One year ago my nation, the UK, voted by a narrow margin to leave the EU. I steadfastly maintain that almost no-one knew what they were voting for, what the question meant, or even what the questions really was. The Remain campaign completely failed to articulate any of the great many good reasons for remaining a part of the EU, while the Leave campaign treated the nation to a feast of lies and false promises, and knowingly manipulated and encouraged a level of anti-immigrant feeling that is, in some people, hard to distinguish from plain existential fear, hatred of the other, a loathing for change, or plain and simple racism.

On the morning of the vote, I wrote the following passage. I wish its basic message had been more widely felt by my countrymen and women.

***

One last point, then I’ll stop (I promise!).

Apologies for the long post, but just in case anyone I know is still wavering and would like more food for thought, here’s why I dearly hope you will vote #remain today.

The Leave campaign have been continually telling everyone the EU is ‘undemocratic’, and that voting Leave would be ‘good for our democracy’.

It’s a serious point, and deserves a serious answer, because it’s also wrong. Why? Because it uses as its foundation an extraordinarily narrow, small-minded and unhistorical conception of what the word ‘democracy’ actually means.

Democracy is not only about walking into a polling station and voting for a political representative, though that is, of course, a vital part of it. Democracy is a great deal more: it is all those things for which the act of voting stands as a symbol and a metaphor. It is a way of thinking, a basic cultural and moral value that declares in principle the rights and the integrity of each individual, and the belief in the right of every individual to be an active participant in his or her society – not as a subject or a slave but as a fully active and responsible free citizen.

Which is to say – democracy is a way of thinking, a way of living. Which means it is also the books, poems and plays we write and read; the songs we compose and sing, the things that make us laugh; our capacity to question and challenge and satirise and mock; our ability to do science and discover ever more incredible things about our universe, precisely because we have developed a way of thinking and living that is not based on absolute certainties, but rather on probabilities and argument and evidence, and the perpetual openness to new generations coming along and ‘democratically’ updating and improving (and sometimes revolutionising or jettisoning) the knowledge that we once took for granted.

In this context, two important truths become striking:

The first is that the European Union is first and foremost a conglomeration of democratic states – countries whose common values are very precisely the values of democracy, free enquiry and free expression – an international organisation created directly as a response and an antidote to centuries of terrible war, and to the totalitarian evils of the 20th century that literally ravaged our continent, including Britain.

Which means: the European Union, for all its functional faults, is culturally, politically and morally one of the world’s great DEFENDERS of democracy. So when Boris Johnson tries to outdo himself for repugnance by claiming the E.U. is secretly attempting to finish the work of the Nazis (about which the kindest thing one can say is that you can be sure he doesn’t really believe it, the slimy opportunist), we really must rise above the nonsense and realise that in the widest and most important sense, the Leave campaign has got it very precisely the wrong way round.

The second is that, yes, democracy is indeed going to face some huge challenges and threats in the next few years and decades.

From where do these threats come? From the seething cauldron of sectarian religious violence that is today’s Middle East, for one, (and the terrorism it will increasingly export); a recrudescence of a quasi-Tsarist Russia with expansionist imperial ambitions for another. And a new global hegemonic superpower – China – with increasing control over Africa and no history of democratic institutions and values, for a third. All these challenges will be better faced by a strong European Union.

So yes, there are threats to democracy in this world. Europe is categorically not one of them.

In the end, a strong Europe will in fact be one of the last bastions of democracy. And a mortally weakened Europe just could, in the end, many years from now, be the very thing that fails to prevent democracy’s collapse. That’s why all the UK’s prominent and respected historians are voting Remain.

So today, when the Leave campaign tell you that voting Leave is ‘the democratic thing to do’, just nod and smile. And know in your heart that the exact opposite is the case.

Then go and vote remain.

#remain

I’m going to come clean and confess that this week, when I look out at the world beyond the happy bubble of my home and family, I feel something close to despair.

