The sometimes prudish, sometimes lascivious folk over at the Daily Mail routinely react in horror to some people getting naked, getting all huffy and conservative, then react rather more excitedly, getting all celebratory and dribbling, often in the space of a few pages pages, or sentences. There’s no apparent mechanism for choosing between the two responses other than the toss of a coin, but they always manage to feature the pictures, either way.

Anyway, they were remarkably quick to spot actress Sila Sahin posing nude in the latest German issue of Playboy magazine, and essentially recycle the interview as a news story. The big media spin on the story is that she is a well-known German-Turkish soap actress, hence she becomes apparently “the first Turkish woman” to appear nude in Playboy. And therefore presumed a Muslim. A naked, Muslim woman.

Dum dum dummmm.

Posing provocatively on the cover of German Playboy magazine with one breast exposed, Sila Sahin seems to be sending a clear and deliberate message to her conservative Turkish family.

‘I did it because I wanted to be free at last,’ she said. ‘These photographs are a liberation from the restrictions of my childhood.’

Her family have, unsurprisingly, reacted with horror, and her mother has cut off all contact with the actress.

‘My mother is still angry. It will be even more difficult with my grandparents, my aunts and my uncles,’ she said on the website devoted to her television soap.

She has, however, managed to talk to her actor father, who expressed concern over the pressure she will inevitably face from those not only within the Turkish community in Germany, but from the wider Muslim community as a whole.

… ‘My upbringing was conservative,’ she told Playboy. ‘I was always told, you must not go out, you must not make yourself look so attractive, you mustn’t have male friends.

‘I have always abided by what men say. As a result I developed an extreme desire for freedom. I feel like Che Guevara. I have to do everything I want, otherwise I feel like I may as well be dead.’

Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1378455/Sila-Sahin-poses-Playboy-Muslim-model-upsets-family-nude-cover.html

The lengthy photo feature (shown here) did the media rounds in Germany. Obviously there’s a “boo” from some of her family and various Muslim sources,(Sahin says she’s “not sure” about her own religious beliefs). There’s another “boo” from those worried that if avoiding doing “what men say” is your main aim, then stripping off for the male gaze may not be the best way to go about it. But there’s also a “boo” from commentators worried that the shoot is such a “cheap cliché” based on exoticism, all too conveniently playing on Europe’s current angst about race, immigration and integration.

“When you look at the pictures you can see how cheap these people at the magazine think about Turkish, Muslim, Islamic, Oriental people,” said Hatic Akyün, who writes a column for the Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel and was born in Turkey but grew up in Germany. “It’s such a cheap cliché they’re using.”

Akyün said she and her Turkish friends were all exasperated to see that a Playboy cover was putting the issue of integration back into the headlines. She accused Playboy, Sahin and her handlers of stirring up controversy for publicity’s sake.

“That’s how it works in Germany. The integration debate works just like that,” she said. “They know exactly which buttons they need to push to get the media to jump all over it.”

Gökce Yurdakul, an expert on race, gender and Islam and a professor at Berlin’s Humboldt University, was equally disappointed with the way the German media have approached the topic. For too long women have been seen as representations of their nations, she said.

“She’s not a daughter of Turkish immigrants; she shouldn’t be represented this way in the newspapers,” she said. “This is an individual woman who is acting on her own behalf, not as a daughter, not as a part of a community.”

Yurdakul said Sahin is just tapping into what Germans expect to read about Turkish and Muslim women, that German society can liberate them.

Link: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15021188,00.html

The Gather : Celebs channel is a bit more forgiving.

Good for her. This message is one that most people can certainly embrace, and hopefully, her family will get over their dismay at her decision to pose nude. Who would have thought that Sila Sahin’s nude pictures could end up helping advance the cause of world peace?

Who indeed.

Link: http://celebs.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474979263193

Far from being offensive, open criticism of deeply held beliefs is part and parcel of respect. Eve Hendrick writes – and you have the right to read.

The right to freedom of speech is one of the fundamental principles of democracy, and it is one which democratic societies are rightly very proud of. The right to freedom of speech includes the right, within limits, to say and write whatever we like about any subject. Putting aside the chances of being accused of slander, libel, or incitement to racial or religious hatred, the right to freedom of speech ensures that we are free to express ourselves and our opinions.

Treating all beliefs equally - Christina Martin's God Trump cards from New Humanist magazine

The right to free speech found its original justification in protecting people from authoritarian oppression because the concept enabled people to speak out against governments without fear of punishment. In addition to this and as a fundamental principle of liberalism, freedom of speech falls in line with other liberal rights as enabling the individual to do and say whatever they like as long as they don’t harm others. In other words, individual freedom is paramount. Furthermore, J. S. Mill thought that freedom of expression did not just ensure an individual’s freedom and happiness but that it might actually contribute to society by revealing better ways of living.

What is interesting about freedom of speech is that it is defended as being an important right of the person doing the speaking, writing or drawing (although Mill thought that free expression would eventually benefit society, this was arguably an added bonus and definitely came second to the idea of the right of the individual to be free). Is there another side to free speech? Can it be defended not only as a right of the speaker, but perhaps as a right of the listener also? If I have a right to say and write what I like, does it make sense to say I also have a right to hear and read what others say?

