"Well, Steve, I'm afraid you've got it wrong. I'm afraid that in the Qur'an, and in many Hadith deemed by most authoritative muhaddithin to be the most authentic Muhammad's own behavior, his words and his acts, show that the message -- Kill the Unbelievers - certainly is there, explicitly in some places, and in many other places, it is the implicit message. And that, Steve, is exactly the kind of thing we have to know about, if we are to have any hope of convincing Muslims to re-interpret the Qur'an, to see it as a historical document, to put it back into history, and thus to truly "contextualize" what Muhammad said and did, as part of early seventh-century Arabia, as reflecting the mores and attitudes of that time, but not as if Muhammad himself were divine - Muslims like to mock Christians for believing in the divinity of Christ - and to convince themselves that to treat Muhammad as the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil, is to endow him with a quasi-divinity that comes perilously close to shirk, that is, polygamy. We must, Steve, if we are to save Islam, change its teachings, re-configure its meanings. I know this, I admit this, and that is what I am trying, nel mio piccolo, in my own little way, to do."
Now I take that "polygamy" to mean "polytheist"; it's the kind of copy error that creeps into a lengthy excoriation.
But, on reflection, it is kind of a useful "slip". The historical relationship between monogamy and (Judeo-Christian) monotheism, with its personal God, must be more than coincidental. If I'm a Christian, say, and if I'm not worshiping God, at least in part, when I love my wive - if my love for her is not modeled on some prior conception of the divine and its incarnation in each person - then my love must be idolatry. But if I presume to love (or ignore) several wives, then God indeed must be something unknowable, and/or the slippery slope to shirk must be all the more slippery however much I profess the oneness of God.
Michael Coren is a smart guy; yes, some of the things he says get my blood pressure up because he has a habit of playing devil's advocate with his guests and thus, in apparent seriousness, logically controverts positions he has previously adamantly held. But still, he says a lot of wise things.
Yet I just watched a youtube of his recent discussion of the Alberta Court's decision on the Stephen Boissoin/Alberta "Human Rights" Commission case - that great travesty of justice, perhaps the greatest scandal to legal due process and justice in Canadian history - and the common sense of Coren and his guests (well he does have one righteous guest, described as an "activist", without the sense to think other than that she knows just which kind of "hate" speech should be sanctioned with fines, as if she could never be on the wrong side of the powers that be in Canada, but I digress...) strikes me as nonsense.
Their common sense goes like this: well, sure we've now (in the light of Boissoin, Steyn, Levant, et. al.) learned the lesson that Human Rights Commissions should not be allowed to go anywhere near the policing of freedom of expression, because the Commisisons have been proven to be staffed by ideologues, arbitrarily asserting the power of the state in their official pronouncements, and with no ability to respect legal due process (for both personal and institutional reasons). But nonetheless, the argument goes, Human Rights Commissions are a good thing if they stick to their original purpose, which was, supposedly, to protect people who have been "discriminated" against in the pursuit of empoyment of housing.
Now even if one believes that business owners and rental property owners should not have the right to "discriminate" (whatever the many things that can mean in practice) in the exercise of their property rights (which don't exist in any full sense in Canada, I'll admit) - I don't believe we should hold this as any kind of general rule but this is a topic for another day - why is it that much of Canadian public opinion maintains the common sense that Commisions and Tribunals, which they admit are incapable of providing justice or due process in respect to "hate speech" or "free speech", are nonetheless at least minimally capable of doing so in other areas?
People like Coren argue that people who have been discriminated against in fields of employment or rental housing can't go to the courts because it's too expensive for them, in most cases, so there needs to be free recourse to "human rights" commissions. I'm wondering why, if people are so concerned about the rights of the poor, they don't just argue well, instead of publicly funding the large "human rights" industry in Canada, with its thousands of employees, we don't just hire a few more judges and lawyers and provide those with prima facie plausible complaints of "discrimination" free legal representation to make their case in a proper court of law, with all the protections of due process and all the standards of evidence and logic the courts uphold? It's assumed this would be much more expensive, but I'm not sure that this wouldn't turn out to be cheaper to the taxpayer than the present "human rights" bureaucracies, given the amount of invidious discrimination in Canada; but even if it weren't cheaper, why are we not willing to pay the price for full and proper due process for all?
