Enlightenment and Spirit of Jihad

The ideas and principles surrounding the enlightenment start-up of a “more perfect union” and the philosophical articulation of “We the People,” are notions of an American version of the Civil Society organized around the idea of Freedom, an idea handed down to subsequent generations, and finally to this present generation, from the Enlightenment philosophes of the 18^th century. We Americans have been wearing these hand-me-down ideas, with some tweaking and amending, for almost 300 years. Now, though, it would seem that recess is over, and that we must once again take up our studies about civics and history and philosophy with some degree of due diligence; because if Jefferson is correct:

“The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny],” are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes” (Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526).

Yet it is not enough for civil society, however composed, simply to celebrate its cornerstones of civil freedom without also guaranteeing the ongoing relevance of those cornerstones as civil values. To do this, Jefferson encouraged the creation of a specific type of education, which even today constitutes the bedrock of a distinctly American program of liberal education—namely the study of politics, and history, and of philosophy for virtue.

“The value of [general knowledge] to a republican people, the security it gives to liberty by enlightening the minds of its citizens, the protection it affords against foreign power, the virtue it inculcates, the just emulation of the distinction it confers on nations foremost in it; in short, its identification with power, morals, order and happiness (which merits to it premiums of encouragement rather than repressive taxes), are considerations [that should] always [be] present and [bear] with their just weight. (Thomas Jefferson: On the Book Duty, 1821).”

I have written elsewhere that if ‘We the People’ desire to continue enabling a Jeffersonian vision of a civil society, which must be anchored in the ongoing intellectual improvement of democracy’s gatekeepers, then we who teach in the Liberal Arts “must continue to insist upon the study of those subjects that keep our eyes riveted upon Power of all sorts, and upon the subtle permutations of power into tyranny. We need to study history, and politics, civics and current events in order to keep before our eyes the (…) institutions whereby Men define and govern themselves; and we need to study foreign languages, philosophy, religions, mythologies and literatures, and all the sciences in order to understand that it is through various and diverse languages and “stories” that we as a people initially begin to frame, and then to flesh out, our political and social institutions, which in turn become reflections of the intellectual life of the American demos.

            Why do we do this? Because, ‘[i]f the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education’ (Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, 1818. FE 10:99).”

So today’s versions of the civil society stand now at a fork in the road of the History of Civil Society, as so many before us have stood, where “two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” On the one hand is the road “less traveled by,” the Civil Secular Society, which was taken by the American enlightenment philosophes, which they also sought to protect for posterity by articulating and then transmitting the freedoms of enlightened [read: non-religious] education and the open society [read: freedom from religion]. On the other hand is the return to some form of a religious or sectarian expression of Theocracy—to an unenlightened and closed model of Society that is autocratic by every definition.

            Let me state for the record books of History that, “as the night the day,” it necessarily follows that within the paradigm of the Civil Society as an idea the Spirit of Enlightenment must finally oppose the Magical or Religious Spirit, which is replete with Neanderthalic mores (to borrow a rather felicitous expression from a recent Salon article). We must not lend credibility to the Spirit of Religion in the civil space because “Doing so lends credence to faiths that, by any humane standard, long ago discredited themselves and should certainly not be legitimized with Washingtonian pomp and reverence.”

           

The American version of the civil society is framed around the foundational ideas of the freedom to express, and the freedom to believe or not and to practice or not, religion; but that New Colossus, which was once fresh and original but which is now somewhat tarnished and dinged, no longer necessarily stands beside the “golden door” to light our way—Lady Liberty and her torch, to the degree that She has become too tolerant of the Spirit of Religion, may have become the anchor dragging us to our philosophical deaths. The outcome depends entirely upon our response, as representatives of Civil Society, to the various autocratic interests, among which is certainly religious jihad in all of its forms, that are seeking to gain control of western societies’ free and open thought life.

There are certainly differences between the various forms of civil society that evolved in Europe, and Civil Society as it was philosophically articulated and constitutionally enshrined in the early days of the American colonies. Principal among these differences is the notion of pluralism as a philosophical value. In American civil society pluralism is neither a primary philosophical nor political value; nor, by extension, should it be construed to be a significant pillar of western civil society in general. Pluralism is a derivative or secondary value in America, because it is first premised on the deliberate intellectual assent to a certain set of core civil principles, which are of primary importance.

