Money quote:
The real reason the left is quiet is that this crisis is a lance at the heart of modern identity politics. It has exposed the stupidity of hate crimes legislation, and made us all aware that our devotion to "tolerance" -- the true god of the Western lefty -- cannot be reconciled with an allegedly victimized group that is itself intolerant. The only solution is surrender, and the left does not want to admit that. So it pretends the story isn't happening. We'll let them know when its over.
The cartoons crisis: The silence of the left
By TigerHawk at 2/05/2006 05:17:00 AM
I am fascinated with the Danish cartoons controversy that has ignited the Muslim world, and blown back to steel the spine of Europe -- if not our own State Department -- unlike any other crisis of the modern age. I am not alone in this. My co-bloggers are also in thrall, as is righty and libertarian blogosphere. The left, on the other hand, is basically silent. Why?
I think it is because the cartoons crisis has exposed the fault line in Western identity politics. Jeff Goldstein declames at length on this question in the must-read post of this young controversy.
This battle over the Danish cartoons highlights all of these philosophical dilemmas (which I have argued previously are the result of certain linguistic misunderstandings that are either cynically or idealistically perpetuated); and so we are brought to the point where this clash of civilizations—which in one important sense is a clash between theocratic Islamism and the west, but in another, more crucial sense, is a clash between the west and its own structural thinking, brought on by years of insinuation into our philosophy of what is, at root, collectivist thought that privileges the interpreter of an action over the necessary primacy of intent and agency and personal responsibility to the communicative chain—could conceivably become manifest over something so seemingly trivial as the right to satirize.
One regret I have is that this battle should have been fought and won in favor of intentionalism and individualism inside our own western universities years ago; instead, the victory went to our progressive academic collectivists, whose fidelity to PC culture, identity politics, free-speech zones, tolerance training courses, et al manifested themselves in a “tolerance” culture that now has the goverment looking inside individuals’ heads (hate speech, hate crime) and effectively chilling all speech by defining tolerance in an Orwellian sense of tolerating only that speech which is so bland and banal that it is unlikely to offend anyone. And now we might be forced to battle with guns and chemical weapons and fissile material rather than with confidence in our own intellectual rigor and rectitude.
I wish I could have written that. Read it all here.
The crashing silence of the lefty blogs is remarkable, especially considering the attention this is getting on the right. As of around 5:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, I found nothing at Ezra Klein, nothing substantial at Kos going back at least until Friday morning, and nothing at The Poor Man.
Sunday morning, after the blogs on Blogspot re-emerged,* I found one short snark at AMERICABlog, nothing at Atrios, and Oliver Willis could only come up with the old saw comparing Muslim extremists to Pat Robertson.
Juan Cole is the only big lefty blogger that tackles the controversy head on, basically arguing that Westerners are simply ill-equipped to appreciate the depth of Muslim pain, and that non-Muslims go out rampages of outrage, too (he cites various examples, none of which involve free speech in another country). I don't agree with him, but he didn't dive for the rabbit hole, either:
Westerners cannot feel the pain of Muslims in this instance. First, Westerners mostly live in secular societies where religious sentiments have themselves been marginalized. Second, the Muslims honor Moses and Jesus, so there is no symmetry between Christian attacks on Muhammad and Muslim critiques of the West. No Muslim cartoonist would ever lampoon the Jewish and Christian holy figures in sacred history, since Muslims believe in them, too, even if they see them all as human prophets. Third, Westerners have the security of being the first world, with their culture coded as "universal," and widely respected and imitated. Cultures like that of the Muslims in the global South receive far less respect. Finally, societies in the global South are less policed and have less security than in Western Europe or North America, allowing greater space to violent vigilateism, which would just be stopped if it were tried in the industrialized democracies.
Kevin Drum noticed it as an amusing bit of news, but couldn't see anything to be learned from the crisis:
If there's a lesson to be learned here — and I assure you there won't be — it's that Arabs rather obviously don't hate America any more than any other country. We just provide them with more opportunity to show it. If the Danes would just step up to the plate more often, maybe we could sneak our troops home from Iraq and no one would notice.
Now, Drum might be saying that we won't learn any lesson from this crisis out of frustration, thinking to himself "we didn't learn from the Rushdie fatwa, either." That's in fact what I fear in my dark moments. But I think Drum really means that there is literally nothing to be learned from Danish embassies going up in flames all over the world. Really? We can't even learn that the Muslim world has decided that it can chill and intimidate the West by just appearing crazy and brutish enough? 'Cause that's what it looks like to me.
Back to the Silence of the Left. Are they silent because they think there is nothing interesting about lethal and destructive riots in a dozen countries all because a Western government refused to denounce a couple of cartoonists? This may be part of the reason -- the big lefty blogs were far more interested in some alleged scandal about Bush covering up scientific truth, or some such.
The real reason the left is quiet is that this crisis is a lance at the heart of modern identity politics. It has exposed the stupidity of hate crimes legislation, and made us all aware that our devotion to "tolerance" -- the true god of the Western lefty -- cannot be reconciled with an allegedly victimized group that is itself intolerant. The only solution is surrender, and the left does not want to admit that. So it pretends the story isn't happening. We'll let them know when its over.
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