Three

We all agree that murder is a bad thing. Some of us believe that adultery and fornication are bad things. But, once you've permitted the killing of animals and bacteria, and the killing of human beings in war and self defence and euthanasia; and accepted that people may sometimes choose to commit suicide; then "Thou Shalt Not Murder" turns out to mean "You are not allowed to kill anyone except those people who you are allowed to kill". And even if you agree that the only permissible sexual intercourse is between married people, you can hardly to fail have noticed that society keeps on changing its mind about what counts as "marriage". Cousins are sometimes allowed to marry and sometimes not; the age of legal marriage can be quite young or surprisingly old; societies can't even come to a firm decision about how many husbands and or wives a man and or woman is allowed to keep on the go at once. So "thou shalt not commit adultery" turns out to mean "you are forbidden from having sex with anyone except those people who you are permitted to have sex with": a variation on "you should do whatever you should do".

I came across a person on the interwebs who affected to be genuinely astonished when I suggested that the Christian church, and therefore very possibly the Christian God, approved of some kinds of killing but not others. I said that it would be rather odd for YHWH to give detailed instructions about meat preparation if by "Thou shalt not kill" she had meant "Thou shalt not kill anything, ever, full stop". I said that since YHWH shows no sign of being a pacifist; and seems to think that very naughty people -- witches, for example -- should be executed, she probably things that the killing of one soldier by another solider in a properly declared war, or the killing of a criminal by an executioner after a perfectly fair trail wasn't murder. So there was no necessary inconsistency in being a Christian warrior or a Christian supporter of capital punishment.

But it says "thou shalt not kill" in the BIBLE, he kept saying, and yet these Christians support WARS. Haven't THEY read their own BOOK? HAVEN'T they READ their own book.

("Can you imagine Jesus in any army uniform" is not a very helpful contribution to the debate. I can't imagine Jesus playing cricket, and, come to that, I can't imagine the Queen going to the toilet. A clever person on the interwebs recently remarked that if you can't imagine Jesus with an erection, you a probably really a docetist.)  

Some people believe, or pretend to believe, that no-one ever really believed in witches. The whole concept was dreamed up by sad individuals who had a bit of a thing about setting fire to old ladies and needed a flimsy pretext to indulge their rather specialized proclivities. Mrs Thatcher (speaking of witches) used to comically and ludicrously claim that there was no political element behind the campaigns of assassination and bombings by the Irish Republican Army: they blew people up because they were the kind of people who liked blowing things up.

A world of bad people who were bad because they wanted to be bad; where no-one ever does a bad thing for a good reason, or a bad thing for a bad reason which looks like a good reason from their point of view.  How nice it would be if life were that simple.

I know: let's pretend it is!

Two

You will remember that, in his wartime radio broadcasts, C.S. Lewis argued that Right and Wrong were a clue to the meaning of the universe. He said that nearly all human beings have at nearly all times agreed that there was a difference between Right and Wrong. They even mostly agree about what kinds of things were Right and what kinds of things were Wrong. That, said Lewis, suggested what kind of a Universe we were living in – one in which Right and Wrong really existed, and would have existed even if humans hadn't come along and discovered them.

No greater person that Terry Eagleton scoffs at this idea. "Unchanging human nature?" he says. "Unchanging human bollocks, more like." (I paraphrase.) People in olden times used to burn witches at the stake. We don't do that any more, except possibly in Texas. Morality has changed beyond recognition.

Not at all, sighs Dr Lewis, anachronistically. If we really believed in witches – if we thought that there were really people who, as part of a real pact with a real dark power, were really causing plagues and famines and crop failiures then we would probably think that they should really be executed. We've stopped hanging witches because we disbelieve in their existence. That represents an advance in knowledge; not a change in morality. [*]

I think that that one's morals include what one does, as well as what one thinks one ought to do. I would not be inclined to say "John is a moral person because although he cheats outrageously on his wife, he believes adultery is wrong; Fred is an immoral person because he cheats outrageously on his wife while espousing a philosophy of free love." If fidelity and promise-keeping are Good Things, then infiedelity and promise breaking are Bad Things, whatever may be going on in the head of the love-rat. I am uneasy with a definition of morality which says "People in the past thought it was moral to execute children for petty theft; not because they differed from us about morality, but because they differed from us about certain material facts (say, the degree to which children could make moral decisions, the degree to which they believed in predestination, the degree to which they thought God would make it up to them in heaven after they died.) The fact remains that they killed kids and we don't. Except maybe in Texas.

By the time you've excluded "witches exist" and "witches are bad" from your definition of morality (along, perhaps, with "throwing old ladies rivers is a good way of determining guilt" and "burning alive is an appropriate punishment for bad people") morality ends up meaning not much more than "you should do whatever you should do."

