socially conscious students) apparently enjoy donning costumes including ‘black-face,’ and ‘raped Indian,’ and enacting historical figures such as Hitler. The organizers subsequently post a video of the event on the videosharing internet site YouTube™, but maintain that their satirical intention was to call attention to the excesses of political correctness.
At the same seemingly hapless college, another student who happens to be African-American, employed by the Office of Residence Life as a Coordinator of a program called ‘Conscious Tension’ (alluding to Martin Luther King Jr.’s notion in Letter from Birmingham Jail), organizes an installation titled ‘Lynched by Silence,’ intended as “a representation of the outcome of silence and inaction when it comes to issues of oppression,” consisting of five lynched black-robed figures accompanied by explanatory text and an illustrative story of someone killed in a hate crime. The installation is taken down by the same Office, amid growing consternation and criticism, on the grounds that, as the Director of Residence Life put it, “the impact of our actions is more important than our intent” (Derby 2007).
In each instance, neither the impartial observer nor society at large nor those adversely affected by the expressions in question can irrefutably know the author’s intentions. Short of an authorial confession of malice, or circumstantial evidence such as a high degree of vehemence, then, it would be difficult to reach a burden of proof. One may very well criticize the author/ artist, as Parekh (2006) does both Rushdie and Rose, for “intransigence” in sticking to whatever their intentions were, and also for lacking “good sense” in not anticipating all of the likely consequences (to which we turn next), but neither charge quite rises to the status of a moral wrong (pace Shearmur 2006).
What about the prospect of limiting speech on the basis of the consequences of the expressive act in question? This is a plausible strategy, especially in democratic societies that are becoming more ‘multicultural.’ Put positively, respect for religious and cultural freedom and diversity requires moralized and perhaps politicized protection of group particularities from adverse representation, criticism, and ridicule.
Two sorts of claims might be made about the way in which speech is morally problematic as a matter of effect: directly and cumulatively, or in the idiom of communication studies by ‘transmission’ and by ‘ritual’ (Carey 1989, Calvert 1997). The objection to transmitted harms is that some specific acts of offensive expression target specific persons producing in them more or less immediate and conspicuous mental and emotional anguish and even physiologically induced physical symptoms. Ritualized harms are problematic to the extent that the expressions in question, through repetition rather like commercial advertising, exert the profound cumulative effects of internalization (of inadequacy) and normalization (of degradation), and ultimately the social construction of an experienced reality of mistreatment. Parekh (2006) expresses this latter concern well:
in a society where different communities enjoy unequal economic and political power, there is always the danger that some communities may never be touched while others remain constant targets of uninhibited freedom of expression. This leads to a deep sense of injustice and discontent. All communities therefore have a common interest in uniting in a spirit of solidarity and ensuring that equal sensitivity is shown to all.
Limiting expression on the grounds of demonstrably intolerable consequences to specific persons or groups is not unproblematic either, however: victims of such speech may be silenced, may choose appeasement, or may not recognize their disparagement. Others (with better attuned sensitivities) may, of course, strive to anticipate or articulate the pain of those hurt. But how does one distinguish such genuine efforts to give voice to the relatively voiceless from political entrepreneurs promoting a ‘New Behalfism,’ as Rushdie (2003, 60) mischievously dubs it? Whether minority Muslim immigrant communities, coming as they have from many parts of the world with distinct ancestral languages (Arabic, Bengali, Farsi, Hausa, Hindi, Serbo-Croat, Swahili, Turkish, and Urdu among others), have been reliably represented is an open question. Parekh (2006), who was Deputy Chair of the British Commission for Racial Equality at the time of the declaration of the fatwa on Rushdie, seems quite confident in reassuring that The Satanic Verses was about “the integrity of Islam as a religion, and posed no obvious threat to Muslims’ self-respect and interests,” whereas “the cartoons challenged not so much Islam as a religion but Muslims as a people and questioned their presence in Denmark.” How does he know all this? There are certainly articulate critics who find more specific harms in The Satanic Verses. Ismail (1991), for example, notes that that the text speaks sympathetically of Westernized and hybridized South Asians at the expense of more conservative identities, while Jussawalla (2001, 971) maintains that “the whole stance in the book is that of the Rugby-educated Rushdie looking down on the crude Bangladeshis of East London.”
Victims or their representatives may also mistakenly or willfully mistake the expression, as Rushdie feels the Iranian mullahs and Islamic opinionmakers did, “quoting and reproducing decontextualized segments of The Satanic Verses” (2003, 235). Along these lines, assuming that one could reliably measure psychological and emotional harms caused by speech, might one not find fault with a good deal of religious speech and advertising that induces negative self-perceptions, e.g. awareness of one’s fallenness and inadequacies (Kateb 1996)?
Moreover, with consequentialist analysis, so much turns on the time frame. In the case of compounding harm from broad cultural stereotypes, how does one calculate the contributory harm of a specific speech act? Alternately, a given expressive act may offend or otherwise hurt the feelings of some individuals or members of groups in the short run, but nonetheless redound to their benefit in the medium and long-term. Rushdie (2005) has himself noted the irony that his “secular work of art energised powerful communalist, anti-secularist forces.” Similarly, if the student party organized to offend proves so successful that it thereby galvanizes campus-wide attention to the issues of race and social justice on an unprecedented scale and sets in motion real shifts in institutional priorities, and the party organizers also claim that they intended as much with their satirical event, then are they moral degenerates or salutary dissidents?
One might also argue on consequentialist grounds that it is better to allow morally obnoxious views to be aired, so that they can be met with more countervailing speech and corrective educational efforts rather than driven underground where they continue to be articulated and rationalized without rebuttal among adherents.
