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Moral Racism - Dripping with Blood by Ian
Buruma What is so terrible
about the Miss World contest? It is a little cheesy, to be sure.
Somewhat old-fashioned, too. And a bit vulgar, perhaps. But
"toxic" (Kathy Lette)? Something "normal" people
should not enjoy (Rod Liddle)? Of course, the contest turns human
bodies into objects to be admired. But how different is that from
Bruce Webber photographs advertising Y-fronts? Or painting a nude
model in a studio? Or indeed a Chippendale show? Was The Full Monty
toxic?
Besides being in bad taste, Miss World is now also being blamed for
the killing of more than 500 people by frenzied Muslim mobs in
Nigeria. People cheered as Christian women and children were dragged
from their cars and torched to death in the street. The prize for the
most idiotic reaction to this murder spree must go to Muriel Gray who
opined that the Miss World contestants' swimming costumes were "dripping
with blood". As though Miss Wherever, whose only ambition
was to have her moment in the media sun, was to blame for this
homicidal madness.
And if it wasn't Miss Wherever, in her bloody bikini, it was Ms Isioma
Daniel, the British-trained journalist, who was hounded out of her
country for writing a column about the prophet Mohammed marrying a
beauty queen. This is what sparked off the riots. And so Julia Morley,
the Miss World convener, blamed Ms Daniel for the killings. She
"made this problem".
Staging the contest in Nigeria might not have been wise, and the
journalist may have been courting danger. But some of the reactions in
London suggest that the killers may have had a point. There
is an odd convergence between fashionable political correctitude and
religious bigotry, as though people who have the bad taste to
enjoy beauty parades are criminally culpable. Rod Liddle, for example,
found it difficult to disagree with the Muslim lynch mob, "from a
theoretical point of view", that Miss World represents everything
that is horrible about "western culture".
Why does the bien-pensant knee always jerk in this predictable way?
Why would so many of us be so quick to blame the brutality of
non-western bigots on "western culture", or a local
journalist who dared to make very mild fun of religious pieties,
instead of on the killers themselves? I can think of a few reasons. The
contempt for Miss World and those - often, by the way, in the
non-western world - who enjoy it, is
partly a matter of snobbery. Our condemnation makes us feel
morally superior, and shows off our superior taste. Morality and taste
are of course connected. What the good bourgeoisie considers to be bad
taste is also, on the whole, seen as morally offensive. Hence the
deliberate bad taste employed by such iconoclasts as Joe Orton or
Lenny Bruce. But the bad taste of Miss World is not deliberate.
Perhaps that is what makes it so low rent, so plebeian, so unfit for
our dinner tables and thus a convenient target for our disapproval.
Besides snobbery, there is a worse reason for being more outraged
by western vulgarity than non-western murderousness. It might be
called moral obtuseness, or even moral
racism. The assumption appears to be that Africans or Asians
can't be held to our own elevated standards. They are more like wild
animals, whose savagery should not be provoked by our foolishness.
When we do provoke them, the consequences are entirely our fault. It
would be as misplaced to apply our moral standards to their behaviour,
as it would be to expect tigers to talk. The murder of Nigerians or
Indian Muslims, or Iraqi Kurds, is par for the course, unless we did
it, or Americans, or Israelis.
At best, this can be excused as a form of helplessness. After all,
there is nothing much we can do in London about brutal dictators,
hysterical clerics, or racial hatreds outside our own cosy borders.
One might even say it is our first duty to make sure we behave, as
well as those whose political acts we might have a tiny chance of
influencing, by voting, or demonstrating, or writing angry letters to
the editor. Criticism is the lifeblood of democracy. So that is all
right.
What is not so fine, however, is to defend Salman Rushdie's
right to free speech, but to blame a Nigerian journalist who tries to
exercise the same right, for provoking mass murder. What is certainly
not all right is to diminish the responsibility of clerics, who
incited the violence, by frivolously concurring with their views on
western culture. That is no way to defend the freedom of others or,
for that matter, our own. |