Douglas Todd: Defending the right to offend

Douglas Todd’s reflections on Charlie Hebdo and the ensuring debates over freedom of speech and religion:

The process of secularization is now thoroughly ensconced in the West; in effect, it declares there is no consensus over what is sacred.

As philosophers such as Canada’s Charles Taylor have pointed out, secularization has elevated the value of doubt so that it’s at least equal to values about what is sacred.

Taylor believes secularism is imperfect, but that it’s a cultural advance.

Not all religious leaders agree.

Even the most staunch defenders of Canadian multiculturalism, such as scholar Will Kymlicka, recognize that’s a problem.

Kymlicka admits religion provides the toughest test of multiculturalism. Canadians, Kymlicka says, have become accustomed to tolerating, and even welcoming, people of diverse ethnic backgrounds.

But religion is not about skin colour; it’s about belief systems. And belief systems make decisions about what is of ultimate value, which can sometimes form into rigid ideology.

That can lead to beliefs that some things are absolutely taboo, such as visual images of Muhammad.

Taking the secularization argument further, some religion scholars say the modern emphasis on doubt, paradoxically, creates healthier religions.

That’s because secularization, at its best, respects the past, but is willing to question it.

In that way, the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment were secularizing movements.

Some go so far to say Jesus and Buddha were secularizers: Reformers who upset the religious status quo, sometimes joking about it.

I’ve never heard anyone maintain Muhammad was a secularizer, but the case could be made, since he was also a reformer, who challenged the degrading tribal customs of seventh-century Arabia.

One Charlie Hebdo cartoon that appeared in recent years featured Muhammad crying, lamenting how he had come to be loved by violent and “idiotic” fundamentalists.

I have no need to publicly mock someone’s religious (or atheistic) beliefs. But that doesn’t mean I won’t be accused of it: Some people are extremely easy to offend.

Do we walk on eggshells around such people, religious and otherwise, who believe they have a kind of sacred right to be hyper-sensitive? Or do we engage in honest exchange to defend the values of a democratic society?

Even though I dislike some of the cruder forms of satire, I dearly hope the genre has a robust future.

Douglas Todd: Defending the right to offend.