As Australia fumbles her way through a generally unintelligent debate about anti-racism laws and freedom of speech, I am reminded that both sides of politics indulge in totalitarian culture wars that are typical of this blighted age. On the Right, most obviously, there is the "War on Drugs". This has been an on-going catastrophe since the Nixon years, officially, but goes back into the early decades of the 20th C. It is a puritan crusade to demonize and remove unapproved substance use from the entire population. Vast sums have been spent, innumerable people have been prosecuted, and still the war goes on. Conservative politicians make mileage from denouncing any public figure who might be "soft on drugs" and, in the face of obvious defeat, argue that the war can be won if we clamp down tight enough - what we need is a culture of "zero tolerance". The Right is happy to have the State intrude into the personal recreational habits of citizens and to trash civil liberties and construct a vast policing regime in order to fight this "war". Most recently, mandatory blood testing of otherwise innocent citizens seems to be increasingly accepted as a part of this "war"; a citizen's life-blood is no longer his own private concern.
On the Left, there is a parallel war on "racism". Anything and everything that can be construed as even vaguely racialist is to be suppressed, denounced, criminalized and snuffed out at every level. This entails such intrusive measures as laws that criminalize forms of speech - or even just words - that may "offend" or simply hurt someone's feelings. There must be "zero tolerance" of bigots in all spheres of life. The slightest utterance that might be "racist" cannot be tolerated in a tolerant society. Every social construction of racism must be eliminated at root. In Australia, most infamously, two-bit social commentator and provocateur, Andrew Bolt, was successfully prosecuted for asking why white-skinned people with only one sixteenth aboriginality are claiming welfare benefits given to indigenous Australians. Bolt had dared to question someone's racial identity. This, the court determined, is illegal. The extent of such laws has led to circumstances where certain groups happily refer to themselves and each other as "nigger" but no one else - absolutely no one - is allowed to utter it in any context, not even by way of reference. (Strictly speaking, this blog should have only referred euphemistically to the "n word" and not used it at all. Tut. Tut.) The Left is happy for the State to determine what free citizens can and cannot say to each other in speech or print. There is a "war" on racism and it won't be over until all vestiges of racist thinking are expunged from the very thinking processes of the common man.
Let me say outright that I regard drug abuse and racism as evils. But in both cases, Left and Right, I am opposed to these totalitarian wars. The problem in both cases is that the wars are being waged upon reality. First reality - human beings take drugs. It is something human beings do. Second reality - human beings notice racial differences and discriminate on that basis sometimes. Human beings are racists. To suppose that we can stop human beings from taking drugs and stop human beings from being racists is just nuts. The very best we can do in either case, in my view, is "harm minimization" as they say. We might be able to create a drug free society - if you want to turn the whole world into Saudi Arabia! It would require a savagely oppressive police state. Similarly, we might be about to create a society where every last whimper of racist ideation is eliminated, but again it would require a pervasive, intrusive Big Brother policing and controlling our very thoughts. Even then, of course, human nature is irrepressible. There are drugs in Saudi Arabia and there are racial murmurs in Leftist Utopia. In the end, totalitarianism is futile, but it is very, very unpleasant in the meantime.
This makes me a conservative. I believe in a reality and I believe in human nature and I think people who don't are dangerous. Apparently, that defines me as a "conservative" these days. We should accept that people are weak and imperfect and only attempt to protect ourselves from the worst excesses of human foibles. We should accept that human beings take drugs for all sorts of reasons. We should, for all of that, take active steps to stop people dying of heroin overdose or driving drunk and stop teenagers sniffing glue, but there are limits to what it is wise to attempt and we really should accept that some harm is inevitable. Any regime of "zero tolerance" is oppressive, dangerous and bound to be ill-fated and will cause more misery than it prevents. The war on drugs has been exactly that.
Similarly, it is entirely my experience that human beings everywhere are, to a greater or lesser extent, "racist". Once I subscribed to that fond middle-class Leftist myth that only white guys like me can be racist, but then I went to Japan, and the Middle East, and elsewhere. People are racist. You realise this when you get spat on and called a "white devil". In most cases, though, it is a low-level thing. Hardened racists are as rare as full-scale smack addicts, but racism nevertheless seems to me to be part of the human lot. People mark differences between each other and will discriminate accordingly. They will. We should accept this about people. At the same time, of course we ought to stop racially motivated violence, incitement and harassment and the most blatant and harmful expressions of racialism. So too we ought to encourage and nurture a culture of racial harmony and tolerance. But there will always be bigots and the cure for that is much, much worse than the disease. The Australian Attorney-General said in parliament last week, "People have a right to be bigots." In my view, it is not so much a question of "rights" as a question of reality. People will be bigots, is the point. But they don't have to right to victimize, malign, incite, inflict harm or burn synagogues because of it.
Where one draws the line in either case is a matter of further debate and may need to shift from time to time. (Changing circumstances is also part of reality.) I would tend to err in favour of personal liberty, an unobtrusive State, and to give people a fair amount of slack. When I discover that my highly respected barrister snorts a few lines of cocaine in his spare time, well, so what, as long as he convinces the jury to find me not guilty. It is entirely his business, frankly. And when I discover that my neighbour would prefer not to rent out his house to Asians, who he regards as "smelly", I'm not going to report him to the Thought Police at the Racial Discrimination Board. It's low-level racism, distasteful certainly, but so what? On cultural differences, most Asians are hard-working and good tenants compared to many of the local Aussie bogans anyway. It's his property and his loss. (He's otherwise a nice bloke and says he doesn't mind Greeks... )
Soldiers engaged in these wars will, I know, insist that there is no parallel to be made. I think there is. In both cases, zealous activists and self-righteous busy-bodies want to engineer a utopia that is contra natura, and they are happy to resort to totalitarian means to do it. In both cases, intrusive do-gooders want to control what everyone else is thinking and doing. I don't trust them. We must remember the limits of prudent social control. You can't legislate away the human propensity to use recreational substances, nor their propensity to discriminate between observable racial characteristics. There are some evils that we just have to live with - within prudent limits. That's because people are people. I do not trust activists and warmongers, Left or Right, who have lost sight of this simple humility.
HMcB
