Freedom of Speech and Santa Claus.

This is more a ramble than an article. Even more so, it's an argument with myself as I try to work out logic in the face of faith. Last week good guy* Pope stated that there should be limits on Freedom of Speech** and that Religion should be protected from Satire. It started my brain thinking about how this boils down to a greater respect for people to have religion being protected than the respect for people to not have religion.

Why do we protect Religion? What is it about a belief in God that elevates it to such a protected status that it is inadvisable for the thoughts of a dissenting person to be aired in public or written down.

There is the common atheist argument that "Babies have no religion", and that religion is emblazoned on them by their parent's beliefs (much like Veganism, I guess). This, in itself, can set aside religion from race in arguing its validity in Freedom of Speech. People leave the womb with a race and a skin colour. In an equal society this doesn't matter, because an equal society sees the person beyond characteristic stereotypes. Of course, we are unfortunately yet to find ourselves in this equal society.

Religion on the other hand will never, ever, achieve an equal society for the sole reason that it demarcates all people based on their ability to conform to a common belief in a God, currently void of evidence either way. Not even God per-sé, but a vision or representation of God written by historians (you can start to see a whole other hypocrisy here) in ancients tomes and scriptures. Naturally, I accept that if we had never had religion, we wouldn't have our society as it is today (from Churches came schools, universities, laws). However, it is my belief that if you solely remove God then you have community, keep it and you have a religion protected from Free Speech.

We see a similar trait in the parents of small children and the paternalistic deception of Santa Claus. The majority of people visiting relatives with small children will have their Freedom of Speech curtailed of any fact pertaining to the fiction of Santa Claus. Yet, we put up with it for the Sake of the Children. It may surprise you to know that I am perfectly happy to allow my niece and nephew to believe in a mythical present-bearing man that sneaks chimney to chimney delivering gifts once a year.

Why do I allow myself this, but not feel OK with the protection of religion?

Children are, basically, the uneducated/undeveloped form of the adult. They are learning how to be an adult, and as yet the world is full of a wonder that is ripe for learning. They learn about societal customs and expectations from their parents and surroundings until they are old enough to make up their own mind. Thus, you are more likely to ask a person "How did you find out that Santa didn't exist?" than "When did your parents tell you Santa didn't exist?". For some people, this happened early due to increased rational thought, for others it comes later (perhaps from finding letters addressed to the North Pole tucked behind a 'magic radiator instead of a fireplace). Perhaps the Santa Claus deception started out as a test for rational thought, with the hypothesis lost to the commercialisation of the season?

Growing up, we are taught to think for ourselves, to gather evidence and make the world our own. We don't burn our hands on the kettle because we've learnt that touching a hot metal is painful, we don't jump off a cliff and expect to fly, we don't expect the stranger we've found in our house at 3am in Winter to be a friendly gift barer. Compare this to the bare-bones of religion, and God, and see a form of thought that evades logic and developmental growth from childhood through to adulthood and death.

Yes, talking ill of religion will cause offence to those practising religion. However, to elevate it to protected expression status above evidence and rational thinking is to loose the crux of Freedom of Speech***. In terms of hurting peoples feelings, I don't disrespect religious people on a day to day basis on the same level that I don't phone my toddler relatives each day to tell them Santa doesn't exist. I sit back through respect for them having their own beliefs, and hopefully let them learn for themselves through experience and evidence. This is, perhaps, where Richard Dawkins and I differ.

Thus, if I am expected to allow religious beliefs to be free from critical thinking, I expect that my own beliefs are allowed the same (it would be fucking amazing to be a scientist in the absence of critical thinking - peer review would be a skoosh). Only then do we have full freedom of speech. Hey, I've not even touched on the ranges of Mr Pope's limits on Freedom of Speech on other religions (will he protect those with more than one God against those with none?).

Do onto others as you expect for yourself, yeah?

*based on the lower public knowledge of evil-ness relative to his predecessor.
** I have found myself capitalising this expression in much the same way as I do the word God. Strange, perhaps hypocritically.
*** When I first heard the Pope saying "There should be Freedom of Speech, but with limits regarding to Religion", my first thought was "yeah, there should be no speed limit on the motorway, but everyone should be above 50Mph". Limits go both ways.

Charlie Hebdo, Barbara Streisand, and provocative retaliation.

Yesterday, shortly after finishing my baked potato and cheese, I felt a queasiness in my stomach. My twitter feed broke the news of the shooting at Charlie Hebdo's offices. For the next hour or two, or three, and more, I was transfixed by the rolling Live News coverage that has became normality. The whole idea of actually taking someone's life (let alone thirteen) because they used their artistic talents to ridicule a belief system is so alien and incomprehensible to me that it started to hurt.

Until lunchtime yesterday, I doubt if more that 5% of my friends would have heard about Charlie Hebdo. Here is the French equivalent of Private Eye, only with more cartoons and, crucially, bravery. While Private Eye might be seen as the satirical outpost of the UK media, compared to Hebdo, it is all rather tame and constricted by the British stiff upper lip. Carry On Politics compared to Chaplin's The Dictator.

After lunchtime, however, the Barbara Streisand effect was in full swing. The perpetrators committed their brutal acts as a method of silencing. "If you don't stop printing that which we don't agree with, we will stop you doing so". As expected, the opposite occurred. Retweeting, blogging, Facebooking, and newspaper printing of the cartoons, were all used as a show of defiance in the face of censorship.