Now, it is also sometimes argued that expressions should be especially unlimited when the content is ‘art’ or ‘humor.’ In this view, art is entitled to its aesthetic autonomy because it is special, transcendent, even sacred and spiritual, and conversely that humor warrants playful immunity because it is slight, trivial, even silly and stupid. Put tersely, art is above politics and humor beneath it. I think this approach is wrong. Though Leni Riefenstahl went to her grave insisting that Triumph of the Will (Triump des Willens, 1935) was ‘only art’ and that she was a political innocent (even though she read Mein Kampf in 1931), her evocative use of the aesthetics of classicism and Weimarera Romanticism in cinematically rendering (and arguably staging in the parade grounds designed by Albert Speer) the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi Party Convention (and re-staging of certain moments in a Berlin studio to better film them), ranks as one of the ‘greatest’ political films of all time. Likewise, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), a comedy of mistaken identity in which Chaplin plays two roles—Adenoid Hynkel, autocratic dictator of Tomania who holds Jewish people responsible for all societal evils, and his identical counterpart, a Jewish Barber—was also a pointed satire of the early political agenda of Nazism and Adolph Hitler, albeit one that concludes, departing the illusionist parameters of art, with a six-minute plea by the barber for world peace and a renewal of humanity. It is not that art and humor are not political or do not want to be taken seriously. Quite often both do. Rather it is that, in contrast to other forms of speech, neither is to be taken literally, superficially, at face value, at first blush, and so on. The content of neither is to be treated as a ‘proclamation,’ ‘exhortation,’ or statement of pre-interpreted essentialism. Artists and humorists are finally unlike, even if they sometimes create and ape, “The speaking subjects of high, proclamatory genres—of priest, prophets, preachers, judges, leaders, patriarchal fathers, and so forth — …” as Bahktin (1986, 133) rightly stresses. They strive, and according to Kundera do so together in the genre of the novel, to dwell in the presence of existential ambiguity and the absence of final meanings, to expose and revise the ‘pre-interpretation’ of reality, as if repeatedly pulling back curtains: “A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose” (2007, 92). In Rushdie’s idiom (2003, 67) art, and humor too, speculatively contravene “epic consistency” and presumptions of infallibility. To recognize that an expression is art or humor is, thus, to know that its meaning is not only or adequately or primarily literal, nor hence to be read as an aggregation of truth-claims or data.4 Rather, meaning emerges from the symbolic, polysemous, unfinished excesses, which must be interpreted. The novel, for example, isn’t reasoned discourse but rather “part social inquiry, part fantasy, part confessional … [that] crosses frontiers of knowledge as well as topographical boundaries” (Rushdie 2003, 52). One might even say that it is always, magical realism or not, ‘otherworldly’ (Teverson 2003). Likewise, humor depends upon volunteering something completely different, typically the formulation of an unexpected juxtaposition, that produces in the receiver pleasures, variously, of ‘incongruity’ resolution, physiological ‘relief,’ affective ‘release,’ and evaluative ‘superiority.’ Indeed, a measure of humor and irony may be required precisely to cope with the existential ambivalences, multivalences, irregularities, and uncertainties revealed by art.
I think it may even be risky to base the protection of art on claims that it is transcendent or deep, namely because this allows critics to draw distinctions between high, great or serious art and low, small, and trivial art. Parekh (2006) makes just this move, in accepting The Satanic Verses because of Rushdie’s apparently unquestioned “literary caliber” but rejecting the Danish cartoons because “they served no artistic or moral purpose” (cf. Laegaard 2007).
Crucially then, even that which mobilizes compelling imagery and symbolism, the reader/viewer/receiver exerts some control over its effects. S/he subjects the expression to a hermeneutic process oscillating between parts and whole, content and context, and hence must also take some responsibility for his/her interpretation. Indeed, in art and humor, if not in all speech genres to some degree, the audience aids and abets the possible meanings through dialogic interactions (Bahktin 1986, 68ff, 117ff).
Thus, for example, Rose (2006) maintains that taken collectively the cartoons painted a complex picture open to multiple and divergent interpretations:
The cartoons do not in any way demonize or stereotype Muslims. In fact, they differ from one another both in the way they depict the prophet and in whom they target. One cartoon makes fun of Jyllands-Posten, portraying its cultural editors as a bunch of reactionary provocateurs. Another suggests that the children’s writer who could not find an illustrator for his book went public just to get cheap publicity. A third puts the head of the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party in a lineup, as if she is a suspected criminal. One cartoon—depicting the prophet with a bomb in his turban—has drawn the harshest criticism. Angry voices claim the cartoon is saying that the prophet is a terrorist or that every Muslim is a terrorist. I read it differently: Some individuals have taken the religion of Islam hostage by committing terrorist acts in the name of the prophet. They are the ones who have given the religion a bad name. The cartoon also plays into the fairy tale about Aladdin and the orange that fell into his turban and made his fortune. This suggests that the bomb comes from the outside world and is not an inherent characteristic of the prophet.
Contrast this with Parekh’s (2006) reading that:
The cartoons had a clear political basis and orientation. They and the subsequent discussion presented Muslims as backwards, barbarians, unfit to live peacefully in a civilised society, and as sexually motivated seekers of martyrdom (as seen in the silly reference to running out of virgins in one of the cartoons).
It seems, then, that if one is going to morally delimit expression it must be by specifying unacceptable content more or less without reference to the ascribed intentions of the author or the subjective states of some subset of the potential affected audience, and especially so of art and humor in which (re- )interpretation by that audience is invited. Moreover, specific content must either be limited on the grounds that it undermines the democratic values that justify speech in the first place, or on the grounds that in the case of such content the values that justify free speech are superseded by other democratic values.
II. Support our tropes
What are the democratic values that justify keeping speech as free as possible? And conversely, what democratic values might warrant enhanced regulation? To bolster himself against accusations of arrogance, intransigence, and subsequently ingratitude, Rushdie leans for support, as many contemporary defenders of maximally free speech are wont to do, on J.S. Mill and the French Enlightenment philosophes who gathered around Voltaire. Accordingly Rushdie (2003, 214) seconds two of the three paradigmatic arguments in On Liberty, that a silenced opinion if right is lost to the world, and if wrong, truth nonetheless is dulled for want of friction, and might be said in his novels to practice the third, namely that truth is best construed as many-sided and, hence, reflected in many perspectives. Similarly, Rushdie invokes Voltaire because he sympathizes with the latter’s satirical skepticism towards religious dogmatism and its alleged crippling cognitive effects.
I have a worry about each of these sources. First, the defense of free speech often plays out by analogy (with more or less metaphoric weight) to the ‘free market,’ be it the ‘marketplace of ideas,’ “the so-called doctrine of Free Trade, which rests on grounds different from, though equally solid with, the principle of individual liberty asserted in this Essay,” as Mill (1989: 95) puts it, “the rough-and-tumble bazaar of disagreement” that Rushdie (2003, 288) affirms, or more grandiosely as an ocean of creative possibilities. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the first novel he published after going into hiding, Rushdie reflected ably on the origins of story-telling and the nature of the imagination and offered a nimble allegorical defiance of censorship along the latter lines (Teverson 2001).
