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.

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Creed

8 May 2023

6 min read

Dialling down the drama in the science and religion debate

In the first of a new series, biologist and priest Andrew Davison explores the perceived tension between science and religion, and the role identities play.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

Vails containing growing plants sit in a lab's fridge.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Evolution isn’t just an idea for me; thinking about it has changed the course of my life. I arrived at university in the 1990s having been a member of a house church, full of the kindest people, but fundamentalist when it came to the Bible. I thought that the world was made in six days, six thousand years ago. When I realised that the evidence is stacked against the idea – to say theleast – it almost cost me my faith.

I got through that crisis because friends introduced me to Christian thinkers from the Middle Ages, especially Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274). Far from representing an age of fear and ignorance (the ‘Dark Ages’), I found there an intellectual world that thrived on questions, with such philosophical sophistication that I was sure any of its chief exponents could have taken evolution in their stride. The struggle between faith and science lifted. Eventually, the sorts of questions that had previously kept me awake at night in worry, kept me awake in wonder. That was almost thirty years ago. Today, contemporary developments in evolutionary theory are one of the main strands of my work as a theologian.

In two further articles, I will describe some of what’s so interesting, and disputed, in biology and evolution at the moment. In one, I’ll talk about the shift away from the idea that we can reduce everything down to the working of genes. That’s sometimes called an example of ‘nothing-but-ery’: here, the claim that our destiny is ultimately about ‘nothing but’ genes. In the other, I’ll talk about some of the ethical repercussions that those contemporary evolutionary developments might suggest, on such practical matters as good housing.

In the rest of this piece, however, I will stick with the idea that it’s useful to see the idea of a tension between religion and science, not least over evolution, as being as much personal as intellectual. In particular, tensions over evolution in ‘science vs religion’ are caught up with questions of identity. Seeing oneself as a ‘religious crusader against science’ or a ‘scientific crusader against religion’ is an identity. It’s part of the story you tell about yourself, part of what you take pride in. Since these are also identities that define themselves in opposition to one another, they tend to extremes. Reconciliation involves renegotiating one’s identity.

Nor is money insignificant. There’s money to be made in writing shrill and divisive books, but in calm and conciliatory books, not so much. Angry books create interest on social media. They find to an already energised readership. Moderate books, and authors who try to dampen the flames of animosity, don’t sell that well; neither do books that are willing to say ‘actually, these questions are more complex, or nuanced’.

Evolution and economics

Crucial in these questions of identity is the gulf between those seen as the ‘elite’ and those who don’t see themselves that way (a common theme in politics today). Why is a denial of evolution more common in poorer communities? It’s not only that these are people without educational advantages. It’s also that they feel on the disadvantaged side of an economic and cultural system. In that situation, people are typically all the more invested in what the system can’t take from them, such as their ethnicity, their religion, and its culture. Good on them for that. People in that situation will be all the more unwilling for others – whom they perceive as an elite, who enjoy all sorts of worldly advantages – to tell them what to think about their biological origins, bound up, as they are, with dignity, faith, and self-understanding.

As an economically disadvantaged Muslim man once put it to me, ‘No one’s telling me that my faith’s stupid, or that I’m just some sort of monkey.’ There’s so much more going on in that statement than ‘being wrong about the science’.

Moreover, disadvantaged people, and especially the majority who don’t have white skin, have been on the receiving end of prejudice cast in evolutionary terms. Teaching the theory of evolution – glorious though it is as a work of science – has a checkered moral history. That brings us back to monkeys. The ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ (1925) has achieved iconic status, as the triumph of science over superstition in rural Tennessee, but it’s more complex than that. The prosecution, with its anti-evolutionary stance, was wrong to dismiss evolution as a matter of science. They weren’t wrong to be repelled by the science textbook at the heart of the case, which was uncomplicatedly racist, and indeed racist on supposedly evolutionary grounds. Evolution, it claimed, had produced lesser (black) and more advanced (white) races. As historians have also shown in recent decades, evolution was a powerful inspiration, into the early century, for advocates of cut-throat economics and politics: winner-takes-all, survival of the fittest, let the poor go to the wall.

I’m not saying that every bit of opposition to evolution among poorer communities rests only on the ways that evolutionary theory has been used against them, but it is useful to remember that some of the religious opposition to evolution in the twentieth century came from a principled response to the unpleasant ethical, political, and economic positions to which – they were told – evolution gave support, including full-on advocacy for eugenic programmes of sterilisation of the poor, and contempt for the physically weak: all clothed in evolutionary garb.

Drama critique

The spectacle of a ‘science vs religion’ drama turns out to be about more than science, and also about more than theology or religious belief. It’s also about identity, advantage and disadvantage, about some deeply unpalatable economic and social positions, and even about making money out of writing books. There’s everything to be said for teaching biology well, and for arguing about the truth of evolution on scientific terms. I do a fair bit of that myself. There’s everything to be said for teaching theology well, and for arguing that it can take evolution in its stride. That’s even more my aim. But neither offers the full picture, and it’s not helpful to think that anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution is simply stupid or wicked. We won’t get very far, not even as advocates of science, unless are willing to listen. Unexpectedly, my experience is that the flagship scientific societies in the United States (where tension over evolution run so high) are better at this than they are in United Kingdom.

Getting trapped in one end of some mutually reinforcing antagonism is hard to shake. It’s difficult to get to a nuanced position when you’re dealing with positions that are defined against each other. Whether arguments about evolution are part of your experience or not, there’s a wider message here, which we might all do well to take on board, asking ourselves whether positions of animosity can become unhelpfully baked into our sense of ourselves.

Accepting evolution does not naturally, or inevitably, lead to brutal social Darwinism, but it’s been used that way in the past, more often than coverage of science today often lets on. We are by no means out of its shadow, even from under the shadow of eugenics. Being aware of that big, historical picture is useful, but it shouldn’t obscure the message from the beginning of this article, that these matters are fundamentally personal, and as much about how we see ourselves, and others, as they are about ideas. Reconciliation and understanding happen person by person, and person-to-person.

You might think the work I’d most relish as a priest and scientist, or think most useful, would be reassuring religious people that evolution isn’t their enemy. That’s a good thing to do, but I’m actually even more thankful for opportunities to reassure scientists that religion can be thoughtful, unafraid, and even downright passionate about science. Turning up to dinner in my college still in my cassock after evensong, sitting next to visiting scientists, and asking intelligent, enthusiastic questions about their science can do as much good as all the lectures I give in churches or to theology students about the irreplicable value of science.