“Right becomes wrong and left become right”

I am still immensely enjoying Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia, as I blogged about last week. As I continue to read, however, I am struck by a recurring theme regarding the makers of Western culture about whom James writes.

Many of them have been victims of one, or sometimes even both, of the two secular ideologies which dominated so much of the last century — to the right, Nazism, and to the left, Marxism. Almost inevitably, these individuals come across as tragic, and indeed are often heroic.

Yet at the same time there are others, for the most part no less talented or dedicated to their particular field, who have actually lent their support precisely to these ideologies. And this surely raises some interesting questions about the whole ‘cultural’ enterprise.

Here we have people who can rightly be regarded as cultured intellectuals. Indeed, they are themselves culturally creative. Yet sometimes they are entirely blind to movements and forces inimical to human, and therefore cultural, flourishing.

It has to be said, moreover, that this is particularly noticeable regarding attitudes on the ‘left’. Here, it seems, people of considerable intellect have, nevertheless, been constantly willing to justify self-evident wrongs and to deny every allegation of moral deviance, in a manner that seems entirely at variance with their own evident capacity for understanding and analysis in other respects.

Thus people who really should have known better have supported, at various times, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and even Pol Pot.

To go beyond James’s own examples, many of us remember Jane Fonda’s visit to, and endorsement of, North Vietnam in the 1960s. And what of the World Council of Churches’ support for violent ‘liberation’ movements in the Third World?

Part of the picture is, of course, that the political left tends to align itself with causes that appeal to the best of human instincts — the desire to help the physically poor and the socially oppressed.

The problem is that organizations and individuals who have been able to talk the right talk in this regard have often walked a very different walk. There may even, as seems to be the case with Mao Zedong, be a transition from a good start to a truly disastrous finish.

Nevertheless, it is a lesson of history that intellectual and cultural brilliance is by no means a guarantee that the individual will possess an accurate moral compass, or pay any attention to it even if they do.

It should also, however, be an encouragement to the rest of us, who do not possess such brilliance, not to be intimidated into silence. Sometimes it is possible to wonder whether, given the mental abilities of those who lend their support to one dubious-looking cause or another, the Emperor for whom they are cheering really is wearing the fantastic outfit they describe, rather than being as stark-naked as the objective evidence suggests.

Reading through the ‘broadsheet’ media today, the Western intellectual opponents of the West, for example, seem to be overwhelming both in their numbers and in their evident learning. “Surely,” we find ourselves thinking, “they must be onto something.” And so we go on listening to the argument that the real threat to human flourishing today comes not from the radicalization of Muslims or the growing brute economic power of China, but from America, or from our own history.

It is said by clever people, and it is said well — so who are you, or who am I, to contradict it?

At times like this it is good to remember that clever, erudite people have been notoriously wrong about such things in the past. They really have done the same for mass murderers and political sociopaths. And sometimes what we need is common sense, not intellectual brilliance.

The title for this post comes from the Dire Straits song, Ride Across the River. There is another Dire Straits line I am fond of quoting as an antidote to the modern mindset, which comes from Industrial Disease: “Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong.”

Of course, it is possible that they are both wrong, but certainly during the 1990s it became possible to scandalize quite intelligent people with the first suggestion: “Who are we to say who is wrong?” became the typical response, even when it was self-evidently true that someone was.

But it is this same moral certainty about the uncertainty of our moral judgement that allows perfectly sane commentators and journalists to condemn ‘Islamophobia’, for example, without ever coming down hard against Islam, or to judge the West by ‘Western’ standards whilst excusing the otherwise unpardonable when it is part of a non-Western ‘culture’.

There is, however, a third Dire Straits line, again from Industrial Disease, that comes to mind at this point: “Philosophy is useless, theology is worse.” When the intellect fails us practically, then only the truly practical person can help us. The wise person in such circumstances may well not be the clever one. They will just be the one who can accurately see and declare what is going on.

John Richardson

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Wikileaks: What is the real motivation?

As I understand it, the ostensible justification of Wikileaks is ‘whistleblowing’ — the revealing of wrongdoing that has been kept secret or covered up.

This is important, because in normal circumstances the breaking of confidences can be considered immoral. Today I received an e-mail (ironically) from the Guardian newspaper group. At the bottom, it contained what is becoming a standard ‘disclaimer’:

This e-mail and all attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the named recipient, please notify the sender and delete the e-mail and all attachments immediately. Do not disclose the contents to another person. You may not use the information for any purpose, or store, or copy, it in any way.

Given the actual content of the e-mail, this does seem slightly over the top. Moreover, I generally find myself wondering whether someone I’ve never met who sends me an e-mail I have not requested can place me under such a moral obligation — particularly if they’ve sent it to me by accident.

