Order without liberty may be possible but what about liberty without order?
Authoritarian attempts to restore order to the streets of modern Britain – CCTV, DNA swabs, house arrest, stop-and-search, arbitrary detention – might be having some success. Crime figures, at long last, seem to have ceased their dramatic upward climb which began in the late 1960s. What is obvious is that voters crave order more than they crave liberty. Since this is the case, our elected representatives must exercise some caution with the latter in order to protect it, whilst maintaining the former to please the electorate. Since they failed, through successive enlightened policies, to retain order in their campaign of social transformation, they began, at some pace, to extirpate liberty as a means of restoring order. The effect has been chilling.
A sensible and free country wants its most wicked inhabitants to fear the consequences of their desires. A totalitarian country, on the other hand, wants all of its inhabitants to live in constant fear – no-one should violate the loose codes of behaviour that exist in the country and transgressors will be summarily dealt with. The first settlement was the one that existed before and the present situation is much closer to the latter. What authority does the state have to supervise our behaviour for hours a day? What right do its agents have to swab and fingerprint innocent men who have been discharged after an arrest? This idea is based upon the belief that we as citizens are the property of the state. The introduction of identity cards, enthusiastically supported by Labour – and the Conservatives until David Davis managed to talk some sense into them – would have been the most obvious manifestation of this attitude yet. Still, vast databases of personal information exist and, with civil service incompetence such as it is, could at any moment fall into the hands of someone with very nefarious intentions indeed.
What change in attitude caused this to happen? Britain’s prisons were once grave and austere places. Its courts were once grand public theatres of justice. Even its hanging cell was remarkable – a stark, bleak chamber with an ominous noose suspended from the ceiling and certain death lurking beneath the trapdoor. These serious institutions were not just utilitarian function rooms to shore up positive results in the latest batch of statistics: they spoke of a country which is no more. The country that is no more is the country of an iron absolute morality informed by a belief in individual responsibility and retribution as the guiding principle of civilized justice. People did not just accept the death penalty merely because it worked, they did so because they believed it to be a fair moral response to wilful acts of the most heinous nature. Similarly, prisoners were seen as free agents who had forfeited their liberties and would therefore be subject to discomfort and hard work at Her Majesty’s pleasure for as long as was deemed necessary to redeem themselves.
That society is now gone. In its place is a culture of infinitely regressive blame: a young man cannot be punished for his actions because he would not have grown up to be so bad had his parents raised him better. His mother is not to blame because his father walked out on the family, causing her to have to work all hours of the day to support him, and thus, neglecting his pastoral development. Her husband is not to blame because he had a stressful job and couldn’t cope. His employer isn’t to blame because… you get the idea. This formulation is just one of millions and in a society where nobody is to blame for anything they do, the state can’t really be said to have a moral right to punish them. People who would previously be regarded as criminals, given to selfishness and false entitlement, are now officially regarded as ‘victims’ in need of ‘help’. It is no wonder, then, that the state can be so casual in its assault on freedom: we are none of us free anyway, so the state must regard us as its wayward children.
The transformation of our country from a free one to an unfree one, in less than half a century, is a heartbreaking tale of loss. The worst thing about the story is, however, that those responsible had the best of intentions. Many of those men and women are dying or dead, and have long since been replaced by a political class of enthusiastic authoritarians bent on destroying our last vestiges of liberty in order, perversely, to ‘liberate’ us further. The things which kept us free looked harsh because they were harsh and necessarily so. But only the wrongdoer needed to fear them. Now, we must all, good and bad, fear the increasingly wide purview of the emerging strong state.
Sex-selective abortion article
Bristol Students for Life have published my article ‘Sex-selective abortion no surprise in a culture of contempt for life’ which you can find here.
‘Happy Easter’ rings hollow in secular Britain
I took some time this weekend to do what most, in our enlightened age, think themselves too clever to do: I read about the Passion, as recorded in the Gospels. It is a long time since I had done this and the knowledge and experience I have acquired since then have given me renewed perspective on the narrative.
What I had done, in years past, is focus on the Resurrection. Now, this is an important part of the story, but since I am sceptical about the supernatural, I dismissed it as absurd and with it, neglected the preceding passages, from which I think we may learn a lot.
