Men and the Irish Abortion referendum

Not Irish. Not a woman. Two good reasons to keep out of this debate.

But then: Irvine Welsh. Not Irish. Not a woman. (And countless other non-Irish men of that ilk.)


Hoping for a huge YES vote in the Irish abortion referendum. Time to consign all those flat earth medieval clowns and their antiquated patriarchal pish to history’s garbage can.

— Irvine Welsh (@IrvineWelsh) 18 May 2018

So let's talk about men and to men...

1) My first memorable brush with the issue of abortion was as a student on a training day for a counselling service. I was pretty left wing in a slushy, undergraduate sort of way, but certainly would have signed up to all the usual shibboleths including abortion on demand. The presenter was a (male) GP who began by bad mouthing one of his partners (a female GP) who apparently had religious objections to contraception, abortion etc. He then enthusiastically went on about how easy it was to do an abortion secretely, describing how they had managed to get a girl into an abortion facility without her mother (female, cleaner at the hospital) ever knowing. It was all very gung-ho. Even at the time I thought it was utterly repulsive. And typically male.

2) Me. (Male.) Can't remember which of my wife's pregnancies it was but one of the 'routine' tests flagged up a heightened risk of one of those conditions which all sensible people abort. (I think it was Downs.) The next stage would have involved an amniocentisis with a risk of miscarriage. I confess I was slightly tempted: I was scared of having a child with a disability. Didn't even cross my wife's mind to accept the further test with the possibility of an abortion down the line. Not the first time I was reminded of  the mother-child bond, nor the first time I was reminded of male inadequacy. (And neither of us were Catholics at that point.)

3) Welsh. (Writer not people. Male.) Would it be fair to describe him as patriarchal? He's a bit bullish anyway, hardly presents as quiche eating. Likes boxing apparently. Creates imaginary, druggy Lebenswelt which is striking rather than flourishing. Seems very certain of his own rightness on any number of issues including pish and abortion. Wants to leave it up to women by telling them how to vote.

4) The guy (that guy) who screams abuse at pro-life rallies or at pro-life women on Twitter. (Male.)


Men like Welsh are heavily involved in promoting abortion: the debate just wouldn't be the same, certainly in tone let alone substance if it were left to women. Moreover it's hard to think of a more patriarchal othering of women than reducing the multiplicity of views and feelings and even morality among real women on this subject to the simplistic 'Women think...', 'Trust women' etc etc. Reasoning regarding the status of an unborn child, bodily autonomy and the interaction of law and morality don't just disappear 'coz lady brain or summat'. I'd be perfectly happy to leave the debate to women because there are plenty of women who defend the pro-life position and, frankly, do so with more authority because they have more skin in the game than most men. But let me say this as a man to men: don't delude yourself that the creation of a culture in which 1 in 5 children are killed, where men encourage women to see abortion as a morally neutral issue, and where you push some ultra dumb narrative about bringing Ireland out of a world of 'flat earth medieval clowns and their antiquated patriarchal pish' into a glorious shiny future just like Britain's isn't more poisoned by patriarchy and indeed neo-colonialism than anything you'll see from the pro-Life side.

Let's leave the final word to a woman:

This immediately makes essentially relevant not only all the facts about human reproduction I mentioned above, but a whole range of facts about our emotions in relation to them as well. I mean such facts as that human parents, both male and female, tend to care passionately about their offspring, and that family relationships are among the deepest and strongest in our lives -and significantly, among the longest lasting.

These facts make it obvious that pregnancy is not just one among many other physical conditions; and hence anyone who genuinely believes that an abortion is comparable to a haircut or an appendectomy is mistaken. The fact that the premature termination of a pregnancy is, in some sense, the cutting off of a new human life, and thereby, like the procreation of a new human life, connects with all our thoughts about human life and death, parenthood and family relationships, must make it a serious matter. To disregard this fact about it, to think of abortion as nothing but the killing of something that does not matter, or as nothing but the exercise of some right or rights one has, or as the incidental means to some desirable state of affairs, is to do something callous and light-minded, the sort of thing that no virtuous and wise person would do. It is to have the wrong attitude not only to foetuses, but more generally to human life and death, parenthood, and family relationships.

Rosalind Hursthouse (1997) 'Virtue theory and abortion', in Daniel Statman (ed.) Virtue Ethics: a Critical Reader, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, p.236.

Shameless speech and the conservative disadvantage

                                            
                                                                      A pundit

There is a sort of Darwinian selection in punditry and indeed academia: those who are too shy or self conscious or simply aware of the strawfulness of their speech will select themselves out of the struggle for publicity, whilst those who lack this basic sense of shame will proclaim their latest thoughts with abandon.

Shame at one's own inadequacies is perhaps only one of a cluster of selective disadvantages that gather around the area of public speech. I remember, for example, thinking while in the middle of a period of postgraduate study that an academic apprenticeship was rather like accustoming oneself to gavage: learning to suppress the natural gag reflex in the face of amounts, or detail or type of work was essential to achieving the academic perspective. Certainly, entry into politics seems to require some highly abnormal personality traits.

But why should conservatives (and I mean by this as normal in this blog the sort of Burkean/Kirkian conservative rather than an adherent of one of the Conservative political machines such as the GOP or indeed the Conservative Party) suffer particularly from this? In politics, the conservative emphasis on the 'little platoons' means that any attempt to articulate their importance in party politics requires individuals to devote all their energies to a field which, ex hypothesi, they think of little importance. A religious sense, a sense which I grow more and more convinced is essential to conservative thought, pushes one to regard the natural end of human life as only of secondary importance to the supernatural end. Moreover the pursuit of personal virtue forces one to confront the shabbiness of one's own contributions sub specie aeterna. Simply a sense of politeness is a grave disadvantage in much contemporary public life.

The thought that conservative values (or perhaps simply civilised values) are selecting themselves out of the market of ideas is one that regularly strikes me. But here are two recent occasions which prompted such reflection. The first was Jordan Peterson's interview with Cathy Newman. Although I thought Newman came off particularly badly in this interview, I don't think Peterson came out of it well either. More precisely, Peterson himself in the interview seemed to endorse the aggressive contest of ideas that the interview itself embodied: whatever else Newman and Peterson disagreed on, they seemed to agree on the fact that disagreeableness (aka 'assertiveness') was a key feature of modern intellectual and social success. This is probably true as a description of modern Western society. It is certainly not  true of all societies (I found myself contrasting Confucian ideas of the junzi with the video while watching it) and not even of our own not so very long ago ('the gentleman').

The other occasion was in this account of the conductor Carlos Kleiber:

In a 2012 documentary, Traces To Nowhere (also the title of the second episode of the first series of Twin Peaks, Lynch fans), it’s revealed by his sister Veronika that Kleiber’s “bedside book” was the Zhuangzi, an ancient text written by Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou. He was particularly consumed by one phrase: “Leave no trace,” or, to quote the line in full, “The Perfect man leaves no traces of his conduct.” In the same film, German mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender says he gave her a book, probably written by an Indian guru (he’d intentionally ripped off the cover), throughout which he’d underlined many passages, including: “We all know the fearsome emptiness lurking behind the way we live. Convictions give life the content we desire. Work becomes an indispensable drug. For its sake we accept all the depravations and disadvantages, and every illusion is welcome.”

The causality behind the current Western attraction to shameless speech is probably complex. Certainly capitalism with its tendency to convert all goods to the salable, democracy with its emphasis on contest and debate, and social media with the person as a brand are all involved in the mix somewhere. The fact that we do in fact live thus is no reason to believe that in the long term at least we have to and no reason that we should. But certainly, while we do live in such an eristic society, those who are committed to living otherwise will tend to find that they have excluded themselves from contributing to a debate that might be the only way to change it.

