Adrift on a sea of claptrap

In a pungent article in today's Independent, Adrian Hamilton lambasts the empty rhetoric spouted by Western leaders at the recent Berlin Wall (demolition) celebrations. Sarkozy, Clinton, and –needless to say – Gordon Brown uttered meaningless platitudes about 'freedom' and the West's role in promoting it. Brown's "you know that while force has temporary power to dominate, it can never ultimately decide" takes the biscuit for sheer nonsense – the hastiest glance at history tells us it simply isn't true.

Our purblind Prime Minister loftily proclaimed that "an Africa in poverty, Darfur in agony, Zimbabwe in tears, Burma in chains, individuals, even when in pain, need not suffer for ever without hope". As Hamilton points out, all this Pollyanna-ish flim-flam churned out by his Whitehall speech writers flies in the face of reality. It wilfully denies the inescapable fact that, far from exerting themselves effectively to right these undoubted wrongs, Western leaders are tumbling over backwards not to rock the boats of petty tyrants, dictators and mini-Hitlers all over the world instead of putting pressure on them to reform.

Unfortunately, little of all this is the result of conscious hypocrisy or of deliberate lying. The reality is even worse – that our leaders sincerely believe most of the hifalutin nonsense they spout about 'democracy' and 'freedom', whilst blithely ignoring the damage they are doing to these concepts both at home and abroad. For most of the past decade – ever since the '9/11' Twin Towers atrocity – they, and much of their electorates and the media, have lived in a paranoid state of false consciousness, misconstruing much of the actual state of world affairs and chasing will-o'-the-wisps such as a shadowy 'Al Qaeda' alleged to have the power as well as the will to launch murderous terrorist attacks on the American and European civilian populations. So, ostensibly to prevent this, the West has launched murderous attacks upon the civilian populations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the rationale of which are now being increasingly questioned. Whether it is already too late to retrieve a firmer contact with reality and tackle the outstanding issues which are making the world such a dangerous place remains to be seen. But judging from the flowery phrases uttered at the Brandenburg Gate, the chances are not very bright.

In these uneasy days, I am increasingly drawn back to Matthew Arnold's superb poem Dover Beach (1867), in which he laments the ebbing Sea of Faith, hearing "its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/retreating, to the breath/of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear/and naked shingles of the world/….And we are here as on a darkling plain/swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/where ignorant armies clash by night."

The dwindling faith of which Arnold wrote was religious faith. Now, it is our previously taken for granted faith in democratic values, principles, and practices which is visibly shrivelling when confronted with our leaders' self-deluded posturings and verbal acrobatics which defy a very different truth.

Is this democracy?

“Democracy”, says Charles Crawford, ‘the world’s first diplomatic blogoir’, “once was the quintessence of civilisation, based on sophisticated philosophical ideas of responsibility and honesty.” Yet the same Charles Crawford defends – on pragmatic grounds – the use by the USA and UK of intelligence obtained by torture. He doesn’t seem to find any inconsistency in this.

So is democracy really reduced to a moral cesspit in which its professional diplomats labour to assure us that all is for the best in the worst of all possible worlds?

I remember, as an eleven-year-old boy, listening to Neville Chamberlain’s sombre broadcast on 3^rd September 1939, when he announced that we were at war with Germany. He concluded by saying:

“It is evil things that we shall be fighting against - brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution - and against them I am certain that right will prevail.”

It did – but only after a grim struggle in which many terrible things were done by ourselves and our allies, as well as by our enemies.

The wars we are involved in today are of a very different kind. Their essence is an ideological struggle between irreconcilable social systems, one of which – that of our adversaries – is far more deeply rooted in religious beliefs than was Hitler’s war. The motivating force of religious belief is a conviction that one’s thoughts and actions are inspired by a supernatural being. This gives great strength, even to those who are physically weaker than their enemy. Whether the supernatural being really exists is irrelevant: devout belief is all that is required to inspire people to extreme action. Such a belief is nowadays largely lacking in Western democracies and – much more seriously – so is informed belief in, and adherence to, the humane values which distinguish democracy from its critics.