            When there is intellectual assent about the philosophical foundation, goes the American version of Civil Society, then the edifice of state can be constructed upon it. What is important in this American version of the story of pluralism is that Individuals came together from all over the world in order to build their lives around an idea. This, in fact, was the opportunity in the Land of Opportunity. The individuals were of plural origin, but the idea of We the People was always primary and singular; therefore it was predictable that while there would be disparity or plurality in public discourse among all the diverse opinions concerning deity and morality, politics, taxes, etc., it was philosophically untenable that there should be discord about the core values articulated in the Constitution.

            That premise, of course, was sorely challenged during Lincoln’s presidency by a fratricidal war among American brothers mutually grounded in a single philosophical premise, and he famously questioned, “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived (in liberty) and so dedicated (to the proposition that all men are created equal) can long endure.” Spoiler alert: the answer was Yes, but not without a fight. Thus the idea of a common philosophical foundation or premise –freedom, was reinforced in the American mythology: first comes assent to a philosophical idea, then comes trying to work out the particulars about how we who share that common intellectual foundation can live together practically and functionally within the confines of Freedom.

Civil societies in Europe, of course, each have their own unique history, and the evolutions of the idea of Civil Society among and between the various “European peoples” seems to have necessitated an early assurance guaranteeing the importance of material pluralism; this was in order to ensure the peaceful cohabitation of the various tribes, clans, ethnic groupings, or who- and what-ever else one might wish to stick in this category of ‘outsider’ living among ‘Us.’

            Even the umbrella document that acts as an ad hoc constitution for member states of the European Union, the Treaty of Lisbon (2009), identifies inhabitants of the member states as “the European peoples,” with the following values, which prevail in civilly defined western democracies:

Lisbon: “The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.”

However, it is insufficient to call pluralism a value where other and more fundamental “ideological,” or idea-based values do not also hold sway, where there is a philosophical vacuum, as it were. As a political value or idea, the European conception of pluralism simply cannot compete against the ethnically unalloyed society or the society that has been purged of religious diversity, which clearly stand stronger in their homogeneity than the state structured around plural groups with competing personal interests. In other words, a theocracy (or a monarchy or an oligarchy) is a stronger cohesive unit than a democracy.

            The historical virtue that backlights cultural pluralism, at least in America, which is the first State truly founded upon an “open” or freedom-based philosophy, is not that any and every material cultural group could go to America for the better life, but that All and Sundry flocked to the philosophical concepts that grounded the possibility of America as an Idea – to the freedoms that framed her as a land of opportunity. The world’s diversity was drawn to the American idea like insects to a light bulb; they were fascinated by the idea that it was possible to live in society as self-determining free men, and they voted with their feet, choosing to leave the various forms of autocratic, theocratic, totalitarian and authoritarian societies that were their homes, in order to participate in the new philosophical experiment that was America, Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

Obviously there will be many analyses of and responses to this crisis, where the idea of Civil Society stands at an historical fork in the road. Some, like French academic Didier Raoult, perceive the natural end of the idea of Civil Society and the promise of some future religious social reality:

“It is not all over; but the “peace and love” that illuminated my youth is certainly gone. One cannot allow the enchantment of a generation of “dunces” (to paraphrase J. K. Toole), which never grasped the failures of the Marxists and those of the Enlightenment (Rousseau’s universality), to lead us into a civil war by invoking an ideal that was never able to become a substitute for religion.”

For this thinker, the plurality that is France is reducible to a simple material-geographical state of being, which has no grounding in an idea or principle: “It is France’s language and her culture, which are constantly changing and being transformed, which unify [the French state].”

            For others, such as Inna Shevchenko, the leader of the topless, anti-religion activist group Femen,

  “Steadfast belief in the inerrancy of religious dogma, coupled with… convictions that the dogma’s many mandates are meant to apply to all humanity, clash with principles of secular governance and Enlightenment-era precepts that oblige us, at least ideally, to sort out our problems relying on reason, consensus and law.  (…) [W]e cannot “adapt” here, especially under threat of violence. We must unabashedly stand by reason, the rule of law, and secularism.”

           

The choice is actually quite simple: if a country wishes to represent the values of the Civil Society within its borders, then it must stand by the Civil cornerstone of secularism, which means that any religion, all religion, must relinquish its claim to the Public Space, and must finally yield to reason in Public Discourse and the articulation of Public Values. Civil Society will either oversee the decline of the Spirit of Religion within its boundaries, or it will be ultimately consumed by that Spirit and thereby cease to be Civil. We cannot travel both roads.

