Response to the shootings by Le Plus cartoonist JM:o

The horrific attacks on Charlie Hebdo  have brought forth a defence of free expression from politicians, journalists, and ordinary citizens. But the outpouring of support is an exception in a broader pattern of events. The French President tries to call for a national unity that seems little more than a distant memory. Satirists across Europe convey their shock and grief – but everyone is rightfully nervous about republishing the Muhammad cartoons which put Charlie Hebdo on the radical Islamist death list. As Foreign Policy magazine and Reason.com have both pointed out, we are not all Charlie Hebdo, and not a few Western outlets once condemned them for using the same freedoms they now defend. FP recalls a victim-blaming Time article written after Charlie Hebdo’s offices were firebombed. Author Bruce Crumley wondered how the common good could possibly be served by “tempting belligerent reaction”. The most disgusting response following the shootings came from a Financial Times writer who accused the magazine of “Muslim-baiting”. Despite generating a negative reaction, these articles seem to reflect the general trend of free speech more accurately than the vigils currently being held across the world. And even with #JeSuisCharlie trending, there is little reason to think that this will change.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the principle of free speech seems to be losing support among up-and-coming Western brahmins. Would the university which forbade students from discussing ideas the student union didn’t like ever allow cartoons attacking protected religions? Charlie Hebdo’s commitment to intellectual freedom is at odds with Harvard leftists who don’t believe that it should extend to violating their social activist forms of “justice”. One wonders how many of the speech codes which at least 60% of American universities now have would have banned it altogether. But is that the whole story? If these trends in academia and media were reversed, would free and open expression be secured? I submit that there is no reason to believe this is true. The key to understanding why lies in the nature of order in diverse societies.

Let’s look at a non-Western state known for being a cultural hub. Singapore is extremely diverse as a country. The three-quarter Chinese majority lives alongside Malays, Indians, and Western expats. English, Mandarin and other Chinese dialects, Malay, and other languages are widely spoken. Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and traditional Chinese beliefs are practiced. Yet Singapore’s stable and orderly society has been carefully engineered by its leaders and comes with tradeoffs. Free speech in Singapore is a very different thing. The constitution sets limits: citizens must respect the judiciary, and threats to racial or religious harmony are dealt with severely. To quote a 2013 report by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy:

“A person who promotes ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore can be convicted under the Sedition Act, and be fined up to $5,000 or jailed up to three years, or both…In recent years, the Sedition Act has been invoked on several occasions.”

The report details these occasions, and most include Chinese citizens making racist comments about Malays and Muslims. In one case, a Christian couple was punished for distributing anti-Islamic and anti-Catholic literature. Punishments range from community service to jail time. Singapore is constantly wary of the social consequences of their investment policies. From cultural differences in the rising Filipino population to the management of foreign workers, its leaders keep the country well away from the brink of conflict.

This helps us understand why Singapore employs the stringent laws it is famous for. Singapore enforces harsh punishments on minor infractions in hopes of avoiding greater disorder. When you can get caned for vandalizing a building, you aren’t going to start fomenting physical violence. It’s essentially a broken-window approach to racial and religious cohesion. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani employed a similar philosophy against petty offences while in office, known as a period when crime rapidly decreased.

Swedish Artist Dan Park responds to protesters. The sign says “degenerate art”, a term used by the Nazis. Via sydsvenskan.se

Hate speech laws in the West have much the same purpose. They are intended to keep ethnic, religious, and other minorities from feeling threatened by speech which could incite violence. Hate speech laws intended to fight political extremists become more widely used to ensure social cohesion as diversity increases. Flemming Rose, the man who originally published the fateful Muhammad cartoons at Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, knows this rather well. In a recent article, he recounts some of the most shocking examples. Did you know that in 2014 the Swedish government not only jailed an artist for his work, but also destroyed the offending pieces? In his book, Rose argues that such laws reduce humans to mere objects. Those who condemned the cartoons as inciting violence essentially painted Muslims as agency-less automatons, unable to resist waging Jihad against anyone who dares mock their religion. Or so Rose would say. And yet the reality is that the nature of the mob is very different than the nature of the individual. Gustave le Bon, the man who wrote some of the first work on crowd psychology, put it very eloquently:

“It is [because the crowd is more than just a collection of individuals] that juries are seen to deliver verdicts of which each individual juror would disapprove, that parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of which each of their members would disapprove in his own person. Taken separately, the men of the Convention were bourgeoisie of peaceful habits. United in a crowd, they did not hesitate, under the influence of some leaders, to send the most manifestly innocent people to the guillotine.”

