I find myself oddly unmoved by the chorus of critics demanding an apology from the organizers of the Garland, Texas, exhibition where two attackers were shot dead last weekend. I’m not suggesting that free speech means never having to say you’re sorry. But our vision of what demands apology and what does not has grown dangerously selective.

Regular readers will know that I am a near-absolutist when it comes to the marketplace of ideas. I have mentioned before the contretemps during my undergraduate years at Stanford over the views of the Nobel laureate William Shockley on the relative intellectual capacities of blacks and whites. Many among my confreres wanted his head on the proverbial platter. I wanted to hear his theories debated instead. I had the opportunity twice: once at a campus forum, where he squared off against an eminent geneticist, and a second time when Shockley met with the editorial board of the Stanford Daily, and I was able to challenge him directly. I learned far more from those two encounters than I would have from any sort of ban. I wasn’t interested in an apology. I was interested in serious argument about ideas.

Nowadays, many people seem to think that mockery doesn’t raise any ideas worth debating. This helps explain why so many paeans to Charlie Hebdo append the disclaimer “Although I don’t agree with … .” But the history of making fun in order to make a point is as old as history itself. Every major world religion has a tradition of humor — including at its own expense. Alas, we live in an era when, rather than acknowledge this simple truth, we too often strain to make insupportable distinctions.

Over lunch a few years ago, a Yale colleague of mine was at pains to explain why Jews but not Muslims might be freely mocked: The issue turns out to be not minority status but influence. Jews have it, Muslims don’t. Had my colleague not been Jewish, I might have put so bizarre a distinction down to anti-Semitism. A more charitable explanation is that this was simply the latest iteration in the popular campus game of explaining why some people but not others merit protection from offense.

I was once asked by a leading theological journal to write an article. The guidelines required that I avoid using gendered pronouns when referring to God. I was perplexed. I don’t believe that God possesses gender as we understand it, but in the traditional canon of my faith, God has revealed Himself as male. So I decided to pass. When I mentioned this episode to another colleague, he told me I was wrong. Using gendered pronouns would offend many readers, and my point would not get across. I asked him whether in that case we should crack down on taking God’s name in vain. For many of us, the casual misuse of God’s name — especially when combined with words of cursing or vulgarity — is disturbing, and even at times depressing.

My colleague conceded that I had made a good point.

But he was wrong. My point wasn’t good; his was bad. We’ve had some experience crafting rules to limit expression that offends religious believers, and none of it is attractive. My colleague was making the very mistake history condemns and advocates of anti-hate-speech rules embrace, searching for ways to transform instinct into regulation: Surely we can protect the powerless from offense?

The trouble is that such prejudices, once indulged, are infinitely malleable. Hairs will be split, forests will be missed for trees, angels will dance on the head of a pin, all in the service of discovering differences among things that are the same. This certainty alone is reason enough to be wary of hate-speech legislation, whether devised on campus, in the state house or in an international forum. Inevitably what one ends up with is the thrusting of coercive authority into the hands of those who are every bit as prejudiced in their preferences as anyone else. I couldn’t possibly be trusted with such power; neither could you.

When those who offend by their speech are asked to apologize, we are often indulging these distinctions. And the distinctions, pursued to their root, can become absurd. Consider once again the taking of God’s name in vain. After I mentioned the business with the theological journal in a lecture at another campus, I was assured by a student that although a white Protestant would have no right to be offended by such words, I as a black Protestant would. Is the issue numbers? Influence? History? One can find literature embracing all of these and many more. What’s fascinating is to imagine the apology the student must have thought I was due: “My blasphemy was aimed entirely at white religious believers. I deeply regret my unintentional offense to believers who are people of color.”

Thanks but no thanks. A universe of discourse that cherishes such distinctions has set itself at war with modernity. Like the Medieval church, the theory supposes that we will build a better society by constructing a bubble into which disagreeable ideas will never intrude. In this sense, the college student who doesn’t believe that her school should host a debate over abortion is running in direct parallel with the baker who doesn’t want to cater a gay wedding. Each is tilting against the windmills of modernity that for well over a century now have blown away one wall after another with gales of skepticism and counterargument.