Coercing Jews: the Mortara Case

                                               Seeing everywhere with complete clarity

A recent book review in First Things has prompted turbulence on Twitter. The review concerned the Mortara Case in which a Jewish child, secretly baptised against the wishes of his parents, was taken away from his Jewish family and brought up a Catholic. (The Wikipedia article gives an extended and, so far as I can see, fair account of the case.)

Although I'm not sure that it's quite fair to say that the author of the review (a Dominican priest) endorsed the Church's actions, he is certainly sympathetic to them. This unsurprisingly provoked some angry responses including one by Rod Dreher.

The Catholic philosopher Joseph Shaw gives a good analysis of why he thinks Pius IX acted wrongly; however,  his main point (that the Church acted inconsistently (and anti-Semitically) in taking away Edgardo whilst ignoring the plight of Catholic children who were not being brought up in the Faith by nominally Catholic parents) is vulnerable to arguments that a) the jeopardy of a child's eternal felicity in a household not even nominally Catholic is factually greater than of a child in a nominally Catholic family; and b) that the Church should have intervened more elsewhere is not an argument that it was wrong to intervene here.

The philosophical problem here is that all (most?) societies acknowledge that, at some point, the welfare of children might require a child to be protected or removed from its parents. More generally, all societies acknowledge that force is sometimes required to prevent wrongs. If (as here) the welfare is a matter of eternal felicity, the reasons for exercising coercion seem pretty strong. Now clearly, secularists will regard this belief of Catholics that baptism and bringing up in the faith are matters of the highest importance to the welfare of children as absurd; but they too will countenance removal of children in the face of abuse (which, at least according to some, will include worshipping sky fairies and circumcision).

So I don't think that the general problem of coercion and removal is a specifically Catholic one, and, given this, it is inevitable that there will be hard cases and, as in all hard cases, the probability that sometimes the wrong decision will be made. (And even where the right decision is made, considerable suffering may result.) But there is undoubtedly something utterly terrible about this case, whatever may need to be said about other cases.

Let's try a slightly different tack. Wisdom literature is full of injunctions to silence and reticence in judgment. For example, 

Proverbs 17:28 Even fools are thought wise when they keep silent; with their mouths shut, they seem intelligent.

Proverbs 10:19 Transgression is at work where people talk too much, but anyone who holds his tongue is prudent.

Moreover, I'd suggest that more generally, the contrast between the folk image of a wise person and that of a merely rational person rests primarily in gravitas: the wise person is reluctant to speak and give judgment unnecessarily; the rationalist has a tendency to (in Russell Kirk's words) to be a chirping sectary (think Richard Dawkins). (As an aside, part of the comic value of Polonius may be that he tries to be both grave and chatty.) So wisdom involves a greater tendency to silence and reticence than the normal run of humanity will display. (And perhaps it is not irrelevant that the wisest of the wise, Solomon, displayed his wisdom most obviously in a child custody case by refusing to make his own judgment.)

Moreover, in the face of the past, we should often feel a particular perplexity in offering moral judgment. It is quite obvious that both the Roman practice of fighting in the arena and the Western practice of the Atlantic slave trade were foul: a society without these things is a better society ceteris paribus. But what really is one to say about those virtuous figures who lived in those societies and lived and prospered sometimes because of those practices? Are they wicked men? (And yet, if one refuses to condemn them because times were different, are we falling into a cultural relativism?) The wise person will, I'd suggest, simply admit the perplexity: there is no need to pretend to a certainty of speech we do not possess and of which we have no need.)

This thought is relevant to a lot of the 'decolonising' activities that seem to be sweeping much of the West. We should find, for example, it perplexing to know precisely what to say about figures such as General Lee with his support of the slave owning South or Washington with his slaves. We can examine and describe their actions and their failings, but to try to come to some sort of final moral decision about their characters or their place in history is both rash and unnecessary. Unlike a judge who does have to come to some sort of decison in the midst of moral complexity, unlike any agent who has to decide what to do in the face of a real moral dilemma, we have absolutely no reason to come to a decision on whether Pius IX acted rightly or wrongly: indeed, it would be wise not to.

(I leave this point resting on the simple observation that wisdom, as commonly understood, involves reticence and the avoidance of unnecessary judgment. As to why this is so, I might offer two strategies. The first is a strong strategy: this might be a justification based a) on the Wittgensteinian thought that language is rooted in a form of life beyond which it 'goes on holiday' and b) the Aristotelian thought that the aim of moral philosophy is ethical improvement, leading to the conclusion that, while reflecting on the ethics of the past is a good thing, it is rash to go from that reflection to a judgment that is, by nature of its being directed at the past, useless. If such a strategy works, there is, in principle, an impossibility of reassessing completely the actions of (especially) the long or very foreign past. The second is a weak strategy: this would be what I take to the commonsense observation that judgments about the past tend, in practice, to be quite difficult to recreate in complete detail, coupled with the thought that they tend to be rather pointless. Such a strategy would not entirely rule out making judgments on the past, but it would strongly discourage it in practice.)

One of the reasons that current discussion of the case involves high emotion is that it seems to have consequences for something that is a live issue: anti-Semitism in Catholicism. I think Joseph Shaw is right that there is indeed more than a whiff of anti-Semitism in the decisions of the Mortara case; I think it is clear that there is still a problem with anti-Semitism in the West, quite apart from specifically in some parts of the Church. Even assuming some form of Catholic Integralism max, where all the decision making powers of the State were thoroughly Catholic, it would still be to the point to reflect on whether those decisions were informed by anti-Semitism, or by wisdom and by virtuous application of Catholic principles. That is of course no guarantee that such a state wouldn't perform something like the Mortara case again. But equally, there is no guarantee that a liberal state wouldn't abduct Jewish children to prevent circumcision or to enforce one-or-other of the modern shibboleths of sexual liberation contrary to Orthodox Jewish belief. A key point here is that, following both Plato and Aristotle, the role of practical wisdom in politics tends to be emphasised in Catholic thought over that of principles: at the very least, practical wisdom is required to apply principles well. That practical wisdom (prudentia) cannot be replaced simply by articulated rules, and thus it is difficult to step back into a long past, very foreign situation and come to judgment: as Aristotle notes, it depends on the perception of the wise person, and, moreover, (as I will add) that perception is essentially embodied and present and not distanced from the situation of judgment by time, space and culture.

I don't particularly want to turn this into another screed on the virtues of conservatism, but it does strike me that a refusal to avoid perplexity, a refusal to express unnecessary judgment whether about the past or fantastic futures is indeed a very wise and thoroughly conservative thing. And it's a habit that social media with its constant demand for verbal responses and constant temptation to imitate the role of the public judge that most of us actually are not will of course regard as cowardice. There is no particular reason to think that we can say anything very sensible about whether a decision made in very different circumstances from ours was the right one, even if we can, carefully, reflectively, tease out some of the ethical background from which those decisions emerge. The real task for Catholics from this case is to learn lessons about the sneaking pervasiveness of anti-Semitism, the sacredness of the family and the impossibility of ever getting any institution that always works properly.

And that will of course sound to many like a cop out. But that's because they are children of modernity (or perhaps more exactly here Kant), who believe that there exists an entirely rational ethics of principle, smoothly applicable at least in theory by human beings across all times and cultures without the need for the virtue of prudentia, while I believe the only panopticon exists in the mind of God, whose vision we glimpse only sporadically and partially. And moreover I believe both that we should refrain from judgment where we can and also that, where we cannot, we should exercise it with fear and trembling and in the knowledge that we are scurrying creatures on sacred ground.