These are, in my view, nonetheless problematic and telling metaphors. Speech does not occur in a vacuum. We do not all operate stalls. We do not all live by the ocean. Precisely in waxing romantic there is concealed a degree of naiveté about the socio-economic and historically located context within which actual speech occurs. Are there any actual markets that are not, to some degree, facilitated by infrastructure and regulations provided by state power, that do not have some barriers to entry, and some ‘sunk costs’ affecting exit, and in which no suppliers and/or consumers affect price, and disequilibrium is not the norm? Aside from the local marketplace of nostalgic memory, often, perhaps typically, industries operate under various degrees of oligopolistic supply, demand is manipulable through heavy investment in repetitive advertising informed by scientific focus group analysis that is then both demographically targeted and widely disseminated, and large or otherwise collectively mass consumers can cause dramatic shifts in demand. What the attempted analogy of free speech to the free market ought to call to mind, then, is that we do not all have the same material access or opportunities to bring our speech, ideas, and expressions into the public sphere, that we cannot afford to see those ideas disseminated and repeated and reproduced at the same frequencies, that the idiom or vernacular in which public discourse occurs may be manipulated by the media, and that insofar as some of our ideas may be more upsetting or offensive, we do not meet a consuming audience with the same level of willingness to listen and to try to comprehend.5 My objection, to be clear, is not to the notion of free trade but rather to the ideological use of the idealized notion to justify actual markets that are not free and moreover to the naïve metaphoric extension of that ideological usage to the realm of cultural production given the extent of media consolidation. Freedom of expression is too readily co-opted to and constrained by commercial and consumerist idioms and ends.
Second, I am not as convinced as Rushdie (2003, 141-144, 215, 231-2, 341, cf.229, 307) sometimes appears to be that religion is the problem and ‘secularism’ entailing not only indifference and “a total separation between Church and State” (239), but unbelief and even overt hostility towards religion the solution. Voltaire’s Candide and Diderot’s La Religieuse are models of sorts for Rushdie. However, is their avowedly blasphemous stance essential to modern culture (Habermas 2005)?
While there is much to recommend in the spate of recent books by public intellectuals affirming science and reason as against religion and revelation, still, and E.O. Wilson notwithstanding, I am struck by their mono-cultural or at least mono-epistemological excesses. They are, that is, too quick (and ironically, as such, unscientific) to over-generalize from a historical record of murderous programs that religion must hold its adherents ‘spell-bound,’ ‘deluded,’ ‘poisonous,’ and ‘terrorizing,’ while ignoring or dismissing as outlier cases instances in that same history of mad, mechanistic, utilitarian agendas that were driven by science and staffed by scientists.6
Moreover, is it possible that the modern liberal individual, the self as agent and bearer of moral rights, such as the right to free speech, may be more of the cultural residue of a particular religious belief system, namely Calvinism, than we realize? If so, ‘secularism’ may itself be the privileging of one set of ontological assumptions over others, a ‘leap of faith’ in one direction not another, but an act of faith all the same.
What of the democratic values invoked to restrict speech? To what sources do such views appeal? The modern ‘public sphere’ or ‘civil society,’ involving the public use of reason in rational-critical debate, and operating independently of, while mediating between, private interests and state institutions, emerged in 18th century Britain. The formative spaces of newspapers and journals, as well as the venues for actual discursive interaction such as open congregations, theaters, literary salons, political clubs, pubs, and coffee- houses, all came to be frequented by an increasingly literate and articulate politicized public. Dramatic social and political mobility meant that Britain could not rely upon traditional static and essentializing notions of vertical superiority to regulate social relations. Rather, it needed behavioral norms that might be available to a much wider range of persons —in religious, socioeconomic, gender, and even ethnic and racial terms — arrayed relatively horizontally, and flourishing or declining over time. Crucially, then, Shaftesbury, Hume, and others developed normative conventions to facilitate yet regulate this newly robust public deliberation under the rubric of ‘politeness,’ and to a lesser extent ‘civility’ and ‘sociability’ (Klein 2004). In effect, contemporary deliberative democrats strive to reformulate the imperfectly stylized possibilities of that 18th century historical moment through their conceptions of the optimal or ‘ideal speech situation.’
According to deliberative democrats, such as Habermas (1984, 1989, 1990, 1996), the outcome of a public deliberative process can be understood to be just if the conditions, parameters, and rules that shaped that process were just. Thus, for example, Steiner et al (2004), on the leading edge of empirical measurement of deliberative politics, offer a discourse quality index (DQI) comprised of the following Habermasian criteria: participation, level of justification, content of justification, respect toward groups, respect toward demands, respect toward counterarguments, and constructive politics. Deliberative democrats presume that deliberation is about serious matters, that discussants will be able to speak about such matters using generalizable reasons in the available shared vocabulary, and that this vocabulary or some judiciously pruned and policed variant can be made and kept transparent and free of hostility.
In navigating this controversy we should be wary of relying on such metaphors, the ‘marketplace of ideas’ equally with the ‘climate of hostility.’ Bumper stickers that proclaim that one must ‘Support our Troops’ have a much more insidious linguistic corollary in the notion that one must ‘Support our Tropes.’ Not everyone gets to participate in setting these terms of the debate, and yet they construct reality and question-beg in ways that affect everyone. Rather, then, as Taylor observed in reflecting on the issues, “We are going to need some inspired adhoccery in years to come.” (1989, 121). In what follows, I want to recall the precocious adhoc genius, by turns pragmatic and principled, of the mid-17th century English ‘Levellers’.
III. Inspired Adhoccery
To take seriously the notion of “the unfettered republic of the tongue” (Rushdie 2003, 250), free speech needs to be justified by a political, and not merely epistemological, set of values. It is in pursuit of those values that I propose to take a historical excursion back to the decade of the 1640s, variously known as the Interregnum, the Puritan Revolution, the English Civil Wars, and the English Revolution. Each of these labels carries some truth. To royalists, the decade was a series of disgusting hiccups cast up from the bowels of the body politic, before monarchy and hierarchy were properly restored. To the Puritans, their brief period in power was the divinely wrought culmination of many years of religious activism against what they took to be the catholicizing tendencies of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. To the many who remained lukewarm, the bloody conflicts made the decade one of considerable pain and suffering exacerbated by economic dislocation and poor harvests. It was also, from the coign of vantage of the present, a revolutionary decade, that occasioned an epochally new public sphere in England. That is, the mass public emerged as a literate, legitimate political force aware of itself as such (Zaret 2000). The onset of elite tensions between the Royal Court and substantial critical factions within the Lords and Commons disrupted the prevailing institutions of control. Before long, elements of the middling and lower orders felt free to gather conspicuously, yet ‘without control,’ in separatist congregations, in outdoor crowds, at state entrées and executions, and on the steps of Westminster to assert themselves. Furthermore, if not crucially, King and Parliament went public engaging in a ‘paper war.’ This publicity, together with the collapse of effective press regulation, allowed authors of all religious persuasions and ideological stripes to cultivate a reading public and involve it in deliberating upon the religious and political shape England ought to take.
