Sacred / profane

This post was inspired (if you will) by the post and comments thread started by Andrew on Once More the other day, on the limits of the law in regulating speech and thought. There’s a lot of interest in this right now because the Government is presently attempting to pass its Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. There are arguments for and against the Bill, of course, although my guess is most of us on the Sharpener would probably rather the Bill didn’t become law, if given the choice. (Jim plays Devil’s Advocate here.)

Now, this post is only slightly related to the Bill. It’s as much about that much-talked-of thing, Political Correctness. Before you run for the hills, I have no great revelations to impart about green sheep or demanding men wear skirts. Not really my thing. I just want to run through some thoughts about Political Correctness, and our attitudes towards religion, and what they might say about the way we live now. These thoughts are almost certainly wrong and misguided, and (one hopes) maybe even a little Politically Incorrect; but I hope you won’t mind me sharing them with you…

“‘Political correctness’ hints at totalitarian conformity, but a real totalitarian state would not suffer sarcastic complaint… So the accusation of ‘political correctness’ is ipso facto an exaggeration. Yet it is also on its face a reproach to liberal toleration as understood today because it would not have been made by anyone who felt comfortable in the new society of inclusive diversity. The accusation shows that someone thinks he is being excluded and this is a claim that must be credited since, according to the advocates of diversity, the evidence of inclusion is the feeling that you are included… Political correctness, then, is necessarily exaggerated and necessarily true – which is not what either side of the matter wants to hear.” (Harvey C. Mansfield, “Political Correctness,” Ch.16 in Michael Foley and Douglas Kries (eds), Gladly to Learn and Gladly to Teach: Essays on Religion and Political Philosophy in Honor of Ernest L Fortin, AA)

“On one hand, almost no sexual display is forbidden, and the most casual of liaisons is perfectly normal; on the other, university professors dare not be alone in a closed room with a female student for fear of accusations of sexual misdemeanour… Extreme licentiousness thus coexists with a Puritanism that out-Calvins Calvin… One minute we are told that anything goes, and the next that we must carefully censor ourselves for fear of permanently traumatizing anyone who might overhear supposedly salacious remarks. At last, Herbert Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance seems to make some sense: We can do what we like so long as we live in fear.” (Theodore Dalrymple, “Looking for Boundaries,” in National Review, June 20, 2005)

Talk of Political Correctness gets the worst of us all. For some, it’s a media-driven Right-wing frenzy, used to tarnish the efforts of people working hard and with good intentions of ensuring greater inclusion for people left on the margins. For others, it’s a modern bureaucratic Inquisition, trampling over our most vital symbols and rituals to impose right-think in the name of some trendy cause or other. Unsurprisingly perhaps, my sympathies lie more to the latter, and for those who think I’m nuts, I’ll point to the rich seam of stories like this or that or the other.

Then again, I do accept, people go overboard worrying about this stuff too. ‘Political correctness gone mad’ has become one of the great clichés of our day. It’s for that reason that I put that first quote at the top – I think it sums up the oddness of Political Correctness, that it (1) exists; (2) isn’t really that bad; but (3) the concept itself demonstrates the failure of Political Correctness as a well-intended strategy of inclusion. What I want to do here is to just explore some of the deeper roots and drives of Political Correctness in the context of proposals to limit speech regarding religion, and to make some reckless judgements about them and their meaning. Throughout, the focus is on Political Correctness as most of us understand it, as something primarily moving from Left to Right – that’s not to say that ‘censorship’ (as it is, with equal exaggeration, sometimes called) doesn’t go the other way, but that Political Correctness is more interesting because it’s a new phenomenon – emphatically not concerned with upholding the established order, but subverting it.

I.

Onto the second opening quote: Political Correctness is odd not just because it’s new but also that it exists now, at a time when we have rarely been freer, and that freedom has rarely been shared so widely. From as early as possible, we want to ensure that there are no limits on individuals expressing themselves and their identity – that’s why there’s such concern about sexual freedom – Dalrymple points out the special confidentality status on contraception or abortion for minors.

Yet on the other hand, puritanism reigns. Not just what we say, but also smoking, drinking, obesity, large-engine motor cars – you name it, we frown on it and crack down on it (in Scotland, 16 and 17 year olds might soon be barred from buying tobacco) – dare I mention straight bananas? Across every part of life, there’s a rising tide of bureaucracy. This isn’t just a government thing – every corporation has its ever-growing Mongol Horde of HR types* eager to restrain, formalise and proceduralise. All for very noble reasons, no doubt, but not exactly a celebration of individual autonomy and the assertion of choice, eh?

So, the message seems to be: be whoever you want, just as long as you do it and say it right, kids. Kinda’ takes the life out of life, really, doesn’t it?

II.