My wife and I, and about a dozen close friends, were in London Bridge on Saturday night, at the home of a very dear friend, temporarily ignorant (at that exact moment) of the rampaging murders that were happening only a couple of hundred meters from where we stood. More unnervingly, had we not cancelled our pre-party dinner plans, all of us would almost certainly have been dining in the Borough Market area at the precise point when three pathetic, inadequate, cowardly little parasites began marauding through the pubs and restaurants, slashing at decent, innocent people with ten-inch blades.

At the moment, as a society, we tend to vacillate, and argue, between two positions on this. Broadly speaking, the right-wing “Muslims are to blame and they are all responsible” – the view popularised by Donald Trump and regularly vomited around the UK by UKIP members and a slightly depressing number of people in this country.

On the other hand, we have the left-wing “terrorism has nothing to do with Islam”, which (and this needs to be said), is every bit as cravenly stupid and irresponsible as the opposite view. These two positions, contradictory though they are, are like a pair of ugly, moronic twins: they share in every respect the same abject lack of intelligence, their utter moral squalor, their total refusal of nuanced thought.

These views shame us. The quality of our debate shames us. We should be ashamed.

The reactionary right-wing response to terrorism is plainly immoral for the extraordinarily simple reason that it implies a form of ‘collective punishment’, regarding individual human beings as a collective, as being ‘guilty by association’, without any reference to their individual ideas, actions or way of life, simply tarnishing them because of their shared cultural association. It is worth remembering that the military form of collective punishment is banned by the Geneva Conventions, and rightly so, and for ethical (as opposed to merely military) reasons that we can and should feel free to apply to non-military contexts.

Philosophical ethics 101: Collective punishment is fundamentally immoral because morality fundamentally takes place on the level of the individual. Simple. Ok? Good.

But the idea that terrorism ‘has nothing to do with Islam’ is very nearly as stupid as the idea that we should deal with it by punishing all Muslims. Islam as a religious culture has tremendously deep problems that need to be addressed, debated, argued about and slowly resolved as part of the global conversation in a technologically globalised world. Its appalling misogyny, for example, is a real and serious problem: its hatred and mistrust of women, directly connected to its medieval hatred and suspicion of sex and sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular. Which, in turn, is directly connected to its evil and barbaric attitudes to homosexuality.

No. Not good enough. And for your sake, don’t you dare be dumb enough to call me a racist for saying so.

The list goes on: The general and very popular attitudes to ‘blasphemy’ within Islam are completely unacceptable in a free society in the modern world. I’m sorry, but your human rights – which I would fight to the death to protect – do NOT include the right not be offended, by anyone who wants to critique, criticise, question, or simply take the piss out of your beliefs. It is their fundamental human right to do so, in fact. Muslims everywhere are going to have to be a great deal less thin-skinned, and it’s not ‘Islamophobic’ to say so. Someone did a picture of Mohammed? Get over it. Grow up. It’s a fucking drawing.

I long for the day that we, as a society, will find the nuance to vigorously oppose the prejudiced vilification of all Muslims, and at the same time feel able to – equally vigorously – openly criticise the many cultural elements within Islam that are in-and-of-themselves extreme, elements which need to be adjusted, reformed, evolved, so that the religion of Islam can authentically put a proper distance between itself and that crazed hatred of this world, that vicious, nihilistic totalitarianism, which typifies those Muslims who find in their faith an injunction to murder and to maim those who don’t share their beliefs.

I look out of my window this week, and I feel, more than ever before in my life, that we have such a very long way to go.

What you see when Trump is interviewed on TV is exactly what you’ll get if you vote for him: a dangerously deluded, proudly ignorant, vain, compulsive, petulant, lying, narcissistic sociopath. I won’t say a word to defend Hilary, but for the world at large a Clinton presidency would be passably ok. A Trump presidency, on the other hand, would have a catastrophic effect on America’s standing in the world, and its role as a world-leader. It would dismantle internationalism, deliver a mortal wound to the cause of democracy, and encourage authoritarian gangsters and psychopaths the world over. It would embolden both Russia and China to flex their military muscles in ways that would take us into a new and terrible era of real danger and nuclear fear. Trump has more or less said, ‘Hey Putin, go ahead and invade Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, because we won’t do a damn thing about it’, which is the most idiotically irresponsible thing imaginable.