                             Judges properly attired for entering the sacred space of judgment

I am conscious in arguing this that it might sound, particularly to a Jewish audience, that this is a typical attempt to avoid the admission of guilt, a tendency typical of Western anti-Semitism in general and a general Catholic inclination to preserve an illusion of infallibility. Perhaps. But the constant demand to revisit the past and to exact precise judgment on it seems to be a very modern, very western habit, one fuelled in large part by recent changes in technology. Moreover the de-sacralization of judgment, the viewing of it as an everyday activity to which all of us are called all the time, is again of fairly recent and geographically limited occurrence. So while there is a constant temptation, particularly if one has a shared identity with a victim group in a particular case, to feel the urgency of just this event, of the exceptional call to judgment here, I would simply ask someone feeling this whether you are sure that the general practice, of which this is merely just one example, is so obviously a good or possible thing that you will set aside more general worries about it in the face of the urgency of just this one case?

The Benedict Option: Prolegomena to any future blogpost that will be able to present itself as a review

I've been putting off tackling The Benedict Option . It's been sitting next to my bed since publication and frankly I'm a little scared at having to read and then comment on it. Anyway, procrastination away! After having finished this post, I shall tackle it and report thereon.

This resolution is in part to do with a Twitter discussion that's been going on for a little while in the Catholic UK blogosphere about the new Catholic Education Service's guidance on LGBTQIIAA+ matters. (Countercultural Father here and Joseph Shaw here give a flavour of the report and the debate.) I simply don't have enough detailed expertise in either English education or the legal/regulatory framework on such matters to get too involved in this. The pressure to adopt the Time for Inclusive Education framework will undoubtedly hit us in Scotland with similar issues shortly. But I did leap in with an expression of sympathy for the dilemma faced by the Catholic Education Service: how to deal with a cultural (and legal etc) environment that frames the discussion and sets out questions to be answered in a way that does not sit easily with Catholic understandings of anthropology, and where that discussion seems to be entirely controlled by LGBTQIIAA+ pressure groups such as Stonewall.

This issue seems to me to be very much at the centre of Dreher's concerns: how an authentically Christian life can be lived out in an environment which is becoming hostile to Christianity. (That doesn't necessarily mean persecution, but it does mean (eg) that expressions of the sinfulness of homosexual sex are no longer 'acceptable' and even in some environments legal.) His solution -well, to be considered!- but the essence is clearly some sort of strategic withdrawal into a more thoroughgoingly Christian space than that offered by a secularising society.

Anyhow, I'm a great believer in Collingwood's idea that you should approach an (archaeological) investigation with questions to be answered rather than just digging around at random. Accordingly, I set out below some of the issues I'm going into this investigation with to see if I can sort them out.

1. Modesty of ambition. One of the reasons I've been so reluctant to tackle the book is that I worry there'll be nothing new there. At various times, I've read quite deeply in the literature surrounding secularisation theory and Stanley Hauerwas so I'm familiar with the difficulties that Christians face in modernity and suggestions about how they should form authentically Christian communities. Dreher's work is short (less than 75000 words I believe) and written by a journalist. So I want to find out: what does it offer that's new? (My suspicion is that it's going to provide some interesting insights into some modern ways of concretely living out Christianity. But it has also provided a 'buzz' around this important issue, and that's a good thing I suspect: we need to be thinking about this more.)

2. Specificity of tradition. Dreher is Orthodox, but the book seems to cover 'mere Christianity' without much worry about denominational differences. I want to see whether this helps or hinders his message. (My suspicion here is that we need to dig deeply into our specific traditions. Catholicism isn't Orthodoxy and neither are Evangelical Protestantism. I would expect the problems and solutions facing each tradition to be different.)

3. Outreach to the non-saints. My main worry is the apparent focus on the gathered saints (or at least saints in making). Catholicism has been a religion of saints doing their best to save a lot of sinners despite themselves. I want to find out: how does Dreher suggest that the 'Benedict' communities reach out to people who are not focused on being saints, but who might just get dragged to purgatory with the grace of sacraments?

4. Finally, inter-community structures and practices. Three things that have really had an impact on my religious life are EWTN, the internet and the Catechism. None of these seem easily into the model of a Benedictine community which is at the heart of the analogy. So I want to know: does Dreher's analysis do justice to the ways in which part of the response to the fluidity of modernity is, to borrow from Evola, 'to ride the tiger' rather than run away from it?

As a final point, part of my reluctance is that I want to like the book and I'm afraid I won't. Inasmuch as one can like a public persona, I do like Rod Dreher: he seems like an honest man trying to do honest things. That's difficult to reconcile with the need in the American religious market to become a personal brand; but although I worry that I should probably be spending the time I'm going to spend on the Benedict Option on Duns Scotus and Suarez, he does seem to be trying to deal with an important issue with integrity, and I want to be able to respect and indeed praise him for that.

No doubt other things will emerge. But that's what I'm aiming to get at just now. Wish me luck: I'm going in....

The protester as hero

The recent 'troubles' both worldwide as a result of Donald Trump's election and within the Catholic Church as a result of Pope Francis' actions made me think quite how powerful the archetype of The Protester (and of his cousin, The Rebel) has become within modern culture.

That's rather odder than might appear. Disagreement is an inevitable part of human societies. But it's hard to think of many other cultures which privilege 'protest' as the appropriate reaction to such disagreement. The quadricentenary of Bishop Sancroft's birth recently reminded me of the non-juring attachment to passive obedience. I confess to a long standing irritation with the fame of the suffragettes as opposed to the relative neglect of the suffragists:

The NUWSS adopted a peaceful and non-confrontational approach. Members believed that success could be gained by argument and education. The organisation tried to raise its profile peacefully with posters, leaflets, calendars and public meetings.

[Here.]

Since the 1960s, there has been a gradual increase in the sense that protest, particularly violent, highly emotional protest, is the proper way to settle disagreement. I can quite understand that many people object to Donald Trump as US President. But that disagreement was subjected to a democratic test and Trump won. Whatever path the losers of such a test now follow ought surely to take account both of the democratic result and the need to preserve the order of the American republic: in short, if everytime you dislike your leader you 'protest' and 'resist', it's hard to see how a republic can survive.

Protest, particularly mass public protest suffers from two main defects. It is disruptive of order, and civic peace is perhaps the main desideratum of public life. Moreover it tends to be blunt: I'm not at all sure what the Women's March recently was objecting to precisely (besides losing the election), still less what it proposed to put in its place.

I suppose (though I'm not completely convinced) that there is a place for The Protester. But I'm sure it's not so great a place as is currently given. If we are to have a pantheon of political role models, let's emphasize a bit more those who conform for the sake of peace, those who bite their tongues and those who compromise.  That goes for both 'sides': if a boorish, expressive individualism characterises much of the reaction to Trump, it also characterises much of the Trump phenomenon as well.

Respecting opponents requires moral self-discipline

                                          Perhaps not the best way of regulating disputes...



An article in the New York Times typified a lot of 'progressive' reaction to Trump's election. A Muslim student discovers her roommate -whom she seems to have got along with rather well before- voted Trump and therefore packs up and leaves:

We fought; I packed. This was Tuesday evening, so I headed to my friend’s dorm, where a small group of us, mainly black women, tried to find solace in one another as the country slowly fell to red. I tried and failed to speak, to write. I ignored my roommate’s lengthy texts.