My historical turn to the mid-1640s is, as social scientists say, ‘overdetermined.’ Ironically, in protesting The Satanic Verses, one of the legal strategies of British Muslims (represented by The Muslim Council of Britain) was to appeal to a duly modified version of the ‘Act for the more effectual Suppression of Blasphemy and Profaneness’ of 1698, which stipulated that denying trinitarianism, monotheism, the truth of Christianity, and its Holy Scriptures was punishable by exclusion from political and economic offices and trusts, and for a second offense with imprisonment.7 That Act revised the dormant ‘Ordinance for the Punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies’ of 1648, which had set a penalty of death for such denials, as well as for repudiating the doctrines of the Resurrection and Day of Judgement.
Mill (1989, 11, 69, 83, 86-87, 90-91) detected, in the contemporaneous 19th century secular moralizing emphasis on public health and the reformation of manners, “engines of moral repression” (16) that were fueled either by hierarchic ambition or the spirit of Puritanism, just as the mid-17th century English justifications of enforcing orthodoxy and persecuting heresy had been.
Kundera (1993) may be right that the pre-history of the novel avant la lettre, begins with Boccacio’s Decameron and continues through Cervantes and Rabelais, but in name, the novel—that genre-bending, border-crossing, curtain-tearing, novelty-seeking hybrid form celebrated by Bakhtin (1986, 1994), Kundera (1993, 2007), and Rushdie (2003, 52ff, 131, 250-1, 373) alike in the face of others who pronounce it or wish it dead—first appears, so far as I am aware, in the condemnation of it by Presbyterian religious authorities in the 1640s. In his Gangraena, a compendium of the rapidly multiplying sectarian heresies that threatened the body politic, the prominent Presbyterian herisographer, Thomas Edwards, warned that numerous unrepentant adherents were taking advantage of the temporary collapse of censorship to advance dangerous new words and ideas. Many of these ‘Independents’ and ‘Sectaries,’ it was reported, are “wanton witted men who are conscious to themselves of singularities and novelties” (1646, I:125). By the second edition of Gangraena, they had become a character-type: they were “Novellists” (1646, II:172).
The dubious heresies and novelties of the 1640s ran the gamut of genres and possibilities, from an illustration—depicting an erect penis, perhaps the first in English popular print (Cressy 2000, 263), intended as a slander against the behavioral norms of independent sects, including the fictive Adamites and later the Ranters, to a constitution—designed to erect a liberal democratic polity, by political activists, principally John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn, pejoratively styled by their critics, the ‘Levellers.’
Indeed, just over three and a half centuries before our September 11, 2001, on September 11, 1648, the Levellers submitted to Parliament, The humble petition of divers well-affected persons inhabiting the City of London, Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, Hamlets and places adjacent, dubbed the Large Petition because it bore perhaps 40,000 signatures, amounting to perhaps a quarter of London’s adult population, and aimed to demolish the edifice of monarchical absolutism.8 In many ways the Petition was the highpoint of a political movement that began reluctantly as a defence of freedom of conscience but would rapidly come to formulate the world’s first liberaldemocratic constitution, An Agreement Of The Free People Of England (1649), before being outmaneuvered by Cromwell and repudiated by sectarian leaders. It consisted of 27 demands pertaining to popular sovereignty (requiring an unicameral legislature filled by annual election, and no conscription); freedoms of worship, petition, press and speech; legal reforms (transcending the ancient constitution, including equality before the law, protection against self-incrimination, trial by jury, and reparations to the victims of the political status quo); and egalitarian economic rights to subsistence and welfare (involving bans on oligopolies, on enclosure of commons, on tithes, and on debt-imprisonment, and requiring payment of soldiers and veterans what was promised them).
The crucial pragmatic lesson of the 1640s, drawn by the Levellers and other radical tolerationists, was that no religious sect—acting on its specific fundamental behavioral norms and beliefs—could be counted upon to handle the power to regulate such matters in the lives of everyone any better than others. In contemporary idiom, ‘really very strong multiculturalists,’ regardless of the stripe, are tender consciences while marginal but become monoculturalists when in power. The fundamentalist Protestants of the day, dubbed ‘Precisianists’ or ‘Puritans,’ horrified that Protestant England was degenerating into an ugly synthesis of paganism and ‘Popery’ (Catholicism), demanded that their doctrines (notably on the Sabbath and against the swearing of oaths) be honored and respected by the polity. In response, Charles’ regime visited vicious public corporal punishment upon representative dissenters. In 1642, once wielding enough power in Parliament to affect policy, the Puritans, or more precisely the Presbyterian variant, pressed for the closure of the theaters, and incidentally for the abolition of Christmas festivities, and instead enforcement of what might be characterized as a perpetual Sabbatarianism or unlimited Lent. The Presbyterians, in turn, soon found themselves outmaneuvered by the Independents, who by 1647 had gained control of the Parliament’s New Model Army, and subsequently of Parliament. The Independents, too, though they endorsed the notion of local relatively self-governed congregations, whence their name, nonetheless, also sought to enforce various theologically informed restrictions on ‘doctrine and discipline.’
The Levellers lost the support of conventional religious groups, and also most of the persecuted minority Puritan sects, in arguing as a general matter in item No. 4 of the Grand Petition for “exempted matters of religion and God’s worship from the compulsive or restrictive power of any authority upon earth” (Sharp 1998, 135-6), and likewise in No. 23:
That you would not have followed the example of former tyrannous and superstitious parliaments in making orders, ordinances or laws, or in appointing punishments concerning opinions or things supernatural, styling some ‘blasphemies’, others ‘heresies’, whenas you know yourselves easily mistaken and that divine truths need no human helps to support them — such proceedings having been generally invented to divide the people amongst themselves and to affright men from that liberty of discourse by which corruption and tyranny would soon be discovered (Sharp 1998, 138).
To be sure, the Levellers and some few sympathetic religious radicals did strive to draw upon various notions within the broadly shared Protestant theology in justifying the separation of state and church. They argued that conversion was God’s work, that man’s obligation was to suffer the tares to grow with the wheat, i.e., the behaviorally aberrant and heterodox with the godly and orthodox (pointing out that these categories have varied from age to age, and during the 1640s, literally, each year), and that eschatological fulfillment required that God might yet grace, correct, and save the ungodly even in the ‘eleventh hour.’ Those of us who really are the godly can take some consolation if we need it (though if we were godly would we really need it?) that the ungodly will be punished or at the very least ‘left behind.’ However, ‘in the meantime’ human beings ought to wait and settle on institutional arrangements that leave open the possibility of them finding God, or of God reaching out to them.
