Gloating for Britain
George Pitcher, Anglican vicar and Telegraph columnist, is just beside himself with glee that Evan Harris lost his seat in the election. Why is Pitcher so delighted? Because Harris is a secularist, and because he thinks terminally ill people should be able to choose when their suffering ends. That’s not exactly how Pitcher puts it though.
For a doctor, he supported the strange idea that terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves…His political demise will be mourned only by those with a strange fascination for death, those euthanasia enthusiasts whose idea of care for the elderly and infirm is a one-way ticket to Switzerland.
Stupid, stupid man, and dishonest besides. (And he can’t even write. “For a doctor, he supported the strange idea” – sheesh!) Harris did not support the idea that “terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves” nor was his idea of care for the elderly and infirm a one-way ticket to Switzerland (i.e. euthanasia). Stupid malicious man – as if he can’t tell the difference between having the option of euthanasia and having euthanasia imposed!
I wish I could gloat that George Pitcher had lost his seat on the Telegraph.
Oh, hey! Steady on! George Pitcher’s take on this is fairly normative Christian rhetoric on the issue of assisted dying (euthanasia, assisted suicide). Bishops and archbishops can’t make the distinction. The ABC the ABY, the Bishop of Durham – any number of Christian officials and theologians – all seem unable to make the distinction between someone asking for help to die, and having death imposed on someone, between self-control and other-control. And this makes complete sense. If individualism is a form of ungoverned or ungovernable relativism – because, after all, we all depend upon some outside authority to make reasoned judgements – then there is little to choose between deciding for oneself and having decisions made for one. Well, this works in religious logic, anyway. That’s why the ABC takes so seriously the unreasonable fears of disabled people that a law permitting assisted dying would place them in danger. Pitcher may not be able to tell the difference, but neither can Rowan nor Tom Wright nor the pope.
Wolves in sheeps’ clothing coming out of lairs all over the place if you ask me.
I have allways been puzzeled by the stange “logic” of xtians (and other abrahamittic religionists as well) regarding disease and death.
If god is the only admissamle acting agent for “the precice timing of death”, -why do they intervene in the progress of a disease at all?
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
[edit]
…that nastyness is, as Eric says, a normative part of christian theology.
Of course, that’s all we know Harris for. I’m surprised he didn’t pitch in the innocent babies while he was at it.
The best result of the election? In a poll where the BNP were routed?? Priorities “Rev.”, priorities.
P.S. Some good responses from some of the commenters at the DT. I loved the suggestion that the whole article was a Craig Brown spoof.
No, Greg, I did not say that Pitcher’s line was normative for Christian theology. I said it was normative for Christian rhetoric. This is a very different thing. What is normative for Christian theology is that death is within the province of God alone, and is not something that individuals can or should decide for themselves. In the old language, human beings have usus (use) of their lives and bodies but not dominium (rule), so they must allow nature to take its course, and must not intervene to abbreviate the dying process. There are some dissenting theologians, such as Hans Kung and Paul Badham (C of E), but intolerably few.
The reason that the Pitcher line is normative for Christian rhetoric is simple. Few except Christians (and perhaps other religious adherents) are going to pay much attention to the Christian theological argument for prohibiting assisted dying. It is too tied up with Christian metaphysics and impoderabilities about God’s will and so forth. So by and large Christians (and other religious – Jews and Muslims are just as opposed to assisted dying as Christians) must make do with weaker consequentialist arguments. This usually takes some form of a slippery slope argument. Occasionally, an empirical form of the argument has been used, but since there is very little sign of slippery slopes in the Netherlands, Oregon and Switzerland, the logical slippery slope will have to do.
This is just where Pitcher’s failure to distinguish between assisted dying as an autonomous choice and euthanasia as an imposed remedy comes in. If you can’t make the distinction between choice and coercion then there is nothing to stop the slide from assisted dying as an individual choice, to euthanasia as an enforced policy regarding lives of a certain kind or quality, what the Nazis would call lebensunwürdig Leben.
My point was simply that George Pitcher is not unusual in this respect. In all likelihood he is a very nice man, and not nasty at all at a personal level. But moral absolutes do not leave a lot of room for mercy and compassion, and they are likely to lead those who hold them to think of those who do not as sunk in a pit of depravity. In this regard Pitcher is typically Christian.
@ Sili. That really is silly.
Yes…I can quite imagine that Pitcher is a nice man at a personal level. Yet by writing that piece he did reveal a large patch of very definite non-niceness – just as the ABC did in his reply to you, Eric.