It might be that "we should do whatever we should do" does represent an essential core which all humans have in common and nothing else does. I personally am inclined to doubt that giraffes, pebbles and sea monkeys have even this minimal moral sense: I assume that all human beings have it. Lewis flirts with this idea in one of his interplanetary essays. It is possible to imagine an alien being which is very adept at building cities and atomic bombs, but is not (in a theological sense) a person because it has no sense of what it "ought" to do, no sense that "good" can mean anything other than "good for me". It is also possible to imagine a hamster or a maggot that does have that crucial "person hood", because it does have a sense that there are things which it "should" and "should not" do. In his fiction, Lewis uses the terms "hnau" for such ensouled beings. (Tolkien found it a useful term, and used it occassionally.) It is in this sense that I have sometimes wondered if certain newspaper columnists, liberal democrats, and (in particular) former prime ministers are really "people". Some of them behave as if they do not have a concept of morality which goes beyond "whatever I have an impulse to do at the present moment." Some of those same politicians may have the same thing in mind when they say that poor people are sub-human and bestial.

But (as is relatively often the case) Mr Lewis's argument remains compelling and thought provoking even if it doesn't quite stack up logically. If there really had been witches, would Matthew Hopkins still be a monster? Or would he suddenly become a hero? If there really had been a widespread communist conspiracy in the 1950s, would we conclude that history has slandered Senator Joe McCarthy? What if there were no witches and no commies but Joe and Matt had honestly thought that there were? 

Or: a question which has been worrying me more and more during a summer which has seen the closing of the News of the World, a massacre in Norway and three seperate riots at the bottom of my street. 

What if the Daily Mail were right? 

[*] It is interesting, if entirely irrelevant, that the great game of Chinese whispers which is the internet has widely disseminated Lewis's observation that if we believed in witches then we would probably believe in executing witches in the form "C.S. Lewis approved of the Salem witch craze" or "C.S. Lewis thinks that wiccans should be hung." Certain segments of the internet has also transformed "I shall use the Chinese term, Tao to refer to the core of morality which all religions have in common" to "C.S Lewis renounced Christianity and died a taoist". See also under lisptick, nylons and invitations. 

I PROMISE THIS IS MY VERY LAST AND FINAL, THIS IS IT, THERE IS NO MORE, ESSAY ON POLITICS, FOR QUITE SOME TIME, ALLMOST DEFINITELY

PART ONE

I don't mean to say "I told you so", but,

I told you so.

I TOLD YOU SO. 

I SO TOLD YOU SO.

The improbably named Jame Delingpole, writing in the Daily Mail, has explained, and stop me if you've heard this before, that Political Correctness and the BBC are part of a plot by cultural Marxists to destroy civilisation.

Just to be quite clear: this is not something which I am wittily reading into his article. I am not doing one of those clever "deconstruction" things where you take what some one says and show that if you took it to its logical conclusion, it would lead to an absurd place. I'm not exaggerating. I am reporting what this man actually said. HOW THE BBC FELL FOR A MARXIST PLOT TO DESTROY CIVILISATION FROM WITHIN. There was a photograph of Herbert Marcuse and everything.

There are days of the week, I don't mind admitting, where I feel a little like Dave Sim. Why are we still having this conversation, I feel like saying. I have told you what is going on. Are you not hearing me? Political Correctness doesn't mean going out of your way, maybe too far out of your way, to avoid offending the other guy. It never did. It is, and always was, a paranoid fantasy about a Marxist Plot to destroy civilisation, invented by an right wing academic called William Lind and sold to the British press and thus to the British political parties by one-man pressure groups with names like the Campaign Against Political Correctness.

"Gee Andrew, that sure is interesting," you say. "But my sys. admin really did ask us to stop referring to the computers as "master" and "slave" units, which I thought was going a bit far. And heteronormative is a pretty unwieldy word. "

No. No, no. That isn't the point. That isn't what we are talking about.

It might be that it's bad manners to ask a Muslim or a Jew "What is you Christian name"? It might on the other hand be that Muslims and the Jews should bloody well get over themselves and stop worrying about that kind of thing. It might be that Christmas is a mostly Christian festival and it might be that it isn't. If it is, it might be that it's okay to celebrate religious festivals in the public sphere and it might be that it's not. There are probably sensible arguments in favour of slippering serial killers and sending children who talk in the dinner queue to the electric chair. It might even be that "nigger" isn't a very offensive word and never was and even if it is it could be that the whole idea of "offence" is not something which the law can or should deal with. There are two sides to every question, apart from the one about whether Jack Kirby created the Silver Surfer. (If you don't think that there are two sides to every question then you are probably a fundamentalist or a bigot or a twit, and I mean that in a very caring way.)

But those aren't the questions that I'm asking. The question that I'm asking is "has the BBC fallen victim for a Marxist plot to destroy civilisation from within" and the answer is of course it bloody well hasn't.

