Liberal humanists make an important distinction between respecting someone’s beliefs, and respecting their right to hold and convey those beliefs. So, for example, when someone holds the noxious belief that it was not the Third Reich that caused the Holocaust, but the US, Britain, and allied powers, as historian David Irving does, the Jeffersonian thing to do is to defend his right to hold (and publish) this belief, even while condemning it.
This is a difficult thing to do, and writers such as Johann Hari and Christopher Hitchens (each of whose flaws I never tire of enumerating) should be given credit for coming to the defense of Irving’s right to be a Holocaust denier (Irving is English, and thus has no right to protected speech, except for the relatively toothless provisions of the UN Charter on Human Rights.) There is no greater test of one’s commitment to free speech than defense of the thing most hateful to you.
Hari and Hitchens’s fellow neo-atheist A.C. Grayling, however, fares much worse in this task, as I wrote earlier this week. In an article for the Guardian from 2006, Grayling writes that we should not, in fact, respect the right of religious people to publicly “advertise” their beliefs, either through conventional discourse or through “eccentricities of dress” (a form of speech) because religious commitment “properly belongs in the private sphere.”
It is time to demand of believers that they take their personal choices and preferences in these non-rational and too often dangerous matters into the private sphere, like their sexual proclivities. Everyone is free to believe what they want, providing they do not bother (or coerce, or kill) others; but no-one is entitled to claim privileges merely on the grounds that they are votaries of one or another of the world’s many religions.
This deeply illiberal move carves away a full half of the protection intended by the great Enlightenment thinkers. It preserves protection for the private act (belief) while jettisoning protection for the public one (speech.) It is essentially an extension of the Clinton Era doctrine of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” wherein we express our profound tolerance of people by pretending they don’t exist. Of special interest is the idea that “bothering” others with one’s ideas is a transgression; a funny thing for a philosopher to maintain.
After Russell Blackford approvingly linked to this piece, I asked him here and in comments on his blog whether he thought it was consistent with liberal, humanist principles to “demand” that the religious keep their beliefs to themselves. I called such a position “intolerant,” a word that Russell takes issue with:
I’m not sure what you mean by “intolerant”. He may not like public expressions of so-called religious identity, but I don’t see where he says he won’t tolerate them. To tolerate something is to put up with it even if you don’t like it. It looks to me as if he’s prepared to put up with it, even if reluctantly.
This is a remarkable dilution of the word “tolerance.” Grayling is explicitly going after not the religious ideas (and “eccentricities of dress”) themselves, but after the right to traffic in them (or, in the language anti-theists share with homophobes and other bigots, to “impose” them on the rest of us).
I suppose you could say that he stops short of calling for legal means to constrain religious speech. By this standard, of course, anyone who speaks out against the public actions of gays, atheists, sexual libertines, communists, or Hollywood producers–but refrains from calling for them to be locked up for these actions–can be called “tolerant” because he or she is “prepared to put up with” them (while bemoaning “What choice do I have?”).
By this standard, Anita Bryant was a great humanist folk hero. In the 1970s Bryant defended her support for a Florida ordinance banning gays from adopting children on the grounds thqat such adoptions “infring[e] upon my rights as a citizen and mother to teach my children and set examples of God’s moral code as stated in the Holy Scriptures.” We’ve heard similar sentiments ad nauseam recently in the bizarre campaign to argue that opposing gay marriage is a “defense” of heterosexual marriage. Compare this to Grayling’s language when he writes:
[I]t is time to demand and apply a right for the rest of us to non-interference by religious persons and organisations – a right to be free of proselytisation and the efforts of self-selected minority groups to impose their own choice of morality and practice on those who do not share their outlook.
Such arguments turn the ideals of the Enlightenment on their head. There simply is no right not to be exposed to things we disagree with, outside of the fairly narrow confines of the right to privacy we enjoy in our homes and our bodies. To live in a democratic society means that things will be “imposed” on us every time we leave the house. Let us rail against these things all we like–I know I will. But let’s not give in to the temptation to rail against the conditions that expose us to these annoyances, which are the conditions of democratic society itself, the best way we’ve discovered to date to ensure equal protection for all.
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