The argument for separation of church and state was not that religious notions were too irrational to be used to turn the wheel of state, but that they were too important, too precious, too integral to one’s present fate and future deliverance, to risk letting them be managed at all coercively by others. As devout and as certain as one might be about what God required of humanity, one ought not dare empower politics to rule on such matters because if this power fell into the wrong hands, the wrong sect, their control over these areas of one’s life could very well be calamitous. Though the leaders of the Levellers were relatively well-educated—Lilburne read Coke and extended the logic of available legal arguments; Overton, though a playwright, probably also dabbled in the new mechanical and chemical philosophies of the day; and Walwyn was not ashamed to admit that he had read Montaigne—they were also still believers.
Two implications in order of importance follow: first, while we may continue to disagree about the nature of the summum bonum (in this life and more so the next, and hence also of the claims of the latter over the former), let us agree that the summum malum in this life is to suffer premature involuntary physical suffering and death at the hands of another. This requires that we not tolerate actions that physically hurt, maim, or kill, or expressive actions celebrating and enjoining that one do so. Notice that this is less than the elliptical phrase ‘to be tolerant of everything but intolerance itself.’ Rather, it is a determination to tolerate the fullest range of experiments in living, including even misanthropic ones to separate from and avoid select others or all others. It requires that we ‘tolerate’ everyone in their respective discipline and doctrine, not that we like or even respect everyone in their particularities, nor refrain from contravening their sensibilities in living our lives. This is a principled stand, and though a relatively minimalist ethical foundation on which to build a political arrangement, most definitely not a neutral one (and liberals ought to refrain from saying so). If you do not agree then you are not part of the ‘us’ constituting this liberal-democratic regime. Some people, then as now, did not agree. Many thought it was too little ethically speaking, others thought it was too much or just plain wrong, i.e., that it was better to torture or kill others if one thereby saves them. Some, like Edwards, also argued that their own fates and futures were dependent on such acts of correction, so that if they did not labor mightily to save sinners, not only would those sinners suffer but so would they and London (the New Jerusalem) and England (the New Israel).
Second, while we are waiting, and talking, we must behave with ‘civility’ and ‘politeness’ towards one another. It is here precisely that I think 18th century philosophers, and the deliberative democrats who rely on an idealization of the public sphere of that century, go astray, namely in conflating ethics with ‘propriety’ and ‘civility,’ i.e., with the paying of superficial respects and the enactment of condescending chivalry. The Levellers, by contrast, had in effect fixed on the root intuitions in these terms. To treat the other civilly is to acknowledge that s/he is entitled to participate in the civitas, no matter how strange or obnoxious his/her behavior and beliefs may seem. To treat the other politely is to accept that s/he has a place in the polity. Conversely, and crucially, it would be not merely uncivil or impolite but morally obnoxious to act as if or argue that such persons are unfit in toto for inclusion in the civitas or polity. This may well sound strange but the Levellers were more morally offended by the status quo presumption and belabored propaganda that certain categories of persons—religious minorities, the poor, manual workers, women, the Catholic Irish—were not entitled to political consideration nor eligible for political participation than they were about charges of heresy, accusations of indecency, and other more superficially impolite treatment. They objected most strenuously not to criticism of their specific beliefs and social behaviors, not even to expressions of hatred per se directed at them, but rather to proclamations that denied basic political membership on such bases. To repeat, they argued that the only considerations for withholding such membership from an individual or group ought to be a demonstrable commitment to injure, maim, or kill others (or to mobilize the power of the state to do likewise).
Thus it was, that in the course of the Putney Debates of 1647 on the future shape of the English polity, the Levellers ignored class status and property qualifications in arguing for the fullest extension of suffrage:
…for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under … (Woodhouse 1986, 53).
Likewise, while critics denigrated the ‘Petticoat Petitioners’ or ‘Levelling Ladies,’ as lower-class rabble and loquacious busybodies, the Levellers nonetheless involved women in civil and political life in litigation, petitioning, pamphleteering, and demonstrations (Davies 1998). The Levellers sought to sever the link between royal and familial authority, characterizing the latter as parental rather than paternal, and readily spoke of the protection of “his or her life, liberty or goods” (An Appeale, Overton 1647,165). Subsequently, in anonymous petitions such as A remonstrance of the shee-citizens of London (1647) and To the Supream authority … humble Petition of divers wel-affected women (1649), for the release from prison of the Leveller leaders, women argued: “Have we not an equal interest with the men of this Nation, in those liberties and securities contained in the Petition of Right, and other good Laws of the Land? Are any of our lives, limbs, liberties or goods to be taken away from us more than from Men?”
Finally, the Levellers conceived of the birthrights of all Englishmen to freedom—the status of liber homo in the Magna Carta—as the consequences of a civilization extricating itself with difficulty from arbitrary hierarchies of power (in this case, Norman villeinage). They are, as such, the historically particular enunciation of universal human rights per se: “It is but the just rights and prerogative of mankind (whereunto the people of England, are heires apparent as well as other Nations)” (An Arrow, Overton 1646, 5).
The Levellers were moved to lobby, successively, for freedom of conscience, freedom to petition Parliament, freedom of the press, and ultimately for the freedom to consent to the political conditions under which one lived.
What then of free trade? Though the Levellers are sometimes claimed as progenitors by adherents of free market doctrines and libertarianism, they not only argued against state-identified monopolies and oligopolies that crowd out and bar small producers, suppliers, and traders from markets, but also more fundamentally for rights of access to the means of making a livelihood and ultimately to rights of subsistence, including the state provision of work, education, and healthcare.
Appositely, the Levellers’ arguments for free press were of a piece with their arguments for state-funded public education and literacy, and legal reforms to gut judicial process of Law French and other legalese, namely that all individuals qua individuals or qua members of sorts, sects, and societies should genuinely have the capacity to speak (on par with to subsist) in the deliberative processes that affect them. When the theaters were closed, Overton in particular became an unlicensed printer, in order to publish and distribute his own words but also the radical tracts of others, evading authorities by hiding out in the liminal fugitive suburbs, known incidentally as ‘the Liberties,’ beyond the walls of the City of London. When caught and imprisoned for his efforts, as happened repeatedly he, like Lilburne, Walwyn, and others, also sought to publish, publicize, and protest what was at stake in these imprisonments.
