Amess tragedy: Blame old religions, not modern social media

Here we are again, looking for the forgotten box left high on the intellectual shelf.

Now, where did we leave it? Ah, there it is. Let’s just reach up and grab it. It’s a bit dusty (but not that dusty, so it can’t have been too long since we last used it). We’ll just crack open the lid…

Ah, yes this is it. Give the contents a quick wipe down and then read what it says: “Hard cases make bad law.”

Remember it now? Doesn’t it all come rushing back: this familiar sense of a government flailing about for any answer that will satisfy the public’s need for justice in the face of an atrocity? We’ve been here so many times before with a populist government eager to introduce draconian rules in the face of an extreme event. This time, they’re already conflating the toxicity of social media with the slaughter of an MP by a deranged man. Yet the latter is the one fact they seem ready to overlook.

So let us just make it clear. Sir David Amess was not killed by rhetoric on either the Right or Left of mainstream British politics. He was not killed by Angela Raynor calling Tories “scum” any more than he was murdered because Boris Johnson once described the average working man as “drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless, and perhaps claiming to suffer from low self-esteem brought on by unemployment”. He was certainly not killed by the decades of insults launched across the political divide, any more than he was victim to the centuries of grossly offensive satire that has become one of this country’s great traditions. His death certainly isn’t another token of the culture war and to argue otherwise is plain wrong.

Sir David Amess was brutally slaughtered in the name of an old god.

What shouldn’t be up for debate right now are those very freedoms we enjoy as part of modern secular democracy. Those are the very freedoms that offend those that would ruthlessly kill in cold blood to roll back our way of life.

Do you want to give the radicals an excuse to continue their cowardly vendetta against modernity? Then go limit a few liberties and show them that our belief in freedom isn’t so absolute. Oh, no need to go over the top at first. Let’s just trim a little back here and there. If being “woke” was previously a choice made by people (perhaps naively) hoping to change behaviour for the better by choosing the words they used, then this enforced “wokeness” would be driven by legislation, and we’d begin with the freedoms that most people would never think to defend. If that’s still not enough, only then will we ask women to cover up a little more, ban a few jokes, and begin to intrude in the ways that people live their lives… It will be a long decline towards autocracy and, for the most part, we wouldn’t even feel the descent.

But no. Even considering the hypothetical is painful. We should instead be discussing how we continue to protect ourselves from the residual effects of centuries of superstition, in whatever form it comes and under whatever name it manifests itself. This is not the time for new laws against blasphemy or hate or whatever the ruling party consider anathema to their voter’s tastes. It is, rather, the time to protect blasphemous language in the name of freedom against medieval thinking.

Critics will, of course, argue that social media is too toxic, and they are right. But one thing we know about free speech is that freedom can be toxic, as it cannot also be absolute. That means it needs to be handled carefully, limiting freedoms only where they begin to infringe upon each other. In terms of social media, the police should prosecute anybody making a threat, but these things happen already. If we need more resources direct towards that, then resources should be so directed. Yet to say that this is all about toxic language in mainstream politics is wrong, and to use it to force through changes in our political conversation is misguided.

Can we honestly say that politics is more toxic now than in the 1980s? People have short memories – or no memories at all – if they don’t remember the Miner’s Strike and then the Poll Tax riots. It’s just that our perception of toxicity is more acute because we’re more engaged online. Social media amplifies those that speak the loudest, but we are not hearing more voices as much as we are heading the increased amplification.

Sir David Amess murder was another reminder that the old evils remain in the form of people who believe that their notion of divinity gives them a right to impose their beliefs on others. The toxicity comes from the messages of ancient texts written before we knew of modern medicine and the intricacies of human psychology or even the complicated nature of democracy. The toxicity also comes from our inability to distinguish our own predilections for supernaturalism that leads us to believe that our myths are somehow more valid than the myths of others.

Killing people in the name of manifold fictions is the problem. It has always been the problem.