RantsCounterRants: Diablog continues on Cross Burning and Free Speech

 

There’s been extensive diablogging and monoblogging on the question of Cross Burning as protected, free speech.  Be sure to make the rounds and catch all the arguments here in the Salon Blogs:

 

Jan Haugland at Secular Blasphemy – once again, Jan lights the fuse and gets us started.  Jan’s believes a cross burning is pretty much just wood on fire and freed speech to boot; if cross-burning’s a threat, it’s not specific enough for punitive action.  However, Jan’s a Norwegian; things might look that way from Bergen.

 

The Raven – our fine feathered friend maintains that prohibition of symbols is a slippery slope.  It’s a razor’s edge he perches on: although he maintains that racism is abhorrent, he doesn’t support a prohibition on cross-burning. 

 

Kriselda of Different Strings – also concurs with The Raven’s take, adding that one man’s insult is another man’s religious delight, reminding us that other symbols like swastikas have meanings in different cultures.  As a Norse Pagan, she admits her sensitivity to this perspective.

 

Emphasis Added by Rob Salkowitz – who believes that the burning of a cross is intended as a racist threat, a call to action, and therefore is not subject to the same protections as pure speech, rhetoric or debate on the topic of racism.  He’s on the other side of that thin, double-edged razor on which The Raven perches.

 

Note my previous post on this topic in response to Jan’s originating post.

 

I lay awake last night, mulling over this issue long after blogging about it.  Watching Mark Hertsgaard this morning with Bill Moyers at NOW encouraged yet more thought on this topic.  Hertsgaards’ discussion of the bewildering dislike of American culture (not necessarily a dislike of Americans as individuals) by other cultures and countries helped me see more clearly that the issue of culture is very much at the heart of this argument and cannot be separated from this particular argument.

 

First, I need to point out the particular debate which Jan brought to our attention is here in the United States, in front of the Supreme Court for evaluation against the U.S. Constitution.  The issue is uniquely American, a local cultural issue – for example, most other countries in the EU had abandoned slavery as either immoral or impractical hundreds of years before this country did so.  The practice of discrimination based on color and ethnicity has only recently been outlawed (1964), in comparison to the enactment of similar laws in other countries.  The actual enforcement of Civil Rights Act here in this country was slow and in some places still difficult.  While we can debate about this for the benefit of Jan in Norway and with Kriselda in perspective of Norse Paganism, the reality is this is a legal and moral argument within the context of the American nation and its culture.

 

The Raven brought us a particularly important concept yesterday in comments:  that symbolism and racism are tied as memes.  While The Raven and I disagree on the methodology of removing racism as a meme, I agree wholeheartedly on the concept of memes, in that racism and its language is acquired, transferred as a specific type of knowledge from person to person.  Culture at large is memetic, with racism a subset of a particular culture.  Memes are the software of a group of people, a culture or society.  Software can be corrupt or become obsolete; in this case, racism is the corrupt and obsolete software, embedded with negative objects symbolizing the software’s intent.  Racism interferes with the constructive objective of open and free collaboration, which in turn benefits our society’s productivity.  Racism may at one point have been seen as a beneficial construct, when portions of America’s economy relied on slave labor – but that was a tenuous, temporary benefit as best based on immoral behavior.  (Kind of like cooking the books at Enron and WorldCom – what did it benefit the whole of society in the long run?  A short-term gain at the expense of long-term health is unethical, immoral.)

 

But how does a country establish the memes, the positive software of its cultures, how does it encourage the growth of positive memes which it feels are most likely to benefit it as a whole over the long term?

 

We’d like to get to a point in our American culture where the concept of threatening minority groups by the use of symbols and other secret languages of intimidations is completely abhorrent and viewed as ineffective and unacceptable.  This will only happen if those memes viewed as constructive are encouraged to flourish, and those memes viewed as negative are smothered or re-programmed.

 

One method by which societies can re-program cultural memes is through education – replace and rewrite bad code with good code.  But education can only go so far, if individual households de-program the society’s memes.  That’s where society must remove and replace incentives which encourage the growth of negative memes.  Codification of rules and their enforcement is a strong method by which negative memes can be tempered in a society – in effect, remove or break the bad code, insert a harmless loop.

 

The meme of racism and of cross-burning in American culture needs to be changed.  At some point in time, the majority of people in this country would prefer to look at cross-burning as either an annoyance, or begin to associate it with something more wholesome.  Until that new code is fully introduced into this culture, the negative old code must somehow be suppressed so that it does not replicate at the expense of positive new code. 

 

Other countries have accomplished this – how did they do it?  I doubt it meant turning a blind-eye to the negative behavior.  And while Kriselda brings up a good point that eventually the Vikings “cross-pollinated” to effect memetic change through genetic change, it’s not likely to happen here since no single culture is in domination, since America is a polyglot intent on remaining as such.

 

Figure out how to constructively re-meme America and we’ve resolved the entire question of cross-burning.

 

In fact, I imagine with the ability to constructively re-meme America, we could solve almost every one of this particular nation’s problems.

 

Think about it for a bit, roll around in it.  The implications can be staggering.

  4:50:27 PM    comment []

I’m not entirely positive, but I think I’m watching Al Gore say “piss off” to Trent Lott as well as the DNC and the 2004 election on Saturday Night Live.

 

Why else would he be caught holding a Chihuahua, dress up as Lott, and feign French kissing Tipper to the point of passing out?  (Not all at once, mind you...)

 

I’m not certain if it’s funny or sad – feels like performance art, not just comedy.  You know, that certain "at arm's length" perspective which comes from viewing, not engaging.

 

What do you think?

 

p.s. He’s really venting on the Lott business (the gloves are clearly off and the gauntlet thrown), but then so is Lorne Michaels and the rest of SNL.  Go for it!

  12:21:04 AM    comment []