We know that we don't know,
So let our vision still be pure;
We are Agnostic Fundamentalists;
We’re fundamentally unsure!
Peace, my sisters and my brothers;
The Agnostic does not smite;
We are tolerant of others;
There’s a chance they may be right.
So let our vision still be pure;
We are Agnostic Fundamentalists;
We’re fundamentally unsure!
Peace, my sisters and my brothers;
The Agnostic does not smite;
We are tolerant of others;
There’s a chance they may be right.
If we believe wrong things, we will do
wrong things. It is therefore sensible to try to believe right
things, and to encourage other people to believe right things.
But none of us is infallible: we all believe some wrong things and are bound to sometimes do wrong things whether we mean to or not.
That's just how
life is. The only alternative is doing nothing at all. No point worrying about it too much. I think that the "not doing anything at all"
experiment might be worth trying for a few days, though.
We can minimize the amount of harm we do by always keeping in mind that there are two sides to every question (apart from the one about who created the Silver Surfer) and that the other guy might have a good point.
But obviously, this approach only applies to everybody else. You have a perfect right to your opinions. But I don't have any opinions. I see things the way they actually are. "How lovely to think that all round the world, different groups of people are worshipping God in their own way, while here we are, worshipping Him in His way" as the fellow said. Now, if Melanie Phillips and Polly Toynbee, and Richard Dawkins and the Rowan Williams could both agree to say, and really mean "The other chap might have a good point" we would be getting somewhere. But we're not.
We can minimize the amount of harm we do by always keeping in mind that there are two sides to every question (apart from the one about who created the Silver Surfer) and that the other guy might have a good point.
But obviously, this approach only applies to everybody else. You have a perfect right to your opinions. But I don't have any opinions. I see things the way they actually are. "How lovely to think that all round the world, different groups of people are worshipping God in their own way, while here we are, worshipping Him in His way" as the fellow said. Now, if Melanie Phillips and Polly Toynbee, and Richard Dawkins and the Rowan Williams could both agree to say, and really mean "The other chap might have a good point" we would be getting somewhere. But we're not.
Anyway there are some things which it is just not possible to be tolerant about. And I'm not going to go all smartarse and postmodern and say "I'm not sure if tolerant people have to tolerate people who tolerate intolerant people, you know." If I were pacifist I really wouldn't see any difference between the dead boys being brought home to Brize Norton and the foreign boys they murdered. A murderer in uniform is still a murderer. I might very well spit on their coffins and picket their funerals, like that nice man in America. Who we should be tolerant of, because there's a chance he might be right.
I'm not a pacifist, in that sense. I'm a pacifist in the sense of thinking that peace is nicer than war, but so's everybody else.
If I
really believed that there was an institution on the high street whose only purpose was to massacre large numbers of small children then I would tie myself to the
railings, picket it, throw rotten fruit at the staff, sell all my
possessions and dedicate the rest of my life to closing down this
infant death camp. I would certainly refuse to have anything to do
with anyone who worked for the baby killing centre, in any capacity. I would hardly say "Oh, this is Mr Smith. He works as a receptionist in a concentration camp, you know. I don't quite approve, but if you set that aside, he's a very nice chap." I might even try to blow up the baby killing center and assassinate the staff. Given that I'm not a pacifist.
For the avoidance of doubt: I don't
think that there are institutions in this country which kill babies. And so far as I can see, neither do those people who a have a real, strong, moral, thought-out, principled objection to abortion (who you should be are very tolerant of, because there's a chance they might be right.) They certainly don't behave as if they think that every single person who works in the health service is on the same moral level as a concentration camp guard.
You might very well think that human
beings ought to be much kinder to the other animals we share a planet
with than we are at the moment. You might very well be right. But you don't really think that a
trainload of cows being taken off to be turned into hamburgers is the
same as a trainload of Jews being taken off to Auschwitz. You might say that you do, but you don't. If you did,
you'd be advocating us sending Spitfires to carpet bomb McDonald's. And
you aren't. At least, I assume you aren't. Meat is not murder, whatever over-excitable vegetarians might sometimes say.
Of course, "Meat is murder" sounds much better than "The production of meat sometimes involves unnecessary cruelty". And "Sainsburies makes life taste better" is snappier than "Sainsburies is a shop which sells stuff." There is nothing wrong with slogans; there is nothing wrong with rhetoric; there is nothing wrong with exaggeration. I have used exaggeration to make a point, on millions of different occassions.
Of course, "Meat is murder" sounds much better than "The production of meat sometimes involves unnecessary cruelty". And "Sainsburies makes life taste better" is snappier than "Sainsburies is a shop which sells stuff." There is nothing wrong with slogans; there is nothing wrong with rhetoric; there is nothing wrong with exaggeration. I have used exaggeration to make a point, on millions of different occassions.
But we need to be fairly clear
when we are engaging in legitimate political exaggeration and when
we are talking dangerous rubbish. You may very well think
that the clerical child abuse scandal is a scandal, and one for which the
Catholic church can't and shouldn't be forgiven. But if you start to
say, and appear to actually mean, that the Roman Catholic church only
ever existed as a means of supplying fresh young buttocks for gay male celibates to
insert their penises between; that the Catholic Church is the greatest criminal organisation in history; that every priest is a
child abuser and every Catholic an accessory to child abuse -- then you
probably shouldn't be too surprised if someone starts killing priests
and setting fire to churches. Because if every village in Europe had
an institution which really was only a sophisticated paedophile
grooming centre, then burning them down would be a perfectly
understandable thing to do. Unless you were a pacifist.