The Levellers took the “liberty of printing, writing, teaching” (Overton 1645, 25) to be vital to an open public ethos, and indispensable if self-possessed individuals were to be politically aware and make themselves understood (Curtis 2000). Not unlike Milton, they called for ‘liberty’ while repudiating ‘license,’ in both of the latter’s semantic meanings. The political licensing (and hence also censoring) of speech should not be required. At the same time, however, private license (or licentiousness) should not gratuitously exceed the civil bounds of friendship. The point of human beings speaking to one another was not to be mechanically “litigious and vexatious,” but to find a consensually “just way” (Overton 1646, 15, 13).
feares and jealousies one of an other, which puts them in a continuall posture of war both offensive and defensive would be at and end; their Controversies would be of an other kind, faire and equall Disputes, and it is better and farre cheaper to provide words for Argumentation, then instruments of war for blowes and bloodshed, and would conduce I am sure more to the common good and safety; the one doth encrease knowledge, the other nothing but rage and revenge (Overton 1645, 30).
Free discussion need not to have magnified dissension, provided the participants observed some minimal dialogical ethics of civility. What was particularly objectionable, in this regard, about the status quo regime of the King and Lords was its unabashed unresponsiveness, its unwillingness to grant ordinary citizens petitionary access to the Parliamentary political process. It bears repeating that Parliament at this time was not a public forum. It was under no recognized obligation to acknowledge petitions, and was consistently disinclined to see its proceedings publicly reported. Thus, Overton objected: “if you lock up your selves from hearing all voices; how is it possible you should try all things” (1646, 13). What was needed was precisely an open public ethos: “I wish the people to try things themselves” (1645, 31).
Though the Puritan campaign for lamentation and against laughter spanned multiple decades, it reached its zenith in the mid-1640s, in someone like Edwards who felt overwhelmed by his contemporaneous generation of scoffers at Religion. He diagnosed four sorts of mundane horrors, each accompanied by its own perfidious laughter: “damnable heresies, strange opinions, fearfull divisions, loosenesse of life and manners” (Edwards 1646, I:125), in effect, pointing plausibly to the pleasurable excesses of, respectively, humorous release, incongruity, superiority, and relief. The Levellers, by contrast, defended their use of humor precisely on the grounds that it enabled the hearer to entertain all opinions, try all things, and engage in pro and con reflection (Basu 2007).
Earlier, I stressed that this way of conceiving of liberal democracy, originating with the Levellers, is not neutral. It might be objected accordingly, that liberal-democracy is also, finally, a mono-cultural regime, too, and, moreover, that it is one redolent with sectarian Protestant individualistic assumptions. While I actually do think that to a greater extent than we (and even Mill) realize(d) the behavioral norms involved in constituting the modern individual secular subjectivity through self-disciplining and self-employment are, in fact, the sublimated cultural residues of Calvinism, it does not seem to me that the two organizing principles the Levellers fixed upon—tolerance of everything except violent exclusion, and the liberty to debate and try all things—could only be arrived at from Protestant premises. Put positively, these principles are closer to being generally or universally recognizable than most any other ones available (Habermas 2005. Cf. O’Neill 1999, Modood 2001, and Dossa 2002). Furthermore, although the human relationship to God was viewed as an ineradicably individual and terrifying one, namely that one’s life would be recalled and read on the Last Day, not unlike a student interrogated closely about his/her apparent plagiarism by an Associate Dean, the limitations on the state the Levellers envisaged were not only for individuals, but also for the associational lives of membership in non-coercive ‘sorts, sects, and societies.’
The Levellers emphasized that for democratic citizens to be committed to trying all things, they would have to engage in genuine pro and con, even when what was at stake are the very beliefs that bolster their own particularistic (group) identity. It bears noting in this regard that this proposal for an open, discursive, consensual public sphere was already a practical feature of some few dissident Sectary congregations, such as the General Baptists. The individual discretion to voluntarily enter into a congregational relationship to God entailed adult baptism (a prodigious heresy in itself ), while the spiritual equality of all believers (a view that undermined the notion of the Elect) required that participating members seek consensus through open discussion. To Edwards this deliberative democratic practice was abominable: “in this Church ‘tis usual and lawful, not only for the company to stand up and object against the Doctrine delivered when the Exerciser of his gifts hath made an end, but in the midst of it, so that sometimes upon some standing up and objecting, there’s pro and con for almost an hour, and falling out among themselves before the man can have finished his Discourse” (1646, I:93).
The English pamphlet wars that preceded and accompanied the actual civil wars of the 1640s prompted two great political statements. Thomas Hobbes conjured up Leviathan (1650), his defence of a fear-inducing political absolutism, in which government exercised tight control over education, print, and discourse, thereby producing outwardly conforming political subjects who were, at best, left inwardly free to worship God as they saw fit. John Locke drafted anonymously the Two Treatises of Government (1690), his defense of an income-generating property absolutism, in which government was limited to entrepreneurial and imperial agendas, thereby permitting outwardly free subjects provided, crucially, that they demonstrated that they were inwardly ‘rational and industrious’ Protestants. Although inexorably in the Modern Age, a perversely symbiotic combination of Hobbes and Locke, the divine right of kings/sovereigns/states and the divine right of property/ CEOs/corporations, has come to be ideologically identified with the globalized advancement of human freedom, otherwise known as ‘liberalism,’ for a brief revolutionary moment things might have been otherwise (Wood and Wood 1997).
IV. Working Draft
So what is the relevance of the Levellers’ combination of pragmatism and principles for the contemporary controversies between free speech and multiculturalism? Should there be moral limits placed on expression? In fending off appeals to ‘hate speech,’ Rushdie invokes the distinction that one ought to “defend people but not their ideas” (2003, 287), that ideas should not be immunized “against criticism, irreverence, satire, even scornful disparagement” (287-8). This might work for literary texts but proves more difficult to apply in the graphic and performing arts, or when what is being satirized are ideas embodied in cultural practices and conspicuously associated with race, ethnicity, language, accent in the dominant language, hair, clothing, and ritually meaningful behavior (Slaughter 1993). Put differently, with much expression, the criticism of ideas shades all too easily into criticism of the persons for whom these ideas are integral to their self-conception. Hence, what people are to be protected from needs to be more clearly specified.