 

Did she really expect me to respect her choice when her choice undermined my presence in this country, in this university, in my very own dorm room? Did she really expect me to shake her hand for supporting a candidate who would love to bar my relatives from this country, who has considered making people of my faith register in a specific database and carry special ID, Holocaust-style?

 

[Here]

 

What the article seems to miss (amongst many other things) is just how difficult it is for people to get along in a civilised manner: it requires virtue and often considerable will power. Certainly, part of this is putting up with other people's irritating personal habits: untidiness, singing off tune, slurping. But even more difficult is putting up with other people's views on important ethical matters. I am surrounded by people who often claim to see nothing wrong in killing unborn children, speak dismissively of God, and are positively foul about the Catholic Church. If I allowed my emotions free rein, I would be running around screaming at them. That I don't is a mix of different reasons. Sometimes it's because, short of ending up starving on the street, I have to get along with them. Sometimes it's because I have special duties to them as, for example, relatives. Sometimes, it's because, despite their views, I can see that they have a basic decency. And so on.

 

I'm not sure how much of this is due to social media, but this sort of recognition of the need for self control to establish civic peace and cordiality seems increasingly to be lost. Given the diversity of today's nation states, we all need to inculcate in ourselves and our children a much sterner self-discipline about knee jerk, emotional reactions. Getting on with other people involves compromise, self-restraint and courage. (I don't dismiss the student's fear of how she will be treated as a Muslim. But taking out that fear on a well-inclined, friendly roommate seems to me viciously self-indulgent.)

 

Self-restraint, civility, simple politeness. Not particularly fashionable virtues in a society where letting it all hang out and stuff anybody else has been the norm of behaviour from the sixties. And, yes, I am only too well aware of the difficulty in reconciling these norms with Donald Trump's behaviour. Doesn't make them any less necessary.

 

 

 

Virtue ethics and motherhood

 

The downfall of Andrea Leadsom as prospective Prime Minister was at least strongly associated with her apparent claim that being a mother gave her an edge over the childless Theresa May.

Putting aside the details of what she said, didn't say and the tone with which she said it, I found the resulting Twitter flood of mockery utterly depressing. Whilst appreciating the inevitability of the brutal knockabout of politics, many comments from people not directly involved displayed a general acceptance of the view that being a mother offered absolutely nothing in the way of a worthwhile experience or endeavour.

Let's consider another way of spending, say, eighteen years of one's life: military service. If a political leader said something along the lines of, 'I think my eighteen years of military service has helped make me a better politician', then I doubt anyone would have objected. It's of course not a knockdown reason to vote for someone. (On the whole, you might suspect that military service would be less important than (say) successfully running one of the more important ministeries.) But it would count for something.

Note a few things here. First, to claim that it gives you an advantage implies that it gives you an advantage over others -and that those others could be (if you wanted to or thought it tactful) be identified. So it is implicitly claiming that, ceteris paribus, you have an advantage over those who have not served. The mere fact of claiming an advantage isn't unreasonable, even if that advantage might be outweighed by other experiences that your opponent has and you haven't. The reluctance to mention motherhood in this way (particularly when May had made it clear that her childlessness was both involuntary and regretted) says more about our implicit acceptance of how important motherhood is to people's flourishing: we expect people (especially women) to be extremely sensitive about failing to have children in a way that we don't consider people likely to be so sensitive about other lacks (such as military service). Paradoxically, the 'horror' that some claimed to have felt about Leadsom's remarks is a testimony to the sui generis importance of motherhood.

But what is that importance? Let's take two aspects. First, it achieves something. Giving birth to a child and rearing it is essential if humanity is to continue. To the extent that we need or want a new generation, we need mothers. It is, we might normally think, right to honour people who achieve an important good. Secondly, it opens up a range of experience that profoundly affects our character and understanding of the world. Going back to the example of military service, fighting in the front line might plausibly be thought to open up an aspect of the world and to produce changes in character that others who had not undergone this might not have access to. This doesn't mean that everyone will be so altered and it doesn't mean that there mightn't be other experiences the importance of which again might outweigh the importance of military experience. But we might once more say that, ceteris paribus, the experience of war is something that would count for something. Turning to parenthood -and especially the experience of motherhood- I find it difficult to see how, normally, such an intense and extended experience wouldn't have a profound effect on people.

For me, the Leadsom stooshie demonstrates yet again how the natural centrality of the family and the experience of parenthood, especially motherhood, is being marginalised. It brought to mind passages in a book I hadn't read for probably around twenty years in which the virtue ethicist Rosalind Hursthouse reflects on the nature and value of motherhood:

So, I conclude, bearing children is intrinsically worthwhile. To do it, and do it well, is to have done something morally significant. Doing it well involves exercising courage, fortitude and endurance, and, moreover, exercising them in the achievement of something worthwhile, not, like being a wall-of-death rider, something worthless. What is done is, I claim, not just worthwhile and significant but morally worthwhile and significant, because of its connection with, on the one hand, the value or sanctity of life and, on the other, with what I have roughly categorised as 'family life' -the field of our closest relationships with other people. For these two areas are the concern of morality if anything is.

[…]

Perhaps the general conclusion to be drawn from any serious discussion of 'the worthwhile' is that all of us who lead ordinary lives should consider whether

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

(William Wordsworth)

Then the particular conclusion to be drawn from the particular discussion of the worthwhile we have been going through in this section is that no woman who has borne children well in the ordinary way should say humbly to herself, 'Well, I haven't done anything with my life really; I've “laid waste my powers” ', for she can say, 'I have done this much'. But anyone who has not borne children well might have to say, 'I haven't done anything with my life really'.

[Hursthouse, 1987, Beginning Lives, pp315-18]

Ash Wednesday and Stoicism

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.

I've a vague intention at some stage to assemble a collection of excerpts from classical philosophy which are analogous to Christian approaches. Whether I'll ever get round to this I don't know, but in the meantime, we can start Lent with the Stoicism of Seneca:

5. I am so firmly determined, however, to test the constancy of your mind that, drawing from the teachings of great men, I shall give you also a lesson: Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: "Is this the condition that I feared?"

6. It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence. In days of peace the soldier performs manoeuvres, throws up earthworks with no enemy in sight, and wearies himself by gratuitous toil, in order that he may be equal to unavoidable toil. If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes. Such is the course which those men have followed who, in their imitation of poverty, have every month come almost to want, that they might never recoil from what they had so often rehearsed.

7. [...] Let the pallet be a real one, and the coarse cloak; let the bread be hard and grimy. Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes for more, so that it may be a test of yourself instead of a mere hobby. Then, I assure you, my dear Lucilius, you will leap for joy when filled with a pennyworth of food, and you will understand that a man's peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune; for, even when angry she grants enough for our needs.

8. There is no reason, however, why you should think that you are doing anything great; for you will merely be doing what many thousands of slaves and many thousands of poor men are doing every day. But you may credit yourself with this item, – that you will not be doing it under compulsion, and that it will be as easy for you to endure it permanently as to make the experiment from time to time. Let us practise our strokes on the "dummy"; let us become intimate with poverty, so that Fortune may not catch us off our guard. We shall be rich with all the more comfort, if we once learn how far poverty is from being a burden.

[Moral Letters to Lucilius XVIII. 'On Festivals and Fasting' . Full text here.]

Wars, politics and alienation

Although there's been quite a lot I've been tempted to write on recently, it's been very difficult for me to focus on anything else without first talking about Syria and bombing. And since I have had little sense of what I should say about that, I have been left in silence. Not a bad thing maybe...