Back to the Religious Hatred Bill. Most of us object to the proposed restrictions because we say that, in a liberal society of the sort we have, one of the achievements is to relegate religious disputes wholly to the private realm. This is probably a good thing, for fairly obvious historic reasons – like large numbers of people being slaughtered over the use of icons or the content of the Lord’s Prayer, say. Much better, most of us think, that everybody’s religious opinion is viewed as being equally suspect, and none are allowed to hold sway over the nation and so dominate our public discourse to the exclusion of those who follow other faiths, or none at all.**

In the US, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia summed up the oddity of this argument well – that we put piety on a par with pornography, as something you are free to exercise, as long as it’s only in private. This is, on its face, absurd – religion is something that we want to express, we want to share, because it’s true. But the piety-as-pornography view is now the conventional wisdom. No position is to be privileged, and all are to be subject to the full force and variety of criticism.

This might be true for those of a more theological disposition, but not everybody with a deep religious faith does so with a clear philosophical make-up. For many religious people, their beliefs are unrivalled claims to Truth, and so having them open to mockery (given their nature, they are ultimately indeterminate and so impossible to defended conclusively), all the way to Chris Ofili’s artwork (or maybe the toilet habits at Gitmo) and beyond, is quite a bit to stomach. So, wanting to avoid conflict we require equal and open criticism of religions, but that does open the door to religious people catching the sharp-end, in ways many of us would find distasteful if it concerned (say) their race.

III.

In this free market in religious truth, all claims are seen to be transient conjectures, open to refutation at any time and from any source, and with whichever intentions. Yet for most people of sincere religious faith, their spiritual beliefs give them their ground for their temporal beliefs, ranging from their moral principles through to their acceptance of the physical world. Leaving everything open to criticism means that there is nothing that can’t be traded away, which can often leave that ground looking shaky, to say the least.

Religious peoples’ moral principles are such because they have divine sanction behind them. Where that divine sanction is certain and unquestioned, these are seen as true and stable, and recognised and enforced as such in society, we derive from them social conventions on how we behave, and arrive at manners and honour, and so on (however imperfectly we may practice them).

From there, we move to a society where those moral principles and, even more, their source, are all open to question. At first, we all stick to the moral principles, because they’re what we’ve been raised with, and seem fair and useful – but at the margins, we are free to question and pick and choose our adherence. If the source is open to question, then so too are the principles. Quite soon, we start to go our separate ways, the moral principles lose their absolute authority, and so shake the foundations of our social – that is, shared – conventions on conduct and decency.

IV.

This fraying of common principles has been going on for some time in western societies. To varying extents, we’ve departed from a single set of principles, differently interpreted, to hold different sets of principles, with common ground found only through interpretation. The collapse of Christian observance and understanding has made it necessary, and the arrival of many non-Christians through immigration accelerated the process (and perhaps made it less confrontational, too). And it has its upside – we are all now at liberty to focus on those principles that mean something to us individually, rather than being left hypocrites by the other parts of a doctrine we can’t buy. But if we no longer have common principles, can our shared conventions, our agreement on what it is to be decent, survive?

Liberal society has its solution. We have one moral principle to which we can all commit, and that is tolerance – the liberal virtue par excellence. Every part of society, every group, and every person, can all commit to the idea of respecting each other’s space. Our fellow man might be stupid, wrong, even malign in our eyes – but, providing that he respects others’ space, that is his business.

But notice: although all of us commit to liberal tolerance (the fascists excepted, but even they talk the talk), this is not always because it is good in itself, but because of its function – it makes peaceful coexistence a possibility. By agreeing to abide by the rules of tolerance, we can get along with the others and – perhaps most important – seek protection from Government if we are the targets of the cardinal sin, intolerance.

Did somebody mention Leviathan? We have never been so free, educated, prosperous – but are we really one society anymore? With times like these (happily) are, we don’t need to worry quite so much. Everybody can get along with their business, and ignore their annoying neighbours – for most of us, life can concentrate on getting laid and getting paid. It wouldn’t, though, be unreasonable to consider how well we might fare in more turbulent times – whether we’d hang separately because we can’t bear to hang together.

V.

Unfortunately, tolerance doesn’t make us happy. Many people on the political Left worry, quite understandably, that giving people space and a route to inclusion doesn’t always mean that they will include themselves. Harvey Mansfield again: “Liberalism pretends to be universal since it means to say that the rights of man are rights of human beings. In fact… its universality is defeated by its formalism … [it] rewards, if it does not require, aggressivity.”

Political Correctness is born: to right the scales and ensure the less aggressive get their crack of the whip. To generalise, Political Correctness shows the limits of the Left’s commitment to liberalism, where it conflicts with other goods (most commitment to liberalism on the Right having long since been similarly exposed). Strict liberalism, of a Locke-Nozick sort, is actually dreadfully boring and procedural – not reason enough for most of us to get interested in politics, or to commit to a liberal society as the best means of achieving the good, or probably even to get out of bed in the morning.***

Rather, people on the Left are driven more by a passion for fairness, for inclusion without compromise for the individual’s identity, than they are by procedural freedom. Certainly, they are in my experience. Many of those I know on the Left don’t fear state control as much as they loathe the injustice of its power being used against those they consider weak or dispossessed. For that purpose, straight liberal tolerance, which often simply reflects the prevailing hierarchy, isn’t enough. Instead, the excluded need to be defended. (And sometimes, it seems, the best defence is to cause offence…)

VI.