As an individual I can remember things from my childhood; but I cannot remember things from my father’s childhood, or his father’s, or his… For longer-term recall we need resources and education, and we need to study that past deliberately, to learn how to value a time and its ideas, which really belonged to someone else. As with individuals, so it is with nations. We tend to be born into our cultural soup, to learn the ‘ways’ of that soup naturally, then to forget that we ‘learned’ because it seems so natural to us. Then that cultural soup changes as new ingredients are added, as, over time, different chefs take over the tasks of spicing and cooking. With time the original cultural soup is gradually changed, sometimes augmented, sometimes diminished, sometimes on high heat, sometimes on low. Equally, and in keeping with the simile, the edges of an original national identity will necessarily become blurred with the passage of time and the accretion of new and diverse members with their new and diverse thoughts and ideas and ways of viewing the world.

            So it is inevitable that there will come tipping-point moments in the life of a society. It is also predictable that societies that have been framed around a materially porous national identity will confront, in the course of their histories, changes of a fundamental nature as their material compositions change through various immigrations. The idea of the Civil Society as it was created in the young America, however, is not grounded in any form of evolving historicism; rather it is framed around an unchanging core of ideas – it is a true ideology in the most positive sense of that term.  

          

So at this moment in the history of the American ‘We the People’, when the American national identity is being so fundamentally challenged, not by any form of material immigration, but by the malign growth within the Secular Civil State of the Religious and Theocratic Mind, which is pernicious to the very concept of the open Civil Society, the People, the e pluribus unum, needs to continue studying the ideas and the arguments that created the original national identity of the American People– otherwise that Unum is destined to become irremediably lost in the famous Santayanian aporia -- "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana (1905) Reason in Common Sense, p. 284, volume 1 of The Life of Reason]. Hence the absolute importance of a broad liberal arts education in the Civil, Secular Democracy, as opposed to a form of education that specializes in specializations—with a potential social yield of a “confederacy of dunces.”

There is no necessarily correct or right form for a religion. Each religion is ultimately authoritarian or autocratic in structure to whatever degree it is framed around some External Authority and not grounded in the values of the civil state—the individual. History shows that the Spirit of Religion will remain true to itself; this is the nature of the beast. So it is a media-driven Null Set {}, the nonsensical rhetoric of non-thinking minds, to say that some certain form of a religion, such as its moderate or its extremist expression, is more or less desirable than some other form of that religion. It is no more possible, or meaningful, to argue that moderate Christianity is the most desirable form of Christianity, than it would be to argue that an extremely liberal form of C. or an extremely fundamentalist form of C. is most desirable.

            However, it is possible to make the argument that only the moderate form of a religion, such as Christianity or Islam or Judaism, is conductive to all parties thriving in the civil secular democracy, and that it is therefore the most desirable form of that religion within the civil and secular society. Hence the philosophico-theological quandary when a Civil functionary, in the form of an American president, makes indemonstrable utterances on intractable religious issues (from Salon): “…Obama launched into what so riled conservatives — musings about faith being, as he put it, “twisted and misused in the name of evil.””  No matter the speaker, this speech is nothing more than a meaningless “tale /Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /Signifying nothing.”

In their expressions of the Civil Society, France and America share in having laws on the separation of church and state, which is certainly a defensible ideological foundation for the secular state. The French version was not legislated until 1905, some 125 years after the American version, and finally constitutionally enshrined in 1956; so it is the later variation on this theme. There is, however, an interesting nuance to note between the two different conceptualizations of separation of church and state. In the original American idea it is question of the ‘exercise’ or public practice of religion, but this is not so in France. In a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling (‘Hobby Lobby’), for example, Justice Kennedy wrote:

“In our constitutional tradition, freedom means that all persons have the right to believe or strive to believe in a divine creator and a divine law. For those who choose this course, free exercise is essential in preserving their own dignity and in striving for a self-definition shaped by their religious precepts. Free exercise in this sense implicates more than just freedom of belief . . . It means, too, the right to express those beliefs and to establish one’s religious (or nonreligious) self-definition in the political, civic, and economic life of our larger community.”

So while the American government may not interfere in the free exercise of religion in the public space, the French state has simply chosen not to intrude at all in the question of religion.

            It would seem that the place of Religion in the American Civil Society is finally being taken to the next level of challenge, which is to say that John Locke’s original anti-religion argument, which he published in his 1689 Letter concerning Toleration, is finally being taken seriously. In his letter Locke argues for the complete separation of church authority from civil authority because, he says, a civil magistrate is not qualified by his civil office to make competent distinctions between competing religious authorities with competing claims. This argument was sufficient, at the time, for the framers of the American Constitution to separate the interests of state from the interests of church in the young republic.  