The phrase ‘Happy Easter’, so jubilantly and liberally used around this time nowadays, betrays with it a lack of understanding about the nature of the events which lead to the eventual resurrection, celebrated on Easter Sunday. The tale is more complex than that – and this bland phrase does not capture the gravity of the event upon which we are supposed to be reflecting.
Secular culture seems not to allow for such subtleties. The emotions and situations dealt with are all real and happen as often as one can imagine, but not only does ‘Happy Easter’ leave them out, it exists as part of a culture which strives to replace nuanced codes of morality with a code which sees hedonism and self-gratification as the ultimate goals. Even the word ‘happy’ is co-opted by this new order.
I quote here, since I have it to hand, from the Gospel According to St Matthew, as it appears in the beautiful Authorized Version of the Bible.
The tale encompasses betrayal:
Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests, And said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver. And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him. (Matthew 26:14-16)
Abandonment, and human weakness:
…all the disciples forsook him, and fled. (Matthew 26:56)
Injustice, by way of a show trial:
Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy. What think ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of death. (Matthew 26:55-56)
Regret and repentance:
Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that. And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself. (Matthew 27:3-5)
The mentality of the mob:
Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified. And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified. (Matthew 27:22-23)
Mockery and humiliation:
And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe. And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews! And they spit upon him, and took the reed, and smote him on the head. (Matthew 27:28-30)
And the feeling that one is all alone in the moments before one’s death:
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46)
In a fairly small number of passages, and in the most stark and direct language, some of the most deep and powerful human emotions are crystallized almost perfectly. The reason this tale retains its potency two thousand years on is precisely because all of these things are, or will be, familiar to us. They reflect upon us and make us reflect upon ourselves – how often have we been the victims of these things? How often the perpetrators? How much of this happens every day, all around the world? What are we doing about it? What should we do? What can we do?
Feelings like these are often laid aside, because it is much easier to consume, or to dull the mind with supermarket shopping or the latest trash polluting the airwaves on ITV. I have some advice for those who do not celebrate the Resurrection: Since tomorrow is Easter Sunday, now the only quiet Sunday in the British calendar, take some time amidst the peace to reflect. You will feel much better for it.
In defence of the Roman Catholic Church
In response to Michael Paynter, I find myself, as a non-believer, perhaps an unlikely defender of the Roman Catholic Church.
It is quite the fashion on the left to attack the Roman Catholic Church. It apparently bears the blame for many of the world’s ills, not least the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, but it is also scorned for its traditional social attitudes, seen as an oppressive, moralistic straitjacket by cultural radicals who prefer to live without such restrictions. This article is inspired by blogger Michael Paynter’s recent piece, ‘Religion Is Constitutional Yakult: Why secular nations are not doomed to totalitarianism’. Herein, I will attempt to provide a critical analysis of Mr Paynter’s statements about the Church of Rome.
Though I commend Mr Paynter for attempting to tackle what I considered to be one of my stronger arguments – that Christianity can check the power of the state – he seems to proceed on a set of assumptions completely foreign to me, and ultimately fails to fulfil his promise of delivering a coherent counter-argument against my position. Though I urge readers to check his blog, be wary of his rather flawed analogy comparing the moral power of religion to the placebo effects provided by so-called ‘pro-biotic drinks’. This is not an analogy I will indulge. Instead, I would like to challenge Mr Paynter on his stance with respect to the Roman Catholic Church:
Perhaps the most damaging effects of religious lobbying can be seen in the HIV/AIDS disaster unfolding in Africa. The Catholic Church’s opposition to condoms has certainly contributed to the spread of the disease and the an [sic] abstinence-only message isn’t working …
… In the UK religious organisations, especially the Catholic Church, are failing to adapt to improved scientific evidence and changing public attitudes, with the gap growing ever wider in a number of important areas, most importantly abortion and homosexuality.
Mr Paynter’s first point, that the Roman Catholic Church is somehow responsible for the AIDS epidemic which has gripped much of Africa, is utterly spurious. Mr Paynter tries to have it both ways: that people in Africa listen to their religious leaders when they are told not to use condoms but at the same time they ignore them when they are told not to engage in promiscuous sexual activity. Mr Paynter is guilty of a classic sleight-of-hand trick here, where blame is shifted from those who are in truth at fault onto an organization which Mr Paynter wishes to vilify and marginalize.
