The corrosive effect of profuse profanity

The coarsening of speech prompts Yaroslav Walker to remember that what you say influences who you are.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

An irate man holds a mobile phone to his ear while gesticulating with his other hand.

Malcolm Tucker makes his point.

“You breathe a word of this to anyone, you mincing f*****g C**T, and I will tear your f*****g skin off, I will wear it to your mother’s birthday party and I will rub your nuts up and down her leg whilst whistling ‘Bohemian-f*****g-Rhapsody’…right!?”

This is my favourite Malcom Tucker line of all time. This is what Malcom might call, ‘top swearing’. The Thick of It exploded onto our screens in 2005, supposedly lifting the lid on the workings (or absolute lack of) of the twenty-first century British government. The show immortalised the sweary Scot Malcolm Tucker – supposedly partly based on real-life New Labour spin-doctor Alastair Campbell, and played to perfection by Peter Capaldi. The nation watched with a mix of horror and delight, enraptured by the best political comedy since Yes, Minister. However, unlike Yes, Minister, power in The Thick of It is not wielded through the obscurantist language of the elite Oxbridge-educated civil service, but through the terrifyingly unhinged and violent rantings of Tucker’s Svengali spin-doctor. I can only assume that most people on the outside of government took it all with a pinch of salt – I certainly did. Surely, SURELY, it couldn’t be as bad as ‘that’!?

Dipping in and out of the coverage of the UK’s COVID public inquiry showed me just how wrong I was. Civil servants and political appointees writing on WhatsApp were indistinguishable from eighteenth century press-ganged sailors in a tavern. The highlight was the testimony of Dominic Cummings, who was confronted with his use of the saltier elements of the English language: “Due in large part to your own WhatsApps, Mr Cummings, we’re going to have to coarsen our language somewhat…” the investigating KC chided. “I apologise”, was the rather phlegmatic response.

We were then given a tour-de-force of aggressive sweariness – ministers were called ‘useless f**kpigs’, ‘morons’, ‘c**ts’, and it was suggested that in the case of civil servant Helen MacNamara he would ‘handcuff her and escort her’ from Downing Street. Upon being asked whether this language might have contributed to a lack of effectiveness in the Downing Street COVID response, Mr Cummings denied the charge – he was just reflecting the prevailing mood…but of course such language did.

He is very clear in teaching people that the words that leave their mouths have the power to bless them or damn them.

We live in a culture where speech, especially public speech, has progressively been coarsened. The television ‘watershed’ excludes less and less offensive speech, performative profanity is now de rigueur for many celebrities and even some politicians, and there has emerged a real generational divide between those of my generation and the baby-boomers. We appear to have forgotten a basic rule that the ancients knew all too well: affect has effect. What you say influences who you are.

What we say, just as what we do, impacts the sort of person we become and the virtues (or lack of them) that we build up and possess. If we look to Aristotle, we are introduced the concept of habitus. It isn’t just a habit – not just an activity that we engage in on a regular basis – but is a repeated behaviour that builds up our character, for good or for ill. This idea was taken up in some form by Augustine, Averroes, Aquinas, and even people whose name doesn’t begin with the letter A. Our speech, if repeated over and over again, moulds our character. Kind speech, lovely speech, righteous speech – repeated ad nauseum – will have as their end product a kind, a lovely, a righteous person. Violent speech, aggressive speech, coarse speech, will have as their end product a violent, aggressive, and a coarse version of the same.

Going beyond Aristotelian categories to biblical ones, the use of language is often a favourite theme. The most famous Hebrew example is perhaps the commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain…” Our speech is important to God, because it is a basic indicator of how we conduct ourselves – and so an indicator of who we are – and we ought to be conducting ourselves in the light of God’s will and God’s law: “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.”

As we move from the Old Covenant to the New, we find St Paul continuing this idea and extending the principle – our words reflect our relationship with God, and so will impact our relationship with other people (who are made in His image). He asks the Colossians that they speak ‘always with grace’, tells the Ephesians to avoid ‘filthiness…foolish talking…jesting’, and commands the Romans to always have a word of blessing ready rather than a curse. The community of holy people, living a life for God and for each other, can easily be destroyed by a cruel slip of the tongue – a fight can break out over even a mild insult. Perhaps this is why Jesus is quite so strict about speech – “But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.” He is very clear in teaching people that the words that leave their mouths have the power to bless them or damn them.

Perhaps one of its recommendations could be that at the highest levels of national decision making, our leaders and officials always strive to behave with calm and considerate courtesy.

“Do you think your description of your colleagues, the way in which you described them, their functions, their abilities, their talents, added to that dysfunctionality?” the KC asked Cummings. “No, I think the opposite…” came the slightly bewildered reply. But how could it not? How could speech that has been revealed to be so chaotic, so hostile, so unpleasant, and so callous contribute anything positive to the working environment? More importantly, and I don’t know Mr Cummings and am not making a statement on what his inner character and virtue actually is - how can it contribute anything positive to the person who utters it?

The COVID inquiry has been set-up to teach us lessons on how to be better prepared to tackle the next pandemic. I pray that it succeeds in this aim. Perhaps one of its recommendations could be that at the highest levels of national decision making, our leaders and officials always strive to behave with calm and considerate courtesy, where speech is used to edify, support, and commend. I believe, and Scripture teaches, that if this is taken on as a vital lesson we will, not only be better prepared to steer the country through the crises of the future, but the entire tenor of our political and public life will be better – holier even. The good news is that it costs nothing to put this recommendation into practice...all it takes to get started is a kind word.

Essay

Comment

Justice

29 February 2024

5 min read

Dignity: why people matter

How dignity underlies our ethics and law.

