Tag: ethics

An Interview with Peter Hitchens – Shouting into the Wind

“I didn’t arrange that,” Peter Hitchens blushes.  A stranger has just told him of her appreciation for everything he stands for and, for once, he’s been caught off guard, disarmed by praise.  The stone wall of rhetoric, dogmatic conviction and obduracy against which I’ve been fighting an attritional struggle for the past hour is felled in an instant.  And I can’t help feeling relieved.

We’re in Starbucks showing our solidarity with their tax avoidance – well, Hitchens is.  “I’m a very bad interviewer,” he opens, slipping into the rich baritone of the ‘Hitchens’ voice that so melodiously beguiles and bewitches, “partly because I’m usually more interested in myself than the other person.”  And he has reason to be.  After all, Peter Hitchens is a hell of a lot more interesting than most other people; I’ll give him that.  Columnist and blogger for The Mail on Sunday, author of five books on drugs and God, crime and politics, reporter from more countries than you can count on two hands – it’s a CV that would dwarf most.

But, if you’ll believe him, no one’s taking him seriously.  Never mind, though: the fact that they aren’t will hardly matter soon enough.  Indeed, the world as we know it is preparing for its final curtain call.  This is the end of civilisation according to Peter Hitchens.

Characteristically, Hitchens has been one of the more outspoken commentators on the recent Sandy Hook massacre that has reignited the debate on gun laws in the US.  “People don’t think about anything most of the time,” he notes about the arguments against gun ownership in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, “It’s just intellectually moronic to close your mind to the possibility that something other than guns are at issue.”  He’s thought, he’s decided, and I’m not about to change his mind: “I’m bored by this subject.  If someone produced a gun in here I’d be as scared as the next man – probably more so because I’ve seen what happens when a bullet passes through a human body.  It’s not nice, I’m not in favour of it.”

Hitchens rests his arm over the railing next to our table, as he attempts to deconstruct the myths of gun control.  To him, the reasoning is unsound.  Indeed, until 1920, he maintains, the UK’s very own gun laws “were so lax they made Texas look effeminate.”  And what about the rarely reported knife massacres in China?  Guns aren’t the only things capable of causing havoc, he argues.  “This problem of increasingly frequent gun massacres is new,” Hitchens goes on, “It’s not something that’s been going on during the entire period that the United States has had relaxed gun laws.  In fact, its gun laws have become increasingly restrictive over the past 30 or 40 years.”  His tone is such that it almost caresses me into submission.  Almost.  But I’m not convinced.  Fifteen of the 25 biggest mass shootings worldwide in the last half-century have taken place in the US, a country with double the number of guns per person compared with somewhere like Yemen.  Hardly coincidental, I might suggest.

“It’s theoretically arguable that the existence of law-abiding gun owners in places where people start shooting provides some protection,” Hitchens digresses as I inwardly cringe, noticing the tell-tale signs of the strand of thought with which he’s aligning himself – the NRA honchos and their ‘more guns, fewer shootings’ claptrap.  For someone who prides himself on logic being his weapon of choice, this doesn’t seem awfully logical to me.  “Take the Anders Breivik incident,” he explains, “Had there been anybody on that island in possession of a legally owned gun, a law-abiding sane person, they could have dropped him from 300 paces, and that would have been the end of that.  Good thing, no?”  Well, yes… provided that you haven’t taken into account how many more Anders Breiviks might crop up if guns were readily available.

Yet still his claim is that the problem lies elsewhere: “It’s a case of the old saying,” he recalls, “‘When the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.’”  Focusing on guns is a lame distraction.  In the world according to Hitchens, we’d bite the bullet and scrutinise “a scandal as big as thalidomide” much more closely.  Most of these shootings, he’s convinced, have involved anti-depressants or illegal drugs (and sometimes both).  However, “the reason we don’t look there is because it’s fashionable to be against guns and it’s fashionable to be in favour of anti-depressants and marijuana.”  Hitchens takes a gulp of his coffee and shakes his head irately: “Fashion shouldn’t govern thought.”  I couldn’t agree more – but contrariness is fashionable too, I think to myself.