Those responsible for the spread of HIV are human beings, capable of freedom of thought and freedom of action. It is precisely because they choose not to listen to the Bishop of Rome’s teachings that it has become an epidemic. The messages of the Roman Catholic Church are those of self-restraint and of prudence, which directly contravene what has plainly happened. If Mr Paynter wishes to blame anything, he ought to blame the flawed nature of man, a being often ruled by his most base instincts. He should not blame those who try, but sometimes fail, to intervene to stop man from obeying these instincts and, in the process, destroying himself.
Even if the points Mr Paynter is making are consistent, there is still a misunderstanding on his part. The Church of Rome is not some twenty-first century, Machiavellian, politically correct lobby group. It is not bound by ‘harm reduction’ dogma, and does not judge the quality of actions on their outcomes. It is a religious institution which has existed for two millennia. Its deity judges actions by themselves, against a set of rigid and immovable moral principles, often difficult to follow even for believers. It could not, and should not, approve of condoms simply because doing so might reduce the incidence of HIV/AIDS. That sort of concession would make its claims to transcend time and place lose all credibility.
This, too, relates to the other social attitudes that Mr Paynter criticizes. Though I do not agree with its opposition to homosexuality, this position is perfectly in-keeping with Scripture, which adherents believe to be the indefatigable word of God. Homosexuality is not a topic which I find particularly interesting, and one I consider so marginal that I have little interest in much discussion of it with anyone. As it is a private matter of conscience, I have no idea why the Church’s stance on it would trouble Mr Paynter quite so much. Abortion, however, is an entirely different matter.
I think with his fleeting mention of abortion, Mr Paynter reveals the greatest weakness in his argument in favour of the secular state. The abortion institution is one that has, in large part, been made possible by the absence of a living religion in much of the West. Without an absolute moral code to live by, many of my fellow non-believers have little time for philosophy and thus are unmoved by the abortion tragedy. Mr Paynter, however, has clearly given it some thought. He, like many, believes it to be a ‘rights issue’ (at least as far as I can assume from his conflating it with homosexuality).
I have heard few loud voices within the Roman Catholic Church – at least here in England – calling for private homosexual acts to be criminalized. Though many may disapprove of what happens, there is no large public campaign, of which I am aware, demanding that homosexuals be restricted in their private endeavours with one another. Thus, as I state earlier, it is relegated to a matter of conscience. Abortion cannot be treated in the same way.
Abortion necessarily adversely affects a non-consenting party, namely the unborn child. It is my belief that it is profoundly wrong to wilfully kill a candidate member of our society before he has had the chance to be born. Mr Paynter almost here attempts to make the argument that the Church’s opposition to abortion is wrong simply because it is out of step with public opinion. Has Mr Paynter considered that public opinion might be wrong? I hope Mr Paynter will at least agree that abortion is either wrong or it is not. On that basis, what does public opinion even matter?
Mr Paynter, throughout, fundamentally misunderstands what a religion actually is. It is not the same as a lobby group, quango, a think-tank or a trade union. If it is to be successful, and live up to its claims, it must hold its principles to be true at all times, rather than bend them to suit the modish opinions of Mr Paynter and the British liberal left.
With double jeopardy gone for good, are we any safer?
Here, I shall outline why repeat trials for the same offence are such a menace to our liberty.
The senseless murder of Stephen Lawrence on 22 April 1993 presumably by a group of men consumed by evil and hatred, does not bear thinking about. The inept handling of the case by the Metropolitan Police, coupled with a misguided private prosecution brought against several men by the family of Lawrence, culminated in the Macpherson Report. The report not only made many wild accusations against Scotland Yard – the most significant one being of ‘institutional racism’ – but also called for various radical changes in policing and justice in England. Most of these would be brought in by Tony Blair’s radical Labour government, the most significant of which is generally an end to the ‘double jeopardy rule’.
The double jeopardy rule has been built into the common law system of justice, here and throughout the Anglosphere, for a long time. It abides by the principle of autrefois acquit: that no person who has been acquitted of an offence may be tried for it on any subsequent occasion. With the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and as a direct result of the perceived injustices of the Lawrence case, this protection was abolished for certain crimes. There are a number of reasons why I oppose this change in the law.
The rule of law is itself a principle which separates free states from totalitarian ones. In a totalitarian state, there is no law, only the iron will of the ruler. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four is the best literary description of such a state. In a law-governed states, there exists a body of laws which are well-defined and a justice system which conducts trials in public and has a set of known punishments due for each crime. It could still be argued that the accused, with limited resources, has less power to defend himself than the state’s agents have to prosecute him. This is why certain ‘balancing conditions’ are built into the system.
The state, the prosecutor, bears the burden of proof. This is the first and most important handicap. The defendant is assumed innocent until proven guilty in all circumstances. There is some question, however, as to whether this is adequate. This is why a second handicap in favour of the defendant is necessary. This is where the double jeopardy rule comes in – the state may only attempt to convict the defendant once. If a jury rejects the prosecutor’s case, the defendant becomes a free man, no longer liable to be prosecuted for that case.
No longer. Can any acquitted person, who knows he has not committed a crime, rest easy once he has been so acquitted? Not under the present system. Why?
The method of bringing about a retrial is one where both the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP – presently Kier Starmer QC) and the Court of Appeal have both acknowledged the existence of ‘new and compelling evidence’ against the acquitted. Assuming this will only be applied sparingly, and to high-profile cases, this means there is a high probability that the jury will be biased against the defendants. The jury is aware that ‘new and compelling evidence’ has been approved by two high profile arms of the justice system, possibly so damning as to have many jurors assume guilt from the outset. This renders a fair trial impossible.
Further, if it is only a tool used in high profile cases, then the law cannot be said to be fairly and equally applied to all subjects. Had Stephen Lawrence’s murder not been considered racially motivated, perhaps the men who were convicted of his killing would never have been brought to retrial. The fact that the principle can only be invoked in cases of ‘murder, manslaughter, kidnapping, serious sexual offences and serious drugs offences’ means that those who are wrongly accused of these things are more vulnerable to conviction than are those (rightly or wrongly) accused of lesser crimes. This is yet another asymmetry which begs the question about the fairness of this new doctrine.
The police and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) might also end up being more reckless about trials, since they now know they have a built-in second chance at obtaining a conviction from a different jury. Not only that, but having put a lot of resources into convicting one man and various statistical targets to fulfil, they might find it pertinent to attempt a second trial by finding some dubious evidence against the acquitted rather than seriously trying to find a new lead.
It is always in the most emotive cases such as this one where we ought to be at our most vigilant, but these are always the times when our most important customs are most at risk from attack by the state. We may feel safe now, but we cannot know how this power may be used in the future. Will it be used to try someone three times? Will it be used to bully and target perceived pariahs like ‘suspected terrorists’? We can only predict.
In the name of justice, a great injustice has been done. In writing one wrong, we have abrogated one of our most valued constitutional protections, perhaps for ever.
I would like to acknowledge this article from legalweek and this article by James Hammerton for providing me with much of the argument I use in this article. I must also thank Helen Skinner of Bristol Freedom Society for providing me with those sources.
A partial response to the drugs advocates
Here, I respond to some of the main challenges from the pro-legalization body.
I would like to thank all of those who responded to my article of 2 January, ‘Drug legalization – a poison doctrine?‘ It has received the greatest volume of comments thus far in the short life of this blog, and I hope the blog can continue in this fashion. Though I am frustrated with some people, mainly by the use of pseudonyms and curt and unhelpful pleas for me to ‘educate myself’ – the assumption being that if only I were as enlightened as my opponents I might agree with them.
That said, these were in the minority and most of them were members of Cannabis Law Reform (Clear)’s Facebook page, where I publicized the article to generate more traffic, so I ought to have anticipated irritable hostility anyway. (Peter Reynolds, to his credit, received me warmly and I hope I can engage with him further on this matter.) What I hope to do here is address a number of contributors at this stage and address some of the criticisms my previous article received.
I would like to point out that I shall for the most part be steering well clear of the three-way argument below between ‘Vladimir’, an alleged ‘Psychologist’ and ‘JW’, which seems to revolve around the unanswerable question of whether there is or is not a god, and what this god’s supposed peculiar preferences are. They are welcome to continue it, but I shan’t be pulling my trousers up any time soon to wade in.
On with the debate:
But… what about alcohol?
