May 13, 2017
Source: Bigstock
The sentencing of the governor of Jakarta to two years” imprisonment for blasphemy may seem like a throwback to medieval intolerance, but it is far more than that. It is a reminder that the suppression of the freedom of others is more fun than the exercise of freedom. The Muslim masses who demanded the prosecution of the governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, almost certainly enjoyed their “anger,” supposedly virtuous anger being among the pleasures that their religion does not deny them.
But there is more. Although no doubt intellectually primitive, the condemnation and sentencing of the governor was in one respect profoundly modern. One of the judges said that punishment was appropriate and justified because the governor had hurt the feelings of Muslims”which, as far as I can tell, must have been as delicate as those of Western students who need safe spaces and teddy bears to hug if they hear something that contradicts their preconceptions.
The desire not to have one’s feelings hurt has been erected into a right, a right increasingly enforceable at law. Of course, not everyone’s feelings are treated with the solicitude that we show to a nice fluffy colorful species of animal that is, regrettably, on the verge of extinction. But there is no doubt that treating people’s feelings with this solicitude tends not only to preserve them but to cause them to flourish and multiply. The more you are preserved from hurt feelings, the more of them you have.
But as I have already observed, hurt feelings are not as unpleasurable as the psychologically naive might suppose. All is not pain that shouts its name. And which of us has never experienced the pleasure of pressing on precisely an inflamed part of our body, a pleasure that we often feel impelled to repeat? We often regret the passing of the inflammation (provided it was trivial). It is the same with feelings of moral outrage”and we rather regret when the supposed cause of them is removed. The inflammation of feeling, in fact, is sometimes an end in itself, indulged in for the sheer pleasure of it, which is not, of course, to say that no outrage is ever genuine.
The distinction between real and bogus anger and every state in between (for what may start as genuine may become bogus by degrees as one grows attached to one’s anger) requires an attempt at self-examination, the kind of self-examination at which Doctor Johnson was so adept and which we have largely abandoned in favor of psychobabble and talk of chemical imbalances, though we have not the faintest idea what the latter might be.
The other day I found myself embroiled in a telephone discussion-cum-dispute with a human being (to whom finally I was put through after having made a score of automated choices) about some merchandise that I had ordered but which had not been delivered as promised.
On reflection, of course, I realized that it didn”t matter in the slightest whether what I had ordered was delivered today, tomorrow, or next week: It was not food to a starving man. But a promise is a promise, and I managed to work myself up into a pleasant state of indignation. And after all, is not the customer (in this case, me) always right? When I phoned, I was spoiling for an argument, if not for a fight.
It did not help that the human being to whom I was eventually put through seemed as programmed as any computer and was unable, unwilling, or too frightened to depart from her very reduced script. She spoke as someone profoundly brain-damaged who could do nothing but repeat herself. As she had given the impression of being a live human being, this was in its own way as infuriating as a recorded message such as “Your call is very important to us” or “Switchboard is very busy today.” (The switchboard of one newspaper for which I once wrote was very busy today for at least ten years, which was not necessarily a lie, of course, since it might have been very busy every day for ten years, but the impression the message would have given most callers was that that switchboard on the day on which they happened to call was exceptionally busy. There is an art to lying without telling a lie”as every doctor knows or ought to know.)
