Mail on Sunday 2005

AFTER THE LONDON BOMB – A MORAL COMPASS?

The bus stopped just by Knightsbridge tube station, where police were patrolling. In the distance a siren screamed. Above a row of shops was a huge billboard advertisement for the clothes chain, Kookai. It showed four women in scanty bikinis: giant, perfect bodies dominating the street. On the bus were two Muslim women, completely covered - and the scene sad much abut today’s Britain. As I ask myself if the two women felt offended by the wholly unnecessary sexiness of the advert, I am struck by a different answer. Because the person offended is actually me.

I know there is precious little respect for women in oppressive Muslim states - nor, for that matter, in most African countries. Still, to question the way we sell everything through sex, and to examine our values, is not to denigrate the best aspects of Western culture. But we cannot be complacent. Surely it would be useful if we could use the current crisis to train a searchlight on the way we live now,  and ask if it is the best we can do? In terms of personal behaviour, would those Muslim women be correct to judge that we’ve lost our moral compass?

One of the themes that has emerged from recent atrocities is that Muslims, moderate and otherwise, don’t integrate. A recent poll discovered that a large number - one third - of Muslims don’t approve of Western society, thinking it decadent and immoral. Like many people reading that, I thought, ‘Well, go and live somewhere else then’ - a perfectly logical response. Yet it doesn’t quite do. Why is fundamentalism on the increase in every religion, not just Islam?  Why do people passionate about their faith feel they are battling against modern, secular values which threaten them? They see our popular culture not as liberating, but as an assault. And the point I want to make is - sometimes I do too.

Quite rightly we take a pride in our freedoms. Understandably we resent the fact that some of those who have come here to benefit now wish to destroy them. We have cherished institutions to be proud of. But rather than bridle when we are criticised, shouldn't we be self- critical?  Freedom is a word much bandied about, but I don’t hear the vital distinction between liberty and license. Liberty is a fine concept  which implies a degree of self-sacrifice - since you can’t have a free society unless you acknowledge that others are as important as you are yourself and that you have mutual responsibilities. License is all about instant gratification for me, me, me.

There’s no point in having freedom if you never ask yourself what it is FOR. An obvious example is the twenty four hour drinking culture which the New Labour government is foisting on us in the name of some spurious notion of choice. No matter that senior doctors and police have combined to beg a rethink. No matter that binge drinking threatens the health of a whole generation, as well as public safety. Or that the most basic common sense cries out that this will cause a further deterioration  to our way of life. No, many people want to be able to drink all day and all night, and in the name of ‘consumer demand’ they will be given what they want.

The effects on young women especially are well known. Proud though I am of my country I see nothing to boast about in our appalling teenage pregnancy rates, and that girls are getting as drunk as they do - at  a younger and younger age - must play a part. Nowadays it seems that hard-won equality for women is reduced to the equal opportunity to fall about half naked and blind drunk on a Greek island, and then - the great feminist irony - to get raped. Or at least, to hold yourself so cheap that in between bouts of vomiting, you ‘shag’ as many strangers as you can on your glorious week away.

The song from Oklahoma, ‘I’m just a girl who can’t say No’ , could be our national anthem. There is no such thing as restraint: children are not taught it, so-called celebrities do not show it, and the idea of it is detested by those with power over our mass media. They who are most privileged (and should therefore possess some wisdom) are the very ones who have given us Big Brother, upping the ante each time - because when everything is permitted, those who stand to gain will push out the boundaries. So completely has the vile pornography trade corrupted language, movies, magazines, TV, advertising, and fashion that nobody sees anything inappropriate in overtly sexual street hoardings, or that a silly shampoo has to be sold on its orgasmic potential.

Just as popular men’s magazine’s like ‘Nuts’ demean women, so the level of violence which is now routine in movies and computer games demeans our shared humanity. How often do children see images of people being cruelly and deliberately hurt?  What does that do to their sensitivity to the feelings of others? Yet if a serial killer were to stand up in court and  admit he was influenced by the film ‘The Devil’s Rejects’, the liberal intelligentsia would still deny any connection between popular culture and behaviour, and complain at censorship.

Like’ freedom’, democracy is a fine word - but it is threatened by a dumbed-down culture of disrespect. Figures of authority - teachers, police, church leaders, politicians - are not given the respect they once commanded, and this spirals down, so that toddlers witness their own parents being abusive and threatening to nurses, teachers - anyone who dares to say something they don’t want to hear. The aggressive materialism which deludes us into thinking we have the right to own virtually anything we want, breeds selfishness and self-importance. Ignorance rules.

If you believe in nothing except your own pleasure, you will sneer at those who call for restraint, for self-sacrifice - a return to old values.  The result is a coarsening of our sensibilities, which has been colluded in across the political spectrum. It’s interesting that right-wingers use ‘do-gooder’ as a term of abuse, while on the left they laugh at those who are ‘moralistic’. Fashionable media liberals detest what is ‘worthy’, and soggy New Labourites hate being ‘judgmental’. We should ask ourselves if we want to live in a society which does harm, is unworthy and has lost to ability to make moral judgments.

The poet W.B.Yeats famously visualised a future time when, ‘The best lack all conviction, whilst the worst / Are full of passionate intensity’. That time has come. Disaffected young Muslim men flock to be brainwashed by hate-filled authority figures, whilst our own disaffected young are destroying themselves with nihilistic ‘pleasure’. On the one hand is fanatical belief, one the other, mindless anarchy. And all the time the centre is passive; speechless before the onslaught. But just as we now expect Moslem moderates to stand up and examine what is wrong within their communities, so I believe that we - what used to be called the Silent Majority - have to do the same. It is the values we share that need to be identified.

It goes back to my question: what is freedom FOR? For the last ten years I have been presenting a series on BBC Radio 4 called ‘Devout Sceptics’ which discusses faith and doubt. People often ask me what I have learnt, and I reply that even in atheists there is  a deep need for meaning . To know that we are on this earth for a purpose. An agnostic, I share with Christianity and Islam a belief in compassion - the ability to see sacredness in every single human being, and a willingness to take care of the vulnerable. Such moral values are perverted by the terrorists, and threatened by selfish materialism. But they need to be fought for - as the only hope we have.