Talk

Keith Hahn-Harris has written a very peculiar piece over at The Liberal Conspiracy. Taking as his starting point the recent Amis/Eagleton controversy he starts off by saying,

How far our society is ‘enlightened’ is open to debate, yet the legacy of the enlightenment remains profound. The consensus is still that engagement in politics requires a careful analysis of social problems and a determined attempt to right-wrongs (sic) in a way that is good for society as a whole.

I’d say that in developed democratic societies that’s broadly true about the sort of discourse people feel that they have to use to express their political views and it’s a good thing that it’s like this. He goes on to say,

Yet the enlightenment consensus, I would suggest, has become a straight-jacket on modern politics. The problem is this: policies that cause harm, that perpetuate prejudice, that stir up hate, that are venal, that corrode social bonds – these are no less prevalent than they ever were, but they have become unjustifiable.

This is where things start to get a bit strange. Does Keith really believe that there is more harm being caused, more prejudice being perpetuated, more hatred being stirred up, more venality and more social bonds being corroded now that 50, 100 or 200 years than now in the UK, which is where I suppose he is talking about? I don’t know anymore than he does but I’d say off the top of my head that democratic countries influenced by the Enlightenment have come on rather a lot in the last 200 years or so and that there isn’t much evidence to support the negative philosophy of history that his comments imply. Abhorrent practices such as slavery and legalized religious discrimination have been largely abolished and even the poorest people in such countries as the UK have their social, economic and political rights protected in a way that would have been difficult for their grandparents to imagine. And though the emancipation of women has not gone as far as it ought to have  things in this area are still much better than they are in most parts of the world which have escaped the influence of the Enlightenment.

I have to say that I understand neither the closing phrase of the quote above nor the one that ends the first sentence of this one,

So it is that politicians may continue pursuing policies that may damage our environment and our society, but they cannot openly justify them. Instead we end up with political discourses that seek to deny the effects of policies; global warming denial is one example, denial that repressive actions against the Islamic radicalism create more radicalism is another.

Keith seems to think that there is a perfectly understood, correct and righteous way to govern, that politicians are failing to govern in this way and that they can’t “openly justify” this failure, whatever that means. As regards the examples he gives, he’s probably right about one; global warming. We’ve had our heads in the sand too long about this but there are some signs that we are slowly beginning to pull them out. The weight of evidence presented and rational argument deployed might possibly have had something to do with this. As regards Islamic radicalism, well, who knows? It depends on what kind of Islamic radicalism and what kind of repressive actions are involved. The trial in Spain of the surviving conspirators responsible for the mass slaughter produced by the train bombings in Madrid in 2004 has recently concluded with some of the accused receiving very long jail sentences. Does Keith think that the use of courts of law independent of the executive, defence lawyers paid for by the state and all the other aspects of due process that were so visible during the trial are likely to generate more Islamic radicalism? If he does, I wonder what alternatives he’d like to suggest. He goes on to say,

When political discourse cannot reflect the desires motivating politics, then we have the current perverse situation in which political arguments are often not really arguments at all. If the arguments for a policy cannot be properly expressed, then counter-arguments cannot be tailored against them. However bad-tempered the Amis debate might have been, at least it is a real debate – visceral and ugly perhaps, but with a level of honesty that more polite debates rarely achieve. The problem of course is that an honest politics of this kind would also be a very unpleasant and hurtful politics. Although honesty about hating Muslims would be preferable to hypocritical pieties in the sense of allowing a debate on our fundamental desires and fears, it would be hard for most Muslims to live through. Written and unwritten taboos against ‘hate speech’ may make for a perverse and dishonest politics, but they also shield vulnerable people from harm.

This seems to be a call for those with racist feelings to say what’s really on their minds, that if you hate a particular religious or ethnic group then you should feel free to let rip and, even though this might hurt the feelings of the group concerned, that this would somehow lead to a more honest and productive political debate.

I was rather under the impression that was pretty much the situation that prevailed in Britain until comparatively recent years. When my mother arrived in the UK in the late 1940s signs saying “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish” were a reality in London. Does Keith think that race relations in the UK were better then for being more honest? And has he thought about the possible effects of legitimising certain racist discourses going beyond hurt feelings and leading to hurt and in some cases lifeless bodies?

I think that the marginalisation of kinds of talk that consist of and encourage the hatred of religious and ethnic minorities in political debate is a damn good thing, is at least partly due to the effects of the Enlightenment (credible reasons for despising entire religious and ethnic groups can’t be given because they don’t exist), reduces the amount of daily harassment that millions of people living in the UK have to put up with, has quite possibly saved lives and is something that liberals and those of the left should be seeking to defend rather than weaken.