timeimmortal

I don’t know what to think of David Cameron. Peter Hitchens, whom I use as a barometer of conservative attitude in England, doesn’t seem to think much of the leader of Britain’s conservatives, and if memory serves Cameron has made more than a few major gaffes that have seen him tarred as a social liberal.

Still, here he is saying what needs to be said, and perhaps repeated very often indeed.

‘We as a society have been far too sensitive. In order to avoid injury to people’s feelings, in order to avoid appearing judgemental, we have failed to say what needs to be said. We have seen a decades-long erosion of responsibility, of social virtue, of self-discipline, respect for others, deferring gratification instead of instant gratification.

“‘Instead we prefer moral neutrality, a refusal to make judgments about what is good and bad behaviour, right and wrong behaviour. Bad. Good. Right. Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely dare use any more.’”

…

“We talk about people being ‘at risk of obesity’ instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise. We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it’s as if these things - obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction - are purely external events like a plague or bad weather.

“Of course, circumstances - where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school, and the choices your parents make - have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices that people make.”

He added: “There is a danger of becoming quite literally a de-moralised society, where nobody will tell the truth anymore about what is good and bad, right and wrong. That is why children are growing up without boundaries, thinking they can do as they please, and why no adult will intervene to stop them - including, often, their parents. If we are going to get any where near solving some of these problems, that has to stop.”

One word: responsibility. Our society seems paralzyed with fear of it. Fewer and fewer people want to admit that they are responsible for e.g. their own weight, for their own sexuality, for their own health, and for the consequences of activities that transgress against the normal ordered function of one or more of those things. Fewer and fewer people want to admit that they are responsible for educating their offspring in areas such as manners and morality. Fewer and fewer people want to do anything other than find some faceless “other” to blame for all that afflicts them, without ever once pausing to consider all that they have done to affect themselves.

It’s nice, then, that at least a few people in power still have the guts to call us out on such matters.

Update: Perhaps predictably, Peter Hitchens looks askance at Mr. Cameron’s statement:

You must have seen the gloopy sighs of praise and wonder from gullible ‘commentators’ who have learned nothing from the 11-year Blair-Brown fraud (remember ‘tough on crime’?). There wasn’t a single specific pledge.

He pretended to attack moral neutrality, saying: ‘Bad. Good. Right. Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely dare use any more.’

I decided to see if he would dare use them himself.

So I asked his Press office if he would care to say if the following were right or wrong, bad or good: taking illegal drugs; owning up to taking illegal drugs and saying it was wrong; living together while not being married; punishing criminals.

And do you know? There was no answer.

With benefit of hindsight, this was probably predictable. Rare indeed is the politician who can be taken at his word.

This is the question that bothers Peter Hitchens this week, and it’s a good one to reflect on given the recent confrontation with police had by Christian preachers Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham, who were told by police officers that the area in which they were handing out literature was a Muslim community, that their evangelism was a “hate crime,” and that if they returned to the area ever again and were perchance beaten…well, they’d already been warned.

A police constable who was present during the incident in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham is also alleged to have told the preachers not to return to the district.

It comes amid growing concern over the development of Islamic ‘no-go areas’.

The preachers, Americans Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham, are demanding an apology and compensation from West Midlands Police.

They say their treatment breaks the Human Rights Act, which guarantees freedom of religious expression.

The preachers, who have the backing of the Christian Institute pressure group, say they will take the force to court for breaching their human rights if they don’t receive an apology.

They have accused the officer, PCSO Naeem Naguthney, of behaving in an ‘aggressive and threatening’ manner. A complaint by their lawyers said he interrupted as they spoke to Muslim youths about their beliefs.

Mr Abraham, 65, who was born a Muslim in Egypt and is a convert to Christianity, said: ‘He told us we were trying to convert Muslims to Christianity and that that was a hate crime.

‘He was very intimidating and it concerns me that somebody holding his views can become a police officer, albeit at PCSO level.’