Nevertheless, I take the attitude that I can interpret the rider as, in effect, a personal request, as if the person at the other end were saying to me, “Look, if we’ve messed this up, please don’t go blabbing it everywhere, and if this is meant for you, please treat this communication as being between the two of us.”

The decision to reveal the contents of the e-mail would therefore be a decision to decline such a request, which puts it, in the end, at the level of other, inter-personal, moral decisions.

However, there are indeed occasions where information one receives ought to be made known to others, even against the wishes of those to who originally divulged it. Sometimes this will be to ‘proper authorities’, but certainly in some circumstances the only obvious route is a general divulgence of this information to the general public. Suitable scenarios are relatively easy to construct.

In the case of what Wikileaks itself is calling ‘Cablegate’, not only the operators of the site, but sections of the Western media have clearly felt that something about the behaviour of the US government has justified just such a general release of information.

And this confidence clearly rests on a presumption of moral fault in what the e-mails reveal. Julian Assange himself is reported as saying that if what some of the e-mails suggest is in fact true, then the newly-elected President of the United States ought to resign — something which would put him in the same category as Richard Nixon, which is scarcely where the world believed him to be just a couple of years ago.

This is why, however, serious questions must be asked following the release of e-mails which detail the nature and location of facilities considered vital to the security of the United States.

In particular, we may ask whether it is a moral fault for a government to compile such a list or to identify such facilities so as to inform its own policies.

If the answer is yes, then of course the release of this information by Wikileaks is just another example of moral ‘whistleblowing’ in an immoral political world.

Yet it is hard to see how the question could be answered in the affirmative. Indeed, it was interesting watching the lawyer for Mr Assange, Mark Stevens, answering questions about this on the ITV lunchtime news. Mr Stevens’s response was that the US government had been given the option to comment on the list and declined to do so, therefore it was appropriate to release the information into the public domain.

His body-language, however, was that of someone who knew he was talking rubbish. As a lawyer, his livelihood depends on being able to spot a non sequitur, and clearly this is one.

If I said to someone, “I have information about how much you get paid, would you like to comment?”, the answer “No,” is not a justification in itself for me telling the world. There may, of course, be other justifications, but these would depend on factors other than simply a refusal to comment.

Up to this point, the ‘Cablegate’ episode, including the involvement of some of the Western media, has relied on the general justification that immoral actions have been concealed and should be brought to universal public attention.

If part of the intention of this is to generate a debate, then it seems fair also to debate whether that is the real motivation, given the nature of what is being revealed.

John Richardson
6 December 2010

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The moral dilemma of Wikileaks

Not infrequently a letter arrives at our house which is intended for a neighbour. What should be one’s first instinct when that happens: to deliver it to the right address, or to open it first to see whether it contains anything of interest?

I would hope that your own answer is the former. I would take it as a sign of ‘good neighbourliness’. Indeed, I would go further, and say it is a necessary quality for a strong social order.

Trustworthiness when we are unobserved is, in short, a virtue. It is not one that we all possess, and certainly not one we all possess all the time. But that is because we are not entirely virtuous, not because trustworthiness is optional.

Imagine, though, that your neighbour is a local councillor. Imagine, furthermore, that the letter is marked ‘Confidential’. Add to that, there have been rumours about irregularities in the recent business of the Council and, furthermore, that these have directly affected you and your welfare.

Now are you so keen to take the letter next door?

Or what if another of your neighbours came to you with the same letter having opened it already, and says, “Here, I don’t understand these things myself, but perhaps you’d like to have a look through this to see if it sheds any light on what the Council’s been up to?”

What will you do now?

Philosophers love to construct such dilemmas, not least to show the fragility of our moral absolutes. What if your neighbour were a known drug dealer? What if you thought they were a spy? — and so on, and so on.

The tendency of such arguments (indeed, often the deliberate intention) is to weaken our reliance on traditional ‘rule based’ systems. And if you are a Christian, there is something to be said for that.

But the fundamental question, familiar to moral philosophers but often overlooked in debate, is not whether we can come up with a workable ‘rule’ (often we can’t), but what is the kind of thing that would be done by the kind of person we ought to be.

In short, what would a virtuous person do in any given circumstance?

This, however, may itself be the subject of some debate, and I am therefore inclined to turn the question round and ask, ‘What would a wicked person do?’ Suddenly (for some strange reason) the answer is generally clear.

If I were a wicked person, for example, I would certainly open any letter that I thought might contain anything to my advantage or offer an opportunity for causing harm to another. The greater my wickedness, the less compunction I would feel in doing so. And if my other neighbour brought me such a letter I would ask whether there were any more from the same source (all the time making sure that as little harm as possible could come to me as a result).

