Well, that didn’t take long. On Tuesday, I wrote: “So now, because of the attack on Salman Rushdie, Dreher has at least temporarily abandoned his naive kumbaya irenicism and is acknowledging again that there is a jihad threat.” On Thursday, The American Conservative, where Dreher doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus, published this piece by Michael Warren Davis, denouncing Rushdie and tepidly granting that it wasn’t good that he was stabbed while arguing strongly that such reactions are entirely warranted and appropriate, and those who don’t resort to them are just self-centered secularist cosmopolites with no values.
Commentary interspersed below.
“Rethinking Salman Rushdie,” by Michael Warren Davis, The American Conservative, August 18, 2022:
If someone insults your mother, you clock him. As a man, at least, there’s really nothing else you can do. It may not be strictly legal, but it’s perfectly honorable. Conversely, if you don’t want to get clocked, don’t insult anyone’s mother. Legally, he may be in the wrong. Morally, though, he’s right.
Free speech has limits—legal, yes, but also moral. You can’t shout fire in a crowded movie theater without legal consequences, and you can’t rip on someone’s mom without having to square up.
This is simplistic and reductionist to the point of parody. “As a man, at least, there’s really nothing else you can do.” Nonsense. Even Davis’s idea of what it means to be a man is a brutish caricature of a lout who goes around slugging people in response to insults. As a man (or as a woman), there is plenty you can do if someone insults your mother. You can respond with your own insult. You can make a joke. You can leave. You can ignore it. Davis might insist that none of these are masculine responses, but then he claims that free speech has “moral” limits, and he seems to be a follower of the one who said: “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:39). Was the one who said that not a man?
Davis’ assumption that there is only one possible response to insult, and that is violence, is an echo of the jihadist assertion that he is tacitly defending (so it’s no surprise that he is defending it, because he agrees with it). The Islamic Republic of Iran recently responded to the Rushdie stabbing by saying it was his own fault for insulting Islam. Many jihadis speak about their attacks as if they were forced to do them and bear no responsibility; the victim bears all the responsibility because he or she insulted Islam.
But this is not the way reality really works. No human being who is not under some threat or other compulsion is forced to respond in a certain way to anything. The response one chooses to make is up to each person. That’s the basis of thinking human beings have responsibility for their actions.
Also, there is a huge difference between a fistfight and a premeditated assassination attempt. There is also a huge difference between publishing a work that people may choose to read or ignore as they wish and personally insulting someone to his face. “Fighting words” may be a factor in determining legal culpability in a face-to-face encounter, but it does not apply to publication. In the long, raucous history of American political insults, the answer to one person publishing insults is for the other person to be free to publish his thoughts — or even insults — as well. But Davis seems to find the publication of material that insults Islam to be objectionable in itself:
Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses didn’t violate the legal limits of free speech. But, as even his staunchest defenders will admit, it was deliberately insulting to Islam. Though Rushdie now calls himself a “hardline atheist,” he was born to a Muslim family in Mumbai, a city with a large Muslim minority. He knew what he was doing. He knew that he was offending the deepest convictions of two billion Muslims around the world. He wasn’t offering an intelligent critique of their faith. He was mocking it. That’s not incidental to the book. For Rushdie’s biggest fans (like Christopher Hitchens), it’s part of the appeal.
Maybe so. But so what? It’s hard to see what Does Davis want material that is deliberately insulting to Islam or that mocks it to be outlawed? Or does he simply want people to be decent enough to refrain voluntarily from offending others’ deepest convictions? But what if he encounters someone whose deepest convictions include obviously abhorrent beliefs, such as the idea that murder is an appropriate response to insult? (An implausible hypothetical, I know!) Would mockery, which can be a powerful rhetorical tool, not be appropriate even then? Michael Warren Davis has served as Editor-in-Chief of Crisis Magazine and as U.S. Editor of the Catholic Herald. The Catholic saint Thomas More said that the devil was a proud spirit who could not endure to be mocked. Was More not endorsing mockery as a bracing and possibly salutary antidote to pride? Will Davis repudiate More?
Davis goes on:
No, he didn’t deserve to be stabbed last week. That should go without saying. But getting stabbed doesn’t make him a hero, either. On the contrary. Rushdie is a first-rate wordsmith, but a very banal blasphemer. His treatment of Islam was shallow and flippant, and Muslims have every right to be angry with him. We’re not obliged to lionize him because some have overreacted so terribly….