This sounds like a strange suggestion, but it may well turn out that free speech is important not only because of what it allows me to say and write, but because of what it forces me to hear and read as well. Consider the idea of religious offence.

Some religious believers find it incredibly offensive to hear criticisms of their beliefs, especially if these critiques take satirical or mocking forms. Perhaps the biggest example in recent history would be the Danish cartoon saga of 2005. Many Muslims, Christians and atheists found the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad deeply offensive, insulting and even racist. There was outcry; one side championed free speech and the other championed religious respect.

What was largely ignored in the debate however, was the possibility that satirical cartoons (and other forms of expression) of a religious figure or belief could be defended, not only on the principle of the individual’s right to express themselves, but because such ‘expressions’ demonstrate respect for the religious believer. This is not as bizarre as it sounds, although it does require a little more work than the simple free speech defence.

The case for this position can be made by understanding what “respect” means. There are many subtleties in the concept of respect but it can be stripped down to the fairly simple (and not so simple) idea that respecting something or someone means recognising what that object is, and recognising what characteristics make that object worthy of whatever we discern respectful treatment to be. So to respect a human being, I must recognise a ‘thing’ as belonging to the group ‘human being’, then I must acknowledge what aspect of being a ‘human being’ make such things worthy of being treated with respect. Then I must decide what respectful treatment actually entails. Crucially, the treatment we decide upon must make reference to the feature we found so respect-worthy. Phew.

So, what does that mean? Why do we think humans deserve this ‘respect’? Arguably, what marks humans out as beings worthy of the kind of respectful treatment we don’t think we owe to animals (few would claim it is equally disrespectful to mock a dog for example), is our rationality and our autonomy. This is the Kantian idea that what makes us worthy of certain treatment is our powers of reasoning and the ability to adopt and follow our own rules. It is true that many of our other features demand specific treatments or attitudes from others, for example our ability to feel pain means others are morally required to avoid (and protect us from) injury, but it is our features of rationality and autonomy that require others to treat us with what we call ‘respect’.

Deciding what respectful treatment of human beings actually entails must therefore recognise and refer to them as reasoning and autonomous beings. ‘Respectful treatment’ must therefore endorse and encourage the manifestation of reason and autonomy. Respectful treatment does therefore not entail backing quietly away from views which others might find offensive. In fact, exposing the potentially offended to these ‘offensive’ views is arguably the epitome of ‘respect’. A mocking, critical, offensive or challenging statement about religion requires the religious believer to use those powers of rationality and autonomy to either challenge in return, or assess and alter their own views. When we criticise anyone’s deeply held views in this way we are recognising that the believer has those rational powers and we are asking them to fulfil them. That is real respect.

Satirising religious views can therefore be defended not only because writers, artists, commentators and everyone else has the right to express themselves, but because the potentially offended have a right to have their powers of rationality and autonomy respected by those who disagree with them. The potentially offended have a right to see and hear material which simply by existing, recognises and respects the very features that qualify them as human beings.

Eve Hendrick is a Campaigns Volunteer at the British Humanist Association.

There are lots of responses today to the French ban on – no not burkas – but the covering of faces. The ban comes into force today and has already led to women being arrested in Europe at a public protest because of what they are wearing. With little  political or social pressure to repeat any such policy in the UK, the government here has stated that there is no prospect of replicating the ban on this side of la Manche. The French ban is estimated to effect only a few thousand Muslim women throughout the republic… and also skiers, people at Halloween costume parties, and possibly bearded men, says Viv Groskop, challenging what she sees as a threat to European freedoms.

For Sarkozy and his friends, the burqa is no joke. It’s dangerous and illegal. Women wearing the burqa and the niqab (the more common facial veil) will not exactly be arrested on sight. But if they wear a veil over their face in a public place, anyone can ask them to uncover their face – or leave. Not quite stop and search. Just stop and unmask. If a woman refuses to co-operate, citizens are advised to call the police. The fine is €150.

Does this sound a little unfriendly to you? If so, be very worried. Because this trend is spreading. A ban is already in operation in Belgium and under discussion in Canada, Denmark and Spain. It is likely to become law in the Netherlands this year or next. There have been calls in Sweden for the niqab to be prohibited in schools and universities.

A de facto ban already exists in Italy (where a 1975 antiterrorism law forbids the covering of the face) and Berlusconi’s party has drafted a new, more specific ruling. Last year, a Tunisian woman was fined €500 for wearing a burqa in Italy’s Piedmont region.

… [T]he women’s rights defence is a ridiculous excuse for something very close to racism. As Ed Balls, then schools secretary, put it last year: “I wouldn’t want to be part of a religion myself where we said to women and girls, ‘You have to wear a veil.’ But I also would not want to be in the kind of society where people were told how to dress when they walked down the streets.”

… If the French were not so cowardly – and were being transparent about what they are doing – they would actually outlaw the burqa and the niqab by name, instead of coyly banning “the covering of the face”. Presumably, it’s now against the law in France to attend a fancy dress party dressed as Zorro or Catwoman. Because if there’s one rule for one set of people who cover their face, that same rule should surely apply to anyone whose face is not immediately visible. Non?