Of course, this still does not translate into a ‘rule’ system. It is not that the wicked person operates by ‘wicked rules’ (though we may be sure such have been devised). Rather, it is that the virtuous person and the wicked person approach a moral dilemma very differently.

Faced with the so-called ‘trolley problem’ — shall I divert a runaway train to a siding where it will kill one unfortunate individual, or leave it on its current track where it will kill five who have been tied to the rails by a mad philosopher — it is easy to know what a wicked person would do. (Indeed, the whole problem is posited on the somewhat-politically-incorrect presumption that madness produces wicked acts, such as setting out to kill people or to tax the morally virtuous with difficult choices!)

But if we may thus be sure that the wicked person would have scant regard for an accidental breach of confidence, we may equally deduce that the virtuous person will, on the contrary, seek to minimize the consequences of such a circumstance.

This still does not push us into the realm of ‘absolute rules’. What if one’s neighbour were indeed a suspected drug dealer? What if the envelope were already open, the letter fell out and one could not help noticing it described plans for an act of terrorism?

The theoretician can always come up with tantalizing situations. The fundamental answers, however, must be couched in terms of what a virtuous person would do, which can itself often be assessed in terms of what would be done by a person lacking in virtue.

Now this brings me to the subject of Wikileaks — its rationale, but also its social impact. What is the significance of such a website becoming part of our cultural ‘fabric’, and of media outlets participating in the process, particularly when they are favoured recipients of the material Wikileaks has obtained?

The reaction of many (including the editors of certain newspapers) is that such a phenomenon is vitally important, exposing, as it does, that governments are corrupt and that they have acted corruptly.

But that leads me to ask, what do we expect of governments? Or do we rather expect that they should be virtuous, and if that is the case, where will we find the men and women of virtue, and by what process will we produce them?

We seem to have forgotten that society can only work with the individuals who actually make up that society. We cannot therefore expect to produce incorruptible police officers, self-sacrificing captains of industry and honest politicians from a population of morally indifferent individuals. Virtue begins in the individual, not in theoretical ‘values’ a society demands, but fails to apply at the personal level.

Let me pose another dilemma. You find the lap-top belonging to an MP. As a virtuous person, is your first duty to open it and see what you can find? Or is it to return the lost lap-top intact to its owner as soon as possible?

What a wicked person would do is surely self-evident.

But why would a person of virtue presume that there might be damaging material on the lap-top. And why would they want to know? Surely the virtuous person would first presume virtue in the other? And the virtuous person would equally regard the keeping of a confidence and the preservation of trust as their first priority.

The problem with the Wikileaks phenomenon is that the values by which it operates either presume a lack of trustworthiness or rely on such untrustworthiness in others. There is something about it of the ‘wiki-sneak’, and a true danger of it undermining our necessary social fabric.

By all means let whistles be blown. But let them never be blown by those who love ‘whistle-blowing’ for its own sake, and let us never become people who long for the next ‘revelation’ of wrongdoing. The difference between the reader of the Guardian and the reader of the News of the World is not as great, in this regard, as the former might like to imagine.

John Richardson
30 November 2010

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Is there a Christian economic ethic?

Apart from its (almost mandatory) snide headline, and a couple of "nudge, nudge" witticisms in the accompanying text, The Independent has published an article on Christianity and ethical investment which could be a useful discussion-starter.

The second paragraph reads,

Cash has always been a thorny subject for the devout. How can one be rich and pious? There can't be too many Christian bankers who are unaware that, according to Christ, camels have a better chance of passing through the eye of a needle than bankers do of getting into heaven. Yet the wealthy may be able to sleep more soundly following the creation this week of Europe's first "Christian equity index". The Stoxx Europe Christian Index is the brainchild of a German investment firm that has spotted a gap in the market to provide a list of companies that the faithful can happily invest in without feeling like they are sinning at the same time.

Of course, Christian interest in ethical economics has been around for a long time. In the 1970s and 80s evangelicals in this country were trying to think through some of the issues involved. Sir Fred Catherwood penned a number of works which I seem to remember were regarded as quite controversial for not saying that Capitalism and wealth-creation were bad (remember, this was in the days when Christians either worried about, or rather approved of, Marxism).

And there have long been Christian groups and companies developing means of 'ethical investment'. The Ecclesiastical Insurance Group, for example, has certain standards it maintains for its 'Amity' funds.

But back in the sixteenth century, Martin Luther and others were writing about what we today would call 'economic justice'.

