Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part Four)

In the preceding three entries, I've discussed three examples of how British society and culture deal with beliefs and behaviour that are considered to be 'beyond the pale': instances of radical intolerance or hostility towards the 'tolerant society' that are by that token 'beyond tolerance' – intolerable to the tolerant society. These examples are those of 'racism', 'terrorism' and 'anti-social behaviour'. Britain responds to these phenomena in a manner that is reminiscent of psychological censorship and repression. In Freudian terms, the super-ego (the authorities) suppresses the irrational, violent thoughts and desires of the id (the racist / terrorist / anti-social individual) from the conscious mind or ego (from the public domain) and then keeps jealous watch to make sure that these 'undesirable' tendencies do not re-manifest themselves openly – resulting in them being acted out in another way that eludes the scrutiny and sphere of operation of the super-ego. Hence, the racist, terrorist and lout are placed under a regime of watch and control (Celebrity Big Brother, Control Orders and ASBOs); but their thoughts and they themselves nonetheless elude their detention, because Big Brother has merely suppressed and displaced the forces that drive its enemies, not dealt with them and resolved the conflict.

Notice that I referred to these three forms of antagonism towards tolerance in inverted commas. One of the means by which censorship of these phenomena takes place is that particular individuals are stigmatised and scapegoated as representatives of the tendencies that society wishes to repress. In psychological terms, society projects onto those individuals its stereotypical image of the racist, terrorist and yob. These stereotypes in turn partly represent the racism, destructive violence and anti-social attitudes of normal, tolerant members of society themselves. By then suppressing those individuals and confining them to a limited, private space, society believes that it is dealing with racism, terrorism and mindless thuggery themselves – in the same way, and for the same reason, that respectable and respected members of the tolerant society believe they have resolved these very tendencies in themselves: by locking them up in a private, mental space that does not, and must not, be articulated openly.

In other words, all of us individually, and society as a whole, bear an uncanny resemblance to the racist, terrorist and hoodlum. They are as it were extreme manifestations of our own petty intolerances. But because we cannot admit to being intolerant, violent and anti-social in whichever respects apply to each of us, we end up wanting to suppress those extreme examples rather than deal with the underlying issues, which would involve confronting the 'enemy within' ourselves. That's not to deny that racism, terrorism and anti-social behaviour are real problems in the external world, for which practical solutions need to be sought. On the contrary, no real solution to these issues can be found if we're not prepared to admit that we're also an integral part of the problem.

Putting this in more straightforward language: to what extent really is any kind of understanding of the reasons for antagonism between the different races, nationalities and religions currently crowded together in the UK advanced by merely stigmatising Jade Goody as a racist and reprimanding Channel Four for not censoring material that offended the veneer of British inter-racial, multi-cultural tolerance and harmony? Similarly, we do not know whether the terrorist suspects that escaped from their Control Order detention the other week were really terrorists or not: one of the purposes of Control Orders is to suppress any possibility of public scrutiny of these cases and of an open debate on the grievances of those who might be drawn to terrorist-type violence. Tony Blair said we were placing too much emphasis on the civil liberties of the suspect. But if they're only suspects – assumed to be innocent until proven guilty – surely, they should be accorded every civil liberty. But 'suspect' in Blair's book seems to imply that that they are, and indeed they are treated as, guilty without trial.

Mr Blair himself, of course, has been widely accused of being the equivalent of a terrorist: a war criminal and mass murderer because of the direct and indirect consequences of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Branding someone a terrorist or a war criminal is a way to distance and differentiate oneself from one's enemy: to refuse to see any parallel or linkage between your actions and those of your adversary. And so the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians are not to be compared with those of 2,000 tragic victims of 9/11. The former are a consequence of 'justifiable' resistance to terrorism and defence of Western strategic interests; while the latter are mere terrorism – not an example of an albeit extreme and, in some cases, desperate response to the injustices for which the West is blamed in Palestine and to Western efforts to place the Middle East firmly under its control. And yet millions of tolerant British citizens gave Mr Blair their approval for the Iraqi foray – apparently accounting the lives of Arab civilians that would be lost as of less importance than those of the Westerners supposedly threatened by Saddam's WMD; just as the so-called Islamist terrorists apparently account the lives of Western 'infidels' as of less importance than those of Muslims.

And is the anti-social individual really any more anti-social than the mass of citizens who pursue their private interests and preoccupations with little concern for those who get left behind? The 'ASBP' (anti-socially behaving person) is stigmatised, on one level, precisely because (s)he is the symbol of the asocial society we have built: one where there is no longer any real shared vision of the type of society and communities we wish to create and sustain, but where individuals invest their energies and aspirations into their own private realm – their homes, their assets, their careers and relationships. The ASBP is someone who is left behind in this rat race. Deprived of the means, opportunity or ability to strive after these personal goals – and without any social or community network to re-direct their energies – they are people confronted by social indifference and lack of personal purpose. So in a sense, it is inevitable that they take it out on a society that has turned its backs on them and attempt to wreck our nice, quiet, comfortable lives. In this way, the ASBP is perhaps more social than the rest of us: they are crying out for the help and attention of a society that doesn't want to know. Rather than opening out and engaging in the social realm that is falling apart around us, our response to ASBPs exemplifies our own social alienation that has given rise to the anti-social behaviour in the first place: the ASBP is merely suppressed, placed under the terms of an ASBO – made to become merely another private individual that will no longer demand that we reach out to them from beyond the parapets of our homes-as-castles, thereby acting in a social, collective manner that could change all of our lives and begin to re-make a broken society.

Those who we ostracise as beyond tolerance – the racist, terrorist and anti-social person – are, ultimately, symbols of the limits of our own tolerance: of the prejudiced bigot, the supporter of violence and the selfish individualist that we all are to some extent. Overcoming these problems will involve defeating them in ourselves: to love our enemies, indeed, as ourselves.

Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part Three)

Britain is the most extensively watched society in the world, in terms of the number of CCTV surveillance cameras per head of population. Three weeks ago, a senior British policeman criticised the extent of CCTV usage, expressing concern that CCTV was spreading out from the cities into the villages and that Britain was in danger of becoming a Big Brother society.

In my February blog entry, I expressed the view that Big Brother – the Channel Four reality-TV show – was a symbol for British society as a whole, as a meritocracy defined in relation to increasingly amoral market forces. Is it also a symbol for Britain as a CCTV culture: one where recording and viewing of actions and events that have previously been beyond the public view is driven by fear of the hidden forces that threaten to undermine the superficial tolerance of the market society – fear of anti-social behaviour and intentions of every kind, from the random and aggressive vandalism of local yobs to the ruthless and systematic actions of the organised criminal or terrorist?

One might say that CCTV is a prime example of the privatisation of the public domain: not just because the operation of CCTV systems is contracted out to private companies, but because it corresponds to a view of the world that is one of the citizen obsessed by watching what is happening 'out there' in the public space that threatens to overrun the security and control of his / her private realm and create a world of chaos and violence. In this way, CCTV is a way of reclaiming for the private individual a public space that has increasingly come to be seen as alienating and hostile. But at the same time, CCTV confirms and perpetuates that alienation from the public sphere, in that responsibility for making our cities, roads and countryside a secure environment in which the citizen can go about his / her private business is transferred away from individual citizens and 'outsourced' to anonymous 'providers' that are not part of the community they are watching.

Indeed, the extent of CCTV deployment in Britain could be taken as an indicator of the degree to which 'old-fashioned' communities have broken down. In a real community, streets, towns and villages belong to the people who live there, and they in turn have a sense of belonging to their environment and to each other. This is what provides real security: people watch out for each other and care for their environment; and there is not so much of a divide between that external social and physical environment, and the 'private' realm: the one flows into the other. CCTV marks the increasing retreat of individuals into private existences separated from the social and physical environment: into their homes, careers, and ever more atomised nuclear families. The external world beyond these bastions is correspondingly not only perceived as an ever greater threat to assets that are all the more vulnerable the more value is invested in them; but it actually becomes a greater threat. This is because 'the outside' is a space that the individual has absolved him- / herself of responsibility for shaping into a human and caring environment, so effectively handing it over to persons who may not have the individual's or the community's best interests at heart. In this sense, perhaps the encroachment of CCTV into the rural environment demonstrates that communities have increasingly broken down there, too, as well as in the cities.

Despite all of this, surveys show that people generally feel more secure in going about places where CCTV has been installed than where it hasn't. 'Classic' CCTV is more effective at reducing casual crime (such as muggings, car crime and violence against the person) than systematic crime, such as drug or paedophile rings, and terrorism. But even classic CCTV has its limits. Offenders can learn where the blind spots of existing cameras are; and while CCTV has a relative deterrent effect, it cannot really prevent the determined thug or thief from carrying out his / her intentions. In other words, it is no substitute for individuals or, rather, communities taking charge of their own security, and being prepared to keep watch over the places where the camera can't penetrate and to intervene when a criminal act is taking place – and the more people are involved in intervening, the less is the risk of being hurt in doing so. But the absence of such a genuine community-wide response to petty criminality and anti-social behaviour generates the demand for more and more cameras to be deployed to cover those blind spots. And as for the petty criminal or anti-social individual themselves, we simply want them taken out of the public domain, whether through detention in prisons or their equivalent, or through so-called Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), which – like anti-terrorist Control Orders – simply involve confining the offenders away from our embattled private lives into their own private spaces and homes. In either case, the problem of their intolerable behaviour is not resolved but merely displaced, to re-emerge elsewhere and on a subsequent occasion.

In other words, CCTV, as a response to behaviour that is beyond what a tolerant society can tolerate, illustrates the same ambiguities and inadequacies as Channel Four's Big Brother and Control Orders: while it appears to be a means to place radically intolerant / intolerable individuals under watch and control, it is actually a means of suppressing and censoring such intolerance rather than really dealing with it. The urge to watch such anti-social individuals is driven by a wish not to see them in a public domain that belongs to the tolerant, private individual who keeps themself to themself. The racist, terrorist or thug can continue to be a racist, terrorist or thug in a confined, private space away from our own. But this exile of the racist, terrorist or anti-social individual from our private world and consciousness means that ultimately (s)he will be free to operate in the public realm from which we have retreated.

Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part Two)

Big Brother has also failed in its duty of watchfulness in another respect, it was revealed last week. It appears that three persons who were confined to their homes under the terms of so-called 'control orders' have escaped. Control orders are a set of judicially sanctioned restrictions to certain individuals' liberties (effectively a form of house arrest). This measure is aimed at terrorist suspects, where there may not be enough hard and fast evidence to stand up in a court of law, but where the security forces are sufficiently concerned about individuals' activities to wish to impose forcible constraints upon them.

As a result of the escapes that were publicised last week, the Home Secretary (interior minister) John Reid stated that the UK might have to opt out of some of the clauses of European human rights legislation that limited the scope of control orders. He promised tougher anti-terrorist measures would be introduced before parliament by the end of June, when he and his boss Tony Blair step down. Tony Blair himself pitched into the fray yesterday (Sunday 27 May) by arguing in favour of a new police power to stop and interrogate suspects on the street. The prime minister stated, “We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first. I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong”. Well, that all depends on what qualifies you as a suspect, I suppose. And are the civil liberties of 'foreigners' any less important than those of UK subjects?

