I see that there is a quarrel, a nasty dispute, in … well, not in my fandom, but in fandom.  With a few shining exceptions, I cannot call it a debate, for most of it consists of snark, defensiveness, and emoting.

That is an important consideration.

We may leave aside the puerile snarkiness.  Sir Jonathan Miller is generally credited with saying that attending editorial conferences at Private Eye was ‘like watching naked, anti-Semitic public-schoolboys in a changing room, flicking wet towels at defenceless victims’; the difference between Private Eye and the Honourable Company of Wankers in Fandom and Others Who Display Their Cool Quotient by Mocking Everything in a Sixth-Form Manner, being, that Private Eye is more reliably funny, and a damned sight more literate.

And of course, having said that, it becomes incumbent also to say that an appalling amount of what passes for humour in Private Eye, and elsewhere – speaking of Sir Jonathan Miller, one notes that Spitting Image portrayed him as an anteater, in reference to his nose, in a clear instance of stereotyping what the mouth-breathing set consider a ‘Jewish characteristic’ – is, in the UK, anti-Semitic.   No: that is a weasel-word: what is at issue is hatred of Jews, of milder or worser extent, along a terribly broad spectrum.  The FCO is Arabist and correspondingly anti-Israel, which is a distinction without much difference, in that the FCO has always – always – been stuffed full of anti-Semites, since well before there was a State of Israel to barrack.  (In that sense, at least, Ernie Bevin actually fit in as Foreign Secretary.)  Before the Hitler War, there was an entrenched form of anti-Semitism in the C of E, the old form of anti-Semitism, tangled up with social ignorance, misapprehended religiosity, and unthinking and unexamined class-prejudices.  For a period after that war, these bigotries could not be openly displayed; but with the rise of the fad for ‘Palestinians’ and the sudden slobbering of the bien-pensant, Grauniad-ista Left upon the ‘oppressed Arabs’, all the old anti-Semitism has reappeared, wearing, this time, not a black shirt, but a ‘solidarity’ keffiyeh.  The BBC is an open sewer of Jew-hatred.  The Establishment in England – and it is primarily an English issue: Scotland is the only European country never to have persecuted the Jews – and the Leftish Counter-Establishment are now largely united in a complacent and reflexive anti-Semitism that seems unthreatening only when compared to the situation on the Continent.  And this has been so for a very long time, and has infected Right and Left alike, Cecil Rhodes and Ernie Bevin equally.  I can think of only three public men in the last century and a quarter in England who were clearly not anti-Semitic and were in fact the opposite: King Edward 7th, Winston Churchill, and, arguably, Lord Rosebery.

Now, I should like you to look at the preceding paragraphs.  You will notice a few things about them.  Although they are magisterial in tone and not precisely dowered with citations, they are clearly statements of fact and conclusions drawn from the stated facts.  Each statement could, if challenged, be supported by records.  And absent throughout are such phrases as ‘I feel’ and the like.

That, I would argue (note: not, ‘I feel’), is what has largely been missing in the quarrel to date – I mean, setting aside the puerile baiting and the wankery.  There have of course been shining exceptions (I’ve a very sound and choice friends-list, after all), yet, in the main, much of the quarrel has not been a debate.  We’ve seen a great deal of ‘feeling’ and damned little appeal to fact.  Where both logic and emotion have fallen short, the quarrel has been eked out with plate-glass – not even redbrick – SCR incantations, buzz-words, candy-floss terminology (pink, naturally).

As a result, there has been a confusion of categories.

For example, I chanced to see, in one thread of comments to a reasonable post, a digression upon the extent to which ‘pagans’ (wait for it) were being – I’m sorry, the Pythonic reference is inevitable: ‘Oi! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! ’ELP, ’ELP, I’M BEING REPRESSED!’ – being repressed, marginalised, or insulted by ‘Yuletide’, the argument – or, rather, the unexamined claim – being that ‘Yule’ is properly their festival and that no-one outside an obsolete carol ever uses that name as a synecdoche for Christmas (and so, interminably, on).

Now, if I should reply, saying, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but Yule – or “Yuil” – is the proper Scots term, and former English term, for Christmas, without any rubbishing “pagan” fakelore attached to it, just as, say, the English May Day bides yet as “Beltane” in guid Scots, just as “Easter” in England is “Pace” in Scotland and the 1st August is “Lammas” and New Year’s Eve is of course “Hogmanay”, and you puir Sassenach haven’t even a Burns-nicht – whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo? – to celebrate wi’ whusky and haggis at a’, at a’, ye puir waefu’ bairns’ … well.  If I also happen to point out the undeniable historical commonplace that modern ‘paganism’, so-called, is a synthetic pastiche of no antiquity, lightly camouflaged with fakelore … well, again, what follows? 

Of course, one thing that will follow, as the night, the day, is, someone is going to take umbrage.

Now.  As a matter of manners, of politesse, did I without provocation or context begin sledging someone else’s religion to no purpose and for no reason – however silly that religion may or may not be – I would almost certainly stand guilty of a breach of manners, a deliberate discourtesy.  And this has no bearing whatever upon whether or not my strictures are, objectively, true.  If, however, I were to correct a linguistic error coupled with a popular falsehood about history, in the context of that error’s and that falsehood’s having been raised in what at least purports to be open debate, then the sole criterion on which I am to be judged is whether or not my argument is correct.  At best, my tone is a secondary consideration, if indeed it is a consideration at all: yes, even if the subject of debate chances to be religion.  The idea that all discussions about religion must be carried out in such a way as to exalt the not giving of offence over logic and intellectual honesty, the notion that somehow this topic is entitled to be a sort of Established Church, cannot be countenanced.

