Civitas

There are several reasons for thinking that, had Locke been alive today, or had the cartoons been published in his day and Locke known all we now do of and about Islam, he would not have opposed their publication, or called for their suppression by law or self-censorship.

First, as Rees-Mogg himself was forced to admit in his piece, Locke was not averse to making remarks he must have known to be deeply offensive to British Roman Catholics and atheists of his day.

Specifically, Locke denied both groups fit for full inclusion within the British political commonwealth. He did so because he considered the the ultimate allegiance of the former to lie with a foreign hostile sovereign, the Pope, and the latter precluded by their disbelief from being able to swear the appropriate oaths by which alone, so he believed, could the necessary unshakeable commitments be created.

But, more importantly and secondly, towards the end of his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke expressly asserts something seemingly in blatant contradiction with the view Rees-Mogg seeks to attribute to him.
Locke asserts:

‘Uncharitableness … and many other things are sins, by the consent of all men, which no man ever said were to be punished by the magistrate. The reason is, because they are not prejudicial to other men’s rights, nor do they break the public peace of societies.’

The implication of Locke's remark which puts it so at odds with the view Rees-Mogg wants to ascribe to him is that, even were publication of the cartoons uncharitable because offensive to Muslims, their publication is not indefensible, since it neither violates any rights nor breaches the peace.

Of course, some protesting Muslims have claimed their publication has violated their rights and those of their coreligionists. Similarly, since their publication, many breaches of the peace have taken place in protest, all too many, tragically, with fatal result.

However, given the content of the cartoons and the purpose of the Danish newspaper in publishing them, it flies in the face of reality to suggest they were published to incite breach of the peace, rather than draw critical attention to the propensity Islam seems to have to arouse all too many of its adherents on the slightest pretext to commit such breaches.

Moreover, as is shown by what Locke was prepared to say about the ineligibility of Roman Catholics and atheists for full active British citizenship, Locke was certainly not of the opinion that anyone had or should be given a right not to be offended by others. Or else, if he was, it was a right that he was fully prepared to believe could justifiably be infringed whenever political circumstances demanded it be – which was, given what he writes about Catholics and atheists, whenever the security and integrity of the realm was at stake.

Mention of this latter consideration brings me to the third and final reason Rees-Mogg is wrong to suppose Locke would have condemned the publication of the cartoons or supported their mandatory or voluntary suppression.

In his Letter, Locke was prepared to assert that ‘neither Pagan, nor Muhametan, nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil commonwealth, because of their religion’, as he was not prepared so to do, for reasons already mentioned, in the case of Roman Catholics and atheists. However, the eligibility of the former for inclusion always remained conditional, in Locke's view, on their willingness to abide by the rule of law and accept and observe the other principles constitutive of a sovereign liberal nation. Where they are not so prepared because of how they construed their religion, there is ample textual warrant within Locke’ writings to suppose that he would not have been willing to tolerate them.

Although written with only intra-Christian rivalries in mind, Locke makes an observation at the end of his Letter highly germane to the current unrest among Muslims here and abroad about the cartoons and other western liberal ways. Locke writes:

‘It is not the diversity of opinions (which cannot be avoided) but the refusal of toleration to those that are of different opinions that has produced all the bustles and wars that have been in the ... world upon account of religion. [Religious] heads and leaders, moved by … insatiable desire of dominion, making use of … the credulous superstition of the giddy multitude, have incensed and animated them against those who dissent from themselves… [T]his … will continue … so long as ... preachers … excite men to arms and sound the trumpet of war. But that magistrates should suffer these incendiaries, and disturbers of the public peace might justly be wondered at; if it did not appear that they have been invited by them unto a participation of the spoil.’

Substitute for ‘participation in the spoils', 'the prospect of Muslim votes’ or ‘a covenant of trust that avoids domestic terror while allowing it to be plotted for abroad’, and one begins to see just how apposite Locke’s observation remains today as well as just how decisive a rebuttal it provides of Rees-Mogg’s view of what Locke’s attitude to publication of the offending cartoons would have been.

If any further proof were needed of just what good reason there might be for publication of the offending cartoons, notwithstanding all the protests their publication has provoked, two recently published facts supply it.

First, only a day after the publication of Rees-Mogg’s article, a report appeared in the Times of the findings of a Populus poll of 500 British Muslims which found that as many as 37% of them believed that the Jewish community in Britain were a legitimate target, and no fewer than 7% thought suicide bombings in Britain justifiable.

