Neuroscientists and Freudians all have their explanations as to why and under what circumstances people — be they Muslim workers, French tyrants or members of an international court — find this “silly,” “trivial” and “irrelevant” medium so threatening.  I have long had a theory that one reason people become so agitated by cartoons is that there is no way of answering back. A caricature is by definition an exaggeration, a distortion, unfair. If you don’t like an editorial you can write a letter to the editor, but there is no such thing as a cartoon to the editor.

But here’s another thought. For years anthropologists, art historians and others have patronized so-called primitive peoples as naïve heathens, as guilty of fetishism, animism and totemism because they believed that pictures had magical powers, that in some sense they were alive. These days neuroscientists tell us that if we want to understand our emotional reaction to what we see, we have to understand the brain, its right (emotional) and left (rational) spheres and how the visual stimulus passes on the information to the region called the amygdala, the brain’s so-called fear center.

Maybe so.  But I can’t help thinking that the British social historian E. P. Thompson was on to something when he wrote, in another connection,  about “the enormous condescension of posterity.” In other words, if brains could whisper, mine would be whispering that perhaps these primitive peoples were right after all; maybe they knew not merely that pictures were magical but also why we should fear them.

Victor S Navasky, New York Times, November 12, 2011