Abstract
Cartoonist and writer
“Be not deceived; God is not mocked.” That’s obviously true. After all, it’s in the Bible, so it must be. And religion is one of those things that is so personal to the individual believer that to mock the object of his or her devotions is certainly the grossest form of personal disrespect. Isn’t it?
In the war between freedom of expression and its various enemies, the skirmishes over the right to be critical of religion and the equal – yet opposite – right not to be needlessly offended appear to be the most fraught. Worse, spies exist on both sides. Why, for instance, is it acceptable to abuse someone’s religion when those who dole out this abuse often believe that abuse on grounds of race or gender or sexuality is actually a taboo? How can so-called progressive secularists be so unremittingly beastly to largely poor, mostly kind and usually blameless people because they believe in something that makes their life meaningful but which the progressive secularists abhor as delusional? Why should religion (or, more pertinently, some religions) be fair game for criticism when the manifest and obvious shortcomings of the critics can’t be? Worst of all, how can it be acceptable to laugh at religion, given its central, and maybe even defining, role in the lives of countless numbers of people throughout human history?
Hence those unending rows continue to erupt with considerable frequency. There’s the notorious case of the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, which ultimately led to more than a hundred people being killed, though none of them were cartoonists and all of them were Muslims, shot dead on the streets of Muslim countries by Muslim soldiers or policemen after having been incited to protest by Muslim clerics. More recently, in October 2013, the London School of Economics (LSE) Students’ Union banned members of the LSE Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Student Society from wearing T-shirts featuring the online comic strip Jesus and Mo at the university’s Freshers’ Fair following complaints from students. LSE’s Legal and Compliance Team and Head of Security told the society that wearing the T-shirts, which depicted the founders of the Christian and Islamic religions, could amount to “harassment” and could be seen as creating an “offensive environment”.
Indeed, when it comes to the rows revolving around religion and humour, cartoons seem to be the most frequent casus belli. I know this from personal experience, and also know why people are so affronted by them. As it happens, that’s got less to do with religion than with the medium: cartoons are, in effect, a very primitive kind of sympathetic magic, calculated to harm through mockery, but they also have far greater powers to offend thanks to the direct and mostly unmediated way that they’re consumed. (Or do I mean “read”? “Seen?” Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a precise English word for how an audience interacts with cartoons, almost as if this process involves an unsayable, nearly mystical mystery). That said, over the years I seem to have succeeded in deeply offending Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and, for that matter, atheists, as well as Republicans, Democrats, Zionists, Islamists, Serbs, the fat, the mentally ill and, thanks to a recent cartoon depicting a jovial if sinister loan shark, shark lovers (I’m guilty, it seems, of the crassest kind of anthropomorphism, unjustly defaming these harassed predators of the deep).
That last example might seem risible, though not, perhaps, if you are rightly affronted by the fact that 10 million sharks were either killed or mutilated for their dorsal fins last year. Still, should that mean that sharks should be protected through the sanctions of the criminal law from hate speech, including drawings? And should that also include jokes? And, if not, why should religions be treated any differently from sharks?
The statement “God is not mocked” doesn’t answer that question. Stripped of the cultural and historical heft it enjoys as the written part of the machinery of control that Christianity exercised over vast swathes of humanity for around a millennium and half, it’s just a hope, a wish. Taken from Chapter Six, Verse Seven of St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, the statement’s wider context was Paul’s programme of severing Christianity from its roots in Judaism by downgrading the significance of circumcision. Many commentators have accounted to Paul the mutation of Jesus’s insurrectionist sect into the kind of totalitarian religion Christianity became, and which it remains in many of its various forms (though by no means in all of them). It shares its prescriptive and totalitarian nature with branches of Islam, with which it also shares its origins in Judaism, the religion that, in its monotheistic guise, possibly evolved out of Persian Zoroastrianism.
The verse continues: “for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” which doesn’t get us much further. However, the Old Testament, usually considered to be more robust in these matters, helpfully states in Isaiah 28:22: “Now therefore, do not be mockers, lest your bonds be made strong; for I have heard from the Lord God of hosts, a destruction determined upon the whole earth.” That, you have to admit, is more like it. To paraphrase very loosely, it says, “if you take the piss, the creator of the universe is gonna get ya!” But at its heart it still says little more than “Don’t laugh at me, or you’ll get it!” That’s an understandable human response, so we need to delve a lot deeper into the nature of ourselves than any religious texts will take us.
