United In Tolerance: Inventing Britain For the 21st Century (Part Four)

United In Tolerance: Inventing Britain For the 21st Century (Part Four)

The Bishop of Liverpool was on Radio Four’s ‘Thought For the Day’ slot this morning. He described how a group of which he is a member, consisting of four Christians, four Jews and four Muslims, discussed Pope Benedict’s recent controversial statement that had been taken as implying that Islam was a violent religion. They ended up agreeing a set of five values that for them defined Britishness. They were:

· Respect for the law

· Liberty

· Language (i.e. English, not the only ‘indigenous’ British language be it noted)

· Landscape

· Monarchy

It seems that many people have their own lists of essential British values and virtues. The Bishop went on to explain that, in his view, these values – in Britain at least – had a Christian foundation, but that he had not wanted to emphasise this point at the meeting of the group. However, he would express this opinion at their next meeting, which had agreed the topic for discussion as that of tolerance. Pregnant pause as the slot came to an end; unspoken allusion to Tony Blair’s contribution on that theme last week (see my last blog, dated 9 December).

Is tolerance a – perhaps the – core British value that unites us all around common principles allowing us to express our differences within a framework of mutual respect? Tolerance is actually quite an ambiguous value. For a start, it can refer either to a personal characteristic (‘x is a tolerant man’), or to a quality or virtue, in a philosophical and ethical sense. As a personal characteristic, tolerance can have more than one resonance: being (over-)indulgent towards others; being prepared to put up with the annoying behaviour of others; having a high anger threshold; or being possessed of the ‘virtue’ of tolerance in the ethical sense just alluded to.

As an ethical and philosophical value, tolerance demarcates the boundaries of liberty: it refers to a high-minded, libertarian affirmation of the freedom and the right of individuals and groups to carry on their lives in the manner of their choosing, regardless of whether those lifestyles seem distasteful or even morally wrong – up to the point at which those behaviours become intolerable. They are intolerable, precisely, if they infringe the liberty either of the individuals concerned, or of others; or, in a more general sense, if they undermine the basic principles – of which liberty and tolerance are cornerstones – that create a framework under law enabling us to live together harmoniously.

Is Britain a tolerant nation in this latter sense? I think it is not, nor do I think the new-found champions of tolerance really want it to be. There is always, and arguably always should be, a moral basis to the law that limits the tolerance of society to a greater extent than is implied by the description of the libertarian limits of tolerance above. For instance, the idea of legalising the use of many currently illegal drugs is generally rejected, but not because free drug use in itself violates the principle of tolerance (allowing people to choose to harm themselves if they want to). On the contrary, the liberalisation of drug use is dismissed at least in part because taking drugs of these types is thought to be morally wrong, both in terms of the damage the user can do to themselves, and because of its potential to harm the wider ‘social fabric’. And this is despite the potential benefit that controlled legalisation could have in terms of decriminalising the supply of drugs. The same type of argument applies in the case of prostitution, which has recently come to the forefront of British public attention as a result of a series of murders of prostitutes in the town of Ipswich. Legalising the soliciting of acts of prostitution, so the argument goes, would make prostitutes’ working lives safer and the risk of sexual infection smaller. But such a change is rejected because of the moral condemnation of prostitution and the fear that legalisation would encourage its spread, thereby undermining marriage, family and social cohesion as a whole.

So Britain is not really a tolerant society in the full sense of the word, which would effectively be synonymous with radical liberalism. British tolerance is circumscribed by ethically defined limits. And those limits are Christian-derived – inherited from our Christian tradition – even if they would not necessarily be accepted as properly or entirely Christian according to either evangelical or Catholic orthodoxies. In this context, one cannot help wondering to what extent this Christian element within our tolerance plays a part in the thinking about appropriate responses towards, indeed legislation about, Muslim women wearing the full veil – niqab – or the burka (the body-length gown that incorporates the niqab). Is the view that it might be right to ban women from wearing the niqab in certain or even all public places derived from liberal principles concerning the limits of tolerance, or from inherited Christian responses?

From a liberal perspective, one could advance a view that it would be a good thing to ban the niqab in public on the assumption that some – possibly many – women are forced to wear it against their will. (There was an implication of this in Tony Blair’s speech last week; see my blog of 9 December.) This violates their liberty, and therefore, it should be stopped. (What happens in the home is another matter; but equally, it would be interesting to see what measures, if any, the potential legislators might propose to defend women whose husbands or families try to coerce them into wearing the niqab in private.) In reality, most of the media testimonies from recent adopters of the veil that have been printed or broadcast since the start of the public debate about it in October of this year emphasise the fact that they have freely chosen to wear it as an expression of their commitment to Islam and its moral teachings as they interpret them.

An additional argument from tolerance in favour of banning the veil in public would be one that relied on the more general basis for regarding a particular type of behaviour as intolerable, i.e. that it undermines the common principles or values that provide the framework for people of different cultures and faith backgrounds to live together in a way that does not infringe their legitimate rights and freedoms. In fact, the way this argument has tended to be put forward recently is not that wearing the niqab, as an expression of ‘radical’ Islam (definition please?), undermines those common principles and the established rule of law they support; but that it somehow intrinsically subverts the social cohesion and cultural integration that is the ideal end result of the application of those principles. In other words, the advocates of restricting the veil start from the supposedly visible effect of impaired cohesion (embodied in the veil) in order to infer the existence of a set of alternative principles and values (those of militant Islam) that is opposed to British values of tolerance. But no one in the public debate, to my knowledge, has set out a credible critique of the way Islamic teachings do (or do not) really conflict with and undermine those values. Now that really would be interesting!

In other words, we seem here to have a classic case of prejudice. We assume that a group of people who are different from us have beliefs and practices that undermine the whole basis of our society simply because they look different, talk differently (indeed, refuse to communicate with us; cf. veil debate), and adhere to a religion we find – in some ways, understandably – threatening and terrifying. But this is surely the point: we have an inherited, Christian-derived prejudice against Islam, which recent history appears to have confirmed and has certainly reignited. And it is that, more than any intrinsic opposition that Islamic values might pose to our own, that determines that beyond a certain point of moderation, public manifestations of Islam are no longer tolerable.

The ‘good intention’ of these British-value formalisers (let’s call them the ‘Briticists’) is to promote the adoption – in social practice and in law – of a value system that is a unique (?) British combination of liberal-tolerant and Christian-derived principles: one which sufficiently abstracts ‘core’ Christian moral and social teachings from any particular formal dogmatic expression of them in order to re-present them as universal, rational-ethical principles to which members of any religion can in principle assent because those core principles are also fundamental to their own religions. Except – so the thinking goes – in the case of ‘radical’ Islam. But here’s the whole heart of the matter: is fundamental Islam the one exception to the rule; the one religion whose core values are irreconcilable with the values that are common to Christianity, liberalism and all the other religions of tolerant Britain? Or is thinking along these lines just a prejudice – Christian in origin – that justifies a refusal to engage in dialogue with Islam; and then perhaps to discover a whole tolerant, humane tradition within that faith that is not so different from our own – and from which our own in many senses actually derives?

But so much for tolerance as a philosophical and ethical principle. In the next instalment of this blog (failing some news event that stirs me into a tangential diatribe), I will examine the question of whether or not Britain is temperamentally a tolerant nation and what that might in fact mean.