            Locke’s argument was recently resurrected in an essay at The Immanent Frame entitled “The Impossibility of Religious Freedom,” by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, professor of law and religious studies, who follows Locke’s thinking, and then some, by making a vigorous and compelling argument against even the very possibility of Freedom of Religion, at least as a category under the law. “Big “R” Religion is a modern invention, an invention designed to separate good religion from bad religion, orthodoxy from heresy—an invention whose legal and political use has arguably reached the end of its useful life.” Her conclusions are incisive:

“The legal and religious fictions of religious freedom have become lies designed to extend the life of the impossible idea that church and state can still work together after disestablishment. There is no neutral place from which to distinguish the religious from the non-religious. There is no shared understanding of what religion, big “R” religion, is. Let’s stop talking about big “R” religion.

                  What remains, as Clifford Geertz reminds us, is for us to work on creating new fictions together, political, legal, and religious…”

We must not delude ourselves: ‘keeping faith’ with the ideas of the Civil Society comes at a cost…. How much are we willing to yield up to some one else’s desire? How much are we willing to yield up our right to be offensive or offended, to be critical or to be criticized? Are we really willing to become all that the Other desires? What will happen when, not satisfied with western democracies’ principles of an open society, Others choose to take offense at the way we dress? At our access to consumer products and to credit purchases? At the gods we may or may not worship? At the cars we drive? How far can the open society yield to the closed society? How far will western civil democracies submit to the fatwas and other whims of clerics camping in Yemen?

            At some point, we either stand with the principles and ideas of Civil Society, or we must be prepared to yield our ideas and principles to the one who wishes to stand with his, and to impose them on us. The ideas and principles of Civil Society have defined the various countries of the democratic west for several centuries; but peoples have been moving and borders have become porous… some are forced to leave the country of their birth and culture, others choose to. And in the movement of peoples between countries, like Nietzsche’s camel, they enter into the west carrying cultural burdens that are, quite distinctly, not western. In and of itself, this very practical reality is neither a good nor an ill; but it is in this way that hard choices are imposed upon us – does the immigrant travel with his culture on his back, bringing his old home into his new, or does he abandon what he was in that other place in order to become something new in this place? And we, who were born in a democratic and open society, what do we expect from the visitors we receive – that they should cease valuing the ideas that held sway in their home, that they should become as us? So, to some degree, the religious questions that have begun to trouble the west should inform our thinking about immigration.

There are many kinds of jihad… a very physical jihad where one sweeps over the opposition to impose rule; and philosophical jihad, where one world-view attempts to impose itself upon another.

          

  What can we learn from the Charlie Hebdo massacre? The first edition after the massacre, depicting Mohammed, was already described by a British national Muslim cleric as an act of war. Just as many religious fundamentalists have been called to jihad by radical Islam, so Charlie Hebdo’s resolute and tenacious stance on the non-sacred depictions of Islam’s prophet, can be seen as a declaration of secular jihad, which is grounded in the idea that the open and secular society, as it is envisioned in philosophy, is a preferable political society to one grounded in an authoritarian belief, be it of Christian kings or individuals, or radicalized Islamic clerics, or any manifestation of the Religious Mind. The Spirit of Religion is, inherently, a variation on the colonizing themes of empire – it wishes to create a kingdom of God in the world of men.

Phrontisterion stands with Charlie Hebdo and the uncompromising Voltaire on the question of Civil Society: Écrasons l'infâme (Ecr. L'inf.)

The Divine Right of Kings

The Old Way

An historical instant is birthed when the great abstraction of space-time collapses onto itself in a single point. It is in such moments as these that opportunities come into being in the world of men, and pass out again, perceived or not, seized upon or not, depending on all the diverse variables and contingencies of human agency, perception, will, intelligence… chance—and that history is made.  Such a ‘moment’ came into being after January 7, 2015 in France, arising out of a great land-swell of individuals coming together as a people around an idea, brandishing the slogan – Je suis Charlie. Now an opportunity is present for all of us to rethink our ‘free’ Western political heritage and thereby, by infirming or affirming old history, to make new history. Now, in this instant, individuals of the west—I and We, standing or not as We the People, stand before a clear possibility to reexamine what types of values we wish to represent through our existence as western Cultures, Peoples, Nations, and States.