I think people don't raise this kind of question because, at the end of the day, "common sense" in Canada remains of the view that poor people, and - in the awful PC expression - "people of colour", who feel victimized should have an easier time attacking businesses and the propertied classes than the latter should have defending their interests. It's ok if a McDonald's franchise owner gets his property rights (such as they are in Canada) lynched by some "human rights" official who gets to adjudicate an employee's complaint, based on the whims of her victimary "common sense" (I won't try to argue the point now, but I think it would be foolish to believe that our "human rights" law has developed a truly disinterested system of adjudication and procedure); but yes, it is a supreme scandal if Stephen Boissoin is told he can't make any "disparaging" remarks about homosexuals for the rest of his life.
Why is this "common sense", even on a "conservative" talk show like Michael Coren's? The despairing side of me thinks it is because those public "conservatives", or classical liberals, who have gotten used to appeasing the gods of our reigning victimary ideologies, still feel they can hold on to some more rigorous defense of freedom of expression. Perhaps they don't find this so difficult to do because "free speech" is still for some on the left a respectable rhetorical cause - the left who forever frill in declaring themselves, amidst the ideological near conformity of the universities, "public service" unions, and "activist" "communities", brave enemies/victims of some mythical "McCarthyism". This would be notwithstanding that, in much daily practice, political correctness and victimary ideology is pretty much all that the left ever any longer talks about and so its authority in such matters is something fiercely defended. And so the idea that maybe, say, a Jewish business owner should have the right to choose not to employ a Muslim (given fears, reasonable or not, of Islamic antisemitism) is yet unimaginable. How dare I even imagine it!!
Or maybe what I'm talking about is just the pragmatic common sense that in this day and age you can't really shut people up on the internet - and it's best just to ignore all those with bad ideas, as we are mostly all so instantly forgettable nowadays - unless you're going to sign on to the most appallingly transparent forms of arbtrary "justice", and use sledge hammers against ants; and that kind of performance just isn't good for anyone's political causes.
More generally, I think the problem is that few in Canada today have any coherent conception of what a human right is or where it comes from. Of course we're not alone, at a time when we hear about Germany imprisoning fathers who refuse to send their children to "sex education" classes that the state, with no sense of humour, no sense that it has become the all-consuming Nanny - calls "My Body Belongs to Me" (HT: Walker). Or when we hear about the great expense to which the Australian "human rights" authorities have gone to rule that a woman does not have the right to offer women-only vacation tours, (HT: Catfur) on the grounds that these would be discriminatory to men (as if that weren't their very point, as if discrimination might not sometimes be a good thing, an idea they seem to have been programmatically incapable of considering).
But again I digress. We have no hard conception of where human rights come from absent some conception of how any aspect of culture is generated, anthropologically. The great value of Generative Anthropology, as I have variously suggested at this blog, is that it provides a rigorous hypothesis (or now, perhaps, hypotheses) of how language or culture could ever have come into existence in the first place, and how this necessarily shared, public, scenic process of our coming into being is re-presented through time, giving us the historical processes in which we have come to discover or develop things like "human rights".
The basic idea of GA is that all culture is engendered as the means by which humans defer their conflicts, in order that they not turn unnecessarily violent. In other words, culture, freedom, rights, come into being because we collectively renounce, or defer appropriation, of some common object of desire. Freedom emerges from collective restraint, from equal sharing in the signs of desire/restraint. We have "human rights" to the extent we have developed the due processes by which no individual, nor any institution of state, can stop us from exercising them. Due process is not some mere means to the provision of justice. It is absolutely integral to it. If we think the case of some poor "victim" is so compelling that we can do away with expensive and time-consuming legal processes, what are the chances that our resulting Lynch mob will ever develop a firm understanding of justice as a process for deferring everyone's violent desires, instead of just a way of buying into one or another scapegoating myth of who is good and who is evil?
But when we begin to imagine a state that should promise us things the state cannot in reality possibly provide, such as an "end to discrimination" (as if our lynching of McDonald's franchisees, or "homophobes", or "hatemongers" were not itself an arbitrary or mythic form of disrimination) or "equality of outcomes" or "personal fulfillment", we are developing a notion of "human rights" that is not grounded in any rigorous conception of anthropological realities. We are instead developing a Gnostic religion that rejects the normal, the established "hegemony", rejects this fallen world, as somehow insufficient to the perfect vision we must somehow bring into being, by hook or by crook. The fact that "a world without discrimination" is a Utopian idea that can make little sense of any imaginable reality (we can change the bases for discrimination in society, but we must always discriminate in some ways among people) is not of interest to the present "human rights" crowd.
This is all by way of recommending you take a look at how John Robson has argued such a point about our indulgence in "metaphysicial madness", at the recent Free Speech and Liberty Symposium in Ottawa (ht again to The Blog of Walker):
At a time when Obama is embracing the idea of limiting freedom of speech at the United Nations, lest Islam be offended by its critics, let us not pretend that there is any guarantee of peace, international order, and civility that the UN can any longer provide.
