Sniveling Cartoon Readers Affair

Well, this seems to be a big month for personal responsibility. First I pen an essay on how society ought to be using the capital punishment process, and now I'm writing about it from the point of view of the anti-Denmark Prophet Cartoons, censorship movement.

Let's make one thing clear right off the mark: this was not about anybody or anything offending or attacking Islam. This is strictly about a bunch of reactionary hysterics screaming rape over their hypersentivities being offended. Theirs, not Islam's. Islam is not a person with feelings. It is an abstraction. To accord to it any kind of physical property is a logical fallacy called reification; treating the abstract as if it were the concrete.

The screaming hysterics aren't any better off arguing that any depiction of Mohammed necessarily constitutes blasphemy, either. Blasphemy is an attack on the authority of God/Allah/Yaweh/Jehovah/fill in diety of choice, and Mohammed was a human being. Seems to me that if anything is a blasphemy, it is to accord to him divine status. However, I'll try not to get sidetracked into comparative religion here.

Before reading any further, kindly look up at the Don Marquis quotation and, if you are a rational person, commit it to memory. Burn it into your mind with all the strength of personal conviction and make it one of your philosophies in life.

Okay, Sparky; here's the deal:

What makes you a free person is that you have sole authority over and responsibility for your own self. As Terry Pratchett put it in Feet Of Clay, you own yourself. But that is just a superficial statement of the matter. When I say that you have sole authority over yourself, I don't mean just what you do physically or where you go materially. I mean in every aspect and regard of your existence, you and you alone choose how to live, how to react to what you feel, what conclusions to draw when formulating opinions, how rationally or not you will formulate them, and what to believe as a matter of conviction.

How this can be is a little matter of something called solipsism. You are alone inside your head. It's your head and nobody else's. Nobody else can feel what you are feeling except in the confines of their own lives, and only as it relates to them. The broken heart you feel from breaking up with your partner means nothing to them, and the broken heart they feel can mean nothing to you, even though you both feel the same emotion. Even though you can relate to what the other is feeling, you cannot feel it the same way.

And you hold sway over how you let those emotions affect you. That's not to say that you should, or can, turn them off. But you can allow yourself to react hysterically and all out of proportion, or not, at your sole discretion. And it is your choice and only your choice. It's not good to sit there and say: "It's not my fault, he made me do it." That's an egregious piece of bovine scatology. Nobody "makes" you do anything! It's all a matter of personal choice.

Now, I understand that this can be counter-intuitive. Consider a scenario where somebody puts a gun to my head and tells me to give him all the money I've got. I've got a choice: I can give him the money or tell him to go to hell. An intuitive cost/benefit analysis tells me that it's better to just give him the money than risk getting my head blown off and have him rifle through my pockets once I'm dead anyway. But the choice is mine, and mine alone. I can make whichever choice I want. And if I tell him to go to Hell, then he is faced with a choice; pull the trigger or don't. He does an instant cost/benefit study and decides having the twenty or forty bucks I've got is worth maybe going to jail. So I end up dead in the street, and a few days later, I hope, he's going up in front of a judge for arraignement. And what does he do? He cries piteously to the judge, "Aw gee whiz, Your Honour! It's not my fault! He made me do it!"

WRONG!

I no more made him pull the trigger than he made me give him the money in the event I made that choice instead. Certainly outside factors can influence your decision, but in the end, the decision is yours.

Nobody made any of those Islamic rioters do anything during this affair. Everyone of them did what they chose to do, and what they chose was to give full sway to hypersensitivity, reactionism, hysteria, hatemongering, and violence. They did so because they chose to allow themselves to overreact to the "offense".

Yeah. You read me correctly: They chose to allow themselves to overreact to the "offense".

"Hang on, here," you're probably thinking. "If you've already said that you can't turn off emotions, isn't a little ridiculous to say that someone has allowed themselves to be offended?"

Nope.

See, you can control your reaction to something that you find offensive. And! -- you can control your exposure to it. Mind you, that wasn't a problem for the majority of the rioters; very few Muslims had seen the offending material. Now, I can be offended, but not casually, and certainly not by your opinions. And not even by anti-Canadian blowhard polemics or cartoons. I might find them stupid, but I am not offended by simple stupidity. It takes invinsible ignorance to offend me. And when I do come across something that offends me, I do let myself feel offended. I might even vent about it, briefly, BUT, I reserve judgement in all matters, and make every effort to not respond to whatever it was I found offensive while I'm feeling offended.

That way when I do respond it is in the spirit of free speech: by providing more free speech -- reasoned speech; rational speech; well formulated opinions that are rationally crafted; not simple minded, hate-rhetoric-filled bombast and bullshit.

So, why am I writing this so long after all the hoorah? Because on 19 Apr, Nat Hentoff had a piece called Fallout from Prophet cartoons continues published in USA Today. It was reprinted on 20 Apr at First Amendment Center, and I finally decided to write a commentary about this whole matter. Nat wrote about censorship incidents that were promulgated or allowed to happen by academe. And I decided that I had to say something about these spineless wimps who are so frightened by different viewpoints they won't allow them, and then won't accept responsbility for the choices they made. Because those academics who perpetrated or allowed the incidents to happen engaged in the classic abdication of responsibility. To wit: they whined, "It's not my fault!"

This kind of spinelessness is something I find offensive. Some of these people, in the riots, mosques, or academe, are the kind of bully that would jam you into a locker or dip your head into a toilet and then flush it. And if you complained about this ill treatment, they'd call you a wuss and tell you to suck it up.

Moreover, all of those rioters were abdicating responsibility for themselves. This is not a good sign. Demands for censorship generally come from people Erich Fromm styled as authoritarian personalities. People who are so afraid of freedom that they cannot stomach the idea of being responsible for themselves and demand that others llikewise not be allowed freedom because your freedom reminds them they are responsible for themselves. The thing is, I look on freedom as an absolute. You are either free or you are not. To be sure, some conditions in slavery are more comfortable than others. Better to be a house nigger warming the Massa's bed than a field hand picking cotton under the blazing sun. But however comfortable your durance vile, you are still a slave.

And if you do not have sole authority over and responsibility for your own self, you are not a free person. If you do not own yourself, who does own you? What difference, in the end, whether you are owned by another human being, or some faceless, soulless state or religion?

Dragging myself back on topic, however, as I have said any number of times throughout this chronology and various commentaries: There is nothing that cannot be found offensive by someone, somewhere. So the only option is to either ban everything, or permit everthing and allow all people to be responsible for their own reactions to it, or for avoiding exposing themselves to it in the first place.