Mr Cunningham, 48, a fellow American Baptist missionary, said: ‘He realised we were Americans and then started ranting at us about George Bush and American foreign policy.

‘He said we were in a Muslim area and were not allowed to spread our Christian message. He said he was going to take us to the police station.’

At any rate, Peter Hitchens — the sane Hitchens brother, mind — muses thusly:

Why did we have to wait for Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, born and raised in Muslim Pakistan, to remind us that, as he put it, ‘the beliefs, values and virtues of Great Britain have been formed by the Christian faith’?

Just as important, why did we have to wait for him to urge us to do something about restoring that faith before we either sink into a yelling chaos of knives, fists and boots, or swoon into the strong, implacable arms of Islam?

Most of our homegrown prelates are more interested in homosexuality or in spreading doubt about the gospel or urging the adoption of Sharia law.

Then again, why did it take the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, to explain to us that our parliamentary system was the best guarantee of liberty in the world and to remind us of the courage and valour of our people in war?

This is not what British leaders say or even think, not least because they are busy pulling the constitution to pieces.

It is not what our children are taught in schools.

In fact, any expression of national pride is viewed with suspicion by the state, by the education system and above all by the BBC.

It was not always so. Half a century ago, we had churchmen, broadcasters, academics and military men who thought it normal to love their own country, normal to support the Christian faith which made us what we are, and were willing to defend it.

The question of what happened in the years between is one of the most interesting in history.

I suggest reading the whole thing — it isn’t terribly long, but is a good summation of just what has gone wrong with modern Britain.

There was a time when the British had the gumption and courage to stand up to all manner of menaces, internal and foreign alike, and when the British people took pride in their nation. Those days would seem to have expired, as Britain sinks more and more into two separate chasms: that of rampant, primitive and violent Islam in its immigrant communities, and that of demoralized, nihilistic secularism everywhere else. And the latter does not have the desire, strength, or courage to resist the advance of the former.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Gastric bypasses. Stomach stapling, as I gather the procedure is also known — a last-ditch treatment for obesity, to stave off a heart attack or stroke.

Being married to a nurse, I occasionally get to hear about this kind of procedure, and I gather that it really is intended to be last-ditch. The long-term survival prospects aren’t exactly stellar, nor are the odds of the surgery really doing all that much to help a person*. It does, I gather, occasionally work as intended, but not often.

Still, as more and more people in society are becoming obese, such procedures are expected to be commonplace. Britain has seen a 41% rise in the number of bypasses done in the last year, at an average cost of 7,000 pounds per operation.

It’s on the rise here in Canada too, although I don’t know by what percentage.

The problem is: surgeries like this are, more often than not, like rearranging deck chairs on…well, you know which ship, O Reader. Treatment is one thing, but a problem like obesity has more and deeper causes that are, frankly, not always addressed, nor always rectified:

I worry that not enough is being done to make sure people don’t gain the weight back. See, a lot of people think the surgery is a miracle cure. It’s not. I have talked to dozens of people who have had it done, only to go back to their old habits and gain all the weight back. This is not a good use of public money. I realize that obesity is a serious issue (my fat ass reminds me of that every day!), but I would rather see the price of green peppers go down before I would want to see so much being spent on a cosmetic surgery that may not solve the long-term problem. Progressives are always on about “root causes”, and this is one area where I agree with them. You cannot change a lifetime of habit in a 3 hour surgery. A person has to be in the right headspace in order to lose weight. Sometimes it takes a health scare. Sometimes it’s a nasty comment from a trusted loved-one. Sometimes it is a positive, like wanting to be more fertile and start a family.

But like going into detox for that last time, you need to have hit your bottom (no fat pun intended) before you can lose the weight. The NHS is spending a lot of money on the symptom, not the disease.