The western democratic vision is a surprisingly fragile flower. The English Bard once served up a lovely adage in Romeo and Juliet that "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet," whereby we are made mindful that whether Montague or Capulet, Juliet is still sweet Juliet. To translate by way of transposition, it is no longer so clear that a democracy by any other name…. –because despite sharing the same name, the principles of America democracy are not necessarily the same principles as those that frame the democracy of the Germans, or of the English, or of the French, although American democracy shares perhaps more commonality with French democracy than with other European democracies.

            As a form of governance, the democratic model differs from most other political models in that power of agency is not ‘seated’ in one specific place, as it is in authoritarian or totalitarian models of governance. Instead, it is fragmented into as many pieces as there are participants. Now in order for such a fragmenting model to work, there are certain essential values that must remain intact in order to keep power from coalescing in smaller places, thereby transforming the democratic model into a plutocracy, or autocracy, or oligarchy.

            The model for the democratic vision, of course, is European enlightenment, and flows organically from the beheading of the idea of the divine right of kings. When the one king is dead, then ‘We the People’ is assigned the burden of kingship – each one his own little bit. Upon reflection, though, in the democratic model how does one so tie the power of state to the individual, both philosophically and functionally, that the state is ensured a long, even if complex life? Historically speaking, the model of democracy in the west, inspired by the ideas of enlightenment, began life moored to several fundamental principles: participation in the vote; freedom of expression; separation of religious interference from the function and power of the state; and a press that badgers those holding office in order to inhibit the easy spread of corruption.

On January 7 at about 11:30 Paris local time, heavily armed masked men entered into the offices of a newspaper in Paris and tried to put to death a principle by the assassination of 12 journalists, 12 talking heads, 12 civilian individuals. Certainly the choice of weapons in this war has been set, as well as the tone. Civilian pens and images oppose selective-firing military assault rifles and summary execution; intangible ideas stand up against very tangible ordnance. Unfortunately, though, the very clear imbalance of power between warriors of the pen and militarily armed terrorists, wreaks havoc in the midst of civil society. As one writer has summarized this imbalance of power: 

“Terrorist groups are very difficult to fight for the simple reason that they draw strength from basic “flaws” in Western democracies that are very difficult to address. Among citizens, terrorism provokes a natural reaction: fear coupled with an overwhelming desire for security.”

So the Charlie Hebdo attack in fact revealed a very real ‘weakness’, perhaps even a fatal flaw, in the philosophical framing of the contemporary democratic model.

 

Official Charlie Hebdo

Most of the initial commentaries on the Charlie Hebdo attack focused on the idea of the freedom of expression and freedom of the press; then came those who turned their reflections upon freedom of religion. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, there is not philosophical or legal agreement, no consensus, among western democracies about the precise value of these two principles of freedom. A writer from The Atlantic expresses it well:

“We are all one” was indeed a powerful message, but what did it really mean, underneath the noble sentiment and the liberal faith that all people are essentially good and want the same things, regardless of religion or culture? Even if the scope is limited to Western liberals, the aftermath of the assaults in Paris on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket has revealed a striking lack of consensus on a whole host of issues, including the limits of free speech, the treatment of religions versus racial groups, and the centrality of secularism to the liberal idea. Turns out, we are not all one.”

FREEDOMS – OF EXPRESSION and RELIGION. There is much rhetoric in the west about Freedom of Speech, and that it is a cornerstone of a free society. Yet one also is quick to discover that this “freedom” is not an absolute concept in most western countries, but that it is circumscribed by any number of definitions, rules, and regulations concerning provocative speech, hate speech, ‘incitement’ speech, respect for religion, etc. Ours is a democratic society in which the phrase, Freedom of Expression or of Speech, is actually a misnomer—there is no such freedom. Rather, there is the Right to Constrained Speech, or speech that is hemmed in on each side by some constraining interest or another – e.g., hatred, race, religion, fill in the blank according to culture, time, and place. Of late, especially since the Charlie Hebdo attack, it seems that much of the conversation about the freedom of constrained speech is linked to religious culture.

            A journalist from New York Magazine expressed the situation in this way: “Every free society, facing the challenge of balancing freedom of expression against other values such as societal cohesion and tolerance, creates its own imperfect solution.”