Indeed, if the French are going to do this, let’s hope they do it properly.Le Figaro has already expressed distress that it is technically against the law to wear a ski mask in a public place. Bad news for the black run at Val d’Isère. Aren’t there some rampant beards that might sprout dangerously in the direction of facial dissimulation?

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/10/france-burqa-niqab-ban

John Lichfield in the Independent meets Parisian women protesting the ban.

Mariam says she wears the niqab, or full-length Islamic veil, by “personal choice” and for “religious conviction”. From today, if she leaves her home in the Paris suburbs she will have to expose her face in public for the first time in five years.

“I have decided to obey the law but to leave home as little as possible,” the 32-year-old said. “I accept that the law of France is the law, even though I think that it is foolish and wrong to force me to go against my beliefs.”

Most French Muslim women who wear the full-face veil are expected to bow, like Mariam, to the so-called “burka ban” which takes effect today.

But pockets of fierce opposition remain. On Saturday, police arrested 61 people who tried to hold an unauthorised demonstration against the ban in Paris. They included 20 women wearing the niqab – the Salafist or Saudi full-length veil with only a narrow eye opening.

Among those protesting or hoping to protest were a handful of Islamist extremists from Britain and Belgium, including Anjem Choudary, once a member of the banned group Islam4UK and a follower of the extremist preacher, Omar Bakri. Mr Choudary was arrested at the French border.

Their involvement was a political windfall for President Nicolas Sarkozy and a source of frustration for moderate Muslim leaders in France who have been trying to distance themselves both from the burka and the burka ban.

Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-wakes-up-to-a-burka-ban-as-sarkozy-unveils-a-new-era-2266054.html

I woke up as usual yesterday in the “geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death” – and very pleasant it was. I fed the cats, read the papers and carried an espresso into the back garden, congratulating myself on being a citizen of a country that doesn’t stone women to death, hang gay men from cranes or murder people who change their religion. I mean, how great is that? I love living in the “selfish, hedonistic wasteland” that is London – both quotes come from one Edmund Adamus, who is apparently a senior British Catholic and an adviser to the Archbishop of Westminster – and I just wish more nations would follow our example.

Frankly, I’m tired of hearing religious bigots running down this country. For all its faults – crap public transport, Nick Clegg popping up everywhere and a national obsession with Simon Cowell – Britain is still one of the most civilised places in the world to live. It’s not Iran, where prisoners are subjected to rape and mock executions; it isn’t Saudi Arabia either, despite Mr Adamus’s downright peculiar belief that we’re more anti-Catholic than the Chinese or the Saudis. (Might I suggest he tries walking along a street in Riyadh carrying a crucifix and a Bible?) The Catholic Church has picked up this habit of dissing secular culture from hardline Muslims, who dislike pretty much the same things: gay relationships, equal rights for women and the freedom to mock religion.

Those of us who aren’t religious conservatives have had to fight every step of the way to create this modern, tolerant, secular Britain, and it’s easy to forget that many of the improvements are very recent. I can just remember the last hangings in British prisons, as well as a time when having an “illegitimate” baby brought shame on a woman and homosexuality was still illegal; even as recently as 10 years ago, when the current Foreign Secretary William Hague was Conservative leader, the party opposed the repeal of an iconic piece of anti-gay legislation known as Section 28.

So it’s good to have this wake-up from Mr Adamus, director of pastoral affairs at the diocese of Westminster, about the need to defend secular values.

Continues: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/joan-smith/joan-smith-in-defence-of-modern-britain-2067886.html

The RSA [Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce] has a new strapline: “21st century enlightenment”.  This acknowledges our origins in the coffeehouses of 18th century London and the pioneering spirit of our founders, who were convinced of humanity’s capacity for principled progress.

The RSA’s challenge now is to revive and reimagine the sprit of the enlightenment for our 21st century context. But can we even agree on the core values of the original enlightenment?

There may be general consensus around ideas such as reason, progress, and liberty, which many would agree have shaped the world we live in today – and indeed our very sense of what it means to be human.  But the very phrase “enlightenment values” still has the potential to open up a firestorm of political and social debate.

The RSA brings together a panel of philosophical thinkers and writers to debate the importance of enlightenment values today. Which ideas should be salvaged, and championed anew? And which should be rejected or reimagined in the light of the challenges and opportunities of today’s globally interconnected world?

Speakers to include: Nigel Warburton, writer and philosopher; Robert Rowland Smith, lecturer, writer and philosopher; John Keane, professor of politics, University of Sydney.

Chair: Matthew Taylor, chief executive, RSA.

http://www.thersa.org/events/our-events/do-we-still-need-enlightenment-values

You can listen to the event live from 12.50pm at http://www.thersa.org/events/listen-live

Nigel Warburton will also be appearing at the British Humanist Association  summer day conference on Humanism, Philosophy and the Arts on the 26th June.

Theo Hobson says that Establishment gives the lie to the Church of England’s claim to be liberal and respectful of religious freedom.