Do you think America can be ‘great again’ by regressing into isolationism and stupid, narrow-minded nationalism? Because the exact opposite is the case. The safety and security of our entire world is threatened by the possibility of a Trump presidency. He’s a moral imbecile and a power-mad narcissist. You may hate Hilary, but Trump is a clear and present danger to you, to me, and to every man, woman and child on this planet.

Cynicism is self-hatred.

Utopianism is world-hatred.

Pacifism is a hatred of the world’s insistence that you need to make moral judgments.

Since Paris, I’ve read and heard a small number of angry reactions that I would characterise as pseudo-fascist in nature: blaming Muslims in general for the attacks; scapegoating; suggesting collective punishment; phrases like ‘boot out the Muslims’, etc.

This isn’t just stupid and immoral: it’s totalitarianism by definition, and therefore stands in complete contradiction to the very values that western society, flawed though it certainly is, rightly attempts to promote and defend in the wake of such attacks.

To entertain these incitements to violence, or any suggestion that individuals be treated collectively (on the basis of their religion, colour, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or for that matter anything else) would be to lose the very thing – perhaps the only thing – that we as evolved humans can be truly proud of, the only genuinely sound ethical basis for collective existence that exists: the belief in the universality of individual human rights.

To buy into such incitements would be to become the very thing we are fighting against.

At the same time, though, many other people seem to want to say that these increasingly frequent jihadist terrorist murders have ‘nothing to do with religion’ or ‘nothing to do with Islam’. This is, I am afraid, almost equally problematic.

Yesterday, I saw one particular well-meaning piece of social media sloganeering: ‘Remember, terrorism has no religion.’ The trouble with this thought, well-intentioned though it is, is that it is plain wishful thinking and nothing more. This terrorism, which is called Islamism, does indeed have ‘something to do’ with Islam. It has a very great deal to do with it, and draws authority for its actions from literal readings of Islam’s foundational texts. To relegate that thought to a kind of taboo status, to regard this observation as ‘culturally imperialist’ or even ‘racist’, is to condemn ourselves to a perpetual state of gibbering idiocy and, in the long run, perhaps even the destruction of all that we should hold dear.

We must allow ourselves to criticise totalitarian ideologies – including religious ones – without anyone conflating that criticism with oppression or violence. Without being silenced by self-victimising paranoids or the obsessively politically correct.

We must be less eager to embrace the delusion that terrorism and religious ideology are unconnected simply because we feel this creeping, sickly fear of offending the faithful. The faithful, frankly, need to grow up a little. Whatever your beliefs are – religious, secular, atheist, left, right, whatever – they exist to be debated, challenged and criticised by others. We all have the right to criticise and dispute each other’s beliefs and opinions in civil, non-violent ways. That’s what living in a decent and evolving society – a free society – looks like. Get over it.

We must allow ourselves to discuss these things openly, and those  who identify as liberals and progressives must be unafraid to make liberalism’s most vital case: that an open society, with an ever-increasing growth of knowledge but no ideological certainties, is better (yes, better) than any system based on the principle that one single book written long ago has supreme authority over all other sources of knowledge.

We should feel free, for example, to ask why it is that now, in 2015, more books are translated into Spanish  every single year, than have been translated into Arabic over the last 1,000 years.

Is that a ‘racist’ thought? No. It would be if it carried the inference that the reason for this astonishing fact was that Arabs were somehow ‘inferior’. But that is categorically not the inference and it’s not true.

Rather, the correct inference – and the truth of the matter –  is that the Arab world has been tragically and appallingly held back, its cultural, intellectual and economic development very severely stunted, not only by the imperial depredations of first Ottoman and then western powers, but also by the overweening cultural hegemony of an extremely oppressive totalitarian religion. And if you think that is a ‘racist’ thought, I humbly suggest you may not understand the meaning of the word.

