Charlie Hebdo, Chapel Hill, and the "I'm Against... But...." Two Step

Here's an issue over which much ink (and many electrons) has already been spilled to the page by many better men and women than I, but it's been on my mind lately and there's something about it that has been free-riding on almost everyone's platitudes that needs to be made explicit.

But first, let's do something that shouldn't be necessary but that I'm going to do anyways if for no reason than that I'm sure someone will (uncharitably) assume I don't thinks so: almost everyone condemns killing people for the crime of disagreement. Almost. Everyone. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Atheists, Straights, Gays, Bicycle-commuters, and Transgender Hot-dog Vendors in the main hold to the consensus that killing people for drawing pictures or living a life a little different than yours is wrong. And I'd put even money that most of them (at least to varying degrees) don't even want it to be illegal under penalty of fine. The problem isn't that most people of any stripe don't agree with what we consider modern liberal values, it's one of two things:

1. They don't really understand the implications of those values
2. All the people who don't agree with these values are geographically concentrated

The first is a blight on otherwise well-meaning citizens of the civilized world, and the second is the blight (mostly) of the uncivilized one. In the former you have the pictured Pope Francis and others like Reza Aslan and Glen Greenwald, and in the latter you have Saudi Arabia and Iran (and maybe some red states). It should be no surprise to anyone that Muslims who live in secular countries are less violent, advocate violence less, or support the exercise of violence on their behalf than the general populace. Many of them have immigrated from places in the latter group, and have no illusions about what that sort of life would be like. These are, by and large, people who I will take at their word, and for whom Islam may actually be a religion of peace. I hope these ideas spread and more of the world begins to agree with them, both Muslims and non, because what a world that would be.

But then you have Pope Francis, the Great White Hope of liberal Catholics who, possibly due to long-time exposure to wrong ideas, can't help but insert them into otherwise palatable statements, as after condemning the attack he couldn't help himself but to add:

If my good friend Dr. Gasbarri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. It's normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.

"Sure, it's wrong but really they brought it on themselves." I make no secret of my loathing of the Vatican and it's long history of waging war against human happiness, but this is a mealy mouthed attempt to play both sides. The Pope is a man of faith, I get it, and you don't have to be an atheist to support the secular right to free speech (I have more on that in another article, tentatively titled Why Atheist Should Talk Less About Atheism, but that's an outline on another burner). But come on.

Oh, and here's perennial favorite of the leftist talk circuit, Reza Aslan:

Well, it’s not a justification by any means at all, but what Charlie Hebdo represents for a lot of people in Europe is precisely this clash of civilizations. Look, the editors of Charlie Hebdo would unapologetically say they make fun of everybody, every religion, and they make fun of Muslims for a very specific reason to sort of show, or maybe demonstrate, that look if you maybe want to be in this country, if you want to be in France, then you have to deal with the French values, you have to rid yourself of your own values, ideals, norms, and you have to take on French values. And there have been a number of laws passed not only in France, with regard to prohibitions on Islamic dress, but throughout Europe about whether you can build mosques, about whether build minarets, et cetera. And this tension, this polarization I’m afraid has led to a lot of acts of violence. Not just the tragedy yesterday…

"Sure, it's wrong, but they had reasons, man!" This is the soul of liberal religious apologetics--yes, they admit, usually over an expensively crafted latte or cappuccino made with soy-milk (full disclosure: the author is lactose intolerant, but I think the stereotype isn't far off), there are some problems among religious communities and sometimes they do bad things--but it isn't their fault! Someone made them do it! It's not their beliefs (some of which he shares), because then he'd have to admit what the rest of us have been saying all along--religion is bunk and all morals are man made. So he's forced to bend over backwards to build another narrative.

And this brings us to the tragedy of what in the press is being called somewhat euphemistically "the Chapel Hill murders". Aha! say the aforementioned liberal apologists, a militant atheist has killed three young muslims and to be consistent you must condemn atheism as causing it! To which I respond, No. And here's why:

I categorically condemn the killings. There is no but, no search for context. Whether it was due to the religious convictions of the three young Muslims or over a parking space, it makes no difference. There is no justification for taking another human beings life over the crime of exercising their rights as free citizens of the free world. Praying loudly, parking inconveniently, wearing hair coverings; none of these things warrant violence of any kind. The minority status of atheists or the actions of Muslims on the other side of the globe bears no significance whatsoever to the magnitude of this horrible crime. And anyone, atheist or otherwise, who prevaricates on this point is no ally of me or mine. These three students should be alive today, and hopefully tomorrow and the day after that and the days following those, because the ability to converse and argue and most importantly convince is the bedrock of secular values. This is the difference, and is why it's disingenuous to try to draw an equivalency between the two crimes. Both are horrific, but only one has apologists.