Ohhh....but when I said that the
Catholic Church was the biggest and worst criminal organisation in
history, then I didn't actually mean that we should treat the
Catholic Church as if it was the biggest and worst criminal
organisation in history. I only meant that we should all write jolly stiff letters to the Independent.
English Kings have got a nasty habit of saying very loudly and in public that they wouldn't be at all sad if some individual met with some nasty accident, and then being very surprised when the aforementioned individuals actually do meet with nasty accidents, often at the ends of swords belonging to the people the king was talking loudly in front of. You would think that they would learn to be more careful of what they say in front of drunken, angry knights. Careless talk costs archbishops.
English Kings have got a nasty habit of saying very loudly and in public that they wouldn't be at all sad if some individual met with some nasty accident, and then being very surprised when the aforementioned individuals actually do meet with nasty accidents, often at the ends of swords belonging to the people the king was talking loudly in front of. You would think that they would learn to be more careful of what they say in front of drunken, angry knights. Careless talk costs archbishops.
Many of us couldn't help experiencing a
sort of morbid schadenfreude when it turned out that Anders Breivik, the right wing nutter who shot 67 people in Norway over the summer, was a reader of the Daily Mail and quoted articles by Melanie Phillips.
But it wasn't actually very surprising. He was a right wing nutter: the Daily Mail is aimed firmly at the "right wing nutter" demographic. When a man rapes a lady, it often turns out that he liked sex magazines; when a man kills a child with a gun, it often turns out that he liked gun magazines; when a man kills a child with a car, it often turns out that he liked car magazines.
And all the stupid people say, with one voice "Ooo....It was the magazine's fault. Let's ban magazines."
But it wasn't actually very surprising. He was a right wing nutter: the Daily Mail is aimed firmly at the "right wing nutter" demographic. When a man rapes a lady, it often turns out that he liked sex magazines; when a man kills a child with a gun, it often turns out that he liked gun magazines; when a man kills a child with a car, it often turns out that he liked car magazines.
And all the stupid people say, with one voice "Ooo....It was the magazine's fault. Let's ban magazines."
We are not stupid people.
What if the Daily Mail was right?
What if there really was a Marxist organisation
dedicated to destruction of civilisation?
What if they had already taken over the BBC, the Labour Party and the
President of America?
What if we teetered on the brink and saying "Before Common Era" and singing hymns at civil partnership ceremonies was going to push us over it?
What if Teh Riotz were the beginning, and that was what it was going
to be like in England every night from now on?
What if there was a real danger that the free press would be banned, Lord Cricket Ground turned into a collective farm and all of us forced to live on cold beetroot soup and turnips for the rest of our lives? (I assume that this is what it will be like after civilisation has ended and Herbert Marcuse and Stalin have taken over?)
What if there was a real danger that the free press would be banned, Lord Cricket Ground turned into a collective farm and all of us forced to live on cold beetroot soup and turnips for the rest of our lives? (I assume that this is what it will be like after civilisation has ended and Herbert Marcuse and Stalin have taken over?)
What if David Cameron really had sided with those who wish to destroy
civilisation, and opposed those who would quite like civilisation to carry on?
The fantasy world of the Daily Mail has been created specifically in order to smooth over moral grey areas; to make it quite impossible to say "there's a chance the other chap might be right."
If we know in advance that the Political Correctness Brigade is on the point of destroying civilisation, then even to ask "How does Songs of Praise, The Life of Mohammad and Thought for the Day fit in with the BBC secularist agenda? How does employing Simon Schama to make history documentaries fit in with their plot to abolish history?" is a kind of treason.
The fantasy world of the Common Sense Brigade, like the fantasy world of George Lucas, is specifically constructed so as to leave no space for nuance.
In the 1980s, us students thought it was cool and ironic to read the Sunday Sport. The Sport was a not very successful attempt to market a U.S style supermarket tabloid in the UK. I think most of us realised that its storylines -- World War II Bomber Found on Moon; Hitler Was Really a Woman; Hitler Still Alive; Hitler Flew World War II Bomber to Moon Because Sunday Sport Revealed He Was Really A Woman; World War II Bomber Disappears From Moon -- were not 100% reliable. I don't think it would have been hard to read a political agenda into the Sunday Sport's made up world, either: they were selling their middle-aged readers a fantasy in which the 1940s and 1950s had never really come to an end -- the news stories of their youth (Hitler, Elvis, Vera Lynn) were still the news stories of the 1980s. In the years in between, nothing much had happened. I don't know if anyone believed in them. I guess that it was a bit like U.F.Os: people didn't believe in every two headed baby but they did feel that there was a lot of wierd shit going down, because, well, it was all in the papers, wasn't it. But it didn't affect political discourse. The Guardian didn't run news stories about what the London Double Decker bus at the South Pole said about Antarctic ecology; the Telegraph didn't write thunderous editorials about how the SAS should be sent to the Croydon chip shop to arrest Hitler, and why this showed that England was soft on Nazi war criminals and we should therefore withdraw from the E.U. The Sunday Sport never set the agenda.
But every time a columnist, or an Any Questions panel, or straw poll or a media phone talks about the fictional banning of the term "AD", or the fictional banning of the term "Gingerbred Man", or the fictional school where children sing baa-baa-green sheep, or the fictional celebration of Winterval then it allows the Express and the Mail and the Campaign Against Political Correctness to set the agenda. It decides that the Common Sense Brigade's fictional England is more worth talking about than the place where we actually live and more and have our being.
And if the Daily Mail carries on encouraging its readers to believe wrong things, surely there is a risk that one of them will one day do a wrong thing? A terribly, terribly wrong thing?
If you really thought that the Cultural Marxists were about to take over, wouldn't you take drastic action to preserve Civilisation As We Know It?
What if the Daily Mail was right?
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