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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War & peace

23 March 2023

6 min read

On war fighting

Why do soldiers go to war? There are a thousand different answers writes Owen, a serving soldier.

Owen

Owen is an officer in the British Army.

Soldiers silhouetted by dust and sunshine work at a fence with tools.

British soldiers dismantle a fence line in Afghanistan.

Jamie Peters RLC/MOD via Wikimedia Commons.

The car bomb went off at 0630, rudely awakening me from a deep sleep. The noise, big and bassy, was followed by silence, followed by the wailing of the camp attack alarm. I felt a range of emotions in those moments, but definitely present was a sense of relief. “So that’s what it sounds like…”. I had been in Kabul for two or three months by that point, and had always been slightly on edge whenever I walked between buildings, knowing that an explosion was inevitable at some point, but not knowing how loud it would really be. Afghanistan was my first operational tour – it was 2014 and the British presence in country was shrinking rapidly, and my reward for a good performance on my intelligence officer’s course was assignment to a unit deploying to the Afghan capital. It might seem a strange reward, but it was sincerely meant, and gratefully received.

A security camera high angle over an Afghan townscape showing an explosion on a street.

“So that’s what it sounds like…”. Security video captured the car bomb that exploded near the author's military base.

Why does a soldier go to war? You could ask a thousand men and women in the armed forces and get a thousand different answers. The most straightforward (and superficial) answer is “Because I was ordered to”, but delve below the surface and you find all manner of motivations and justifications. All I can offer you is why I think I wanted to join the British Army and fight (there are reasons that are probably hidden even to me) and how as Christian I make sense of war.

I joined the Army at a time when what were known as Blair's Wars were stuttering to an unsatisfactory conclusion. We had withdrawn from Iraq, leaving behind a broken country and unwittingly paving the way for Islamic State, and soldiers were still fighting and dying in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. While I was going through the selection process for the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst there were a plethora of war documentaries on television that had been filmed using helmet cameras, giving an unprecedented first-person view of conflict. A normal person might have watched those programmes and thought they wanted no part on it whatsoever. I saw them and wanted in. Why?

What appealed to me most was the responsibility; of deploying to a dangerous place with your fellow soldiers and doing everything in your power to keep them alive.

I look back and think there were all sorts of reasons floating round my head. There was undoubtedly a slightly boyish sense of adventure – it seemed like most of my peers at university were off to be bankers, lawyers or management consultants, and I wanted to do something a bit less grey. There was a desire to challenge myself too – a worthier reason, but still not the full story. What appealed to me most was the responsibility; of deploying to a dangerous place with your fellow soldiers and doing everything in your power to keep them alive and to complete your mission. I saw soldiering as less a job than a calling.

Throughout my career much has changed but that sense of responsibility is still there. It is at the heart of how I understand being a Christian in conflict zones, my personal ‘theology of war’, if you like. When I came home from Afghanistan, I was asked by a friend whether I had killed anyone. I said I hadn’t. He then asked if I thought I could bring myself to do so should the situation arise. I said that I hoped so, because I had been on armed sentry duty multiple times and so was the only person standing between my colleagues and the enemy. If I had identified a suicide bomber but decided not to shoot in that moment, then I would have been betraying the responsibility I had to my friends. Indeed, I doubt that any suicide bomber would have thought worse of me had I shot him – he would have recognised that I had my job to do, just as he had his.

Who is anyone to judge between us, and who am I to claim the morality of what I do for a living?

Of course, this line of thinking is problematic. If I am just doing my job and the suicide bomber is doing his, then in moral terms we are surely are only as good, or as bad, as each other. His God calls him to do his duty and look after his brothers and sisters, and so does mine, and we are therefore equally right or equally wrong. Who is anyone to judge between us, and who am I to claim the morality of what I do for a living?

And yet sincerely holding a belief does not make you right. The failings of moral relativism are well-documented, yet too often we act as the sort of people who treat Pilate’s question “What is truth?” as a viable philosophical position rather than as the moral evasion that it is. We in the West are jaded by complex and bloody counterinsurgencies with no clear end state, affirming Bart Simpson’s dictum that “There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: the American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars Trilogy”. But the conflict in Ukraine has shown that binary wars between an obvious aggressor and a nation defending their homeland are not merely history, and that today people can still take up arms for justifiable reason.

I'm a Christian so I am a pacifist in the sense that peace is vastly preferable to war, and I have seen first-hand the suffering and misery it causes. Yet as a Christian too I cannot affirm peace at all costs when it means that rights and lives of innocent people can be callously disregarded by an oppressor who can only be resisted by force. I look at pictures of bombed-out apartment blocks in Ukraine, of kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria, of civilians murdered in Afghanistan and cannot affirm anything less than this, that there are things in this world worth fighting for.

I would reflect too that both my calling as a soldier and my faith have given me a sense of the value of life not as something not to be clung too at all costs, but as a gift to be made the most of. One of the things we did in our first week of Sandhurst was to make a will. There I was, fresh out of university, deciding who should inherit my meagre possessions (I didn’t even have a car), and asking the bloke next to me, who I’d only met 24 hours ago, to witness my signature. To be honest, it didn’t really feel real. What felt much more real was posing for a photo in the unit sports hall two years later, arms crossed, Union Jack and regimental flag behind me, knowing that it was the photo that would be used in the newspapers if I was blown up in Afghanistan.

You see that mutual love in tight-knit units where one soldier is prepared to die for another.

When you’re forced to confront the fact that you might die, you start to realise what it is that you are living for. I believe in the sacredness of life as a God-given gift, which makes the idea of sacrifice which lies at the heart of the Christian faith all the more powerful. “Greater love has no one than this” Jesus says in John’s Gospel, "to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”, and you see that mutual love in tight-knit units where one soldier is prepared to die for another. I think it’s that idea of living and possibly dying for something or someone more than just me is what keeps in the Army, when many of those who made their wills in that room at Sandhurst have left for civilian jobs.

Which brings me back to my initial reflection, that there are myriad different reasons why people join the armed forces and go to war. My Christian faith is at the heart of my reason(s), but I'm realistic to know that many of my colleagues do not share that faith and so would have a different motivation (though perhaps not quite as different as one might think). We all have stories to tell about why things matter to us, and matter to us so much that we think they are worth fighting for, in whatever guise 'fighting' takes. You have heard my story. What’s yours?