From Blasphemy to Hate Speech (VIII. Reverence & Enchantment)

(Note: this essay is the final in a series.)

It is worth exploring the more subtle effects caused by the absence in our lives of a law against Christian blasphemy.

Of course, any social phenomenon will have a multitude of causes, and it is virtually impossible to quantify the impact of any one cause. But, though the nihilism of our age has many causes, I think the absence of this law must be relevant.

After all, that is why the law existed in the first place. This is true of any law: if it was not expected to have a social impact, it would not be created. And the impact goes beyond merely discouraging blasphemy. It is more insidious and wide-ranging than that. I believe that the absence of blasphemy law has the following effects, in order:

1. To reduce people’s awareness of blasphemy

2. To reduce people’s understanding of “the sacred”

3. To reduce people’s ability to hold anything sacred (reverence)

4. To coarsen culture and debase life in general (enchantment)

5. To coarsen people’s notions of themselves and each other

So, even if you are not Christian, you might have reason to value a law against Christian blasphemy. Maybe you desire social stability; that in itself is a good enough reason. But there are other, more profound, reasons. Maybe you want the people around you to be more than animals, for example.

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In the 1978 House of Lords debate, the Bishop of Durham said:

I believe that the health of a society depends on holding some things sacred...

For me the matter is not just the health of society but the health of individual people. I am confident that an individual’s life is improved by holding some things sacred. “Improved” is not strong enough. “Enriched” is also not right, with its feel-good connotations. “Completed” sounds pretentious but seems the most apt. I believe a life is incomplete, a person is incomplete, if he does not hold some things sacred.

From the sum of millions of individual lives flows the life of the society itself. If the individual lives are healthier, so too will be the society (as the Bishop of Durham said) and that will feed back into the lives of people. It is a symbiotic relationship - an individual and his society being, if not entirely inseparable, deeply intertwined.

But a society’s health has implications not just for the individual citizens but the society itself - what it is, what it stands for, how likely it is to survive, how much help it can be to other societies, how it will be viewed by allies and rivals and enemies, and how much of an inspiration it can be to people in the future. This is all common sense, really; we shouldn’t have to defend the notion that a society should be healthy - but I feel we do, such is our atomisation in the early 21st Century.

With all that said, there is also the question of whether, in our age, we actually do still hold some things sacred. The concept of equality would be an obvious candidate. “Diversity” is just a buzzword; it’s something people know they’re supposed to say, and in that sense they do (sort of) believe in it, but it has little if any real manifestation in their lives. “Respect for human life” would be another candidate, especially when combined with equality/democracy, so that every human life is said to be equally valuable (an absurd notion, in my view). “Personal liberty” is held in very high esteem, but in practice is limited to sexual matters, consumer choices, and how one presents oneself (ways of dressing and speaking). Of all these candidates I think only “Equality” can fairly be said to be held sacred by (some) people today. This is consistent with my previous statement that it is our equivalent of God. I think it is more of an absolutist political axiom than a sacred deity, but I’m not sure that there is much difference between the two, in terms of how ordinary people feel and behave towards the thing.

In any case, the “religion” of Wokery and its “god” of Equality notwithstanding, it is clear that we do not have the same concept of “the sacred” as our ancestors did a century ago. I think most people would agree with that statement. In fact many would agree with it gladly and proudly, since we have come to regard the sacred as at best a delusional romantic indulgence and at worst an example of the dumb (and harmful) superstitious thinking that we’re all supposed to be gleefully moving away from.

The possibility of anything being sacred seems to rely, for most people, on the authority of a god, which in turn must be believed in. After all, if we don’t believe in a god that would make certain things sacred, then surely no things are - or could ever be - sacred?

And, if nothing is or ever could be sacred, then what is this business we call life? It is a dance of atoms - sometimes pretty, sometimes impressive, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but never meaningful, never important beyond the moment. We, witnessing it, are also mere dances of atoms, and no more meaningful or important.

To think along those lines for any length of time would surely lead to despair. We would have to agree, even if reluctantly and even if using protective layers of sarcasm and irony, that we ourselves are just meat, and everybody we care about is just meat. Does anyone really believe that? Does anyone live as if that is true? Of course not. So at some level we in fact believe, against our pretensions, that we are meaningful, and that everyone we love is meaningful, and that every thing we enjoy and every thing we hate is meaningful. It is not a dance of atoms but of meanings.