“The anti-depressant scandal is so huge,” and he’s cross with the failure of his trade to report it.  Hitchens carefully explains to me that it’s a “known fact” that the pills induce “suicidality, a tendency to feel suicidal,” but that nobody seems to care: “If people were constantly dying of a physical disease after having taken a pill that was supposed to cure them, the suspicion would be thrown on the efficacy of that pill.” But self-interest shuts the door to examination – on the part of “an awful lot of people in the media” who are taking these drugs, the “huge number of doctors” who prescribe them “out of laziness and a desire to get rid of patients,” and the pharmaceutical companies whose profits keep on soaring.

Hitchens fidgets in his chair slightly, before candidly admitting: “My engagement with the argument about drugs is purely to point out that everybody is talking balls.  I don’t have the slightest illusion that anything I say is going to make a difference.”  It’s the first sign of Hitchens’ distaste for the modern world – and its distaste for him.  “It’s coming, it will come,” he prophesies, “If you’ve read Brave New World, soma [the hallucinogenic consumed ubiquitously in Huxley’s novel] is on its way.”  Illegal drugs, according to Hitchens, have been systematically decriminalised in recent decades by the UK.  He rubbishes my suggestion that Portugal has seen notable successes since decriminalising possession of all drugs in 2001, regarding the Cato Institute’s conclusions as self-serving: “The evidence is that they had an agenda.  Besides, Portugal hasn’t decriminalised to anything like the extent that Britain has,” he explains, swooping up his coffee mug and leaning back once more.

Regulation of the drug market is a cowardly kowtow to the “stupid people that take them,” Hitchens believes.  But what about the tens of thousands of preventable deaths in Mexico, or the Taliban-swelling destruction of Afghanistan’s poppy fields (the only crop that yields its farmers any sort of livelihood)?  “Well, they’re caused by the selfish cretins who encourage the trade.  They’re on their conscience.”  He disputes the idea that decriminalisation would, in one fell swoop, eradicate (or at the very least, significantly reduce) the nefarious effects of just these two examples.  The way I see it, prohibition has been ineffective – it’s changed nothing but the girth of the criminal underbelly.  Peter Hitchens has no time for such arguments, though – indeed, his writings deny the very existence of a policy of ‘prohibition’ in the UK – and he’s not afraid to show his impatience with them: “Oh it’s pathetic, sub-intellectual drivel!  Any thinking person would easily see through it if they were given half a chance, but it’s fed to them as truth,” he complains.

Lazy thinking is a bugbear of Hitchens’, not least when it comes to God.  Which is why I’m a touch surprised that he appears jaded by the conversation when I bring it up: “I’m reduced to repeating things I’ve said over and over again,” he sighs, “It’s a matter of saying that either this is a created universe, and it is therefore the product of a mind in which we live and move and have a purpose that is discoverable, or it’s a meaningless chaos in which nothing we do has any significance.”  Life without faith, for him, is necessarily devoid of meaning and happiness: “You live, you die, it’s over.  There’s no justice, there’s no hope, those who are dead are gone and we have no souls.  Why would you want that?”  The trouble is that Hitchens’ argument smacks of teleology, even though it’s dressed up as rationalism – he wants there to be a meaning, a narrative he can follow with his finger down a page, a universal and unalterable understanding that is discoverable.  Therefore God exists.  Persuaded?

Above all, what religion gives Peter Hitchens is justice and morality.  “I don’t care whether you need him or not,” he expounds in pugnacious style, “Human justice, as we know, is a completely fallible thing.  Yet we all desire justice – I bet you do.  If it isn’t happening in the temporal sphere, there’s only one sphere in which it can take place: the eternal.”  Hitchens believes that a world without religion would substitute morals for ethics.  And we’d be poorer for it: “Ethical codes change all the time.  What’s more, they usually change to suit powerful people who need them to.  But God does not change; justice does not alter.”  My mind wanders momentarily, and I wonder whether he would agree that Henry VIII’s divorce proceedings – on which Hitchens’ Anglicanism was founded – constituted precisely the kind of change to the Church’s morality (at the behest of a very powerful person indeed) that he’s disparaging in the secular world.

