"Kill her, Kill her." That's what the fundamentalist crowds of Khartoum were chanting during the trial of a western school teacher who had allowed her students to name a teddy bear "Mohammed." The judges handed down a somewhat more moderate sentence, 15 days in prison. The schoolteacher, Gillian Gibbons, a young British woman, had offended Islam by allowing a stuffed animal to bear the name of its greatest prophet. And this, the fundamentalist crowds of Khartoum found heretical.
The scene hearkens to a Monty Python sketch in which a young woman is on trial for being a witch. At one point it is proposed that the young woman be thrown into the moat; if she floats she is a witch, and must be stoned. A bit later one of the townspeople complains "She turned me into a newt." The judge scowls in disbelief. The townsperson mumbles "I got better." What this woman's actual offense might have been I cannot recall. Whatever it was it had no basis in law. And more tolerant sensibilites won over less tolerant ones. But only just.
The teddy bear named Mohammed scene is described in a piece by Mark Steyn. The subtitle of Steyn's piecesuggests that the difference between Sudan and the United States is "the ability to give and take offense." But whether this is true or not depends a bit on what it means. Certainly in a society characterized by fundamentalist values such as the one of the uneducated Sudanese, tolerance of other points of view is not considered a virtue. And certainly in the Anglophone tradition since at least the early seventeenth century tolerance of other regligious points of view and other social methods is considered a virtue. So if Steyn is referring to the idea of tolerance as a virtue when he uses the term "ability to give and take offense" I would have to agree with him.
But it seems that this is not what Steyn is talking about. He complains about people who wish to remove "God" from the pledge of allegiance to the flag. And this is not an inherently tolerant point of view. Nor is tolerance a virtue widely preached among the NR faithful.
Now I happen to have a very different point of view about the pledge of allegiance. I happen to believe that a nation must earn what allegiance it gets. And that pledges of allegiance, if they are thought to be necessary, are a sign of bad faith on the part of a government toward its people. For a pledge forces honorable people to behave constructively toward a government even once that government works to undermine the general welfare of a people. Now I admit that at any given point in time a well run legitimate government will be doing a number of things with which good and honorable people disagree. And this should not be cause for undermining a government. But when a government is actively engaged in destroying the lives and livelihoods of most of its citizens or when it is completely unprepared to protect them from highly destructive external forces, it may sometimes be viewed as illegitimate. The pledge, if it means anything, removes this possibility.
The pledge, then, because it implicitly denies this contractual point of view, is antithetical to the idea not just of democracy but of all forms of government that assume a contractual bond between government and governed. In other words, the pledge of allegiance actively undermines the idea that government is properly judged in terms of how well it governs - or at least on how well it intends to govern. It undermines the idea that allegiance is an earned property of good government. This is the fastest shortcut to bad government.
The pledge calls all honorable people to respond to country as the religious do to their God. The great difference being, however, that many religions today encourage their followers to study the founding texts of the religion and to judge their own beliefs in light of those writings; while the proponents of the pledge of allegiance also argued against the study of civics in schools, effectively making the writings of the founding fathers and the ideals upon which this nation are founded less available and less widely circulated. Belief in the nation becomes more an act of blind faith than it does an act of reason. It becomes a kind of fundamentalist act.
I am, therefore, a little ambivalent over the whether the term "God" appears in the pledge of allegiance. I believe that, to the extent its existence encourages people to maintain a kind of moral framework that lives outside that encouraged by their government, it ought to stay so long as the pledge is said. So long as people imagine that there is a moral framework that informs law there is some tiny hope that some parts of the body of law will agree with good ethical principles. I yearn for the day when it is a moot point.
I disagree with the practice of public prayer in schools. If people wish to sequester themselves in rooms after school hours and practice Yoga, or Wicca, or Buddhism, or Catholicism, or Islam, or Methodicism or any sort of legitimate religious practice, I have no problem with that. I categorically reject public prayer in schools because it conflates religion with nationalism. While I am inclined to reject both; I wish to do so for different reasons.
I reject prayer in schools not because I am offended by prayer in schools. It is not because it causes offense to others. No. It's because it turns us into the very people who wish to burn witches and kill clueless teachers who allow stuffed animals to be named after sacred personages. Homogenizing God and Country is the most effective way of producing a huge class of fundamentalists of the sort who burn witches and chant "kill her, kill her" in the streets of Khartoum. Nor is it an accident that Darfur is on the western fringe of such a fundamentalist nation. This is the natural consequence of fundamentalism run rampant.
Mr Steyn's paper routinely panders to the fundamentalist right in America. It does so in this article by calling for prayer in schools and by calling for a pledge of allegiance containing "God," And as it does so it strengthens the fundamentalist fringe by giving its ideas more currency.
The great irony of Steyn's piece is that Gillian Gibbons is saved from the fundamentalist mob by a judge who, in the eyes of that mob would undoubtedly seem like a great liberal activist. He would be viewed contemptuously by them for undermining the precious fundamentalist values of the Moslem masses of Khartoum. Yet here in the US. the National Review publishes its own "Judicial Watch" in which it takes to task judges who, when viewed from the point of view of good old fundamentalists are doing things that are offensive.
Acts that are liberalizing - acts that tend to get us to view the world from other points of view - will axiomatically be seen as being offensive by fundamentalists. Calling for an end to prayer in schools, for example, offends the fundamentalist Christian who views the school as being one more Christian institution in a Christian society. Calling for an end to religious dress in France offends fundamentalist Christians who would wear special clothing and it offends fundamentalist Moslems who would do the same; not because it aims to offend, but rather because it aims to remove the biases that arise from religious points of view. Thought unbiased by religious points of view is a crucial goal of any good education. But simply because it challenges faith it must offend.
On the other hand, not all offensive acts are necessarily liberalizing. I might call Mr. Steyn a kike and cause offense. Because it is a pejorative term and causes offense, Mr. Steyn might argue that doing exactly this furthers the cause of western civilization. I would agree with thim that it is offensive. But I would never be able to understand how, outside simply being offensive, it serves any liberalizing purpose.
In fact, such a comment could reasonably elicit a defensive reaction from Mr. Steyn and at the end of the conversation it is most likely that we would find our fundamentalist prejudices more firmly entrenched. And this conflict would tend to make both of us more firmly entrenched in our own fundamentalist biases.
So Steyn is mostly wrong. And to the extent that he is right, he is right by accident; liberalizing forces offend fundamentalists simply because fundamentalists have so much of their selves invested in their closed-minded views of the world. The differences between the fundamentalists of the west and those of Khartoum is a matter of degree, not of kind. Steyn and the paper he writes for, I fear, are not drawing us in a liberalizing direction. They are not working to preserve the benefits of the differences that exist between the west and the Moslem mideast. They are, if anything, working to establish an oppositional fundamentalism, one no less based on arbitrariness and blind faith. One that is gratuitously offensive, evidently.
If they succeed, the following question will again make sense in a judicial debate: "Does Gillian Gibbons float?"