The affectation is not religion but nihilism. But, we are doomed to that affectation if we do not declare ourselves to be aware of the sacred, and therefore cognisant of blasphemy - because blasphemy is a constant assault on sanctity.

Without the blasphemous, there cannot be the sacred. Without the sacred, there can only be nihilism. Atheism, as an attitude, flies in the face of how we feel, and drastically changes how we will think.

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The Bishop of Durham’s fear was that abolishing the blasphemous libel offence would assert that nothing is sacred, and he feared this because he saw that already happening in England even when the offence still existed:

what can happen, and what we see happening all around us, is a gradual undermining of the sense that some things are sacred.

Remember that he was speaking in 1978. England’s blasphemous libel offence would (astonishingly) exist for another 30 years yet, but he could already see the wages of nihilism “all around us”. Of course, I believe he was correct, and that these effects already being present is partly why it would eventually become possible to abolish the offence. In other words, abolition would be in keeping with the times, and would exacerbate the traits of the times. Conversely, retaining the offence might - just might - alleviate those traits, because it would be seen as a repudiation of nihilism.

That was probably what happened in 1978, but the effect was surely negated by so many other, more powerful, forces in society… which, of course, is why the offence was eventually abolished, and with barely a whimper of protest. The offence was not erased until everything around it, all the cultural infrastructure upon which it relied, had been excavated away, making the offence truly an anachronism, an absurd irrelevance in a godless age.

The general point the Bishop was making is that allowing blasphemy would diminish the concept of the sacred, and that this in turn would diminish people’s ability to treat anything as sacred. He uses the word “reverence”:

We see a loss of the capacity for reverence. This, I suggest to your Lordships, is a serious loss which we ought not to do anything to accelerate. Reverence is a profound human emotion of great personal and social importance.

The fact that it can lead to blindness and hypocrisy is a reminder that it is possible to be stupidly reverent about the wrong things, but to be without reverence at all is to be lacking in human depth.

In my opinion this is certainly true. One of the depressing things about being sentient in 2024 is that most people today are so lacking in depth, and it is precisely because they have no reverence for anything. Most people today, even the older ones, are appallingly shallow compared to our grandparents’ generation. Occasionally I subject myself to leftist and centrist YouTubers, people of between 20 and 50 years of age, and I am always staggered by their vacuity. Their thinking is limited and immature and blind, and is never going to take them anywhere respectable, because their lives contain nothing transcendent.

The women have duty but no direction, because the men have no reverence, only vanity. For both sexes, the self is supreme, and it interacts with the world only through buying things and espousing precious abstract “values”. There is no tangible external thing which the men serve, so their beliefs only serve their own vain self-image. What you have is men in a state of arrested development, still with the sensibilities of 15 year-olds when they are 40. Unaware that they should be serving something, they spend their lives drifting in a futile quest for validation. In the meantime they have infantile notions of society and people and what life is all about, or should be all about, or could be all about. To listen to one of these grown men grappling with moral or political conundra is like listening to a 6 year-old boy talking about his action figures.

Reverence, as an emotion and an approach to life, is unknown to most Westerners today. Should you try to convey its importance to them, you will be met with scoffs, chuckles, baffled looks, and mocking remarks.

The less intelligent among them will recall the comforting promises of democracy and feel genuine outrage at the idea of being “forced” to revere anything, the very idea that someone else - anyone else - can, should or might try to “tell me how to think”. (In fact, they are told what to think every second of their lives, but they haven’t the capacity to realise this, so instead fondly imagine that they come up with it all themselves.)

The more intelligent among them will, deep down, suspect that you might be right, but they will have no idea how or why you would be right. They have no frame of reference. Your suggestion (revere something) even seems to contradict their learning (all is equal), but in any case they have no vocabulary for it, so they cannot even begin to investigate the matter. What’s more, they know (as any idiot does when confronted with a new idea) that to entertain it would be to separate themselves from the crowd, to both alienate themselves from friends and colleagues, and (criminally) place themselves “above” other people, to be “up themselves” - and then the neoliberal jantelagen taps them on the shoulder. The suspicion is there, and might even worry them slightly, but it is easy for them to bury it with some cheap derision. The deed is done in a few seconds and then they can return to their familiar life of consumption, stupidity, shallowness, self-satisfaction, rationalism, materialism and cretinism.

We have several generations of adults who are not thinking seriously, and therefore are not serious people.