What are these values? First and foremost, freedom of speech and expression. This is the bedrock of democracy, underpinning all other freedoms and rights, because it is only through freedom to speak our minds freely that we can win or defend all our other liberties. Secondly, personal privacy – the right to shape and lead our own lives as we wish, provided that we don’t impinge upon the equivalent rights of others, and to do so without being snooped and spied upon by the State or anyone else. Thirdly, toleration of all views, opinions, and lifestyles which don’t deny equal toleration to others: tolerance is not a one-way street. Fourthly, adherence to rational discourse, as opposed to dogmatically imposed beliefs grounded in uncritical adherence to dogma. Fifthly, commitment to scientific method and experimentation in enlarging our knowledge of how things work and in devising new technologies essential for the future health and wellbeing of humankind. Sixthly, academic integrity and a willingness to follow the argument wherever it leads.

Doubtless there are many other components of democratic thought and practice which can be added to this list. But I hope it is sufficient to demonstrate that democracy cannot exist without open-mindedness. And open-mindedness is the fundamental quality which is largely and ever more rapidly being eroded today. We are living through an era of ‘political correctness’, when the range of acceptable viewpoints is shrinking because they are frowned upon by authority; and legal curbs on free speech have been imposed in the last few years which would have been unthinkable only a couple of decades ago. Even worse, this policy is largely driven by fear of violent reactions by those living amongst us who don’t share our traditional notions of democracy but wish to replace it with alien concepts originating from other parts of the world. Britain is still an open society – just – but we have enemies in our midst.

Our political discourse, and our political debate, is correspondingly debased. There has always been an element of school playground “yah boo sucks” rhetoric in party politics. But when Charles Crawford laments that “we are now reduced to whose imaginary ex-cat stinks the most”, he might ask himself why. My answer is cowardice.

Islam in the West

For a couple of months now over on Stephen Law’s Philosophy Blog, we’ve been having an extended debate with Ibrahim Lawson, the headmaster of an Islamic school. The whole thing began because Ibrahim had said, on Radio Four:

IL: The essential purpose of the Islamia school as with all Islamic schools is to inculcate profound religious belief in the children.

INTERVIEWER: You use the word "inculcate": does that mean you are in the business of indoctrination?

IL: I would say so, yes; I mean we are quite unashamed about that really…

INTERVIEWER: Does that mean that Islam is a given and is never challenged?

IL: That’s right…

Not surprisingly, Stephen commented that this was a dangerous theory of ‘education’. Ibrahim replied, defending his position on the ground of his absolute certainty of the ‘truth’ of his own faith, and the discussion has rumbled merrily on all around the houses ever since. Ibrahim is a former Anglican convert to Islam and, like many converts, ‘more Catholic than the Pope’. He sees Islam through a rose-coloured lens of personal mysticism as a pathway to union with Allah, and appears unconcerned about the collective social, cultural, political, and legal aspects of Islam which worry non-Muslims far more than its devotional attraction for individuals like himself. Indeed, he determinedly ignores repeated requests to confront these issues – which are surely relevant to what he teaches his pupils – and on the rare occasions when he deigns to address them, brushes them aside as trivialities, pooh-poohing the notion that to teach his religion is ’unquestionable’ might be in any way socially divisive.

If Islam were indeed no more than a mystic ‘inner path’ for the Faithful, there would be no cause for alarm. But of course, Islam is far more than that. It is a fiercely self-justifying and aggressively proselytizing faith which comes with an inextricable array of theocratic baggage aspiring to control all aspects of individual and social life and, most menacingly, replete with numerous injunctions to the Faithful to dominate the ‘infidels’ and subjugate them to the world ummah [community of believers]. Ibrahim himself has said that he would welcome the establishment of the Islamic Caliphate [political rule] in Britain. When challenged about this, he replies consolingly that from his perspective, Islam is compatible with our democratic society “given the circumstances” [that Muslims are currently in a minority in British society] - although he doesn’t think the latter is the best option, because “Islam is actually a far better, more humane, just and civilised system of governance than secular pluralism”! He also sees little if any prospect of sharia law and other Islamic practices being imposed as legal jurisdiction in Britain “at the moment”. [This was before the Archbishop of Canterbury kindly informed us the other day that he views it as “unavoidable”.]