Possibly the most common myth associated with western style democracy is the notion of secularism, or freedom of religion; and yet even this “freedom,” perhaps especially this freedom, is dangerously absent from western democratic experience. The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), who greatly influenced early Americans in their thinking and framing of the best form of governance for a people to adopt, made an excellent case in his 1689 Letter concerning Toleration for the complete separation of church authority from civil authority. To put Locke’s argument succinctly: how can a civil judge make competent distinctions between competing religious authorities with competing claims?  The question is rhetorical, of course, because a civil magistrate cannot intelligently choose between one religious interest and another, not only because any such choice would reek of bias and therefore be subject to criticism as an injustice, but also because a civil magistrate is not formally knowledgeable in how to assess the value or validity of one religious claim over another—how, for example, does a magistrate decide that Methodism is more valid as a religion than Anglicanism? It is therefore more than reasonable, and a reflection of right and just thinking, for Locke to conclude that the separation of church or religious interests from the state or civil interests must be established as an absolute basis for a free democratic society. This is also the normative wiki-definition for secularism, which is “the principle of the separation of government institutions and persons mandated to represent the state from religious institutions and religious dignitaries.”

            Now, this type of freedom may be the theoretical case in the philosophy of democracy, but it is certainly not the de facto case of religious thinking or of the influence of religion in democracy. A writer from The Atlantic, for example, assumes that at least one of the goals of democracy [in France] is religious pluralism – “If the goal is religious pluralism—and in a country with about 5 million Muslims, it should be—then laïcité, by definition, is doomed to fail. It effectively forces observant French Muslims to choose between their religious practice and their French identity.”  The obvious challenge in this line of thinking, however, is that the democratic vision of a John Locke and a Thomas Jefferson, grounded in the absolute separation of private religion from the public sphere, never included the idea of creating a space for private religion. A goal and purpose of the democratic society was never to create pluralism, but only to allow it to breathe and to co-exist, as long as everyone plays by the rules of the democratic environment – thereby ensuring the freedom of expression and religious liberty for all of We the People.

            In the United States the First Amendment to the Constitution bans Congress from passing any law respecting the establishment of religion and from prohibiting people from freely exercising their religion. In 1981 the United Nations General Assembly passed a "Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief," which recognizes Freedom of Religion as a fundamental human right. In the Preamble one finds expressed these classic democratic and secular sentiments:

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

This formulation is not a fluke, because it is expressly reiterated in Article 18 of the same U.N. document: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” And yet, it would seem that this very guarantee is being regularly violated internationally, with impunity, if we are to believe Huffington Post headlines such as, “The Charlie Hebdo Murders: An Attack on Religious Liberty, Not Free Expression” (Doug Bandow; Cato Institute; 1/28/2015).

            So, in the present state of western democracy it is certainly beginning to seem like the civic freedoms of Expression and Religion, which have historically been the philosophical pillars of enlightened democracy, are crumbling under the onslaught of world-wide religious authoritarianism.

BLASPHEMY LAWS & THE QUESTION OF FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION. The diverse western democracies have negotiated diversely the troubled waters that stand between private religion and the public domain. In some democracies the relationship between the private religious and the civic is friendly. In Germany, for example, as in the U.K. and the Netherlands, there seems to be relatively peaceful cohabitation between the church and the state. In other civil societies, however, that relationship is somewhat more tenuous and hostile. Such is the case in France, Mexico, India, Spain, and in the U.S.  In these latter societies, where the separation between church and state is more clearly defined and codified in legislation, where the society is formally ‘open’, one might also expect to see a consistent commitment to secular or non-religious civil social institutions. In societies where the church and the state have a closer co-existence, on the other hand, one might expect to find the growth of stronger and more stable ‘closed’ institutions and structures, by means of which ‘open’ societies remain bound to inherently authoritarian or religious world-views.

            But even the more radical separation of the church from the state in democracy does not guarantee the state’s safety from the inherently colonizing project (proselytism) of religious thinking. The Americans still have the formal theoretical idea of the absolute separation of church and state, and yet their political landscape is infested by the unruly sprouting of Christianized politicians who patiently seek to bring about the velvet coup d’état of transforming civil society into Christian theocracy. Religious America, imitating Moses’ long march through the Sinai, seems to be paving the way for a modern exodus out of state secularism and into a new-world theocracy. But democracy, where political authority has been squarely placed on the shoulders of the individual, is philosophically incompatible with the authoritarianism inherent to a theocratically defined state. At least philosophically, a velvet revolution is indeed afoot in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Generally speaking, one tends to find blasphemy laws more strongly rooted in those countries that have a close relationship to specific religious traditions. This is predictable in the sense that a blasphemy is, by definition, an insult of or contempt for the sacred; at heart, blasphemy is a religious notion. In countries having a weaker affiliation with formal religion, the notion of the sacred has simply been transferred to the public dimension through the language of hate speech, etc.; but the reality of blasphemy continues to thrive through the various euphemisms of secular thought—this is just a secular expression of the velvet coup d’état designed to move We the People away from the messiness and tension of secularized democracy working itself out through the lives of individuals, and closer to a religious authoritarianism.

