Month: May 2025

Taking offence

Why should anyone take offence at anything? Giving offence is uncertain. Taking offence is a personal choice. It is more important than invented rules about what constitutes offensive words or debate. There should then be less debate on words spoken, and more on the reasonableness of the reaction to them.

Etymologically, offence by words should be impossible, if offence is in plain meaning an attack – then a word can only be offensive if it carries a threat of violence. That would be a narrow meaning. We need to tie a meaning down: “in wrong, or no Definitions’ lyes the first abuse; from which proceed all false and senslesse Tenets”

I recall being offended in my youth by many things.  Mainly it was people being rude about ideas I believed (and usually still do). That was not a personal insult:  if it was an attack, it was an attack on my own certainties.

The less certain an idea, the more it must be defended, at least in the mind.  An idea, an ideology or religious doctrine (which are barely distinguishable) calms the frantic mind, by providing an anchor point. It may be a flaky idea or a good one, but once the mind has settled upon it then there is rest from uncertainty. This explains the popularity of pop-philosophy and conspiracy theories: cheap ideas to explain everything so you can get on with life. They are also nonsense.

An attack therefore on the ideas on which you have anchored your life will feel deeply personal: the words seek to wrench you from your certainty and cast you out into the sea of complex reality. The staple of dramas; ‘Listen – there is something you should know about her..’ ‘No. no; I don’t want to hear it!’; and that is genuine. A personal revelation can be devastating. Likewise a religious or philosophical one.

Pleasure therefore, (or Delight,) is the apparence, or sense of Good; and Molestation or Displeasure, the apparence, or sense of evill. And consequently all Appetite, Desire, and Love, is accompanied with some Delight more or lesse; and all Hatred, and Aversion, with more or lesse Displeasure and Offence.

There is another article (I promise) on personal offence and insult. The current generation’s use of the word “offence” as an offensive action is of more political interest.

The current debates are framed in terms of personal dignity, arising from the long drive for racial equality.  There is a sound base position: language is used to depersonalise whole races, by which impersonally directed words can lead to mistreatment, or the exclusion of individuals from the shield that society provides. This is not about “offence” but about changing the language. The word is not the fault, but the way it is used.

The widening of this original idea is problematic, and linking it to personal offence is dishonest, mostly. If you wish to change the way people speak, be honest about it.  The old days of “politically correct language” were honest in terminology: it was about changing they way things are expressed in order to reflect a particular political view of the world. That is ancient: those in the days of St Augustine adopted the term “catholic” for themselves was a claim to be mainstream as opposed to the Arians, to form a world view. Every new political movement is a euphemism. If insistence on political consistent words is kept within the political group, it is appropriate. It is a form of group idiolect – the quirks of language belonging to a specific group.

At the spoken word then, if the hearer claims to be offended, it may be:

  • A genuine fear of violence (whether reasonable or deluded);
  • Revolt at a personal insult;
  • A false insistence, in an attempt to force a change in the use of language;
  • A projection of the group idiolect beyond its proper sphere;
  • Genuine discomfort that the hearer’s mental certainties have been challenged.

Take any expression of offence at words, genuine or feigned, and they should fit one or more of these categories.

There is language which is socially improper:  I am repelled by foul language. It is odd that as there has grown tolerance in society for foul language, at the same time there has grown an intolerance of the expression of unfavoured language. We may have it the wrong way round these days. Nothing should hinder research and genuine enquiry – if an outrageous blood-libel is proposed, at least research it in all seriousness, all the better to disprove it.

There is genuine outrage over insults, individual or collective, and anyone may make a genuine, benevolent protest against collective libels or the language which encourages them. The majority of such claims though are false. I suspect (without the data to prove it) that the greater number are genuine, but not about insult; they are the discomfort felt by the hearer that their comforting falsehoods are being challenged. Shut your ears to what you do not want to hear, or try to shut another’s mouth, rather than have think afresh.

See also

Books

 

We shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds

Eighty years since Victory in Europe, and the world has changed so utterly we cannot imagine the joy of the day.

The War was beyond description. For those at home, six years of fear, despair, destruction, hope, hope dashed, then regained, and suddenly a new, unfamiliar world blinking into the light from all that had overwhelmed every moment.  For those on land and sea and air fighting, and endless train of scenes no man should see interspersed with comradeship, boredom, comedy, pain, suppressed fear, endurance beyond endurability, death, hopelessness without sight of an end. We as a nation fought a relentless, suborned people engaged in the most monstrous ideology we had ever seen (and lived to know it was defeated by allying with another; when Orwell wrote the word “doublethink” in 1948 we had all lived with it). Whatever we read of the War, those of us born later, that cannot but touch the surface of the horror that the nation defeated.

And then it was won. Good had triumphed over evil in the West (and in the East, evil triumphed over evil).

Rejoice they did, and we can still rejoice in knowing that, for all the trouble and wars since, nothing like that has befallen our nation since. I want to rejoice. Except that it is hard to do so when I see the two great Russian-speaking nations tearing each other apart in fratricidal war, watching cities fall and burn as once ours did. We celebrate peace just as two of the world’s largest nations, India and Pakistan, one artificially divided nation, are on the brink of war. There is no limit to the follies of mankind, or its evil. We learnt that as the ashes of Europe cooled eighty years ago, and saw all that the Hitler cult had done.

Eighty years ago they dreamed of peace before they dared to hope to see its dawn.  Like Sonya assuring her Uncle Vanya; “We shall rest! We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds, we shall see how all the evil of the earth, all our sufferings shall drown in mercy, which will fill the whole world, and our life shall become quiet, gentle, sweet, like caress.”

And then it was done. There was nothing to be done but unrestrained rejoicing, and so they should have. The peace is a challenge, but a greater, joyful blessing than we in the peaceful West can ever understand it, as we see a jewelled sky and life is quiet and  gentle like a sweet caress.

See also

Books

Not so smug now, are you Nigel?

So you thought it would be easy, but the established parties have clocked you long since, and you failed. Here you face the reckoning.

Yes, I know – you have almost single-handedly made your party the biggest force in British politics, and have turned swathes of the council landscape a fetching shade of turquoise, and put a boxer into office as another was turned out, and turned defecting Tories a whiter shade of blue, and all that. There is not a single deep blue county council left. Nigel, you can be measuring up the curtains for Number 10.

Except of course that it’s not your party now. One man on a megaphone is what you know, but suddenly you have all manner of men and women, dedicated people and fruitcakes and loonies, wearing your colours and speaking what they are pleased to call their minds, out of turn and out of control. You remember what happened to UKIP? It makes you wake with a sweat in the night still, doesn’t it.  Now they are in charge of actual things, given unwonted responsibility and left to fall into the inevitable pit of compromise, prevarication, dishonesty and trusting whatever the council officers tell them they have to do. They  are human, after all – they cannot be Nietzschean supermen like yourself. And they, Nigel, are the ones with the power and the voice now. It is not your party anymore.

Four years are yet to run until 2029. (That is, if Sir Keir allows us an election then.: his beloved European élites have shown you do not have to accept the popular choice. He is an experienced prosecutor, after all – he might have let Jimmy Savile off, but you and your people are in his sights for any wee infraction of the rules, even if the rules have to be made up.)

The path to Downing Street is no yellow-brick road but is a twisted woodland track, with tripping-roots and potholes hidden in the shadow. Footpad beggars, who were once potent men you cast out of their castles, lie in wait there.

But Nigel, enjoy your feigned triumph for the brief time you can, for when you look, you have failed in your bold attempt: there are still some Tory councillors left.