The control order regime, and the fact that it was sufficiently lax to allow these three suspects to escape, is another illustration of the British approach to dealing with radical intolerance, discussed in my last entry in connection with the Shilpa Shetty episode in Celebrity Big Brother. Control orders bear all the hallmarks of a process of suppressing and censoring people and ideas that are 'beyond tolerance', rather than dealing with them in a more publicly accountable way, or even in a more ruthless, systematic fashion that would definitely put them out of circulation. In this sense, control orders already do represent Britain's equivalent to Guantanamo Bay, a direction in which the Northern Ireland minister Peter Hain yesterday warned that the new proposed anti-terrorist measures were taking Britain.

Indeed, what more striking expression of the ambiguity of British 'zero tolerance' towards the radically intolerant could there be than control orders? Individuals are not locked up in a judicial limbo, like Guantanamo (which, to give him his 'credit', Tony Blair has argued that they should be); instead, they are 'politely' removed from the public domain and confined to the private realm of their homes. It is as if the intolerance exemplified by supposed terrorists – like the intolerance to which every citizen is prone to some extent – can be tolerated so long as it is confined to the privacy of the home and the individual's thoughts. And like any form of censorship – political or psychological – the setting up of control orders represents a means not just to suppress the individuals and ideas that are intolerable but also to censor the very mechanisms by which those persons and thoughts are suppressed: the process takes place in a sort of judicial no-man's land, outside of the normal operation of justice, where the facts of the case, the names of the individuals involved, and the values driving the activities of the 'suspects' are removed from the public domain.

In other words, control orders are a very British compromise between wanting / needing to act in a radically intolerant way towards those suspected of threatening the very tolerance upon which our liberal society rests, without having to admit that one is behaving in an intolerant manner. Because of this, control orders do preserve some elements of 'liberty' for those subjected to them: the liberties of private association, conscience and speech. We don't in fact seek to exercise mind control like the Orwellian Big Brother or, arguably, like the mental torturers of Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib. The specific control order that applied to the three escapees must also have allowed them sufficient freedom to meet or communicate with each other to co-ordinate their flight. There is perhaps even an element of British fair play involved: we allow them a bit of slack, on the basis that our gut instinct is that what we're doing to them strictly isn't fair, and on the assumption that they might have the decency to play fair in their turn and not attempt to abscond – and then we get all indignant when they have the temerity to do a runner anyway!

There's an interesting parallel between the control-order evaders and the lack of editorial oversight on which the Shilpa Shetty furore has now been blamed. When what is involved is censorship of something intolerable rather than acknowledging it and attempting to deal with it openly (whether through honest discussion or due legal process), then what happens is that rather than watching the object of suspicion, it is all too easy to take one's eye off the ball: to stop looking at the real issue and the real danger. And then that real threat, which has escaped your attention because you thought you'd placed it under control and then stopped looking at, can elude you and come back to haunt you.

The evasion of the three control-order detainees represents the danger that their actions and ideas could once again impinge upon, invade, the public domain. But in a more profound sense, their evasion presents the threat of an invasion of our privacy. Our confinement of those suspects to 'their own' private space was a means to keep them away from ours. Our British society is a private society, where the individual jealously guards their right to freely pursue their own personal and professional goals (both ever more exclusively defined in the terms of the market society, or 'private enterprise') untrammelled by the claims that religious or ideological absolutism might wish to impose upon them. The 'terrorist' or the 'racist' extremist is a threat to this tolerance based on mutual respect and pursuit of each other's private goals. They must therefore be suppressed, and their intolerance (as is ours) must be relegated to its own private space: the control-order detainees' prison-from-prison that is their home, or the prison of the Big Brother House. If they should get out – even more importantly, if their intolerable ideas should get out and gain hold – then, like the 'racist' outbursts in Celebrity Big Brother, this would indeed be an unbearable invasion of privacy.

Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part One)

Channel Four got rapped on the knuckles this week. An Ofcom report on last January's Celebrity Big Brother criticised it for broadcasting some incidents of abusive behaviour towards the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty without setting them in context or providing any opportunity for the inappropriate conduct and remarks to be challenged or reprimanded. The consequence was that around 45,000 viewers telephoned in to complain, many of whom regarded the actions of the offensive housemates as tantamount to racist bullying.

This was not in fact racist behaviour, as I've argued in some previous blog entries on the subject. Indeed, the Ofcom report makes no judgement as to whether the actions in question were racist; nor does Channel Four – in the formal apology that it has been obliged to make by Ofcom – accept that it was racist.

The issue that I am mainly interested in here is not a debate on what constitutes racism, or whether racism still has deep roots in British society. Rather, the whole episode casts a fascinating and somewhat dark light on what might lie behind the much-vaunted British value and national characteristic of tolerance; and on how we react to those who attack and threaten the socio-economic system we have built up around it. The question it raises is, how do we – as a nation – tolerate those who are intolerant: those who question the whole liberal basis of our tolerance and who may even seek to overthrow it altogether?

The British solution is not to seek to take on and eradicate intolerant movements and their representatives through direct political action, repressive measures or draconian laws. Such an approach would itself violate the principles of tolerance for the freedoms of others, even – within reason – those who portray themselves as the enemies of our own freedoms. The British method is to suppress and mute intolerance: to censor it and remove from the public domain into the private realm. In this way, we act towards the intolerance of others as we do to our own: we wall it up in the privacy of our thoughts, hearts and homes, and do not allow it to voice and manifest itself in our interactions with others – at least, if we want to be thought reasonable and respectable.

