They don’t care about winning you over, only about making you submit

Peggy Noonan and Thomas Sowell. They always write with simple clarity.

Amid all the editorials fueled by outrage and anger and sanctimony, Noonan has produced a simple declaration. So many others want to cover their bets. Statements taking the form of "The attack on Charlie Hebdo is a crime but . . .", "I am committed to free, responsible speech . . .," "They have the right to publish anything they want but they ought to have seen this coming." Noonan, correctly, will have none of that. You are either for unfettered free speech or you are not. If you are not, then don't try and cloak yourself in the virtuous mantle of free speech while shackling it with restrictions.

Charlie Hebdo magazine has struck me as aimed at the immature, or at least the not fully formed. Its cartoons and other humor are broad and vulgar, even primitive, not witty or sly. The magazine delights in crudely, grossly insulting all faiths, especially Islam. But as a Westerner would say, so what? It has been alleged by a few people that the staff of Charlie Hebdo brought the tragedy on themselves. That is exactly what was said of Salman Rushdie, that he shouldn’t have written such an offensive book.

Maybe it would be instructive to look at how we in the West handle what is rude and unpleasant and offensive.

First, our freedoms are not merely our “traditions,” our “ways,” “reflective of Enlightenment assumptions” or “very pleasant.” In America especially, they are everything to us. Here freedom of expression is called free speech, and it is protected in the first of the Constitution’s amendments because it is the most important of our rights.

In the way that courage is the first of the virtues because without it none of the others are possible, the First Amendment protects the freedom upon which all others depend. Without free speech no difference of opinion can be resolved, no progress made in the law or in politics, no truth found and held high, no scandal unearthed and stopped.

But free speech takes patience. It requires us to hold our temper and give each other plenty of room in which to operate.

This is how we deal with offensive speech:

In the late 1980s, Andres Serrano produced “Piss Christ,” a photograph of a small crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine. That didn’t go over well with a lot of Christians. They wrote op-eds, protested peacefully, and criticized the National Endowment for the Arts for subsidizing the work with tax money. The arguments were vigorous. But the protests were peaceful, and no one even dreamed of harming the artist.

In the late 1990s it was Chris Ofili, whose painting “The Holy Virgin Mary” depicted Mary surrounded by pornographic images and smeared with elephant dung. When it was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum it didn’t go over well with Catholics, including Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. The museum received public money. There were protests and arguments, the mayor withheld funds, the museum sued him and won. No one ever dreamed of harming the artist.

We resolve these things peacefully in the West. And this is not only “tradition.” We know on some level that this is how civilization keeps itself together. I remember long conversations during these controversies in which people tried to view the provocative works charitably. Maybe the artist is trying, awkwardly and imperfectly, to say something big and even good? Maybe he’s trying to say: “You say you love Christ but you don’t honor him.” Maybe he’s trying to say, “You say you honor Mary, but in your own actions and lives you cover her not with glory but dung.” Or maybe the artists were just talentless hacks producing the only thing they were good at: publicity.

The point is people considered and debated. They didn’t pick up a gun.

A singular feature of extremist Islamists is that they are not at all interested in persuasion. They don’t care about winning you over, only about making you submit. They want to menace and threaten. They want to frighten. They enjoy posing with the severed head.

It is the West’s job not to be overcome by fear, not to give an inch.

Steady is the word.

Steady indeed. While the assaults from outside by radical Islamists are quite obvious in their intent (no matter how the clerissy attempt to avert their eyes - see the NYT self-censorship, the reluctance to translate the West African terrorist group Boko Haram's name (Western education is forbidden)) they are not, in my view the greatest threats.

We eventually respond to obvious external danger. Eventually, over years or decades, radical Islam will be conquered in the West and in their heartlands. I think the greatest threats are those near to home. It's not even our artists. Who takes Serrano or Ofili seriously as an artist. They get their full recognition as self-publicists but the number of people who regard them as serious artists must be vanishingly small.

No, I think our greatest threat to our intellectual discourse comes from those remnant statists propagating Gramscian memes. They have found shelter in the our big educational institutions in sociology, gender studies, ethnic studies and anthropology and have begun to eat away at the traditional humanities and the education department. Their worn out and discarded theories are still alive and well in corners of our K-12 education system.

All the calls for speech codes and hate crimes and regulation of communication between the sexes and catcalling and microaggressions and triggers and the whole panoply of discordant speech are naked power grabs. "You can't say that . . ." is the modus operandi of every dictator and there are innumerable dictators in our midst, all eager to stop people from saying things. Those are the ones we really have to watch because they sound reasonable and they look like us and their threat isn't apparent until you start paying attention to what they are really saying and doing. "They don’t care about winning you over, only about making you submit."

UPDATE: Now James Madison, there was someone who defend freedom of speech without being all equivocal.

Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of everything; and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press. It has accordingly been decided, by the practice of the states, that it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than, by pruning them away, to injure the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits. And can the wisdom of this policy be doubted by anyone who reflects that to the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression? – Report on the Virginia Resolutions, (1800-01-20)