I find little comfort in such hollow, because meaningless, assurances. It is becoming glaringly obvious that devout Muslims are incapable of renouncing – even if they wished to - the Koranic injunctions to establish an Islamic society wherever they happen to be, because if they did they would be apostates and liable to the death penalty in the eyes of their fellow–Muslims.

If I am wrong about this, theologically or practically, no doubt Ibrahim or some other authoritative Muslim voice will correct me. If I am not wrong, the question is, as Lenin said, ‘What is to be done?’

Furthermore, the nub of the problem posed by Islam in the West is that its strident claims are always presented with a subtext of implicit and, on an increasing number of occasions, actual violence. Consequently, it is next to impossible to discuss the merits of Islam as a faith, or the social aspirations of Muslims in Europe, in a calm, detached manner. As I said to Ibrahim in one of my responses to his posts, “you cannot convincingly claim that Islam is not responsible for the evil done in its name, but should be credited with the virtuous things Muslims do. Religious belief is either a genuine motivation or an excuse: it cannot be both.”

“I am not [Ibrahim countered] prepared to be drawn on the kind of contentious issues which might force me to be more explicit than is advisable in a world where many people look at each other with daggers in their eyes.”

To which I responded: “Well! You have indeed let a very large cat out of the bag [or described the proverbial elephant in the room]. The reason why candid discussion of religious and many other issues is increasingly inhibited in contemporary Britain is, quite simply, FEAR of the consequences of saying what one really thinks – especially as the daggers don’t remain in peoples’ eyes but increasingly take the form of violent aggressive action by bigots against those who dare to differ from them. I trust you will agree that such unbridled visceral hatred and intolerance, whether religious or secular in origin, is the root cause of many current social ills.”

The above was written before we read this week of angry Muslims rioting in the streets of Copenhagen shouting “Freedom of speech is like a plague!” [What does Ibrahim teach his pupils about freedom of speech, I wonder?]

In an interesting recent post on his blog 'Political, Human, Environmental Respect', Jose asks whether Western hostility to Muslims is prompted by racism, bigotry, or a sense of self-defence? He concludes that it is primarily the last, because of increasingly vociferous demands from immigrants - mostly Muslims - for special treatment. "In my opinion [Jose says] the main cause of the resentment of our populations regarding aliens is not something that can be called racism or bigotry. It is a feeling of self-defence which our authorities have not been brave enough to ease up by applying the Law with all its consequences. Those of any religion or race who live in our countries must respect the Law as we do and must get the punishment the Law metes out in all cases it contemplates."

I agree with Jose, and commented: "I think one of the main reasons why many 'post-Christian' Europeans find Muslims indigestible as immigrants is that Islam is 700 years younger than Christianity, and most Europeans are ignorant of their own religious history. Six or seven hundred years ago, most Christians believed fervently, and often literally, in their version of faith, just as Muslims do today. There were bloody religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, and persecutions of heretics which we now consider to have been barbaric.

"To do Muslims justice, they are - whether ‘extremists’ or ‘moderates’ - much more serious about their faith than most Christians are today. In an interesting article about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent speech on sharia law, the sociologist Frank Furedi says, quite rightly, that 'Islam appears to motivate and inspire people in ways that most ordinary Anglicans find difficult to comprehend.'

"The problem is literalism, and until Islam evolves to the point where its doctrines are viewed by its adherents in a more metaphorical light, there is bound to be friction between opposing concepts of life which are obviously incompatible.

"So I agree with Jose that the nub of the hostility towards Muslim immigrants is more one of self-defence against an ideology that challenges our more evolved European way of life than of racism or bigotry. The peaceful resolution of these frictions is one of the most urgent tasks of the 21st century."

"Have a nice day" - in Baghdad?

Two eye-witness accounts of daily life in 'free and democratic' Iraq [courtesy George W. Bush & Co.] Here and here.