I agree with Richard Harries’ defence of faith groups who want to conduct civil partnerships in places of worship.  But I really dislike the way he poses as a defender of religious liberty. We Lords-spiritual have no right to oppose them holding civil ceremonies in places of worship, he loftily says: “it would harm no one, and it accords with their deepest religious convictions. Religious freedom is indivisible”. This is laughable. For an Anglican bishop to say this is like a Thatcherite saying “compassion must always come first”.

The Church of England has many things going for it: it has lovely buildings, lovely music, lovely liturgies, lovely literature, and a lovely habit of theological vagueness. But it does not have the moral high ground in terms of religious liberty. Indeed it is founded on the denial of religious liberty. This is too often obscured by its reputation for “liberalism”, which is based in the fact that it is more liberal than certain other churches on certain issues, and manages to find a few nice people to say nice things on Thought for the Day.

According to the vague, lazy orthodoxy about our history, the C of E is deeply entwined in the story of British liberalism. From the time of the first Elizabeth, did this Church not nurture the distinctive English tradition of toleration, pluralism, fair play? Did it not reject the authoritarian ways of another church we won’t name, and choose freedom? No, actually. It is truer to say that our tradition of liberty arose in opposition to the established Church.

Continues at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/mar/05/religion-christianity

There’s a new paper out by Satoshi Kanazawa which is causing a bit of a stir. You might have seen something about it already – I’m a little behind the curve on this one, but on the plus side I have actually read the paper, unlike many other pundits!

What’s got people talking is the correlation between atheism and intelligence, although that isn’t what the paper is actually about. It’s already pretty well established that atheists tend, on average, to be more intelligent. This paper firms that finding up a bit more, but makes a bigger claim than that.

…

There were actually two studies, both using US data. The first looked at intelligence scores from a group of adolescents (junior high and high school), and compared it with their religious beliefs 8 years later.

The figure shows that atheists are smarter by a good few points on average. And the link remained even after Kanazawa corrected for age, sex, race, education, earnings, and even religion. It’s not a trivial difference. In fact the effect is pretty strong – stronger than the effect of education, for example.

The second was from the general social survey – a survey of adults. Once again religion (belief in god and religious intensity) was strongly related to intelligence, even after correcting for a host of factors that you might think could explain the link.

So what? Well, Kanazawa believes that the explanation for the link lies in the Savannah hypothesis. This is the idea that general intelligence evolved as a way to deal with evolutionarily novel situations. It lets us transcend our evolved behaviour and do things that contravene our instincts.

In support of this, Kanazawa shows that intelligence is linked to liberal ideals in the same way. In particular, the link seems to be between intelligence and openness to support of people from other ethnic groups (i.e. whites supporting government intervention to help blacks).

What’s more intelligence in those adolescents increases belief among men (but not women) in sexual exclusivity – i.e. that people should not sleep around.

If Kanazawa is right, then intelligence should not be linked to behaviour that is not evolutionarily novel. And, indeed, attitudes to children, marriage, family and friends are not linked to intelligence.

It’s an interesting hypothesis, and an interesting analysis. To me, it seems intuitively reasonable that general intelligence should have evolved as a way of solving problems. But it will take more than this study (and his previous one) to convince me.

Continues at: http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2010/03/is-this-why-atheists-are-on-average.html

Tom Rees blogs at Epiphenom. He’s a member of the Humanists4Science group which is affiliated to the BHA.

More intelligent people are significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.

The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years.”

“Evolutionarily novel” preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are “evolutionarily familiar.”

…

An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals. Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk. Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel.

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

http://www.physorg.com/news186236813.html (via RDF)

After more than six months straining to convince itself of the immense, nationwide danger of a phenomenon that involves fewer than 0.1% of France’s Muslim population, a parliamentary committee yesterday ­recommended the banning of the full veil in many of France’s public places. There is nothing eccentric about asking why they are getting so bothered.

As usual, when France confronts such debates, a panoply of intellectuals, politicians and artists gasp their indignation over an alleged assault on “our values”, wheeling out their rhetorical big guns to denounce the “philosophical scandal” of refusing to show one’s face publicly.

We have been systematically treated to five justifications, all hammered home with the aim of getting the full veil banned for good: the feminist, the theological, the humanistic, the ­securitarian and, finally, the prophylactic. None of these justifications has been convincing. For a start, the vast majority of women concerned have clearly actively chosen to wear the veil, sometimes in the face of opposition from their family. Moreover, many see their veils as a means of expressing independence, even sometimes as a vehicle of feminine empowerment.

Story continues at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jan/26/proposed-veil-ban-in-france

Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association

It should be criticised for many reasons, but banning the burkha would run counter to a deep principle of liberal democratic society, argues Andrew Copson.

We’ve had lots of contact from members at the BHA office in response to the debate in France about the place of the burkha in French society and law. The BHA has also appeared on a few local radio stations to discuss this issue.

‘Banning’ anything is automatically controversial for obvious reasons – if you are discussing banning something in the first place it is only because a lot of people are doing it and all those people will obviously oppose any ban on their preferred activity. But this particular discussion is made even more charged by the fact that the burkha itself is a highly emotive symbol for western societies. We may not like the burkha, we may think it disrupts normal social contact (as in fact it is intended to) to the extent that we can never know a Muslim woman in the burkha that we meet as well as we may know one who goes unveiled, we may think it is a sign of the oppression of women and an insult to men. I myself think all these things.

