The Price of Taboo
Society has Moved from an Imperfect Previous Consensus on Certain Offensive Statements To Something Much Worse
The big story in academia this week involved Hamline University, which fired an adjunct professor for showing a historic artwork that depicted Muhammad. This is horrible on its own terms, both in terms of how little Hamline values academic freedom and also how poorly adjunct professors, a growing segment of academia with no job protections, are treated.
But I think it’s also worth examining the substantive principle being enforced here, because there are a lot of problems with it. We might start with the fact that the principle is the same one that terrorists invoked to justify the attack against the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris in 2015. Indeed, in a sense, it is an even more strict version of the taboo- Charlie Hebdo, after all, really did insult Islam: that was the point of its cartoons! But Erika López Prater did no such thing at Hamline; she merely showed her class a piece of historic art meant to honor Muhammad, after warning them what they were about to see.
Now obviously, just because a terrorist might believe something doesn’t by itself invalidate the belief— the cause of Irish independence and sovereignty was not invalidated by the fact that IRA terrorists bombed London repeatedly, and the cause of Palestinian self-determination is not discredited by Hamas attacks. But it’s at least worth thinking about.
That’s far from the only problem with the substantive principle, though. Importantly— and this is unknown to a lot of white Americans— there’s actually a vigorous debate within Islam about whether depicting the Prophet is even prohibited, and numerous Muslims and various sects believe there is nothing wrong with doing so. Indeed, this is exactly how the extensive canon of artistic depictions of Muhammad got created in the first place.
Essentially, a faction that has lost a debate within Islam (or at least has not been able to win it) is attempting to use bullying tactics to force the rest of the world to conform with the position that it has been unable to convince its fellow believers to accept. That’s really unacceptable. It’s obviously far more unacceptable when we are talking about a violent attack on a French newspaper, but it’s still unacceptable when it is students attacking a professor and causing her to be fired.
I’m not a fan of taboos generally, but at least a taboo needs to be backed by a real social consensus, not a small group of people who are utter failures at persuasion but who are willing to act like complete douchebags to force people to comply with their minority viewpoint.
In many ways, these student protesters, who identify with the left, are reminiscent of so many right wing protesters in the past, the folks who utterly failed to persuade the public not to consume “immoral” and “obscene” expression and then tried to use the government to suppress the stuff that their fellow Americans wanted to view.
But beyond even that, on the level of taboos generally, I think we need to reacquaint ourselves with the cost of taboos. Because depictions of Muhammad are not the only area in which the academic Left is trying to institute taboos— they are also trying to change the rules on two slurs, the n-word and the two words relating to gays that start with “f”.
You’ll notice I am obeying the taboos. And to be clear, I don’t really have any problem with obeying the taboos. I could imagine a situation where I would be forced to say one of those words in public, but it would have to be in a court case or similar situation where the word was directly relevant and there was no way to avoid it. (F. Lee Bailey famously used the n-word, a lot, in his cross-examination of Mark Fuhrman.)
But nonetheless, the taboos reflect a serious change in the rules. We used to adhere to something called the “use-mention” dichotomy, where it was OK to mention these words where appropriate so long as they were not used as descriptors of or insults about people. (It’s worth noting there was always a more relaxed rule for Blacks on the n-word, which is why Chris Rock could do his infamous comedy routine on Black people and the n-word. On the other hand, there really wasn’t a more relaxed rule for gays on the slurs starting with “f”, which is why Dan Savage had to stop using it in his advice column.)
An example of “use-mention” was that during the OJ Simpson case, numerous white reporters said the n-word when quoting testimony or the Mark Fuhrman tapes. Ted Koppel did a whole episode on it where he said the word multiple times. Nobody called for Ted Koppel to be fired. Law professors quoted cases that used the word. Nobody called for them to be fired.
When you switch to a taboo, it puts people’s jobs in jeopardy. Not only have white professors lost their jobs for saying the n-word in class, they have faced employment consequences for saying words that weren’t even the n-word but sounded a little like it in class. And the response to this is almost certainly that material that contains the n-word simply gets expurgated. The school district whose schools I attended as a kid now no longer assigns Mark Twain or Harper Lee. Who wants to run the risk?
And that’s the problem with taboos. The only way to comply with a taboo is not to present the material at all. Of course, one can be very cynical and point out that the faction that has been unable to convince fellow Muslims that depicting the Prophet is taboo would love it if nobody actually understood that they had, in fact, lost that debate, and one way to do that is ensure nobody sees any artwork that might refute their claims. But even beyond the point about not giving in to a faction that failed to persuade, there is a broader point which is you really do lose something when you enforce a taboo. Indeed, we learned this lesson with movie censorship decades ago. A whole bunch of great American movies were made in the 1970’s and thereafter after it became possible to depict real life in all of its complexities without having to satisfy a bunch of censors. For instance, a movie like Fast Times At Ridgemont High violated numerous taboos, from bare breasts to teenagers having sex to abortion. It is also one of the greatest movies ever made about teenagers.
If we decide the new taboo is no depictions of Muhammad can be displayed in any context, the losers will be art students (including, by the way, the students who protested— one leitmotif of these academic controversies is that students are supposed to be in college to sit and learn and aren’t supposed to control the curriculum) who don’t get to learn about the rich history of such depictions as well as the debate regarding their propriety. And if we decide that nothing containing the n-word may be assigned to a student or read aloud in a class, the losers will be literature and law students and others who won’t get the rich experience of reading Mark Twain or will never understand exactly why Brandenburg v. Ohio was such a vexing case.
I’m not saying that collectively, there can never be a situation where we decide we have a taboo. But such taboos really do need to be formed from a real social consensus and after real debate and discussion. An activist group, a group of students who are supposed to be learning and not teaching, or the people who lost such a debate should never get to impose such a taboo through sheer bullying.