Make no mistake, this attack on Charlie Hebdo's offices was an act of Censorship

And that's where I, for all my support for Freedom of Speech, started to become a bit queasy again. At the start, the reprinting of Hebdo cartoons showed for everyone to see, the wide ranging aim and scope of their satire, from politicians, to bankers, to authors, and of course to mutiple religions (including the major ones of the 'west'). However, a sense of retaliation started to build. A sense of 'us' versus 'them' with every 'I'm going to draw cartoons of Mohammed every day' or the mocking and public flogging of any media outlet that dared to censor or outright block publication of Hebdo's cartoons.

Front cover of Charlie Hebdo showing Michael Houellebecq, a noted author who has been accused in the past of being Islamophobic. Cover mocks him as a 'mystic' saying he'll lose his teeth in 2015, and practice Ramadan by 2022.

Where as the original Charlie Hebdo cartoons were printed in the context of lack of context: Everyone, absolutely everyone, was a target of the cartoonist's truth, we are now assigning a malicious context to them. We tell ourselves that the radicalised perpetrators aren't a true indicator of Muslims or Islam, but then use a staple of Islam (Aniconism) to attack them, to provoke them, to retaliate.

Freedom of Speech allows you to do this, and I am not for a moment saying that it doesn't. I am merely saying that respect as Human Beings should make you wonder if you are, in the quest to taunt the perpetrators, censuring people's Freedom to Religion?

If we get caught up in using cartoon depictions of Mohammed as the weapon of choice against these murderers, we are in essence declaring war on Islam. If we want to declare war on the perpretrators (and their radicalised ideas), then we should satirise yesterday's murderers and their horrific acts.

I am not brave enough to do that, and for that reason, I am not Charlie and chances are, neither are you.

What did the author mean?

I spent an infuriating half an hour in the car listening to the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2. Mr Vine was chairing a discussion about a blog post for the British Medical Journal, written by previous BMJ editor Richard Smith. In this fairly poetic blog, Smith breaks down a choice of four deaths (ignoring suicide) on their effect on family and friends. Depression, as he perfectly describes " the most awful as you are slowly erased", perhaps long before the body is ready to shut down. A sudden death on the other hand leaves relationships in a frozen state that may or may not be positive, leading to tragedy, guilt and regret.

Cancer, Smith proclaims, allows a period of contemplation and action. Allowing the terminal patient to, hopefully, bid farewell to family and friends and leave all loose ends tied up nicely. Smith, then ends with a flippant line about the wastage of research funds on cancer. Which, brings me to my frustration.

Vine repeatedly re-introduced the discussion along the lines of "Is cancer the best death?" and "Should we cut funding for cancer research as an editor of the British Medical Journal suggests?". This was followed by many callers voicing their disapproval of the premise; "Cancer's awful" "I watched my dad die from cancer" etc. To be fair, he did have a guest who was into her last months of terminal cancer and who agreed with the premise.

The whole discussion was infuriating because it reminded me of a meme that gets passed around the internet from time to time.  This meme, below, relates to literature teachers trying to teach students how to think about what the author means when they write "The curtains were blue", with the response being that "the curtains were fucking blue" and any other description is superfluous. Perhaps the sentence before the introduction of the curtains informed the reader of the curtain'owners cat passing away, or he is a retired ship captain longing for the sea. Both of these would change the motive for the author to tell you the colour of the curtains in his house.

To go through life believing that the "curtains were fucking blue", and I am in no doubt that they had that colour, is to completely forget how to read beyond the physical ink on paper/pixels on screen words that appear. Context is lost, and while an instruction manual may need the reader to take the words as unequivocal truth less the instructions can't be followed, other forms of writing and literature require the reader to question the meaning beyond the words.  

While trying to formulate this blog post, I was trying to think of an example of songwriter where a simple lyric on the page can see throwaway but with context opens up a whole world of interpretation. That line is taken from Bruce Springsteen's Cautious Man:

"He got dressed in the moonlight and down to the highway he strode , when he got there he didn't find nothing but road" 

Here, we have a guy standing on the road at night and nothing else. In the meme above, that is what the author fucking meant. That however loses all the power of what songwriting and literature in general sets out to do. In the context of the song, here is a man who is burdened with regret and longing, who is looking for an easy way out, symbolized by the highway but then finds that it can't solve his problems. The song comes in the middle of Springsteen's break up album, Tunnel Of Love, giving even more credence to the redundancy of the escape in the context of an adult relationship. Then, outside the context of the album, you have the author, Mr Car's and Girls, Mr Born To Run, writing about the highway being 'nothing but road?'. Sheesh, there's a whole autobiography in two lines of simple songwriting. 

To bring this back to the BMJ blog, Richard Smith uses poetic language and imagery to talk about the taboo subject of death. He does this to remain respectful of the whole topic of death and those facing readers who are facing it themselves or in their family, and at the same time to allow those not imminently facing it to understand it. The image of depression 'erasing a person' is one that will stay with me for a long time. The final line about research funding has a change of tone and style that allows it to come across as a punchline in the context of the text as a whole. 

It is this change in tone that Jeremy Vine missed in his chairing of the discussion, reducing the whole poetic piece to nothing more than words on a screen to push an agenda. Had he taken two or three minutes to merely recite the blog piece then his listeners would appreciate the beauty of the author's argument. 

By trying to reduce every small set of words to "what the author fucking meant" is to reduce our language and lose meaning, we will have static facts and data but no humour, empathy or allusion. 

So, next time you read a blog or listen to a song, please don't take two sentences which you don't agree with out of the sum of their parts and get angry. Instead, take it as a whole and try to understand what the author really meant and work out for yourself if you still agree.

Then, if it calls for it, get angry and phone in to the Jeremy Vine show.

Currently listening to: Megan Trainor, All About The Bass.