If you had asked us a fortnight ago to endorse or come out in support of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo we would have hesitated. We suspect that many of the people now displaying the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag would have been similarly reticent.
What happened last week in Paris is a tragedy and after a tragedy we are wont to hold high the victims. It is understandable - commendable - to identify with the fatalities and casualties of such an act of mass murder. This demonstration of mass solidarity is a clear good.
We ought to be careful with our martyrs though, even – perhaps especially – at a traumatic time. Charlie Hebdo has for years revelled in its no-prisoners-taken, vulgar and aggressive style. Politicians, religions (especially Islam) and celebrities: no one escaped the withering and contemptuous satire of the magazine’s cartoonists. We should be clear what this is, a shock jock publication, the cartoon equivalent of a Frankie Boyle stand-up show. It has a popularity based on notoriety, a humour that is based on deliberately pushing a joke as far as it can go and on relentlessly targeting people’s most intimate sensitivities.
In one respect, that is irrelevant as to the events of last week. It goes without saying that however nasty Charlie Hebdo could be, that does not legitimate it being banned, as some have called for in the past, still less the kind of nauseating attack the magazine endured last week, in which so many people lost their lives. Similarly, it goes without saying that it is good that Twitter is awash with journalists refusing to be cowed into silence about things they believe on the basis of such violence. We need a press that is able to speak, criticise and provoke debate without fear of violent reprisal.
But we need to be clear why, and that clarity stands to be obscured by any complete and uncomplicated identification with what the magazine stood for, however emotionally understandable that is.
Lots of people have said that it’s very important that Charlie Hebdo published offensive cartoons. Perhaps so: the proud and pompous always need puncturing. But ‘the West’, about which we are encouraged to generalise, stands for more than the freedom to mock and puncture and even to speak honestly and freely. In its original formulation, whether from the pen of John Milton or John Mill, we needed the right to do such things in order that we might arrive at the truth, to identify the good, and to shape our shared lives for the better by building on and building up the good and the true.
Losing sight of this telos, and seeing only the process, is to identify ‘the West’ as simply the place where we can blaspheme and ridicule and shock as freely as we like. It is to identify with the right to tear down what is wrong with the world without any commensurate duty to build up what is right.
Today we have profound difficulty in agreeing on what is right and good and true, and that naturally orients towards means (about which there is broad agreement) rather than ends (about which there is rather less). This, for example, lies behind our energetic genuflection before the altar of democracy and our simultaneous disinterest and contempt for the politics that goes on between elections. But it would be a mistake, perhaps even a tragedy, if we sought our identity solely with a culture that celebrates means over ends, the rights to tear things apart over the duty to rebuild them. We should be Charlie Hebdo, but not only Charlie Hebdo.
Ben Ryan and Nick Spencer
Image from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence
