The free society and its enemies

Two stories in today's papers fill me with dread. 



The  Independent today is exercised about the choice of a former Playboy model as television presenter as successor to Barbara Walters, for a leading American show. Some years ago, and not so many, the fact that they she had modelled naked would have caused dismay, at one time from respectable people and later from feminists, but this does not seem to be, as they say now, 'an issue'. The problem is that the former model is opposed to vaccinating children against measles and other childhood ailments, which she thinks can cause autism.

I am not interested in American television presenters, except to note that they are often blonde and very pretty. I am slightly interested in autism but what is much more interesting is the sense that we are living in an increasingly closed society. I suppose that this lady's fears about vaccines are probably baseless, though no-one knows for sure. I have no doubt that by expressing them she will dissuade some parents from vaccinating their children and it may be that deaths of children will even ensue. Perhaps she should be told not to mention the subject on the air. Her employer is certainly within his rights to do so, but in that case what about freedom of speech?

Had she said she was opposed to homosexual marriage things would look much worse for her. Had she admitted in a sworn affidavit, as happened recently with another American television star, that she had used the word 'nigger' (at some unspecified point in her life) she would not have been given the job, although Miss Paris Hilton narrowly got away with it. And so it goes.



The other story is one that has run for several days in England about a sports commentator on the BBC who said of a woman tennis player that 'she is never going to be a looker'. This was probably true, though unchivalrous, but he is not in trouble for being inaccurate, unchivalrous or downright rude, but for being sexist. He has been publicly humiliated and might lose his job. 

I do not accept that considering, talking about and treating women differently from men is wicked, if that is what sexist means. I am also aware that women judge one another on their appearance, just as men judge women on their appearance, and that this is because appearances are very important. Especially for women, but for men too to a lesser degree. I do not think that the remarks were sexist, in any case, though by using the word one concedes ground to the feminists. Plenty of women make cruel remarks about men's appearance.

But this is about political power over people's lives, not courtesy towards women. The idea is to make sure people who have an old-fashioned, inarticulate liking for old ways of thinking, or not thinking, are kept in a state of low-level apprehension about voicing their opinions on the important things in life, such as sex and race. England's cleverest Prime Minister, Arthur James Balfour, said that society is perpetually persecuting, but this does not come from society spontaneously policing itself. It comes from powerful opinion formers, who prod people like cattle about what to think or pretend to think. How did they gain the power they now wield? I do not know, but I do know that, though it began in the 1960s, it largely happened while Conservatives like Margaret Thatcher were in office and Marxists were surrendering in the Cold War,

There are increasingly authoritarian societies on both sides of the Atlantic, and how far removed we are from those two great Anglo-Saxon (well English, anyway) virtues: a sense of humour and common sense. We are living in an age of compulsory niceness and, for people who fail to live up to the rules about niceness, things can instantly become very, very nasty indeed.

Witness Emma West, the woman on the train who ranted about black people not being British and ended up spending Christmas in prison, while her child was taken into care. It took them eighteen months, with the threat of her going back to gaol and losing custody of her child, before she agreed to plead guilty to whatever racially aggravated offence she was charged with. Witness the man demoted at work for saying on his Facebook wall 'Gay marriage in church would be a step too far'. Witness the Oxford undergraduate who spent a night in the cells for making a homophobic remark by telling a mounted policeman that his horse was gay, the Protestant missionaries who were told by the police that they were not allowed to distribute their leaflets in a 'Muslim area' of Liverpool and the man who was fined for revving his car 'in a racist manner' when two people from the Indian Sub-Continent walked past. He said he hadn't noticed them, but he lost his case.

Once, recently, English society had its own power structure, wholly separate from the state, expressed in sexual conservatism, the class system and social deference, which told people how to behave and stigmatised those who broke the rules. Britain's real religion, in Maurice Cowling's phrase, was low-key respectability. People kept an eye on their neighbours and sometimes tutted about things they did not care for. Some people cared about what other people thought and some did not give a damn. People's lives were narrower in those days, but they could say most things they liked. People sometimes used to reply, if you asked if you could sit at their table in a railway station café, 'It's a free country'. Now, instead, we have state-enforced means of telling people how to live their lives. In place of organic inequality we have synthetic egalitarianism, enforced by employment laws and the police. No-one says, even in joke, that this is a free country, because everyone knows that it is not and that this is no joking matter.

We were once a rational civilisation. How do we fight against all this?