Distorting what people say is not nice; distorting laws and positions and consequences is not nice; doing both of those in aid of blocking people’s ability to choose to terminate their own suffering by dying is not nice. There’s malice in all of them.
I think it’s as well to be clear about this – because people like Pitcher get excused as “well-meaning.” I don’t think he gets to claim to be well-meaning. His malice is fostered by blindness, but it’s still malice.
Of course, I agree with you Ophelia! I was just playing a game of tic tac toe. You see how easy it is to ascribe malice to someone, or to a group of people, in general, for taking a particular point of view?!
For some reason I don’t think that Pitcher or the ABC or Tom Wright can actually see what they are doing. I may be wrong about that, but I don’t think they can. They cannot move into a space where it is possible for them to say that there are situations where it is not only reasonable that people might choose to end their lives, but where it is reasonable that we should help them. I think they simply see this as the top of a single slope. (In fact, John Keown – who, I assume, is religious – argues in detail that it is.) Of course, they can’t see it because their religious beliefs prescribe this way of looking at the world. That’s why religions are dangerous, and individual religious people are often unaware of the dangers they pose to those around them.
This is also why I will go on hammering away at them ‘in the round’, sozusagen, even though I may sound illiberal from time to time. Christians who speak about assisted dying tend to speak in George Pitcher’s way. Christians who think that assisted dying might be a good thing, with very few exceptions, remain silent. The representative view is the one that is publicly enunciated, not the one that is privately held. Dawkins’ point is very powerful, I think. Moderate religious voices almost always provide cover for the immoderate.
Yes, what the ABC said in his reply to me (kudos to him, by the way, for the primate of the Canadian church didn’t bother to answer my letter, and he used to be a friend), had a lot of nastiness in it, but I don’t think that he recognised it, and since he didn’t answer my letter where I pointed out how slanted his rhetoric was, I don’t know whether he can recognise it even now. I’m not less angry with him, but I think it’s just a characteristic of the religious mind. I have responded to George Pitcher’s stuff on The Telegraph website, but I don’t think anything can make him see that he is simply wrong about what supporters of assisted dying are proposing. It’s always going to be, for him, as it is for Tom Wright (Bishop of Durham) a ‘murky moral world.’
Thank you, by the way, for editing my post!
Welcome for editing Eric!
Ah yes but I think there’s a vast difference between ascribing malice to one person on the basis of what that person has said or done or written, and ascribing malice to a whole category of people on the basis that they are in some way identified with a religion – or with a political stance, but even that is more specific than identification with a religion, which really can include no following of the rules at all.
What you say about Christians there, you see, is different – it does include the qualifications. That changes how it comes across.
There’s no very good way to express this in English (or any other language, for all I know). What you mean is “the people who do the following things are Muslims” but that really is different from saying “Muslims do the following things” and there’s just no crisp clear way to say the first instead of the second.
Well, they are mutually converse statements. “The people who do the following things are Muslims” = “Non-Muslims do not do the following things”.
As for moral absolutes: “all generalizations are false”.
Of course the problem with George Pitcher’s morality is the same as ever: he is looking at things through his lens of preconceived ideas, just as other religious people do. Sometimes he will get things right, but it’s a bad method.
And Pitcher is certainly wrong about Evan Harris too. Perhaps he thinks public policy and religion should use the same principles of evidence. Harris will be missed.
It’s not just that Pitcher is an ignorant, lazy, bigoted writer, apparently not overburdened with brains, he’s also ridiculously spiteful in a way that completely undermines (what passes for) his case. Harris on the other hand is always scrupulously civil and fair to his opponents. Many moderate people who agree with him on the issues must surely be shocked at his sheer uncalled-for nastiness. Is this sort of wild-eyed shrieking frothing at the mouth, from someone claiming to be an ordained cleric, really what The Telegraph thinks its readers want?
You see, this is just my point. Stephen, you just said that “all moral generalizations are false.” But this is a generalisation about Pitcher’s morality. Is it false? Well, in one sense, yes, since some religious people don’t look through a lens of preconceived ideas. Some are very nuanced and some are very vague. But, in general, given the nature of religious believing, this is true. In fact, people who try to be very nuanced are often accused of ‘cherry-picking’ and other crimes.
And this is the game that I was playing. How general could I be in speaking about normative Christian this or normative Christian that, without tripping the switch: “You can’t speak about all Christians (or all Muslims, or all Jews, etc.) in that inclusive way”?
I can remember, years ago, my son saying something to the effect that, “Well, you believe …,” and then he went on with a catalogue of beliefs that I did not share. (He never did really listen to me very much!) We just do talk about religion and religious people in that way. They do look through a special lens, and to the extent that they disappoint our expectations in this regard, we take them to be less religious in certain important respects. I do think we tend to generalise about religious believers and believing, because certain ways of believing and behaving tend to be characteristic of what we consider religious.
