In Defence of Insolence

In defence of insolence

Whether etiquette, decorum or savoir-faire – politeness is beamed upon as a virtue. While some might think that a gentleman is a creature found in an Austen novel, civilization has never been more refulgent with civility. But is it all that it is cracked up to be? 

What it means to be polite at the macro-level, I feel, is fundamentally the resolve to do what one ought rather than what one want. It is a display of morality and altruism that transcend mere self-satisfaction and thus build trust and friendship between individuals, a process vital in all social species, not the least homo sapiens. In humans, it is a check against the ignoble instincts that often, due to their deep-seated and primal nature, triumph over reason. In the micro-sense, acceptable hypocrisy is also a form of politeness, without which small talk at a party would be a mine-field.

While we instinctively understand the important role politeness plays as the necessary oil that lubricates (if you’ll pardon the expression) social intercourse, a push back might be needed to illustrate the important, indeed vital, role that insolence, disrespect and ridicule can play in the battle-field of ideas on the macro-level. First of all, what different people might find to be rude or (that ghastly word) offensive are different. If one wished to live in a society where the biggest concern is that nobody is ever ‘hurt’ by any imprudent lack of politeness, like some extreme left wing liberals (small L) would wish for, one would axiomatically be required to cease all conversation and probably forced to stay indoors lest your haircut might offend someone. Especially if there are those desperate to be offended and willingly acting as self-imposed thought police. 

This is illustrated acutely by the lamentable case where a Yale professor, Erika Christakis, who wrote a gentle and innocuous email to the students pushing back on the ridiculous directive from the Intercultural Affairs Committee that warned students that it would be insensitive to wear costumes that symbolise cultural appropriation or misrepresentation. What would such a offensive costume be, you ask? How about a feathered headdress or war paint. To this, the professor wrote: “I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious, a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?” This mild reprimand against a mirthless and Orwellian injunction, drew so much vitriol from students that she quit her post. A video is online of Ms Christakis’s husband Nicholas, also a lecturer at Yale, being swarmed by a mob of students incensed with the righteous fires of political correctness calling his stance on freedom of expression “disgusting”. In particular, a female student, shrill with indignation with spittle flying as she shouts at the mild mannered professor, whom she must see as the embodiment of bigotry and hatred, “You shouldn’t be able to sleep at night!” This from students at Yale, the crème de la crème, attending a place of higher learning where ideas clash. If these young adults can’t handle Halloween costumes with feathered headdress, are we expected to have them as our future doctors? Or Lawyers? Or politicians? This is where a blind insistence on politeness will result without an understanding of history or a sense of proportionality. It would be funny if it wasn’t so alarming. It is also equally alarming that the adults that run Yale, responsible for the education of the students, in a country founded on the constitutional right to self-expression, didn’t use this right to tell students like the furiously irate student demanding political correctness, that Yale is not a kindergarten and that she should grow up and learn to deal having her fur ruffled if she wants to be of any use to the world. Similar things are happening elsewhere. In the UK, the Middlesex cricket team named the Crusaders has to change its name after complaints from Muslims and Jews. A school in Huddersfield renamed its production of 'Three Little Pigs' to 'Three Little Puppies' as to not offend Muslims. A jobs recruiter was left reeling when her advert for 'reliable' and 'hard-working' applicants were rejected by the job centre when they deemed such request would be offensive to unreliable and lazy people. In the US, many councils and organisations have actively removed any term with 'man' as prefix or suffix. A manhole is now a 'utility hole'. The termite of politeness have bored deep and dined well. 

Secondly, casting an eye back on the long meandering course of history, one notices that almost all the great cases of persecutions are blasphemy cases, where individual thinkers dared to challenge and show disrespect towards the sacred values or doctrines of churches or institutions that are considered inviolable or sacred. Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Darwin, Trotsky, the Suffragettes, Mandela, Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. What they did (and suffered for) were seen as disrespectful, insolent and brazen attacks on the status quo. As Orwell wrote, ‘In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’ Revolutionaries of ideas always ruffle feathers and pushed against boundaries and made many people angry, outraged and offended, often without meaning to do so. But as we know, progress of ideas is made through the dialectic process where ideas clash, interpenetrate and re-emerge stronger.  To insist on mere politeness would mean to do without the progress and subsequent emancipation of the mind made by the people listed above and many, many more.

W.H Auden wrote his caustic poem “August 1968”, in response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, where he clinically dissected and exposed the divorce between language and meaning utilized by authoritarian states wishing to control thought through inhibiting expression. 

The Ogre does what ogres can, 

Things quite impossible for man, 

But one prize is beyond his reach,

The ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,

Among its desperate and slain,

The ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips. 

The vile attempt to control ideas by dismantling, purging and repressing dissent has been a technique used by countless institutions in power. One piercing weapon against this insistence of what the French term la langue de bois and to stifle the ability to engage in ideological discourse is the ability of mockery. Like the Hans Christian Andersen story of the Emperor with no clothes, the obvious statement of the innocent boy, although perhaps rude, broke the spell of good manners and fear shackling the whole populace like a breath of fresh air. Mockery and showing the internal inconsistencies of an idea, a position or a construct, even if it has elevated itself by force or tradition to be unchallengeable dogma, can demystify it and bring it down to a level where people can see it, naked, as what it truly is and hence allowing them to judge it and challenge it if need be. A prime example of this, following on from Auden’s poem, is the Czech Velvet Revolution that took place at the end of 1989. Popular protests against the Soviet Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, led by playwrights, poets, authors and students, including Vaclav Havel, who was to become the future president, led to the dissolution of the one party control and the formation of Czechoslovakia into a parliamentary republic. Almost uniquely for a revolution, there was no blood shed. The authoritarian state was brought crumbling through mockery, ridicule, satire and conversation.

Vaclav Havel during the Velvet Revolution

The principle I espouse is a simple one which Voltaire encapsulates in the following: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Only by allowing freedom of expression of others can you possibly retain that freedom for yourself. Lest one day you find your most innocuous remarks to ‘offend’ and thenceforth forced by the PC police to shut up. Or, as Rosa Luxemburg said, “Freedom of speech means nothing unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently.” Being offended is part of life, one must not, for the sake of politeness and hurt feelings, which often reveal one’s own personal failings and lack of understanding, curfew the most previous freedom we have, which is also the wellspring from which all our other freedoms are got. For as Orwell put it ‘If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’  

Aside from the civilizational question, rudeness can also be devastatingly funny. Humour is based on the misfortune of others and for that reason alone rudeness should be protected like a favourite child. Some famous put downs that made me weep with laughter:

Telling off his subeditor for some dissatisfactory editing, Clive James was overheard to have said “If I wrote like that, I’d be you.”

An editor’s letter firing the magazine’s astrologer began, “As you undoubtedly already know,”

Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac – “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

Lord Byron on Keats writing as “a sort of mental masturbation.”

Mark Twain on James Cooper – “There are a lot of daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now.”

Oscar Wilde on reading the overtly sentimental The Old Curiosity Shop by Dickens – “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

Churchill on Atlee – “A sheep in sheep’s clothing.”

Churchill on Baldwin – “He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”

Lady Astor to Churchill – “Winston, if you were my husband I would flavour your coffee with poison”

Churchill to Lady Astor – “Madam, if I were your husband I should drink it.”

Christopher Hitchens on the death of Jerry Falwell – “If they gave him an enema, they could have buried him in a match-box.”

To end it on a Hitch-slap that is thematic,

“My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.” 

May insolence flourish and thrive.