http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/opinion/17Wright.html?incamp=article_popu
lar

Op-Ed Contributor

The Silent Treatment

By ROBERT WRIGHT
Published: February 17, 2006

THE American left and right don't agree on much, but weeks of
demonstrations and embassy burnings have pushed them toward convergence on
one point: there is, if not a clash of civilizations, at least a very big
gap between the "Western world" and the "Muslim world." When you get beyond
this consensus — the cultural chasm consensus — and ask what to do about
the problem, there is less agreement. After all, chasms are hard to bridge.

Fortunately, this chasm's size is being exaggerated. The Muslim uproar over
those Danish cartoons isn't as alien to American culture as we like to
think. Once you see this, a benign and quintessentially American response
comes into view.

Even many Americans who condemn the cartoon's publication accept the
premise that the now-famous Danish newspaper editor set out to demonstrate:
in the West we don't generally let interest groups intimidate us into what
he called "self-censorship."

What nonsense. Editors at mainstream American media outlets delete lots of
words, sentences and images to avoid offending interest groups, especially
ethnic and religious ones. It's hard to cite examples since, by definition,
they don't appear. But use your imagination.

Hugh Hewitt, a conservative blogger and evangelical Christian, came up with
an apt comparison to the Muhammad cartoon: "a cartoon of Christ's crown of
thorns transformed into sticks of TNT after an abortion clinic bombing." As
Mr. Hewitt noted, that cartoon would offend many American Christians.
That's one reason you haven't seen its like in a mainstream American
newspaper.

Or, apparently, in many mainstream Danish newspapers. The paper that
published the Muhammad cartoon, it turns out, had earlier rejected cartoons
of Christ because, as the Sunday editor explained in an e-mail to the
cartoonist who submitted them, they would provoke an outcry.

Defenders of the "chasm" thesis might reply that Western editors practice
self-censorship to avoid cancelled subscriptions, picket lines or
advertising boycotts, not death. Indeed, what forged the chasm consensus,
convincing many Americans that the "Muslim world" might as well be another
planet, is the image of hair-trigger violence: a few irreverent drawings
appear and embassies go up in flames.

But the more we learn about this episode, the less it looks like
spontaneous combustion. The initial Muslim response to the cartoons was not
violence, but small demonstrations in Denmark along with a lobbying
campaign by Danish Muslims that cranked on for months without making it
onto the world's radar screen.

Only after these activists were snubbed by Danish politicians and found
synergy with powerful politicians in Muslim states did big demonstrations
ensue. Some of the demonstrations turned violent, but much of the violence
seems to have been orchestrated by state governments, terrorist groups and
other cynical political actors.

Besides, who said there's no American tradition of using violence to make a
point? Remember the urban riots of the 1960's, starting with the Watts riot
of 1965, in which 34 people were killed? The St. Louis Cardinals pitcher
Bob Gibson, in his 1968 book "From Ghetto to Glory," compared the riots to
a "brushback pitch" — a pitch thrown near a batter's head to keep him from
crowding the plate, a way of conveying that the pitcher needs more space.

In the wake of the rioting, blacks got more space. The National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People had been protesting broadcast of the
"Amos 'n' Andy" show, with its cast of shiftless and conniving blacks,
since the 1950's, but only in 1966 did CBS withdraw reruns from
distribution. There's no way to establish a causal link, but there's little
doubt that the riots of the 1960's heightened sensitivity to grievances
about the portrayal of blacks in the media. (Translation: heightened
self-censorship.)

Amid the cartoon protests, some conservative blogs have warned that
addressing grievances expressed violently is a form of "appeasement," and
will only bring more violence and weaken Western values. But "appeasement"
didn't work that way in the 1960's. The Kerner Commission, set up by
President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 to study the riots, recommended
increased attention to the problems of poverty, job and housing
discrimination, and unequal education — attention that was forthcoming and
that didn't exactly spawn decades of race riots.