Christianity was tamed in Europe, over the course of several hundred years: slowly stripped of its political power and largely relegated to a matter of personal spirituality and pleasant Sunday-morning community get-togethers. It had its political wings clipped, in other words, and that is as it should be with religion.

America’s take on ‘freedom of religion’, from the beginning, also created, implicitly (and crucially), the freedom from religion. Thomas Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’ between church and state set the template for the modern world in this respect: it is a personal human right to have a religion and to practice it… but no religion will have its hand on the levers of power. Personal spirituality?  Fine, wonderful, and indeed, one of our inalienable human rights. But religious political power? Theocratic government? No.

Religion should not – it must not – have the power to coerce anyone into anything. It should certainly not have the power to burn or stone homosexuals, or throw them from tall buildings; to murder infidels and apostates while claiming the authority to do so directly from a holy book. Religious people should not be able to feign moral authority when making statements that plainly regard women as inferior beings, whose minds, private lives and sexualities are to be restrained, controlled and punished by a corrupt caste of jaundiced old men.

In response to events like those in Paris on Friday (and there will, of course, be more events ‘like’ them), reactionary acts of violence and statements of prejudice against individual Muslim human beings going about living their lives would be both morally evil and horrifically stupid. However, a free discussion about old and obsolete religious value systems – including direct and stinging criticism of them – is going to be indispensable for the future of our evolution and the long-term survival of our species. So we may as well get used to it.

It is true that this is a war. And inevitably, a part of that war will be fought against the armies of ISIL using guns and bombs. But the war will never be won using only these means. This ‘war’ is also a moral and intellectual debate, about values and ideas and ways of living; about death and metaphysics and about how we are to behave in this, the living world, the only world we can be sure exists.

It is in this aspect of the conflict – the intellectual and moral debate – that I think we are failing so depressingly.

So, please let us talk openly about it. Let us allow ourselves to be free to criticise religion – to criticise all totalitarian certainties. Even more, let us begin  by opening our minds and our hearts to those brave and vital men and women in the Arab and Muslim world who are attempting to reform and modernise Islamic culture from within. Let us celebrate and support the Arab and Persian, Muslim and ex-Muslim secularists, reformers, democrats, liberals and feminists who will be, in the end, the vanguard of a momentous change within Muslim culture itself, a change without which this ‘war’ can never be won.

Please, my beloved liberals and friends on the political left, instead of making knee-jerk common cause against America and Israel by siding with the Arab world’s most nauseating fascists and gangsters (the most reactionary and conservative forces in the world, in fact, which is why it’s heartbreaking to see the political left so often allied with them), why not pledge that support, instead, to the Arab world’s courageous liberals, its reformers and feminists and secularists?

And who knows? Perhaps across the Earth, the sight of European liberals actually standing up for liberalism might communicate a moral coherence on the part of ‘the west’ that has been hitherto lacking. It might even help to dilute the perception, very common in the Muslim world, that ‘the west’ will be easy to vanquish in the end , because we are spineless, depraved, morally incoherent.

Maybe – just maybe – a strong and defiant, fiercely-articulated argument in favour of liberalism and secularism against religious totalitarianism might be the one thing we really need now, both to defend ourselves from the moral effects of the attack we are under, and to help our reform-minded brothers and sisters in the Muslim world begin to win their desperate battle for hearts and minds.

Over the last two weeks, like many people, I’ve felt compelled to read as much as I can about the Paris attacks of the 7th of January, perhaps in an attempt to make some kind of sense of those terrible events. On that day, armed fanatics broke into the premises of a satirical magazine and snuffed out the lives of 11 of the magazine’s staff, injuring 11 more, firing something in the region of 50 bullets, each deadly projectile accompanied by a gunman’s voice shouting repeatedly in Arabic, ‘God is the greatest’.

