Pope Francis on Paris Attack - "one who throws insults can expect a 'punch'"

[traininthedistance]

What differentiates a vulgar cartoon about a religion from, say, a vulgar cartoon about a political view, or about opinion on a movie? Why is the former "hateful" while the others are just expression of a viewpoint?

I'm tempted to just say 'because I've moved towards an admittedly and self-consciously traditionalist-conservative position on this specific issue' and leave it at that, but that's not really a legitimate argument so I won't. One left-oriented argument that springs to mind is that, especially in Europe, while Islam obviously isn't itself a race, it's rhetorically racialized in a way that lends itself to economic marginalization and political repression, and so, while criticism is certainly warranted in many instances, it's kind of unseemly to satirize it insofar as satire should punch up rather than punching down--id est, while I'm actually really offended by some of Charlie Hebdo's anti-Christian material, I don't think it's as problematic for them to be putting out as the anti-Muslim stuff.

All I can say about your first point is that this really saddens me. I can only say we are both lucky to not have met half a decade ago, when I was in my fierce anti-clerical phase, because despite our respective goodwill we probably wouldn't have been able to get along at all. It's unfortunate that the drift of your perspective seems to be taking us apart once again.

Your second point (which, due to your presentation of it, I'm not sure if I am supposed to consider it an argument or a pretext) is one I've heard quite often on this forum. It's drawn from the dialectic of "social justice", which, I guess, is the closest thing to a proper ideology that modern American liberalism has been able to produce (and is certainly preferable to the vapid individualism of other American liberals). As a French leftist who was educated in a very different conception of progressivism, this worldview used to puzzle me, but spending a year in San Francisco allowed me to understand it better, and I have espoused some of its tenets.

Still, what I cannot stomach about this perspective its avowed, exacerbated moral relativism. In "social justice" thought (and your post reflects it quite well) it's all about "privilege" and "oppression". Every reflection of the morality of an action or the consequence of a situation is conducted through the lens of these concepts. The division between the "privileged" and the "oppressed" determines everything. Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that social justice views privilege as a binary notion - there has been a lot of great work on the complexity and multidimensionnality of privilege in society. But I'm annoyed by the fact that considering the dynamics of privilege comes at the expense of holding any kind of universal value.

The case of Charlie Hebdo makes this especially obvious. Charlie isn't "racist", anyone with a brain and who actually reads the paper can realize that in fact they're one of the most outspokenly antiracist publications in France. They systematically denounce xenophobic discourse, wherever it comes from, and take the defense of French Arabs/Muslims whenever they are discriminated against. They also happen to not be very fond of religion. They consider religion to be a factor of oppression, so they use satire as a weapon against this oppression. The argument you're making basically means that they should be nicer toward Islam because people who practice it tend to be economically and socially disfavored. But the people of Charlie Hebdo have no reason to make this connection, because, precisely, they have never racialized Islam, and are always careful to distinguish satire of ideas with insults to a group of people. Their struggle is against a vision of society (theocracy and its derivatives), not against one or another segments. Should they drop this principled commitment in the name of strictly material considerations?

Let's put it in another way. When the murderers stormed in the journal's conference room and killed 11 people, who was being oppressed? We can agree that it's the Charlie Hebdo crew. What force was responsible for this oppressive condition? Not a material state of affairs (as the Charlie Hebdo people would count as "privileged" by most metrics), but rather an idea. Oppression is not only a material reality, ideas can, and often are oppressive. Religious fundamentalism is, in itself, oppressive. And you can't combat a universal idea with relativistic notions, you have to develop a principled rebuttal. The Charlie Hebdo massacre is the bloody demonstration that what the journal were doing was noble and right, because until a person can be shot (or flogged, or stoned, etc.) for satirizing religions, satirizing religions will be a way of challenging power.

Would it be possible for me to get permission to quote portions of this (edited for brevity perhaps) at other parts of the internet?

(I'm pretty sure I'm not as pessimistic as you about the prospect of "[combating] a universal idea with relativistic notions", and I'll openly cop to being a product of that more individualistic American strain of liberalism in general, but this is pretty damn beautiful and I'd love to be able to cite it in a couple of places.)