Summary
In October 2020, Samuel Paty, a French teacher, was murdered following a false accusation by a 13-year-old student who claimed he’d shown anti-Muslim bias. The girl had made up the story to cover the fact she had been suspended from school for bad behaviour.
In reality, Paty’s lesson on free speech included optional viewing of Charlie Hebdo cartoons, but he hadn’t excluded anyone. The student’s story triggered a social media campaign led by her father, who, along with others, is now on trial for inciting hatred and connections to Paty’s attacker, an 18-year-old radicalized Chechen.
The school will be named the Samuel Paty School from next year.
We need a common foundation around which any coherent society can centre themselves. In order for that to propagate beyond a single generation, ideas must be passed down in some form for others later to still understand why things are as they are. We simply don’t have a perfect answer, and never will without knowing all of everything which ever has and ever will happen.
I think we can still do that without having to buy into the idea of a divine and immutable source of morals or tying our moral thinking to a specific textual work or collection of works. I’d argue we can do it even better without those things because whilst they did have a place in our history and were probably helpful at one time they have ended up holding us back particularly in recent times.