There should be moral limits set on the content of speech that is clearly exhorting violence, as well as for what are characterized as ‘fighting words’ that are targeted at and continue to be spoken even though they transmit direct injury (Scanlon 1972). To this familiar pair meriting moral criticism I would propose to add speech that insists that any group or target is in toto ineligible or unworthy to participate in the polity. This exclusion, from a liberal democratic perspective, is more ugly than hate speech per se unless the vilification explicitly asserts that implication (Brink 2001, 140, 152). The hanging of the lynch noose today, whether relatively symbolic or realistic in its graphic effects, recalls the approximately 5000 African-American men (and the few women, and white men) lynched between the 1880s and 1960s, and the photos and postcards commemorating if not celebrating these murders (Allen et al. 2000). It is an emblem of domestic terrorism. As such, and though unintentionally to be sure, the lynched representative human figures on the Willamette campus discussed above join the three nooses hung from the ‘white tree’ at the Jena High School in Louisiana, in September 2006, and the dozens of reported noose incidents since then on other campuses, at work places, and in public spaces, in conveying racial intimidation that thwarts the socio-economic mobility and political participation of African-Americans. The contemporary meaning of the hanging noose is unequivocally malign and merits moral condemnation; even more so, arguably, than the swastika.9
Objectification and even bestialization of specific individuals and groups, though sometimes (intentionally) hurtful, are not necessarily so. Moreover, such speech acts involve metaphors open to interpretation and reinterpretation. However, to the extent that such statements reduce specific categories of human beings to the presumably non-political status of objects or animals, they ought to be closely morally scrutinized.
Now, on the other hand, unless it also engages in political exclusion, that this or that statement demeans and thereby causes offense must be tolerated even if it is superficial, irrational, or plainly empirically wrong (Fish 1997, Tripathi 2006, Kamm 2007). Blasphemy, likewise, should afford no general grounds for moral limitation whatsoever (though members of religious groups are free to morally condemn fellow adherents qua group members).
As many critics have argued, excessively formal versions of deliberative democracy assume dispassionate, disembodied, detached, and not especially disagreeable discussants. In doing so they risk theoretical unreality and practical repression. Ideal speech is unfair insofar as “language competency is a skill which, like other forms of symbolic power, is unevenly distributed” (Kohn, 2000:412). Precisely because there is no neutral speech genre and the liberal-democratic polity is a provisional endeavor, or ‘working draft’, then, deliberative democrats need to be pluralistic towards what counts as meaningful discourse. Allowing the widest latitude to free expression, including artistic and humorous speech that is odd, evaluative, transgressive, and/or shocking, attends to the failings of those versions of deliberative democratic theory that assume that language can always be transparent and ‘correct.’ More specifically, humor (involving the seeming idiocy and irrelevance of buffoonery) licenses reflection for critical purposes (which may sound or be cynical and even cruel), including entertaining thoughts that cross taboo boundaries and forging connections that appear normatively unnatural (at the risk of boorishness and bawdery), and even presses these efforts upon others (to the extent that it is infectiously hysterical).
In fairness, Habermas’s preoccupation with transparency is itself a reaction against the rhetorical excesses, such as those of Riefenstahl, which made Nazism seem profound and beautiful (Dahlberg 2005, 133). That the Nazis were able to co-opt the arts (and humor) on behalf of a banal aestheticization of fascist politics is undeniable. The artistic and the humorous can sponsor interpretations that bear no necessary relationship to moral principles or empirical realities. Nevertheless, in the absence of the freedom to engage in aberrant expressions, to what untold, because untellable, extent does respect for the status quo idiom produce mechanical sociopolitical loyalties in its users (Butler 2000)?
If one values free speech on liberal democratic grounds in America today, then what differential moral considerations, if any, should one place on discursive public space? The answer ventured here is ‘very strong multiculturalism.’ One should not save discursive space only for expressions that conserve or complement the hegemonic majority (be it secular humanist or religious fundamentalist) and status quo. One ought to be concerned about legislative efforts to ban flag-burning, and likewise of the role allotted to the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private organization staffed by representatives of the two dominant political parties, in managing the form, content, and participation of the televised Presidential debates (cf. Boyd 2006).
Likewise, it would be undemocratic to offer special protection to speech that denigrates minority religious, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups (especially if it thereby ritually reproduces, or enlivens deeper pre-judgments, in that majority and/or nostalgically recalls a prior history of actual mistreatment and political exclusion). On the contrary, if one knew that such speech acts oppressive to particular groups were occurring, one would be morally obliged to respond with countervailing and even pre-emptive speech and art. Thus, for example, Carl Zuckmayer’s remarkable stage comedy based on an actual historical episode, Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (The Captain of Köpenick, 1931), in which a military uniform was a central character, present in every scene, effectively satirized the banality of the mindless submission to the Weimar symbols and apparatus of authority that would subsequently shift to Nazism.
By the same token, it would be wrong to morally censure a minority group that expressed its disapproval of a view implicating them on the grounds that the expression was culturally unconventional, such as for example the Muslim book-burning response to Rushdie (Jussawalla 2001). Rather, as a democratic citizen, one must make space for, what Mill (1989, 11) characterizes as, “the odium theologicum, in a sincere bigot,” and hence tolerate both majority and minority groups when they express their disapproval of another group’s beliefs or behaviors.
Conversely, it is also not appropriate to morally condemn expressions that fail to insulate the sensibilities or trumpet the achievements of minority cultural and identity groups, as ‘political correctness’ and some campus speech codes arguably do. Again, respect for the political legitimacy of the members sharing a group identity does not entail abiding by all of that group’s taboos, or observing all of its behavioral expectations in public. Instead, those who sympathize further with the transmitted anguish claimed by this group and who want to acknowledge and ameliorate the ritualized cumulative harms done to its members ought to write and communicate the histories of those harms, support the regular participation of group members in public space, express solidarity with them, translate if necessary, and, as a last resort, speak on behalf of the group.
What of universities? Setting aside the extent to which American public universities must conform to the First Amendment, how should the space of the university be conceived? Although universities are gates through which those who pass successfully are more likely to participate effectively and flourish in mainstream society, this role in the social reproduction of the status quo should be broadly construed. That is, liberal democracies in general would do well to allow campuses to be liminal spaces, or ‘Liberties.’ Contemporary America has few genuinely open spaces of assembly and expression left. The open marketplace of old has been replaced by the privately developed shopping mall, where those who venture out of suburbs beset with codes, clearances, and regulations to visit it will find themselves hemmed in by owner policed rules. Hence, while we should be mindful of the fact that an university campus is frequented not only by faculty, staff, and students but by impressionable children (my own among them), prospective students, paying parents, potential donors, and the general public, the university should not aspire to be as bland as the typical suburban landscape. If necessary, instead, warning signs might be posted on the various thresholds of the campus: ‘Proceed with Caution: freedom of expression at work’ (Varlotta 1997). Beyond this, to worry about how every expression might offend some potential individuals and groups would be paralyzing. Almost any statement or aesthetic experiment might plausibly leave someone feeling victimized. Such sensitivity would require warnings on every program, and, likewise, on every public statement, course syllabus, and classroom door.