To defend the excluded then, some on the Left seek to restrict speech and practice which might affect them – that’s Political Correctness. Whereas liberalism demands others in society keep their subjective sense of virtue to themselves and their lives, the Politically Correct Left can claim the promotion of inclusion as simply a logical extension of tolerance. In the guise of fair and neutral liberalism (to which we subscribe for functional reasons), Political Correctness advances a very specific view of right and wrong.

Just as the religious defend their principles with moral language, so too does the Politically Correct Left. Racism, sexism, homophobia, are damned not simply as stupid, ill-mannered, uncivil, and so on, but as moral evils – bad thoughts, not to be contemplated. Hence the special status assigned to racial speech, and the extremely subjective mode of classifying racism proposed by Lord Macpherson in his Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report (i.e., if a person feels that something was said or done for racist motivations, then it was).

The contrasts can be quite interesting here. On the one hand, Political Correctness means no qualms about labelling unintentionally discriminatory behaviours as the most pernicious evil; on the other, things we might traditionally call wrong are anaesthesised through the use of bland, therapeutic language – Anti-Social Behaviour, anyone?

VII.

This use of moral language, though, undermines the claim of Political Correctness to be simply an application of liberal tolerance – tolerance moves from an obligation to give others their equal space to a right for the oppressed to assert and express their own identity.

At this point, religious people might start to wonder quite what they’re getting out of the liberal settlement these days. Liberalism dethroned the old culture and establishment in the name of neutrality and fairness; but now, it could be suggested, the throne has been assumed by the Left. And similar criticisms might be advanced – the pettifogging of Political Correctness replaces the old repression of Christian doctrine; the establishment’s power, built on exclusion, is replaced by the PC Left’s power, built on inclusion – not all, it seems, are deemed worthy. None of this is wholly true, but it is felt, and so achieving the sunny dream of inclusion might not be quite so simple as was first thought.

Weber’s secularisation hypothesis having dropped from favour, the drive for justice of many on the Left pushes them to act on that perceived exclusion, because religion too can be integral to individual identity. Maybe, the concern goes, the new tolerance needs to extend to them, too. After all, some of the religions have as much claim to inclusion as any other group – they suffer discrimination and exclusion.

Some then suggest clamping down on religious ‘hate speech’. The problem is that we’ve long since declared that all the traditional qualitative distinctions – commitment to certain core principles, for example – are too exclusive, and so can’t be used as a basis to prefer one religion over another. As a result, we can’t think of passing a law that won’t offer protection to pretty much any ‘belief’.

VIII.

There are no limits to the growth of Political Correctness’s sacred realm, and that’s why some of us are concerned (to put it mildly) about where things are going. Because our move to secular society has been led primarily from the Left – with contributions from global capitalism – Political Correctness has often carried on in well-meant, if at times beautifully absurd, attempts to ensure inclusion. It might get on many of our nerves, but it didn’t cause too much direct, obvious damage. Recent trends, like the Religious Hatred Bill, lead some of us to wonder if the future bounds of the Politically Correct are likely to be not just unpredictable but increasingly disagreeable.

With the goal of inclusion and identity always left so vague, there’s no point we can stop this expanding forbidden territory – there always new injustices to fight, always new barriers to individual expression. In any context, there can be oppression, and a duty to stamp it out… and so we end up with the bizarre story of the gay horse in Oxford. The masses become exasperated because there’s no end that they can get used to – they’re continuously being told to change, control, and limit their behaviour for the benefit of those who (and that’s the point, after all) they don’t really know, anyway.

This is why I’m against the Religious Hatred Bill – not because I’m against all limits on expression, but because the creation of a blanket ‘right-not-to-be-offended’, without being confined to a particular doctrine, has no logical limit. At some stage along this path, we are creating the conditions where Political Correctness really can Go Mad, and I think that’s best avoided. The kind of society this Bill envisions will work if its citizens have purely privatised opinions; there would be no discussion except back-slapping confirmation of each others’ prejudices; and social happiness would rest on cold indifference.

We should all be concerned at the possible consequences. Already, the perceived randomness of Political Correctness clouds over the question of what is and is not reasonable to say; we first blur and then lose the lines of decency and manners that we inherit from a more orderly, if dully conformist, culture. Variations on the line “some people might say I’m a bit Politically Incorrect” have already become the stock excuse for bigots across the land – where before, clear lines could be used to damn them as uncivil, Political Correctness creates a grey area, where people give them leeway because they think that they too probably aren’t PC. Bigotry gains in respectability as we go further down this path. That’s not a good thing.

* Some of my best friends are HR people, before anybody accuses me of being HRist.

** At this point I could demur – this country has a National Church, and has not been anything other than a Christian country for most of the time we’ve been a country (if not all?). Another time.

*** That isn’t to say that individual people on the Left (or the Right) can’t be more liberal than not, and many are – but that’s rarely all they are. Ideological Right-libertarians often are purist Locke-Nozick types. But they aren’t interested in politics.