I've been reading (amongst many other things) Robert Nisbet's 1953 The Quest for Community. And this morning I came across this passage:

The clear tendency of modern wars is to become ever more closely identified with broad, popular, moral aspirations: freedom, self-determination of peoples, democracy, rights, and justice. Because war, in the twentieth century, has become rooted to such an extent in the aspirations of peoples and in broad moral convictions, its intensity and range have vastly increased. When the goals and values of a war are popular, both in the sense of mass participation and spiritual devotion, the historic, institutional limits of war tend to recede further and further into the void. The enemy becomes not only a ready scapegoat for all ordinary dislikes and frustrations; he becomes the symbol of total evil against the forces of good may mobilize themselves into a militant community.

Now this isn't quite applicable to the present case in the UK: certainly, bombing Syria or even more generally the 'war' against ISIS is not popular in the sense of mass participation or even mass support. But one of the things that has paralysed me in expressing any views about the present situation is the 'spiritual devotion' of many public commentators on both sides: whether you are one of those calling Cameron a c*** or one of those sonorously advising the bombing of civilians, there is clearly more spiritual weight being placed on the issue than a difficult practical decision about how best to exercise force.

There's an awful lot that might be said about this, including a recognition that decisions of life and death ought to be taken with a good deal of fear and trembling (although of all the current reactions to the seriousness of the issue, that of fear and trembling in the face of God's Judgment seems least in evidence). But I want to focus on two which I take to be central to that issue of alienation and the desperation to escape from it which Nisbet identifies, among other modern ills, with an obsession with war.

First, there is the modern tendency to concentrate on act based ethics rather than agent based ones: in essence, a focus on the right action rather than being (or becoming) the right person. Catholic ethics (like most ancient ethics) is at its foundation agent based: it is focused on becoming a good person and the attainment of beatitudo (the Beatific Vision of God) rather than simply doing the right action. That's key because for the modern, particularly the progressive, there is a desperate search for and conviction that there is one right answer, and, moreover, that it is essential for each individual to get that answer right. (Part of the problem here is that, in replacing God with the individual's consciousness, the duty of Jove to see everything correctly devolves upon every participant in social media.) For the ancient (and Catholics are very ancient) I am neither God nor (unless I am David Cameron etc) under a particular duty to express a view on a decision I have little understanding of and little influence on. Democracy of course complicates that by turning us all into little legislators, but practical wisdom should remind us how marginal such a decision is to most of our lives and quite how foolish it is to pretend otherwise.

Secondly, there is the tendency to identify politics with salvation. The fundamental problem in regard to Syria is not so much whether the RAF should drop a few bombs on Syria, but how the Mediterranean world -particularly North Africa- can be once more a place where ordinary people can get on with the pursuit of beatitudo. Defeating ISIS (well, denying them territory) might help, but the recent history of Iraq shows how clearly destroying one tyranny doesn't solve the problem of what happens next. The overemphasis on politics amongst moderns shows itself in two ways. There is the tendency to look to politics and the expression of political views (on war and other matters) as the cure for personal dissatisfactions and the meaninglessness of modern life. (Evidence of this among Islamists, MPs and progressives.) Furthermore, there are the unrealistic expectations of what might be achieved in the foreseeable future in the Middle East. One might not go quite as far as Hobbes in suggesting that any stable government would be better than none, but one might take the Augustinian view that the main business of government is essentially to facilitate or at least to allow the really important business of salvation by establishing civic peace. Instead we have the sort of mentality that leads to seeing anything other than the establishment of Hampstead on the Nile as a failure.

There's much more that could be said but I'll leave it there with the critique of overemphasizing the right view of actions we have little part in making at the expense of cultivating our character, and the critique of overemphasizing what politics can achieve rather aiming primarily at the sort of stability that allows the really important permanent things of life to be achieved. A coda. While mulling over what to say here (and now mulling over whether such mulling over is itself a sign of lack of virtue), I receive news of a friend's having been attacked. Not by a terrorist, but a thug screaming at 'Pakis'. (The friend is horrifyingly white but the friend whom he was with I suppose might look like a 'Paki' to someone not too fussy about a victim.) Not unusual I suppose in cities late at night and, in this case, only some relatively minor physical damage done. Possibly nothing to do with current events although somehow I doubt they helped. I can't do much directly about the Middle East, but I can do a great deal about how I react to them. It would be good to grab back, for a start, the word 'dignity' from those who identify it with a hysterical desire to establish their autonomy by getting the state to kill them.

Stoicism and Eudaimonistic ethics

                                                                 Where's Zeno...?


After reading a report from STOICON 2015 (ie a conference on Stoicism) (here) I tweeted the following question:

Reading report from STOICON wonder here about relative attractiveness of Stoicism vs Ancient Philosophy in general. Arguably all Ancient Philosophy is therapeutic, but what is it about Stoic therapy that appeals? (Why eg don't we take Platonic injunctions to mathematics or even theurgy as seriously?) For a modern 'therapeutic' Platonism see http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/andersons-pure.html …

(That provoked a very helpful exchange mostly with Cathy Barry (@Cathyby) with Jules Evans (@julesevans77) joining in at the end to which I'm grateful for prompting me to further thought.)

The original question wasn't (purely anyway) rhetorical: Stoicism does seem peculiarly attractive to many moderns and I'm not sure exactly why. In the report I linked to above, much of what is valued in Stoicism is common to much ancient philosophy. For example, most ancient ethics is therapeutic in the sense that it offers to improve your life: to make you eudaimon (flourishing). Moreover, it is focused primarily on internal goods (the virtues) rather than external goods (stuff, social status). To the extent that Stoicism tends (more than other schools) to be (at least) deistic, perfectionist, rationalist, suspicious of emotions and utterly dismissive of external goods (you can be as eudaimon on a rack as you can be watching TV with a good whisky), it might well be thought to have particular difficulties that make it less attractive to the modern mind than other ancient ethical approaches.

I'm pretty sure that most of the answer lies in the peculiarities of Roman Stoicism, and in particular the philosophers Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca. Roughly, all of these tend to be much more interested in practical techniques rather than in the more foundational questions raised by the earlier Greek Stoics. Moreover, to the extent that Stoicism in general rejects external circumstances as an element in flourishing to a quite unusual degree (certainly when compared to the Peripatetics), it is peculiarly compatible with any modern lifestyle: why change your life when you can just change your mind?

Now, I have two related worries about this. First, technique without asking serious questions about what purposes those techniques serve isn't philosophy , certainly not in a sense that Socrates or a modern academic philosopher would recognize it. (Indeed, were I to be waspish, Plato might well find a combination of marketable techniques and the promise of success in the everyday world rather more characteristic of sophistry than philosophy.) And to the extent that philosophy, that personal, desperate grappling with truth, is part of the good life, then a focus on technique together with a distraction from the pursuit of truth is at least unfortunate and perhaps harmful. Secondly, to the extent I've reflected on the ethical claims of Stoicism, I'm pretty sure they're wrong. In ancient terms, I suppose I'd count as close to a Peripatetic (ie Aristotelian) with a consequent emphasis on the need for reforming the political space, a focus on good upbringing, the cultivation of appropriate emotions (including anger)  and contemplation of 'divine things' as the perfect life. Whether I'm right in that judgment isn't terribly important: what is important is that many of the specific claims of Stoicism are by no means clearly correct and if the techniques recommended actually do have an effect, they may well be producing vice rather than virtue.

