I bring you a Pankaj Mishra longread in The Guardian

January 20, 2015 8:03 AM

After the Paris attacks: It’s time for a new Enlightenment We must move past the tired debate that pits the modern west against its backward other and recover the Enlightenment ideal of rigorous self-criticism
posted by infini (24 comments total)

The article points out: "Only 5% of the Muslim population in France, a variegated group, regularly attends a mosque; nearly 20% are atheist...there is no such thing as a single “Moslem” community."
It may be that the extremists are so extreme because so many of their peers are simply indifferent.
posted by Sir Rinse at 8:29 AM on January 20, 2015

But so intense is the demoralisation of many previously regnant elites that historically self-aware criticism – the fundamental tenet of the Enlightenment – in recent decades has often shaded into fervent self-pity or equally zealous cultural nativism.

...and that, succinctly, is the problem with Bill Maher.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:38 AM on January 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh, and for anyone who is TL:DRing the article, the last paragraph is lovely:

We may have to retrieve the Enlightenment, as much as religion, from its fundamentalists. If Enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”, then this “task”, and “obligation” as Kant defined it, is never fulfilled; it has to be continually renewed by every generation in ever-changing social and political conditions. The advocacy of more violence and wars in the face of recurrent failure meets the definition of fanaticism rather than reason. The task for those who cherish freedom is to reimagine it – through an ethos of criticism combined with compassion and ceaseless self-awareness – in our own irreversibly mixed and highly unequal societies and the larger interdependent world. Only then can we capably defend freedom from its true enemies.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:41 AM on January 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

Wait, how can Muslims be atheists? If you're an atheist that means you don't adhere to the religion of Islam and thus you can't be called Muslim.
posted by I-baLL at 8:41 AM on January 20, 2015

Wait, how can Muslims be atheists? If you're an atheist that means you don't adhere to the religion of Islam and thus you can't be called Muslim.

It's a cultural identity and a religion. I'm agnostic-atheist, but I was raised in an Episcopal family, and have adopted many of their values and customs, and I both self-identify, and am identified by others, as a WASP, even though I'm not a practicing protestant christian.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:47 AM on January 20, 2015 [8 favorites]

Jewish tends to occupy both a religious and an ethnic category, and I think we have seen Muslim come to occupy the same space (Muslim = descended from Muslim-majority ethnic group).
posted by AdamCSnider at 8:47 AM on January 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

My Gran identifies herself as a Catholic despite not believing in God or "any of that nonsense". Cultural identifiers run deep.
posted by sobarel at 8:49 AM on January 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

So much of all of this IS about cultural/ethnic identity, not "religion", whatever that actually is... This is in a way, the one thing Christopher Hitchens didn't talk about so much. It's not about your particular theology, or philosophical definitions of "Prime Mover" or "Divine Spirit" or some such... Isn't it about who is your "other", and most particularly the "other(s)" that is/are your enemy, and whether or not your tribal mores and your degree of psychological socialization lead you to consider killing them as an appropriate thing to do? I have no answers.. but figuring out a way to move toward a cultural ethic of "peaceful coexistence = good : killing = bad" can't be wrong, and in my simple mind that is a large part of what the enlightenment was/is/should be about.
posted by anguspodgorny at 9:06 AM on January 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

The West needs the Englightenment now just as much as the rest of the world. We need to reimagine our societies more firmly upon Enlightenment values rather than the slow taint brought on my excessive capitalism, militarism, and narrowing elites. The values are sound but the practice is rotten, so to speak.
posted by Thing at 9:20 AM on January 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Wait, how can Muslims be atheists? If you're an atheist that means you don't adhere to the religion of Islam and thus you can't be called Muslim.

