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Account Disabled
Join Date: Nov 2012
Location: The Black Country
Posts: 8,827
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A brilliant read in The Times:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/c...pass-klsl9mk65
Quote:
Lefty activists, like smug cyclists and selfish parents, wrongly believe they are so superior that they can set the rules
Do parents have the right to change a stinking nappy at a restaurant table? You might assume, as I did, the correct answer is, hell no. Yet reading a recent online debate I was startled by how many disagreed. That raising children is an arduous, stressful self-sacrifice, they reasoned, entitles parents to commit this disgusting, selfish act.
Believing that because you are a “good” person you have permission to do a bad thing is what psychologists call moral licence. It is epidemic in modern parenting: “That I am a noble nurturer of tiny infants entitles me to drive this 4x4.” When my elderly folks once parked in a supermarket parent-and-child space because all the disabled bays were full, they returned to find — despite the blue badge displayed in their car — a monstrous letter from an outraged mother.
Moral licence gives cyclists the right to scream in pedestrians’ faces if we complain about them riding on pavements: “Move aside for we eco-gods who risk our lives in combat with cars.” Recent Oxfam exposés highlighted a “saviour complex” among charity workers: “As a heroic rescuer of disaster victims I’m allowed to trade aid for sex with vulnerable women.”
One psychology experiment showed that men given the opportunity to disagree with blatantly sexist statements were later more likely to select a man for a stereotypically male job. Another at Stanford in 2010 revealed that white people who were given a chance to express support for President Obama felt granted “moral credentials” and were thus more likely to make racist choices.
I am a Good Person and therefore everything I do, even a self-evidently bad deed, is rendered good. Herein lies the thinking behind someone seeing an 81-year-old man wearing a Brexit Party rosette, going off to a shop to buy a strawberry milkshake and returning to ruin his suit. Normally, drenching an old person sitting harmlessly outside an Aldershot polling station would be grotesque. But not under moral licence.
I’ve spent the week wondering if the left has totally lost its mind. I heard the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams on Radio 4 describe the milkshaking of Nigel Farage as “ludic and playful”. (Williams has justified protestors spitting on journalists and Tory party delegates as a response to social exclusion.) Aditya Chakrabortty, of the same newspaper, described milkshaking as “political theatre” akin to mime artists hired in Colombia to shame dangerous drivers.
The intellectual contortions by supposedly serious people to justify physical assault are extraordinary. It’s funny and subversive, a custard pie in a dictator’s face, they say, a litre of banana and caramel doesn’t hurt. Anyone who disagrees is an aged centrist fun-sucker who doesn’t care about the rise of the far right.
But what is the remit of moral licence? The answer, if you self-identify as good, is limitless. Liberated from decency, impervious to the law, high on self-righteousness, you can freestyle your protest: a hot coffee, bleach, acid . . . And in that panicky public moment — to be replayed a million times on YouTube — who knows which liquid was thrown?
I find this blithe justification of assault horrifying, not least because I receive threats whenever I write about the tensions between gender identity and women’s rights. Already in this vicious, entrenched debate, anyone who asserts that biological sex exists is deemed to have committed “actual violence”. Thus trolls tell me to “die in a fire” or send me memes of guns, while left-wing, bearded, self-proclaimed feminist men enjoy venting their latent misogyny with insults and smears.
Report, block, ignore. It’s only social media. But this week someone who isn’t an anonymous idiot, but a named journalist on a well-known news website, suggested that I and several other women journalists should be milkshaked for the crime of attending a meeting set up to defend the 2010 Equality Act. Yes, for the offence of supporting existing legislation we were asking for assault. Fellow feminist writers say they’re only surprised it hasn’t happened already.
In our tinderbox times, threats are moving from online to the real world. Hear racist insults often enough on Twitter and you may feel entitled to scrawl a swastika on a synagogue or rip off a woman’s hijab on the bus. Yet how can we condemn such crimes and sanction others?
Increasingly activists of all hues believe they have moral licence. A man who threw an egg at Jeremy Corbyn declared “his civil rights were violated” because parliament had failed to deliver Brexit. No one suggested that egging the leader of the opposition was just playful fun, that his attacker’s 28-day prison sentence was too harsh or disagreed with the judge that — especially after Jo Cox’s murder — “this is an attack on our democratic process”.
Who is seen as a legitimate target for milkshakes has shifted within weeks from Tommy Robinson to an elderly Brexiteer. So why not every Tory MP for austerity, Lib Dems for collaboration, any old “gammons” who voted Leave . . . What are the rules and who is allowed to set them?
Our political maelstrom, like a centrifuge, is flinging moderates out to the extremes of left and right. Remain and Brexit supporters alike are speaking of opponents in dark, inflammatory terms. It takes tenacity to cling to the middle, with dull, old-fashioned beliefs that all political violence is wrong. How complacent we are about our peaceful country, stable democracy and largely safe streets. But if we reject the universal values that underpin them during this period of flux and uncertainty they are far from secure.
Moral licence creates a moral vacuum. As in that famous Mitchell and Webb sketch, the Nazis hate to think they’re the bad guys.
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Accurate.
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