Culture and Anarchy Revisited 3: On Liberal Practitioners

Transcript of talk by Simon Heffer on The Westminster Hour, 29 June 2003.

Simon Heffer

Is it not a paradox of our liberal society that freedom of speech is limited as never before in modern times? It's not just the extreme politeness otherwise known as political correctness, where nothing critical of a minority can ever, it seems, be mentioned. It's that we now have laws preventing people from saying unpleasant and ignorant things about, for example, ethnic minorities.

An earlier generation would have felt it sufficient that such persons, by their own low behaviour, placed themselves outside the society of all decent people: but now it is felt they must be condemned by the law. There was even a suggestion a few years ago, supported by Jack Straw, that it should be a crime to deny the murder by the Nazis of six million Jews. Now since only a mental defective or a malicious bigot could not accept that this genocide took place, it might be thought that the very act of denying it would bring punishment enough in derision and contempt upon those who did so.

However, the penalty meted out to those warped minds who argue that the newsreels of Belsen were manufactured in a studio in Hollywood would not be for the benefit of the penalised. Rather, it would be for the benefit of those who proposed and then passed the law. Our liberals like nothing more than to grandstand, to search for wrongs and stupidities that can be magnified into absolute evils, and to punish them with illiberal severity. Happily, good sense has prevailed, and holocaust denial has not been made a crime - and those who do it are denied their martyrdom.

When, in Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold lambasted the people he called 'Our Liberal Practitioners' he attacked a very different sort of person: but one who was definitely the antecedent of those who practise what they call liberalism today. In a book that concerned itself much with theological dispute, and that accepted religion as a cornerstone of our society, Arnold identified the worst excesses of liberalism with decadence in religious practice and observation.

He also thought that the obsession with free trade of 19th century liberals made economics a higher consideration for them than humanity. On the religious question he was perhaps a little wide of the mark even then. Carlyle, more than 20 years before, had noted the secularisation of the English mind, seeing the press as a new form of religion with an ever-growing number of devotees among the newly literate. Today, it is not the Bible that we live by, or any of the teachings of the mass media, but the tenets of what we have come to call political correctness: the most noxious creation of liberals, and the most illiberal too.

Some regard political correctness as a form of good manners: others, however, see it as a means of avoiding debate on problematical subjects such as the contemporary issues of asylum seekers, or the activities of a few Islamic extremists in our otherwise peaceable Moslem community.

In Arnold's day the Liberal party made up half the House of Commons, and many of its members were religious nonconformists. His particular gripe with them in 1869 was that as the Gladstone administration sought to disestablish the Church of Ireland it was not motivated by 'reason and justice'. It was, he said, motivated by 'the power of the nonconformists' antipathy to Church establishments'. In other words, they were motivated by prejudice.

The very existence of an establishment was, ipso facto, a bad thing: just as it is a bad thing, to their descendants today, for anyone to criticise something the modern liberals of all parties hold sacred. Then, they sought to impose their views about the superiority of nonconformism upon everyone else.

Today, they seek to impose their views about the so-called multicultural society, or about what the Victorians called the undeserving poor, or about what some people still consider to be objectionable sexual and social practices, on everyone likewise. Any disagreement invites not debate, but ostracism for the dissentient. Arnold contrasted 'reason and justice' - the attributes of any argument evinced by those who had benefited from 'sweetness and light' - with the 'fetish or mechanical maxim' .

We can use the same comparison today, between those liberals whose central hypocrisy is that they wish to confine freedom of expression, and those Tories who, oddly enough, wish to let it flourish. I am not, of course, saying that the Tory mind is one inevitably marked by reason and justice - I am not that naïve - but at least it does not demonstrate the inconsistency of demanding a free-for-all for everyone, just so long as they agree with the prevailing orthodoxy.

We live in a society where all sorts of people - lawyers, local government officials, even tiresome newspaper columnists - make a living in an industry concerned with getting people their 'rights'. The whole notion of political correctness is wedded to this.

The 'fetish', as Arnold would have called it, exists to invent rights for people in principle, then if possible have them passed into law. If a new 'right' is proclaimed with sufficient force, the rest of us are supposed to concede that it must become a matter of statute. To take one example, the Government has now been persuaded that it should not be illegal for homosexual men to have intercourse with each other in public lavatories.

Their rights, apparently, would be infringed otherwise. Similarly, it has become, it seems, a right for people with no claim on this country, who have never paid taxes here and who give no allegiance to its Sovereign, to become beneficiaries of our welfare state.

Those who criticise the former are condemned as homophobes: the latter as racists. Such terms of abuse close down the debate that the liberals, of course, do not want. Their main interest is to alter society and to destroy its previous values. Debate and the exposition of reason it would bring would not be helpful in that context. There are not, it seems, two sides to every story.

'Does any one,' asked Arnold, 'if he simply and naturally reads his consciousness, discover that he has any rights at all?' He thought not. 'The deeper I go in my own consciousness the more it seems to tell me that I have no rights at all, only duties.' Arnold railed against the concept of the 'false ideal', and stated yet again how reasonableness and education would help prevent such mistakes.

