Batman: “I am currently fighting a few different people.”

Joker: “What?!”

Batman: “I like to fight around.”

These are a few lines from the Lego Batman Movie when the Joker was forcing (Lego) Batman to admit that they have a ‘special’ relationship.

Those who can get the innuendo in this kid-friendly movie would probably have got it by now. Those who can’t, let’s just say this is not exactly the right place to talk about it.

The bigger question is, should we fault someone for offending our sensitivities when to them the ‘F’ word just means ‘fight’ and not whatever some of us instinctively relate to? Is it even a crime when others don’t get the subtexts and references we do?

While the references made in those lines are quite apparent to most of us daily English speakers who in many ways live a rather Westernised life, it may not be so to many others.

I personally would know a dozen, all adults, not getting this ‘adult’ reference I am chuckling to when the scene plays.

And it’s not because they don’t understand English. They don’t get it because they are linguistically and culturally not familiar with the parlance that is being used.

According to German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, this is one language-game of dating although many, but evidently not everybody, play by.

In fact, the idea of what the notion of dating implies already varies greatly between different cultural, religious and class groups in Malaysia.

Common sense or common senses?

Obviously, my aim here is not to deconstruct what the writers of the Lego Batman Movie are up to, but to use a relatively harmless entry point to drive home the fact that most sensitivities are premised on subjective, hence shaky, grounds.

What we usually deem apparent or common, tend to apply only within specific cultural contexts. And thanks to globalisation and the exponentially increased movement of humans, common senses now have more opportunity to clash with each other than ever before.

For example, a friend recently expressed shock that I bought her a meal that contained two types of meat (chicken and fish) as if I bought her frogs for lunch. What I had taken as natural (having two types of meat in one meal) is obviously culturally alien to others.

Let’s not take this to the extremes as if I am speaking about widely accepted taboos such as public nudity or laughing in funerals.

Instead, what Malaysians fight over about what is sensitive and who gets to feel sensitive are over the minutiae of things such as newspaper layouts, or more recently, should a pilot be allowed to ask his passengers to say a prayer.

No doubt, some objective criteria do exist to assess the merits of certain actions. For instance, the AirAsia pilot can be judged as to whether he had adhered to the ethical or professional guidelines set for the profession.

The question of intent

But if the question is whether an action is considered offensive, then we have to not only dissect the action itself but the intent behind it.

Intent is important because as I have demonstrated earlier, ‘offensive-ness’ alone is a highly subjective matter. One can assume as much guilt as innocence.

A pilot asking passengers to pray could be considered offensive by, let’s say, some atheists, but asking someone to pray could also be a habitual offer of solace from a religious person.

It need not necessarily mean someone is relinquishing all his control over fate to a Higher Power, nor a deliberate imposition of his God-centred worldview over others.

Proving intent might sound ludicrous to some. After all, who knows what’s going on in a person’s head?

But proving intent is instrumental to proving murder according to the Malaysian Penal Code, which carries the mandatory death sentence in Malaysia.

If an act of killing is done without the intent of causing death, lesser offence categories such as culpable homicide would be considered.

Yet oddly, according to Section 3(3) of the Sedition Act 1948 in Malaysia, intent is irrelevant to the offence, as long as there is a ‘seditious tendency’ within the contended speech or publication.

Granted, it is worth noting that a landmark ruling by the Court of Appeal has deemed this part of the Act to be unconstitutional with the Federal Court projected to have the final say over the matter soon.

Entitlement culture and cultural warfare

Even so, the fact that the law is left as it is sheds light on our entitlement culture (which appears to worsen in this global climate of viral media and ‘hyped-up’ political correctness) where an offence over ‘sensitivities’ taken will automatically mean an intentional offence is committed.

We demand self-policing from others over boundaries we constructed for ourselves. If that is not absurd enough, some of us fabricate even intent and conspiracies for others without asking their side of the story whenever our little sensitive cocoons are breached.

For the purpose of mutual respect, we should also be sensitive to what is not ‘sensitive’ to others and not act like tripwires waiting to explode over the slightest move from others.

To assume others would know all the nooks and crannies of your ‘sensitivities’, never mind the constantly shifting goalposts, is also a condescending form of cultural imposition.

I am not advocating that we don’t exercise some restraint in our actions in consideration of the sensitivities of others. To the contrary, I think that is rather important to our multicultural peace.

But the knee-jerk language of ‘victim versus offender’ is not a language of peace. That’s the language of war. Unfortunately, one can observe a cultural war being waged these days using the language of victimhood.

A cultural war is really one war I don’t want to fight around in. There are greater struggles, such as against income inequality or climate change, to tend to. – July 4, 2017.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.