In the case of Big Brother, a group of private individuals are indeed locked away into a sort of home. But here, the reverse process seems to be at work: the people concerned are confined in the Big Brother House in order to be exposed in the public domain, not hidden from it. However, precisely because of the intense public scrutiny to which the housemates are subjected, along with the dictatorial rules that are imposed on them, the participants are placed in a situation where they do in fact have to suppress and hide away their intolerant reactions to one another, along with their self-seeking stratagems and tactics to take advantage of one another and enhance their chances of winning the game. Often, of course, within the intimacy of the 'Diary Room', the contestants will 'open up' and express their irritation or prejudices towards one or other of their co-residents, thereby covering up an attempt to damage the chances of their rivals under the guise of an all too understandable private exasperation at someone they cannot stand – a feeling that they must suppress within the 'public' domain of their interactions with other contestants inside the house.

The whole 'premise' of the Big Brother House is that it blurs the distinctions between the public and private realms in this way. In the case of Celebrity Big Brother, the model of confinement within a private space being designed to at once suppress and expose in the public domain individuals' private thoughts and feelings is complicated still further. In this case, the contestants are already well known to the public. Their sojourn in the BB House therefore appeals to the audience's curiosity to peer through celebrities' public personae and catch a glimpse of their private selves (and even their 'private parts', let's be honest). By contrast, the appeal for the participants themselves is almost the opposite: that the show offers them some further 'exposure', puts them in front of the public eye and offers them a chance to present an attractive public persona, thereby potentially revitalising or relaunching a flagging career.

In this sense, the Shilpa Shetty episode clearly delivered on Celebrity Big Brother's dual selling point: exposing normally suppressed intolerant and aggressive attitudes to the public view; and providing an avenue for a fading Bollywood star to launch her career as a Western movie actress and celebrity. However, the programme has now been adjudged guilty of being too honest and realistic: too much 'reality TV', in fact, and not enough mindless entertainment. Indeed, you could say that the show failed to be sufficiently Big-Brother with regard to the naked hostility that was shown towards Shilpa, expressed and justified – in the eyes of those responsible – in the terms of cultural prejudice and stereotype.

The original Big Brother – the Orwellian one, in the novel 1984 – did not merely seek to watch over the private actions and intimate thoughts of citizens; but, where these were ideologically intolerable, the state sought to transform those thoughts from within by inventing a new form of language – Double Speak – that represented a sort of knowing lie that the individual came to believe because the old honest language came gradually to be forgotten. In the case of Celebrity Big Brother, the show failed to make the outbursts of Jade Goody and others 'acceptable' by presenting them within an editorial context that allowed a politically correct spin to be placed on them and appropriate sanctions on the offending individuals to be imposed. In other words, the programme merely exposed the private prejudices and intolerant reactions of its contestants but did not – unlike its Orwellian predecessor – seek to transform them by making the transgressors publicly confess to their 'crimes' and commit themselves to not 're-offending' in the same way.

Celebrity Big Brother got its brief wrong: its purpose is not merely to expose the ugly face of hidden intolerance but, in fact, to participate in society's attempt to suppress it, in part by narrativising a process whereby individuals come to recognise their faults, reform their ways and reconcile their differences. The object of Big Brother's systematic surveillance, in fact, is precisely not to watch intolerance but to censor it from the public domain. The editorial failings of the programme boiled down to the fact that viewers were indeed forced to watch a spectacle of intolerance. Big Brother may well have been watching the housemates, but it wasn't vigilant: it didn't see what was going wrong early enough in order to prevent it from escalating almost to the status of a crime.

And now, in order to prevent a recurrence, the ordinary, non-Celebrity version of the programme that is once again starting up will itself be watched over. The author of the Ofcom report stated: “I . . . welcome the measures that they have taken to ensure proper and rigorous oversight. We will be watching very closely to ensure that these have the desired effect”. The Commission for Racial Equality also said it would be “keeping a close eye” on the new series of Big Brother: “We will be monitoring it carefully to ensure that such disgraceful behaviour is not repeated”, a spokesman said. And so we now have the 'spectacle' of the watchdogs of the media and of political correctness watching over Big Brother in order to ensure that as Big Brother watches the show's contestants, it keeps a watchful eye over what it is acceptable or not for its viewers to watch. More a case of 'Big Brother, you're being watched' than 'Big Brother is watching you'.

But the one thing we won't be watching, if the regulators get their way, is any all too realistic scenes of unacceptable intolerance.

The Amoral Market and the Randomness Of Reward: Inventing Britain For the 21st Century (Part Seven)

The TV show ‘Big Brother’ is a competition: “only a gameshow”, as the contestants of the first ever, non-celebrity version of the programme chanted out at one point. But as such, it is a metaphor for contemporary British society – reality TV.

In the second of this blog series on ‘Britology’ (the cultural project to define and unite around ‘British values’), on 3 December, I listed one of the most important contemporary British values as ‘free competition (of ideas, individuals, businesses, economies)’. This is the form that freedom takes in modern Britain: not the high-minded Enlightenment concept of Liberty (although it is a practical development of it), nor the Christian idea of moral freedom. It is essentially what happens to freedom when the model for society as a whole is the market. Freedom becomes the right to compete fully in the market place, as it provides the fundamental condition for the market place to be genuinely a market: one where goods and services are allowed to find their true ‘value’ based on the principles of supply and demand – the matching of our desires with the conditions for their realisation.

This is not to say that freedom in the pure meanings defined above is not also thought to be an essential British value. But, strictly speaking, freedom is not a value in itself: it is the very condition for objects, desires and actions to be of value to us, and to be perceived as good or bad, because then they are things that we have chosen. Cultures endow freedom with their own meanings and ‘purpose’: freedom is the possibility of choosing and embracing something that a given culture or society holds dear. In modern Britain, the exercise of ‘choice’ has become associated more with consumer choices (choice as a fundamental condition and characteristic of the market-society), rather than with informed moral choice, or even with choosing a form of society on the basis of some notion of the collective good or other ideological belief.

