[Mb-civic] Tradition vs. modernity - Cathy Young - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Tradition vs. modernity

By Cathy Young  |  February 13, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

AS THE DANISH cartoons satirizing Mohammed continue to cause violent 
protests throughout the Muslim world, and Western newspapers grapple 
with the issue of whether to publish the offending cartoons, many people 
are asking what this incident says about the ability of Islam, at least 
in its current state, to coexist with modern democratic civilization and 
its cherished freedoms. That is a legitimate question, and we should not 
be deterred from asking it by either political correctness or 
intimidation. But the tension between traditional religion and 
modernity, between piety and freedom, are not limited to Islam alone -- 
though Islamic radicalism today represents a uniquely deadly form of 
this tension.

In a New York Times column, David Brooks contrasts the Islamic 
extremists' attitudes with ours: The West, with its ''legacy of Socrates 
and the agora" and its ''progressive and rational" mindset, is open to a 
multiplicity of arguments, perspectives, and ''unpleasant facts," while 
radical Muslims cling to ''pre-Enlightenment" dogmatism and shrink from 
the ''chaos of our conversation."

Yet Brooks overlooks the fact that a large segment of the population in 
the West, and especially in the United States, rejects the progressive, 
rational mindset and embraces pre-Enlightenment values as well. 
Fundamentalist Christians, traditionalist Catholics and ultra-Orthodox 
Jews do not, with very few exceptions, call for violence in response to 
heresy; that is a key distinction. But they too often equate criticism 
(let alone mockery) of their beliefs with ''religious bigotry" or ''hate 
speech." And they, too, often seek not simply to protest but to shut 
down offensive speech.

In 1998, when a Broadway theater announced the production of Terrence 
McNally's play ''Corpus Christi," depicting a gay Jesus-like character, 
the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights launched a 
letter-writing campaign against it. There were also threats of violence 
and arson, which at one point swayed the theater to cancel the play. The 
Catholic League reacted with jubilation, and while formally deploring 
the threats it also warned that if another theater picked up ''Corpus 
Christi," it would ''wage a war that no one will forget." (The theater 
eventually revived the production.)

Interestingly, the head of the Catholic League, William Donohue, 
recently applauded the decision of most American newspapers not to 
publish the Mohammed cartoons and lamented only that his group's 
protests against offensive material have been less successful. Many of 
the same newspapers that decided -- quite wrongly, in my view -- not to 
reproduce the cartoons even as part of a news story about the reaction 
to them have run photos of controversial works of art considered 
sacrilegious by Christians, and defended the display of those works in 
tax-funded museums.

Donohue makes an important point when he says that this double standard 
reflects fear of violence by Islamic extremists, and that caving in to 
such intimidation is a deplorable message to send. But he, too, agrees 
that freedom of the press should take a back seat to respect for what is 
sacred to believers. Respect is of course a fine thing, but where does 
one draw the line between insult and criticism or questioning? A few 
years ago, the charge of ''Christian bashing" was leveled at the ABC 
show ''Nothing Sacred," which questioned Catholic doctrine on birth 
control and priestly celibacy.

Others from the Christian right, such as Andrea Lafferty of the 
Traditional Values Coalition, have echoed the notion that the media 
should show the same deference to conservative Christians that they show 
to Muslims. And a few have openly voiced sympathy even with violent 
manifestations of Islamic extremism. Pat Buchanan recently wrote:

''When Bush speaks of freedom as God's gift to humanity, does he mean 
the First Amendment freedom . . . of Salman Rushdie to publish 'The 
Satanic Verses,' a book considered blasphemous to the Islamic faith? If 
the Islamic world rejects this notion of freedom . . . why are they wrong?"

The truth is that modernity with its ''chaos of conversation," its chaos 
of lifestyles, its attitude that there is nothing more sacred than 
freedom of expression, is profoundly threatening to many religious 
traditionalists of different faiths. (Last year, quite a few American 
conservatives applauded Pope Benedict XVI's assault on ''the 
dictatorship of relativism.") At the present moment, for a variety of 
historical and cultural reasons, radical fundamentalism holds a 
particular sway in the Muslim world, where it is wedded to political 
violence in ways that have no parallel in other religions. To ignore 
this difference and this danger would be foolish. But it is also unwise 
to ignore the religious backlash against modernity right here in the 
West, and its own tensions with individual freedom.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/13/tradition_vs_modernity/
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