Cartoons are, in effect, a very primitive kind of sympathetic magic
To begin with, when I asserted a few paragraphs ago that religion has defined people throughout human history, I should have qualified that statement by affirming that history – which is usually defined as the written record of human events – is very young compared to humans’ time as a species on the planet. Our species of hominid has been around, it’s reckoned, for roughly 200,000 years. “Civilisation” – that is, settled human communities based around agriculture – and “history” – the record that permits us to know more or less what happened – have existed for not much longer than what’s often called “Biblical time”, that is, the period that spans not much longer than the 6,000 years that the 17th Century Irish Archbishop James Ussher calculated was the age of the Earth. In other words, what we think of as human history covers about three to four per cent of actual human history. There is, furthermore, no evidence whatsoever that the kind of totalitarian monotheistic religions that appear to be least able to tolerate jokes about themselves have been around for more than around 2,500 years. Meanwhile, extrapolations from the archeological record remain mostly guesswork: pre-Neolithic artwork may have religious significance and it may not; it might even be argued that the exaggerated and stylised animals painted in the Chauvet caves in southern France 32,000 years ago (that is, at least 24,000 years before agriculture) are more like cartoons or caricatures than anything else, with equal amounts of spiritual or transcendental content or significance. This, though, could just be my special pleading.
Laughter and mockery are among the instinctive tools we use to help us navigate through life
That said, clever geneticists have traced humans’ ability to laugh back through the gene sequences five million years to our hominid distant ancestors. Which makes laughter a thousand times older than what we chiefly understand as organised religion. Moreover, there’s no reason whatsoever to assume that homo sapiens have altered much physiologically during our existence; or that we’re no longer good at the things we do well, like sex and jumping and laughter and empathy; or that what progress we’ve made has been limited to the areas that we were previously bad at, like maths or flying or keeping a straight face.
More than that, over a century and a half of ethnographic studies of still-existing pre-agricultural peoples have all come to the same conclusion: that hunter-gatherer groups of humans, living as our species has done for 96 per cent of its time on Earth, are fiercely pro-actively egalitarian and cooperative, using many different strategies to prevent the development of hierarchies and the emergence of alpha males. These strategies include murder, ostracism and, naturally, mockery. In his 2001 book Hierarchy in the Forest, the primatologist and anthropologist Christopher Boehm cites many examples of mockery being used as a social control. For example, among the Kung people of the Kalihari, a particularly good hunter will try to exert autonomy over the rest of the group by showing off the antelope he’s just killed; the rest of the group respond with sarcastic comments along the lines of “Call that an antelope? Wanker!” In another example, the shaman of an Amazonian tribe tried vainly to bend the rest of the group to his will by threatening them with the terrible things the gods will do to them if they don’t obey him; sadly for him, everyone else ended up laughing at him, and his gods.
But we don’t need anthropologists to point out human truths we all recognise, because laughter and mockery are among the instinctive tools we use to help us navigate through life and the experience of living with other people. So we all have a basic understanding about how to use humour to attract people and to repel, to forge bonds and break them, and even if we’re not that funny ourselves, we understand its potency. That’s why lonely hearts ads seek out potential sexual partners with a GSOH (good sense of humour); why stadia are filled with comedians telling jokes; and why a farting raspberry blown on the belly of a child under the age of one anywhere on Earth will automatically make them dissolve in laughter. It’s also why we laugh at shit and sex and death – to make the inevitable realities of life both bearable and controllable. We also laugh at power and otherness, for identical reasons. And all that laughter does things to us: it releases endorphins that make us happy, and happy to be with other people who also make us laugh. However much life might seem a vale of tears, getting people to laugh has never been a problem. The real trick is to get them to stop.
As I’ve suggested, the priests emerged comparatively recently, around the same time as the kings. What both demanded of other people was something much harder and less natural than laughter: they demanded respect and obedience. The measure of how hard it was for people to respond the way the priests and kings demanded is evidenced by the extraordinarily disproportionate punishments meted out for defiance to the new “laws” of treason and blasphemy. In the case of religion, the cruelty was extended from torturing the living to promising the torture and cruelty would continue even after death. This cruelty was punishment for disobedience or refusal to believe preposterous things – about imaginary creatures or the superiority of kings – which are, in all other circumstances, wholly laughable.
I think there are several key elements we can glimpse in the mists of pre-history that have helped define the way we are now, and which turn things on their head. Maybe it’s not so much that God is not mocked, but that God has been created as something so unimaginably vast and terrifying simply to stop the mockery and terrorise the mockers into silence and obedience; that things are deemed sacred – in the same way as other things are deemed to be taboo – because in all other circumstances they’d be ridiculous.
We still live with this legacy. The terrible earnestness and seriousness of our leaders cows us into allowing them to commit any number of appalling crimes, including murder; the po-facedness of the priests not only stops us having fun, but prevents us from having a laugh at preposterous nonsense like virgin births and hidden imams and being alive after we’re dead and all the rest of it. Permitting even the slightest giggle allows for the possibility of it all melting into air. When you consider that religious identity is such a potent political force, operated by those with power and without it, it’s no wonder that God is not mocked, even if it’s infinitely more human to make sure he, she, it or they are. After all, everything else is mocked.