Friday, June 03, 2005

Krauthammer Gets Something Right???
And: What Are Our Obligations to the Superstitions of Others?

Usually the following is a fairly safe epistemic strategy: find out what Charles Krauthammer thinks, then think the opposite. But in this op-ed, I think he gets something substantially right. (The NYT link generator is down, so I don't know how long that link will work.)

Well, first I should note that Krauthammer dismisses most of the charges of abuse at Guantanamo Bay with a wave of his hand. That's irrational, and we don't want to follow him there. Many of the reports are probably false, but we don't know which ones yet. Krauthammer and his ilk can't be trusted on such topics as they are far too willing to exonerate the U.S. These are the same folks who compared the sexual abuse at Abu Graib to fraternity pranks...

But as for the more-or-less confirmed abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Krauthammer is right. Minor abuses of the Koran simply aren't a big deal. As Krauthammer points out, in the cosmic scheme of war crimes, this ranks just above jaywalking.

Of course one might argue that only those who revere the Koran can determine how severe is the crime of mishandling it, but this raises serious philosophical problems. Offense isn't something that can only be judged by the reactions of the offended. Even these reactions must be subject to criticism by reason. At some point, such reactions become irrational. If, for example, I am extraordinarily offended by other people touching the tops of their heads, I'm just going to have to learn to live with it. You might choose to humor me, but you are under no obligation to do so.

Questions about how to treat religious paraphernalia are weird and difficult. Some of my acquaintances are Christian, and some of them think that the Bible is the infallible word of God, and that it must always be spoken of with respect. I think it's an old book, one of many old books, more interesting than some but less interesting than others, and that it deserves only the respect deserved by any book. From my perspective, the person who thinks that the Bible deserves special respect is no more rational than the person who thinks that The Amazing Spider Man #1 deserves special respect. In fact, I own a copy of the Koran, and I can guarantee you I've mishandled it. Like most of my other books, it has sometimes ended up on the floor, and it's definitely been carried around in one hand, and handled ungloved. And I don't feel the least bit bad about this.

Now, because I'm a weenie liberal in many ways, I tend to show non-Christian religions more deference than Christianity. That ain't rational, but it's true. Other religions haven't bugged the crap out of me and thrust their most irrational doctrines in my face ever since I was born. Consequently, other religions don't trigger the same ire in my that Christianity does. But it's important to try to control these differential reactions, and be equally tough on Christianity and Islam.

I ask myself: what if some sect of Christians made these demands on us about the handling of the Bible? How seriously would I take these requests and violations thereof?

Not very, I'm afraid. If someone has a superstitious view about the status of an ancient book, that puts no special obligation on me. Under some conditions I might choose to humor them, but I have no obligation to do so. In this case we might have some prudential interest in handling the Koran in a traditionally acceptable way--we might, for example, hope to avoid making the Islamic world hate us even more. But that doesn't mean that we would be doing something moral wrong by "mis"handling it.

But these issues are hard, and there's no way to deal with them effectively in a blog post. The source to go to on such points is Joel Feinberg's Offense to Others. But it's going to take a lot to convince me that we're committing crimes by handling the Koran in non-traditional ways.

11 Comments:

Blogger rilkefan said...

I don't see why the above argument wouldn't be applicable by a culture which had a different view of the value of individual lives than we do. "Sure we killed the prisoners we took, but so what if they have superstitions about H. Sapiens bodies? Killing a few of them doesn't affect their society, which is the important thing." Or why the above doesn't reduce to "religion is stupid and should be ignored where inconvenient or non-overlapping with my views". Which I'm sympathetic to in an intellectual sense, but not as a way to organize our foreign policy.

Anyway, why can't the crime be the offense?

1:21 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

rilkefan,

c'mon, dude, you can't be serious with this shit. It doesn't hold up for a second: the difference we're dealing with is that American culture doesn't revere the koran but muslim cultures do: EVERY GODDAMN CULTURE ON EARTH has a taboo against murder.