There’s no doubt in his mind, though, that the Church of England is in decline.  According to census figures, the percentage of UK citizens classifying themselves as Christian nosedived by 12.4 per cent between 2001 and 2011.  “Christianity has more or less talked itself out of existence,” Hitchens acknowledges, “It lacks confidence and in many cases is espoused and headed by people who don’t really believe in it anyway.” It’s a depressing indictment of his own dearly held faith.  “This will be an Islamic country in 60 or 70 years’ time, I think,” he continues, resting his hands lightly on the table, “When the fundamental religions of modern life – namely, uninterrupted economic growth and an endlessly expanding welfare state – have proved to be false, which they are doing as we speak, there will be a religious revival in the Western countries and Islam is very well placed to take advantage of it.”

A distinct sense of resignation penetrates nearly everything Hitchens says.  He appears to see himself as a modern-day Cassandra, shouting truth into the wind whilst everybody else’s back is turned.  There’s a certain earnestness in his voice when he laments that he has “absolutely no influence over the politics of this country.  Maybe you do,” he offers.  “The existing political system is incredibly intolerant of dissent.  And it keeps me out,” he notes as though he’s living in 1984, but still he keeps fighting his corner, “I’m treated as a sort of licensed lunatic.  Nobody reads my books; nobody listens to anything I say.  All I can say is that I’ve tried.”

And just when I think we’ve reached the nadir of this conversation, he hits back with a sucker punch: “The jig is up, the country’s finished, Western civilisation’s over.  It’ll be the Chinese writing the history of this place.”  His advice?  Emigrate: “If I were you, I’d leave tomorrow.  But I’m too old, I couldn’t make a living abroad now.  I’m stuck.”  He tells me how he’d board the first plane to Canada, because “it’s a sensible, well-governed place and its people have a good sense of humour.”  But that does nothing to take away the sour taste of his doom and gloom end of days story.  “We’re watching the end of an ancient and once rather wonderful civilisation,” he meditates wistfully, “You’re watching the end of it.  It’s how these things go – neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with the country sinking giggling into the sea.”

At length, we get up to leave.  Maybe it was something in the coffee, but I felt sure I’d walked into Starbucks feeling about five feet taller than I did now.  We shake hands, and I watch as he flings a scarf over his shoulder and strolls back to another day at the office, another day in the world of Peter Hitchens.  It’s all well and good, but the trouble is that I’m not quite sure the world that Hitchens thinks he lives in really exists.  At least, I hope it doesn’t.

Is Anti-Smoking Based on Science or Morality?

Tobacco smoking is currently seen by many as the scourge of society, an action of those wanting to slowly kill themselves. It is common perception that this idea is based solely on scientific evidence that has accumulated over the past 60 years. Yet the truth is, smoking has always attracted the wrath of purists. In the past, ‘public health’ measures were not enacted because of scientific evidence, but a sense of morality – alcohol was condemned and labelled a sinful activity because of moral sensitivity, and the same was true of tobacco. So the question is, is the attack on smoking today once again borne of ethical reasoning, or scientific rigour?

 

When Christopher Columbus reached Cuba in 1492 with Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, his two men experimented with smoking the tobacco pipe; Columbus himself not only refrained but spoke against it, referring to Rodrigo and Luis as sinking to the level of “savages” for smoking. When they packed tobacco on their boat and returned to Europe, there was an immediate divide between those who loved it and those who hated it, even inspiring King James I to write ‘A Counter Blaste to Tobacco’.