In March 2014, in a Policy Brief entitled Prisoners of Belief, The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom articulated essentially the same philosophy toward religion, as did John Locke in his 1689 Letter concerning Toleration—which just goes to show how difficult it is to kill a good idea.

“Blasphemy laws inappropriately position governments as arbiters of truth or religious rightness, as they empower officials to enforce particular religious views against individuals, minorities, and dissenters. [… because] In contexts where an authoritarian government supports an established religious creed, blasphemy accusations are frequently used to silence critics or democratic rivals under the guise of enforcing religious piety.”  

The Commission’s brief continues:

“Blasphemy laws are incompatible with international human rights standards, as they protect beliefs over individuals, and they often result in violations of the freedoms of religion and expression, especially when persons are jailed. Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) protects the individual right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the right to manifest this belief through various acts, such as worship, observance, practice and teaching. Limitations on this right are narrow, and are only permitted as necessary to protect “public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.” Article 19 of the ICCPR protects the individual right to freedom of expression, which may only be limited to protect the rights or reputations of others, national security, public order, or public health or morals. And in terms of the protection of morals, the UN Human Rights Committee has observed that limitations on this ground “must be based on principles not deriving exclusively from a single [social, philosophical, or religious] tradition.””

The conclusion of this Commission is democratic and secular in the highest degree:

“International law experts have repeatedly deemed blasphemy-type laws incompatible with human rights commitments. For example, the UN Human Rights Committee has stated that “[p]rohibitions of displays of lack of respect for a religion or other belief system, including blasphemy laws, are incompatible with the [ICCPR].” In addition, an international group of experts convened by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights recently recommended that “[s]tates that have blasphemy laws should repeal the[m] as such laws have a stifling impact on the enjoyment of freedom of religion or belief and healthy dialogue and debate about religion.” Furthermore, these laws run counter to consensus UN resolutions recognizing that religious intolerance is best fought through positive measures, such as education, outreach, and counter-speech, and that criminalization is only appropriate for incitement to imminent violence.”

A similar philosophy motivates another “independent watchdog organization dedicated to the expansion of freedom around the world,” Freedom House, which argues that, “Founded in 1941, Freedom House was the first American organization to champion the advancement of freedom globally.” On the question of blasphemy laws their conclusion was that:

"blasphemy laws foster an environment of intolerance and impunity, and lead to violations of a broad range of human rights, including the obvious rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion, as well as freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention; the right to due process and a fair trial; freedom from torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; and the right to life and security of the person."”

Among the various players of the democratic game, however, there still remains no especial consensus about the distance, far or near, that is to define religion’s relationship to the civil state. So, if there is still no philosophical agreement about how religion might best coexist within and with the civil state, perhaps it might be possible to find a single unifying concept that could historically bind together the various democracies of the west.

THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS, or RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY and CIVIL SOCIETY. Historically speaking, the birth of the modern democratic principle: We the People, flows from a decline in the idea that kings are innately endowed, from Heaven, with special authority to rule over societies. There are many reasons for the decline in this latter idea, including the perception that kings were not neutral in the distribution of their favors, and that kings could not be held accountable for excesses and corruption. Philosophers, such as Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau, and other interested parties argued for an alternative view of governance for the civil society, which was grounded in the notion of the ‘consent of the governed’… and, following a series of revolutions and beheadings, the social contract was acclaimed and proclaimed, at the heart of which was very firmly embedded the core idea of We the People.

            This was a moment in western history when it became philosophically clear that authoritarianisms seem just naturally to want to accumulate social and political and financial and religious power among a select few insiders, and that the only practical way to avoid that trap was to fragment and to disperse all social power among the real builders and players of civil society – individuals, who would become in that instant of history ‘We the People’.

Now, even though the various democracies of the world do not necessarily agree on the limitations of speech and religion, it would still seem reasonable that all states which claim their philosophical heritage from the western principle of We the People, should continue to resist the principle of authoritarianism in all of its diverse incarnations; and this must include our resistance to any private Religious Thought trying to impose its values and its worldview in the public space on free hearts and free men.

