276. Negotiating Muslim Culture

To change tomorrow, change children.  If we've got adults who don't distinguish private religious responsibility from public political responsibility, who take their Holy Scripture as literal and unchanging truth, who think that dying attacking unbelievers is rewarded in heaven, and who take insults to their Prophet with deadly seriousness, and if we don't want to live with such adults in the future (see preceding post), then we've got to change them.

It's a problem of education, also called (in the marketplace) brainwashing, indoctrinating, robot-making, and cookie-cutting.  I decided I had to face it when I saw that short-term measures to live with Islamic fundamentalism were not sustainable.  In the metaphor I had going at the time we just can't afford to have our young fish maturing in that kind of water.

We in the West can avoid that only under the constraints imposed by our dominant culture, that of (still) the Enlightenment.  Here it's the need to preserve freedom.  We were restricting freedom of speech when we justified having lawmen sitting in on imams' sermons, listening for our newly defined incitements to violence.  Here it's the freedom of local governments, specifically school boards, that we want to restrict.  Should a school in Birmingham, England, be free to teach Islamic principles?  Should a school in Kansas be free to teach the Bible creation story?

My answer, minus its development, is, "Yes, as long as they're taught in an academic way, and as long as they're not a substitute for the teaching that prepares youth for democratic citizenship."

The academic way is the way Socrates taught the West, testing beliefs in an impersonal fashion and abandoning those that fail.  The way of science.  Presentation of its results requires disinterestedness.  An academic presenting the creation story says, "This is what Christians believe."

The teaching that prepares youth for democratic citizenship is less distinct, though the ideal product is clear enough, at least for me.  It's that voter who takes up a candidacy or an issue the way a Supreme Court justice takes up a case, holding his or her thinking to what has consequences in the practical world.  Ms. Perfect Voter is Sandra Day O'Connor acting under a time constraint, as Ms. Perfect Journalist is Barbara Tuchman writing in haste.  Perfect-in-the-World is a university scientist without the leisure or the grants.

I believe that a Western democracy's need for something close to this in its citizens is so great that I am willing to reduce almost any of democracy's associated values that get in its way.  Freedom of local citizens from control by the central government is a long-held value in the United States, especially in the Heartland.  I want to say, to the citizens of Ohio, and now Colorado, "Here is something every school must teach.  You are free to teach other things, but you are not free to substitute anything for this."  And I will present them with what I think will make their students most like Sandra Day O'Connor, the curriculum for ideal democratic citizenship.

The benefit of this constraint (I'll get around to the curriculum) is that, like many constraints, it allows greater freedom elsewhere.  Be recognized as an approximation of Sandra Day O'Connor and you can say nearly anything you want, anywhere.  That goes for Muslims who have achieved the approximation.  Regardless of how they started out.  We trust our mandated education.

We also trust the social pressure O'Connor approximations can bring to bear.  Slam an ethnic group, as you are free to do, and O'Connor will show the irrelevance of your slam to the issue at hand.  No gratuitous slaps among her kind, not without bringing a blush.  Her kind attack a belief by demonstrating its consequences.  Call that a slap and you'll blush from the opposite direction. 

Because we think we have enough of O'Connor's kind out in the marketplace we let people there slap and slam as they will.  Satire is fine.  (It's an Enlightened Western country's substitute for violence.)   Incitement to ridicule is OK.  Insult is expected.  Developed populations can call undeveloped populations benighted and barbaric.  Undeveloped populations can call developed populations decadent and rapacious.  All because such callers can be put in their place by better-educated callers, who in Enlightened countries will, like Supreme Court Justices, carry the greater weight.  We in Enlightened countries trust in our education system to supply that weight.  When it does we don't need laws against such speech.

For the weight-supplying curriculum I am going to impose on every local school, I look first to what produced Sandra Day O'Connor.  And I will present school governors with what I think will make their students most like her.   I can make a pretty good guess about what was taught in her El Paso high school, classic college-prep, and an even better guess about what was taught at Stanford, where she got her B.A. in 1950 (my time in school): classic liberal arts.  For the latter, in American colleges, the key course was English Composition.  It was the course, then and now, that was counted on to introduce newcomers to the academic way.  "Address the question, avoid prejudgments, cite evidence, anticipate objections, be skeptical, suspect absolute generalizations" — those were the big imperatives in nearly every composition handbook.

And I would require that they be obeyed in English.  Because that is the language in which democratic debate goes on in America.  It is the language of the marketplace out of which votes come, determining elections. The marketplace.  Where the need for the protection of free speech arose in the minds of our founding fathers. 

So our advice to Muslim leaders is, "Get in on the marketplace scrimmage, friends.  Mix it up.   There are so many things you can attack: our drone strikes, our behavior at Abhu Graib, our insensitive satires of the Prophet.  Go beyond that immediate ugliness; attack our materialism, our hypocrisy, our arrogance, our vulgar popular culture, our all-consuming consumerism, our pornifaction of the inner life.   If you go too far our Sandra O'Connors will put you to shame.  If you incite to violence our police will put you in prison."