Second, notwithstanding that the European Commission appears to be pressing for a European-wide code of conduct in the reporting about religions to avoid future disturbances, and one which would involve self-censorship of future publication of cartoons like those which have given rise to the current disturbances, it now turns out that an Egyptian newspaper saw fit back to publish the entire set of them last October without its having occasioned so much as a murmur of protest at their publication at the time. So much for the cause of the current protests being their offensiveness to Muslim sensiblities.

For what the true reasons for the protests might be, I refer back to the blog I wrote on the subject last week, although that conjectural explanation has to some extent been superseded by a very illuminating account in today's New York Times of how the protests were planned by Muslim heads of state at a meeting in Mecca back in December of last year.

Finally, if we must , as I am all for doing, go back to the turbulent seventeenth century for instruction on how best to interpret and respond to current Muslim unrest, we will find no better instructor than the playright and former poet laureate, Tomas Shadwell, and the response to his play The Lancashire Witches.

First performed in 1681 at the height of the Exclusion Crisis, when parliamentarians in vain sought to prevent the accession of Charles ll's openly Catholic younger brother James, the play was virulently anti-Catholic by having suggested, not without some reason, there was a concerted conspiracy among some of their number to re-Catholicise the country. Among other salacious delights contained in the play was a graphic depiction of a full witches’ black Sabbath orchestrated no less than by an aptly named Irish Roman Catholic priest, Tegue O Divelly!

When first performed, however, Roman Catholics disguised their true reason for opposing the play, which was the doubt it raised about their loyalties, by focussing on its portrayal of a smug obsequious young Anglican, the equally aptly named Smerk, who was house chaplain to a true and upstanding stalwart member of the English gentry, Sir Edward Hartfort -- i.e stout of heart or stout-hearted.

When first published in 1682, Shadwell went into some detail in a prefatory note to the reader recounting the initial reception of the play upon its first performance. There is much in this account to instruct and inspire those today who are confronting current protests at the irreverent cartoons of Mohammed.

Shadwell begins by alluding to the sharp and intense religious divisions of his day so:

‘Fops and knaves are the fittest characters for comedy, and this town [London] was wont to abound with variety of vanities and knaveries till this unhappy division. But all run now into poltics, and you must needs, if you touch upon any humour of this time, offend one of the parties.’

He goes on to remark that he is unable to see how what he had written could possibly give cause for offence to anyone save Roman Catholics, about offending whom he seems to have been as little exercised as Locke, until he learned how some closet Catholics had objected to his play on the pretended grounds of its having insulted the Church of England by the way it portrayed Smerk.

Although initially first licensed for performance in almost its entirety, Shadwell recounts how later the play came under severe censorship as a result of the disingenuously motivated and artificially staged protests that had attended its very first performance. These protests, he recounts, had been artificially stirred up by Catholics who had paid others to attend the play and to hiss during its performance. His account of how and why these planned disruptions failed is well worth reading by all who rightly see no reason why newspapers should not be perfectly at liberty to publish cartoons like those the Danish newspaper did, despite all the outrage and protests their publication has occasioned:

‘But they [the Catholic opponents of the play] had gotten mercenary fellows, who were such fools that they did not know when to hiss and this was evident to all the audience. It was wonderful to see men of great quality and gentlemen, in so mean a combination’ -- that is, people of integrity and learning prepared to stand up and not be bullied by this orchestrated conspiracy of ingnoramuses whio had been paid to disrupt the play’s performance.

Shadwell then relates how the protests of the rent-a-mob failed in their intent of preventing the play from being performed:

‘But to my great satisfaction they came off as meanly as I could wish. I had so numerous an assembly of the best sort of men, who stood so generously in my defence, for the first three days, that they quash’d all right the vain attempts of my enemies, the inconsiderable party of hissers yielded, and the play lived in spite of them.’

Those who recognise just what is at stake at present over the cartoons should be both uplifted and inspired by what Shadwell relates here about how his play was able to withstand the orchestrated attempts to shout it down. . What he writes should reinforce their unwillngness to be misled by faulty Lockean exegesis into supposing there is no truly classical liberal response but to do as Rees- Mogg has bid them and roll over like tame pussies to await their stomachs being rubbed by the hand of some appreciative Muslim whose anger has been temporarily stayed by that submissive gesture.