It is a principle of a liberal democratic society that people have the freedom to do as they please as long as they don’t harm others. This means we may prohibit the burkha in some specific instances, where teachers are teaching small children for example, or in service industry jobs, or at times of necessary security such as airport gates. It may also mean that we recognise a difference between the right of adult women to chose what they wear, if that is a free choice, and the enforced wearing of a burkha by a child, which we might make moves to prevent. But it also means that we have no justification for an outright ban on the wearing of the burkha at all times.

In Iran, women are prosecuted because they are not wearing a head scarf or are improperly clothed and in Arabic countries similar or more strict legal sanctions apply. We do not want to end up with a reversed – though equally improper – situation in Europe. We can argue against the veil, we can encourage women not to wear it, but we should not ban people from wearing it in public unless they are harming others by doing so.

Besides the points of principle, the practical consequences of a ban may very well be negative, giving fuel to anti-liberal and anti-democratic extremists, and confining women who will be wearing the burkha come-what-may to the home.

I know that many people disagree. Some that I have talked to about this issue over the last couple of days have argued that the burkha is so objectively oppressive of women and is such an anti-social practice (not in the superficial sense of anti-social but in the sense that it radically disrupts normal social relations between people) that some sort of ban can be justified on the grounds that great harm is being done to others by this practice of a few. Others have argued that the practical consequences will not be as I have described but that – just as laws against racist hate speech played a part in radically reducing racism – a law against the burkha would in time erode the practice.

What do you think?

Andrew Copson is the Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association.

Faith schools should be legally obliged to teach that homosexuality is “normal and harmless”, and gay civil partnerships should be replaced by true marriage, Nick Clegg said last night.

In a pitch for the gay vote unprecedented in its scope, ahead of a general election likely in May, the leader of the Liberal Democrats threw down the gauntlet to his opponents. He called on the Tories, and in particular the Conservative leader David Cameron, who has voted against gay rights, to prove that they really supported full gay equality.

In an interview with The Independent columnist Johann Hari for today’s edition of Attitude magazine, Mr Clegg changed the terms of political debate on what it means to be gay in Britain. The father-of-three detailed a series of proposals, among them:

* Force all schools – including faith schools – to implement anti-homophobia bullying policies and teach that homosexuality is “normal and harmless”.

* Change the law to allow gay men and women the same marital rights as straight couples, including the symbolic right to use the word “marriage” rather than civil partnerships.

* Reverse the ban on gay men being allowed to give blood.

* Guarantee any refugees genuinely fleeing a country because of persecution over their sexual orientation asylum in the UK.

* Review Uganda’s membership of the Commonwealth if its government was to bring in the death penalty for practicing gays.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/clegg-lays-down-law-to-cameron-on-gay-rights-1866116.html

Update: The BHA has formally responded to this news: http://www.humanism.org.uk/news/view/430

It is fitting that the BHA’s follow-up to the Atheist Bus Campaign – billboards featuring children asking “Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself” – focuses on the autonomy of children in the year when we also celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of On Liberty by J S Mill. In the BHA’s briefing on On Liberty (PDF) Dr Alan Haworth calls Mill’s volume “the classic philosophical statement of a liberal position which continues to play a considerable role within political thought in the world at large, not just within academia.”

If the relevance of Mill, writing 150 years ago, seems remote to some, it’s worth thinking about his own description of those times, expressing a view far from unheard of today especially from skeptics of religion and critics of blasphemy laws.

In the present age–which has been described as ‘destitute of faith, but terrified at scepticism’–in which people feel sure, not so much that their opinions are true, as that they should not know what to do without them–the claims of an opinion to be protected from public attack are rested not so much on its truth, as on its importance to society. [On Liberty, p19]

What does the campaign say?

A few commentators argued that rather than encourage the free development of children, the “Please don’t label me” message is in fact illiberal toward the rights of parents to raise their own children as they see fit. In many cases this is down to an exaggeration of what the campaign is about, with critics variously asserting that the billboards: censure parents for conveying any “philosophical framework of their choosing”; suggest that “one does cultural violence to one’s child by [merely] exposing him or her to religion”; and imply that children should be raised “without the sharing of any moral or philosophical convictions”.

Let’s call this the “Please Don’t Influence Me At All” interpretation of the campaign.

The BHA rejected this straw man interpretation of the billboards. One should not – and cannot, anyway – raise a child without influencing them in the broad sense, and moral education is obviously hugely important.

If “Please Don’t Influence Me At All” is a bad interpretation anyway, then criticisms based on it pose no problem for the actual message of the “Please Don’t Label Me” campaign, of course. But the straw man is a good place to start thinking.