What about diversity and its impact? Historically we see that the societies with the strongest traditions of free speech were also some of the most ethnically, religiously, and culturally homogeneous. Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands lead the Press Freedom Index, a fact that Reporters Without Borders attributes to “a real culture of individual freedoms, a culture that is more integrated than in southern Europe.” Also near the top are Luxembourg, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Iceland, and New Zealand. The highest-ranking non-Western countries include Jamaica, Costa Rica, Namibia, Cape Verde, Uruguay, and Ghana. But wait, aren’t some of these countries pretty multicultural? In fact, although Namibia is ethnically diverse, its population is only 2.1 million and the country is 80-90% Christian. Most other ethnically diverse countries show similar trends of small populations, religious homogeneity, and economic stability. The exception is Ghana, which has made tremendous gains in education and press freedom despite having large Islamic and Christian populations, in addition to nine widely spoken languages. All in all, the contribution of culture cannot be understated, as evidenced by the country at the very top of the Index:

“The country that has headed the index since 2008, Finland, paradoxically evinces two obstacles to the development of a benign environment for freedom of information: defamation is punishable by imprisonment in certain circumstances, and just three companies own virtually almost all the national media. In practice, however, it is extremely rare for journalists to receive jail terms for what they write and there is a great deal of media pluralism despite the concentrated ownership. In a country where print is resisting digital well, the media are self-regulated through the Council for Mass Media, an independent body based on the voluntary membership of news media and journalists’ associations and funded mainly by member contributions.”

Given these patterns, the question before Western countries is inescapable. The new diversity brings tradeoffs. In countries with large populations, rapidly increasing minorities, and uncertain economies, one of those tradeoffs is between social cohesion and free expression. Governments in Europe, Canada, Australia, and the US are in the midst of historically unprecedented immigration flows. Europe now has a large Muslim population, Canada and Australia experience an increasing Asian presence, and the US has its expanding Hispanic population. If UKIP, the Front National, and all the other nationalist or right-wing parties were elected tomorrow, they would still need to contend with these factors – even if they managed to cut future immigration to historic lows.

As of this writing, there have already been several violent responses to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Foreign Policy reports that shots and even grenades have been used to attack two mosques in response, and a bomb was used in the eastern region of the country. The dream of the Western liberal was of a cosmopolitan, multicultural, free, and tolerant world. Unfortunately for them, the mass immigration that they supported may ultimately undermine the values they once prized. In Australia, a recent study showed only that 53% of citizens would choose a good democracy to a strong economy – and Australia’s economy is currently pretty good.

History indicates that that number decreases quite a bit when the economy tanks and conflict rises. Flemming Rose himself notes that Weimar Germany was characterized by lax enforcement of laws prohibiting violence. Whether by unwillingness or inability, the results were the same: those who promised order carried the day.  If populations tend towards order over and above freedom in times of strife, then it will be all the easier for governments to curb traditional rights in favour of social cohesion. Charlie Hebdo publisher Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier is reported as having declared that he would rather die on his feet then live on his knees. The words were tragically prophetic. The death of the values which Charlie Hebdo stood for will likely prove far less heroic.

The post #JeSuisCharlie Won’t Save Free Speech appeared first on Social Matter.

All three walked quickly. They maintained a nervous gait, as if trying to angrily injure the ground with each step. Hands in pockets, their backpacks hoisted high and tight so that they were leaning inwards. Their eyes never met mine, because their peculiar postures kept their lines of sight directed firmly downwards two meters ahead of them. All three had white earphones firmly implanted into their heads. All three became separate again as quickly as they had become close.

For a moment as they walked away, I felt as if I had witnessed something of supreme importance, even though I didn’t know what it was. Breath firmly bated, balanced somewhere between contemplation and bewilderment, I then finally exhaled a knowing chuckle: I had just witnessed social alienation!

