The Dud

Courtesy of here:

“Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate on the Quranic abuse at Abu Ghraib points out the inconsistency in attitudes towards the sacred: those incensed by the Newsweek report because of the desecration of their holy book do not extend the same principle to others who might hold the US flag to be sacred since "(o)ver the last week, the flag of the United States of America has been cheerfully incinerated by grinning crowds in several cities."

A rather obvious point: of course those Muslims who think the Koran sacred don’t ‘extend the same principle’ to some other thing. The idea that ‘I personally don’t value x but will defend and respect your valuation of it’ is of course the tritest liberalism, and there's no reason why Hitch's polemical target should be commited to it. The veneration of the Koran in no way involves a ‘principle’ that what is deemed sacred should be respected (a principle which could then be ‘extended’), it’s rather that this thing really is uniquely sacred and worth venerating (precisely non extendable). There is therefore no ‘inconsistency’ in failing to ‘extend the principle’. There is no ‘principle’ to begin with.

It’s perhaps worth adding that the many non-Muslims suspected that the Koran desecration was part and parcel of the humiliation of prisoners. Those reacting to the reported desecration were not doing so because certain texts are in principle sacred but because the deliberate humiliation of individuals is wrong.

It may also be worth adding a more general point here. There is an obvious difference between purposely humiliating an individual by desecrating something he/ she holds sacred, on the one hand, and, on the other, publicly burning as a political gesture what many happen to hold dear. (The flag is presumably not sacred in the same sense – nor should it be). One needs to bear in mind the difference between burning/ desecrating something that someone holds dear precisely because they hold it dear, ie because you want to defile that which is valuable to the other regardless of what it might be), and burning something because you oppose what (for you) it represents.

The point here is to look at how an action is embedded, for this ‘embeddedness’ is part of its meaning as an action. This does not, very obviously, involve a surrender to relativism, but rather allows one to clarify what exactly is at issue and therefore to speak in an appropriate and meaningful way rather than using empty abstractions.