The news media are all filled with outrage and fear following the killing of 12 members of the Charlie Hedbo staff and the wounding of seven more. The people killed were cartoonists and writers who had over the years offended the sensibilities of Islam and made unflattering caricatures of Mohammad and contemporary Islamic leaders. The offices were firebombed in 2011 after naming Prophet Mohammad as “Editor-in-Chief”.
Access to the offices where the killings took place was gained by waiting for one of the staff members to pick up her daughter from daycare and then forcing her to let them in. By hiding under a desk she managed to avoid injury.
Two of the killers were born and raised in France. The police identified as Hamyd Mourad and brothers Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi as the killers and are conducting a national search for them.
This attack comes just two days after demonstrations in Germany by the Pegida group to protest the growing islamisation of Europe. The Pegida demonstrations were denounced by celebrities and politicians as “xenophobic” and “intolerant”. Those opposing Pegida outnumbered those in the anti-islamisation protest.
One of the more common themes in the Western media reaction is the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword”.
Well.
No,
it’s not.
As Chairman Mao so perspicaciously observed, “power comes out of the barrel of a gun” and what all of our pen-wielding warriors will be demanding from now on are gun-toting bodyguards.
Statements like “the pen is mightier than the sword” and “power comes out of the barrel of a gun” are cliches. Slogans are at best like ideal laws in science. They only apply in textbooks where the reader is told what aspects of reality to ignore.
Other slogans or cliches draw our attention to this. “The Devil Is In The Details” or “When the rubber hits the road” remind us not to forget about context. Experts are people who not only know the rules but also know the contexts in which the rules do not precisely apply. Youngsters who know “F=ma” know jumping out of an airplane is a bad idea. Experts who know about air friction know skydiving is fun. Yesterday, for example, an airplane in New Zealand crashed. Nobody was hurt. Why? It was filled with six skydivers and six passengers. They all jumped out. So did the pilot. Had things not gone well the death toll would have been 13 and the world media would be running stories on how terrible it all was.
The general reason people say pens are mightier than swords relates to the role of communication in human society. It relates to the “power” of ideas.
But what is “power”?
In physics class we were given a little poem to remember the formula for electrical power. “Twinkle twinkle little star, 
Which almost worked for us but one classmate blurted out
“Little star up in the sky, 
Thus ruining it for everyone. And now for you, too.
Power also has a definitions for its mechanical manifestation.
Sometimes electrical power can be turned into mechanical power. This is known as “transduction”.
When the pen is used to motivate people into either picking up their guns and killing cartoonists (or picking up their guns to protect cartoonists) or to get everyone to put down their guns and resolve their disputes with words and pictures, then we are witnessing was is called “the power of ideas”.
Another kind of power.
Ideas are transmitted through words, deeds, and gestures.
And images.
The images used to transmit an idea must themselves present the idea either through representations or through icons. The are “communicative acts”.
The Parisian jihadis justified their actions by noting the ideas being communicated by the cartoons were deeply offensive and the appropriate action was communicate their displeasure with another communicative act. The act of killing the cartoonists.
The same cartoons which “communicated” the contempt the cartoonists had for Islam also “communicated” to the jihadists the need to kill the cartoonists in a manner which made their deaths iconographically significant. Both groups were “sending messages”.
If we look at these killings as forms of communication and if the message they were attempting to communicate was their degree of displeasure with the Charlie Hedbo worldview then we place these actions in the realm of “rational conduct”.
About a century and a half ago, Europe was in the grip of ongoing unrest because of the displacement of the working class by the industrial revolution. In 1871 the Paris Commune and one of its leading figures, the anarchist Errico Malatesta and others advocated what they called the “propaganda of the deed”. Those who followed this idea became the assassins, bombers, and rioters of their age. So violent were the anarchists the US government banned their entry in the Immigration Act of 1903.
In other words, they were banned for what they believed, for their worldview.
The idea of “propaganda by the deed” was born in Paris in the 1870s and was practised in Paris once again in 2015.
The second half of the 19th Century was a period of great dislocation for people and most of these dislocations were caused, eventually, by ideas. The ideas of the Industrial Revolution created what Marx would contemptuously call the “lumpen proletariate” and the ideas of ethnic nationalism which were in their own way reflections of the loss of the centrality of Christianity as the dominant worldview led to Zionism, the Unification of Germany and Italy, Pan Slavism, and the realisation that something we now call “culture” is an idea which aids us in placing ourselves in the world and in our community.