And there has been much to read on the subject. In just a few days I’ve digested a quite extraordinary range of viewpoints: I’ve read reactionary demands for all Muslims to take the blame, and to apologise for the attacks. I’ve read British writers say with conviction that the Paris attacks, and all Islamist crimes, are to be blamed solely and squarely on western foreign policy. I’ve read passionate defences of the idea of free speech, and I’ve read equally committed assertions that freedom of speech must have limits and come accompanied by responsibilities. I’ve also read Arab liberals decry their western counterparts’ self-flagellating, instead imploring us to recognise that Jihadism is the ultra-conservative right wing of Muslim culture, a new and global recrudescence of the fascist impulse – something, therefore, that simply must be fought.

On social media I’ve seen anti-racist French cartoons obtusely decried as racist; just as I’ve heard anti-racist liberals make arguments that sounded to me both racist and illiberal. I’ve read arguments about whether cartoons should be censored, about whether we have the right to offend or the right to silence those who offend us, as well as various arguments that appeared to question whether left is in fact right, right is left, up is down, the victim is the oppressor, choice is tyranny, and whether the moon might in fact be made exclusively of cheese. Ok, I made that last one up.

The tendency of some western liberals to out themselves as cowering capitulators whenever something horrible happens has left me almost speechless. I was horrified when I read Tim Lott’s article on the Guardian website, which blithely asserted, with no evidence, that all ‘belief systems’ are essentially religions and that “we are all in the same boat as the jihadists who elevate and concretise their improbable set of beliefs into an inflexible ideology.”

He then hammers the point home with this: “On this definition, business is a religion, career is a religion, family is a religion, nation is a religion, secularism is a religion, and religion is a religion. There is no getting away from it.”

Well, there is one way of getting away from it, and that’s by realising that it’s the most appalling nonsense. There is no perfect world – we don’t live in Utopia now and we never will – but we can quite effectively judge any belief system by judging the actions of those who adhere to its beliefs.

By that measure alone, I can immediately think of several ways in which those who adhere to the extremist, jihadist belief system behave in a markedly more despicable and morally inferior way compared to, say, people whose ‘belief system’ orbits around the imperfect-but-preferable constellation of tolerance, pluralism, democracy, human rights, freedom of speech and respect for women. Frankly, it’s no contest, and there is nothing whatsoever to be gained from such mindless moral equivalence.

Yes, it’s been a strange couple of weeks. We’ve heard of fears of a rising tide of anti-Muslim prejudice while also watching a genuine rise in anti-semitism across Europe. Of course, some of the ‘Islamophobia’ fears are fully justified and need addressing. This issue, however, is made thoroughly opaque, firstly by the term ‘Islamophobia’ itself – which fails to distinguish between opposition to the doctrines of a religion with a hatred of people who share an ethnicity – and by both Muslims and non-Muslims alike failing to make one other very vital distinction.

The distinction I refer to is between two ‘rights’, both much discussed and often conflated as if they were exactly the same thing. The first problem is, they are not the same. The second problem is, only one of these rights actually exists.

The first of the two ‘rights’ I’m referring to is the right that all Muslims have – that all people have – to live freely, to choose their own lives and to practice their own religion (or any religion, or no religion), and to enjoy their lives and their customs without fear of oppression. This is a right that all people should have, and we should all be steadfast in supporting this right, for everyone, including those whose belief system contradicts our own. This is the heart of pluralism, and the heart of tolerance.

On the other hand there is the right ‘not to be offended’: the right to demand the silence of those whose opinions offend us. Let us, please, be clear on this point: Britain’s Muslims do not have that right. No one else has that right, either. This ‘right’, the right not to be offended, simply does not exist – and can’t possibly exist – in an open and free society.

In a free society, you have the right to offend. You also have the right to feel offended. But you do not have the right to hurt, or threaten, or demand the silence of, the person who caused your feeling of offence. You do not have the right to demand that offence not be given to you.

This is largely because offence is, in truth, taken rather than given, and our society has intelligently recognised that the person who carries central moral responsibility for you feeling offended… is you.