           

The principle of the divine right of kings is resurrected again in the democratic west only when and where democratic countries allow religious thought, of any ilk, to hold public sway within their borders. And so democracy dies, not with a whimper but with a bang, unless citizenry discovers in itself courage sufficient to stand the ground of its ideas, and commitment enough to the principle of truly free (i.e., unbridled) speech, and to absolute public neutrality on questions of religion. Yet it is unfortunately true, as has been said, that “Among citizens, terrorism provokes a natural reaction: fear coupled with an overwhelming desire for security.”

Who holds the real power of our lives in the democratic state? Philosophers will tell us that we do, as individuals. And yet free speech and free religion in the democratic state, to whatever degree We the People allow it, to whatever degree We the People censure ourselves out of fear, is largely controlled, de facto, by some of the following religious thinkers who have and are attempting to seize control of the free world of ideas, and speech, and religion, and choice, through their fatwas [compiled from various sources and Wikipedia]:

·       L’imam afghan [Mir Faroq Husseini, un dignitaire religieux dans la province occidentale de Herat] qui a offert 400.000 dollars de récompense pour quiconque tuerait le producteur du film islamophobe ainsi que le dessinateur français Charb.

·       Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses.

·       In 2001, religious authorities in the United Arab Emirates issued a fatwā against the children's game Pokémon, after finding that it encouraged gambling, and was based on the theory of evolution, "a Jewish-Darwinist theory, that conflicts with the truth about humans and with Islamic principles".

·       In 2001, Egypt's Grand Mufti issued a fatwā stating that the show "Who will Win the Million?" (modelled on the British show Who Wants to be a Millionaire?) was un-Islamic. The Sheikh of Cairo's Al-Azhar University later rejected the fatwā, finding that there was no objection to such shows since they spread general knowledge.

·       In Syria, Grand Mufti Ahmad Badruddin Hassoun issued a fatwa prohibiting every type of smoking, including cigarettes and narghile, as well as the selling and buying of tobacco and any affiliation with tobacco distribution (see also Smoking in Syria).

·       Yusuf al-Qaradawi released a fatwā on April 14, 2004, stating that the boycott of American and Israeli products was an obligation for all who are able.

·       Sheik Sadeq Abdallah bin Al-Majed, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan, issued a fatwā that prohibits vaccination of children claiming it is a conspiracy of the Jews and Freemasons.

·       Indian Muslim scholars issued a fatwā of death against Taslima Nasreen, an exiled controversial Bangladeshi writer. Majidulla Khan Farhad of Hyderabad-based Majlis Bachao Tehriq issued the fatwā at the Tipu Sultan mosque in Kolkata after Juma prayers as saying Taslima has defamed Islam and announced an “unlimited financial reward” to anybody who would kill her.

·       In 1998, Grand Ayatollah Sistani of Iraq, issued a fatwā prohibiting University of Virginia professor Abdulaziz Sachedina from ever again teaching Islam due in part to Sachedina's writings encouraging acceptance of religious pluralism in the Muslim world.

·       In June 1992, Egyptian writer Farag Foda was assassinated following a fatwa issued by ulamas from Al-Azhar who had adopted a previous fatwa by Sheikh al-Azhar, Jadd al-Haqq, accusing secularist writers such as Foda of being "enemies of Islam". The jihadist group Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya claimed responsibility for the murder.

·       In 1951 Egypt issued a fatwa on Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola citing it was safe for Muslims to drink both beverages since "they do not contain narcotic or alcoholic substances, nor do these analyses show the presence of pepsin. From the bacteriological point of view the beverages are free of microbes harmful to health."

·       Osama bin Laden issued two fatwās—in 1996 and then again in 1998—that Muslims should kill civilians and military personnel from the United States and allied countries until they withdraw support for Israel and withdraw military forces from Islamic countries.

·       Earlier this month a video was release showing another AQAP [Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] leader, Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi, claiming responsibility for the attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which claimed 12 lives. According to reports from RFI (Radio France Internationale), "We, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, claim responsibility for this operation as vengeance for the messenger of Allah," one of the group's leaders, Nasser al-Ansi, said in reference to the magazine's publications of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.”

In memoriam, not just to these executed individuals from Charlie Hebdo, who are only the most recent victims to the divine right of kings, but also to the very idea of secular democracy—unless the west continues to ensure that the voices of divinely inspired “kings” are given no hearing in civil society.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2e9kdp_charliehebdo-la-video-hommage-de-france-televisions-noussommescharlie_news?start=2

[#CharlieHebdo : la vidéo hommage de France Télévisions ; #NousSommesCharlie]

Further reading: Profane. Sacrilegious Expression in a Multicultural Age, edited by Grenda, Beneke, and Nash. University of California Press, 2014.