It’s easy to sympathize with the desire to create that bubble of psychic calm, to keep at arm’s length a world seen as threatening to the values at one’s core. But neither regulation nor apology can long cloak the truth that sooner or later the protective bubble pops, and in sweeps the real world, with all of its vulgarity and confusion and diversity. The clash of ideas is often painful. Out of that pain, however, springs courage and strength and even growth. That’s why we’re usually at our best when, instead of seeking an apology, we argue back.

Stephen L. Carter, a Bloomberg View columnist, is a professor of law at Yale University, where he teaches courses on contracts, professional responsibility, ethics in literature, intellectual property, and the law and ethics of war.

Bloomberg View

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CNN’s special report on atheists last week didn’t draw many viewers, and has been kicked around a bit in the blogosphere. Certainly the program had its gaffes. Most important, as other critics have noted, the report trotted out the hoary — and ridiculous — claim that 1 in 3 millennials are atheists. (The correct figure is closer to 3 percent.)

But that wasn’t the biggest mistake. By focusing on the lives of atheists, CNN swept into the wings, with only the briefest of mentions, atheism’s significant race and gender problems.

According to a much-discussed 2012 report from the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life, only 3 percent of US atheists and agnostics are black, 6 percent are Hispanic, and 4 percent are Asian. Some 82 percent are white. (The relevant figures for the population at large at the time of the survey were 66 percent white, 11 percent black, 15 percent Hispanic, 5 percent Asian.)

The same report tells us that women are 52 percent of the US population but only 36 percent of atheists and agnostics. The gender split has led some male atheists to muse about differences between the male and female brain — which in turn unsurprisingly generated sharp ripostes. Certainly it makes the atheist movement less attractive to would-be adherents. As one commentator has put it, “Show me a party to which women are invited but that they overwhelmingly choose to avoid, and I’ll show you a party to which I’d ask you to remember not to invite me.”

Some feminist atheists contend that the gender split is a distinctively US phenomenon. They point to a 2012 WIN-Gallup International survey tending to show that outside the U.S., men and women describe themselves as atheists at about the same rate.

But the WIN-Gallup data also point to what might be atheism’s larger difficulty: race, nationalism and ethnicity. In the US, atheists and agnostics are disproportionately male and white, as we have seen. Around the world — well, let’s let the data tell the story.

Seven of the 10 least religious countries are in Europe. The other three are China, Japan and South Korea. Seven of the 10 most religious countries are in the developing world, headed by Ghana and Nigeria. When the data are tabulated by region, those most likely to describe themselves as atheists are from north Asia (42 percent) and western Europe (14 percent). At the other end are south Asia (0 percent), and Latin America and Africa (2 percent each).

At some point one has to admit that there is a pattern here. And just to pile on a bit, the estimable Craig Keener, in his huge review of claims of miracles in a wide variety of cultures, concludes that routine rejection of the possibility of the supernatural represents an impulse that is deeply Eurocentric.

Richard Dawkins, well-known apostle of atheism, only damages his cause when he insists that atheists are a race. Even if he was being tongue-in-cheek (and one certainly hopes so), he’s more likely to stir an already boiling identity politics pot. Atheists themselves increasingly fight nasty battles over these issues — at least online. (That’s how this sort of criticism leads to this sort of response.)

I had lunch a couple of years ago with a Yale colleague who is a committed atheist. He explained away the international data in pretty much the way one would expect: those other countries have to be liberated. They are mired in a false consciousness as the result of oppression and lack of education. In other words, people around the world who continue to believe in God are too stupid to understand the glittering truths that atheists see clearly.

The late Edward Said, in his classic work on imperialism, pointed out that an important step along the road is to describe those who are to be controlled as primitive. Not inhuman, but primitive. Therefore when the imperialist foists his system upon them, he is not oppressing them but improving them.

I’m not judging atheism here. There are atheists aplenty whose behavior is morally superior to that of many a religious believer. Activists in the atheist cause, however, would do well to come up with a better explanation than primitiveness of people of color for the rejection of their message in most of the developing world. In any case, these issues would offer a far meatier topic for CNN’s next exploration of atheism.

Stephen L. Carter, a Bloomberg View columnist, is a professor of law at Yale University, where he teaches courses on contracts, professional responsibility, ethics in literature, intellectual property, and the law and ethics of war.

Bloomberg View

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