When Thoreau refused to pay a tax to support the Mexican War, he was tossed in jail. Emerson visited him and asked, “Henry, what are you doing in here?” Thoreau replied, “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”
This came to mind when the news broke of the murderous attack by Muslim extremists on the French satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo, an attack which came on the heels of the North Korean attack on Sony over Seth Rogen’s “The Interview.” At first blush, the Thoreau tale and the malicious behavior of a humorless Korean dictator and medieval Islamists would appear to be unconnected, but in fact the issue is the same.
Emerson thought Thoreau was behaving badly or at least unwisely by refusing to go along. Thoreau thought the dictates of the individual conscience were more important than the whims of the authorities. “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.”
In practice, this sort of pure individualism can be tricky, but Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience represents a milepost on a long road that has brought the West from it’s own inquisitions, enforced orthodoxy, witch burnings, intolerance and repression to the present when core beliefs enshrined in law and tradition are freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of religion. Some societies have traveled as far as the West down this road, many struggle to move beyond autocracy or theocracy to democracy, pluralism and liberty.
It’s no surprise that in places with no such traditions of dissent, heterodoxy or dissent can be a dangerous business. So a satirist like Bassem Youssef in Egypt can find himself muzzled, a Punk Rock girl group like Pussy Riot can end up jailed in Russia, a journalist in Iran who shares a joke with The Daily Show can spend months in a prison, and anyone in the ISIS orbit who won’t bow down to their version of truth faces beheading. Just this week Raif Badawi a blogger from Saudi Arabia was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for insulting Islam.
In the West, the haters seem to have chosen trivial targets at first. Did Kim Jong Un and Al Qaida in Yemen attack Charlie Hebdo and “The Interview” because they were soft targets or is something more fundamental at work? I think the latter.
When people like Secretary of State John Kerry or Washington Post geopolitical savant David Ignatius speak (or indeed any high level member of government or the Fourth Estate), they tend to do so in an institutional voice. As a result, when they intone solemnly, lugubriously, soporifically about Kim Jong Un or ISIS, your eyeballs roll up into your head. It’s like the WaWa voice of the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons — easily tuned out.
But when the jesters begin to mock, the people listen. And laugh and sneer and cease to fear. In fact, treating loons and throwbacks as if they should be taken seriously may be the mistake. That just strokes their egos and confirms their fantasy that they matter. Ridicule of two-bit despots and small-time terrorists stings because behind the mockery lurks the truth.
These people may be murderous thugs and villains, but history is not on their side. They can destroy, but they cannot build. Like the anarchists whose bombings made life miserable for a few years around the turn of the 20th Century, they will attract no large following, change no policies, invent no technologies, cure no diseases. They are more akin to pests or viruses. They are a nihilistic joke and those who point it out infuriate them.
Obviously they have to be combatted and caught, killed or quarantined. And in repressive states, blowing things up may be the only way to make change. Here, the ballot box, the chance to determine one’s own destiny, a fighting chance at a middle class life is a reliable vaccine against extremism. If our leaders want to keep us safe, they need to worry about keeping us free, prosperous and equal. A vast disaffected majority with no hope is big trouble. A people confident of the superiority of their system is safe from crazies.
That’s why it was heartening to see crowds go out to see Rogen’s dopey movie in order to make a statement and to see far more people than ever read Charlie Hebdo hold pens aloft in vigils across Europe indicating they approve a sentiment often, erroneously, attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Such a display of solidarity is a sign of a healthy society that recognizes sickness when it sees it.
Haters may fulminate and cause pain and suffering, but they will remain on the losing side of history so long as we hold to the traditions we have created — democracy, modernity, rationality, the rule of law and equality. And especially the liberty to mock the fools, ridicule the villains and say the emperor has no clothes on.
And we need to affirm our values everyday. Free speech is threatened when we succumb to political correctness, permit schools to censor textbooks or teachers, don’t speak out when the government is wrong for fear of being branded unpatriotic, allow ourselves to go along to get along, accept the conventional wisdom unquestioningly, fall for the demagogue.
The only cause for concern is not that satirists gleefully perform the valuable function of questioning the status quo, but that so many people with power and big megaphones are content to be the status quo — to play it safe, proceed with caution, and refuse to rock the boat. Our leaders should be the first in line defending our freedoms, not following somewhere behind the clowns and cartoonists.