The top search term on Technorati is "Mohammed Cartoon," the hottest two tags there are "Islam" and "Cartoon." Clearly many bloggers are obsessing on this subject, from many different perspectives. I want here to finish up the musings begun in my post, Fundaments of Fundamentalism, before I lose all incentive to continue. The article I referenced in that post, The Fundamentalist Agenda, by Davidson Loehr, posits that all fundamentalisms are (pardon this, please) fundamentally alike. After giving the universal characteristics of all of them, he goes on to say that fundamentalism is in fact the default setting for humanity:
What conservatives are conserving is the biological default setting of our species, which has strong family resemblances to the default setting of thousands of other species. This means that when fundamentalists say they are obeying the word of God, they have severely understated the authority for their position. The real authority behind this behavioral scheme is millions of years older than all the religions and all the gods there have ever been. It is the picture of life that gave birth to most of the gods as its projected champions.
Fundamentalism is absolutely natural, ancient, powerful—and inadequate. It's a means of structuring relationships that evolved when we lived in troops of 150 or less. But in the modern world, it's completely incapable of the nuance or flexibility needed to structure humane societies.
Here is where this essay really begins to get interesting, and challenging. Fundamentalist impulses want stability for society - liberal impulses offer, not stabililty, but civility, or in other words: humanity. It is the liberal impulse that creates what we call "civilizations," by continually expanding the definition of the "in group." A fundamentalist society is rigid, determined by preset laws, unwilling to change, focused on keeping out all those who do not "belong;" whereas a liberal society is pluralistic, admits all comers, by its advances adding to the list of those who belong within our society's protected group.
Loehr feels that liberals have failed in our job over the past four or five decades, by having too narrow and too focused a vision. This discussion is complex, and I don't want to pick out quotes to try to simplify it. The gist is that when liberal visions succeed it's because they have "kept one foot solidly in our deep territorial impulses with the other foot free to push the margin, to expand the definition of those who belong in 'our' territory." He offers John F. Kennedy and Rev. ML King as two leaders who were most successful at doing this, and gives the burning of the American flag during peace protests against the VietNam war as an unsuccessful action.
In Loehr's view, the current fundamentalist uprisings, both those of Muslim populations and those here in this country, are results of a failure of liberal leadership: "When liberals don't lead well, others don't follow. And when society doesn't follow liberal visions, liberals haven't led." It's something to think about, both to look back on those past four or five decades, to look at our current liberal leadership in these terms, and to look forward to the possibilities of future leadership.
I am quite a distance here from specifically discussing the Danish newspaper cartoons, but there is a connection. Or at least I hope so. Before I end this discussion, I want to reference two more articles that I have found interesting and helpful in considering this situation. They are both from Open Democracy, a UK political forum. The first is A Carnival of Stupidity, by Neal Ascherson. Ascherson gives a very enlightening time-line of the story of this contumely, and his final two paragraphs once again make the point made by our own Voice writer, Lisa, as well as many other sane and considered voices:
Freedom of expression has to be fought for and defended, in every European generation. But freedom should not be defended by a "'neocon" doctrine of pre-emptive strikes. Anyone who can read knows that portrayals of the prophet, even without insult, are profoundly upsetting to pious Muslims who are not necessarily at all "extreme" or "Jihadist". What Jyllands-Posten did was to publish something it knew would provoke Muslims (though it had no idea how much) in order to flaunt its own "liberal" credentials. That was unforgivable.
In the same way, rights – like the freedom of the press – inherently offer us the right to decide when to use them. The grounds for that decision include common sense and prudence. I may have the right to throw away a cigarette near a pile of leaky petrol drums, but I will probably choose not to do so, and will be held criminally responsible for a conflagration. Publishing insulting cartoons of Mohammed at a moment haunted by suicide-bombings, fanatical murder and American-led war or threats of war in Muslim countries was an act of that kind.
The second Open Democracy article is from the archives, October 2003 to be exact, but is quite germane to this whole debate. The author's name is Ulf Hedetoft, and his piece is "Cultural transformation': how Denmark faces immigration," in which he examines recent shifts in Denmark's public discourse about immigrants, outsiders and strangers. And with this we return to Loehr's thesis, a badly-run liberal society itself rigidifying, veering toward an ethnic fundamentalism, closing ranks against outsiders, many of whom are themselves fundamentalists. Though the two groups would appear to be very different, the conclusion may have tobe "at night all fundamentalist societies are grey."
(The Rev. Dr. Davidson Loehr is minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, Texas, and a Fellow in the Jesus Seminar. He holds degrees in theology, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of science. He considers himself a religious liberal but not a Unitarian Universalist. Neal Ascherson is a journalist and writer. He was for many years a foreign correspondent for the (London) Observer. Among his books are The Struggles for Poland (1988), Black Sea (1996), and Stone Voices: the search for Scotland (Granta, 2003).)
