Will Self in Harper’s Magazine:
How could we satirize all sorts of different people, with different faiths, without implicitly arguing that they should abandon their ethical precepts in favor of our supposedly superior ones? Under such circumstances, all the satirist could responsibly do—especially if he lacked moral certainty himself—was get his readers to think about the problems they were all facing.
The test case for this had been the publication of Salman Rushdie’s not-unsatiric novel The Satanic Verses: Western liberals convulsed over the fatwa issued against the author by Iran’s ayatollah—largely because they were concerned about an enemy from within. Not that liberals would acknowledge their own bad faith in this regard; if they could have, they’d have had to do a lot of hard thinking, instead of indulging in the sort of empty attitudinizing many did when the next climacteric arrived, in the form of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which caused certain satirists, such as my old friend Martin Amis (who really should have known better), to completely abandon their moral compasses and argue that the Muslim community deserved “to suffer until it gets its house in order.” And if a society’s most prominent public intellectuals are incapable of sustaining a discourse informed by a defined position on right and wrong, then there really is no discourse anymore.
More here.
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