The family that never bickers has yet to be invented. Ties of blood, culture, background, experience and appearance can’t guaranteee clan tranquility. So in our wider society, with its variety of people, with differing backgrounds and experiences and assumptions, the chances of a communal life without contention are nada, zero, zilch.
So if we accept that, even on a good day, there might be conflict, the priority becomes conflict resolution. We have been lucky. We have seen acts of violence in the UK, but we have yet to experience the sort of cultural outrage that played out in Paris last week. Journalists shot dead by men who objected not to war or geopolitical machinations but to cartoons published by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Some will take this as proof that civilised conflict resolution in a multiracial, multicultural society is not possible. Nigel Farage, quick as ever to seize a divisive opportunity, cited the Charlie Hebdo catastrophe as proof that the European family has been invaded by a “fifth column”. But then he would. Locate Farage and the dog whistle is never far behind.
How can all this horror have been caused by a few cartoons, people ask, quite reasonably. Why don’t aggrieved Muslims just accept that, in a democratic society, people have the right to say and draw what they like, as long as what they do is legal. My take is different. I don’t seek to persuade them to be sanguine about the cartoons. The images seem harmless to me, but my beliefs are different. A group of French Muslims went to court to try to stop the cartoons being published. They lost. But I don’t criticise them. At least they understood the parameters within which civilised societies seek to settle conflict.
We are angry – with good reason – but it is important to be clear what we are angry about. Muslims who don’t want images published are not the problem. That is their right in a free society, as is the legal pursuit of that objective. They have the right to argue a point of view, even if the rest of us don’t understand it.
That’s the family bickering. We can handle that. The family will always bicker about something. The actual threat is from madmen with Kalashnikovs. The whole family has much to fear from them.
