Though Cowards Flinch

There are some really mixed up views of partiality, freedom and democracy in this country. I’ve been reading a Liberal Conspiracy article on a Tory who wants to give everyone the freedom to take a pay cut. In the comments section, there are those who consider themselves liberals arguing that actually this guy has a point, that we should be ‘free’ to make ourselves more competitive, and that employers should be ‘free’ to reduce wages below the minimum in order to keep all of their staff.

Then there is an article by Peter Tatchell, at Comment is Free, where he argues about the privileged nature of the Catholic church. Many of the commentators on his article suggest that he is somewhat totalitarian in his approach, wishing to force everyone to have the same views as he does. There’s also several asserting that Tatchell is trying to force his ‘secular’ views on to the religious. Finally, there are those who say that anyone should be free to lobby for anything they want.

Discussions of what people should be ‘free’ to do are awkward things. The Left are inclined to believe that democracy only has authority to answer the question, “Cui bono?” That is, only where the consequences of an action are social and likely to have a damaging effect on those beyond the individual may a democracy be asked to weigh in with a ruling on what is and is not permissible. The difference between myself and the Tory discussed in the first article is simply that we have different answers.

Commentators on article two, however, don’t just have different answers to the question, “Cui bono?” Many of them wish to see the power of the state extended into the lives of the individual – on questions such as abortion, drug use, homosexuality and so forth. Arguments of an ages-old right wing claims that all of these things (conveniently tagged by the label “moral degeneracy”) have a bad effect on the nation as a whole, in an attempt the phrase the issue in terms of “Cui bono?”

Thankfully modern society largely rejects those arguments. We have moved on from the era in which giving women the vote was not a matter of empowerment and fairness, but was to have massive repercussions for the state of motherhood, the prestige of Britain amongst her imperial peers and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, in their own heads, the people making these sorts of arguments genuinely believe the effect of individual moral decisions to be harmful to the nation as a whole.

Convincing them is not a matter of reasoned, logical argument. In my experience, people don’t change their mind on the big issues on the basis of ‘reason’. Some of the Tatchell commentators argued that democracy is a free society, so any lobbying group should be able to say what they want; they supplemented this by declaring that the Catholic church only remains a powerful influence because “people” want them to remain an influence. My objection to this argument is that it is pro-capitalist but also it brings up the question of how we answer “Cui bono?”

Firstly, the argument ignores a bias in how the answer to “Cui bono?” is created: freedom of speech is circumscribed by money. Those with money can afford speech, regardless of what they say, and those without can’t. The Catholic church has amassed much in the way of resources; it continues to do so not merely through individual donations but because it has bought a stake in the economy: hotels, tourist operators and so forth. In this way it remains independent of its (usually) more liberal membership.

Secondly, although “people” want them to remain an influence, let’s not forget that the world is not motivated merely by ideas. Thousands, if not millions, of working class people will vote Tory at the next election despite the fact that it may mean an attack on wages, on terms and conditions and is unlikely to mean any real change in the situation of our civil and social liberties. They may do so out of real conviction, but by doing so they sustain a system which is geared to their exploitation.

Voting Tory, the same as being a Catholic who supports the Catholic church, is not an abstract concept. It exists within a larger ideological narrative; we lose our jobs; the media pumps out information saying that immigration is harmful, that single mothers are taking advantage of tax payers, that the unemployed are lazy, that race is a key factor in crime and that individuals, not systems are responsible for the dire straits in which we find ourselves. We find ourselves looking for a leader with all the answers.

That is how we are conditioned to think. The Catholic church exists within the same milieu; famine is desperate, so we’re invited to give to charity; we sin, and evil exists, and we are invited to repent. We are invited to lead Christian lives and merely turn our cheeks. It is the cult of the individual response to every crisis. Each event is phrased in such a way as to evoke an individual response, and policies of the state are seen analogically to the moral choices of the individual.

This narrative is itself sustained by the material resources possessed by institutions like the Catholic church. After all, we could hardly go to church every Sunday if there was no church. The Catholic church could hardly maintain its diplomatic envoys and its heirarchy and its employment for the faithful and its efforts at reproducing its own thought in schools without collecting the revenues it earns from capitalist enterprise, and from the wealthy small business owners and townsfolk who often seem to make up the backbone of Catholicism – at least where I grew up.

Political, social and economic crisis, which are irretrievably bound together, often conspire to create debate which is not circumscribed by money to the same degree as the capitalist ‘public sphere’. Today, I write on a blog – and even the chances of finding this blog are affected by money – but tomorrow I may be speaking at a public meeting or distributing leaflets, activities which take on new relevance to onlookers in the light of new objective developments, such as the onset of a generally acknowledged ‘crisis’.

Not to say that other groups, even those opposed to me, won’t be doing this, but ‘crisis’ is how we describe the involvement of much larger layers of the population than normally face the sharp end of capitalism and its assembled ideological motors. Catholics and Tory voters aren’t immune to this; capitalist crisis is the great equalizer, since millions can lose their jobs regardless of education, status, gender, race, religion, political affiliation or whether or not they’re a nice person.

Other groups, such as the Tories, will talk about freedom – freedom to make onesself competitive. This very freedom is underpinned by the cast iron bars of capitalism, the logic caused the crisis and the logic from which the Tories don’t want people to believe that they can escape. If we can, then one worker doesn’t have to fight another worker for scraps from the table of some hypothetically benevolent boss. They can fight together to take the whole table away from the boss.

A new answer to “Cui bono?” is required by this impulse to collective action, since the old answers are individualistic and the methods for reaching them are placed under threat by crisis. We need to be ready and waiting to provide that new answer for a new context.