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It is decadent to tolerate the intolerable
In all the monstrous accusations that have been hurled since September 11 at the United States, and at the West in general, there is one that has an uncomfortable grain of truth in it, at least as far as Britain is concerned. It is the accusation of decadence. What our accusers have in mind is usually greedy, destructive, licentious, capitalist self-indulgence. I wouldn't agree entirely with that, though I suppose one would have to admit there is something in it too. What I mean is that there has, for a long time, been something decadent in Britain about our failure of conviction, our failure of self-respect.
The usual explanation for this is liberal guilt. I find it difficult to understand, partly because I don't suffer from it for some reason. I don't, for instance, feel inclined to apologise for Britain's part in the slave trade, unspeakable though it was. To feel guilty about it is to have a very weak understanding of history, or of historical responsibility. Besides, if one is going to talk in such irrational terms, several of my forebears did their best, in the Royal Navy, to stop the slave trade. But for many Britons there has been, throughout my adult life, a profound self-doubt, which can be explained only by some sort of misplaced sense of guilt, and which has deprived the indigenous Judaeo-Christian culture of confidence in itself, and in its true and admirable values.
The signs of this loss of conviction are legion and many of them have to do with anxieties about race; there is the obsession with race and "institutional racism", the Orwellian rush of every major institution to confess racist thought crimes, the adoption of the word "winterval" instead of Christmas holidays by a Midlands town council, a Christian Prime Minister using "Season's greetings" on his Christmas cards for fear of - well, fear of what? - and any number of unnecessary capitulations to what you might call the spirit of Durban.
This first struck me forcibly at the time of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. That a foreign power should openly promise to reward the murder of a British subject was bad enough. Much worse were the astonishingly symbolic images on television of other British subjects publicly burning copies of his book on great bonfires in the streets, and openly baying for his blood, supposedly in the name of Islam. Here in Britain, people howled openly, in groups, in pamphlets, on television and in demonstrations, for a man's death. Worst of all was that nothing was done about it. No one in Britain was arrested - as far as I remember - and no one was tried for any of the obvious offences involved.
Criticism of the book-burners was surprisingly muted. Efforts were made to understand. People argued that it was wise to play things down. Confrontation might be inflammatory. Racial tensions might be exacerbated. Ethnic sensibilities might be offended. All that happened was that Rushdie got bodyguards. I now wonder what lesson was drawn from this feebleness at the time by extremists, Muslim or other. And I wonder whether there is any connection between that decadent failure of nerve then and the way Britain has since acquired a shameful reputation as a haven for terrorists.
More than half a dozen foreign governments have filed diplomatic protests with the Foreign Office about the presence in Britain of terrorist groups. The list of known or suspected major terrorist individuals or groups in the country is long. At the same time, it is still possible to say outrageous and unspeakable things here with impunity.
Omar Bakri Mohamed, for instance, a man denied asylum in the 1980s but still living here and apparently seeking British nationality, is the spokesman for the UK-based sister organisation of Osama bin Laden's Islamic Front for Fighting the Jews and Crusaders. He leads the Al-Muhajiroun group, which aims to overthrow Western society and create a worldwide Islamic state, and has issued a fatwa against the president of Pakistan as a "puppet" of America; last week his group called for holy war against Britain and America. Yet, for all the Home Secretary's warnings, the man is still at large.
It's true that the Government has recently tried to tighten the law against terrorism. It is also true, as Oliver Letwin has argued here, that the recent incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law now makes it more difficult for the Government to crack down on terrorists. But I suspect there is, or was, an underlying problem - a deep-seated reluctance among the educated to speak up against cultural assaults and for the host culture, and an unwillingness to criticise members of ethnic minorities at all, even under provocation. Paradoxically, this is extremely dangerous, particularly now, for ethnic minorities; the ordinary law-abiding majority of them can come to be lumped in with the tiny minority of fanatics, as if they were all the same.
What I think of as Western decadence has come together, most unfortunately, with Western tolerance. Tolerance is not only one of the greatest achievements of our civilisation and the bedrock of freedom; it is also its Achilles' heel. As the old sixth-form debating society cliche points out, it does not make sense, in the name of tolerance, to tolerate the intolerant. It does not make sense to allow intolerant people or ideas to undermine our all-too-tolerant culture. We should, in the name of tolerance, insist on the freedom to stop them. If we lack the will to do it, and the wisdom to do it right, then we are decadent, softened up by our soft lives.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, September 22, 2001
