life in a gracious society we had all better be connoisseurs of such
distinctions. Of course, prevention of the sort of offence I have
been discussing is not easily legislated for, and generally is better
not, but this is a matter of practicalities. It is not because offence
is a trivial or unimportant wrong.
On the other hand, offensiveness may serve important ethical
and political purposes. In a moving defence of the rights of Sal-
man Rushdie, when still under fatwa for the publication of The
Satanic Verses, Jeremy Waldron insists that ‘the great themes of
religion matter too much to be closeted by the sensitivity of those
who are to be counted as the pious’.^63 Who is a proper party to the
debate as well as what counts as good manners may in themselves
be points at issue. I’ll quote Waldron at length; the issue merits his
eloquence:
The religions of the world make their claims, tell their stories,
and consecrate their symbols, and all that goes out into the
world too, as public property, as part of the cultural and psycho-
logical furniture which we cannot respectfully tiptoe around in
our endeavour to make sense of our being.... Things that seem
sacred to some will in the hands of others be played with, joked
about, taken seriously, taken lightly, sworn at, fantasized upon,
juggled, dreamed about backward, sung about, and mixed up
with all sorts of stuff. This is what happens in The Satanic
Verses.... Like all modern literature, it is a way of making
sense of human experience.^64Three cheers for this. In a multicultural society, as in a multi-
cultural world, offensiveness cannot be avoided. We are stuck
between the rock of respect and appropriate courtesy and the hard
place of polemical ridicule. We strive to protect our dignity as
persons and then lampoon in literature and cartoons those
whose values we challenge. We don’t thereby violate our own
ground-rules of debate. Where the ground-rules themselves are the
question at issue, offence is ineliminable.LIBERTY