Depending on context, I consider myself Catholic, despite being a fairly staunch atheist. There's more to it than religion.
posted by empath at 9:22 AM on January 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

leotrotsky, yes the the last paragraph is terrific!
posted by Slothrop at 9:43 AM on January 20, 2015

it's a question of which God you disbelieve in, isn't it?
posted by thelonius at 10:12 AM on January 20, 2015 [9 favorites]

> It's a cultural identity and a religion. I'm agnostic-atheist, but I was raised in an Episcopal
> family, and have adopted many of their values and customs, and I both self-identify, and am
> identified by others, as a WASP, even though I'm not a practicing protestant christian.

Understand perfectly. When I don't attend church it's the Episcopal church that I'm not attending.
posted by jfuller at 11:07 AM on January 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment’s greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic. The Revolution also helped create what the historian Jacob Burckhardt called “optimistic will” – the belief in progress, reason, and change, which France’s revolutionary armies then spread across Europe and even into Asia.

It also inaugurated a blood bath like none the world had ever seen.
posted by empath at 11:17 AM on January 20, 2015

It's also wrong. Roger Williams' "Lively Experiment" in separation of the political from the theocratic in what would become the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations predated the French Revolution by 150 years or so.
posted by Slap*Happy at 12:05 PM on January 20, 2015

a blood bath like none the world had ever seen.
But we've seen far worse since. And Christians will loudly declare Atheist Communists Mao and Stalin 'the worst mass murderers ever' (and toss Hitler into that category). Maybe one of the benefits of religion is that it's easier to keep yourself alive by declaring your allegiance to the local ruling one.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:28 PM on January 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

So much of all of this IS about cultural/ethnic identity, not "religion", whatever that actually is...

This is how I've interpreted these conflicts. Religion is often the pretext and often the most visible aspect, but not the thing in itself, which I think is mostly cultural identity.

(Also, this Mishra essay is the best writing on the Paris Tragedy that I've read so far. I must say that I've seen a fair amount of disappointing commentary).
posted by ovvl at 12:31 PM on January 20, 2015

I don't know. I've often admired Mishra's writing, but I find quite a lot of this piece to be tendentious. For one thing there's the all-too-familiar attempt to suggest that because Houellebecq was on the cover of Charlie Hebdo that somehow that implied they endorsed his opinions. You might as well assume that they were committed Muslims because they put Muhammad on the cover. The Houellebecq cover was attacking Houellebecq and it's dishonest not to point that out.

Similarly, the claim that Jyllands-Posten was caught in a revealing double-standard because they refused to publish cartoons mocking Jesus is just badly distorting the actual situation. The cartoons they refused to publish were unsolicited drawings sent in over the transom by an obscure cartoonist; it would have been pretty much a miracle for them to be published regardless of their subject. They were rejected for being, in the editor's opinion, unfunny. To try to pretend, as Mishra seems to do here, that there's some sort of simplistic double standard, where any mockery of Christianity or Christian icons is unacceptable but all mockery of Islam is fair game is just absurd. That's not to say that there aren't more subtle double-standards at work, but that requires a more careful teasing out that Mishra seems willing to do here.

I think it's also deliberately misleading to summarize Packer's piece in the New Yorker a call for “higher levels of counter-violence”. Packer offers that as one thing that might be required in certain contexts, while in other contexts he advocates revised rhetorical strategies (precisely the kind of thing Mishra's advocating, as it happens).

None of these are, in themselves, gross offenses, but they add up to a kind of corner-cutting, over-simplifying approach that I think undercuts the usefulness of the argument as a whole.
posted by yoink at 1:59 PM on January 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

Freedom, freedom of the press, freedom of speech are rewards of civilization. It is uncivil to engage in rough speech designed to infuriate, or insult others, especially when it comes to belief, family, culture or persons in mourning.

For big-time intellectuals to go after trailer park boys, or poor immigrants, poor people, people displaced by violence in their home countries, is like mean girls in the cafeteria going after whomever they think is the weakest target. It is not wise, you would think a bunch of crafty writers would have more wisdom, but no. Maybe that is the hazard of making money by playing to low sentiment.

Hello not everyone wants to be like an American or a Western European, or a rich white person, or fit, exactly into the role one society has to offer them. Satire is one thing, but wave a red flag at a bull and things happen.