In this context, in contemporary British culture, the value or merit of ideas, individuals or physical objects is increasingly not perceived to be intrinsic (related to their moral status, beauty or ability to serve real human needs, for instance) but depends on their desirability and marketability: their ability to appeal to our free choices, to compete successfully in the market (to ‘participate fully in society’), thereby vindicating the efficacy of the free market itself to deliver what we want (to ‘realise our aspirations’). This model for society admits of an egalitarian dimension when it is allied to the goal of bringing about the inclusion of previously marginalised and disadvantaged groups, such as gays and lesbians, ethnic minorities and disabled persons. In the society-as-market paradigm, the condition of these groups is transformed when they are ‘freed’ – enabled – to participate in the market as fully as any other groups or individuals: trading themselves and ‘what they have to offer’ in exchange for society’s recognition that this has a value.

But there is an amorality and randomness about all this: the value of something becomes equated with the extent to which we want to have, do or be it; and the principal criterion by which we judge the merits of a person or action is by how they are rewarded, or not, with market / social acceptance = economic success. The reason why ‘celebrity culture’ has taken off in the way it has is because celebrity (popularity and commercial success, fame and fortune) has acquired pseudo-intrinsic value as a symbol of the power of the market to realise the dreams of nobodies (people of no value) and turn them into somebodies (valuable commodities).

Big Brother is in this sense a microcosm of modern Britain. It is a show that specialises in taking nobodies and turning them into instant celebrities and valuable commodities simply by exposing them to a mass-market audience and a democratic (and highly lucrative) popular vote: less of a mirror to society than a metaphor of our society as shop window. It is no accident, in Blair’s Britain, that Big Brother’s success in endowing supposedly ordinary individuals with enhanced social-market value has been such an influential egalitarian fast-tracker, helping to bring a whole variety of previously ‘undervalued’ groups into the socio-economic mainstream through the democratic acceptance their symbolic representatives have attained through the show. Gays, lesbians, women, transsexuals, racial minorities, disabled people and, yes, even Christians have either won Big Brother or done extremely well in it – expressing the social will that these previously discriminated groups should be allowed to enjoy the rewards of the market-society as fully as any other sections of it.

If the value of individuals, lifestyles and social groups is measured in terms of their right and ability to participate on level terms in the social market, what this means is that the morality of those individuals and lifestyles becomes secondary to their socio-economic value (their ‘contribution to society’). Moral choices become a series of ‘lifestyle options’, and the moral good is equated with what is ‘good for society’: with whatever contributes to greater social inclusion; greater participation in the free (and liberating) market; and the encompassing of ever more aspects of life within the market, resulting in their legitimisation. Ultimately, this leads to a sort of moral neutrality or equivalence: the moral good converges with the concept of equality, such that the good is no longer a factor of differentiation (setting apart right from wrong), but, on the contrary, the good is whatever contributes to the greatest lack of ethical discrimination between ‘competing’ choices and lifestyles. In this context, the ‘common good’ (associated with the idea that that there are certain actions and choices that can be of benefit to the whole or greater part of the community and of society) is replaced by a belief that all individuals and choices are of equal value (equivalent, ‘equally valid’, as good as one another). Instead of the qualitative idea of the common good, we have a quantitative notion of the ‘best’, which is whichever lifestyle, product or individual is most successful in the social market – whichever becomes the most widely adopted and most commonly accepted (common goods, indeed). The reversal of traditional morality is completed when it is the centres of resistance to this commercialisation and equalisation of values – such as the Catholic Church, nationalism and Islam – that are vilified and morally condemned.

The recent row over gay adoption was a case in point. One of the most interesting – and least commented – aspects of the controversy was the way adoption was framed as a sort of commercial service offered by adoption agencies to would-be parents. The whole context of the discussion was the sexual orientation regulations in the forthcoming Equality Bill, which set out the bases for ensuring equal access to goods and services irrespective of sexual orientation. But is adoption a commercial service in this way? If that is the case, then adopted children become a sort of product that gay couples are allowed to purchase on the free market on equal terms with straight couples, married or not; and adoption agencies’ ‘services’ are offered to the parents, not the children, and consist essentially of matching children with suitable parents in rather a similar way to the pairing of individuals carried out by dating agencies or the matching of potential employees to vacant positions provided by recruitment agencies.

But this is not really what adoption is all about: it should be a service of love towards the children, whereby the agencies are dedicated to finding parents who in turn will serve the children with their life-long love and support. Beneath all the rhetoric and position taking on both sides of the debate, the issue was very much one of a conflict between a traditional Christian ethic focused on the needs of the children and the demand of the market society for an equal supply of children to fulfil the desires of all would-be parents, irrespective of their lifestyle choices. This in part accounts for the fact that the perspective of the needs of the children was relatively absent from the arguments of the pro-gay adoption side: these needs were secondary to the demand for equal ‘rights’ to access adoption services – the rights of adopters being implicitly prioritised over what is right for the children. Maybe also, as most of the people defending the cause of equality for gay people in this area were straight, there was an element of not wanting to delve too deeply into the question of the needs of the children; as the majority of straight people perhaps secretly feel that adoption by a stable heterosexual couple is in fact the best option for children, despite the social market-equality agenda.