For the most part, I agree with Winston: I happen to find both Christianity and Islam horribly obnoxious and damaging to human society and human potential and both of their holy books elict absolutely zero reverence from me and even if somebody did throw a Koran down the toilet there should be no statutue to punish them with: since when is the desecration of a book a criminal offense?

However, the question of what role these sort of allegations play in anti-Americanism in the muslim world is trickier. Still, even on that score, I tend to think that unqualified support for Israel, the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib and indefinite detentions have probably fucked that relationship up indefinetly, and some Koran abuse isn't going to make much of a long-term difference one way or the other.

2:18 PM  
Blogger rilkefan said...

"EVERY GODDAMN CULTURE ON EARTH has a taboo against murder."

What's murder, exactly? Joshua wasn't ordered by his god to murder both man and woman, young and old, just to kill them.

2:55 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Man, you're, like, blowing my mind.

3:37 PM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

I think I follow rilkefan, who is an occasional nemesis. You just gotta get your multicultural groove on.

Philosophically, I think the proper stance is always agnosticism; to declare the Bible or the Qur'an false is an assertion that cannot be logically proven, since you can't prove a negative.

Further, as children of the Enlightenment, we superior beings grant respect to the person who believes something, not the belief. We know that ancestral burial grounds must be given deference, not because we believe the dead are sacred, but because we uphold a freedom of religion for those who do. We don't dunk crucifices in urine, call them art, and put them on public display because we

Oh, never mind.

9:13 PM  
Blogger rilkefan said...

tvd, I was shooting more for "worst nightmare", but "nemesis" is ok, esp. if you could prepend an "arch". And if you get tortured by my govt by being subjected to art, I will certainly protest.

Anyway, my actual attitude is that only physics has any truth and these arguments about morals and ethics and so forth are ill-defined. But in any case, Winston probably wants to reconsider the post in view of the usual Friday evening truth-about-GWOT news dump.

2:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Back to the point of the post, the crime isn't intrinsic to the idea of mishandling a holy book. The crime is that we made a big point of saying we were going to respect their religion and we didn't. Again, I'm not sure why this is so frickin' hard for people to understand. It really shouldn't be.

If you make a huge point of something and then you turn around and do the opposite - on purpose - then it really should be no surprise that you get kicked in the teeth for doing that. It doesn't mean that it's something that's intrinsically wrong. It's just that your violating your own rules and that's something that humans see as being a very bad thing - regardless of the philosophical underpinnings.

I mean, you're dealing with the primitive brain here. Maybe that's just too hard for the philosophy types to come to grips with, but it seems pretty obvious to us less advanced types.

9:41 AM  
Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

So that's what I get for trying to help you out, eh, rilke? Even when I'm with you, you're against me.

4:29 PM  
Blogger Random Michelle K said...

Perhaps it's just me, but I'm bothered by the mistreatment of any book, be it the Quran, the Torah, or Webster's Dictionary.

I hate those creepy people who stand on campus handing out mini versions of "The New Testament" because then I'm stuck with a book that I don't know what to do with: throwing it away seems wrong, but I certainly don't have any interest in keeping it.

Looking at Guantonimo--I'd be disturbed if someone wrote curse words in or accidentally urinated on a library book, so I guess I can see why people would be upset about mistreating a Quran in such a manner.

9:29 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

I'm with you on that score, MK.

10:51 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Anonymous,
Oh, and dude, don't pull that reverse intellectual discrimination bit on me, o.k.? If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but I hate that "well, YOU'RE so frickin' SMART Mr. P-H-D that you can't see this think that normal people can see" bit. I don't think I every claimed to be smarter than average.

Other than that, I think your point's a good one. I didn't say that there weren't numerous ways in which this Koran stuff was bad, I was just talking about the idea/act of "desecration" of a "holy" book per se.

10:55 AM  

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