Alcohol is bad too, right? And that’s legal? And you don’t see me calling for alcohol to be banned, do you? All true. However, alcohol is a particular poison deeply entrenched in our society over hundreds of years, and no policymaker would realistically be able to have it banned. I do, however, recognize that there is an increasingly evident alcohol abuse epidemic presently in Britain, particularly amongst people my age, which makes town centres and other places extremely unpleasant, and often no-go areas, a lot of the time.
This does not seem to me to be a desirable set of circumstances. I might suggest that if the police occasionally arrested people evidently involved in disorderly public conduct, and establishments were penalized for churning out scores of drunken louts on a routine basis, the atmosphere in these areas would be greatly helped. But this policy – which I see is very similar to the ‘harm reduction’ policy towards drugs advocated by liberalizers – has its limits.
I am not an apologist for alcohol. To say that because one poison, which causes so much harm and misery, is legal therefore means that another, such as cannabis, should therefore be welcome into legitimate society, is a complete failure of logic. Alcohol is already a problem, a problem which I don’t think we can realistically rid ourselves of. That is not the same thing as saying that because the war against drunkenness cannot be won, we should give in to all the other stupefying substances there are, which are wars I believe can still be won.
Decriminalization – the Portugal case
This article from ‘Time’ seems to form some sort of standard legitimizing propaganda for the drugs lobby because I have been enthusiastically pointed to it by a number of different and seemingly unrelated people over the past few days. Whilst I expected to find some sage wisdom and indefatigable truth therein, I was heartily disappointed by what I did discover.
Rather than coming across the paradise where legalization had occurred and all drug use had disappeared, the article revealed rather plainly that the law in Portugal had in practise now become the same as the law here in England: drug trafficking and the sale of illegal drugs is still illegal, as technically is still possession. However, since 2001, those caught in possession of ‘ten days’ supply’ of a drug or less cannot be criminally prosecuted. Why do I say this is the same as Britain?
Well, because it is. Most people caught in possession of small amounts of illegal drugs in Britain – presumably with the intention to use them – are almost never criminally prosecuted. Most are given cautions and some are ordered to seek treatment, whilst a small number are also given fines. (Astonishingly, those possessing cannabis are now given something called a ‘cannabis warning’ which does not even carry the weight of a caution.) Whether or not this policy has been a resounding success in Portugal – and I would love to see more in-depth figures about the changing nature of drug use there – it certainly can’t be said to have worked very well here where people use drugs with impunity.
Is ‘medicinal marijuana’ a red herring?
I’d be grateful if anyone more knowledgeable than myself actually knows where the metaphor ‘red herring’ comes from, but I’m sure we all know what I mean here. Are people using the alleged ‘medicinal’ uses of cannabis as a means for legalization through the back-door? Is it a cynical ploy to try to win over those who are generally opposed to the drug’s intoxicating qualities? I suspect the answer to this question is yes.
When a drug is prescribed by a pharmacist, or a GP, or whoever, that drug has gone through stringent medical trials in order to get there. It has been applied in controlled doses to a number of subjects in blind testing scenarios in order to test its effectiveness. Its side effects are also noted.
There are some drugs, which, whilst otherwise illegal because of their harmfulness, have legitimate uses, such as some opiate derivatives, and steroids. Whilst I accept the argument that there may be some medicinal use for the chemical compounds within cannabis, I see this as entirely separate from the main point here. Even if it were legal for such a use, I doubt the quantities of and the form in which medical professionals would be able to prescribe it would please pro-drug advocates anyway.
Is drug use immoral?
Part of the debate here has involved the interesting question of whether drug use can be considered ‘immoral’ or not and I suspect this forms a largely unspoken part of the debate, but for many people on both sides forms the basis from which their other arguments stem. There are undoubtedly many competing moral systems and I shall seek to briefly apply mine here, but this is a bigger question than a subsection of this article can answer.
I believe the use of recreational drugs is very much immoral. To ingest substances purely for the purposes of seeking hedonistic, chemically-induced, sense-altering pleasures whilst ultimately dulling the mind to the material world strikes me as a ruinous pastime. It does not seem to have any positive aspect to it, personally, or for those who witness it, and many negatives. Overindulgence, and the negligence of one’s greater duties, also seems wrong. I also consider the trade to be immoral. I believe people who make money out of the misery and ruin of others, whether they be criminal gangsters, small-time crooks, or rapacious businessmen, to be flatly contemptible.