I suppose at the end I'm left with wondering what would be lost or gained if we didn't have conferences like STOIKON or events like Stoic Week, and instead had VIRTUEETHICSCON or Eudaimonia week. What would be lost, I think, is the coherence of a brand: here is something with a fairly coherent message and with immediate, relatively easy instructions for getting involved at once. You don't have to think much: you just have to be attracted and act. And that's not necessarily a bad thing: we all have to start somewhere and most of us have stumbled onto the deeper things that inform our lives by some sort of combination of luck and immediate (erotic) attraction. I'm not sure that any other school of ancient philosophy can do that quite as easily as Stoicism (although Mark Anderson has a damn good go for Platonism) even if I'm pushed to be absolutely clear as to why that's the case. (Another suggestion that crosses my mind is that it is to do with the occasional, conversational style of Roman Stoicism (esp) Seneca, quite apart from the issue of content. Much more engaging than (say) the 'contents of an academic's wastebin' style of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. But anyway...) But I think it would be terribly sad if you stopped there and didn't explore ancient ethics further and, in particular, when examining Stoic claims, ask: Is this true? Is this truly virtuous?

Why does any of this matter, except to those (undoubtedly a minority) who have an existing interest in ancient philosophy? There are a number of possible answers to this, many centring on the general role of classical studies in modern education. But let me give a more narrowly philosophical answer. There is a view (one I largely share), developing from Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre that there is something radically amiss with modern moral philosophy. (Anscombe's paper of that name is the locus classicus for this analysis.) In essence, both advise a return to eudaimonistic ethics, an ethics based on human flourishing and the virtues. If anything along those lines is right, then adopting the correct view of eudaimonia and its attainment is of central importance not only to each individual's life, but also to our wider society. Stoicism may well be an excellent introduction to that ressourcement and the general pattern of eudaimonistic ethcs, but it is one that we Aristotelian-Thomists at least would like to see subject to philosophical challenge and ultimate abandonment.

What are our duties to refugees?

Encountering a moral dilemma should make us reflect on our character. What aspects of the dilemma appear salient to us? What do others notice that we fail to notice? What actions would we take and what would we feel about it? How does all this compare to the standard of the practically wise person, the phronimos?

One aspect that ought to occur to such a deliberator is the luxury of thought: while I ponder, others die. On the other hand (and is that hesitancy itself vicious?) if we do not plan, we go blundering in and make matters (and often different matters) worse...

The efficacy of a photograph is that it can cut through to our natural response: to see a dead child is to be instantly reminded of that natural response to protect the weak. But to see a dying child and to be prompted to try to save it now is one thing. To see a photograph of a dead child and to vow to save others in the future is quite different. That latter involves planning and calculation.

Perhaps the one philosophical paper which has troubled me most over the years (as a person, not academically) is Peter Singer's 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality' (here). In it (and elsewhere) Singer argues we are morally bound in the West radically to alter our lives to save those of others facing (eg) starvation. Essentially, Singer bases his argument on the commonsense principle that a small good should be sacrificed to avoid a great harm. If, by (slightly) constricting our luxurious Western lifestyles, we can save lives, we should do so. (We should probably do more than that. But we should at least do that.)

And it is this that has sat in the back of my mind since a conversation at a post-graduate conference some twenty years ago where both I and an interlocutor admitted we were convinced but... I remember the principle. I remember the conversation. And yet.

So when I see the photo of a dead child, I put on my ice cold utilitarian hat, and I see just one more, very concrete example of a problem that very few seem to worry about: that while I sit here with my extraordinarily materially comfortable lifestyle, all round the world, others live in desperate circumstances. I don't know whether letting in 1000 refugees to Scotland is a good thing or not. (Who are they? What are the alternatives? Are there better alternatives? Isn't the constant desire to rescue people from their own countries and bring them to the only place where life really exists properly (the West) itself deeply suspicious?) But I do know that whatever happens to the thousands who might enter Europe, the millions left struggling in the Middle East and elsewhere won't disappear, except from our jaded awareness.

All this reflection leaves me nauseated by myself and frankly nauseated by a lot of the virtue signalling or callousness of the public debate. As something of a valetudinarian, I'm not even going to pretend that I would invite another family to share my home on a long term basis. I've given more to charities, but it's almost nothing. As I've said, even to stop and think about the issue seems an unpardonable luxury.

While living with this uneasy conscience, two things. First, Aquinas. Singer as a utilitarian neglects a proper view of human flourishing. The strong utilitarian case (according to Singer -and I think he is right here for a consistent utilitarian) ought to be that we reduce our wealth to the point that marginal utility is equalised:

The strong version, which required us to prevent bad things from happening unless in doing so we would be sacrificing something of comparable moral significance, does seem to require reducing ourselves to the level of marginal utility. I should also say that the strong version seems to me to be the correct one.

But we are not and should not be utilitarians. So the deeper, correct view is going to take into account other considerations such as those sketched by Aquinas (STh IIaIIae q.117, a.1) here:

Reply to Objection 1: According to Ambrose (Serm. lxiv de Temp.) and Basil (Hom. in Luc. xii, 18) excess of riches is granted by God to some, in order that they may obtain the merit of a good stewardship. But it suffices for one man to have few things. Wherefore the liberal man commendably spends more on others than on himself. Nevertheless we are bound to be more provident for ourselves in spiritual goods, in which each one is able to look after himself in the first place. And yet it does not belong to the liberal man even in temporal things to attend so much to others as to lose sight of himself and those belonging to him. Wherefore Ambrose says (De Offic. i): "It is a commendable liberality not to neglect your relatives if you know them to be in want."

 Reply to Objection 2: It does not belong to a liberal man so to give away his riches that nothing is left for his own support, nor the wherewithal to perform those acts of virtue whereby happiness is acquired. Hence the Philosopher says (Ethic. iv, 1) that "the liberal man does not neglect his own, wishing thus to be of help to certain people"; and Ambrose says (De Offic. i) that "Our Lord does not wish a man to pour out his riches all at once, but to dispense them: unless he do as Eliseus did, who slew his oxen and fed the poor, that he might not be bound by any household cares." For this belongs to the state of perfection, of which we shall speak farther on (Question [184], Question [186], Article [3]).

In essence, we are not required always to adopt Singer's utilitarian principle of sacrificing lesser goods to greater ones if we have a particular relationship to those benefited by those lesser goods (eg ourselves or our families).

Secondly, and apparently (but I think not really) in tension with that, there has to be a change of heart. Father Zossima's injunction in the Brothers Karamazov that we see ourselves as responsible for everything and everyone is not an algorithm: it could be applied to motivate the sort of neo-con interventionism that has probably done much to bring us to where we are now, But equally, unless we cultivate on a regular basis the understanding that all humanity is in this together whether or not we have recently seen a photo of some disaster or not, any chance of a genuine long term improvement in others' lives is minimal:

There is only one means of salvation, then take yourself and make yourself responsible for all men's sins, that is the truth, you know, friends, for as soon as you sincerely make yourself responsible for everything and for all men, you will see at once that it is really so, and that you are to blame for everyone and for all things. But throwing your own indolence and impotence on others you will end by sharing the pride of Satan and murmuring against God. [Here.]

Donations to the SCIAF Syrian appeal can be made here.

Muslims are rapists

                                   Lazarus' favoured panel of sociological expertise

                                   
One of the great things about being conservative is that you're allowed to be stupid: indeed, it's positively a vocation. One resists grand narratives of decline and fall and the cheap theories of bearded Germans, and one sticks to more local verities. In particular, one assumes that evil and criminality are abiding features of the world, and primarily one doesn't worry too much about that except to arrest criminals when you find them and lock them up.