In the last couple of decades, though, it all seems to have gone rather quiet. One of the few solid works I'm aware of on the subject is Andy Hartropp's What is Economic Justice? Biblical and Secular Perspectives Contrasted. This is a very solid work and deserves to be widely read and known. But the commitment in the 'Five Marks of Mission' to "seek to transform unjust structures of society" and to "strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth" don't seem to be translating into very much except (still!) a vague hostility towards and discomfort about Capitalism, which has meanwhile so richly blessed us in the West.

What the article in The Independent might usefully prompt is a discussion on precisely what is a 'Christian' view of economic life. Regulars on this blog, for example, will know that I have a 'thing' about the biblical mandate against usury in any form. (And, contra an opinion in The Independent, I did not take my cue in this from the Muslims, though I do think they usefully show that an ethical principle can actually have an economic application.)

Most of us are also dimly aware of the examples of past Christian entrepreneurs, especially amongst the Quakers.

I cannot help wondering, though, whether from a Christian point of view what matters is not the great scheme of things but the small - the 'insignificant' - details. It is surely as great a challenge to be personally honest in one's business dealings in the office as it is to come up with some 'macro-economic' theory.

Many years ago, I heard someone who was regarded as something of an evangelical leader advocate that Christians in the workplace should go along with the 'dodgy practices' and 'petty' dishonesties so that, when the time came for them to speak up in the Trade Union meetings, they would not have lost the respect and the hearing of their workmates because of their 'stand-offish' attitude. That has got to be mad, hasn't it?

Personally, I think that telling the truth at work because you are a Christian is just as likely to get you 'crucified' as wearing a cross - and I have to admit to being frankly relieved that my own form of employment lets me off most of these ethical challenges.

John Richardson
28 April 2010


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Golly! The BBC shows its moral fibre

Hearing Jay Hunt on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning defending the BBC’s treatment of Carol Thatcher left me fuming with anger, but also with a nasty feeling that I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of Ms Hunt’s own righteous indignation.

Clearly she felt that the BBC had acted from the highest moral principles in dismissing Carol Thatcher from the One Show because, during the relaxation time after the show, the latter had described a black tennis player as looking like a golliwog.

This is how Ms Hunt justified that response:

What Carol decides to say in the privacy of her own home or in a private conversation with friends is one thing. What she says in a greenroom space, when there are 12 people [there], in her capacity as a roving reporter for the One Show is a rather different thing.

On this occasion, her using this phrase and it being overheard and having caused offence to a number of people was totally inappropriate. It was deemed inappropriate in the circumstances for her to continue to work on a show that prides itself not just on the diversity of its production team but on the range of its coverage across the country. I think everybody will be able to see that that is not an appropriate place for her to work.

Now, as I recall, this is the same BBC — is it not? — that a couple of years ago broadcast Jerry Springer: The Opera. Before the broadcast they were asked not to go ahead, on the grounds that the show would be offensive to a large number of people. After the broadcast, OFCOM received an unprecedented number of complaints. Yet the BBC remained not merely unapologetic, but adamant that it had done the right thing.

This is also the same BBC which allows Jonathan Ross a public forum for a constant stream of innuendo and suggestive comments. Ross is someone with a proven track-record of unpleasantness, but the BBC pays him literally millions to retain his services.

The BBC’s response, of course, is that viewers can always turn off. But then people who overhear a private conversation can always move away.

Clearly it is not the number of people you offend that counts at the BBC, but how you offend them. If the offense is caused by something the BBC management consider offensive, then it is actionable, if the offense is caused by something the management deem inoffensive, then it is acceptable.

The real issue here is not whether it is OK to liken a black man to a golliwog, or to broadcast a song which says that the Virgin Mary was raped by an angel, but how the guardians of morality at the BBC perceive themselves.

And a clue to that can be seen in Ms Hunt’s use of the word ‘diversity’. This is, of course, code for the social application of a particular view of morality — a view which is, if necessary, to be inculcated by force and by social re-education, as in the case of Christian nurse Caroline Petrie who, because she had shown insensitivity to her patients was recommended to attend an ‘equality and diversity’ course.

In the old days of the Maoist Cultural Revolution, the same approach was used with the bourgeoisie, who needed not only to be made aware of their crimes, but made to accuse themselves of being criminals in the first place. Though this was deliberately punitive, it was similarly designed to achieve moral reform according the lights of its administrators.

Meanwhile, from the tone in Ms Hunt’s voice she clearly views herself in the role of one striking down “with great vengeance and furious anger” on the unrighteous. But it is the narrowness of her moral viewpoint, not the vehemence of her desire to purify the BBC, which is most the serious cause for concern — that, and the blindness to the fault. Mote and beam surely springs to mind.

Revd John Richardson
5 February 2009

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