 

In the 1600s parts of the world saw people actively punishing smokers. First-time ‘offenders’ in Russia were subjected to being whipped and having their noses slit before being sent to Siberia. If they were caught a second time, they were punished by death. Sultan Murad IV of Turkey castrated smokers, and 18 a day were executed. In China, smokers were decapitated.

 

Such activities did not spread to the UK or USA, but other restrictions existed. In 1900, Tennessee, North Dakota, Washington and Iowa banned the sale of cigarettes by law, and by the following year 43 American states were strongly opposed to smoking. In 1904 a woman in New York was sentenced to prison for smoking in the presence of her children, and a policeman arrested a woman smoking in her car, stating “You can’t do that on Fifth Avenue.” In 1907, businesses refused to employ smokers.

 

By 1917 the anti-smoking feelings were still strong, and the primary focus was on using children to stop people smoking. Doctors would tell smokers they would suffer from blindness, tuberculosis or “tobacco heart”. Like today, insurance companies and surgeons would enquire if their customers or patients smoked. The August 1917 issue of magazine ‘The Instructor’ was labelled “the annual anti-tobacco issue” and featured cartoons to demonise smoking, as well as articles stating: “One puff does not destroy the brain or heart; but it leaves a stain…until finally the brain loses its normality, and the victim is taken to the hospital for the insane or laid in a grave. One puff did not paralyse the young man in the wheel chair; but the many puffs that came as a result of the first puff, did.”

 

That run of anti-smoking lasted until 1927, in America at least, but none of our science of today had been collected by then, rather it was all based on a moral principle. Germany was producing its own anti-smoking campaign around that time, with the famous “The German woman does not smoke” posters, as well as public smoking bans. The 1950s was the decade that saw the creation of the now-famous studies by Sir Richard Doll linking smoking to lung cancer, and in this time were other researchers like Ernst Wynder, described as a fanatical anti-smoker. By focusing on smoking as a sole factor in a time when it had yet to be implicated in disease was perhaps a tip of the hat that the researchers wanted to find an association, as so many scientists strived to do at this moment in history. In light of the findings, it was mentioned that 10% of smokers may contract lung cancer. That figure has been dropped in more recent decades although it still remains true.

 

Things progressed again in the 1970s with what has become known as the Godber Blueprint. Sir George Godber was a WHO representative who spoke openly of the “elimination of cigarette smoking” with comments such as “Need there really be any difficulty about prohibiting smoking in more public places? The nicotine addicts would be petulant for a while, but why should we accord them any right to make the innocent suffer?” Godber laid out a plan to achieve that goal, much of which has come into effect, such as “major health agencies [should] join forces to create and produce anti-smoking material for mass media” and he said the following should happen: elimination of smoking cigarettes; include quit-smoking assistance in health insurance; create “a social environment in which smoking is unacceptable”, raise tobacco prices enough to discourage sales; ban all forms of tobacco advertising; and create committees of sophisticated politicians in every country to help pursue stated goals. Almost 20 years before the EPA’s report that second-hand smoke poses a threat to non-smokers, Godber was creating plans to convince people of that very thing.

 

With regards to second-hand smoke and the question of ‘morality or science?’, about 85% of the studies on secondhand smoke and lung cancer failed to find a significant relationship between the two. Of the remaining 15% most indicated a statistical positive relationship while some actually indicated a statistical negative, or protective, relationship.  The studies of course were all statistical epidemiology: not actual findings of cause and effect. Only 15% find an associated risk, and the average relative risk of those is only 1.17, which is categorised as statistically insignificant. Of the 85%, most are kept out of sight, the most famous probably being the study conducted by the WHO, the largest study performed on second-hand smoke and which was hidden by the organisation because its findings showed no ill-effect of secondhand smoke. Enstrom and Kabat also conducted a large study, for 39 years, into passive smoking. It was commissioned by the American Cancer Society and was funded by the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program. When the preliminary data arrived and showed no harm was posed from passive smoking, the funding was pulled. This led the researchers no choice but to accept funding from the tobacco industry-funded Center for Indoor Air Research, although the results remain unchanged from what was discovered when the TRPRP funded it.

