Should Rudeness Really Be Illegal?
Under the SNP’s Hate Crime Act, ‘stirring up hatred’ will be a criminal offence punishable by seven years in jail.
A few years back, I went with my partner to a club which describes its entrance policy as ‘for women and respectful friends’. We got drunk, danced to Kelis and The Spice Girls, and then went outside for a cigarette (though I don’t in fact smoke). Soon, three men who were clearly smashed and spoiling for a fight tried to enter. The bouncer, a woman of about forty, turned them away. Men were not allowed, she said, which was not strictly speaking true; though certainly men like them could not come in. After rowing with her for a while, and trying unsuccessfully to gain access to the club, the men left; but not before one pointed at me.
‘You let him in.’
True enough. True enough, even though I happened to be wearing a full face of makeup, hoop earrings, a bodycon dress, and heels. I was unbothered by this attempt at rudeness (it was not my first rodeo); but the bouncer, like some knight from the 13th century, decided to stand up for me. Though her intervention was unneeded, I was really quite touched — touched that someone would leap to my defence in that way. I would like to think that I would do the same. Here was a drunk and a boor with hurt feelings, trying to upset someone to satisfy his anger. He was trying to cause trouble. And people called that out.
A new law extends the offence of ‘stirring up racial hatred’ to disability, religion, sexual orientation, age, trans identity and ‘variations in sex characteristics’.
But should what he said be illegal? I ask because that is what the Scottish government has just decided. A new law extends the offence of ‘stirring up racial hatred’ to disability, religion, sexual orientation, age, trans identity and ‘variations in sex characteristics’. This instantly implicates J.K. Rowling, who has promised (against the advice of her people, clearly) not to delete her tweets expressing and promoting gender-critical views. Others have promised the same.
In my view, the French counter-revolutionary Louis de Bonald was onto something when he said that ‘a people that has been deprived of its customs through a desire for written laws has imposed on itself the harsh necessity of writing down everything, even its customs.’ When ordinary habits of behaviour — good manners, for instance, of the kind on show that night in Soho — become laws, then flexible, adaptable ways of self-regulation are swept away and replaced by inflexible formal rules that reduce social interactions to legalistic transactions. If we were to make good manners mandatory (or, more precisely, if we were to make rudeness illegal), then the ordinary custom of good manners would morph. It would become less a matter of character and more a question of rule-following. The duty of teaching our kids good manners, or trying to teach them to ourselves, would vanish. Avoidance of punishment would replace the desire not to be rude as the main motivation.
Moreover, police in the UK already investigate a vanishingly small number of reported crimes. According to the Home Office’s own data, someone is charged after a break-in (of which there are a 1,000 a day in England and Wales) in less than 4 per cent of cases. Scotland even said a few months back that it would stop investigating certain crimes. What, then, is the point of the law? And why are they making up new laws? Perhaps because investigating Twitter abuse means they do not have to get up from their computers. Even so, your average copper might not relish having more work to do. Since the new law was introduced on Monday, Police Scotland has received more than 3,000 complaints of ‘hate speech’.
Police in the UK already investigate a vanishingly small number of reported crimes. According to the Home Office’s own data, someone is charged after a break-in (of which there are a 1,000 a day in England and Wales) in less than 4 per cent of cases.
If you ask me, policing language should fall lower in your list of priorities than, for instance, policing theft or violent assault. I am quite sympathetic to the view that you ought not to police language at all, since it is the means by which we think, and since compelled common decency is not decency at all. Being respectful to others because you fear repercussions is not respect. This was a point made by Hegel in his lord-bondsman dialectic, in case you care: if a bondsman is compelled to respect and obey his lord, then the lord will not find it satisfying, since he is not being respected and obeyed freely: the bondsman respects and obeys him because he has to. Moreover, if an incursion on the freedom to speak is an incursion also on the freedom to think, then the democracy which rests on the assumption that the demos (that’s us) will think for itself starts to look a bit fragile.
Clearly it does not seem this way in Scotland. But perhaps it is not just Scotland. As Patrick Deneen writes in Why Liberalism Failed, liberalism so completely sweeps away all the customs and traditions of the society in which it takes root that soon, its rulers must pass positive laws just to keep the peace. He claims that liberalism, paradoxically, gives way to its opposite, in an instance of what Heraclitus called coincidentia oppositorum. If his analysis his correct, then this is how we find ourselves in the ironic and less-than-ideal situation of seeing the home of the Enlightenment make saying nasty things to people illegal, when it ought simply to be considered bloody rude, since it is. And this is how Scotland’s most celebrated novelist could end up in the clink.
