In the first few days after the terrible murders at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, there seemed to be pressure for everyone who is against Islamic fundamentalism to show this by declaring, 'Je Suis Charlie' and calling for certain of its cartoons to be reprinted. A failure to respond in this way was seen as a failure to stand up for free speech and evidence of surrendering to terrorism. As time has gone on, thankfully, responses have become more thoughtful and measured. I say, 'thankfully' because I cannot have been the only person who felt uncomfortable with the idea that unless you declared your unequivocal support for people's right to be gratuitously offensive, then you were not standing up for freedom. Worse, such an unwillingness to stand up and be counted didn't seem to be regarded just as a failure of nerve, but as playing into the terrorists' hands. It appeared to demonstrate a lack of push-back that surrendered ground to the Jihadists in their fight to establish a Caliphate in Europe.
So I was very pleased to hear a discussion of this issue on last week's edition of The Media Show on BBC Radio 4 hosted by Steve Hewlett. The programme began with Hewlett asking various representatives of a number of news organisations if they had published the controversial Hebdo cartoons or not and on what they had based their decision. I was interested by a point made by Emma Tucker, Deputy Editor of The Times, who said that the tradition of satire in France was very different from the tradition in the UK. Here, cartoon satire tended to be more about teasing and being amusing, whereas in France it is much more brutal. She went on to say that ordinarily The Times would not print the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, or anything like them at any time. The implication was that her paper wasn't in the business of going out of its way to be deliberately offensive just for the sake of it.
The call for the republication of the cartoons seemed to me to be a rather fundamentalist response in itself. What type of republication would be sufficient to prove that you were not giving in to terrorism? Should it just be UK newspapers and magazines? Some people have tweeted the images and some have used them as their profile photos, thereby making us see them if we wish to continue to follow them and compelling us to disseminate them if we wish to retweet something on a different subject that they are bringing to our attention. Why stop here? Shouldn't the state show its support for freedom? Why doesn't it fund a billboard campaign to publish the cartoons nationwide? Should every local authority in the country republish them on the side of their refuse lorries to advertise their commitment to ...er... what exactly?
There was another interesting discussion on another BBC Radio 4 programme last week. In Unreliable Evidence, Clive Anderson was talking to a number of distinguished law experts about the so-called Good Samaritan Law. In some countries, the citizen is compelled in law to give assistance if he sees someone in trouble. In others, like the UK, there is no such requirement and the citizen is permitted, like the priest and the Levite in Jesus's parable, to walk by on the other side of the road, ignoring the dying man, and face no prosecution. When asked if this situation was acceptable in today's Britain, the judge on the panel, Lord Hoffmann, drew the important distinction between what the law allows and what one's conscience permits. The fact that the law allows a person to ignore another person's dire need of help, does not prevent the moral citizen from going to his aid. He is not compelled by the law to refuse to help.
I was interested that, even today, the law looks to the Bible for understanding and explanation. As a lapsed Evangelical Christian and the son of a preacher man, I often find myself going back to the Bible to find guidance for dealing with vexed questions. In 1 Corinthians 10 v. 23, the Corinthian Christians say all things are lawful, to which the Apostle Paul responds, yes but not all things are helpful and not all things are constructive. The moral citizen cannot content themselves with what is allowable under the law because they are called to meet a higher standard. It must be the memory of this teaching that makes me feel uneasy when I hear people defending their freedom to act in a certain way. 'So far, so good', I think, 'but not really far enough'.
But what is 'far enough'? St. Paul helps us out in the very next verse where he says, 'Let no-one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbour'. Our objective should be to seek the public good. But our obligation does not end there. Writing to the Christians in Rome, who were a persecuted minority at the time, Paul encourages them to, 'If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all' (Rom. 12 v. 18). So if you want to live in peace with your neighbours, pursue it by having regard to what's in their best interests and avoid giving any unnecessary offence.
A multicultural society will be in a very precarious place if the act of giving offence ceases to be just something that is permitted under the law and becomes the only credible evidence that you believe in 'freedom'.
