sapere aude

Although these are not reflections suitable to an overcrowded prison cell in Khartoum, it really is interesting to observe the mechanisms of popular manipulation and the apparent attempts to minimise their impact (on the part of the judge). As they stream out of the mosques after Friday prayers the demonstrators are fired up in favour of the immediate beheading of Gillian Gibbons. Apart from the incongruity of 'taking offence' as a badge of religious commitment there is the total disconnection in this conduct between rhetoric and reality. Of course Rowan Williams is right to say that the sentence is an absurdly disproportionate response to a minor cultural faux pas, and one wonders how deeply cynical the agitators are ('conservatve clerics'). If we concede that it is monstrous and wicked to insult the Prophet then we can see why people might think that there should be severe punishment, why they might stream out into the streets in a fury. I suppose the point is that they don't get to consider the minor premise, that Gillian Gibbon is guilty of inflammatory insult etc. One has to suppose that the demonstrators are reacting because they have been told that some infidel Englishwoman has consciously insulted the Prophet, as part of a wider British plot to undermine Islam. And so they rage and rail against the image of a wicked woman, a ghastly Britannia, and Gillian Gibbon doesn't get a look-in, or a voice. But this happens all the time, reaction to an image which makes some sense of the reaction, but unaware of the reality. This is how manipulation happens, from the vile descriptions of the Jew in Nazi Germany (monsters of the infflamed imagination against whom one must in one's dream fight to the death with courage and firmness) to the routine savaging by the Opposition, synthetically worked up under a description of events which renders the reaction intelligible but without connection to the truth, and it is synthetic because they know that very well, which is what makes it all in its small way also vile. How sad to hear Cameron's insinuations against Brown's integrity, sad whatever one's opinion of Brown whose ordinary human flaws are out there on view, no longer exposed only to the private circle. And yet his integrity shines through his manifest mortification at the course of events.