How Does One Respond to being Offended?

An odd sensation, feeling as if I am failing if I don't do a weekly entry, in spite of the fact that very few, if anyone, actually reads this thing. But I persist. From Onanism to Solipsism?

Well, at least it's not a list.

I try to convince my students reading Plato's "Apology" that it probably isn't fair to find Socrates guilty, and execute him, because he is annoying. Even if he is Annoying. Let's consider the people, and kinds of people, who annoy us (me) (I include myself as a given): lawyers, politicians, religious figures, teachers, entertainers, and people who make too much money; Gallagher, Tom Cruise, Pat Robertson, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bill O'Reilly, Elton John, Lee Greenwood, and thousands more (and, no, I don't know why they are all men.)
I strongly urge that none of these people, or groups, be killed.

There are, of course, people who have been killed because there were those who found them so intolerable, or such a threat, that they had to be eliminated; Socrates, of course, and Jesus; but also Giordano Bruno, and Yitzhak Rabin, and Martin Luther King jr., and Gandhi, and Anwar Sadat, and a whole host of others whose offense was so great that their voices needed to be silenced. Rather they go rather than we hear something we don't wish to hear.

My financial accounting teacher makes us listen to Elton John and Billy Joel while doing work in class; I resist calling for the death of any of the three. (My teacher actually seems like a very nice guy, in spite of his bizarre affection for accounting and his execrable taste in music. I don't know, and don't really care, if Elton or Billy are "nice guys" or not.)

Perhaps we should adopt as a rule "thou shalt not kill." Novel, I know, but even this rule has come under attack, for those who wish to maintain the death penalty like to point out that the Hebrew of this commandment is better translated "thou shalt not murder."

One of the things I respect about the Roman Catholic church is its occasional nod to a "consistent life ethic." I like consistency (well, I do and I don't), and while this raises some rather substantial issues about the fetus, abortion, and the rights of women (all of which I shall ignore), I think the idea is, in general, sound: don't kill. If you don't like someone's view, find another approach than killing that person. If a person commits a heinous crime, punish that person, but don't kill him or her.

This, of course, paints me as some kind of squishy bleeding-heart pacifist. Clearly enough, however, there are cases in which this kind of response simply is naïve--when dealing with mass murderers and genocide, or the imminent threat to one's own life, natural law and most other traditions argue that pacificism isn't an appropriate response, and can indeed be immoral.

This is why I don't do ethics.

The response to the current worry over the Danish cartoons, reprinted by those crazy Norwegians, enraging all pious Muslims to the point that people need to be killed, embassies burned, and entire countries boycotted, seems to me to be relatively easy at one level--namely, that such violence is wrong, and accomplishes nothing. I remember the Iranian clerical fatwa pronounced against Salman Rushdie (this was before he was on "Seinfeld"); death to one who dares write about the Prophet in a way that someone rejects. (I did what I could, by immediately running out and buying The Satanic Verses.)

At the same time, portraying the Prophet is a grave offense, allegedly, qualitatively different in theological terms from anti-Semitic cartoons about Israeli politics.

I say "allegedly" because such portraits have been widely available since, well, about the 13th century:

Go here to see pictures that can get you killed.

My guess on all of this is that many Muslims in the Middle East are pissed off: about the occupation of Palestine, the interminable and repeated violations of Palestinian rights for decades without any indication of change, about the fact that Hamas is described as a terrorist organization while a country can invade and bomb (at times indiscriminately) and occupy another and assert that it has some moral right (if not obligation) to do so (and, on occasion, the maximum leader of the invading country invokes a religious imprimatur to do so), that they live in countries where there is no tradition of democracy but rather one of imposed and sexist hierarchy, and that most of them see relatively few benefits from the astounding wealth their countries have produced (often for foreigners).

I'd be pissed off, too, and multiply it about 10-fold if I were a woman.

I'm starting to think that a question I saw a blogger ask might be the right one: do we want to stay and fight for what is right in the 21st-century, or do we want to go back to the 16th-century, with those whose interpretation of Shar'ia is that of the Taliban?

I also think that there is a tendency on the left (such as it is) to give Muslims more of a break; but how patronizing is it to suggest that because Bush is a war criminal and Israel commits human rights violations, that we don't hold Muslims to the same kind of standard we use to excoriate and condemn Bush, Netanyahu, et al.?

This is not to say we don't have a few problems in our country, where a number of leaders seem to find guidance in their own (idiosyncratic) religious traditions: where some are happy to condemn homosexuals to hell (in their selective interpretation of Leviticus) or at least to the status of second-class citizens, where women really shouldn't be regarded as human beings with the same rights and responsibilities as men, where there is relatively little condemnation of the machinery of death yielded by the Bush administration, and where much more effort is made in preventing the termination of a pregnancy (even within 48 hours) than there is spent on worrying about the post-partum children who live in poverty and fear, besieged from a variety of directions due to no fault of their own.

Finally, my friends on the right like to say that they wish they would hear more condemnation of rioting Muslims than they do (similarly, they wish they would have heard more condemnation of the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhist statues from Muslims).

My question is whether we don't hear such information because Muslim clerics and others don't offer such responses, or that we don't hear such information because it isn't carried in the US media, many of us don't read Arabic, and so mostly what we get from the Middle East is the same filtered nonsense that many people in the Middle East rely on?

Mostly, I'm tempted to think that this whole ruckus is one more example of why I tend to side with Enlightenment values, such as freedom of thought and expression--and also freedom of religion (as long as you keep it to yourself, for God's sake)--and worry about those who reject such values as "modernist." Such critics put together in an interesting group the 19th-century Catholic church, Horkheimer and Adorno, and all those trendy types who regard such "freedoms" as phallogocentric bourgeois ideés fixes on the part of those who don't "get" Nietzsche and Heidegger.

In short, what if organized religion isn't the solution, but the problem?

I'm done. Lists are more coherent.