We do not want to be led upon the high road to becoming a satellite of the German Nazi system of European domination. In a very few years, perhaps in a very few months, we shall be confronted with demands with which we shall no doubt be invited to comply. Those demands may affect the surrender of territory or the surrender of liberty. I foresee and foretell that the policy of submission will carry with it restrictions upon the freedom of speech and debate in Parliament, on public platforms, and discussions in the Press, for it will be said - indeed, I hear it said sometimes now - that we cannot allow the Nazi system of dictatorship to be criticised by ordinary, common English politicians. Then, with a Press under control, in part direct but more potently indirect, with every organ of public opinion doped and chloroformed into acquiescence, we shall be conducted along further stages of our journey.
Ezra Levant may portray himself, as an Alberta conservative, as someone not part of Canada's government-trusting Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor, mid-twentieth century, liberal welfare-state mainstream. Yet his manner of speaking is something distinctively Canadian; you only find quite this kind of impassioned, enraged, civility, this quaint diction, in Canada. So, it's compelling when he assures us that the parasitic federal and provincial "human rights" commissions that have inveigled their ways into policing our freedom of expression are Un-Canadian, the fruit no doubt of some kind of ill-considered heresy. Ezra, a somewhat identifiably-ethnic Canadian, reminds us, through his tv performance, that our much celebrated multiculturalism is actually dependent on some prior basis of unity, that our diversity is only ratified or truly recognizable (as a shared national political reality) to the extent it provides new bases, new ways of teaching us what unites us.
Ezra was just interviewed by Michael Coren, for the launch of Ezra's new book, Shakedown; it's an hour-long interview, an exercise in renewing our nation's covenant, and SDAmatt has posted five youtube videos to cover the whole. You can watch them in succession, here: Shakedown - Ezra Levant
Unfortunately, video of last night's Michael Coren show debate is not yet up on the internet, as far as I am aware. I saw some of the debate, a friend's clip, featuring mostly Warren Kinsella talking. And so here are some general thoughts on how I would approach Warren Kinsella's and Bernie Farber's arguments in favour of retaining Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Basically, Kinsella and Farber's arguments are only convincing if you assume a certain context for them. Their arguments, as most people know, are rooted in the response to the Holocaust, to the assumption that the normal culture of a normal modern Western society is not only capable of, but there is a sizeable risk of, turning into the kind of society where every class and profession will make its willing contribution to building the next Auschwitz.
If we lived in that kind of society, we wouldn't be having this debate about "free speech", in the first place. But if I thought we did live in such a society, I wouldn't hold quite the same positions I hold. (Most obviously, I probably wouldn't be trying to argue with the state, but rather undermine it or run away.) So it seems to me that our debate ultimately rests on how we apprehend our shared reality today.
K & F's post-Holocaust assumption is that our differences - all those for which "discrimination" is supposedly outlawed in Canada's "human rights" codes - are non-negotiable, except by the judiciary and in the highest backrooms of the government. It is a belief in the impossibility of normal society itself dividing the things or issues at stake, a belief in a non-negotiable indivisibility that affects so many of our debates, from abortion to schooling to employment law to "hate" speech.
Yet believing we do live in such a potentially genocidal society has all kinds of negative implications for those who must defer to Kinsella's and Farber's expert class, instead of fighting things out in freer less centralized arenas. It makes all of us less free. And ultimately that is the challenge we need to put to people: do you realize that only greater freedom can solve certain kinds of post-postmodern problems - the problems now posed by our previous "solutions" to the Holocaust - and that we are not in the 1930s? If we live forever with Farber's thoughtless "genocide starts with [bad] thoughts" then we can be sure that we will remain trapped in a world where all kinds of discussions can't be had. To question gay marriage, e.g., is to threaten a queer Holocaust... But how is such an understanding really liberating for anyone?
And so K and F should be questioned not largely in some abstract philosophical world but in terms of pragmatic realities in Canada today. (That is what K and F's opponents in the debate, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv and Mike Brock were starting to get at in the clip I saw.) I don't think you can tell people whose lives are genuinely threatened to grow a thicker skin; but you can tell people that there are many downsides to playing the group whose lives are ostensibly threatened - as if that's the only way your leaders and patrons can get "heard" - and who are thus in need of the state to put a chill into their "enemies".