This is something Grace and I talk about every once in a while. The plain fact is, a lot of people who go in for this and other forms of surgery related to complications from obesity do not change their own lifestyles, which are the real cause of the problem in the wake of the surgery. If a person’s liver fails because the last time they didn’t eat at McDonald’s was sometime in the 90s, they expect a new one. And when they get a new one, they finish the post-surgical healing time and go right back to the Big Macs.

(Basically, it’s the culture entitlement at work again, with the usual lack of understanding that rights are tempered and accompanied by responsibilities. People have the inalienable right to eat at McDonald’s, and when something fails in their own body they demand, as though they are owed, corrective treatment. God forbid it cross their minds to amend their own destructive habits to prevent a re-occurrence of the failure!)

To be fair, some people do transform their lifestyles, and they deserve to be commended for that; this is especially true from within a Christian understanding of the world, since we should rejoice every time someone turns his or her life around, in same way that God rejoices over every sinner who repents.

But I agree with my wife when she observes that responsive treatments like this are, ultimately, a losing battle. As long as people in places like Canada and England know that the government will foot the bill when their body craps out, there’s no real incentive for them to change…especially when that same government mandates and enforces a human rights regime that basically encourages people to feel entitled to…well, everything.

What ultimately needs to happen, and this is hinted at in the excerpt above (i.e. “green peppers”), is that health care services need to focus more on preventative medicine, instead of just on responsive medicine. Surgery is all well and good, but we could do more and better to fight obesity if we focused on responding to people at risk of becoming obese, and getting them to change their lifestyles accordingly. Yes, programmes of this nature would still have quite a cost associated with them, but in the long term they would probably save quite a lot of dollars if they were, in fact, succecssful to any meaningful degree.

A person really “cannot change a lifetime of habit in a 3 hour surgery,” and our health care systems need to be able to address this reality. At present, as I understand it, patients in for bypass surgery do receive counselling, and (correct me if I’m wrong, O Reader) have to have demonstrated the ability to lose a certain quantity of weight on their own prior to undergoing the surgery itself. That said, somewhere along the line that person did begin down a path that led them to become obese, and one gets the sense that more could have been done for them earlier on to perhaps prevent them ever becoming so morbidly overweight as to require drastic surgery in the first place.

The elephant in the room is a pair of questions: what could be done, and how do we get people to take it seriously. And this brings us back to our culture of entitlement, because while such a thing persists it may well be nigh-impossible to put in place programmes that work to prevent morbid obesity by way of counselling, teaching, and exercise.

In a way, the prevalence of gastric bypass surgery, and obesity as well, is just one more testament to the way in which our rights-obsessed, responsibility-free, post-Christian society is ultimately destroying itself.

It might be entirely predictable of me to point out that modern atheism bears a goodly deal of the blame for this self-destructive trend in society, as surely as it bears the blame for other such trends (e.g. demographics). But I observe that I’m not the only one who thinks so…and the sane Hitchens brother has quite the thing to say about another trend with the same root causes.

I did mention Atheism at the beginning. For that is at the root of all this. Once people don’t acknowledge any moral authority outside themselves, they can choose which rules to take seriously and which not to entirely according to their own feelings at any time. They will generally do this on the basis of what suits them. It begins with little things, and moves on to the great. We are now at the stage where it is moving on quite fast.

One of the key features of atheism is that atheists themselves are unable to grasp this point. We’re just as good as religious people, they respond, if not better. Maybe so. Religious people who understand their creeds know perfectly well that they’re no better than anyone else. That’s not the issue. What is?.

It is this. What do you really mean by ‘good’? Why (for example) is fidelity better than adultery, patience better than impatience? Watch people who are nice to you in the office, as they drive, in a hurry, in frantic traffic, and you may see another side of them. ‘Road rage’, where we are unrestrained by fears about how we will look to those we live and work with, is an interesting measure of what we are really like. Cars are a powerful moral lie-detector.

The connection might not seem immediately intuitive, but it is there, and it has a great deal to do with both individual liberty and the distinctions drawn between what are considered private matters, and what are considered public matters.