The “Please Don’t Influence Me At All” interpretation

On the “Please Don’t Influence Me At All” interpretation of the billboards, parents and teachers would be compelled either to provide no education whatsoever (Mill values education, of course, and the notion is preposterous anyway, so need scarcely be considered), or more likely to act in some kind of impossibly objective way, offering an indisputable universalist education. This is what, for example, the Bible Society thinktank Theos claimed to believe the campaign was about, their Director suggesting the campaign “assumes that there is a position of philosophical neutrality out there, a value-neutral cultural space in which children can grow up. The suggestion is dubious, to put it kindly.” Indeed it is, but we can still ask what Mill would make of this exaggerated form of the slogan.

The notion of a hypothetical, one-size-fits-all, objective education, would have run up against Mill’s considerable respect for diversity of opinion and specifically his strong preference for a plurality in educational approaches. Disagreement and a range of differing approaches are required in order for a society not to become set in its ways, Mill says (p63). He writes appreciatively of the multiple autonomous approaches humankind is capable of adopting in parallel:

the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals. [emphasis added, p62]

This ‘multiple approaches’ approach is applied specifically to education:

All that has been said of the importance of individuality of character, and diversity in opinions and modes of conduct, involves, as of the same unspeakable importance, diversity in education. [p95]

Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, on the contrary, there are varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience. What the State can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others; instead of tolerating no experiments but its own. [p99]

Mill’s concerns about a homogeneous state education stem from a fear that it will “mould” people into an form designed by the state, priesthood, aristocracy, or a tyrannous majority of the population (p95). It would be interesting to know what he’d think of the National Curriculum and whether this left sufficient room for his multiple “experiments” in education. But that’s another question. The point is that Mill would fear a totally uniform education which falsely assumed that the whole truth was already in hand.

Thankfully, though, the billboards don’t say “Please Don’t Influence Me At All”, they say “Please Don’t Label Me”.

Labelling and “boxing”

If neither total abandonment of children’s education nor one-size-fits all conformity are implied by the campaign, the message is rather that “Some practices, some ways of speaking, some implied threats of severe parental disapproval, serve to prejudice a child’s free development in a way which goes beyond merely conveying one’s own deeply held opinion” (see BHA’s “Responses to our critics”). Examples given include:

Parents who do not educate their children about the range of positions that people hold (“protecting” them from the big wide world) while over-educating them about their own position

Parents whose faces and attitudes grow ominous in response to critical questions about their personal beliefs, especially if their child moves toward “abandoning” the parents’ religion

Teachers who bend over backwards to teach about one religion to the exclusion of all others (we hear a lot about this happening)

Any adults who naturally think of the children of religious parents as “belonging” to the same religion – and refer to the children as ‘Muslim’, ‘Christian’ and so on

So what, when it comes to his more narrowly defined sense in which adults can “box children in” to a particular worldview, would J S Mill have made of the billboards? For a start, would the grand daddy of liberalism want to interfere in family life at all?

Is it liberal to interfere in a family?

At a superficial glance it might seem that the message of the billboard campaign (even on the proper “Please Don’t Label Me” reading) is illiberal because it would interfere in the more or less sacrosanct  relationship between parent and child. For some modern liberals (and, Mill tells us on page 98 of On Liberty, many of those called ‘liberals’ in his own time) any intervention in a family or even a ‘culture’ other than one’s own is regarded as illiberal and paternalistic. Even if such a liberal found the “boxing in” of children repugnant, they might favour standing back rather than “intrude” into the dynamics of that parent-child relationship.

But for Mill things were not so black and white. Or perhaps, in a way, they were more black and white, because his position is that questions of liberty and intervention rest at the level of the individual. Higher level collections like families and nations do not have collective rights of non-interference, precisely because one individual within a ‘collective’ of this kind might be intruding on the liberty of another. Even for groups of people which some will regard as quite natural sets, like nuclear families, there is a kind of arbitrariness to defining multiple people as one unit qualifying for liberty in its own right. (If the whole state were defined as a collective in which no one from outside should interfere, then the government could abuse the liberties of individuals at whim!)

If we run this position against examples like abusive parent-child relationships then it becomes clear why it is individuals, not the corporate family or other collections, that are the atomic units in Mill’s liberal framework, and why intervention between individuals need not be illiberal and can in fact be a moral obligation.

Richard Reeves, speaking at the Bentham Lecture 2009, regards this kind of moral intervention, even into a family, as characteristic Mill and an essential ingredient of liberalism. As an example of this moral intervention Reeves cites Mill’s views on the capacity of families to raise children:

The laws which, in many countries on the Continent, forbid marriage unless the parties can show that they have the means of supporting a family, do not exceed the legitimate powers of the State: and whether such laws be expedient or not (a question mainly dependent on local circumstances and feelings), they are not objectionable as violations of liberty. [p97]

Our own contemporary “circumstances and feelings” would probably lead most of us to reject any means-testing of the bride and groom before their big day! In Mill’s time contraception was considerably less accessible and less effective and the purpose of marriage more singular; but today we do not see marriage as solely, often not even primarily, as a framework for raising children.  But Mill’s point in and of itself is not unreasonable and is made by many today (usually in the context of child benefits), namely that if we do not have the means to support them then we should not wantonly churn out offspring (Mill warns of “a life or lives of wretchedness and depravity to the offspring, with manifold evils to those sufficiently within reach to be in any way affected by their actions.” p98).

