Chait reminds us of this abhorrent 2011 opinion piece by Time magazine's Paris bureau chief, penned in the wake of Charlie Hebdo's firebombing. Wrote, in part, Bruce Crumley:
Members of … free societies have to exercise a minimum of intelligence, calculation, civility and decency in practicing their rights and liberties—and that isn’t happening when a newspaper decides to mock an entire faith on the logic that it can claim to make a politically noble statement by gratuitously pissing people off….
So, yeah, the violence inflicted upon Charlie Hebdo was outrageous, unacceptable, condemnable, and illegal. But apart from the "illegal" bit, Charlie Hebdo’s current edition is all of the above, too.
Crumley's argument is easy enough to fathom. We should all behave with "acceptable" civility. But Crumley left a couple things out of his morality and human-decency lesson, and their absence turns his argument to mush. He neglected to issue comprehensible guidelines as to precisely what constitutes civility and exactly who should draw its parameters. Is it government officials, who may interpret what I see as necessary incivility as instead an unacceptable offense against society's sensibilities? Is it schoolmarms? Is it the Church? I believe we already tried that one.
And those parameters. If mocking my religious ideology is unacceptable, then surely mocking anyone's religious ideology is just as unacceptable, be it veganism or voodoo. It's a sensitivity thing. And if my religious feelings are to be delicately protected from uncivil speech — to avoid a shattered society — should not my political views be covered by the same official protection?
It ain't long before Crumley's argument results in an altogether incoherent, upside-down kind of anarchic phantasmagoria. In his acceptably civil society, Lutheran neo-Nazis could be found bellowing on any street corner, but disallowed would be my ridiculing presence — for what I considered my "politically noble" statements would be received by some, no doubt, as merely "gratuitously pissing people off."
A paraphrase of WarGame's WOPR perhaps says it best: When it comes to censorship, the only winning move is not to play. Q.E.D., Crumley's opinion piece.