Nowadays, for example, it is quite in order to speak generally about new Christian demands that are being made to be heard in public space. There was a long period when religion, and, in particular, Christianity, in secular polities, was assumed to be something private and personal, not something that should intrude into public decision making. Increasingly this is not the case, unfortunately. As Muslims have moved into formerly Christian majority parts of the world, they have made demands ….
Now, I don’t want to go on from there. My only point is to say that this is a perfectly legitimate way of speaking, and that we do in fact speak in this way all the time. When we speak of Christians in this way it is not considered racial or racist, but it is easy to trip the multicultural switch if other religions are mentioned. This is so, today, especially with regard to Muslims. No matter how large a footprint insufferably extremist Muslims have in Western societies – and it is disturbingly large – we mustn’t say anything about Muslims, because that sounds bigoted. We are restricted to Islam or Islamism. And that, it seems to me, is a serious impoverishment of our ability to criticise the effects of religion on our society. It’s dead easy to slip away from the implications of one’s beliefs if all we are talking about is a particular understanding of a belief system. All you have to say is: “That’s not what Islam/Christianity/Judaism, etc. means to me.” So the religious can deflect criticisms of belief and implied practice into the realm of theoretical dispute, without once considering whether those criticisms apply to them.
It is true that some of this language can look illiberal, just as those who responded to Dawkins, Hitchens, etc. say it does. They use the words ‘strident,’ ‘shrill,’ and so on, but stridency is not the problem. Being caught in the net of criticism is. But those responses can themselves also look illiberal, when the criticised beliefs and practices are genuinely a danger to the stability of liberal societies.
Anyway, Ophelia, this is the game that I was playing, whether I played it well or not.
This type of argument is not just used by the religious. I am reminded of the ‘justifications’ for draconian laws against adult sex workers often cited by allegedly secular individual.
Eric, well yes, Muslims are a special case, but then there are real reasons for that, and I don’t think it is much of an impoverishment of our ability to criticise the effects of religion on society if we take some extra care about how we word things.
You could just specify “fundamentalist” or “strict” or “highly observant” Muslims for instance – because it just is the case that not all Muslims fit into that category. The word can mean a wide variety of things, including mere family background rather than personal belief.
I think there are good and compelling reasons not to look illiberal on this subject.
“All generalizations are false” was a joke, because if it’s true then it’s false! [I’ve a feeling we’ve had this at B&W before.] Anyway, Eric, I don’t understand how can one be religious without preconceived ideas?
Well, Ophelia, I’m not altogether sure that I agree with you entirely. Certainly we should be careful that we not look too illiberal, but I don’t think it would be pointful to carry this particular discussion much further. Certainly, I’ve got more mileage out of it than it probably really deserved.
I do think, however (says he, carrying it just a little further, because he simply can’t shut up), that there comes a time when we must ask ourselves whether a particular world-view, weltanschauung, or religious ideology is inconsistent with the continuing health of liberal polities, and whether, for that reason, those espousing those ideologies, no matter how moderately some individuals may adopt them, are a danger to the continuing existence and flourishing of liberal freedoms. Christianity, in some of its forms, is certainly that, but its historical tradition tends to mitigate the danger. Islam, however, is, as you say, a special case. I think it is special in that its foundational form includes an ideology of war, and throughout its history, though some periods might be characterised as times of peace and consolidation, this is the form to which it has inevitably returned for reform and vitality. It is not surprising that, in the face of this kind of threat, people should be wary, not only of Islam in its more radical forms, but of Islam itself, and of those who espouse these dangerous beliefs (whether or not in a supposedly ‘moderate’ form).
I take Kenan Malik’s (as well as Paul Berman’s) point about the wrongness of identifying Islam with salafi reformism. There are other, more moderate forms of Islam. However, every religion carries withit itself the seeds of its fundamentalist form, and the fundamentalist form of Islam is particularly dangerous. As it stands there is no interpretation of Islam, or at least I know of none – and to be viable it at least has to be generally known, and even more widely accepted – that makes Islam compatible with liberal democracy, and that should be a warning to us.
