FREE SPEECH AND DOUBLE STANDARDS

I have written an essay for the upcoming 40th anniversary issue of Index on Censorship that  explores the changing character of the free speech debate in recent decades. It includes an interview with Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of  Jyllands-Posten, whose challenge to cartoonists to depict the Prophet Muhammad helped launch the Danish cartoon controversy. I will publish the essay in full when the new issue of Index comes out in March. But here is a short extract that probes the question of double standards in Jyllands-Posten’s publication of the cartoons and in the broader campaign for free speech.

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For the critics of Jyllands-Posten the cartoon controversy had little to do with free speech. It was simply about targeting Muslims. It is true that Jyllands-Posten is, as the critics suggest, a conservative paper, often hostile to immigration and obsessed by the threat of Islam.  But that is an argument against its political stance, not against its right to publish cartoons that some may see as offensive or blasphemous. After all, it is not just those with nice liberal views who have the right to free speech; though increasingly many have come to believe that it should be.

More pertinent, perhaps, is the charge that, far from being a defender of free speech, Jyllands-Posten betrays double standards. A few years before the Mohammed controversy, the newspaper had refused to publish cartoons about Jesus by the caricaturist Christoffer Zieler. ‘I don’t think Jyllands-Posten’s readers will enjoy the drawings,’ the editor Carsten Juste wrote to Zieler. ‘As a matter of fact, I think they will provoke an outcry.’

SAYING IT LIKE IT IS WITH HANIF KUREISHI

For no reason other than that I had never realised this video was online, here is my conversation with Hanif Kureishi at last year’s Festival of Asian Literature in London, in an event entitled ‘Saying It Like It Is: Culture, Free Speech and Power.’ And here, too, is the essay I wrote, at the time of that conversation, about my debt, and that of my generation, to Kureishi’s writing.

TO RENDITION JUSTICE

By next Monday William Hague and Phillip Hammond could be behind bars. In December, the Court of Appeal ruled that the foreign and defence secretaries had by February 20^th to produce before the court a Pakistani rice merchant, Yunus Rahmatullah; if they did not, then the court would ‘be moved to commit you to prison for your contempt in not obeying the said writ’.

Hague and Hammond will not, of course, be sent down. But the Rahmatullah case does reveal, yet again, the lawlessness of the war on terror. The story begins in February 2004, when Rahmatullah and Amanatullah Ali, a fellow merchant, disappeared on a business trip to Iran. They were held incommunicado for nearly a year before their families learned that they had been seized by British forces in Iraq and then turned over to the Americans who had renditioned them to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. There they have been held for the past eight years beyond the rule of law and in conditions far worse than those at Guantánamo Bay. No charges have been filed against them, and both the British and American governments have refused to provide any hearing or account for their continued detention.

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 13]: NIETZSCHE, NIHILISM AND THE DEATH OF GOD

In the series of extracts from my almost-finished book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 14, which is devoted to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. This extract is from the discussion of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals.

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Nietzsche trained as a philologist, not as a philosopher, and his writing is quite unlike traditional philosophical work, whether the dry, rigorous plodding of an Aristotle or a Kant, or the flights of sometimes barely-intelligible fancy that mark the work of a philosopher like Hegel and, later, Heidegger. It is, rather, frothy, pithy and aphoristic, often fragmentary, usually poetic, always provocative. Nietzsche himself saw his work neither as philosophy nor as literature, but ‘declarations of war’. He was not a writer, nor even a prophet, but a ‘battlefield’ on which was being fought the struggle for Europe’s very soul. There was always a touch of the megalomaniac fantasist about Nietzsche.

Beneath the light and the froth and the absurd self-regard lay, however, an engagement with the most profoundly unsettling issues of the day: the ‘death of God’ and the moral chasm that now seemed to have opened up. Though Nietzsche is usually credited with coining the phrase, it was actually a Young Hegelian, Johann Caspar Schmidt, better known by his nom-de-plum Max Stirner, who first wrote of ‘the death of God’ in his 1844 work The Ego and His Own. Stirner also nurtured many of the key anti-moral themes in Nietzsche’s work, including an early notion of the ‘Superman’.  It was, however, Nietzsche who quite unlike any other gave voice to the spiritual disorientation of fin-de-siècle Europe with startling insight. Few spoke to the dilemmas of modern nihilism with as much force and clarity. One of his last books, The Twilight of the Idols, is subtitled ‘How to Philosophize with a Hammer’. Nothing could better express both Nietzsche’s method and his impact on subsequent moral thinking.

THE COLOUR OF ICE

Photos taken while Britain was freezing last weekend. They were, as so often, taken in and around Blythe Hill Fields in south London, which I have also photographed in fog and at sunset. Check out also my photoblog, another lonely pixel, from which some of these photos come.

WHO NEEDS GOD?

Like a lion, perhaps, in a den of Daniels, I gave a talk last week on ‘Why I am an atheist’ to theology students at Bristol’s Trinity College. It was an enjoyable event, and hopefully helped me to think through and sharpen my arguments (though not, I suspect, to change anyone’s mind). Here’s the transcript.

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There are three kinds of arguments that an atheist can make in defence of the insistence that no God exists. First, he or she can argue against the necessity for God. That is, an argument against the claim that God is necessary to explain both the material reality of the world and the values by which we live. Second, he or she can argue against the possibility of God, against the idea that a being such as God is either logically or materially possible. And third, an atheist can argue against the consequences of belief in God. This is the claim that religious belief has pernicious social, political or moral consequences and that the world would be better off without such belief.

TO CATCH A SHAFT OF LIGHT

For no reason other than that I have never captured a rainbow quite so dramatically before. And on a wet, freezing February day such as this a little sense of drama and wonder and awe cannot go amiss.

BEYOND THE SACRED

I gave a talk called ‘Beyond the sacred’, on the changing character of ideas of the sacred and of blasphemy, at a conference on blasphemy organised this weekend by the Centre for Inquiry at London’s Conway Hall on Saturday. Here is a transcript.

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To talk about blasphemy is also to talk about the idea of the sacred.  To see something as blasphemous is to see it in some way as violating a sacred space. In recent years, both the notion of blasphemy and that of the sacred have transformed. What I want to explore here is the nature of that transformation, and what it means for free speech.

AMERICA IS NOT BOTSWANA

John Kiriakou, a  former CIA officer, was charged this week with espionage for disclosing to journalists classified information about the capture and torture of Abu Zubaydah, a suspected al-Qaeda member. Before Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, just three Americans had ever been prosecuted by their government for espionage for leaking stories to journalists. Kiriakou  Is the sixth person to face such charges under Obama. In less than four years under Obama, in other words, twice as many people have been charged with espionage for leaking information to journalists as in the previous two centuries under all the presidents put together. Whatever the Obama presidency  will be remembered for, it will not be for its sympathies towards civil liberties.

Obama strode into the White House promising to roll back George W Bush’s egregious attacks on liberties in the name of the war on terror. Three years on Guantanamo still stand. Last month Obama signed off on the National Defense Authorization Act which allows for indefinite military detention. He has maintained the policy of extraordinary rendition and of secret prisons, and intensified the use of drones and the programme of assassinations, including of US citizens. Obama has also endorsed the right of the government to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion. He has extended the scope of the Patriot Act allowing for warrantless searches of everything from business documents to library records.