What You Can't Say (2004)

The relevant part:

The meaning of “Islamophobia” is not at all like the meanings of those other terms. It is simply not easy to differentiate prejudice against Muslims from ordinary racism and xenophobia directed at Arabs, Pakistanis, Somalis, and other people who happen to be Muslim. Of course, there is no question that such bigotry exists, and it is as odious as Greenwald believes. But inventing a new term does not give us license to say that there is a new form of hatred in the world. How does the term “anti-Semitism” differ? Well, we have a 2000-year-old tradition of religiously inspired hatred against Jews, conceived as a distinct race of people, both by those who hate them and by Jews themselves. Anti-Semitism is, therefore, a specific form of racism that, as everyone knows, has taken many terrible turns over the years (and is now especially prevalent among Muslims, for reasons that can be explicitly traced not merely to recent conflicts over land in the Middle East, but to the doctrine of Islam). “Sexism,” generally speaking, is a bias against women, not because of any doctrines they might espouse, but because they were born without a Y chromosome. The meanings of these terms are clear, and each names a form of hatred and exclusion directed at people, as people, not because of their behavior or beliefs, but because of the mere circumstances of their birth.

Islamophobia is something else entirely. It is, Greenwald tells us in his three points, an “irrational” and “disproportionate” and “unjustified” focus on Muslims. But the only way that Muslims can reasonably be said to exist as a group is in terms of their adherence to the doctrine of Islam. There is no race of Muslims. They are not united by any physical traits or a diaspora. Unlike Judaism, Islam is a vast, missionary faith. The only thing that defines the class of All Muslims—and the only thing that could make this group the possible target of anyone’s “irrational” fear, “disproportionate” focus, or “unjustified” criticism—is their adherence to a set of beliefs and the behaviors that these beliefs inspire.

And, unlike a person’s racial characteristics or gender, beliefs can be argued for, tested, criticized, and changed. In fact, wherever the norms of rational conversation are allowed to do their work, beliefs must earn respect. More important, beliefs are claims about reality and about how human beings should live within it—so they necessarily lead to behavior, and to values, laws, and public institutions that affect the lives of all people, whether they share these beliefs or not. Beliefs end marriages and start wars.

So “Islamophobia” must be—it really can only be—an irrational, disproportionate, and unjustified fear of certain people, regardless of their ethnicity or any other accidental trait, because of what they believe and to the degree to which they believe it. Thus the relevant question to ask is whether a special concern about people who are deeply committed to the actual doctrines of Islam, in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, is irrational, disproportionate, and unjustified.

To give an example in the present day: imagine you believed a gender or race was literally subhuman, in the sense that you had every right to do whatever you wanted to the Thing. That is something that was a widespread belief in the past but is now simply unspeakable. Note that we're not talking about race and IQ, which is still "allowed" to be spoken of, in the sense that people can and do talk about it, even if other people vociferously disagree with the person. But also note the framing the race-and-IQ folk themselves use when talking about it: they bend over backwards to claim that they think race has no bearing on whether a person has rights or equal moral status. It's always framed as a purely scientific statement which, although perhaps having policy implications, says nothing about the moral status of the person designated as more likely to have a low IQ. Someone arguing otherwise wouldn't be denounced but altogether written out of rational discourse.

When PG talks about the unspeakable assumptions and fashions of an age, that's what I read him as talking about. In general, I mean, not about race in particular. It also goes to show that just because something is a widely shared assumption of an age doesn't mean it's wrong.[1]

[1] But isn't it interestingly meta that I can reference universally shared moral assumptions and use the fact that they are universally shared as rhetorical evidence that they're good and useful?

>What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people.

It may appear that morality behaves like fashion, but it's doesn't, or at least it shouldn't. The key ingredient here is that in fashion, there is no wrong, only taste. Thus, you can pull back the curtain on any would-be wizard trying to force you to conform.

In ethics, on the other hand, screaming a bunch of hurtful crap at people, just because you're "not supposed to do that" isn't cocksure cleverness. It's wrong. It hurts people. There are good, justifiable, reasons why you shouldn't say them.

Do we have taboos we shouldn't have? Sure, but if we are going to talk about them, they should be within a moral framework, not in some empirical mess of hey-that-shouldn't-be-that-way.

The juxtaposition of the Santa and Jesus myths has always baffled me. It is truly a spectacular example of the mental hoops people will go to get past their fear of death: even when they are given an opportunity to question their wider beliefs when the truth about the non-existence of Santa is revealed, they are somehow able to effortlessly compartmentalize the "real" unbelievable stories (like rising from the dead, etc) and the "made up" stories (Santa visits all children on Christmas, elves make the toys, etc.) You couldn't make this up if you tried: we piggyback a widely acknowledged fake myth about a man with superpowers on top of a widely believed myth about a man with superpowers, and "grow out" of the former but will go to the grave with the latter. It's the ultimate troll.