However, that is such an obvious digression from George Pitcher and his particular form of nastiness, that I think I should probably stop. Of course, Stephen, religions have to approach things through preconceived ideas. This is precisely why, as Hitchens points out so wonderfully in his book, religions have a tendency to poison everything they touch. They can only look at the world, not as the world is, in some reasonable idea of what that might be, but only in terms of what they wish it to be. One assumes that George Pitcher’s nastiness in this case is but the flip side of his vision of what the world, under the rule of God, might actually be. Suffering, in this conception of world and life, is an aspect of God’s loveliness, and must simply be borne with fortitude and grace. (By the way, Stephen, “All moral generalisations are false,” is not clearly reflexively self-defeating, since it is a grammatical point, whis is what I took you to be saying, since that is the equivalence that you set up to begin with.)
Eric, I know every religion carries withit itself the seeds of its fundamentalist form. I said that here long ago, and you agreed. We’re agreed on that. But it’s also true that there are real and terrible dangers in lumping people into groups and then treating the groups as dreaded enemies. With groups such as “fundamentalists” one just has to bite that bullet, but with “Muslims” or “Catholics” things are not so clear-cut.
In other words I of course agree that people who espouse a particular ideology are just that, but that doesn’t describe all “Muslims” as such. That’s not to say “assume all Muslims are liberal unless shown otherwise” but it is to say “don’t assume all Muslims are Wahhabists unless shown otherwise.”
Thank you, Ophelia. My, you are valiant, and very patient, soldiering on so! And, of course, I do agree with you, and in many contexts that is true, but sometimes I think that it is only natural and right that we should just “lump” people of a certain stripe together, and this is not a matter of bigotry, but of genuine concern for the truth and right.
Catholicism, for instance, is becoming an increasingly serious problem for democratic polity – which is why I am continually amazed at the present composition of the American Supreme Court – and because of that, it seems to me, catholics are a problem, and I’m not really shy about saying that. Because of a regressive position on a number of things, Anglican Chrisitianity is a problem too, and so Anglicans also get to be problematic.
I don’t think we should let people off the hook when the institutions with which they are alligned take positions which are immoral or regressive. As an Anglican priest I was exceedingly conscious of this, and spoke out publicly against anything that I thought was contrary to what I took (perhaps mistakenly) to be the best tradition of Christian moral concern. In fact, I now believe that I was mistaken in believing that these good things were in that tradition, but I never pretended to beliefs that I did not hold, and consequently I ruffled not a few orthodox feathers. (We were the only church in the world, to my knowledge, for example, which put on the “Vagina Monologues” in the church.) As a consequence, many ‘fellow’ Anglicans thought of me as a heretic, and I was told on more than one occasion that there was not enough room in the church for both me and some other person. The silent acceptance of beliefs or actions which were taken in my name – that is, in the name of the institution to which I had given my allegiance – was, for me, simply unacceptable, if those beliefs or actions were contrary – as too large a proportion of them came increasingly to seem – to what I believed was either reasonable or just. And I would have taken a criticism of me as an Anglican to be doubly justified had I not taken a stand against them.
I think I have quoted this before, but it seems to me to be very true and important, and it is something that we need continually to remind people of when they have subscribed to some named form of belief or practice. It is from Rushdie’s essay in Hitchens’ The Portable Atheist:
I could not agree more. It is, to me, a matter of simple personal and moral integrity that one expresses one’s dissent when one is dissentient. This is too seldom done. And those who fail to do so deserve to be lumped together with all the most objectionable of their tribe, and I do not believe it is bigoted to do this. But, really, I must let you go now to do other things! Thank you for the conversation. I had just begun to read Harris’s Huffington Post article, and just checked back to see if, per impossible, you had bothered to answer. You really mustn’t tease the bears!
Hahaha – but telling me you must let me go just gives you the last word!
Hahahahahaha.
No but seriously. I almost did leave it last time, but I did have something to say, so I said it. And if I am patient and valiant, well, you are a valued reader and contributor, to put it mildly, and I don’t want to come across as trying to be Morally Superior.
I too think we shouldn’t let people off the hook. I hate it (as I’ve mentioned) that the Supreme Court is so full of Catholics. On the other hand I take what comfort I can from the fact that Sotomayor is probably “Catholic” in a different sense from Scalia (may he develop a sudden passion for South Sea travel and retire early).
But I also think we can and should at least try to make the necessary distinctions, not least in order not to drive away the Saeeds of the world.
I also agree with that Rushdie passage though. And for that matter I think Tony Blair did a wicked thing in converting to Catholicism; I think he should be ashamed of himself, and I’ve been trying to shame him. But being born to Catholicism or Islam (or “born” to it) is more complicated. Not to mention the fact that leaving Islam is a capital crime! One of the very things that makes Islam The Worst Religion also inflates its numbers. In a way making all Muslims complicit in Islam is like making all prisoners complicit in the prison system. Ya know?