 

Recently there have been suggestions or enacting of outdoor bans, with Milton Keynes almost having one and New York establishing one, despite no evidence to suggest that they benefit health of non-smokers. Indeed, anti-smokers today openly talk of keeping smokers out of sight and “denormalising smoking”. Although the difference today with the past is that there are now many vested interests with financial gains to be sought from the prohibition of tobacco, the similarity remains that much of the hysteria is based on a moral disagreement with the act. If the science is lacking, as it is on passive smoking, but bans are still in place and studies showing ‘undesirable’ results are hidden while those who do not agree with the literature are to be accused of being in the pocket of Big Tobacco, the scientific credibility is thrown into disrepute, and we are left wondering if those behind the numbers harbour similar feelings to Columbus himself.

 

 

How Strong Are Your Ethics?

Sometimes, as we go about our daily lives trying to look after our families, the grander ideas are not thought about. Every now and then a conflict will arise between our ethics and our desires. This is when ethics may become expendable.

The strong forces that drive us – love, sex, money and power – tempt us to compromise or even do a complete U-turn. Personal relationships and careers are put on the line. Truth is a hard currency to deal in when there is a conflict of interest.

 

There’s three minutes to go and your team needs a winning goal. Do you take a dive to get a penalty kick? Will the glory be tainted by guilt? Sport is a minefield of ethical conundrums. For me, it’s still the beautiful game but marred by cheating and dissent. Children’s football matches echo what’s happening on Match of the Day. Role models are few and far between and it’s bad boy behaviour that gets the media attention.

 

Some would say that one’s loyalty should be to your teammates and the fans and this consideration is of a higher order, placing it in front of any other moral code. Well, isn’t that convenient. Thinking like that will bring selfish rewards, all dressed up in some warped rationale.

 

Bobby Moore led England to victory and was a national hero, not just because of the trophy but how he conducted himself. He won and lost with equal grace. In contrast I heard Roy Keane on TV the other day giving his insight as a pundit. Talking about a player on the losing side missing the chance to stop his opponent from scoring, he said, “he should have fouled him, he should have taken the yellow card”. The presenter, Adrian Chiles, did not pick him up on it.

 

Performance enhancing drugs seem to be endemic. How many of us sigh with cynicism when the latest track or swim or cycling record is broken. If I were holding my gold medal (it ain’t going to happen), I’d be thinking about the 10 year old kid in the stands who pasted my picture on his bedroom wall. Throwing matches and shaving points leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. Greed sometimes makes us cross lines we never imagined we’d cross.

 

You know the words – “what did you do today to make yourself proud?” Most of us shift the goalposts to varying degrees. Have you ever taken the credit for a colleague’s idea to get promotion? Do you hand it back when the shop assistant gives you too much change? Do you pilfer (notice how pilfer sounds less serious than steal) stationery or fiddle your expenses? Are you economical with the truth on your tax return?

 

But surely our leaders can give us inspiration? Yeah, right. We all know what’s been going on lately. We all know who could successfully hide behind a spiral staircase. It’s not just greasy pole climbing politicians that lie for a living. Some public relations and advertising people wear deceit as a second skin. They try to bamboozle us with unsubstantiated facts, half-truths and distorted visions of reality, all to sell a dream and false hope.  We work all week and we’re rewarded with bread and circuses. Don’t draw back the curtain; the wizard isn’t there.

How ethical am I? Well, that would be telling! Is the erosion of ethics getting worse? I think it’s too complex for a yes or no answer and there was never any golden age of innocence. Rather, lots of wrongdoing is covert now. Being the baddie has become more sophisticated. We know “the cost of everything and the value of nothing”. We win at any cost and we try to have it all at any cost. Does the human race have a collective portrait of a decaying Dorian Gray? If so, heaven help us because we all know what happened to him.