What we eat, most people would agree, is a private matter. What, where, and how fast we drive can be similarly classified, but in the case of a car it is easier to observe that what can at first be viewed as a private matter can very rapidly become a public matter, if in fact we drive too fast or too recklessly. What we eat can similarly become a public matter, if we are reckless about it as well. This is perhaps not as true in places like America, given that one pays for one’s health care there, but it certainly is true in places like Canada and England, where the government generally foots the bill. Obesity — which, psychological considerations aside, arises out of too much consumption — and the expensive surgical treatments for it are an example of how the private issue of what we eat becomes a public issue; basically: we have eaten too much, and are now a burden on the public purse.

Drugs? Take them. Sex? Have it now and to hell with the consequences. Abortion’s easy now. Manners? Who cares. Patience? What’s that? Parents? Ignore them as soon as you can, and especially once you’ve got to university thanks to their money and effort. Teachers? What do they know? Rules? They’re for other people. Religion? It’s a wicked fraud designed to keep us down. This belief is itself a moral code, but one which is entirely based on the desires of the person involved — and which is destined to cause growing problems as more and more unfettered egos bump into each other.

The same attitude could probably be observed, I suspect, in response to the above suggestion that medicine become more preventative in nature — this is the illustration of the elephant, so to speak. For as surely as our society believes that rosaries should be kept far away from ovaries, we believe every bit as much that nobody is allowed to tell us to put the cheeseburger down in favour of a green vegetable…even if that is exactly what we need to do.

It might seem strange for a “freespeecher” to be thinking in this manner, but let us come back to what was said above, O Reader. Let us look again at the issue of where the private exercise of rights becomes a public issue. With freedom of speech, that line ostensibly exists at the exact point where the articulation of an idea or viewpoint becomes incitement to violence. We have laws against that sort of thing (and rightly so).

Where does that line exist regarding the issue of what we eat? Does it exist at all? Should it exist, if it currently does not? How might we effect such a thing in real life? One possible answer is that receiving treatment is contingent upon meeting a set of criteria both pre- and post-surgery, although what the penalty would be for breaking such an agreement post-surgery would be, I do now know (a gastric bypass can’t really be undone, after all). The idea of a user-pay system for obesity treatments is a tempting thought, but given that even in the U.S. obesity is on the rise, the effectiveness of that idea is called into question. Denial of treatment to those who did not seek counselling earlier on in their obesity is a possibility, although that raises other issues.

Social upheaval would probably achieve the best results, but it would be rather unrealistic to expect such a thing to occur.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Peter Hitchens asks and answers.

The word ‘Rights’ can mean several rather different things. Take the Magna Carta, and its descendants, the English and American Bills of Rights. These fine documents are, for the most part, made up of things which the state is not allowed to do. It cannot imprison us without trial, try us without a jury, billet soldiers on us, search our homes without a warrant, censor the newspapers, force us to incriminate ourselves, take away our weapons or exercise arbitrary power without the consent of Parliament.

If such a Bill were to be drawn up now it would prevent phone-tapping and surveillance, but there is no chance of a modern Parliament or Congress, packed as they are with party placemen and dimwits, passing any such law.

The English Bill is, alas, more or less a dead letter anyway. Most British subjects have never even heard of it and do not know it exists, and many of its requirements are now being breached - especially the one making it illegal to fine someone without trying him.

One observes that much the same thing is happening in Canada, as the fundamental rights of citizens — which classically have been understood to mean the various ways in which citizens are protected from unjust state action or activity — are being eroded, while imaginary rights are being granted.

So a lady with a skin condition has a “human right” not to wash her hands even when working in the food service industry; what does that matter if we all lose the right to speak our minds in open, public forums?

Read the whole thing.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

What bothers me just as much is the sense of being transported, when I wasn’t looking, into a very bad dream from which there is no waking up.

When exactly did it happen? When did my town hall change from being a friendly, efficient place into a headquarters of fussy political correctness where I feel like an unwanted interloper?

When did the BBC news become a shameless propaganda show, instead of a discreet one?