Taking this step almost guarantees these opponents will become enemies and not potential interlocutors in a debate that can hope to find a basis - i.e. the ongoing debate whose healthy existence continually renews the basis - for mutual co-existence, either nationally or internationally. It may be true that there can be little accommodation or dialogue with those who hold to some more primitive understandings of what is sacred and non-negotiable to their group. But to the extent there is any hope for finding something sacred that individuals in a free society or global economy can share and divide, we don't get anywhere near there under our present victim-worshiping discussions and regulations in Canada, it seems to me.
Kinsella is the quintessential liberal, with a great faith in implementing expert/"judicial" processes to mediate problems of "hate". That sounds good to a lot of people because it is what we have been told for a century or so now and especially in the last forty or fifty years. But it is not enough to defer to the experts; at the end of the day there has to be some acknowledgment of reality: can our experts and "judges" today really achieve the task the Kinsellas want them to achieve? Do their careful processes get results? Do they create a sense of justice? Or do all the best laid plans no longer work? Does justice appear arbitrary and political no matter how much careful mediation is attempted? Does justice become indebted to a need for victims to wave around?
Many of us in Canada today no longer have faith in the post-war system. That's the reality. The basic problem, as I see it, is that our expert class mediation - e.g. mediation of some words alleged "likely" to harm - in pretending to appear fair and disinterested, actually requires highly involved and interested "investigations", i.e. bureaucrats engaging in lengthy politically correct talk sessions, in mediating a now politicized law, that go on for years and never really provide a sense of just closure. Offensive words by nobodies can take up years and millions of taxpayer dollars. All kinds of writing is chilled because no one knows if they can say what they want to say, e.g., about Islam as a political religion. If all the experts and "human rights" officials in Canada can't help us transcend the debates and conflicts we're having, which I think to be evidently the case on many issues of "multiculturalism", then we need a new way of mediating our rivalries. But it will take some shared good faith to go there.
When Kinsella offers an emotive argument - "what about the kid who comes out of his house and finds a racial slur on his mailbox"? - I would say well that kind of thing should probably be dealt with under the criminal law of making threats, or possibly vandalism. But for Kinsella to then drop that personal context and go into the abstract world where we should prosecute anyone who makes racially derogatory comments on the internet is to say that a) we believe there really is a threatening "normal" and potentially Auschwitzian culture out there (except this time the state is on the good side), and not just a few mentally ill or terminally resentful people best ignored; and that b) the members of racialized group x cannot but escape their racialized status and stand up as free individuals not too worried about the racists out there and not wanting a victim-championing cure that is worse than the disease. But that all depends on the reality out there in Canada today; and that is what we have to make the Kinsellas debate.
But in order to really win that debate we have to do more to use this debate in a way that is truly liberating for all involved (keeping in mind that some sacred things, in certain political religions, just can't continue to exist and be at peace with the modern world that now sustains us all). We too have to argue in ways that help us move towards creating the reality in which fear of Auschwitz makes less and less sense; that is what the present debate should really be about. Debate on section 13 needs to become the sign of a new and freer shared order that we are ever trying to build.
The other side only wants to trap us in a limbo of fears. Kinsella and Farber want to throw out red herrings like "what about child pornography?", knowing full well that people will allow for those who have, say, certain literary fantasies, but will not stand for those who abuse children. Ultimately these invocations of an evil that, according to K and F, needs a new and improved expert/speech limiting class to redeem the expert/speech limiting class of the Nazi state, are shoddy ways to make an argument about our shared reality. It is to ignore, most of all, that Auschwitz required much more than bad words: it required a people committed to a state of total war against some imagined evil. Auschwitz may have started with the first guy to hate Jews, but it required World War II to really happen.
It is not enough to invoke that first moment of hate as a justification for state action, especially since resentment of the other is a universal human necessity or inevitability, fundamental to our fallen human reality. We need also to be worried, rather more worried, about justifying the state's righteous calls to war against "the normal" - that evil other within us all. That is what the other side in this free speech debate is doing. They are the righteous (Kinsella's manner on tv is rather supercilious!) defenders of the state and expert class against evil norms. So I'd argue it is they who are taking the first steps to the next genocide. Yes, that's (only) a little hyperbolic, but at least I'll admit it.
I call Farber and Kinsella's position as potentially conducive to genocide in order to insist on some proper symmetry in our claims on a sacred, but I believe infinitely divisible and exchangeable object of common national interest - individual freedom. We need that symmetry to allow for the truly free exchange we can have without undue fear, and that I have faith will best mediate both side's present fears. Kinsella and Farber don't want that symmetry; they want to be the superior experts of a tv-mediated elite with a privileged access to and role in defining the sacred things of our nation. They want to patronize and institutionalize a victim class in the name of "human rights". Time to move on.