Charles Foster

Professor Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Law Faculty.

A pupil in a classroom looks around and into the camera.

Indus Action

You think that you matter: that you are significant. I agree with you. I think the same about myself.

We all think we are significant, and that our significance requires us to behave and to be treated in particular ways. One of the main functions of the law (perhaps the function of the law) is to regulate this sense of significance: to protect my sense of my significance and to stop it interfering with the sense of significance that others have.

A common name given to this sense of significance is dignity. It is a defining characteristic of humans. We see it as soon as we see behaviourally modern humans – who came on the scene about 45,000 years ago. We laid our dead tenderly in the earth, clutching flowers and amulets, rather than leaving them out as food for hyenas. We carved our faces into mammoth ivory because we knew that there was something about our faces which should endure. We believed that we had souls and that other things, human and non-human did too. This made eating other ensouled things a real problem. We evolved solemn liturgies of oblation and satisfaction to solve it. Our walk through life and death was elaborately choreographed, because it wasn’t proper to stomp and blunder. Comportment mattered because we mattered.

These were astonishing assertions – so astonishing that no big society has ever taken them completely seriously.

Jumping from pre-history to history, dignity, like other precious resources, was appropriated by the rulers, who said that they and only they had a right to it. The hoi polloi never truly believed this; they knew their own worth and moral weight. But the rulers told an artful story. The gods had dignity, they said, and the gods gave it to their favoured ones – typically the royals and the heroes. The royals were the gods’ embodiments or regents, and so the thrones of Mesopotamia and Egypt were invested and affirmed by divine dignity. The capricious gods of Olympus gave dignity at particular times and for particular purposes to their particular favourites, who therefore became demi-gods for a while.

In the Hebrew world, however, a radically democratic move was afoot. God was indeed dignified, but since every human was made in his image, all humans were dignified too – and in the same way as God. The idea was picked up by St Paul: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek’, he declared. ‘There is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus’.

These were astonishing assertions – so astonishing that no big society has ever taken them completely seriously.

The obscenity of Auschwitz relegated the hyper-spiritualised notion of dignity to the cloister, and Kant’s notion to the Academy. For whatever dignity was, it was outraged there, and the outrage extended to bodies and to the non-rationally-autonomous.

Less ambitious, and so more palatable, was Stoicism’s rather anaemic version of the Imago Dei. All humans were potentially dignified, it said, and each human had a duty to strive to realise their dignified potential. It was much less radical than the Judaeo-Christian conception, but still represented a tectonic break with the royal theocracies of Mesopotamia, Egypt and elsewhere.

This Stoical conception of dignity did useful work. It served to save the notion of dignity from two mortal threats - both, embarrassingly, from the Christian world (though Kant’s relationship with Christian orthodoxy was sometimes uneasy).

There is a strand of Platonised Christianity (drawing on the early Augustine) that spiritualises the idea of dignity. If it prevailed dignity would have nothing to say in hospitals about bowels or bedpans, in bedrooms about sex, in plantations about slavery, in jungles about the fate of trees or toucans, or in newsrooms about anything at all.

Kant located dignity in rational autonomy, so snatching dignity from children, the demented, the unconscious, the depressed, everyone who has drunk a bottle of red wine, and more or less everyone who doesn’t have a PhD in philosophy.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War dignity (almost always undefined) appeared in endless national and international laws and declarations. Fairly recently it has started to have a real legal life of its own, being invoked for many purposes, from prisoners’ rights to reproduce to the right to have your name on your tombstone in the language of your choice.

These specific invocations of dignity sometimes disguise its foundational nature – foundational to human nature itself and to the laws that seek to determine how humans should conduct themselves in society

To say that the Judaeo-Christian account of dignity gives rise to all ethics and law in the western world is a big claim. I make it unapologetically.

To see how foundational it is, ask yourself why you think it is wrong to kick a child, but not a rock. Or why it is wrong to play football with a human head, or do an intimate examination, for the purposes of teaching medical students, on a woman in a permanent vegetative state. In describing the wrongness you will certainly find yourself relying on something that looks suspiciously like human dignity.

The law is often said to be protecting interests other than dignity (such as autonomy, freedom, or bodily integrity), or promoting other values (such as beneficence or non-maleficence). Yet on close inspection, those interests and values will all turn out to be parasitic on dignity. Dignity is the first order principle: the others stem from it.

In the last forty or so years there has been a good deal of academic discussion about just what ‘dignity’ means. There is a growing consensus that it has two complementary parts. First: an inalienable element: the intrinsic dignity possessed simply and solely by reason of being human. This cannot be lost or diminished. It just is. And second, a dignity which is a consequence of the first, but denotes how, in the light of your dignified nature, you should comport yourself. If we say of someone ‘She’s let herself down’, we mean that she has failed to behave with the dignity expected of someone who has the high status of being human.

This account of dignity is derived straight from the notion of the Imago Dei, and from Paul’s gloss. The watered-down Stoical version simply gives encouragement to behave well: it has nothing akin to the inalienable element.

To say that the Judaeo-Christian account of dignity gives rise to all ethics and law in the western world is a big claim. I make it unapologetically. Perhaps you think that it is too extravagant. But it is plain enough that this account, or one of its iterations outside the sphere of Judaeo-Christian influence (there are several), accords as does no other with our intuitions about ourselves and about how we should act, and with the most fundamental axioms of the laws in all tolerable jurisdictions. The most enlightened parts of Enlightenment thinking originate in this account, though they are often embarrassed to admit it.

Whatever we mean by the Rule of Law, part of it is that no one is above or outside it: Jews and Greeks, and bond and free, and male and female are to be treated alike. We’re so used to the idea that we have forgotten its revolutionary roots.