The row over the supposed racist bullying of Celebrity Big Brother (CBB) participant Shilpa Shetty by Jade Goody and other contestants was another example of a clash between the Big Brother model of social-market equality and more traditional ideas of cultural separation. I’ve written about the CBB controversy in previous blog entries. In brief, Shilpa was not a victim of racism but of a sort of jealousy and bitchiness that is capable of being read, to some extent, as representative of a not uncommon English-nationalist resentment and resistance towards people of other nationalities and races taking advantage of the British free market-society and competing successfully within it, to the apparent detriment of those who were born here. In the discussions on the show, Shilpa was clearly seen as a representative of the ideals of social-market integration: that people of all nations and races should be allowed to compete freely, equally and fairly in British society and its cultural-economic extension – the global market. But Jade Goody’s behaviour – for all its aggression and crudeness – could be seen as the expression of a wish for England to be for the English and India to be for the Indians: a defence of separate, distinctive national-cultural identities. This is not just jingoistic and racist: the wish to maintain differences between cultures can, on the contrary, be seen as proceeding from a concern to hold on to things that are precious and distinctive about one’s country and background, and not for everything to be absorbed into the globalised free market in which all cultures are equally valid to one’s own, and have an equal right to exist in – and compete against – one’s own culture.

Similarly, Shilpa Shetty’s own aspiration to compete and achieve success in a Western market (symbolised and actualised by her participation in CBB) could be seen as symptomatic of how the success of ethnic Indians and of the nation of India in the global economy is actually contributing to a loss of distinctive aspects of Indian culture, rather than being an affirmation of them. Shilpa Shetty – the Bollywood star – was not setting out to bring Bollywood to a mass market in the West, but rather to leave behind her Indian background and to forge a career in Western films and TV: on Western terms. This is perhaps one of the meanings of Jade’s suggestion to Shilpa that she should go and visit some of the slums in her country: not so much an insult to India as a poor and backward country, but an implication that Shilpa was so concerned to make a career for herself on the global market that she was indifferent to the continuing hardships faced by the people – Indian filmgoers – who’d given her the opportunity in the first place. In this context, Shilpa could be seen as representative of an individualistic, free-market-competitive notion of equality superseding a true concern for social equality, opportunity and solidarity on a more collective level.

Shilpa Shetty was a convenient symbol of ‘pure’ racism, uncomplicated by other factors that might have made the unpleasant language directed towards her more recognisable: appearing to have more in common with generally held opinions and ordinary behaviour. Ethnic Indians constitute one of the most successfully integrated racial minorities in British society, and this is what made it easy to view Shilpa’s treatment as simply racist: motivated by prejudice, ignorance and race hate rather than by broader socio-economic and cultural factors. But if a Polish or Lithuanian immigrant had taken Shilpa’s place and received the same treatment, would it have been possible to present it as racist? If so, then all the many people up and down the land who resent the way in which low-paid jobs have been given to Central and Eastern European immigrants – pushing down wages and, so the argument goes, reducing opportunities for British people – are also merely racist and bigoted. And how different the arguments would have been if Shilpa were a burka- and niqab-wearing Asian Muslim! Then her victimisation could not have been described as racist, not only because it would have been more obvious that it was more accurately viewed as the expression of socio-cultural insecurity and defensiveness; but also because many of those decrying the ‘bullying’ of Shilpa Shetty would actually agree with at least the ‘philosophical’ basis for strong suspicion of the Muslim veil, if not the overtly aggressive expression of that hostility that might have been provided by Jade Goody! After all, what does the veil symbolise? One of the things it symbolises – at least from the point of view of Western onlookers – is the resistance of orthodox Islam to the Western market-society in which all have a right – indeed, a natural inclination – to trade themselves, their goods and services freely, openly and equally: women as much as men. And this resistance of course has a spiritual and moral foundation: ethical differentiation between right and wrong lifestyles, and between the expected roles and behaviour of men and women, versus the social-market-egalitarian view that all have a right – and therefore, it is right – to lead a full, independent and active socio-economic existence.

In this context, it was highly invidious when – in a speech on multiculturalism at the end of January 2007 – the UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron compared Muslim ‘extremists’ with members of the hard-right British National Party (BNP). Not many commentators seem to have pointed out how conceptually screwball and insulting towards Muslims this comparison is. Islam is one of the bugbears of the BNP, and the party’s supporters in its strongholds have been linked with campaigns designed to fuel prejudice and even violence against Muslim communities. It’s about as accurate as equating Nazis with Communists: OK, their actions might have been similar but not their philosophical justification. This is no better than when President Bush condemned ‘Islamists’ as ‘Islamic fascists’. It’s an example of just how prejudiced and extreme in its turn is the tendency for moral equalisation inherent within the social-market-egalitarian point of view. Just as any lifestyle and form of economic activity that promotes a dynamic free market is capable of being seen as ‘good’, anything that opposes the amoral, global market is seen as ‘evil’; and therefore, fascists and ‘Islamists’ are somehow equivalent.

The problem is the definition of what is an ‘extremist’, and Mr Cameron’s view appears to be that anyone who is in favour of the introduction of Shariah law is an extremist. Promoting such a thing through violence and insurrection could certainly qualify for the epithet of ‘extremist’; but holding Shariah law as an ideal for the whole of society is probably something that the majority of Muslims around the world regard as integral to their faith. So is it a form of extremism merely to be a devout, committed Muslim who attempts to structure his or her daily life around the dictates of Shariah; and who regards the commitment to Islam as fundamentally more important, morally and ontologically, than any commitment to a secular state and to the material benefits of economic life? The ‘racist’ (BNP) and the ‘Islamist extremist’ are facile categories with which anyone who resists the desired unification of Britain around an optimised and globalised free market-society can be readily assimilated. The views that are stigmatised in this way can then be condemned as promoting social division rather than merely standing for a different society and way of life than the competitive free market-society into which the unifiers would have us all fully engaged: to be different and separate from the market society is therefore simply equated with divisiveness.

