Monday, February 13, 2006

At this point, it's hard to find any piece of commentary that offers up anything fresh on the now infamous Mohammad cartoon controversy. But the op-ed in today's Globe  by Cathy Young -- who favored publishing the cartoons as part of the news coverage -- deserves credit for making this crucial point:

In a New York Times column, David Brooks contrasts the Islamic extremists' attitudes with ours: The West, with its ''legacy of Socrates and the agora" and its ''progressive and rational" mindset, is open to a multiplicity of arguments, perspectives, and ''unpleasant facts," while radical Muslims cling to ''pre-Enlightenment" dogmatism and shrink from the ''chaos of our conversation."

Yet Brooks overlooks the fact that a large segment of the population in the West, and especially in the United States, rejects the progressive, rational mindset and embraces pre-Enlightenment values as well. Fundamentalist Christians, traditionalist Catholics and ultra-Orthodox Jews do not, with very few exceptions, call for violence in response to heresy; that is a key distinction. But they too often equate criticism (let alone mockery) of their beliefs with ''religious bigotry" or ''hate speech." And they, too, often seek not simply to protest but to shut down offensive speech.

The truth is that modernity with its ''chaos of conversation," its chaos of lifestyles, its attitude that there is nothing more sacred than freedom of expression, is profoundly threatening to many religious traditionalists of different faiths.

In her column, Young singles out William Donahue, the head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, who has made a career out of being outraged at what he considers egregious media insults to conservative Catholics and of cranking out press releases at a breakneck pace to make those views known. To Donahue's credit, I guess, he is intellectually consistent in applauding US media outlets who didn't run the Mohammad cartoons -- even if he thinks they did so for the wrong reasons.

So maybe we all ought to be a little less cavalier about throwing around the idea of "western values," when not everyone in the west is on board by any means. Based on his track record of five years in office, why would anyone get the idea that George Bush is a big fan of the First Amendment?  And, God forbid, the right to dissent?