Of course, being a highly complicated and interesting chap myself, I don't mind slumming it with a little Hegel or even Marx now and then. But it's strictly a hobby, you understand. Mostly, I just want the criminal justice system to get on with protecting the virtuous and harmless against the vicious and harmful, and not worry too much about the grand sociology that underlies it all. (To put a Catholic spin on all that, we should be suspicious of theories that attempt to pin down the mystery of evil and explain it away as a factor of society or culture: evil is fundamentally a matter of intelligent agency and traditional Western law recognized that.)

So when one comes to the Rotherham rape gangs, I see it primarily as a police and criminal law issue. Bad men did bad things and got away with it for far too long: there seems little merit in worrying about deeper theoretical issues such as the putative link between patriarchy in Islam and child abuse. Most of the things that went wrong seem to be fairly straightforward failures in policing or control of children (particularly by the council operating in loco parentis) (all para references to the report here):

One parent, who agreed to her child being placed in a residential unit in order to protect her, wrote to children’s social care expressing her fears for her daughter’s safety. She described her despair that instead of being protected, her child was being exposed to even worse abuse than when she was at home:
“My child (age 13) may appear to be a mature child, yet some of her actions and the risks to which she constantly puts herself are those of a very immature and naïve person. She constantly stays out all night getting drunk, mixing with older mature adults, and refuses to be bound by any rules.” (5.11)

Or the case of criminal gangs being allowed to intimidate without police response:

Within just a few months, Child B and her family were living in fear of their lives. The windows in their house were put in. She and her family received threats that she would be forced into prostitution. (5.22)

most of the men in South Yorkshire who were involved in the sexual exploitation of young people for the purposes of prostitution were also believed to be involved in drug dealing. They might also be involved in rape, violence, gun crime, robbery and other serious criminal offences; (10.22 (a))

If one looks more widely than the Rotherham problem, we see here recurrent social issues: the difficulty in exercising adult control over teenage behaviour; the difficult of the police in exercising effective responses to criminal gangs.

It is clear that one area that police action failed miserably was in the control of taxi drivers:

One of the common threads running through child sexual exploitation across England has been the prominent role of taxi drivers in being directly linked to children who were abused. This was the case in Rotherham from a very early stage, when residential care home heads met in the nineties to share intelligence about taxis and other cars which picked up girls from outside their units. In the early 2000s some secondary school heads were reporting girls being picked up at lunchtime at the school gates and being taken away to provide oral sex to men in the lunch break. (8.16)

The paragraphs following this makes absolutely clear that, whether as a result of poor regulations or poor application of those regulations, taxi drivers became a key way in which girls were brought into abuse or kept in it. I've no doubt that most drivers are probably Pakistani (as has been widely claimed in the press): it's also completely clear that effective action in this area is not dependent on identifying ethnicity or religion.


Against the narrative of brutal Paki males abusing second class women, the report continually emphasises the unfinished business of the investigation of homosexual abuse:

Generally, there has been relatively low reporting of sexual exploitation of young males, with the exception of the police operation and a criminal conviction in 2007 of an offender who abused over 80 boys and young men. Over the years, this was identified at inter-agency meetings and in CSE plans as an issue that required attention in Rotherham. That continues to be the case today. (4.16)

Or the (continued) underassessment of abuse of Pakistani women:

The Deputy Children's Commissioner’s report reached a similar conclusion to the Muslim Women's Network research, stating 'one of these myths was that only white girls are victims of sexual exploitation by Asian or Muslim males, as if these men only abuse outside of their own community, driven by hatred and contempt for white females. This belief flies in the face of evidence that shows that those who violate children are most likely to target those who are closest to them and most easily accessible.' The Home Affairs Select Committee quoted witnesses saying that cases of Asian men grooming Asian girls did not come to light because victims 'are often alienated and ostracised by their own families and by the whole community, if they go public with allegations of abuse.' (11.16)

What to make of all this? First, that race isn't the most immediate issue here. (And, by covering up abuse of Muslim/Asian girls and boys rather than girls, the narrative of Muslim patriarchal violence against women is likely to be positively harmful.) Far more important are (eg) issues such as listening to women (and boys), following up evidence. These are pretty clear lessons that have come out again and again in the various permutations of the child abuse scandals that have come up over the years, and some are merely straightforward issues of traditional good police practice. Secondly, it's not surprising that child sexual abuse is so difficult to deal with. Here, you are dealing with rape (never easy to prosecute), child witnesses (again, not easy to deal with in adversarial criminal system), and often issues of mental health and drug use (leading to obvious difficulties in credibility). That's not a complete excuse for failure, but it is an explanation of how failure took this particular shape (and why it's likely to be resistant to solution).

The overwhelming impression in reading the report is less one of a cover up of Muslim/Asian complicity, and just of the sheer hell that awaits those who fall out of protective social structures: basically, you'll be written off as vermin by those of us who are all right, and left to the mercies of the more violent among your fellow Lumpenproletariat. If race is an issue at all, it's because it made some officials tread carefully (hardly surprising if regrettable) and because it just seems to be a fact that the vast majority of abusers in this particular episode were Muslims of Pakistani origin. I'm not sure why this matters so much. Criminality often has some sort of cultural dimension. (Why was America dominated by Italian gangsters such as the Mafia?) Doubtless, there's some interesting sociology to be done here. But in the meantime, such speculations seem entirely irrelevant to struggling with identifying and successfully prosecuting crime.

So I disagree profoundly with (eg) Melanie McDonagh:

But, as the report on abuse in Rotherham makes embarrassingly clear, the ethnic character of the predation was the reason why the initial police report was simply stuffed under the sofa (and in passing, this oversight shouldn’t be investigated by the same force that perpetrated it).

I've read the report a few times now and -allowing for having missed something in its 159 pages- I don't see anything of the sort made 'embarrassingly clear'. (If someone wants to point out the relevant paragraphs, I'd be grateful.) Certainly, the ethnic character of the predation was played down (and should it have been played up? difficult to get the balance right) but the real problems seem to be elsewhere. She goes on:


When the issue was abuse in the Catholic Church, the church underwent prolonged soul searching about the background of individuals accepted for the priesthood and about the requirement for priestly celibacy (though the issue was power, not celibacy). In England, the church commissioned the Nolan report on child protection, which was a model of its kind.

When it came to the abuse of minors by celebs like Jimmy Savile, we examined our collective conscience about the cult of celebrity and the immunity it seemed to convey to those in that bubble; we’re still agonising about it.

I'm not convinced by either of these. To take celebrity culture, how's that 'agonising' going? (Have the Kardashians disappeared? Have pop musicians disappeared into the anonymity of mediaeval craftsmen?) On the Catholic Church, the main advance has not been so much a conclusive analysis of the causes of the abuse (what would that look like? Instead you have the sort of 'combox punditry' convinced that it's all the fault of celibacy, analogous to that attributing all fault to macho Islam) so much as the systems needed to prevent it: the sort of dumb, conservative 'how to catch them and lock them up' sort of response I'd suggest.

Enoch was right and doing something about Islam

I'm surprised no one (or at least no one I've come across) has yet said it, but let me be the first: Enoch was right.

Having said it, let me add that I don't mean it: I actually think he was profoundly wrong. But it's probably worth saying it out loud, because large numbers of commentators are muttering things about Islam that are very hard to understand in any way other than words disguising the thought too terrible to utter explicitly: that Enoch Powell was right in warning about the dangers of immigration, particularly Muslim, and we must now do something to prevent the rivers of blood he predicted -if indeed there is still time. And now that line of argument has been brought into the air, let's dispose of it.

