Much of the most pointed and painful mockery that I've seen from satirists from Charlie Hebdo to Bill Maher to Fox News pundits is remarkable to me because it seems poorly aimed. It misses the intended target.
Take a look at the famous or infamous cartoons by Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and others that feature depictions of the Prophet Muhammad doing things that are degrading, violent, or against Islamic principle. Listen to Bill Maher talk about how "all religions are stupid and dangerous". The target of this mockery—or perhaps more significantly, the person, group or thing that it is in response to—is, in these cases, Islamist extremists.
Those, however, are not the people who are affected by the mockery. A cartoon depicting Muhammad as a terrorist, or doing something Muslims would consider degrading does not hurt the members of ISIS. It does not hurt Islamist or fundamentalist extremists. It may make them more angry; it may validate their certainty that western culture is indeed an attack on their faith, such as they conceive it to be, but it will not hurt them.
And that is the point of mockery—to inflict emotional pain or discomfort on the target audience. Unfortunately, the people who are hurt by this—who are emotionally wounded and confused by it—are not the intended target, but the Muslims and other religious people who live in the society informed by the satirical pieces. The only group that is positively affected by the mockery are people who share that view of the world.
Maybe this encounter I had in an online atheist forum a while back will illustrate what I mean. I was having a dialogue with an atheist (or rather an anti-theist) who when I failed to adhere to his idea of a religious person (I was assertively pro-science, accepted evolution and the extreme age of the Earth and the Universe, etc.) resorted to mockery, including referring to me as a Bahooey and making jokes about a conception of God that was simplistic and childish and which I don't believe in. He also attacked a Christian poster who had always been reasonable, courteous and who had never been remotely preachy.
I asked him why the mockery. What did he hope to accomplish? He wasn't likely to sway a person of faith, for one thing because he was refusing to engage them in dialogue in favor of hurling insults at a stereotype (which could not, he informed me, actually hurt any reasonable person's feelings.) I observed that, from my experience, when you assaulted someone's beliefs with a barrage of mockery, they were inclined to simply shore up their defenses, tune you out or, like our Christian friend, leave the discussion.
"Well, that's true," my atheist acquaintance said. "I don't really expect to convert a religious person to reason through mockery. It's really people like AgnosticCommenter we're speaking to. We hope to engage the fence sitters."
The fence sitter in question piped up at about that moment to comment that he, too, was leaving the discussion because the "regulars" had become combative and sarcastic and he no longer saw real communication taking place. (We later became online friends, actually, because he was impressed with the way I kept my cool in the face of attempts to enrage me
"Well, okay," the anti-theist said finally, "I guess this is really about preaching to the choir. We need this sort of banter to create solidarity and rally the troops."
I'm not, for a moment, saying that satire should be legislated against (unless it violates applicable laws against hate speech or incitement to commit crimes against humanity), I'm just not sure how effective it is in creating a positive and rational atmosphere around ANY subject matter. If it only wrest to entrench the target of the anger and mockery in their world view, hurts people who are not the target, and gets laughter only from those who already hold the same critical view, then does it really have a positive impact on anything? Does it facilitate communication about important matters or shut it down?
If there are fence sitters in this case, who have no opinions of Islam, say, because they simply know nothing about it, how positive is it if their introduction to the faith of Muhammad comes in the form of a rude caricature of it?
Just something I've been pondering lately...