There is perhaps no more compelling symbol of the way the British political establishment is wedded to the idea that market forces are inherently good, and can always be channelled to serve the cause of economic regeneration and social inclusion, than the government’s enthusiasm to allow the development of so-called ‘super-casinos’: Las Vegas-style ‘gaming’ (=gambling) complexes. On announcing recently that the first of these casinos was to be built in a deprived area of the city of Manchester, the government attempted to justify this choice on the basis that the new gambling venue would bring employment and regeneration to a place where it was desperately needed. But no consideration was given to the broader harm to individuals and society as a whole that will inevitably come from more people being drawn into gambling addiction by the lure of such places. Instead, the emphasis was placed on gambling being just another form of entertainment choice, which consumers (gamblers) were entitled to have the opportunity to make or not to make.

In this way, gambling stands as another metaphor for the way in which the amoral market, and the random nature of success or failure in it, has come to replace traditional moral judgements of right and wrong, and of reward being linked to true merit (as opposed to success being viewed as meretricious in its own right). There are winners and losers in the lottery of the market society – but that’s just life, isn’t it? You pays your money and takes your choice. Just as gay couples, so the argument goes, have the right to choose – and it is right that they can choose – whether to spend their money on adopting children. Just as paying TV viewer / voters have the right to choose / it is right that they did choose to support an Indian Bollywood star who was trading on her sex appeal as the innocent victim of racism; rather than choosing a more random celebrity – Jade Goody – on whom those same viewers could vent their envy of the coveted fame and fortune they’d not been able to achieve. Just as senior politicians have the right to – it is right that they should – brand Muslim traditionalists as extremists because they resist the encroachment of the market into every aspect of life; thereby adding fuel to the fire of British-nationalist Islamophobia, and then adding insult to injury by comparing Islamic supporters of Shariah to their very enemies in the BNP.

After all, we live in a free society in Britain, don’t we? And the purpose of freedom is to create a competitive, dynamic market society, in which all individuals, goods and services can realise their true value. But this freedom isn’t made available so that ‘extremists’ can abuse it – in the name of so-called ‘free speech’ – by daring to question its morality and socio-cultural consequences. So cultural conservative, Catholic traditionalist or devout Muslim beware. Speak out, criticise the morality of the global market ideal at your peril. Because in Britain, Big Brother is watching you.

Big Brother Is Watching You: Why Jade Goody’s Demonisation Was Timely

Big Brother Is Watching You: Why Jade Goody’s Demonisation Was Timely

Let’s accept for the moment that the row about the supposed racist bullying on Celebrity Big Brother has been blown out of all proportion to the actual offence (see blog of 21 January). I’m not saying it wasn’t offensive, as clearly, many thousands of viewers genuinely were offended. But it certainly wasn’t racist. Jade Goody’s words and actions expressed racial prejudices and stereotypes, that’s clear. But that doesn’t equate to racism. Jade didn’t say and do what she did because Shilpa Shetty is ethnically and nationally Indian but because she felt she was being looked down on by someone who thought they were socially superior, and because she was jealous. Bitching rather than bullying.

The terms ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ have become cheapened. Anyone who dares to say or even think anything that implies a prejudiced or negatively stereotypical view of another race or culture can now be labelled a racist; whereas, in fact, such views are an inevitable part of human nature and ignorance, and are often no different from the stereotypes different European nations have always nurtured about each other: French frog’s leg eaters, German sauerkraut munchers, etc. No one would seriously call these ridiculous clichés racist. Or would they? One thing’s for sure, people had better be on their guard from now on and mind their language, because the PC thought police have been alerted: Big Brother is watching us!

The fact that so many worthies – politicians, religious leaders, cultural commentators – have joined in the chorus of condemnation leads one to wonder what particular nerve this incident has touched. Jade has been made a scapegoat: not by the angry lynch mob seizing on a hapless bystander in order to seek vengeance for a violent rape or child abuse; nor by a racist political party blaming the Jew or the Asian for all its countries ills. No, this act of scapegoating has been endorsed by some of the highest moral authorities in the land. So it must be serving a particularly acute purpose for British culture at the present time.

Jade has been made a scapegoat because the BB antics have shown up the claim that Britain is an inherently tolerant nation to be a lie. The reality, as revealed by reality TV, is that we’re all a bit racist like Jade and her co-contestants: carrying within our heads any number of more or less unconscious prejudices about people of other races and cultures, which we perhaps sometimes voice in private or even rehearse in the silent realm of our unspoken thoughts; but never in public, never on TV before an audience of millions. That is clearly unacceptable. It’s unacceptable because it’s broken a taboo that’s become more powerful even than the former sexual taboos. We can now say the F-word as freely as we like; but say or do anything that has a hint of racism about it, and we deserve no place in the Big Brother house.

The important point is that the idea of tolerance has recently become a central plank in the project to define essential British values and virtues around which the integration of different cultures and religions can be achieved. Shilpa Shetty – a sophisticated, Westernised, successful career woman – stands as a symbol for this integration. One could say that she both symbolises the increasing integration of modern India into the global economy and culture, and serves as a model for a similar integration that many would like to see taking place between the West and the Muslim world. In this sense, Ms Shetty is the antithesis of the traditionalist Muslim woman who wears a veil out of deference to her husband and obedience to her faith. Just imagine the furore and international crisis that would have been sparked off if they’d put a devout, veil-wearing Muslim woman into the Big Brother house instead of Shilpa Shetty, and if she’d been the victim of racial abuse and bullying!

That wouldn’t have been racism, though, would it? That would have been, in fact, a rather uncomfortable combination of cultural and religious prejudice, and what many would perceive to be justifiable criticism and suspicion. That perception would be held by many of the people who now condone the scapegoating of Jade Goody for alleged racism. Far better to have an all-too similar example of prejudiced attitudes and behaviour that can be simplistically characterised and vilified as purely racist. Then there can be no confusion between racism and Western hostility towards traditionalist Islam; they can be kept in safe, distinct categories. One is bigoted hatred towards people ‘because of the colour of their skin’; the other is justifiable reluctance to tolerate traditional practices that appear to entrench potentially destructive cultural divisions. One is irreconcilable intolerance of difference; the other is intolerance of irreconcilable difference. However, both embody fear of, and prejudice towards, the Other.

