Checking Charlie Hebdo’s Privilege (Douthat, NYT) [View all]

[Yorktown]

Checking Charlie Hebdo’s Privilege

APRIL 18, 2015 - Ross Douthat - NYT

A LIVING cartoonist lecturing his murdered peers makes for a curious spectacle, but that’s what transpired at journalism’s George Polk Awards a week ago. The lecturer was Garry Trudeau, of “Doonesbury” fame; his subject was the cartoonists for Charlie Hebdo, (..)
“ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny — it’s just mean.”

Trudeau is hardly the first writer to accuse the Hebdo cartoonists of “punching down.” (..) David Frum, in a response to Trudeau, distilled as follows: In any given conflict, first “identify the bearer of privilege,” then “hold the privilege-bearer responsible.”
(..)
on the contemporary left, the theory’s simplicity is becoming a kind of intellectual straitjacket. The Hebdo massacre is just one of many cases in which today’s progressives, in the name of overthrowing hierarchies, end up assuming that lines of power are predictable, permanent and clear.

Which they are not, for several reasons.

First, while power flows from pre-existing privilege, it also grows from the barrel of a gun, and the willingness to deal out violence changes power dynamics, even when it doesn’t have a truly revolutionary outcome. The terrorist’s veto on portrayals of Islam is itself a very real form of power, and as long as journalists who challenge it end up dead, the idea that they are “up” and their targets are “down” reflects a denial of life-and-death reality. (..)

Second, we live in a world where William Gibson’s insight that “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” is vindicated every day, and where migration and communication bring cultures that are experiencing this uneven distribution into constant contact. In a globalized world, the faith that the Hebdo cartoonists mocked is the faith of both the powerless and the powerful, (..)

Third and finally, almost every official hierarchy of victimhood tends toward some kind of blindness or partiality.
(..)


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-checking-charlie-hebdos-privilege.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fross-douthat