Ah, well, as you know, it’s difficult to have the last word! The really really last!
I agree with what you say about being born into a religion – of course, you’re not really born to it, you’re indoctrinated into it – especially Islam, because it is so totalising – and what makes Islam the worst of religions also makes Muslims, by and large, the most submissive of devotees, and intellectuals in the West, the most cowardly, and justifying that submission, or the lack of courage of so many Western intellectuals (see Berman’s Flight of the Intellectuals), just perpetuates the problem, I’m afraid, and makes it worse.
Of course, they have an excuse, but it might be absolutely disastrous to permit people to continue to use this as an excuse, to keep making excuses for them, and counting them out, even though it’s so hard to say how many people are being counted out. After all, according to at least one poll, 56% of British Muslims don’t think that the 9/11 atrocities were carried out by Muslims, and, of course, as you know, there are other troubling statistics too. So, if we always count them out, carefully qualifying those about whom we are speaking – you know, the radical Muslims, not the moderate ones, the fundamentalists, not the more liberal Muslims, and so on – we are simply providing a wide open space for anyone to count themselves out, and no one, or at least, very few, may consider themselves criticised, when many perhaps should do so. And we are also, perhaps, comforting ourselves with language, when perhaps we should be much more concerned.
If the radical Muslims are keeping the majority of Muslims from speaking out because of fear, then the problem is worse than even I thought it was, and Islam in the West is a clear and present danger that will only get worse. And the more we temporise about descriptions, and calling people to account, the more serious the danger will become. This is not liberalism as I understand it, and, if I am not mistaken, it was precisely this kind of atmosphere of fear and submission that contributed to the uninhibited growth of NSDAP in Germany between the wars. If we succumb to this kind of force – and I think we are doing this – perhaps even more than I thought – then we will not only lose the freedoms that we have, we will not be able to extend them to those who are brave, like the doomed dissidents in Iran. It is not at all clear that Islam is consistent with a liberal democratic polity. I do not think that it is. But if it is not, why are we being so careful not to offend?
You say:
Yes, I do know, and that’s what makes it so very difficult, but if we don’t call them to account, then the situation might well look a lot like Germany, where people were both prisoners of a monstrous system, and complicit in it, and at such a price!
As for the Saeed’s of the world. That’s why I took the line I did, because I don’t think the Saeed’s of the world are all that reassuring. He sounded as though he was making very curt demands, not trying to make careful distinctions. It was precisely his tone that led me to respond in the way that I did. Tariq Ramadan says the same sort of thing, and Tariq Ramadan is a dangerous man.
Honest, I didn’t mean to write so much! I wish I had the gift of pithy, succinct speech!
Well Tariq Ramadan has a lot of influence; I don’t know that Saeed does.
People are born into religions; they may be indoctrinated as well, some are indoctrinated instead, but some are just born into a situation, and that’s that.
I’m not sure what you mean by calling “them” to account…Ah well, we’re not going to agree on this. I loathe Islam, but that doesn’t commit me to loathing “Muslims” or to thinking of “Muslims” as uniform.
Now, that sounds like the last word! But, just to round things off. I don’t loathe Muslims. I worry about the role that they play in contemporary liberal polities, and I deplore their religion, but I’m not in the habit of loathing people I don’t know.
Of course, I knew you’d pick up on the ‘them’. That’s why I put it there. By ‘them’, though, as the context makes clear, I was referring to those who are prisoners of a system, because, through fear, or lingering nostalgia, are complicit in their imprisonment. Socrates thought we were all complicit, unless we looked at our lives with an unsparing critical eye. May a thousand Hirsi Alis bloom.
As to being born Muslim. I was just reflecting Dawkins’ point that no one is born a Christian or Buddhist or a Muslim, which is why it is so terrible to label children with the names of the religious superstitions of their parents. In much of Europe birthdays were at one time not celebrated. Rather, people celebrated their Name Days, when they were “christened”, made Christian by baptism, and given their names – which, perverse as it was, made the distinction between birth and acculturation clear.
Yes but “they” don’t play that role – not all of them, therefore it’s not fair to say “they.” The discussion needs to be more precise and nuanced than that.
I know, about Dawkins’s point, but I was making my point, which is different from his more general one. Just for one thing, lots of people are called Muslims whether they are Muslim or not – lots of people are assumed to be Muslims just because they live in a certain country or neighborhood or because they have certain names or because their parents are Muslim.
Well, I’ll leave it at that. Thanks for the discussion. I could add – I am tempted to add something, but I won’t. Yours is the last word in this particular thread. This is just me bringing it to an end!
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