In principle, then, Mill will allow us to interject into a family relationship. When impinging on the actions of others Mill makes a distinction between on the one hand “reprobation, and social stigma” and on the other hand “legal punishment” (p98). The “Please Don’t Label Me” billboards are about raising consciousness on the issue of presuming religion of children (as Richard Dawkins said it’s about trying to get people to cringe at the sound of children being labelled); the campaign does not call for any legal reprimand. So we needn’t decide whether Mill would outlaw the “boxing in” of children. But would he regard religious presumption of minors as itself illiberal and worthy of becoming a “social stigma” as the billboards intend?

Limiting their options

A particularly insidious manner of “boxing in” someone’s beliefs is the removal of other options, the Orwellian redaction of language such that words are only available in support of your own view, the silencing of questions by editing out the question mark. Living with a label and being told “You are a Christian” or “You belong to this religion” can serve to have this effect, and in some cases discussion of alternative beliefs within a family are taboo, even explicitly forbidden.

Mill gives his reasons for calling freedom of opinion and expression a “necessity”:

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. [p46]

There is something prideful then, arrogantly sure of yourself, in limiting the options on the table. Mill goes on to say that even if a silenced opinion happens to be false, it may still contain some “portion” of truth that we might have learned from, so even when open debate opens up false beliefs it still has utility. The “collision of adverse opinions” is essential for coming to the truth, says Mill: even if the pedagogue happens to be in possession of the truth, being entirely correct in their religion, a contest with other opinions is still essential if that position is to be anything more than a prejudice.

Furthermore, in an argument which should move even someone intent on labelling a child as faithful for faith’s sake, Mill suggests that if an alleged truth is forced on others then:

the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character of conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience. [p46-47]

Mill is very wary of the closing down of options, then. And closing down options is just one way of attempting to perpetuate your own beliefs by coercing others toward conforming to your point of view, something else Mill warns against.

Conformity to “Custom”

Writing in 1859 in terms we would now stand back from, Mill asserts (p63) that “Custom” holds sway over much of the world including “the whole East”; for these other cultures “justice and right mean conformity to custom”. The contemporary philosopher is unlikely to ascribe a universal conformist traditionalism to almost all foreigners! But Mill’s point is that any society which has become stagnant and uncritical was not always so.  The countries he alludes to once possessed “originality” and “were then the greatest and most powerful nations of the world. What are they now?” he asks.

His answer is that these aged and decrepit cultures have lost out in the game of civilizations, even succumbing to the title of being ‘colonies’ of European states.

A people, it appears may be progressive for a certain length of time, and then stop; when does it stop? When it ceases to possess individuality. [p63]

The capacity not to conform, not to blindly inherent Custom from society, the public recognition of individuality as a virtue: these are crucial to the vitality of a civilization.

We can extrapolate and apply the same argument to families: a child’s education, like a country’s culture, needs to allow for individuality and non-conformity, so that unexpected ideas can enter into the space of ideas and provide vital new energy.

But we don’t have to extrapolate from Mill’s argument. He is concerned about enforcing conformity both from the State and a the social level. At the social level the dogged perpetuation of Custom is local and most often familial. There is a reason that the pressure to conform in most coming-of-age stories comes from parents and elders! It is through the cosy inheritance of ideas from generation to generation that “Custom” will stagnate a whole society. Mill abhors the widespread “atmosphere of mental slavery” (p29) brought about by any stagnant conformity. Talking about social inability to challenge fundamentals he says the price paid “is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.” (p28)

Religious authoritarianism

Mill speaks often against religious dogmatists and explicitly considers the specific case in which religion is the “Custom” being illiberally enforced on society. In the context of discussing blasphemy laws and Sabbatarian legislation, which Mill puts firmly on the wrong side of liberty, he claims that:

The notion that it is one man’s duty that another should be religious, was the foundation of all the religious persecutions ever perpetrated, and, if admitted, would fully justify them. [p81]

Of course, the mindset of an inquisitor attempting to force a heretic or unbeliever into conformity, even murdering them before accepting their differing beliefs, is usually far more demonic than is a parent’s desire to raise ‘a Christian child’! Nevertheless, Mill brings the point back down to a more day-to-day level:

Though the feeling which breaks out in the repeated attempts to stop railway travelling on Sunday, in the resistance to the opening of Museums, and the like, has not the cruelty of the old persecutors, the state of mind indicated by it is fundamentally the same. It is a determination not to tolerate others in doing what is permitted by their religion, because it is not permitted by the persecutor’s religion. It is a belief that God not only abominates the act of the misbeliever, but will not hold us guiltless if we leave him unmolested. [p81]

Now, Mill is here using Sabbatarian attempts to legislate against working on Sundays as his example, and the case is very much a matter of the state and its laws, not of domestic norms and parental demagoguery. But the logic of the argument is not far removed. A child in a family home (where the rules and the taboos and the ‘established religion’ and the terms of engagement are all decided by their elders) is not so much unlike a citizen in a state under the same conditions decided upon by their government. The attitude of a religiously pushy parent – who feels it a duty not to leave the child “unmolested” and instead to inculcate the child into her religion – carries the same weight of implication: that God in some way demands belief even if it must be obtained through coercion.

