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Assume There’s a “Right to Offend.” Should We Exercise It?
September 15, 2009
by Miroslav Volf
Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology and the director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School.
Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Danish paper which published the controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, justified his decision to print the offensive images with the following argument: in liberal democracies people have many rights, but they do “not have a right not to be offended.” For him, the right to offend, a corollary of the absence of the right not to be offended, includes the right to desecrate. Let’s assume that he is right: in liberal societies there is a “24/7 open season” for offending and desecrating. The question is then this: should we, citizens of liberal democracies who embrace liberal ideals, do everything we have the right to do? Should Yale University Press have reprinted the caricatures? It should not have.
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“I've read the whole manuscript with no difficulty without having seen the cartoons.”
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First, the reprinting of the caricatures would have likely provoked violence on the part of some who felt offended. That violence would have been utterly unjustified and indefensible, of course, but it being so would have been a small comfort to the victims. The concern about potential for violence is not a matter of wanting to spare Yale a bit of trouble that a few extra police could easily prevent, as John Bolton '70, '74JD, suggested to the Yale Daily News. In the aftermath of the original publication of the caricatures, Denmark was a comparatively safe place. Nigeria was not; riots triggered by Mr. Rose’s decision to exercise his right to offend led to many deaths thousands of miles away—a consequence of living in an interconnected and interdependent world.
Yale would have acted irresponsibly had it followed Mr. Rose’s suit, and doubly so since Yale’s exercise of the right to offend would have been completely gratuitous. After all, the caricatures need not be reprinted in a scholarly treatise on their effects; I've read the whole manuscript with no difficulty without having seen the cartoons and my understanding of the book was not deepened after having seen them (they are readily available on the Internet).
Second, though gratuitously offending others may be our right as citizens of liberal democracies, the exercise of that right hardly counts as a mark of a well-lived life. At issue is not the appropriateness of expressing one’s opinion and arguing for one’s position. I have had extensive debates with Muslims about the key issue that the caricatures address—the claim that Islam is inherently a violent religion. Muslims were not shy telling me that the Bible promotes violence and that Christians have a violent history. I returned in kind (while noting that secular ideologies have hardly done better). We argued strenuously—and parted as friends. It would have neither helped my case nor marked me as an admirable human being had I also insulted my interlocutors in the course of the argument.
But why, a person may ask, is desecration of religious symbols so offensive to many deeply religious people? Though some religious people cannot stand their faith being subjected to criticism, many live comfortably with reasoned criticism. But for all of them, symbols of faith are not merely intellectual propositions, but also expressions of deep identity. As Robert Scruton has written, religious symbols are a bit like “family portraits, which stay on the wall and the desk, defining the place where we are, the place that is ours, the home that is sacred and not to be defiled. Those who spit on them,” he added, “are not regarded kindly.”
In sum, Yale’s decision not to reprint the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad was right. Reprinting them would have been (1) irresponsible because it would have likely led to renewed violence, and it would have been (2) uncivil because it would have gratuitously offended people by desecrating what defines their very selves. So here is how I see Yale’s decision: not as a result of “self-muzzling,” but as a fruit of imperturbable civility; not as a consequence of cowardly “giving in to the extremists,” but of taking responsibility for the likely effects of its actions on third parties.  |
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