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"Error Has No Rights" and the Tolerance of Mr. Bottum
Leave it to Joseph Bottum to take the simple proposition of mocking The Boston Globe for its double standard in the Danish cartoon row and somehow manage to muddle the issue:
Tolerance for diverging viewpoints isn’t the reason the Globe refuses to publish racist material; if anything, such tolerance ought to require publishing the vile stuff. Newspaper [sic] don’t publish racist remarks because they’re wrong—and error has no rights. Oh, the erroneous holders of such errors may have some rights, but the error itself has no business in a newspaper.
This is an interesting thing for Mr. Bottum to say. He might well be right that error should have no rights, but that would take him deep into my kind of reactionary country where neither he nor any of his colleagues at First Things wants to go. A liberal society with "freedom, democracy and all that good stuff," as Col. Tigh would say, is supposed to allow speech of all kinds, including those opinions that the majority finds erroneous and even pernicious. This is one reason why people do not long maintain a liberal society.
Obviously, newspapers cannot simply print known falsehoods and libel, but in the realm of opinion (where both racist remarks and the "inflammatory" cartoons would fall) "error" certainly does have rights, because it is not (yet) legally anyone's business to ban "error" from print and other media. Newspaper publishers choose to ban certain kinds of things, but fortunately they do not get to determine whether a given opinion is actually outside the protection of the law.
This state of affairs is, if I may be rather blunt, why Mr. Bottum can continue to write the foolish and wrong things that he so often does. It is also why Muslims and any number of other religious minorities can express their outrage at having their prophet or religion mocked. Under a different, older dispensation, the "error" of Islam would have few or no rights. But, of course, the only "error" Mr. Bottum and his colleagues are prepared to censure with such ferocity is their favourite bogeys of racism and "racist remarks," the definition of which is ever expanding and elastic.
Error may not have rights, but these Muslims are sure taking a few liberties with the Danish consulate in Beirut.
Via Caymanian Compass
Photo: AP
Daniel Larison | February 07, 2006
Comments
Error has no rights.
This phrase was re-popularized among Catholics, particularly Traditionalists by Michael Davies in his excellent book on Vatican II's document on Religious Liberty - which Davies proposed may clash with the historic and traditional teaching of the Church that "error has no rights."
The body of literature Traditional Catholics have built around this phrase in the past 40 years often strike hard against "Americanism" an error defined by the 19th century popes - but it seems partially embraced by the enthusiasts for liberal democracy, even some of those who write for First Things.
Michael Brendan Dougherty | 02/07/06 13:46
Thanks for the background of the phrase. Of course, the phrase makes perfect sense, and I generally agree with it. But then I think the Byzantine attitude towards religious freedom was a pretty good one. In fact, one would be hard pressed to justify why "error" has rights--even a libertarian would probably not defend the claim in those terms, but would deny that anyone can make authoritative statements about what "error" is or that it is not the business of any authority to make such determinations and so avoid the issue all together.
What I find so remarkable is that Bottum can use that phrase in all seriousness to attack racism (and apparently only racism), but somehow does not see the problem it poses for his "three-legged stool" of Catholic neoconservatism (Christianity, capitalism and democracy). If error has no rights, the "erroneous holders," as he called them, must have curtailed or limited "rights." Political ideologies that espouse recognisable, fundamental errors of principle would have to be regulated or even banned, and it would go without saying that actual religious doctrinal error would have to be penalised. Depending on how rigorous you want to be, this could affect half the people in the country or perhaps as much as 80-90%. Of course, neither Catholic nor Orthodox Traditionalists would have the chance to establish such an arrangement, but the idea is actually so thoroughly incompatible with the general drift of First Things that I was genuinely surprised when I saw it.
To put it another way: if racist statements are offensive and wrong and "have no rights," how much more offensive is impiety? Because this can cut several ways in a society with several religious groups (your piety is my impiety), the cultural and perhaps legal privileging of one then becomes unavoidable. How much more important does it then become to have a common set of norms and shared truths (and not just the watered-down, lowest common denominator version where we all believe in the "rights of man" or some such) that everyone will, or indeed must, accept? Homonoia becomes essential to maintaining social order, as erroneous beliefs are regarded not simply as innocuous or protected forms of speech and expression but as subversion and actually a form of injustice. That is the road the folks at First Things don't want to travel, because it will take them to an authoritarian or theocratic place they actually despise. They would like to occupy a happy middle ground where truth and untruth can lie down together in a field of public discourse, but that happy middle ground is already occupied by the church of the Laodiceans.
The proponents of the idea that the Enlightenment and Christianity can walk peacefully hand-in-hand through the garden of liberal democracy shouldn't be using phrases like this if their views are to remain remotely internally coherent.
Daniel Larison | 02/07/06 15:36
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