I admit that, again, this has only really scratched the surface of the drugs debate, but the volume of contributions was quite overwhelming, and I will of course return to it again in the future. Contributions and comments are, as ever, welcome.
Drug legalization – a poison doctrine?
The legalization of drugs would not solve any of the problems it claims to, and would exacerbate the existing ones.
The latest cause of the progressive movement, which holds so much sway over the policy direction of government, is concerned with the current system of drug regulation and the problems thereof. Reformers claim that the current system, invariably described as a ‘war on drugs’, is failing, and many go on to say that a system of licensed sale and regulation, similar to the regime presently imposed on alcohol and tobacco, should be introduced.
Liberal Democrat Voice, the semi-official blog of the Liberal Democrats, recently polled its members on their attitudes to drugs law reform. A staggering 70 per cent said they backed moves to make cannabis possession legal, and significant minorities backed changes in the law for cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine and various other drugs. So, why do I disagree? There are two facets to my argument: an ideological, and a practical.
Ideologically, I oppose drug legalization because of the invariably destructive nature of drugs. They have been made illegal because they are, essentially, poisons. Poisons which typically induce some kind of physical pleasure or euphoria, which tempt thrill-seekers into using them, and then when the disastrous side effects take hold, they must take them again to experience the high – often in contrast to the dreary boredom of normal life.
‘But it’s my body,’ I hear you say, ‘I’ll do what I want with it.’ This is a powerful argument – as an advocate of personal freedom, I have a lot of sympathy with those who see this as a heavy-handed state move to curb someone’s autonomous liberty. However, we each of us exist, not as entirely autonomous beings, but as people, in society. These drugs don’t just visit horrors upon the people they inhabit, they also affect terribly the courses of the lives of the people around them, and society as a whole.
A father who is habitually under the influence of cannabis cannot be doing the best for his children. His senses dulled and his reactions slowed, his children are not receiving the care and attention that they are due. They, seeing him more often than not slumped in a sofa inhaling noxious chemicals and giggling, will come to seek the same sensual pleasures that he does. Cannabis, a supposedly ‘soft’ drug, oftentimes has an iron grip on its users, who crave the pleasurable state it induces. This pleasure, however, is had at the expense of responsibility.
For the whole of society, we must ask, who bears the burden of paying for the drugs? People who use the hardest drugs like heroin more often than not cannot sustain any kind of employment, and certainly not the sort of job that would afford such a destructive habit. So where does the funding come from? Excepting the ludicrous proposition that someone would receive any meaningful personal charity in order to buy these toxic substances, there are two main means by which a user will get his money – welfare benefits and crime.
Where do benefits come from? A heroin user is not going to be a net contributor under any tax regime. Benefits are paid for out of general taxation, so it will be those who do not use drugs who will have to foot the bill. As for crime, if the housing benefit, the job-seekers’ allowance, and various other handouts do not cover the cost, the user will quickly find that he has to rob, mug and burgle his way into enough cash to buy more. Naturally, the trail of victims this will create will be made far worse off by these circumstances. But what of the practical reasons for making drugs illegal?
First, drug legalization will cause use to increase. How could it not? For those people who are too proud to keep shady dealers in their telephone books, but would still quite like to take drugs, the convenience of being able to purchase them over the counter at Boots would certainly cause them to consume more.
Second, use by children will also be on the rise. Who doubts now the ease for a child of obtaining alcohol and tobacco? Why would it be any different if any old off-licence could sell other drugs? Their availability would cause many to become deranged or their minds sterilized when they are just developing.
Third, drug dealers and the criminal import trades they operate will not disappear. Their market share may be slightly diminished, but with some sort of levy presumably imposed on legitimate sellers, they will simply be able to undercut the price that the non-black market traders charge. Without asking for ID, they will still be able to exercise control over much of the younger market as well. This ties into my fourth reason, which concerns our strained health care provider.
The National Health Service, a behemoth whose annual budget is reported to sing to the tune of around £100 billion per year, would surely bear the brunt of all of this increased drug abuse. With their victims now in state care, it is yet again non-users who are being asked to pay for their selfish pleasures. This is extremely unfair on decent people and could even require an increase in general taxation to pay for it.
In short, drug legalization is a doctrine that has no winners, and will create plenty of big-time losers if it is followed through with.