The commission recognized the difference between what triggers an uproar
(how police handle a traffic stop in Watts) and what fuels it
(discrimination, poverty, etc.). This recognition has been sparse amid the
cartoon uproar, as Americans fixate on the question of how a single drawing
could inflame millions.

Answer: depends on which million you're talking about. In Gaza much of the
actual fuel came from tensions with Israelis, in Iran some fundamentalists
nursed longstanding anti-Americanism, in Pakistan opposition to the
pro-Western ruling regime played a role, and so on.

This diversity of rage, and of underlying grievance, complicates the
challenge. Apparently refraining from obvious offense to religious
sensibilities won't be enough. Still, the offense in question is a
crystalline symbol of the overall challenge, because so many of the
grievances coalesce in a sense that Muslims aren't respected by the
affluent, powerful West (just as rioting American blacks felt they weren't
respected by affluent, powerful whites). A cartoon that disrespects Islam
by ridiculing Muhammad is both trigger and extremely high-octane fuel.

None of this is to say that there aren't big differences between American
culture and culture in many Muslim parts of the world. In a way, that's the
point: some differences are so big, and the job of shrinking them so
daunting, that we can't afford to be unclear on what the biggest
differences are.

What isn't a big difference is the Muslim demand for self-censorship by
major media outlets. That kind of self-censorship is not just an American
tradition, but a tradition that has helped make America one of the most
harmonious multiethnic and multireligious societies in the history of the
world.

So why not take the model that has worked in America and apply it globally?
Namely: Yes, you are legally free to publish just about anything, but if
you publish things that gratuitously offend ethnic or religious groups, you
will earn the scorn of enlightened people everywhere. With freedom comes
responsibility.

Of course, it's a two-way street. As Westerners try to attune themselves to
the sensitivities of Muslims, Muslims need to respect the sensitivities of,
for example, Jews. But it's going to be hard for Westerners to sell Muslims
on this symmetrical principle while flagrantly violating it themselves.
That Danish newspaper editor, along with his American defenders, is
complicating the fight against anti-Semitism.

Some Westerners say there's no symmetry here — that cartoons about the
Holocaust are more offensive than cartoons about Muhammad. And, indeed, to
us secularists it may seem clear that joking about the murder of millions
of people is worse than mocking a God whose existence is disputed.

BUT one key to the American formula for peaceful coexistence is to avoid
such arguments — to let each group decide what it finds most offensive, so
long as the implied taboo isn't too onerous. We ask only that the offended
group in turn respect the verdicts of other groups about what they find
most offensive. Obviously, anti-Semitic and other hateful cartoons won't be
eliminated overnight. (In the age of the Internet, no form of hate speech
will be eliminated, period; the argument is about what appears in
mainstream outlets that are granted legitimacy by nations and peoples.)

But the American experience suggests that steadfast self-restraint can
bring progress. In the 1960's, the Nation of Islam was gaining momentum as
its leader, Elijah Muhammad, called whites "blue-eyed devils" who were
about to be exterminated in keeping with Allah's will. The Nation of Islam
has since dropped in prominence and, anyway, has dropped that doctrine from
its talking points. Peace prevails in America, and one thing that keeps it
is strict self-censorship.

And not just by media outlets. Most Americans tread lightly in discussing
ethnicity and religion, and we do it so habitually that it's nearly
unconscious. Some might call this dishonest, and maybe it is, but it also
holds moral truth: until you've walked in the shoes of other people, you
can't really grasp their frustrations and resentments, and you can't really
know what would and wouldn't offend you if you were part of their crowd.

The Danish editor's confusion was to conflate censorship and
self-censorship. Not only are they not the same thing — the latter is what
allows us to live in a spectacularly diverse society without the former; to
keep censorship out of the legal realm, we practice it in the moral realm.
Sometimes it feels uncomfortable, but worse things are imaginable.

Robert Wright, the author of "The Moral Animal," is a senior fellow at the
New America Foundation.