cartoon violence

I suppose we should talk about the cartoons. The best piece I read on the alleged moral equivalence between those doing the rioting and those doing the publishing was by Dan Gardner in the Citizen. One of the nicest lines about the suppose clash of civilizations was by David Brooks in the Times, when he said that it isn’t that Muslims and the West have different ideas, it is that we have a different relationship to ideas. In yesterday's Guardian, Ronald Dworkin lays down some basic principles here, getting all John Stuart Mill in the process. Let me try to add something semi-new to the debate. What seems to be happening isn't so much a clash of civilizations, as it is a clash of concepts of civilisation: Much of the Islamic world remains largely what philosophers call a "perfectionist" society. On perfectionist views, it is the function of society to promote the moral and spiritual perfection of each person, according to a shared conception of the good life. In a perfectionist society, there is no distinction between church and state, or between law, religion, and morality. The West – or perhaps better, Christendom -- used to be a perfectionist society, oriented around a common and publicly enforced vision of human excellence. That's why we felt the need for things like Crusades and Inquisitions. Then we had schisms, reformations, and whole lot of religious warfare. As Christendom became the West, it (gradually) ceased to be a perfectionist society organized around common moral values (“the good”) and became a society organized around certain liberal principles (“the right.”) What is important to note is that our ancestors in the West didn’t choose our liberal freedoms because they woke up one day and decided that they preferred liberalism over perfectionism. It is that they eventually realized – after centuries of fighting about it – that the only alternative to religious toleration was perpetual war. But religious toleration is the thin edge of the liberal wedge. Once you allow a man to say that he has different Gods than you or that there is no God at all, it is hard to set any principled limit on what anyone can say, about anything at all. Looked at it from this perspective, Fukuyama’s thesis of the "End of History" comes across not as a final triumphalist victory for the West, but as the inevitable consequence of the exhaustion of reasonable alternatives. Liberalism isn't a reflection of our deepest values, but a second-best regime more or less forced upon the societies of the West. This is why, when the protesting Muslims carry placards that read “damn your freedoms,” they are missing the point. Not everyone here likes the consequences of our freedoms, either. It isn’t that we chose liberalism because we thought it would be nice to have high divorce rates, huge drug problems, a debased popular culture and a general lack of respect and civility. That’s just what we’ve ended up with, because the cost of clamping down on these things is too high. Bernard Lewis and other commentators on Islam like to note that Islam has never had a proper reformation or enlightenment. Yet unlike the West, which more or less had to arrive at liberalism by groping through the solution space, Islam has our experience as a guide. It would be extremely unfortunate if the Islamic world had to go through what Europe went through a few hundred years ago. It would be nice if we could just point to our experience and say, look, we tried all the alternatives and they don’t work. This is where you are going to end up, so why not just get started. But that obviously won’t work, because this would be to posit a “stages of civilization” view, which is exactly the sort of moral superiority and arrogance that the muslims are protesting. Where that leaves the world, is very hard to say. *** I'd love to hear your thoughts. It probably doesn't need saying but this isn't my place, so please keep things civil.