Sadly, we now live in a world of false ideals, made for us by liberals of the sort to which he so violently objected. For Arnold's generation, the great liberal excess was the determination by the House of Commons to pass a Bill to enable a man to marry his deceased wife's sister. In our age this might seem trivial or footling and self-evidently acceptable. Then, though, it seemed no less shocking to many than the modern idea that homosexuals should be allowed to contract marriages with one another does to some people now. Arnold ridiculed the notion that just because the Bible did not expressly forbid something it was acceptable for someone to 'do as he liked' in that context. He said this idea was most 'eminently exemplified in that crowned Philistine, Henry the Eighth - the craving for forbidden fruit and the craving for legality.'

This brings us back to our own liberal practitioners. They seek to use legality to sanction ideas or practices that many regard as wrong and contrary to the interests of society; and they seek, also, to use the law to punish those who might start to express contrary opinions.

Even Arnold in his most pessimistic moments, even Stephen in his most bilious, did not conceive of that second development. The freedom to be ignorant and the freedom to be offensive might not have been admirable, but they were inevitable, and they were worth controlling by law only when they became positively criminal. Today, even if thought is still not a crime, the expression of certain thoughts is. And who is to say that some expressions of opinion that now merely invite social ostracism will not themselves, in future, be criminalised? Why else would the European Union, in its draft constitution, seek to reserve the right to ban political parties?

I do not dispute that much of this has sprung from the best intentions. It is appalling, for example, that any Briton should be disadvantaged because of his or her ethnic origin. However, when liberals are thwarted, when ostracism is not enough but the law cannot be railroaded into sort of authoritarianism they like, true liberty is put at risk.

We have seen this in the case of the murdered London student, Stephen Lawrence. Two facts are not in doubt. Mr Lawrence was murdered, and the people who murdered him have not been and will not be, punished for the crime. It is impossible to judge the motivations of others - though the law these days claims, with shocking presumption, to be able to so - but it is highly likely that mr Lawrence was murdered by white racialists simply because he was black. There is video evidence, indeed, of the alleged murderers boasting about how they would like to kill black people.

In any case, the motivation is in the end irrelevant: an innocent person is cruelly killed, and those who did it should be brought to justice and punished with the mandatory sentence, a sentence whose severity is unaffected by the motivation for the crime.

Some people nevertheless saw their opportunity, in the wake of this injustice, to use it for other ends. Some saw it as a means to attack the whole basis of our society, even though the shock and disgust of all right-thinking people at this murder was plain to see and hear. The particular focus was on the actions of the police. Many murders, of white people as well as black, are not investigated satisfactorily because of a lack of hard evidence or because of police incompetence. Because Mr Lawrence's family had little social influence, the police may well have been casual in the extreme about investigating the case. Whether that was because of their race, or whether a humble white family would have suffered likewise, should be a matter for debate. Any objective observer of the Lawrence fiasco could see that incompetence played a huge part in it.

However, the lawyer who conducted the inquiry, Sir William Macpherson, said it was down to something called 'institutional racism'. Some of us had always thought that racial prejudice, like any other form of bigotry, had to be founded in the minds of individuals. Sir William chose to overlook that.

The Metropolitan Police was scapegoated for this act of wickedness. A mind was invented for it that was deemed 'racist'. Individual policemen were told they were, inevitably, 'racistwhether they had ever harboured such thoughts or not. Keen to join in the mood of national self-flagellation, other bodies decided they, too, were probably institutionally racist. Some immediately acquired policies aimed at preventing any further lurches in this direction: all of which was designed to waste a great deal of public money, but made those in charge feel a great deal better.

Nor of course, does the matter end with institutional racism. There is almost certainly institutional sexism. However, not all these institutional-isms are bad. Institutional classism, when practised against the more privileged classes such as when their children apply to universities, appears entirely justified in the interests of 'progress'.

It is like the now discredited American idea of affirmative action, which many perfectly able black people came to resent because of the way in which it patronised them. And institutional leftism, where the orthodox politically correct view of the world is made to prevail and become the norm, is of course highly acceptable almost everywhere now. That it might not be related to normal life seems merely a quibble: and we are forced to ask, again and again, which is the illusion, and which the reality.

Arnold implored that 'we must not let the worship of any fetish, any machinery which are not, like perfection, absolute goods in themselves, though we think them so, create for us such a multitude of miserable, sunken, and ignorant human beings, that to carry them all along with us is impossible.' Yet the determination our liberal practitioners have to devote themselves to the promotion of sectional interests, without debate, and to ostracise those who demur, is the worship of just such a fetish. It results in what Alexander Solzhenitsyn called 'the censorship of fashion'.

And all this happens, to return us to a theme that has run through all three of these talks, because of a want of reason. In deploring the fact that the lower classes of his day seemed unable to stop procreating, Arnold called their behaviour 'just as contrary to reason and the will of God, as for a man to have horses, or carriages, or pictures, when he cannot afford them'.

He castogated liberals for not seeing this. In my first talk, I argued that to deprive people of a proper education was to rob them of the power of reason; in my second, that the abuses of our welfare state and its depleting effect on society was a sign of that lack of reason.

Today, I have tried to argue that the hijacking of our perceptions and the stifling of our freedom of expression is done by the unreasonable; and that their victims, lacking reason themselves, are powerless to counter it. And simply for saying these things I can expect to be howled down by illiberal liberals.

But we can either carry on down this road, where truth is inverted and a majority will find itself enslaved to diverse minorities, or we can begin again to act in accordance with the tenets of culture, suitably dosed up by sweetness and light, in the pursuit of reason, as Matthew Arnold recommended. It is not too late, but it soon will be.