MATTHEW PARRIS | COMMENT
October 25 2019, 5:00pm, The Times
Intolerance lurking under the surface of liberal Britain
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Matthew Parris
A new survey says we’ve become more tolerant in the past 30 years but our attitude to free speech suggests the opposite
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“Britain getting more tolerant,” I read. If so, is this because our people are changing their minds or because the Grim Reaper is changing our people? And what do we mean by “tolerant” anyway? Or “liberal”?
The newspaper headlines this week provoke but do not answer those questions.
The Times on Thursday said:
“Liberal attitudes on the rise . . . ”.
The Independent said: “UK has become socially liberal on drugs, abortion and LGBT+ rights over past 30 years, study shows”. The Daily Mail thought that “Britons are more liberal than ever …”
The study in question has been carried out by King’s College London, replicating an Ipsos-MORI survey carried out three decades ago. How different are today’s responses to essentially the questions posed by that 1989 survey? Take for example the surveys’ questions about relationships: “Here is a list of issues some people might think are immoral or morally wrong. Which of them, if any, do you personally think are morally wrong? (i) Couples living together who are not married; (ii) Divorce.”
In 1989 13 per cent of respondents thought cohabitation was morally wrong, and 11 per cent thought the same of divorce. This year the two figures were 7 per cent (cohabitation) and 6 per cent (divorce). “Intolerance”, if that’s the right word, has halved.
In 1989, 40 per cent thought “homosexual sex between consenting adults” morally wrong. Today the figure is 13 per cent. Interestingly, though women remain more relaxed about homosexuality than men, the survey’s gender-divide suggests the gap is narrowing. I’d guess men generally are getting more comfortable about themselves and each other.
Today’s old are yesterday’s young. Have they changed their minds, or is it just that new generations think differently? This survey does not track the same age-cohorts through the years but, broadly speaking, most of those who were young three decades ago appear to have borne their grudges into 2019. There are variations, though. The young of 1989 seem in later years to have become more relaxed about homosexuality. But attitudes have calcified on TV sex and violence.
As for full frontal male nudity, today’s elderly disapprove even more than they used to. Perhaps we wrinklies are asking ourselves whether
we would care to appear naked in public!
Results in the two areas of I’ve cited are mirrored across much of this wide survey. On printed pornography, children out of wedlock, soft drugs (and even hard drugs), abortion, euthanasia, embryo-experimentation and TV violence, we seem to be getting steadily more “tolerant”.
Exceptions include sexual infidelity and cinema pornography, which see little change. But the exception that’s seriously out of kilter with the rest (the survey claims) is capital punishment – of which, says the survey, we are now less tolerant: 37 per cent of us now disapproving, when it was 22 per cent in 1989.
I think this is a category mistake by the pollsters’ publicists rather than a rogue social trend. If the same question had been framed differently – to elicit our moral attitudes to murderers and their just deserts – and the result had suggested (as it would) that we’ve become less inclined to kill them, the headline would be that we were getting more “tolerant” or “liberal”, not less.
Which leads me to my question about the meaning of “tolerance”. Take paedophilia. The King’s College survey does not ask about abuse because no such enquiry was included in the Ipsos-MORI survey 30 years ago. My strong hunch however is that we’ve become less “tolerant” of child-abusers, not more. But does that make us less “liberal”? I wouldn’t say so.
Nor does the survey ask about racist attitudes. Again, my hunch is strong. We’re surely getting more “tolerant” of racial diversity – but this of course means we are getting less “tolerant” of racism.
Or male chauvinism (another question the survey doesn’t explore). We’re less “tolerant” of unreconstructed male attitudes, aren’t we? But doesn’t that make us more rather than less “liberal”?
A problem arises from the word “tolerance”. This has positive connotations. Few care to be called intolerant. We therefore tend to use the word for activities or human types that we approve of, or at least don’t strongly disapprove of. But moral attitudes change, and the things we think sinful or wrong change. It follows that as social disapproval is lifted from (say) gays, divorcees, atheists, co-habitees, transgender people or ethnic minorities, we tell ourselves that we’re getting more tolerant, more liberal. But the converse does not apply. As social disapproval intensifies towards (say) child-abuse, wife-beating, religious zealotry or cruelty to animals, we do not tell ourselves we’re getting
less tolerant, less liberal. The reason we don’t is that these people or practices have moved beyond the pale so the idea of “tolerance” no longer applies.
An illusion arises: that we’re getting more tolerant all the time. But that’s because we’re only using the word when we approve; so we’re counting in the things we’ve added to the list of what we tolerate, without counting up the things we’ve dropped.
Were we to do so, you might conclude, as I do, that the well of human intolerance remains deep and constant: it only shifts its furies from one disfavoured group to another.
Now that suits a gay man like me, as it may suit people of colour, disabled people or transgender people. Something absolutely central to our lives has ceased to be the handicap it was. St Paul’s “thorn in my side” has been removed. I rejoice that – for us – this is an age of tolerance. Nor can I feel regret that patriarchal male attitudes, racist attitudes or the shrugging off of concerns about child abuse, have become the new taboos.
But there’s one big loss of tolerance I do regret, a loss that disfigures our era. Our tolerance of free speech, and the narrowing of our range of tolerable opinion, marks for me a huge regression from thirty, even forty, years ago. In a way we were not when I was 19 or 29, people are becoming frightened of saying the wrong thing, using the wrong language, or betraying the wrong thoughts, about a pretty wide range of opinion, attitude, or even scientific hypothesis. This is serious, potentially huge, and disabling to human progress.
I’m glad to be gay. But I’m sorry that, whereas as an MP I could propose such motion at an Oxford Union debate 37 years ago, I doubt anyone today could propose the motion “I’m sad to be gay” in a mainstream university debate. If only the new bigotry could see how big a loss this represents, both to tolerance and to liberalism.
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