So turning Jade into a hateful caricature of a racist has come at an opportune moment: it allows a clear distinction to be made in the eyes of the British public between unreasonable racism and reasonable criticism of Islam. And, at the same time, the ritualistic collective washing of our hands from the stain of racism allows us to demonstrate to the Muslim community that we are not racist like Jade, nor crudely Islamophobic; but that actually, we believe in fairness, unity and equality between different races and cultures: that – unlike Jade – we do really tolerate difference and wish only to bring about a society in which all people and cultures can be treated with equal respect.

Except that – in the person of Shilpa Shetty – it’s not difference that’s being embraced but a vision of assimilation. Even more than East-West integration, Ms Shetty symbolises the arrival of India as a power in the West: the aspiration of modern India and ethnic Indians to compete on level terms – or even on superior terms – with Western nations on the global stage. Jade, on the other hand, tapped into an undercurrent of resentment about the growing economic and cultural success and influence enjoyed by India and ethnic Indians, in this country and globally. India is asserting itself proudly and rapidly becoming an invaluable cog in the Western economy, which is increasingly dependent on the services and skills provided by Indian firms at a fraction of what they would cost using Western staff. What was especially insulting towards Indians in some of Jade’s remarks was that they exemplified a stereotypical image of India as backward and dirt-poor: an attitude inherited from the era of Empire, when India was indeed in a highly inferior and dependent position in relation to the West; the age of the Indian take-away not that of the Indian take-over.

So it’s not really Indian cultural differences that are being defended in the BB case against the ‘racist’ that wants to keep ‘subordinate’ races in their place. Rather, it’s the right of Indians and India to be more like us – more like us, in some ways, than we even are ourselves. So much so that the posh-speaking Shilpa exemplified almost a complete role reversal: she was the classy, well-mannered ‘princess’ speaking perfect grammatical English; while Jade felt relegated to the category of the retrograde, ill-mannered underclass speaking crude and ungrammatical English. English, in other words, like what it’s spoke in England today; not as in our imperial past, which is how it is learnt in India. Jade’s was the response of the former colonial nation that fears that its former slaves will become its masters: irrational and unjustifiable this may be, but there is not a total absence of anything in reality to make those fears seem believable to some. But for the liberal intelligentsia, Shilpa symbolises a righting of historical wrongs: the right to equal access to the benefits of Western civilisation that were denied to Indians under the Empire. The right, that is, to be an equal partner in our continuing imperialism: the ethical imperialism that seeks the global triumph and vindication of 'our values' – those 'Christo-liberal' values of economic, social and personal freedom, equality and unification to which only the ‘extremist’ (rabid racist or fundamentalist Muslim) could possibly object.

Only those, in other words, who are pariahs because they beg to differ.

Big Brother, Little Britain: Have We Suddenly Become an Intolerant Society?

Big Brother, Little Britain: Have We Suddenly Become an Intolerant Society?

What a lot of cant has been written and spoken about the Big Brother ‘racism’ row this week! For a start, it is not at all self-evident that the behaviour and remarks about the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty made by celebrity contestants Jade Goody and others do qualify as racism. Prejudiced and insulting they may be; but racism is an extremely strong term. One can have racial prejudices without being racist. Racism implies having a hatred towards an individual or ethnic group simply because of their race or religion. I don’t think Jade Goody’s antagonism was motivated – at least not primarily – by race hate. Channel 4 was right to state that they were unsure whether the hostility shown towards Shetty Shilpa wasn’t more to do with cultural and class differences. And I believed Jade herself when she disowned any racial motivation in what she’d done. Of course, there can be unconscious fear and dislike of other races; but I don’t think any human being alive is totally immune from that.

The reality of whether or not Jade and her co-contestants have acted in a racist way has become less important than the need to banish any appearance of racism from our TV screens. For once, reality TV has done its job and exposed racism for what it mostly is: petty, bound up with silly cultural stereotypes, and just part of the language and coping mechanisms through which people of different classes and backgrounds vent the frustrations of having to live together. But it’s not race hate, in this instance at least.

The irony of it is that it’s some of the champions of Britain’s supposed intrinsic tolerance that have been most up in arms condemning the behaviour of the contestants as symptomatic of – in Archbishop John Sentamu’s words – “an ugly underbelly in society only too ready to point the finger at the foreigner, or those who might not fit in”. Well, I’m sorry; it’s condemnation of Jade in these terms that shows Britain up as an intolerant society just as much as her actual words and actions. Those remarks are classist and prejudiced in their turn: based more on a stereotypical image of ill-educated, working-class racism than the reality of what went on. I think the biblical injunction applies: do not condemn the splinter in your brother’s eye until you remove the plank from your own.

Jade has become if anything more of a scapegoat than the scapegoat she supposedly made Shilpa into. As with any scapegoating, it’s been necessary to distort and exaggerate the supposed evil Jade represents; and then cast it onto an acceptable object for our derision: an ignorant, ‘undeserving’ celebrity from a ‘white-trash’ background. In this way, she can be fully separated out from the mainstream of tolerant, educated, middle-class Britain to which people of all races – such as Shilpa Shetty or John Sentamu – have the right to aspire.

There’s a word for this: inverted racism. But let’s not confuse it with race hate. Let’s just call it verbalising class and cultural prejudice. A necessary outlet, indeed, to ensure we can all still get on together.