It turns out that now the BBC has banned presenters from using the designation "BC" and "AD" when talking about dates again. This is another example of the sort of thing we could probably have a sensible discussion about, but aren't going to. It would seem to me that "AD" and "BC" are commonly used in colloquial English, and that we are going to carry on having comic books called "2000AD" and bad movies called "Six Million Years BC" for as long as we say "he was inching up the road" rather than ""he was 2.5 centimetreing along the road" and "and that's worth a few bob" rather than "that's worth between 5 and 15 pence" and "pull the chain" rather than "depress the little button thing on top of the cistern." Americans still have "dime stores" even though you can't actually by anything for 5c cents. On the other hand, we are likely to carry on, in more formal, technical settings like history text books, to say "C.E" and "B.C.E" has we have been for the last fifty or sixty years, because it is, in fact, a little odd to say that Mohammed was born 570 A.D because that's not the dating system that Moslims use. It would be very confusing to say that "Jesus was born 5 years before the birth of Christ" and completely barking mad to say that a particular dinosaur thrived in the year 64,997,989 BC. But it would be a little pedantic to say that the Battle of Bosworth field happened in 1485 C.E because Henry Tudor and Richard of York both called the year 1485 AD.

But that isn't the question. The question is why are we even talking about this. Because the BBC have not, in fact, banned the terms A.D or B.C. They just haven't. This isn't one of those cases where you can say "oh they kind of sort of have" or "Andrew has an opinion that the terms A.D and B.C don't appear on BBC websites any more, but other people think they don't. This is one of those interesting disagreements, and I guess BBC-AD believers and BBC-AD denialists will just have to agree to differ." Go to the page. Have a look. It hasn't happened, in the same way that Birmingham City Council haven't just banned Christmas again and never did. Hitler Diaries; Protocols of the Elders of Zion; Piltdown Man; Holy Blood and Holy Grail; Stan Lee created the Silver Surfer. Not differences of opinion. Lies. Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies. Lies.

Cleverer, or at any rate calmer, people than me have already pointed out that what the Daily Mail is objecting to is that people on the BBC are permitted to use the secular designation if they want to (Jeremy Paxman tends to; Andrew Marr tends not to) and that what the extreme right is saying is that they shouldn't be allowed to. The terms C.E and B.C.E should be banned and the terms B.C and A.D mandated, on ideological grounds. The Daily Mail is in fact doing precisely what it's fictitious political correctness brigade would be doing if it really existed, which it doesn't -- it just doesn't -- banning words banning words which it doesn't like.

BUT THAT ISN'T THE POINT. The point is that they are talking about an IMAGINARY ban which they made up out of their own head in order to promote their EQUALLY IMAGINARY story about how COMMIES are trying to DESTROY CIVILISATION.

And isn't it only fair that we should be a bit more considerate to the sensitivities of other races, religions and creeds? No, it's an act of cultural suicide. Most of us may not realise this but the ideological Left certainly does, for it has long been part of its grand plan to destroy Western civilisation from within. The plan's prime instigator was the influential German Marxist thinker ('the father of the New Left') Herbert Marcuse. A Jewish academic who fled Germany for the US in the Thirties, he became the darling of the Sixties and Seventies 'radical chic' set. He deliberately set out to dismantle every last pillar of society – tradition, hierarchy, order – and key to victory, he argued, would be a Leftist takeover of the language....

My old sparring partner from the Yorkshire Evening Post the "rev" Peter Mullen is a more straightforward

To be honest, I don't think the BBC's undoubted loathing of our Christian heritage is the main issue. They just loath anything that smacks of tradition and value and Englishness, of all that most of us were brought up to respect. Like Stalin or Pol Pot, the BBC would like to abolish all reverence for the past and for the institutions created by that illustrious past, and to make policy from year zero - a desolate, heartless, rootless public realm dominated by the banal celeb culture, pop music and the banal display of depravity which fills the air wave....

Just how many history shows has the BBC put out over the last twelve months, you pathetic little arsehole?

The made up fact about the new dating system is only one of large number of made up facts which the Common Sense Brigade have made up this week. Melannie Phillips assured us that (sit down, please) that "Christmas has been renamed in various places Winterval". It is, I suppose, just possible that Liz Jones really believes that there is no recession because a waiter wouldn't give he the seat she wanted in posh restaurant and lose fitting trousers caused the riots. You can be stupid without being dishonest. But it is not possible that Mel really believes in Winterval. She is circulating a lie which she knows to be a lie. she must be be.

We have also had this kind of thing:

Yet Britain’s response [to the pacific economies] is to adopt the faddish fixation with man-made global warming, for which no shred of reputable scientific evidence exists, and thus to sacrifice prosperity on the altar of New Left green ideology along with Old Left class war.

I said above that there were two points of view about every question. But when there is complete unanimity among experts (about highly technical and specialist subjects) you do have to say "the is complete unanimity among experts about this highly technical and specialist subject" which is very close to saying "this is true". But not if you are part of the Common Sense Brigade. If you are part of the Common Sense Brigade you make up a story in which all the real scientists agree with you but the MARXISTS are suppressing the real truth. (Mr Delingpole's article assuring us that homeopathy works and the scientists who keep explaining why it can't are a bit like witch-finders is worth hooting with derision at, as well.)

The Marxists. Herbert Marcuse. The Frankfurt Group. Stalin. Poll Pott. End of civilization.

I told you so.

I TOLD YOU SO.

For no particular reason, I thought it might be nice to see what I was ranting about almost exactly seven years ago to day. 

-o0o-