Yes. As Davis correctly says later on, “the fact that someone tried to kill an author doesn’t make that author’s books any good.” No problem there. But Davis takes National Review‘s Charles Cooke to task for defending the freedom of speech, as he doesn’t find that freedom worthy of a strong defense. Davis writes:
Later, Cooke mentions the Charlie Hebdo shooting of 2015. The comparison is apt, but not for the reason he thinks. The magazine’s offices were targeted by radical Muslims over their crude, satirical drawings of Mohammed. Twelve people died in the attack, while eleven more were injured.
And what was the point of it all? For what cause did those twelve give their lives? The answer is, insulting Muslims. Speaking to the press after the attack, Charlie Hebdo’s editor said they would go on mocking the faith “until Islam is just as banal as Catholicism.” That’s it. But dying for a cause doesn’t make it right, and Charlie Hebdo doesn’t even have a cause. They give offense for the sake of being offensive. How tragic….
Or maybe they died for the very freedom to give offense, to say what they saw fit, and to exercise the freedom of expression. Without the freedom of speech, any tyrant can claim that he must silence some opponent — for mocking his deeply held convictions, doncha know. The freedom of speech is the foundation of a free society.
This is what Rushdie’s champions are really getting at. Whatever Cooke may say, most critics of The Satanic Verses don’t think the book should be banned or its author beheaded. They are saying that human beings should be more respectful of each other’s convictions. Religion shouldn’t be treated as something banal. Art shouldn’t be flippant….
This is an extremely dangerous argument. What if someone’s religion is indeed banal, or someone’s art is indeed flippant? Who is going to police this? Yes, in a perfect world everyone should be respectful of each other’s convictions, but this is not a perfect world, and where would Davis draw the line? People constantly tell me that by quoting what the Qur’an and Sunnah really say, I’m not respecting Muslims’ convictions. Do the Muslims sources, then, not contain the material I quote? Should I refrain from quoting it because some Muslims claim they’re offended when I do? Many Muslims have maintain that counterterror measures offend their deepest convictions. Should we, then, abandon all efforts to resist the jihad so as not to insult anyone?
Davis goes on to argue that The Satanic Verses is a bad book, “because mocking other people’s religion is childish. And it’s boring. It doesn’t make for good art.” That’s really of little moment, and doesn’t belong in his piece, as it’s off topic. The Satanic Verses may be the worst book ever; the question at hand is whether Rushdie should be allowed to publish it and live in peace in the contemporary West. Davis may hate the book; that’s his business. But he’s coming very close to saying it should be banned, or that the attack was justified, and that’s quite a different matter.
Except for libertarian ideologues, no one really believes that all “expressions” should be treated as equals. Most folks aren’t willing to divide humanity between Rushdie fanboys and Khomeini acolytes. We can condemn violent extremism without endorsing a frivolous nihilism. We can support the right to free speech while urging our countrymen to exercise that right more responsibly….
This is the problem with libertarian conservatives. Their deepest loyalties are to legal abstractions. If someone insults your mom (or your God), they expect you to shake his hand and cry, “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it!”
That is why Russell Kirk referred to J.S. Mill, that most classic of classical liberals, as a “defecated intellect.” And it is why they are more dangerous than violent extremists, even violent Islamic extremists. Because when a man is willing to fight for his God (or his mom), it means he loves something more than himself. He might do terrible things in the name of that love. His heart may be in the wrong place. But at least he’s got a heart. What do the classical liberals have? Theories. White papers. A brain in a vat.
Here we come to the heart of Davis’ argument: “when a man is willing to fight for his God (or his mom), it means he loves something more than himself. He might do terrible things in the name of that love. His heart may be in the wrong place. But at least he’s got a heart. What do the classical liberals have? Theories. White papers. A brain in a vat.”
So in Davis’ view, someone who is willing to commit an immense moral evil because of misguided love for his God or his mother is preferable to the bloodless classical liberal who sits by and theorizes about it. Well, I suppose that’s what I’m doing here, but Davis sat down and typed out his article, too, so perhaps he’ll allow me to theorize long enough to respond. Just as a man whose mother is insulted may respond in all manner of ways, so also a man who is willing to fight for his God may fight in all kinds of ways other than killing an author or suppressing a book. He may engage in apologetics and refute arguments against his belief. He may write his own treatise explaining why the book in question is wrong and offensive. And so on and on.
Davis may find this passionless and desiccated as he slips on the gloves for another round against those who have dared to insult him, but what he is arguing against is actually the very hallmark of a civilized man, going back to the very beginnings of the Western civilization he professes to admire so deeply. Socrates, I’m sorry to inform Mr. Davis, was no bar brawler. And the freedom of speech is worth protecting and defending.
