Hi all, this post is long overdue. Things in my neck of the woods have been hectic (to say the least) for the last few weeks, and I've missed sitting down to get my thoughts out there on the wire. It feels good to get back to it, and I hope that this time between posts has renewed your enthusiasm as readers as much as it's renewed mine as a writer. Let's get to it.
Almost two weeks ago now, some of my Guelph cohort and I ran the second Philopolis Guelph philosophy festival, at which over 20 activities were offered. One of the presentations that I attended, about politics, had a strange atmosphere about it, and it soon became clear that the presenter had quite a strange political view indeed. In order to avoid out-Heroding Herod, I shan't get into the details of what was said, but the outcome was that someone was so offended that she walked out of the presentation. The presenter was disappointed, but also extremely surprised. He shouldn't have been. His hypothesis was indeed very offensive, even to me. However, I felt it a better move to stay and talk to him than to abandon the situation.
After arguing quite conclusively that his hypothesis was drastically thin on substance (I really rolled up my sleeves on that one and didn't let him off the hook), I started to talk to him about understanding one another as a joint responsibility. He was shocked and disappointed that the lady had walked out of his presentation before he had had a chance to make his point more fully, or defend it appropriately (which ultimately he was unable to do anyway). I stressed that while she definitely does have a responsibility to stay and listen, to allow him to make his point, he also has a responsibility not to be so abrasive and offensive that she feels that walking away is the only course of action left open to her. The listener has a responsibility to try to understand the speaker's point, and to understand it in the most charitable manner possible before taking issue with specific issues; but the speaker has a responsibility to respect the listener and not make the process of understanding unduly difficult, specifically in this instance a responsibility to present ideas in a non-offensive way (though in this case that likely wasn't possible).
It was an interesting discussion, and arguing that understanding through dialogue is a joint responsibility allowed me to keep him from relinquishing any responsibility for his actions. I hope that he took seriously what we talked about. (And as a good philosopher, I suggested some things that he might find helpful to read in this context: it was Charles Taylor, for those keeping score at home.)
This whole discussion came back several hours later when I gave my own talk. My talk was about Cassirer's phenomenology of myth and how we can use it to understand the Islamic injunction against iconographic depictions of the sacred. (As regular readers of this blog know, I've already written a piece about that, and I'd like to once again express my gratitude to those whose insightful comments helped to considerably enrich my Philopolis talk.) One of the important lines of discussion that followed after my talk was about freedom of speech: should blasphemy be allowed, and more specifically, should we accept blasphemy when it comes from outside the culture, when the one contradicting sacred rules is not a believer in those rules? A good friend of mine suggested that freedom of speech is an important mark and pillar of a healthy democracy, which sounded right to me. However, I pointed out, Canada seems a healthy enough democracy to me (at least, pre-Harperland), and we have laws that restrict free speech, specifically outlawing hate speech.
Rational and critical dialogue among citizens is indeed an important part of democracy, and freedom of speech guarantees that we all have access to that dialogue (though, of course, some have far greater access than others, but let's put that massively important issue aside for now). However, as I mentioned in the first part of this post, we have a responsibility as parties to a dialogue to protect the integrity of that dialogue, to neither abandon it prematurely nor offend our interlocutor(s) so much as to force them to abandon it. In this sense, I see anti-hate speech laws not as impediments to free speech, but rather as complements to it, because they serve to legally underpin the need to refrain from premature offense. If free speech is instrumental to the intrinsic good of rational and critical dialogue, then anti-hate speech laws are instrumental to that same good.
So what do we say about the Danish cartoons, and movies like The Innocence of Muslims, that clearly controvert the religious laws of Islam? Should we allow this kind of criticism of Islamic culture? That will have to wait for next time.
