Political and other leaders and opinion-formers, if they can help it, shy away from what are cast as inter-cultural controversies, for fear of appearing to favour one group over the other
Liberal values are undermined by misguided attempts at neutrality, warns Zia Haider Rahman
The deep currents of a society do not show themselves in banner headlines announcing, for example, a decision to go to war; such events are driven more by transient demands than by the slow heave of a society's cultural change. So it is that a minor news item last month, barely surfacing above the hubbub of party conferences, quite possibly provided the clearest signal of where Britain and the West more generally are heading.
In September, Clarence House announced that Prince Charles would not be attending a charity film premiere in part, we were told, to avoid the protests that will inevitably attend the first showing of Brick Lane, a movie based on Monica Ali's novel of the same name. The first loss is his: Brick Lane is a breathtakingly moving film – one that reminds you what cinema can do.
But the second loss is ours, for when the prince decided to withdraw from the royal film performance, Britain edged closer towards becoming a society that bows to the whims and sensitivities of fringe groups, however absurd and illiberal their claims might be. It is in this way – not through immigration, as we often hear, but by our own hands, through the small day-to-day concessions we make in the name of cultural or religious sensitivity – that Britain loses something of itself that is worth keeping.
Brick Lane (both the novel and the film) have attracted protests from some East End residents of Bangladeshi origin. One protestor, the BBC reported, said: 'If you're going to write certain things then don't upset people. That's all we ask. It's upsetting our elders and giving us a bad name.' That particular protestor admitted to not having read the book, though he had read 'bits and pieces' while other sections had been explained to him. A photograph shows another protestor holding a placard with the words 'Monica’s book is full of lies'. Which is, in one sense, hard to contradict: it’s a novel, for goodness’ sake.
I have met people who hold these views. I lived on Brick Lane for some years and remain a governor of a school on the street. But special knowledge is unnecessary. The position of the average protestor is simple enough to understand: a book which upsets him (for they were almost all, to a man, men) and gives 'his people' a bad name should be banned. If anyone has explained to these protestors that book-burning or protesting against books they have not read is more likely to give them a bad name, then they have not grasped this.
Nor, however, have liberals properly grasped the essential nature of the conflict – and, make no mistake, there is a conflict at the root of all this, to which I shall come.
Shiv Malik, writing recently in the Observer, has argued that the issue is one of liberals failing to support artistic truth. 'White elites', he believes, 'are incapable of standing by the integrity of their commissioned works because of fear and guilt over race.' Malik rightly points the finger at the bien pensant, but naïvely characterises the issue as concerning the defence of the arts. The hope that British society could ever be moved to rally to the support of artists overlooks a history of society lagging behind those who test and push its artistic boundaries, from Wilde’s Salome to Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Artistic integrity is for many, at its highest, a smug abstraction and, at its lowest, a cover for moral depravity.
Writing for the Guardian, Monica Ali provided a penetrating reading of the forces at play in this particular controversy. She argued that it was a sideshow overblown by a media so hungry for controversy that it wouldn’t let the facts get in the way. The reality was, as we now know, that the reported crowds of protestors were never more than a few of the same usual suspects, something which was seldom apparent in the media reports. Ali described an 'outrage-economy' in which grievances based on feelings – and those of a relative few, at that – rather than arguments based on logic and reason become the stuff of media trade. The reportage of outrage makes for riveting news: they play to our baser instincts.
But if the market forces of the outrage-economy are to be blamed for making stories out of molehills, then Ali’s analysis is ultimately pessimistic because, short of censorship, surely nothing could motivate the media to restrain itself from accurately reporting an uncontroversial story when inaccurately doing so could spice it up so nicely?
Yet restrain itself the media will do – and has done – though for all the wrong reasons. When the Danish cartoon episode broke, virtually the entire British media decided not to reproduce those cartoons. On that occasion, they gave us an incomplete and therefore inaccurate account of a genuine controversy of the highest order. One after another, news editors told us that re-publishing the pictures would only inflame passions and that sensitivity had to be shown to the feelings of Muslims. The story was the major news item around the world for over a week and yet the British press decided not to allow its readers the benefit of seeing what it was that had caused such a commotion.
Since when did the news media concern itself with not hurting the feelings of any particular group? Of course, the reality is that much of the press and other media conceded to implicit threats emanating from those Muslims who have little regard for the liberal value of freedom of speech when it doesn’t suit their purposes.
Our grievance should indeed be directed at our elites and opinion-formers. Standing up to the obscurantist nonsense of Brick Lane protestors would serve as an important statement of liberal values. Instead, they scurry away for fear of causing offence. Those in positions of influence must face up to the conflict that is at the heart of all this.
That conflict can be seen in different arenas in Britain and the wider West, from arguments over artists' rights and responsibilities and the wearing of religious symbols in classrooms, to the broadening of laws against incitement to particular kinds of hatred and the extent to which employees should be free to act according to conscience. Through such issues, the drama of 'value-pluralism', of which Isaiah Berlin wrote, is being played out in our daily lives.
Berlin powerfully argued that there are values across cultures which are incommensurable and, moreover, incompatible. This is not moral relativism, which admits no scope for anyone to rank values, but a philosophical outlook that regards values as intrinsic to human nature. What is necessary is to remain vigilant to any insistence on values which emanate from a monist perspective that does not permit pluralism. Fundamentalist religions often exhibit such tendencies. But the perspective of the Brick Lane protestors equally falls within the same category.
We should be keen to detect the small ways in which illiberal, exclusivist values express themselves, and, moreover, to check the ways in which we give in to them. The cumulative effect of these concessions may be even more undermining of how we wish to live than the destruction of towers.
Clashes of values will only proliferate in the near future as different groups (whether united by religion, ethnicity or anything else), perceiving themselves to be under siege, dig in and insist on their rights to express their values. There will be some occasions on which such clashes will pit entire communities against each other and they will present immense difficulties to resolve.
But on other occasions, we will see that such a supposed clash is really the handiwork of a small but vocal minority (perhaps aided by a conflict-hungry press). We must interrogate the motives of such groups. As Ali observed, one suspects that more than a few of these protestors were aggrieved by a book and film whose main character, an adulterous woman, is sympathetically portrayed.
Political and other leaders and opinion-formers, if they can help it, shy away from what are cast as inter-cultural controversies, for fear of appearing to favour one group over the other (which is precisely what the press demand of them). Yet when they take to their heels, they implicitly endorse the idea that neither side of the controversy can readily be favoured. Such reticence does enormous harm where the values in which one side bases its claims are hostile to liberal traditions and which can and should be swiftly rejected. Faux neutrality is unmasked by its indifference to illiberal demands.
The prince’s withdrawal will, by default, encourage the Brick Lane protestors and many others to greater claims. It will discourage others who may wish to take a stand against such claims. The media’s outrage-economy will tighten its grip, as a manufactured controversy pays off with a genuine one and journalists see how fruitful the enterprise of misrepresenting conflict can be. And, indeed, the centre of artistic freedom – let alone its perimeter – will lose the protection of consensus.
Small concessions matter. Because they are small, they do not draw sustained criticism. But they add up. This is the curse of sensitivity that hangs over us. By skirting the fray, we gradually demean our values and compromise our culture. Just as they are not built in a day, civilisations do not fall overnight; but brick by brick, they are dismantled, and we do not notice each small step that leads towards their passing.
Zia Haider Rahman is a writer and commentator