Does TMatt Get Journalism, Liberalism?
February 15, 2006
Terry Mattingly over at GetReligion has been all over the liberal establishment in the press and in Hollywood for their failure, in his mind, to properly honor Dutch politician, Islamic dissident, and filmmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Mattingly is pitching the same idea he pitched last year—an honorary Oscar for Ali at the Acadamy Awards ceremony. The story line is this: Hollywood loves to celebrate “women’s rights, artistic freedom, [and] the right to offensive free speech” which are precisely the things Ali literally risks her neck for. In the recent Danish cartoon controversy, Ali has been an adamant critic of those American media outlets which refuse to reprint the offending material. Mattingly quotes her as claiming she is “here to defend the right to offend.” What could be more Hollywood than that, eh? The problem is that Ali is offending Muslims, something that tends to grate against that other pillar of liberal virtue—tolerance.
So Mattingly has a point, sort of. Liberalism’s commitment to tolerance undermines its other commitments, free speech, liberty, etc. This line of attack is worn out. It has been used for years by conservatives sick of having their views censored in the media: you are tolerant of everything but that which is intolerant! It is true so far as it goes, but to believe that pointing out this inconsistency in a call to a more pure practice of tolerance is somehow a knockout blow is an error of analysis, for it fails to probe and understand the deeper consistencies of the liberal mind which are not innocuous and will hardly even notice such stale debating points.
Mattingly’s crusade is a case in point. Notice the points he believes are being scored against the media establishment by taking this woman’s cause and railing at Hollywood for not giving Ali more “honor” and air-time. This could only be true—and Mattingly’s assertions depend on an assumption that it is true—if the liberal public square functioned as it is alleged to function: as a neutral public geography with a disinterested and objective media as its cartographer. So in the end, both Mattingly and Ali come to liberals as liberals, cracking the whip for party discipline. And, in fact, many liberal editors have published the offending cartoons. Not, as Stanley Fish recently pointed out, because of a perception that the cartoons are true, but almost “by accident,” as some generic act of faith in “dialogue” and free speech in the church of liberalism. Fish argues that the liberal mind cannot understand the rage over the cartoons because they have lost the ability to rage over anything. They practice a morality of withdrawal from morality. This is close to the same thing as saying liberals tolerate everything but intolerance, but it penetrates more deeply to the root of the spiritual sickness at work in the liberal soul.
Let me illustrate what I mean like this: suppose Ali was forcefully saying that Islam was an evil religion hell bent on murder, mayhem, and conquest, and must be resisted by any and all necessary means, including violent means, in order to preserve and protect ourselves. Perhaps she is saying things like this, I don’t know, but if so, these are not the passages being picked out by Mattingly (and other conservative commentators like Rod Dreher) as praiseworthy. Rather, it is her impassioned defense of free speech and artistic freedom and the “right to offend” that are quoted approvingly. Why? Because on this ground the media and Hollywood can be taken to task for allegedly failing to maintain a neutral and objective public square, open to all comers. Rather than castigating the morality of withdrawal from morality as a false and destructive faith, Ali in the hands of Mattingly and others becomes an argument in favor of the liberal faith, though in this case, I believe, unwittingly so.
Dreher goes so far as to say that Ali is this generations’ Solzhenitsyn. She may be, certainly no one can doubt her courage. But it will take more than criticism of arranged marriages and a defense of the right to offend to get there. A lot more.
This is Does TMatt Get Journalism, Liberalism? in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: A Significant Admission | Next: Baylor’s Iconoclast | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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