There's an argument to be had about immigration whether past or future. But let's put that aside. Even if you closed the gates tomorrow, there are going to be many people within this country of the Muslim religion (2.7 millions) most of whom will be British citizens born and raised here. (And if any one is wondering why I'm focusing exclusively on Islam just now -please don't be silly.)

Now, these are people with human and legal rights and, just more generally, a right to respect as persons. (This really ought to be bread and butter stuff for Catholics. Anyone else can just accept it as a statement of my starting point.) So there can be no question of 'sending them back where they came from' or making them disappear in some unexplained way, and that means there are going to be large numbers of Muslims in the UK for ever. So whatever doing something about Islam might mean, it can't mean getting rid of Muslims. (I think we ought to be profoundly shocked by the very idea, but there is wild talk out there.)

So presumably it means changing them in some way. Multi-culturalism is its loony sixties best was founded on the thought that, deep down, we all agree, and that having different religions is merely a matter of exchanging samosas for Scotch pies: cultures were all beautiful and all mutually fertilizing. Any 'odd' traditional practices like sexism would disappear under the benign influence of the Western sun, and we'd just be left with all the nice, entertaining colourful differences. As such, multic-culturalism was really a variety of the secularisation thesis: that modernity would lead inevitably to a reduction in religion. Either way, any unfortunate aspects of other cultures or religions would be smoothed away over the generations in the West.

Well, no. And because that doesn't seem to have happened naturally, we now need (so the story goes) to do something about it, by, for example, getting them to adopt wiser, British values. The problem with this is twofold. First, there is the question of practicality. If we have abandoned the secularization thesis that modernity will do its work without any help, there are very few plausible mechanisms for enforcing religious change. If we knew how to mould people religiously, believe me, the Vatican would be far more successful in retaining Catholic children in the Church. To take a specific example which I have spent a great deal of time blogging on, the attempt to clamp down on the influence of parents in the 'Trojan Horse' schools a) cannot have any relevance to current radicalized adults since the supposed Islamicization of the schools has only taken place in the last few years; and b) is just as likely in my view to promote further radicalization by alienating (conservative but peaceful) Muslims from the education system and the state. Secondly, there is the question of what values we mean them to adopt. Do they have to be sexually licentious for example? Must they drink? Are they allowed to accept traditional understandings of Islamic punishments, or do they have to adopt some sort of liberal Protestant figurative interpretations? (And if the later, by what mechanism do we get current Muslim authorities to teach these revisions?)

Again, much muttering and very few explicit statements in this area, but there does seem to be widespread view that Islam as an intellectual/cultural system is inevitably prone to producing offshoots such as ISIS: in Gove's words, we need to 'drain the swamp'. But people are not mud: what is a mechanical action in drainage, becomes that chimerical goal of a sure way to change people's minds: we cannot (should not) stop people from being Muslims and we cannot (should not) stop the values of that religion from challenging certain 'British' values. Moreover, we cannot control the shape of Islam: it has its own history, its own depths which go beyond the control of governments or schools.

But we must do something. Surely? Well, it's worth considering the possibility that we should do absolutely nothing or at least very little. Part of the problem here are emotional associations between different problems. There is undoubtedly a geo-political/foreign policy problem with ISIS. There is undoubtedly a moral problem with regard to the fates of Christians and other minorities in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. There is undoubtedly a problem in Gaza and Israel. (And so on.) Some of these can be helped. Some possibly cannot. But I put those foreign aspects aside. There is no direct link between these and the 'problem' of Islam at home.

So what is the 'problem' of Islam at home? That a few hundred youths have gone off to fight? Not new and, whilst regrettable, of no real effect on the Middle East. (By all means use military force and the criminal law to punish the guilty and preserve the innocent -but here, either we are in the area of the marginal (how to treat a few criminals) or the area of foreign policy again.) That the fighters may come home as terrorists? A real issue, but one that can only be dealt with by police measures or personal engagement with the returners. (And even if, per impossibile, we could ensure that no British youths fought for ISIS, this wouldn't remove the threat of Middle Eastern terrorism hitting our shores.) I think these are genuine problems but are of the sort that can only be dealt with as part of an ongoing security awareness in a dangerous world: the main driver for a terrorist threat against the UK is the unstable state of the Middle East, and the solutions there are extremely unclear. There is a general historical lesson here that each generation needs to remember: most people don't think like you and some will try to kill you.

Back to 'draining the swamp'. Part of the inchoate, vague sense of 'something must be done' is that Islam represents a threat to 'British' values, not so much through violence, as through its very presence. I think the main response to this is agreement: of course it does. That's what democracy means. If large numbers of people think a current aspect of British life is wrong, it is, ceteris paribus, liable to be changed in a democracy. There is absolutely no guarantee that, in one hundred years, our country will be dominated by the same values it has now. If you think that, despite the comparative smallness of the Muslim vote and cultural weight, it might in future be able to exert more influence, then, unless you are willing to do something about Muslims, you are going to have to accept that possibility.

To dig down into the range of issues a little more here, if British values are just the preservation of a snap shot of British culture now, then they are clearly not going to be preserved: the snapshot will change. If it means preserving a subset of 'key' values, then much depends on what those key values are. Roughly, we might distinguish between the political liberal values (say, representative democracy, an independent judiciary and the rule of law, freedom of speech etc etc); and the ethical, substantive values of attitudes to sex, family, religion, art etc etc. I don't see any particular reason why the first class couldn't be preserved simply on the grounds of effectiveness: almost any society works better with such structures. But there is certainly no way that a society with a greater traditional Islamic influence upon it would have the same attitude to the ethical issues I've mentioned. And of course it's precisely those issues that many moderns are obsessed about: if you are a feminist, for example, the structure and ethos of the family is not so much just one more item up for negotiation over the years as the very heart of political life. And it's precisely these 'non-negotiable' issues that are most likely to be negotiated in a society with a lively Islamic contribution.

As a Catholic, I have no doubt that society would be better run with a Catholic view on those ethical, substantive issues. But equally, I accept that I can only do my best to persuade others and utilize my rights to preserve what I can of the best life within my own private sphere: I cannot (indeed have not been able to) stop others, unpersuaded of my views, making use of the political values to support their (wrong, I believe) view of the ethical values. Equally, in the future, there is nothing that I (or they) can do to guarantee that Muslims will not influence ethical values in ways that the currently victorious progressives will dislike. If they (and I) want to do anything about preserving what the correct ethical, substantive values are, then we need to fight the culture wars (or, more pacifically, defend our view of the correct nature of human flourishing and seek to persuade (not compel) others). The outcome of that dialogue is indeed not certain.

Back to Enoch. He was right, I suppose, to see a threat to British values from immigrant communities: to substantive ethical British values rather than political ones (to use that rough and ready distinction). Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is almost irrelevant: it is simply a fact that is not going to change. (I can't resist pointing out, however, that the major change in (destruction of) ethical British values from those (say) of the fifties to those of 2014 has been nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with Powell's cronies in the existing educational, political and artistic (native) elites.) I see every reason to be optimistic that the political values can survive over the future. Or, to be more precise, I see rather less threat from Islam in this direction than I do from progressives who wish to impose their views of human flourishing on everyone at the expense of freedoms of speech and family life.

To finish, let me put all this from a more positive direction. I think a Britain (or Scotland etc) with a politically active Islamic population challenging the ethics and aesthetics of our current society within the peaceful political values I've sketched above would be a better place than it is now or was with Enoch. Not only would Muslim youths find themselves with a better struggle in which to channel their young energy, but the critical edge provided by such a critique would mean that Britain might arrest some of the cultural decline that was presided over by a predominantly  white, male and aboriginal elite.