Exhortations on the dangers of social alienation (or atomization, or isolation, if you prefer), are hardly limited to the Right. Slate, among other things, relates a statistic that “loneliness” has doubled among Americans since the 1980’s. The Los Angeles Times says “People who are socially isolated are more likely to die prematurely, regardless of their underlying health issues…” Social alienation – the term I will stick with – is hardly an invented problem for traditionalists and Luddites, yet its manifestations are poorly articulated by the secular clerisy and its implications even more poorly.

The most recent vogue seems to be to describe problems of social alienation in relation to, or as a result of, social media and technological advances. The Slate writer in the previously linked piece only implicates new technologies as causes of social alienation. Her personal anecdote about loneliness begins with a coast-to-coast relocation, but she doesn’t overtly identify her move as a culprit. It is easy to see why technology attracts the most blame – throw a stone through Times Square and you’re more likely to break someone’s iPhone than someone’s skull (at least, you’ll break both).

Yet technology alone cannot be blamed for social alienation – iPhones and Facebook accounts do not force themselves on unsuspecting socially integrated people in the middle of the night in a dark alleyway (or frat-house, for the feminists out there). The three atomized individuals who passed by me and my street corner made a conscious choice before they began their journeys across town not to care for the bustle and noise of their homes and fellow citizens. If a fellow citizen was whistling holiday tunes, they would not know. If songbirds sang today, they would not know. If a cry for help rang out from behind a building, they would not know. Since they had made a conscious decision to notice nothing but their feet and the two meters of pavement in front of them, they would hardly know anything about their surroundings at all. Ought one not feel a chill realizing that pop music might get in the way of rescue after an accident or attack?

Where does one typically shove in the earphones and ignore reality? On airplanes? Public transport? Yours truly, who strives to be socially integrated rather than alienated, typically only turns on the iPod on international flights, surrounded by cranky foreigners. I recall one particularly interesting transatlantic flight, wherein I was sandwiched between a number of uniformed American soldiers returning from Iraq on one side, and a number of bearded Muslim scholars of some sort attired in traditional Islamic garb on the other. Yes, in such a situation, I would imagine the healthy response to be alienating oneself from the particular social situation, and inputting the earphones. Yet what does it say about Western society, then, that self-imposed isolation by technology, even while in public, is the norm? Frankly, it says that the average Westerner has come to expect to meet cranky foreigners in daily life outside the home.

I see the roots of social alienation in the political policies enacted by government functionaries steeped in the ideologies of materialism, globalism, internationalism, secularism and socialism. From small Italian city centres swarming with Bangladeshi families to sprawling German cities filled with loitering Africans, the doctrines of diversity, multiculturalism and mass immigration have never been proven so harmful yet been so devoutly implemented anyway. While the precise source escapes me, I recall one German identitarian remarking that, above everything, what bothered him most about immigrants was how loud they were compared to Germans – boomboxes, shouting matches, loud conversations; all these disrupted the rhythmic lulls of native German life. In such a situation, why not atomize? Choice of music in, “vibrant” “multicultural” life out. This has become the default situation, seemingly, from Seattle to Stuttgart.

International industrial capitalism certainly plays a role too – the modern world is unique in the way it prompts people to move from city to city, or even country to country, in search of a paycheck. A growing class of rootless cosmopolitans certainly doesn’t positively affect the average social alienation of a society. Yet, the most flagrant gestures of inward, anti-social movement do not stem from periodic relocation. It is not just that citizens fail to invest money in their local communities, or fail to establish long-term clubs or businesses or relationships due to their nomadic modern lifestyles. Rather, they have opted not to invest even their eyes or ears in their surroundings. Modernity has turned the public sphere into a 3:00am Bangkok—Kabul flight with a crappy airline, and the Cathedral reassures us this is a great improvement on our societies of old.

On a recent trip to Germany, I spent an afternoon exploring the streets of my hotel neighborhood and killing time in the cafés and bars therein. In the few free hours I had, I remember noticing an animated Greek couple, an angry Serb yelling into a mobile phone, a visibly intoxicated (and possibly retarded) Russian, a Turkish kebab vendor who couldn’t affect a German “r,” and a surly blonde German waitress, covered in tattoos, who served me my coffee. (The café bathroom had an ANTIFA sticker on the door). The stream of native Germans, whom I passed on the street, silent and unobtrusive, failed to make an impression on me. I can’t remember how many of them wore earphones.

The post Thy Name is Social Alienation appeared first on Social Matter.