[Credit to my friend James 'Molly' Mollison for inspiring me to write this article.]
Denying the existence of Atheism
A response to Michael Harratt, President of the University of Bristol Atheist, Agnostic and Secular Society.
I make no apologies for having fairly aggressively promoted the article I posted on Thursday, ‘Has Atheism become a political movement?‘ After all, what is the use in all this writing, and all this thought, if nobody is reading it? Thus, I thought it sensible to advertise on Bristol’s Atheist, Agnostic and Secular Society (AASS) Facebook page. Having done so, a number of contributors there have kindly considered my arguments and posted their own thoughtful responses. Here, I shall deal with Michael Harratt, who wrote his response to my article here.
Mr Harratt, as part of his introduction, contends:
The non-religious movement is a vast and multi-faceted beast and it’s impossible to represent everyone so I have made an effort to include elements to appeal to all aspects of the movement and to allow our members to cherry pick those that suit them and those that do not.
I am fairly sure I understand and agree with the substance of what Mr Harratt says here. There are, naturally, many irreligious people who no doubt disagree with one another on a whole smorgasbord of different topics. However, where I disagree with Mr Harratt is in his description of irreligiousness as a ‘movement’. It is my opinion that being non-religious constitutes the rejection of a movement. The essence of the article which he was responding to was that there was an attempt to conflate unbelief with some sort of movement, a movement with which I hold broad and strong disagreements.
The other corollary question which springs to mind out of his suggestion that it is a movement is, ‘What of those non-religious people who don’t want to be part of this movement?’ A movement suggests an active participatory element. I do not wish my own unreligious bias to constitute membership of any ‘movement’ by itself. This is what I find so creepy about Daniel Dennett’s attempt to rebrand atheists as ‘Brights’. It is not that I have chosen not to believe, I simply find that I do not and cannot.
I feel that speaking of atheism or thinking of it as some sort of movement is part of this political wave that I see Professor Dawkins riding the crest of. I draw you back to my question, ‘Has Atheism become a political movement?’ I contend that it ought not to be movement, but that there is a movement out there which sees itself as speaking for all atheists, much as some feminists believe they speak for all women.
By far the most interesting part of Mr Harratt’s piece is, however, the following seemingly tangential group of statements:
On a personal level, I believe that religious influence in public life should be diminished. I’d like an end to automatic seats for Bishops in the House of Lords and, yes, I’d like an end to the segregation that faith schools bring to our communities. Above all, I’d like to see the removal of “Hey, that’s my religion you’re talking about, you can’t criticise my faith” argument. However, if people choose to wake up in a morning and say “Hello God! Thank you for putting me on this earth” then that is fine by me and I have no right to judge them for that.
The second point – about faith schools – and the fourth point – about freedom of thought – essentially deal with the same point, and Mr Harratt sees a discontinuity here which simply does not exist. He says he’d ‘like an end to the segregation that faith schools bring to our communities’ and within that compact statement, I find several problems here. The first and most obvious is that communities are already segregated along faith lines, and forcing them to cohabit in the same schools can therefore only serve the purpose of diluting those religious differences. For someone who says he finds no sympathy with those who wish to ‘destroy’ religion, he still wishes to create circumstances in which this will happen.
The other question is, what kind of ‘end’ would he like these religious schools to meet? Would he like them to be confiscated by the state? Would he like the enforced secularization of privately operated schools, as well as state-funded faith schools? This seems particularly authoritarian – surely it is the same thing to be able to thank your god in the morning, and to be able to choose the method by which your own children should be educated? What right does the state have to demand a particular kind of education for your children? In that kind of state, we are serfs to a great power, rather than our own masters.
His secular faith also leads him to the belief that the bishops of the Church of England should be removed from the House of Lords. I wonder why. As he is I am sure aware, the bishops only ever vote on matters concerning the Church of England, which, as the established church, is still legally under the control of Parliament (though it has in recent years delegated many of these functions to the General Synod). Therefore, it would make sense that its senior figures have some say in how it is run. Does he not agree? Or is he instead, as I suspect, troubled by the other function the bishops serve in Parliament? That is, the same function performed by other members of the legislature – holding the government to account? Removing them would be an equivalent action to silencing them, since speech is all they use that platform for anyway.