I know better than to make fun of religion, at least not to strangers. Discussing religion in some camps, while not practicing that religion is also out of bounds, believing is a difficult process, after all, not for everyone.

I really do not condone the violence in Paris, in the US directed fearfully at men of color, across the entire Middle East, fomented by agendas suspect and well funded, forwarded by ancient tribal, ethnic, religious and resource warring.

Now the hawks are circling, now the arms dealers dream of untold wealth, now we fear more, we hate more, we had better write for peace, meditate for peace, vote for peace, let our Senators and Congresspeople, and allies know we are working for peace.
posted by Oyéah at 8:32 PM on January 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Satire is one thing, but wave a red flag at a bull and things happen.

It's not that I can't decide if this sentence is offensive or not, it's that I can't decide which of the many ways it is offensive is the most offensive.
posted by Justinian at 11:46 PM on January 20, 2015 [7 favorites]

I disbelieve in THE God, the one and true God, is the one I disbelieve in.
posted by telstar at 12:27 AM on January 21, 2015

Justinian - maybe post a sampling of the many ways the sentence is offensive ?
posted by Crustybob at 5:58 AM on January 21, 2015

I agree with yoink's comment, except I think each of those things are individually gross offenses. This piece is really pushing a weird "both sides do it" angle that's reductionist and just wrong. The problems in the West are varied, but they are not caused by a "fundamentalist" commitment to the Enlightenment; and as you can see in Oyéah's comments there is plenty of "well, I'm against murder but..." thinking going on.
posted by spaltavian at 6:01 AM on January 21, 2015

I was wondering about the protocol or how normal a request is it to be buried in a country one doesn't hold citizenship. (Thinking prompted specifically by the people who were gunned down for being at the Hyper Cacher food store in Paris.)

I didn't find the answer exactly but in the process happened upon a couple totally unrelated but intriguing articles from a publication called the Jewish Journal.

They changed their cover name from Jewish Journal to Jewish Hebdo in solidarity for this issue. (I found this fun because hebdo is short for "hebdomadaire", which just means it is a weekly publication but since it's not recognized in English, hebdo gets infused with a new connotation ... so it is kind of neat.)

The article that pulled me in, Why there’s no Charlie Hebdo in Israel

Excerpt : “There was always less anger than we hoped for,” Sandy said. “I kind of realized in Israel people are not easily offended by humor. Maybe it’s because we’ve all told Holocaust jokes since we were little.”

Then, during the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, he said he and his colleagues found themselves almost at a loss for commentary.

“Imagine it: The religious guys from ZAKA [Orthodox rescue volunteers], because they have to put the whole body in the grave, would be collecting fingers from treetops,” Sandy said. “I think that as satirists we always fail to surpass the reality in this place.”

Article related to name change, Nous Sommes Charlie : This week we are Jewish Hebdo

Excerpt : It was a big story about Islamic fundamentalism and the limits of free speech, but even though we ran a story about it, I chose not to print the cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb for a turban, even by way of illustration. For one, I found it crude and offensive — I never would have published it had the cartoonist submitted it to me cold. At too many painful times in our history, Jews had been the subject of caricatures that ascribed negative traits to all Jews, that impugned our entire people in one stereotypical stroke, and actually fueled bigotry and incited attacks. There is a line between satire and incitement. Nothing is wrong with provocative or controversial, but the “turban bomb” cartoon in question struck me as just racist and — worse — not that funny.

And because I didn’t love the cartoon, the very real threat that accompanied reprinting it — no matter how remote — didn’t seem worth it.

I now see I was wrong.

There are a couple more similar themed articles in the issue that are also worth a perusal.

Small disclaimer : Just to be clear, I am not trying to make any grand statement with these links or derail into an Israel / Palestine debate or single any person or group out. They are intended as a continuation of the old Charlie Hebdo thread, of providing links to individuals thoughts / opinions from different cultural / lived experience, to mull over.
posted by phoque at 8:56 AM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]