Curbing the abuses of power

LORD RADCLIFFE'S FORESIGHT

In 1952 Lord Radcliffe, a much-respected senior Judge, delivered the BBC Reith Lectures on “The Problem of Power”. When these were published in book form, a few years later, he added a Postscript, from which I quote the following:

“The old glories of the liberal tradition, the passionate belief that political liberties are the essential condition of the greater liberties of thought, speech and action, have shrunk to a meaningless constitutionalism which asserts that anything is all right if it is permitted, nothing is all right if it is forbidden, by an Act of Parliament. We have forgotten, or we do not care to remember, that the formal liberties of Parliament, Press and Trade Union were established to be the vehicle of real liberties of individual persons, not at all to set up those institutions to be the chartered libertines of modern English society….

“It is the vulnerability of the modern democratic society that is our abiding danger. If there is one noticeable change in the general outlook of this country in the twelve years since the end of the war it lies in a marked lowering of public tone. We seem to be losing at an alarming rate the power of independent judgment, the independent sense of value…it is egalitarian democracy that nourishes this oppression of the individual personality by its dislike, even fear, of privacy, its prim refusal to accept distinctions of value between persons, its obsession with the struggle for material advantages. We gaze with misgiving at the spectacle of a society which combines a low level of thinking and feeling with a wide diffusion of benevolence and goodwill….It is one of the deplorable results of our developed engines of publicity that persons can deeply affect the taste and tone of society who are neither conscious of their responsibilities nor qualified to perform them….

“It is enervation of soul, an abdication of personal responsibility of judgment, that we have to fear. It does not come about because evil men set out to corrupt society: it comes about because the majority of members of society will always beg not to be required to keep themselves in training….Modern life is lived as an essay in public relations. Facts themselves begin to matter less and less: all that matters is the way to put the thing. Persons themselves begin to matter less and less: all that matters is the kind of show they give….

“It seems to be the fate of the member of contemporary society that he should be invited to participate in everything and to experience nothing. Two-dimensional feeling of this kind must in the end corrode the link that relates action to emotion. When the full range of Pity and Terror can be travelled two or three nights a week, at stated hours, in all the comfort of the home, it really seems as if there was nothing more to be done about it except to register the receipt of the appropriate emotions. It is often said that this great enlargement of the possibilities of experience at second hand also extends the range and capacities of human sympathy. I daresay that it does. But it would not be a safe inference that it deepens them in the same measure. ‘Very terrible: what is the next programme?’….

“It can never be too early for people in this country to take stock of their beliefs and aspirations, to ask themselves who or what they think they are and to where they want to go. They still have the great opportunity – richness of human material, a history at once fascinating and unique, and social relations which, for all the criticism, have yet been humane, kindly and wholesome when contrasted with those of other countries. What they must not believe is that they will be saved by their institutions if they are not saved by themselves….”

[My italics]

Re-reading this after nearly sixty years, I find its prescience remarkable. Although the political and social situation of the 1950s was very different from that today, the seeds of many of our present discontents were already sown, and clearly discerned by Lord Radcliffe. If he were still alive, he would be in the forefront of those expressing concern at the way supposedly ‘democratic’ governments in Britain and the USA are trampling roughshod over our traditional and hard-won civil liberties in the name of a spurious ‘war against terror’.

THE SITUATION TODAY

Lord Radcliffe published his lectures shortly after the 1956 Suez Crisis, which had divided the country more sharply than any other political event since the struggle over Home Rule. It was the only time I remember when total strangers were arguing heatedly with one another in public – even on buses and tube trains. There was a deep sense of anger and, later, humiliation on the part of those who supported Eden’s disastrously abortive venture, and of shame on the part of those [including me] who felt he had besmirched the national honour.

Today, the nation is even more bitterly divided, and the rift has gone on far longer – for practically the whole of the 21^st century so far. The dispute between those who originally supported the invasion of Iraq [and the dwindling few who still do ] and those who regard the whole thing as an unmitigated moral and practical disaster is exacerbated by their common feeling of helplessness about how to extricate ourselves from this sorry mess.

