Giving offence

I take a guilty pleasure in reading of well-crafted insults. The best are by journalists and writers – an educated, intelligent, literary man has the capability to lay it on in such a beautifully crafted way that his target can but admire the deed in his fury. If there are fewer intelligent, literary men these days, and schools and colleges ensure that few educated men remain intelligent, nevertheless we still have such women and men enough in Britain and the Commonwealth to ensure that the art of the brilliant insult will not yet die.

Insult and offence, not quite the same, have both fallen into the Charybdian whirl of social politics.

Taking offence may be a matter of choice. Giving offence then is uncertain: even when well crafted and deliberate, the offence is a subjective choice by the hearer. Trying to lay down rules is a hopeless task, and I would say we should not try. Slander is slander and narrowly defined by law, with liberality allowed for an honest statement, but slander is measurable and objective. A true statement, however painfully hurtful, is not condemned by the laws of defamation. The more censuring statutes of the realm and of media platforms are another kettle of fish. What we really want to know is not what oafish politicians have decided, but whether there is a moral right to be found somewhere.

Plainly no man should be condemned for an honest statement which his fellow does not want to hear, in which circumstance the offence taken is a deliberate choice. To tell a man a hard truth to keep him from self-delusion is often a cruel necessity, and leaving him in the dullness of error may be the sin. To tell a woman a hard truth, well – we have social conventions about that. It is not a matter for judges, but for our own judgment.

All this said in terms of law and society, we are not morally free in all our words.

In Matthew we learn:

Οὐαι τῷ κόσμῳ ἀπὸ τῶν σκανδάλων ἀνάγκη γὰρ ἐλθεῖν τὰ σκάνδαλα πλὴν οὐαὶ τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ δι᾽ οὗ τὸ σκάνδαλον ἔρχεται

(‘Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!’)

Here the word is ‘σκάνδαλον’, which may be a trap, a snare of a stumbling block. That is the sense in which Hobbes uses “scandall” in Leviathan: a stumbling block for others, which may cause them to sin or to offend criminally. That is the meaning of σκάνδαλον or offence in that passage. It does not mean insults. For insults we have Jesus’s words elsewhere in the Gospel:

ὃς δ᾽ ἂν εἴπῃ τῷ ἀδελφῷ αὐτοῦ ῥακά ἔνοχος ἔσται τῷ συνεδρίῳ ὃς δ᾽ ἂν εἴπῃ μωρέ ἔνοχος ἔσται εἰς τὴν γέενναν τοῦ πυρός

If saying “Μωρέ!” (“Thou fool!”) can condemn you to Hell, that tells us we cannot be blasé about insults. I would not want to go even as far as ‘Ρακα!’ (which would be terribly rude, if we knew what it meant). The Sanhedrin involved itself in such matters, but the law in our time for a free society should not be descend to the matters of the gutter without actual threat of violence.

Morally and philosophically, you should not call a man a fool; not your brother nor anyone, because while there are a great many fools in the world, we are all fallible and not so different from each other, things taken as a whole, and ‘For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you.’ Only the ultimate judge can judge.

And as to the faculties of the mind, (setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat els,) I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength.

These two elements are different but lead to the same condemnation. Offence, meaning the “scandall” that causes another to sin, is doing Satan’s work for him, and condemned as the sin itself. Raw insult is often hypocrisy, often an unworthy a power-play, often an outburst of bestial anger which is condemned in itself. Often those who think themselves sophisticated will call another a μορον, without thinking that the flames are not far from his heels, and we must all be careful of that in ourselves.

To make a law of it would be impossible, and I would remind any politican in his confected rage of what Hobbes wrote on the point:

And therefore the offence men take, from contumely, in words, or gesture, when they produce no other harme, than the present griefe of him that is reproached, hath been neglected in the Lawes of the Greeks, Romans, and other both antient, and moderne Common-wealths; supposing the true cause of such griefe to consist, not in the contumely, (which takes no hold upon men conscious of their own Vertue,) but in the Pusillanimity of him that is offended by it.

The moral law though is set out plainly and we pass it by at our peril.