Please note that I am not, here, speaking of debating theology, to do which would be amongst the most pointless exercises imaginable for a gaggle of laypersons, even those of ostensibly similar traditions.  I have nothing to say, really, to a Kirk o’ Scotland communicant about the Thirty-Nine Articles or the episcopate; indeed, I’ve nothing profitable to say to other C of E and overseas Anglican friends about the imminent schism (‘I’m not a member of any organised religion, I’m C of E’).  But religions, like nations and peoples, have histories, and those histories are not off-limits to polite discussion.

Or, again, were I to agree with the statements of a Jewish poster who, having lived in all three countries, argued that the United States is far less harassing a place in which to live as a Jew than are Canada and the UK, and should I adduce in support of that anecdotal conclusion the histories of that group in those countries, would I as a Gentile be overstepping any bounds?  I think not.  And were I to further note that the British and American Jews most likely these days to be attacked with all the traditional armoury of anti-Semitism, from charges of dual loyalties and conspiratorial Zionism to the charge of having created a world-controlling cabal, were those whose politics would most horrify the majority of participants on both sides the current LJ quarrel-alias-debate, it might put the cat amongst the pigeons, but it would be a fair statement of the current climate as it affects, say, Melanie Phillips, Daniel Finkelstein, and others.

I am not going to attempt to know what is in the hearts and minds of the non-wanking posters in this quarrel.  There is a danger in imagining how others ‘must’ feel – and you note that this, again, reduces everything to emotion – and imputing feelings and motivations to them.  In the end, to do so merely dehumanises them, making them into lay-figures upon whom one can practice one’s political pieties and through whom one parades one’s superior sensibilities.  Similarly, I do not have the right to tell anyone whether or not he has the right to feel offended; yet anyone of good will and clear mind has the right to walk disputants back from the precipice and point out, should this happen to be the case, that they are being silly or unnecessarily sensitive in taking offence (‘Well, old man, before you went in for ranting, no one had been accusing you of being an anti-Semite, merely of cultural insensitivity, although, now, you’ve made such a spectacle of yourself that one does rather wonder if you’re secretly BNP…’).

What I can say is that one cannot but conclude from the quarrel that there is a great confusion here between the emotional issues and the issues of fact.

As to the issue of courtesy, it seems simple enough to me.  We have reached a point in common discourse at which there is almost always at least one person who will take offence at almost any statement, including a simple, ‘Good morning’ (‘An’ whit’s guid aboot it, then?’).  Yet this in no wise changes the fact that there are innumerable instances in which a statement may give rise to offence, legitimately, as it were.  Now, these fall into several categories.  There are statements that are either deliberately offensive or are so gobsmackingly over the line that even a naïveté rising to the live of idiocy cannot excuse them (e.g., Walt, Mearsheimer, and Richard Dawkins’s latest inanity on the ‘Jewish lobby’).  These are inexcusable, and no time wants to be wasted upon their contemptible utterers.  There are then statements that are unintentionally offensive, and here is where it gets unnecessarily complicated.  The appropriate response to such a statement, I would argue, is to say, ‘Now, look here, I don’t know if you didn’t think that through, or if I misheard, or if we want to define our terms, but I heard that as saying the following offensive things,’ and so on.  In reply, there are a limited number of possible clarifications.  The first is a mea culpa – I trust I’m not offending any RCs – that says, basically, ‘I was being stupid, I am ignorant, teach me’ (and I trust that offends no one).  The second is to say, ‘I’m sorry, that wasn’t at all what I meant, it was ill-phrased.  What I was driving at was this’, and so on.  The third, which should be used sparingly but which may upon occasion be demanded as a matter of intellectual honesty, is, ‘I regret that you were offended, but if you will look at the following authorities, you will see that you are placing a wholly unjustified construction upon my words, which clearly mean and are generally accepted as meaning this and that’ – as I say, sparingly.

And so long as there is no pre-existing reason why either party should be suspected of bad faith, both the response – ‘Er, you may not realise that there is a potentially offensive construction that could be placed on that remark’ – and the reply – ‘I’m sorry to hear that, but what I was saying was, actually, thus and so’ – should settle the matter, or at the very least allow for further actual debate rather than a sordid quarrel.

What is imperative, I would argue, based upon the foregoing, is to separate matters of tone, style, manner, and manners, from matters of logic, fact, and the worth and weight of arguments advanced.  If only for tactical reasons, it is best not to object to a potentially or arguably offensive statement by saying, ‘I, as a member of such and such a group, find that offensive’: if it is truly offensive, we ought all of us to complain, and when all of us complain, it makes it impossible for the offending party to riposte by saying, ‘Oh, you people always do that’ or whatnot.  Equally, unless there are reasons not grant the presumption of good faith, both sides want to be taken at face value: both in claiming offence and in denying the intent to offend.  When a potentially offending remark is passed, the challenge, ‘Oi, that looks dodgy, can you clarify that?’ has the very great benefit of showing either that the remark can be clarified, at which point it can be argued, or cannot be, in which case it, and its maker, can be economically dismissed.  Finally, of course, certain historical facts can be unpleasant to reflect upon, but it does no good to wish them away and little good to be offended by them.  Note that I say, ‘offended’: they can be condemned, and their present consequences challenged, but the people who committed the offence in the past are dead, and merely emoting does nothing.

What is fatal is to couch what ought to be rational arguments in the nursery terms of ‘I’m offended by what you said to the OP’ and ‘Well, I’m offended that you’re offended’, of ‘You’re not merely thoughtless, you’re a knowing anti-Semite’ and ‘How dare you accuse me of being an anti-Semite’ and All That. 

Were we to employ a dollop of common sense and lashings of forbearance and good will, and to distinguish between emotion and reason, between manner (and manners) and the validity of argument, we should all be much happier, and learn a great deal more than we are doing.  Might I suggest to all of us that we do?