For the next 100 years Europe and the West would struggle with the psychological requirements for identity and belonging and the undeniable impact of the ideas we call “science” and “rationalism”.
Now, with Europe again on the cusp of another industrial revolution and its implications for social relationships and communications, we find another revolution which was unthinkable to most (but not all) of those in the 19th Century. We are striving for mastery of our own genetic makeup. Every conceivable pillar of identity is now under attack by our culture.
This time, in addition to the members of our own culture who are facing redundancy and exclusion, our borders have within them people whose cultural and historical preparations are even less tailored to cope with these changes than our own is.
Islam, after all, is a religion which regulates almost all aspects of life. One is, for example, to cut one’s fingernails every two weeks and one’s toenails every month. It is a religion which in theory at least is based on a set of unchanging rules for the running of society.
One of the great oversimplifications of Western Idealism, one of the great slogans is the statement “all cultures are equal”.
There are two issues which arise here. The first is simply “what do we mean by ‘culture’ anyway?” and the second is the more thorny “if all cultures are equal then what does the term ‘multiculturalism’ signify?”
Each of these statements can be justified. What cannot be done is to make them justifiable in the same context. When we talk about these two viewpoints they are in fact different viewpoints. They occupy different “points” from which the world is perceived.
Recall the different ideas of “power” encountered earlier. It is possible to argue that the pen is “mightier” (more powerful) than the sword (or a gun) in one context but in another one sees the truth of the relationship between guns and power.
The gun has the power of compulsion. The pen has the power of persuasion. Failing to get the contexts sorted out properly leads us into one of the most common logical fallacies in daily life. Aristotle called it the fallacy of the fourth term. Today it is often termed a “category error” and another term for it is “equivocation”.
In mathematics and science it’s a mistake caused by sloppiness or ignorance. In law it represents a tactic open to both sides in an adversarial dispute. In art and literature it provides the ambiguity needed for the misunderstandings in which both tragedy and comedy see their plots advance. When found in the public policies of democratic states it is seen as hypocrisy, bias, preferential treatment, and special privileges.
Just two days before the killings at Charlie Hebdo, the Wall Street Journal’s “Weekend Interview” was titled “How to Fight the Campus Speech Police: Get a Good Lawyer”. The same people who now speak in stirring support of “free speech” may well be those who also will, without any hesitation, proscribe “hate speech”, “sexist language”, “islamophobia” and “homophobia”. They may well also denounce “eurocentrism”, “racism”, “sexism”, “anti-semitism”, “whiteness”, and “patriarchy” while they’re at it. In Canada the graduates of Trinity Western’s school of law are not permitted to do their articles either in British Columbia or in Ontario because their university has a code of conduct which prohibits sexual activity between unmarried people. Two days after the Charlie Hebdo killings groups in Western Democracies were calling for the abolition of their various “hate speech” laws.
Nobody should really expect any culture anywhere or at any time to defend absolutely free speech. It would permit libel, slander, and all manner of misrepresentation. It would make society basically unworkable. The idea of being able to express one’s thoughts “freely” was at the outset not intended to be a way to flood the town square with kiddie porn or patent falsehoods about other members of the community. Originally it was meant to hold those who were in positions of authority and trust to account. The right to free speech was defined at the beginning as the right to criticise the government. It was related to what we now call “transparency”. It was seen as necessary for the kind of social harmony which is only possible in a society which is as free from corruption as is humanly possible. Societies work best when the people in it believe their fellow citizens are all carrying out their responsibilities as honestly and competently as possible (whether because they are inherently virtuous or they fear the shame of being shown to be dishonest and incompetent) and the openness and transparency must also extend to the reasons for certain people being given the authority they possess. Many societies have mixtures of aristocratic and meritocratic forms of legitimacy but they too are governed by the need for transparency.
And this brings us back to “culture”. When we look at France’s Front National or Britain’s UKIP or the Dutch Party for Freedom we encounter people who believe their respective cultures are not congenial with the culture of Islam. When people in those countries take up the mantle of multiculturalism and denounce Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, and Geert Wilders as xenophobes and islamophobes another idea of culture is being given to us.