The people I have criticized in this post may very well mean well. They have, in the main, taken a decent observation, that Muslims often are unfairly maligned for the actions of others and that the region populated primarily by Muslims was subjected to terrible forms of colonization and humiliation by Western powers up until late in the last century, and drawn a line across all actions in order to try to be overly generous and excuse anything they due in order to speak truth to power, but in doing so they sell out the very thing they claim to support: liberal values. 

You can't support victims while making excuses for victimizers. You can't promote internationalism while encouraging parochial hatreds. And you can't align with free speech while making some topics off limits. There is plenty of real bigotry against Muslims in what we like to think of as the Free World, and let's call them out on that, but don't forget that sometimes a spade is really just a spade no matter who deals the cards--and then nothing more needs to be said.

A Meditation

This, the inaugural post of this humble offering, had originally been planned as a self introduction that described my social and political ideologies, handwave their contradictions, and ultimately try to make the case that the dialectic is more important than consensus. But today I read of two deaths that affected me more deeply than I expected, since I have never met either person, and now I find myself in something of a meditative mood--and since there's no time like the present, let's reflect on that sword that dangles above us, that which we do our best to dream away and that which, in the end, will claim all of us. That darkened, twisted blade, Mortality.

The first person whose death I heard of today was of Ajivit Roy, an American secular blogger who was hacked to death by machetes in Bangladesh. The second was Leonard Nimoy, now the late actor of the late cultural touchstone called Star Trek. This post isn't really about them because, as I mentioned, I've never met either of them, and I can't clearly remember if I actually read anything by Mr. Roy at all. His name was familiar when I heard it, but I had to ask to verify who it was. The Original Spock was ancient and had announced over a year ago that he had a terminal condition--his death is no surprise other than it actually occurring. But now they are both dead, and some day there also go I.

That's what I'm trying to write about.

But why? Why a meditation?

I am no Marcus Aurelius. I'd probably barely pass for a philosopher of any stripe, much less one who can command an audience (although, to be fair, Marcus was an emperor and could remove any ear that refused to turn his way--he's dead now too, by the way, as well as any ears he may have bent), but I have a life and I have no doubt that one day I will lose it. And then what?

Void?

Nothing.

Time stretches out after us just as it stretches out before we sprang with a squal and a gush from the womb of the woman who bore us--and, as Einstein instructed us, there is no privileged frame in either space or time. We none of us will miss this life after we are gone any more than we did before we had it. And then as children, when all men look back and remember the joy of it more clearly than any child could conceive of it, we revelled in it without even knowing what it was and with no concept that it could ever end. And now, as men and women (and other?) grown, now that this fact rests upon our psyche and crawls down into our gut whenever it is dark or whenever we, through the hubris that rests behind the human eye, we take a deep honest look at our own reflections which betray the passing of life slowly and inexorably into the abyss which spawned us--what now? I am not now young, but neither have I achieved any great age. I have no right to bitterness as I, fortune be fair, may have as much time left--though hopefully a little more--than has passed, but still there comes the times less and less infrequently where everyone who abandons the fairytales of humankind's adolescence must take pause and make accounting of their own expectations, or else abandon themselves to be a husk. Empty of the complex weaving of consciousness that fools us always into thinking we are something.

So here, reader, is where knife cuts, where the philosopher must admit he can never be king, and what was once madness is now the only wisdom left to our tragic species: there is no life. Not in the way we have always, as humans, tried to convince our twisted ape-bodies that we had. We are no more than an evolutionary bridge in a species of ape between what it was that crawled from the primordial ooze and what will be when our distant descendants either reach the stars and ensure that eyes like ours are witness to the final moments of existence itself or are ignominiously wiped out by our own short-sighted ape-brains unequal to galactic scales. There is no magic in us, any more than there was in the proto-human, or the proto-chimp that joined us and our closest living relatives. There was no magic in the first animal to grow a hair, or to crawl from the ocean, or that first protein that popped together in the sludge we tell ourselves was miraculous. We, and everyone we know, and everything we see, is nothing more than chemistry and chemistry is nothing more than physics. There is nothing separate in us, and in the great view of time there is nothing that separates our parts from the parts of the stones, or the air, or the vacuum of space.

We will one day be that which we were--nothing. And that nothing is the everything that has ever been.

So eat, the world is bounteous. Drink, moderation provides relief from all toil. And be merry, for life is nothing and death is nothing and WE LIVE.





good night