Those blasphemous Danish political cartoons might save the world.
I hate them -- they are offensive to me in a cellular, media-as-the-message sort of way -- but they may save the planet from self-destruction.
I have been studying religion and religions for more than 30 years. Freedom of speech always trumps piety, IMO, but piety deserves our respect for practical reasons: most people think it matters some, and some people think it matters enough to kill and die for.
I used to feel that way myself. When I was 12, I swore a sacred oath -- a sacrament -- to suffer for my faith "as a soldier," martyrdom included. A bishop struck me on the cheek to commemorate my oath in front of a church full of people -- families of my sixth-grade class.
I'd like to remember that I had more sense, but in 1962, I would have suicide-bombed for Catholicism had circumstances warranted. My heroes were all martyrs, I was named after one, I wanted to be a priest. I was a hungry little Palestinian kid with a rock, longing for God's notice and invincible as any 12-year old.
When I read about the Danish cartoons last week I tried to imagine what freedom of speech might look like if we could affix minimalist guidelines to moot the power of intentionally offensive speech to offend pious people.
I started reading the 30 or so dKos diaries on the topic. You have to pick through a little garbage to find it, but collectively, those diaries offer profound insight -- and a sound lesson on the meaning of freedom.
That's when it occurred to me that offensive, bullying, rightwing fascist asshole Danish cartoons might save the world.
We westerners like to pretend we invented Enlightenment. In fact, we stitched it together -- pretty quickly and for good reason -- to cover up an enormous pile of Islamic booty. Our great fruits of Enlightenment -- democracy and capitalism -- were cut from that same tarpaulin.
When Islam reached its zenith, the Mediterranean Sea was the center of the known world and Islamic adherents owned two thirds of the coastline, including all of Spain and parts of France. (Big, beautiful map/wiki.)
Centuries later Islam retreated from Europe, leaving behind vast treasures, not the least of which was an academic heritage manifest in scriptoria, libraries, and universities with professional faculty.
That academic culture incorporated an Arabic book called the Almagest, a collection of ideas -- ancient tables of the positions of the sun, moon and principal stars and planets compiled as Ptolemy's ancient Syntaxis a millennium before.
In 1252 Alphonse The Wise, King of Castile and Léon in Spain, gathered 50 of the world's leading astronomers to "remaster" the Almagest and re-release it the Christian label as the Alphonsine Tables.
It was those Alphonsine Tables that Nicolai Copernicus famously refuted with the idea that earth is not the center of the universe. European Enlightenment? Your table is ready.
After centuries of conflict, western civilization learned the most essential principle of Enlightenment -- freedom of thought -- and expressed it by rejecting the imperial demands of the Church of Rome. In fact, boil Enlightenment down to a sound bite and it might go like this: God didn't appoint anyone to make us brush our teeth; God makes make our teeth fall out if we don't.
That preference for observation and reason over religious ideology as the fount of our civil laws -- even while we might privately define our universe by just such religious ideology -- is the benchmark of Enlightenment.
Its most common formal manifestation is familiar. Conflicting ideas colliding within a single intellect unleash a nuclear energy we can measure as literary irony and it can be bright as the sun: irony values human life over religious ideology even as it reveals that ideology (something I wish all the MSOC-bashers here would learn to accept).
Another manifestation that's not as universal is certainly more pervasive. It's called democracy, more appropriately American democracy and most accurately liberal American democracy.
American principles didn't stem from our from high-mindedness. We weren't aiming to perfect civilization. All along, we have been slapping together frenzied, patchwork solutions to horrible social problems that threaten to doom us to lives Thomas Hobbes famously called "nasty, brutish and short."
It took time. Some of the ideals that powered the American Revolution in 1776 had powered the English Revolution more than a century before. Pluck your average Puritan Whig out of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, slap on a little perfume and lipstick, they could spout obscene talking points on Fox Radio all night long and no one would know the difference.
Conflict with Islam taught western civilization the secret of Enlightenment: religion is a stupid reason to kill people. My God's Better Than Your God is a game show for fools and slaves.
It's time we put Enlightenment to work.
In the Enlightened west, radical religious ideologues are minor league crackpots and soothsayers on the order of Pat Robertsons and Sun Myung Moons.
They are capable of spectacle, and they wield disturbing influence over American policy at the moment, but our widespread embrace of Enlightenment and our "irony vaccine" renders them ineffective as a governing force. When Robertson urged the assassination of Hugo Chavez, a storm of authentic grassroots outrage demonstrated that most Americans found his proposal stupid. He quickly backtracked.
Within the greater Islamic society, it doesn't happen that way.
Within the greater Islamic society, substantial numbers believe as strongly in their ideology as I once did in mine. They are willing to kill or die if conditions warrant, and they are supported by others who, perhaps unwilling to kill or die, consent to the violent compact passively and sometimes actively. In some Islamic circles, urging assassination of American leaders is how you get past the door guy, and protesting that can get you assassinated.
So planet earth faces a rather profound dilemma. Islam counts 1.2 billion adherents worldwide, according to the Council on American-Islamic relations. That's about 22 percent of the world's population. If one percent of them comprise the "market universe" of fundamentalists, that's 12 million people -- way too many to kill without corrupting our world.
Islam is growing about 2.9 percent annually -- that's faster than world population, which increases about 2.3 percent annually. Unchecked, Islam will eventually attract a majority of the world's population.
Allah is great, and I respect Islam, but I won't be dominated by any religion, and of all the ones I have studied, Islam is one of my least favorites. In fact, were I forced to live under Islam today, I'd be looking for suicide bombs myself. And I'm a committed agnostic.
Our wisest course, then -- the only sane course IMO -- is to figure out how to enlighten Islam. I'm not the first person to come to this conclusion -- minority Islamic scholars have been urging it for generations, and a majority of Islam is already fully enlightened -- including many of my close friends.
Enlightened, reality-based people -- that includes a majority within Islam -- have a duty to share our enlightenment with cuckoo Dark Ages fundamentalists. Our human propensity for religious madness makes the immediate need of that effort pretty obvious.
That's where ugly, cold, insensitive, hard-nosed rightwing crappy-assed Danish cartoons come in. We need more of them, not less, and they need to target the American fundamentalism of Pat Robertson and George Bush as well as Islamic fundamentalists like Muqtada al-Sadr.
Instead of the pro-west propaganda the Pentagon is paying the Arabic press to publish, we should buy advertising and run profane cartoons -- that lambaste the nuttier extremes of Islam and Christianity both -- everywhere.
Reasonable human beings have both a practical and moral obligation to temper nihilism -- religious or otherwise -- with truth.
We'll never eradicate fundamentalism altogether. A need for fundamental levels of conviction exists in all of us, else we would have stormed Pat Robertson's lair long ago and burned him out. Snake-kissers in Kentucky, Avenging Angels in Utah, 12-year old chubby boys awaiting a bishop's smack on the cheek -- they may all seem odd, but they are fairly normal degrees of religious fervor.
Finding peaceful ways to share Enlightenment -- which requires some level of gentle confrontation, after all -- is the hard part.
Ideally, our confrontation will reach -- bloodlessly -- deep enough into the Islamic psyche to calm its most fundamental elements. I can't think of a deeper, more bloodless way than cartoons.
They are offensive. But buried in that offense is a universal truth: that Enlightened reality offers substantially more value, life, energy, enrichment, advancement, love and opportunity to sing out praise to God than any religious ideology.
If cartoons profaning sacred icons will do that, we should publish them everywhere. In some places, some of the followers of Allah are already doing that.
I would argue against it, of course, but laws to require the publication of profane cartoons would do the world more good than laws prohibiting them.