What is “culture” anyway? Can both of these groups be correct in the same way that both the statements relating pens to power are also correct? Is there a contextual understanding which will allow us to place into a common framework the two (or three if we include Islam) contending worldviews?
Anthropologists speak of culture in several ways. When they examine archaeological finds they are primarily looking at the “material” culture of a society. This gives an idea of technology, of economy, and of various approaches to social status. Examining burials can show some clues as to the attitudes towards death and eternity.
A society which has written records can give us insights into their worldviews, their ways of understanding the human condition, their ideas. If cultures are not only shared languages and shared economic undertakings but also shared ideas then multiculturalism must not only confront technological and linguistic dissimilarities but also a possible lack of agreement on ideas. Some of those ideas could possibly involve the most basic tenets of how a society is to be organised.
Cartoons are little more than lines on paper. They are iconographic representations of events, individuals, and possibly through allusion to metaphors, of ideas. They are not only highly symbolic forms of communication, they can only have relevance if the iconography of the cartoon is shared. It is only when the iconography is shared that additional modifications to the way the cartoon is rendered can make it funny, informative, insightful, offensive, and so on. They occupy a level in the hierarchy of communicative actions which is presumably inaccessible to frogs, dogs, and most likely even chimps.
As such they can engage that part of human consciousness which is most unique to humans. It is that same level of consciousness in which our ideas of the meaning and purpose of life, of the distinction between law and justice, and the abstractions we call mathematics and philosophy are located. The content of particular cartoons may be frivolous or absurd or boring to us but the ability we have to make such determinations is given to us by our highest intellectual capacities. And it is from those highest intellectual capacities we apprehend what we generally take to be the answers to the most important questions of our existence. The most resilient and advanced forms of culture provide not only the technological means for daily physical survival, not only the patterns for the organisation of how the necessary tasks of communal life, and not only the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable conduct in communal dealings, but they also provide concepts of individual virtue and the moral justification for the continuation of the community’s patterns itself. They may also extend the definition of the community’s relationship to other communities and justify (or even mandate) everything from peaceful co-existence to the need to conquer and force into submission all those which differ in their cultural interpretations.
Here we encounter that part of human culture which is essentially confined to human consciousness. This is the aspect of culture which allows us to synchronise our individual sense of self, our sense of identity, our experience of existence, with those around us. This is the source of those shared understandings which give us our place in history as well as our role in the present. This is the genesis of those values and behaviours which make it possible for different communities to live both distinctly as themselves while harmoniously dealing with one another. It is also the genesis of those values and behaviours which make it legitimate for one community to exterminate, subjugate, or expel another.
Analogies are not proofs but they can be useful for illustration. Keeping in mind that “cultures” are not “atoms” it may be beneficial to use this as an analogy.
Each culture has some core values which cannot be removed without changing it. An atomic nucleus is defined ultimately by reference to the number of protons it has. Changing that number invariably changes it to a different atom. Atoms can have different isotopes and different levels of ionisation but as long as they have the same number of protons there is some definable group to which they invariably and exclusively belong.
When we confront secular French society we find words like “secularism”, “rationalism”, “democracy”, and “tolerance”. When we look at Islam we discover Sharia law which has words like “submission”, “ummah”, “caliphate”, “jizya”, “jihad”, “taqqiya” and rules on how to deal with “unbelievers” and “polytheists”.
Extending this atomic-nucleus analogy allows the posing of the following questions:
First, would a dialogue based on the comparative evaluation of the various cultural core values be possible? Would it lead to a greater understanding of what kinds of state and what kinds of state laws could accommodate particular cultural orientations? This may lead to one or all sides having to surrender various aspects of their collective life and have them excluded from “the public square”.
Second, would it be advisable to augment existing immigration laws for various countries to go beyond the present educational, occupational, and physical attributes and look at cultural values as well?
Third, will we find that only some groups cultures are able to co-exist peacefully for multiple generations with one another?
Fourth, are there some cultures which must dwell alone?
As these words are written the news reports inform me the jihadists in Paris, like their victims, are dead. The consequences of their actions live on.
Unjustified Margins 