When people are imbued with an ideology, they generally don’t reason their way to conclusions, but instead rely on prepackaged and relatively fixed ideas that function as heuristics for easy, kneejerk decision-making: “Four legs good, two legs bad.”
We are very good at identifying this flaw in others. But as a general rule we are terrible at identifying it in ourselves. And so it is with modern liberals and the shibboleths and slogans which dominate their thinking. When it comes to an issue such as whether or not a Pro-Palestinian protest should go ahead on Armistice Day, they imagine themselves to be “refusing to accept oversimplified interpretations of reality or outsourcing decision-making capacities to an already established creed”, all the while mouthing precisely the kind of oversimplified, creedal slogans that they so decry in others. And so the argument is trotted out, as it always is: “But enlightenment values! But autonomy as long as it doesn’t encroach upon the rights of others! But tolerance of intolerance!” And the result is liberal’s great error: complete inertia when it comes to the protection of dearly held values, including freedom itself.
Let’s go back to basics. As Stanley Fish once put it, there is no such thing as free speech – and it’s a good thing too. Freedom of expression for people buying and selling child pornography would be bad. So would freedom of expression for slanderers. So indeed would freedom of expression be bad for teachers in indoctrinating children with whatever stuff and nonsense pops into their minds. So would it be for sexual fetishists who wish to parade their peccadillos in public, including in front of children. So would it be for people who possess state secrets. And so on. Sane people all realise this. John Milton, often wheeled out as one of the first advocates of freedom of speech (or at least opponents of censorship) was all in favour of ‘extirpating’ people who had what in his view were dangerous opinions (i.e. Catholics). The difference between him and us is one of degree rather than of kind; we basically are happy for Catholics to have freedom of expression (although not if they silently pray outside abortion clinics or speak too loudly about the contents of the Bible), but not child pornographers, who we metaphorically burn at the stake.
So when it comes to freedom of speech, what we really mean is that we want free speech within acceptable limits. The limits are the rub; that is what we are arguing about. And the important thing about the limits is that they very often themselves derive from competing freedoms, and indeed competing freedoms of the same kind. Two people have the right to exercise freedom, and those freedoms clash. And it is of course necessary, in those circumstances, for somebody (the State) to decide which freedom wins; otherwise the victory will just go to the side who shouts the loudest or has the biggest (literal or figurative) stick.
The issue of the Pro-Palestinian protest is precisely this sort of problem. On the one hand, yes, we have the freedom of protestors to protest. But on the other hand we have the freedom of people who wish to publicly express the sentiments they bear towards members of the armed forces killed in war. Those freedoms are not reconcilable, because the manner of the protest (which will be loud, boisterous, etc.) will clash with the manner of the act of remembrance (which requires quiet and solemnity). In short, the State has therefore to pick which freedom it chooses to protect – that of the protestors or that of the rememberers. There is no middle ground. There is a winner and a loser, and the State has to decide which is going to be which. If it doesn’t, the victory will by default go to the ones who are willing to shout the loudest, and there are no prizes for guessing which side that will be.
The point, as trenchant critics of liberalism (Stanley Fish among them) have always observed, is ultimately that the idea of freedom for everyone is a fantasy. Freedoms clash. And when they clash, decisions have to be made as to which freedom wins. Those decisions will always ultimately be political ones, and will therefore rest on judgments about value. And those judgments will not derive from objective reason, but feeling. The issue of the Armistice Day protest, seen in this light, is therefore actually a very simple one. We have to decide which freedom we want to win. Is it the freedom to protest? Or the freedom to express gratitude to the dead? I know which one, on this particular day, I think matters more.
The wider issue, of course, is that – to go back to an earlier point – if one does not choose which freedoms one wants to protect, and by extension which values one wishes to enshrine, then the alternative will be that freedoms will default to those with the muscle and vocal cords to exercise them. The problem for liberals, then, is that their own “four legs good, two legs bad” thinking (we might summarise it as “tolerance good, intolerance bad’) blinds them to what is actually at stake, and shuts down precisely the kind of rational thinking which they claim to embody. Freedom is never absolute, only contingent, and if you don’t choose which freedoms are important to protect, based on the values you think are important, then somebody else with a bigger stick and a keener sense of the values they support will get to decide instead. And whoever that is, they are probably going to be a lot less tolerant and nice than you are.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. He is the author of the News From Uncibal Substack.
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How about a Tik Tok dance? It helped in the past
I could bang a pan with a wooden spoon if that would help.
I actually hadn’t heard of that as an thing (clapping/banging a pan) before the first occurrence. I wondered WTF was going on. When I did realise what it was the sight of BoJo on the TV news standing on the steps of No 10 clapping made me want to puke.
There is so much I could say on the subject of NHS but I will try and keep on topic. As one NHS worker said to me, doctors prescribe drugs to solve the symptoms without determining the root cause (eg lifestyle,diet). Almost all drugs have side effects. And the winner is ….the pharmaceutical companies. The answer so far has been more money needed to pay for this so called ‘free service’ which will be paid for by you and me (the taxpayers). I won’t be clapping for this failed institution any time soon.
I so despise every facet of the state that I’m enjoying watching our sainted NHS crash and burn. There are no solutions to this mess that don’t eventually involve spending every last penny of the country’s wealth on RNHS. We’ll be destitute, but at least we’ll be able to get our privates chopped off on demand.
On 5th July 1948 after much planning and political wrangling the UK government implemented one of the most radical reforms in healthcare provision in the world at the time.
The NHS was announced to the general public through a leaflet sent to every household.
The quality of available healthcare did not change. Just the way we paid for it.
No. It rained hospitals, ambulances, porters, nurses, doctors, beds, operating theatres, surgical instruments on 5th July – stuff we had never had before and would never have but for ‘our’ Holy NHS. Come the day, heaps of The Poor™️ were no longer blocking the gutters in their death throes.
”You are all paying for it…”. Maybe then, but soon enough ‘all’ weren’t and increasingly fewer were paying for it, and we certainly have millions of immigrant hordes who haven’t paid a brass farthing, nor ever will… but who are first in the Everqueue.
The mortality stats tell the same story. No change in the overall trend in reduction of death rate after the inception of the NHS. A distinct small step down in infant mortality but as it had fallen from 20% in 1900 to about 3.5% in 1947 the majority of the possible improvement had already been accomplished. death rates among men over 45 and under 85 actually stopped improving at around that time and didn’t resume improving until the seventies.
Prior to NHS ‘free’ GP services were funded by local councils – so from local taxes, not central government taxes.
Thing was, the original NHS didn’t fund many elective things which are now offered – and not just because the technology didn’t exist.
Quite so. The arrangements put in place by the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments were such as to ensure that more and more patients received treatment without financial anxiety. The overall plan – supported and extended by the original Beveridge report – was to use the state as a coordinating agency, stitching together the well established and multiple provisions supplied by private, local and charitable sectors.
Excellent! Well deserved. It’s what they keep voting for.
More people unable to pay their mortgage – that’s the reward for hiding under the bed during the Fakedemic.
Electricity on ration – great because they want to save the planet and no plastic too to save the fish.
Also adding to the list, the ever increasing gene therapy injured.
Yet surgeries – unasked – send frequent requests to healthy people for blood tests for diseases they don’t have….
This is a data collection exercise – our health data sent to China for analysis. NHS very keen to analyse our poo as well. Digital data is very desirable and biological data too.