The following feature from the National Post covers one of the main themes of my interests so nicely that I run it in full and hope it spreads to every mind on Earth, it being an excellent summary of eugenics and a great piece on socialists in general. Socialisst: I call them Death Hippies for a number of reasons, and this piece will shed more light on at least one reason:
Michael Coren: Don't blame right-wing thugs for eugenics — Socialists made it fashionable
An exhibition of the history of those scientific ideas that gave a grimy intellectual veneer to the Nazi genocide opens this week at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. The collection centres on eugenics, the notion that humanity can be improved and perfected by selective breeding and the elimination of individuals and groups considered to be undesirable. Entitled Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, it reveals how it was not thoughtless right-wing thugs as much as writers and scientists, the intellectual elite, who led the movement.
The exhibit is important, accurate but, regrettably, long overdue. It also fails to stress just how much the socialist left initiated and supported the eugenics campaign, not only in Germany but in Britain, the U.S. and the rest of Europe. Playwright George Bernard Shaw, English social democrat leader Sydney Webb and, in Canada, Tommy Douglas were just three influential socialists who called, for example, for the mass sterilization of the handicapped. In his Master's thesis The Problems of the Subnormal Family, the now revered Douglas argued that the mentally and even physically disabled should be sterilized and sent to camps so as not to "infect" the rest of the population.
It is deeply significant that few if any of Douglas's left-wing comrades in this country or internationally were surprised or offended by his proposals. Indeed the early fascism of 1920s Italy, while unsavoury and dictatorial, had little connection with social engineering and eugenics. The latter German version of fascism was influenced not by ultra conservatism in southern Europe but, as is made clear in the writings of the Nazi ideologues, by the Marxist left.
The most vociferous and outspoken of the social eugenicists was the novelist HG Wells, author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man. He argued in best-selling books such as Anticipations and A Modern Utopia that the world would collapse and from this collapse a new order should and would emerge.
"People throughout the world whose minds were adapted to the big-scale conditions of the new time. A naturally and informally organised educated class, an unprecedented sort of people." A strict social order would be formed. At the bottom of it were the base. These were "people who had given evidence of a strong anti-social disposition", including "the black, the brown, the swarthy, the yellow." Christians would also "have to go" as well as the handicapped. Wells devoted entire pamphlets to the need of "preventing the birth, preventing the procreation or preventing the existence" of the mentally and physically handicapped. "This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and the sensual is possible. I have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned and achieved."
The people of Africa and Asia, he said, simply could never find a place in a modern world controlled by science. Better to do away with the lot. "I take it they will have to go" he said of them. Marriage as it is known would have to end but couples could form mutually agreed unions. They would list their "desires, diseases, needs" on little cards and a central authority would decide who was fitted for whom.
Population would be rigidly controlled, with forced abortion for those who were not of the right class and race. Religion would be banned, children would be raised in communes and all would be well. The old and the ill would, naturally, have to be done away with and doctors would be given the authority to decide who had a right to live, who had a duty to die.
In the United States socialist writer Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and the mother of the abortion movement, called for a radical eugenics approach as early as the first years of the 20th century. She wrote of the need for "a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring. It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stop breeding these things. Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them. Herein lies the key of civilization."
The key of civilization. Unlocking the doors of a hell once unimaginable but now, after the Holocaust, the Ukrainian genocide, Pol Pot and Mao's mass slaughter, entirely within the grasp of contemporary sensibilities. History is often clouded by fashion and the whims of the victorious. Because some of the most pernicious intellectual criminals of the past century wore red they have escaped condemnation. It is time for the clouds to clear and the fashions to change.
I like capitalism only because I've lived in enough socialist nightmare nations to see the true face of evil that socialism is. Socialists are Death Hippies. If ever anyone wants to make the world a better place and make people happy and whatever else socialists think they want to do, they can start by creating a business and employing people and providing something concrete and mediocre, something boring and banal and of philistine worth. Make the world a better place by creating a couple of jobs that allow people some income to buy food and pay rent and dress nicely. That's what it takes. I hate grand schemes. Everyone is crazy and fucked-up to some degree, and they get on just fine for the most part if they have some kind of decent life, the kind of life a capitalist society can and does provide. Food, shelter, clothing, and some relief from those who would save us all. Everyone else gets on fairly well, especially without being "improved" by those who would kill them for the sake of the improvement. Death to Death Hippies. Yes, God save us from those who would save us from ourselves.