The university should be an ivory tower in this sense, not secluded and rarefied, but viewing from a critical distance, and engaging along novel tangents; not mono-cultural and defensive but multifarious and exploratory, and the liberal arts college in particular ought to provide opportunities for the cultivation of the plural arts that liberate. Both ought to permit the widest possible range of expressions (that do not exhort violence or disenfranchisement) while making clear that it does not necessarily endorse any single view. Along these lines, however, the university that aligns itself with democratic free speech should disassociate itself from private spaces and institutions that are avowedly exclusionary (e.g. certain sorts of private ‘country clubs’) or that under the guise of public information promote narrow formulations that advance industry interests (e.g. certain sorts of ‘world centers’).
The university ought to contribute to the fuller incorporation of members of historically oppressed and traditional under-represented groups and identities into the discursive spaces of America, and it ought to expand the curriculum sufficiently and pluralistically so that the traditions, narratives, and symbols which might appeal to as wide as possible a range of speakers, are available and recognized in the content of potential communication. Presently, not everyone gets to write history, and not everyone gets written into the history where they belong. As Gary Okihiro and many others have pointed out, so much of the apparent coherence in the grand narratives of America was, in fact, contingent and constructed, forcing binaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography upon “the plenitude of America’s past” (2001:136). Rushdie, who is rather taken by the notion of ‘the frontier,’ would not disagree that Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis advanced the triumphalist myth of rugged individualism by falsely minimizing the presence of Native American tribes, regional differences, and variously oligarchic, corporatist, and federal socio-political relations and institutions (2003, 361ff).
Students and faculty alike, regardless of their demographic location, ought to regard both familiarity with the fuller historical record and the cultivation of inter-cultural competence as integral to their roles as democratic citizens. They should remain optimistic about the gains from crossing intellectual frontiers, even as they realize, as Rushdie has demonstrated, that stepping across lines sometimes involves stepping on toes.
Conclusion
Responding to the emergent modern predicament of a denatured freedom without an eschatological end to history, Hobbes ordered: ‘in the mean time, be quiet,’ Locke calculated: ‘in the mean time, be rational and industrious;’ and the Levellers volunteered: ‘in the mean time, separate if you must but talk to one another.’ Imprisoned in the Tower of London on Cromwell’s orders, the Levellers began one of their last collective efforts, A Manifestation (1649), by affirming and drawing fresh implications from the Stoic maxim, which Willamette University aspires to hold dear, “No man is born for himself only” (Sharp 1998, 158). In the spirit of the Levellers, and in agreement with Fish and Rushdie, we should try to accept and talk to one another about our shared ‘dirty’ ‘polyculture,’ or ‘multifaceted culture’ rather than insist on ‘multiculturalism,’ inasmuch as the latter involves multiple purist mono-cultures disgruntled to be co-habiting, like poorly matched roommates who disagree markedly about what counts as ‘clean’ yet have to share a bathroom. We should, that is, welcome historicism and hybridity provided the former is not all-excusing and the latter does not become assimilation in fancy dress. We are all, in one way or another, migrants and mongrels with much to talk about.
[1] — Rushdie (2006). One might also feel that the Danes are being slighted. Rushdie’s statement, it might be noted, echoes an earlier similarly flippant but self-referential one (2003, 217): “if there is a god I don’t think he’s very bothered by The Satanic Verses, because he wouldn’t be much of a god if he could be rocked on his throne by a book.”
[2] — Legal reasoning might invoke Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution, and Sect.77 of the Danish Constitution.
[3] — http://www.bumfights.com/ accessed 19 December, 2006, though now defunct. I thank Amanda Helfer for bringing this to my attention.
[4] — At the heart of what is problematic in The Satanic Verses is Rushdie’s fictional extrapolation of certain notorious lines within a historical account of the Prophet Mohammed’s life, according to which he was tempted by Satan disguised as the archangel Gabriel to recognize three idol goddesses then worshipped in Mecca in the new monotheistic religion he was proclaiming. These li(n)es of Gabriel/Satan, repudiated by traditional Islamic interpretation, are, in effect, the “Satanic Verses” which Rushdie (2003, 230) uses in his fable of a prophet named Mahound misled by the Devil. For some Muslims, the cover images and title are enough to arouse ire. Others fix on the insults of calling Mohammed and contemporary leaders including Khomeini a haramzada, i.e., bastard. Others complain of the derogatory treatment of Mohammed’s wives.
[5] — One does not have to be either an avowed Marxist (like Roberts 2003) or a neo-Puritan to notice and be alarmed by the pervasiveness of commodity aesthetics or the fetishistic pleasures taken in consumption. See Lindblom (1977), Schiller (1996).
[6] — I have in mind Dawkins (2006), Hitchens (2007), Dennett (2007), and Harris (2005). Cf. Connolly (1999).
[7] — The archaic Law had been successfully invoked most recently in a 1977 British legal case. The Danish Cartoons were also briefly considered under Section 140 of the Danish Criminal Code, known as the Blasphemy Law, unsuccessfully applied in 1971, and successfully last in 1938.
[8] — It is a coincidence noted and ably discussed along similar lines by Linebaugh (2002). See also Sharp (1998), Wootton (1991).
[9] — In January 2005 after Britain’s Prince Harry was seen at a friend’s birthday costume party in a uniform bearing a Nazi swastika armband, German MPs lobbied unsuccessfully for a Europe-wide ban (opposed by the UK and Italy) on the gratuitous use of the symbol, as part of a campaign to criminalize holocaust-denial and the dissemination of racist extremism. Germany tried again at the onset of 2007 not realizing apparently that in concocting an Aryan lineage the Nazis misappropriated the swastika in both appearance and name from the svástika of Hinduism. For five millennia, in both right and left facing forms and often red in color, the latter has been a revered and auspicious symbol, second only to the Om. It remains widely-used in Dharmic religions around the world on buildings, thresholds, flags, religious books, wedding invitations, and so on. What does respect for multiculturalism warrant in this instance? Hinduism by some accounts is the third largest religion in the world, with 1 billion adherents, and there are sizable Hindu populations and communities in Europe and America.
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