I do agree with Mr Harratt on one point here, though: that something is someone’s ‘religion’ does not disqualify other people from criticizing it. For example, the oppressive dress mandated of Wahhabi Muslim women is deeply troubling and should not be exempt from commentary simply because it is part of a religion. However, this particular practice which Mr Haratt would like to see end is a social norm, and social norms can be eroded without the intervention of a legislator. I too would like to see them end. However, this is quite distinct from the other things Mr , aHarratt doesn’t like – which would both require heavy-handed government intervention.
To conclude, though Mr Harratt contends that this anti-theist, authoritarian secularist movement is only a small group within the broader category, I put it to him that not only is it an increasingly large group, it is one which claims to speak for all unbelievers. Mr Harratt’s society, of which I am now a member, is affiliated to the National Secular Society. I think the NSS policy platform represents precisely the movement I oppose, and yet I am now in danger of being associated with it.
Has Atheism become a political movement?
An atheist’s response to militant secularism
For as long as I can recall, I have been an atheist. I have never worshipped any gods, taken religious texts as factual documents, or believed that miracles – that is, suspensions of the laws of nature in our favour – could happen. However, until recently, I thought this belief pretty much independent from my politics. I assumed that an atheist could hold a private unbelief without it affecting his overall philosophy too much. At least, that was, until I came across Richard Dawkins and subsequently, the late Christopher Hitchens.
Now, it seems that atheism itself is associated with a militant, secularist, anti-religious political movement. Not only do these people believe that God doesn’t exist, they also blame religion for some, or in the case of Hitchens – the subtitle to the US edition of God is not Great was ‘How Religion Poisons Everything’ – all of the world’s man-made ills. It led Dawkins to the authoritarian view that teaching Christianity to children in schools was a form of brainwashing and should be outlawed. Hitchens was mobilized to support interventionist wars in the Middle East, where he felt a stone-age Islamic dogma was the main pervasive force keeping the people of the region suppressed and unfree.
It is in this sense that, instead of making the word ‘atheist’ acceptable in polite circles as was their aim, they have almost succeeded in changing its meaning altogether. Many atheists, like myself, are actually content to exist alongside religion, and recognize that the roots of the most prosperous and free societies in the world are in Christianity. I find comfort in the absolute laws it provides, and am wary of the increases in state power that secularization can bring. For example, if the Ten Commandments are no longer inviolable, and just a transitory set of laws for one people at one time, the government is free to define what is absolute. Therefore, nothing is absolute except the government.
This new secularism has recently embraced a rather divisive and spiteful kind of multiculturalism, as shown by the National Secular Society’s recent bid to have town councils banned from holding prayers before meetings. Though the NSS claims here (naturally) to be upholding the high principle of inclusiveness, it seems they are simply pursuing this case in order to further obfuscate the Christian character of the country, so that they may mould it in their image.
Their image often does not appear all that inclusive, either. We shall have to wait until they have achieved their ultimate goal before we know truly how they would treat religions in subordinate positions, but a revealing glimpse of the future is close at hand.
Dawkins, in the Christmas edition of the New Statesman, no less, makes clear that his idea of winning means ‘destroy[ing] Christinaity’. I suppose thought-crimes are part of this inclusive deal, then?
What would follow from the kind of secularism which Messrs Hitchens and Dawkisn support is moral relativism: nothing is immoral, it is only a particular time and set of circumstances which makes anything right or wrong. With the ghost of Christianity, if not a true living, breathing religion here in Britain, we still retain much of this aversion to relativism, but I wonder, with other atheist adopting more militant territory, and with their views chiming in more and more with those of the people in power, how much longer is this destined to last?
Without some sort of order, society simply cannot function properly and with civility. The lessons of the past tell us that the Soviet Union, once it had abolished religion using brutal force, had to replace it with a new doctrine – that of the totalitarian state, which makes and amends the rules as it pleases, so as to keep its citizens in enough of a state of fear that they will obey.
My suggestion to my fellow non-believers is that since we have yet to find an adequate replacement for Christianity, we must end this war against it unless and until we do. We should accept its contribution to the great history of this country. My suggestion, as an outsider, to the established Church would be that it has to listen to its members occasionally, or it will continue to haemorrhage them and we shall all be the worse off.
Additionally, it may be of interest to readers to check out Ian Silvera’s View for an excellent article on Dawkins’s vow to ‘destroy’ religion.