In the last two weeks there has been much online discussion about the pros and cons of Charlie Hebdo’s sense of humour, as if making an aesthetic judgment on what the magazine says has any bearing on its creators’ right to say it. No, again. Unless Charlie Hebdo’s satires on the religion of Islam are inciting other people to physically harm Muslims, then the magazine has every right to print its cartoons, whether you or I or anyone else likes them or not. And if anyone is offended, the answer is very simple – don’t look at them.

Disliking an image/text/film/utterance is not the same as questioning the right of its producer to have made/written/said it. You can despise the work of Charlie Hebdo yet still believe in its freedom of speech. That darling of the left Noam Chomsky once said, “if you don’t explicitly believe in free speech for people whose opinions you despise, then you don’t believe in free speech at all”, and on this point, at least, Chomsky was spot-on.

The confusion many people in the west understandably feel at the moment seems to me to be have been enflamed by two separate – and prolific – stupidities. The first is the stupidity of the political right, who want to blame not just Islam but all individual Muslims, or worse, make them ‘apologise’ for Paris. This is very stupid, both in its sinister denial of the individual agency of particular Muslims, and in its implication of the kind of ‘collective punishment’ practiced in history by the worst kind of tyrants. On the other hand, we have the stupidity of the political left, many of whom want, as usual, to excuse terrorist murder as being the ‘consequence’ of western foreign policy – or as they like like to snidely say, ‘blowback’ – and to thus mystifyingly align western liberalism with the most conservative, illiberal, reactionary and non-progressive political force in the world.

To both groups, I would suggest this: how about a change of tack, a shift of emphasis? Why not instead seek out, and make common cause with, all those liberal Muslims and people of Muslim heritage who are working and battling and striving to build a movement of reform and progressive values within the Muslim world itself? It is these people, and all the many ordinary Muslims across many countries, who are at all times most likely to suffer terribly at the hands of the Jihadist scumbags, after all.

This is the one point on which I regard the mainstream media as badly at fault. We have not seen anywhere near enough of these many brave and brilliant people, Muslims and of Muslim heritage, who are fighting this vital intellectual and spiritual battle. People like the brilliant Maajid Nawaz, an ex-radicalised and now ultra-liberal Muslim and proud campaigner against extremism; or the singer and activist Ani Zonneveld, musician, activist and  founder of  Muslims For Progressive Values, who writes about the importance of freedom of speech from a Muslim perspective here.  Or how about the many other women of Muslim heritage who are bravely speaking out against the uncountable crimes against their gender that are committed daily by the normalised and entrenched doctrines defended by many within their faith as sacred and unchangeable? Women like Karima Benoune, whose brilliant TED Talk, “When People of Muslim Heritage Challenge Fundamentalism” can be seen here, or secular feminists like the Iranian Maryam Namazie or the Algerian Marieme Helie-Lucas, both of whose views can be read in this worthwhile article from Democracy.net.

This last point – on the rights of women specifically – is one viewpoint that has not been heard anywhere near enough in our national media. With the exception of Suzanne Moore’s excellent piece on the Guardian website, “Add faithophobia to my crimes: I have no respect for religions that have little respect for me”, I’ve read far too little in the British media that is willing to make the basic, self-evident point that the treatment of women in traditional religious cultural settings, and especially in many parts of the Islamic world, is generally appalling and often horrific. When are we going to hear more voices speaking up to say that religious extremism, too, is a feminist issue? Soon, I hope.

Yes, there’s been almost too much to read on this subject over the last couple of weeks. But that fact, by itself, rather proves my point: in a society that morally and legally promotes and protects freedom of speech, a huge range of different views will naturally appear, and proliferate, and multiply, and be much discussed and debated and argued over – always. The question is: does this make us as a society better, or worse? I’m fairly sure it’s the former.

I’ve loved and admired some of what I’ve read about the Paris attacks over these last two weeks. And I’ve hated some of it, too. That is my right. But do I have the right to silence those whose views offend me? Should I have that right? Would I, myself, ever want to have that right?

No, no, and no.