For the Wall Street Journal, Geert Wilders is, at best, another “Piss Christ”

(Note: this entry was revised and expanded after its initial posting.)

At the luncheon in New York this past Monday where Geert Wilders spoke, I happened to be seated at the same table with James Taranto and Claudia Rosett of the Wall Street Journal. I wondered what a universalist, anti-national, culture-blind, “South Park conservative” type like Taranto could think of Wilders, and I thought it wouldn’t be anything positive. I figured he would, at best, as Bret Stephens of the Journal did recently, put Wilders in the same class as Salman Rushdie and Andres “Piss Christ” Serrano, that is, he would mark Wilders down as a distasteful, destructive figure who ought to be protected because we believe in a general right to freedom, not as a person who has anything useful and important to say, let alone anything useful and important to say in defense of our civilization. Indeed, the Stephens approach, which reduces the meaning of our civilization to the protection of individual freedom, conflates enemies of our civilization like Serrano and Rushdie with a defender of our civilization like Wilders: they’re all equally dislikable, and all equally deserving of protection.

Though I had forgotten it, my guess about Taranto had already been shown to be true—by me. As he made clear in an article he wrote about Wilders last November, which I commented on here, Taranto has zero interest in what Wilders actually has to say, since Wilders’s only real significance to him is as a figure of intolerance. One could even wonder whether Taranto would grant Wilders as much protection as he would to the likes of Serrano, since, from the “South Park conservative” perspective, expressing intolerance toward a non-Western minority is surely worse than displaying an artsy photograph of a crucifix immersed in the artist’s urine.

Here’s the key passage in my discussion of Taranto’s article:

Notice how Taranto segues directly from quoting Wilder’s remark that what he, Wilders, says about Islam is not his invention, it’s what Muslims themselves say about Islam, to Taranto’s response: “Yet [Wilders] insists that his antagonism toward Islam reflects no antipathy toward Muslims.” But Wilders was not expressing antipathy toward Islam, he was making assertions about Islam that are arguably true. Taranto neither accepts their truth, nor denies their truth. He simply translates Wilder’s arguably true assertion about Islam into Wilder’s “antagonism” toward Islam. Taranto thus shows himself to be a liberal know-nothing who refuses to discuss the possibility that Islam is indeed what its critics and its believers say it is.

And here are the last several paragraphs of Bret Stephens’s stunningly idiotic and incoherent article on Wilders, from the February 17 Wall Street Journal:

For liberals, the issue is straightforward. If routine mockery of Christianity and abuse of its symbols, both in the U.S. and Europe, is protected speech, why shouldn’t the same standard apply to the mockery of Islam? And if the difference in these cases is that mockery of Islam has the tendency to lead to riots, death threats and murder, should committed Christians now seek a kind of parity with Islamists by resorting to violent tactics to express their sense of religious injury?

The notion that liberals can have it both ways—champions of free speech on the one hand; defenders of multiculturalism’s assorted sensitivities on the other—was always intellectually flimsy. If liberals now want to speak for the “right” of this or that group not to be offended, the least they can do is stop calling themselves “liberals.”

For conservatives, especially of the cultural kind—the kind of people who talk about defending Western Civ.—Mr. Wilders’s case should also provoke some reconsiderations. It may not be impossible to denounce the likes of Mr. Serrano while defending the likes of Mr. Wilders. But a defense of Mr. Wilders is made a lot easier if one can point to the vivid difference between a civilization that protects, even celebrates (and funds!), its cultural provocateurs and a civilization that seeks their murder. [LA writes: Translation: You cultural conservatives “may” denounce Serrano while defending Wilders, but the more logically consistent and higher path is to defend both, because the true meaning of our civilization is freedom, freedom without reference to the good, freedom without reference to what the freedom is for, freedom without reference to whether the freedom is destroying the civilization that gave birth to the freedom, so that (the logic implies) the more offensive something is, the more damaging to society, the more it should be protected. The substantive meaning of a man trying to defend our civilization from its mortal enemies as compared with the substantive meaning of a man trying to tear down our civilization is irrelevant. All freedoms are equal to all other freedoms. All freedoms are equally good, just as all discriminations are equally bad.]

This is no small point. Western civilization is not simply the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” It is also the civilization of Socrates and Aristophanes, Hume and Voltaire, Copernicus and Darwin; of religious schismatics and nonbelievers. This is the civilization that is now required to define itself, oddly enough, by the case of a flamboyant Dutch politician with inconsistent ideas and a bouffant hairdo. If he can’t be defended, neither can Mr. Rushdie. Or Mr. Serrano. Liberals and conservatives alike, take note.

[end of Stephens’s article.]

LA replies:

So that’s Stephens’s final, belittling summing up of Wilders: “a flamboyant Dutch politician with inconsistent ideas and a bouffant hairdo.” I’ve seen Wilders now twice in person. He’s not flamboyant, but low key and sober. He has, even according to Stephens, only one arguably inconsistent idea, not “inconsistent ideas.” And he doesn’t have a bouffant hairdo. He has very thick hair, which suits him (even the dye job suits him), and, while unusual, looks neat and appropriate. But you see, Stephens’s dismissal of Wilders has a specific purpose in line with Stephens’s ideology. From Stephens’s point of view he is not putting down Wilders with a bunch of cheap shots but helping him. What Stephens is really saying is that, because Wilders is nothing but a poseur with funny hair and offensive ideas, therefore his freedoms are sacrosanct. Stephens doesn’t defend Wilders because Wilders has something positive to contribute; he defends him because, in Stephens’s view, Wilders is bad and worthless, like Andres Serrano.

Such is the nihilist liberal ideology the object of which is not the moral good or the flourishing of society, but the never-ending advancement of freedom without truth.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 26, 2009 05:23 PM | Send