How has this situation come about? In part, because we have not heeded Lord Radcliffe’s warning that we shall not be saved by our time-honoured institutions if we are not saved by ourselves. The ‘Mother of Parliaments’ has proved even more spineless in articulating the widespread opposition to the ill-starred Gulf adventure than the wishy-washy Democrats in the US Congress. There is as yet no help in either of them – which brings to the forefront the burning question of the ‘Democratic Deficit’ which is at the heart of the modern malaise.

During the past quarter-century, there has been an increasing slippage in the power of public opinion to exact accountability from its elected representatives, or from over-powerful corporate interests which increasingly operate on an international, and even global, scale. As a result, the individual citizen feels increasingly impotent to influence the course of events, and ends up [as Lord Radcliffe realised he or she probably would] helplessly shrugging shoulders in front of the latest atrocity beamed in by the ‘telly’ and turning to more palatable fare. Thanks to the onslaught of our dear and belatedly departing Prime Minister and his authoritarian-minded cronies upon our freedoms of speech, movement and privacy – the latter concept now almost a thing of the past - there is an uneasy and growing sense that we are sliding, gently at present but more precipitately soon, into an Orwellian nightmare strongly reminiscent of Nineteen Eighty-Four . It is ironic, to say the least, that less than twenty years after the euphoria engendered by the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a decade after the even more misguided euphoria at the advent of ‘New Labour’ [the very name should have warned us!] the materialisation of a British Stasi, in substance if not in name, seems more and more imminent.

It had been my intention, in planning this piece, to offer some practical suggestions as to how this dire and increasingly menacing situation is to be redeemed. But as so often, analysis is far easier than prescription; and this post is already long enough. So I shall pass the problem over to my readers, some of whom I well know have given even more anxious and sustained thought to this mess than I have.

How do we rebuild genuine democracy? How do we stop overpowerful toxic tails wagging supine, bemused underactive electorates? Who is going to bell the cat, and to prod sleepy Cerberus?

W.B Yeats inimitably pinpointed our current dilemma in The Second Coming:

“THINGS FALL APART; THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD;

MERE ANARCHY IS LOOSED UPON THE WORLD,

THE BLOOD-DIMMED TIDE IS LOOSED, AND EVERYWHERE

THE CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE IS DROWNED;

THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION, WHILE THE WORST

ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY.”

It is five minutes to midnight – there is still time for the Democratic Centre to regroup and ACT. But only just.

All values are relative, but some are more relative than others

I remember, when I was a first-year undergraduate, one of those intense after-dinner discussions where an earnest young lady fervently proclaimed: “Nothing is absolute! Everything is relative.” This [even if illogical] is probably true. But it didn’t occur to me then that it would ever be used by self-styled ‘intellectuals’ to maintain that “and therefore, nothing is better or worse than anything else”. This is obvious nonsense, if only because if something is relative it has to be relative to some standard of value.

Ancient and mentally out-dated I may be, but I would never have foreseen that anyone educated in the Western liberal tradition of free enquiry and open debate could seriously aver that closed thought systems of a totalitarian cast, whether religious, philosophical, or political, are entitled to equal respect and toleration – one-sided, of course – with democratic pluralism.

But such is the case nowadays. Incredibly, many of the trendy pundits of the Left are tumbling over themselves to assure us that Islam is deserving in Britain and other European countries of equal status for those who adhere to it with the values of our open secular society and the rule of law which have evolved over centuries of hard-fought struggle against tyranny. Are they seriously proposing that a primitive system of medieval law such as Shari’a, which by Western standards is in many respects cruel and even barbaric, should be given houseroom here?

If this is true of Islam, why not of Roman Catholicism, fascism, communism, and other mind-controlling doctrines? All of these, whether religious or political or both, seek to dominate and control not only their own willing followers, but everybody else. Whatever route they follow, their destination and ambition are always identical: their domination and others’ submission – ultimately obtained, if necessary, by violence.

There are indeed many and deep flaws in the practice of Western democracy in these grievous opening years of the 21^st century. Remedying these is surely task enough for anyone who cares about the health and future of our society, without embarking upon quixotic championship of Trojan horses in our midst.

By all means let us be relativist – but not mindlessly relativist in the fashion of Gilbert’s “idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this, and every country but his own”.