There's a paradox buried deep within Western liberal attitudes toward Muslims, and it helps explain the otherwise incomprehensible behavior that multiculturalists exhibit when confronted with arguments, evidence, and finally proof that Islam is an aggressive ideology on the march. It will take a little digging, and several points of comparison, for me to uncover, but once I've done so, I hope my thoughts will help the reader deal more productively with the kind of people who are outraged by foolish stunts like Koran-burning, but blithely indifferent to suicide bombing, blasphemy laws, and the death penalty for escapees from Islam. To understand all is not to forgive all, but it can help build a bridge, across which we might be able to coax the occasional dupe back over to sanity.
In his New Republic review of That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect, by Stefan Collini, Isaac Chotiner analyzes why it's considered essential in “enlightened” Western circles to avoid offending Muslims, but perfectly acceptable to outrage Christians. In the course of recommending the book, Chotiner writes:
Collini begins by defining “offense.” From a dictionary entry, he writes that the taking of offense is often seen as intensely related to one’s feelings. This may suggest, he writes, “that if someone does not feel offended, they have not been offended. And this may in turn seem to entail the reverse proposition, namely that each individual is the only possible judge of whether or not they have been offended.” For claims of offense to be given respect, however, an objective standard needs to have been violated by the offender. No one, for example, is offended by people who snore in their sleep. We might find them annoying, but they do not offend us. Nor is sympathy always granted to those who claim to have taken offense. To say of someone that they “do not easily take offence” is to compliment them, Collini notes. The bar, in other words, is higher than it could be.Let me translate this into terms that make more sense to me: Western liberals feel that as part of the upper-middle class of prosperous, First-World countries, they stand in a position of safety and strength. It seems to them—at least, they convince themselves—that members of Muslim minorities in such countries are comparatively weak. If that is true, then criticism of Islam or Muslim behavior appears in their eyes as bullying, the abuse of the weak by the strong. Their own self-images as broad-minded and magnanimous, cosmopolitan people are bolstered by acts of apparent generosity toward the weak. Indeed, their very status as members of Western elites depends on displaying such behavior—as the prestige of Renaissance Florentine bankers rested on their generosity toward the arts; that's how they bought higher status than that city's old nobility. To show a narrowness toward ethnic or religious minorities in the West is now a clear cultural marker that one is not in fact of the elite, but one of the lumpenproleteriat or lower-middle class philistines—whose anxiety and hostility toward the “Other” is merely a symptom of their fragile, fading standing in society.Collini is also aware that in many societies today, free speech is highly valued, even at the cost of offense. “If we confine ourselves to the traditional form of the debate about ‘free speech,’ it is not difficult for those of a liberal disposition that the rights of criticism should be guaranteed in any tolerably open society, even when the activity risks giving offence to some of those being criticized.” And yet Collini sees the outlines of a problem: “Those who think of themselves as committed to ‘progressive’ moral and political causes have come to believe that two of the central requirements of an enlightened global politics are, first, treating all other people with equal respect and, second, trying to avoid words or deeds which threaten to compound existing disadvantages.”
Treating people with respect is a fine goal, but Collini notices that respect tends to be shown with special deference to so-called “out groups.” Claims of offense that would otherwise be ignored are instead given credence and even deference. Collini also correctly identifies the people who tend to fall into this trap. Very few “progressive” forces, for example, would have shown any “understanding” of hurt Christian feelings if Jesus had been mocked in a Danish newspaper. The entire force of the argument against the offensiveness of the Danish cartoons was based on the concern that Muslims were somehow less powerful than other religious believers. But this hardly qualifies as an adequate justification for a double standard.
To put things more concretely, a native Upper East-Sider in New York City enrolled at Columbia University cements his psychological sense that he belongs in the top 2% of American (and hence of world) society by attending lectures by visiting Palestinian terrorists. If on the way out he sees a “Bridge and Tunnel” construction worker waving a flag and holding a sign, that undergrad sneers disdainfully at the “Islamophobe” in exactly the same way he might at a painting by Thomas Kincaid, or a gathering of (white!) Pentecostalists singing hymns. Should that same undergrad—perhaps in search of really good hummus in the Arab section of Park Slope, Brooklyn—stumble into a mosque, he would never, never admit to having similar feelings of scorn for the open religiosity he'd witness there. For one thing, he'd get a frisson from how “exotic” the whole thing was. More importantly, if he permitted himself to admit to a feeling of cultural superiority, by that very act he would be lowering his own social status. He might as well toss out that jacket he bought at Barney's and put on a Walmart vest, then go home and crack a Coors lite while watching Glenn Beck.
There's another, darker side to the equation—the envy elite liberals feel of the very minorities they claim to succour. George Gilder had the cojones to point this out in his classic Men and Marriage. He wrote at length of the many ways in which feminism had truncated, quashed, and make disgraceful many of the traditional attributes of masculinity among men: Aggression, stoicism, physical courage, pride in one's name, patriotism, adherence to inherited tradition—all of these became stigmatized as toxic secretions of the “patriarchy,” and elite men who wished to mate with elite women learned to shed them. It's as if on some secluded island all the peahens “decided” they despised their cock's flashy tails, and in order to reproduce, those peacocks had to pull out all their own feathers.
However, when upper-crust liberals (I include here elite nonwhites such as Barack Obama, who had to take lessons, as he admits, in how to “walk black”) look at minority groups, they find that masculinity remains respectable there. All the attributes that would get you shunned on Morningside Heights are on proud display in the ghetto ten blocks north, and the SAT athletes who feel deprived of them can get a “fix” by blasting gansta rap in their iPods, or indulging in revolutionary politics. Likewise, I'd argue, liberals can live vicariously through Muslims—their “pride,” their group cohesiveness, their dogmatic certitudes and their truculent aggression.
Thus pro-Muslim liberals can at once retain their attributes of upper-class status by showing their generosity to the weak and distinguishing themselves from low-status “xenophobes,” while indulging at one remove the game-cock self-assurance, macho pride, and truculence of Muslims. It's really quite an impressive psychological adaptation our elites have made to the almost impossible mating conditions set for Western males, and I'm tempted to admire it. But I can't help looking at the bloody stubs where their tails used to be and feeling a twinge of sadness. No, make that contempt.
There—I've given the game away, and climbed down several notches in the social hierarchy. I shall turn in my collegiate tie for a Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt. No peahen nookie for me.
