The big irritating topic of the month was the brouhaha surrounding Ben Affleck's appearance on Bill Maher's show together with Sam Harris. You all know what happened next - Ben Affleck said "That's gross, you're bigoted, and you're racists," then proceeded to lambast Maher and Harris for the rest of the short segment. What was more perplexing was how Affleck would garner a lot of public support for having tarn a stand against racists and 'Islamophobes', and then there was a dearth of any kind of sensible discussion about any of the topics. Since then Sam Harris has put up an excellent explanation of his side of the fracas so I won't be mounting a defence of atheism or central state materialism here.
What I do want to write about is this growing notion that you can't criticise a group of people for having a particular beliefs, and to criticise them is
- somehow intolerant
- leads to 'ethnocide' and that is
- tantamount to genocide.
The second notion that questioning the ideas in other people's cultural beliefs leads to ethnocide needs some examination. If we came across a tribe of people 'X' in a remote place of the world and they had a cultural practice that was against our values (and you can insert your most hated taboo here), is it ethnocide to try to change their practices?
I am reminded of a friend of mine who once taught a high school class about evolution. A muslim girl raised her hand, and said "sir, I don't think you should be pushing your Christian views on to us."
Is teaching evolution ethnocide?
Sometimes bog ignorance is exactly that and getting educated might mean the abandonment of dearly held beliefs. After all, things that fly in the face of reality have a limited utility. It's hard to argue the gain in utility by the ignorant as ethnocide.
The third notion is perhaps the most pernicious. It suggests if we were to change people's beliefs, it would spoil their culture, and if their culture is gone, the people are gone. It is argued vehemently that this is genocide. I have great trouble with this construction. Genocide, to my mind of thinking is systematically targeting a people and trying to kill them into extinction. As the Ottoman Turks did to the Armenians or the Nazis did to the Jewry in Europe, or the Bosnian Serb did to the Bosnian slims, which was to round them up an kill them; that strikes me as the working historic model of genocide, from whence we get this notion. The jump from ethnocide would mean if you taught the tribe 'X' not to commit taboos, it kills Tribe 'X'.
I have a friend Roddy the Samoan, who once told me that his people used to eat people. Roddy felt that this was just wrong. Some Samoans wanted to hide behind cultural practices as a defence, justifying cannibalism but Roddy was dismissive of such arguments. He felt that some things are just wrong and better left behind.
If you make Samoans stop cannibalism, is this ethnocide? Did they really lose their identity as Samoans when they stopped the practice? Can this legitimately be called 'genocide' in the same sense as the Ottoman Turks and Nazis and Bosnian Serbs carrying out their respective killing programs?If we did, aren't we cheapening the definition and gravity of the genocide offence to take a cheap political shot? Is that a worthy exchange? Really, I think not.
I raise all this to point out to the hysteria on my own side of politics with the desire not to demonise people. It's understandable that we ought not demonise anybody for their beliefs. Not even Satanists - even though they're really into demons themselves - and so I totally understand the politically correct impulse to say one should not attack a people for their beliefs. Yet Maher and Harris made those caveats, just as any proper thinking small-'l' liberal pinko would do - and really wasn't the point under dispute. The mischaracterisation of their position that followed has left me wondering just how polarised the left end of the left has become.
The crux of the argument is, how explicit are the injunctions to attack apostates and infidels in Islam, and should this cultural practice really be given a free pass on the basis of our liberal tolerance. This actually hides a very difficult problem. For instance in Algeria during the 1990s Muslim brotherhood put up a candidate for election whose electoral promise was to shut down democracy and return Algeria to Sharia law. In other words, the candidate stood in a democratic election on the promise of ending democracy. It's unthinkable in the liberal west that we could have such a candidate, let alone that such a candidate would find significant popular support. Just how far must our tolerance stretch for these ideas? Is it really unreasonable to say, "look, you can have your religion but we're keeping our laws and institutions." Is that really bigotry, racism and 'Islamophobia'?
This is sort of weird. We're at the point where some small-'l' liberals are willing to sell out their own institutions and traditions that gave them the small-'l' liberalism for the sake of staking out the most politically correct position. And being the small-'l' liberal pinko lefty that I am, I'm just not comfortable crossing that bridge to that penultimate PC-ground being staked.
Instead I would posit that an infinitely open mind is not a mind at all.
Perhaps missing in this trendy-lefty intramural crossfire of abuse is that we have to understand that appeals to tolerance includes a hefty dose of our own cultural baggage that allows us to understand what tolerance might look like. we have freedom of speech, expression and religion, and nobody is talking about revoking those things. It really shouldn't exclude discussion of whether Islam has injunctions that we might find politically for philosophically unacceptable. That's not 'white privilege' and 'entitlement', as some have claimed in lauding Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck shouting down the discussion is privilege and entitlement.
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