When did my GP surgery start asking me for my ethnic origin? Worse, when did they start treating parents as guilty suspects if they bring a child into hospital after a fall?

When did it become impossible ever to speak to anyone who will take responsibility for anything?

When did I start getting the feeling, as one of these episodes begins, that there is absolutely no point in complaining or resisting, because if I don’t accept this, sooner or later, ’security’ is going to be called and I will be worse off than I was before.

It was not always like this. I know it wasn’t. I can remember when it wasn’t. What I cannot remember is, at any stage, asking for the changes that have happened, or being asked if I wanted them.

They just happened, and now they’re here.

Canada is not all that far behind Britain in becoming a police state in all ways except for the actual establishment of a secret police. Our human rights commissions already censor opinions held to be “disagreeable” while at the same time serving as a vehicle of agenda and propaganda for subversive interests. Bureaucratic record-keeping is certainly monolithic enough in this country as to make the issue of a person’s ethnic origin a suitable topic for a medical form (when in reality, all that should matter is a) whether one is injured or ill and b) if so, in what way). And the dichotomy that has emerged between parental rights on one hand, and the whims of educators and health facilitators on the other, is well known here. But then, we opened that Pandora’s Box when we started giving fourteen-year old girls the option of getting an abortion, or a supply of condoms, without having to first seek parental consent, didn’t we?

Chesterton observed that if anarchists sought to throw down the small laws, they would be left with big laws instead, a none-too-subtle reminder that when one dismantles the pillars of a functional and free Western government, the result is not a governance-free anarchist paradise, but a dictatorship.

Analogous to Chesterton’s observation is the fact that if human rights commissions would seek to protect, at any cost, the human rights of every petty interest group that dares speak out, they will not be left with a paradise in which every person walks about in an optimal, self-actualized and enlightened appreciation of his or her own rights; they will be left with a place in which no person enjoys any basic rights at all. The police state loometh, in Canada as surely as in Britain.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

“Chimeras” is the term some use — and I think I will join their number — to describe the human/bovine hybrid embryos that British researchers have recently created. The very idea seems, to me, repugnant, and my reservations about such experimentation are echoed (with greater eloquence) by Peter Hitchens this week.

“Steve B” derides caution about certain types of experimentation. Does he believe there are no boundaries to research? I doubt it. In which case the argument must be where those boundaries lie. The Roman Catholic position, that you do not deliberately and voluntarily destroy life to do good, is a clear unequivocal borderline, inconvenient to scientists but preventing many evils. And it has the virtue of being absolute. There are alternative methods of conducting the research, which don’t involve Dr Moreau-type outrages with monster animal-human embryos. And I think the argument that Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s will somehow be cured as a result of these laboratory adventures also need to ask themselves how they can possibly be sure. Even if you accept that the end justifies the means, oughtn’t you to be sure that the end are in fact attainable by the chosen method. You cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs, but you can break eggs without making any omelettes.

There are severe problems with attempting to justify the means to an end by looking first at the end; I abandoned such shallow moral reasoning in about the ninth grade, more or less. And I think Hitchens nails one of the more important criticisms of “by the means” justification — until we have achieved the ends by which we might attempt to justify the means, our means are without justification. So if we cannot be certain that the ends desired will be the ends achieved (and we cannot be), our means are without justification. And at that point, we create for ourselves a real moral quandry, especially if — at the end of whatever process we are referring to when we talk of our means — we do not achieve the desired ends. If in fact these chimera embryos do not enable us to, for example, better treat Alzheimer’s, can we still say that our means were justified?

All we are left with is our intent, and intent — while important — is not sufficient to justify as moral any particular means. The means by which we achieve what ends we arrive at must itself be morally justifiable wholly on its own merits, above any beyond the desired ends being sought, as well as above and beyond our intent in pursuing said ends by said means. Yes, that’s a more demanding framework to work within…but where Morality concerning the value of human life is concerned, we should be more demanding.