Varieties of influence

Mill speaks ironically of over-bearing moralism: “we are eager for improvement in politics, in education, even in morals, though in this last our idea of improvement chiefly consists in persuading or forcing other people to be good as ourselves.” (p63) But he’s not trying to prevent all moral discourse, or all kinds of influence on others (after all, On Liberty is itself a moral essay aiming to convince others to behave according to its principles). It’s how you go about moral persuasion that is important. Listing types of influence that would not violate the ‘harm principle’ (i.e. measures that are allowed when trying to stop someone from causing harm to themselves), Mill gives:

Advice, instruction, persuasion, and avoidance by other people if thought necessary by them for their own good, are the only measures by which society can justifiably express it dislike of disapprobation of his conduct. [p84]

So for the sake of someone else’s “own good” certain kinds of persuasion are acceptable, but you still cannot force someone down a particular route. This has implications for both the way in which some kinds of influence “cross the line” and become something closer to coercion than to free expression. Would religious presumption of infants and children constitute ‘force’? Would predetermining their religious identity be a kind of permissible “instruction” or a kind of illiberal intrusion?

Kinds of compulsion

Mill’s essay, On Liberty, turns pivotally on his ‘harm principle’.

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. [p8]

Whatever else it is, labelling children is not remonstrating, reasoning, persuading or entreating. It’s more like presuming. But is it therefore a form of compulsion? The word ‘compulsion’ is often used of an active force in the here and now, but as discussed above (“Limiting their options”) making presumptions and taking certain questions off the table is something more like prejudicing the child’s development, a kind of compulsion by stealth. This compulsion by stealth is in some ways more sinister than overt compulsion, especially when applied to children, because it can remain invisible until the child is old enough to think outside the box. Let’s call it a ‘pre-compulsion’. Children who are labelled and boxed in have suffered an act of pre-compulsion. They have been pre-compelled. To label a child as “belonging” to your own creed it to pre-compel them to adopt your own views.

“… to grow and develop itself on all sides …”

Mill was hugely, abundantly keen on autonomous development, not just of individuals as adults, but in terms that speak of the whole person developing from birth without being compelled or (as we’ve shown above discussing the heredity of “Custom”) without being pre-compelled or forced to conform to a particular identity. He talks of “framing the plan of our life to suit our own character” as an essential domain of liberty (p11). “One whose desires and impulses are not his own,” he says, “has no character” (p53). And speculating on historical development he says, “society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.” (p54) The rhapsody continues:

It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it, and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation [p55]

In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others. There is a greater fulness of life about his own existence [p56]

One crucial passage, often quoted, gets to the core of the humanism within Mill’s position.

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. [p52]

“Please Don’t Label Me” is about when a parent’s free expression crosses the line to be a pre-compulsion of the child. It’s about a failure to respect something like ‘fair play’ as young minds are developing. Mill writes:

To give fair play to the nature of each, it is essential that different persons should be allowed to lead different lives. In proportion as this latitude has been exercised in any age, has that age been noteworthy to posterity. Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men. [p56]

Conclusion, and blame

In an essay only 104 pages long Mill has a whole chapter on individuality. He is terribly concerned about the illiberalism in anything which unfairly detracts from individuals’ free development, compelling them toward conformity and “Custom”. And despite the dangers in doing so, he talks at length about the particular offences of religion in this area. It is no stretch of the imagination at all to think that Mill would see the “Please Don’t Label Me” message, properly understood, as correctly identifying an extremity of influence which goes beyond the parent’s right to express their religion to impinge on the liberties of their children and infringe on the autonomous development of their individuality.

Writing on the the manner in which arguments are conducted, Mill says that:

Undoubtedly the manner of asserting an opinion, even though it be a true one, may be very objectionable, and may justly incur severe censure. But the principal offences of the kind are such as it is mostly impossible, unless by accidental self-betrayal, to bring home to conviction. The gravest of them is, to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion. [p47]

Labelling children from infancy is prior to sophism; so distorting is it that it forestalls any need for discussion let alone any need for sophistry. In addition, if a parent suppresses the facts about other religions or the arguments raging within their own, or misstates what it means to “belong” to their religion, or sullies the name of conflicting worldviews, then Mill it would seem is committed to turning that portion of their parenting into a “social stigma”.

Would he blame them, though? The billboard campaign is light in tone, framed in colourful letters as a plea from children rather than as a castigation of parents. Even Dawkins’ claim that “Please Don’t Label Me” is about “raising consciousness” assumes that people who label children are not yet aware of the illiberalism it embodies. Well, Mill also gives us a lot of room to be ‘consciousness raising’ rather than castigating. Immediately following from the above, he continues:

But all this, even to the most aggravated degree, is so continually done in perfect good faith, by persons who are not considered, and in many other respects may not deserve to be considered, ignorant or incompetent, that it is rarely possible, on adequate grounds, conscientiously to stamp the misrepresentation as morally culpable; and still less could law presume to interfere with this kind of controversial misconduct. … Yet whatever mischief arises from their [rhetorical "weapons"] use  is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of asserting, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions.” [p47-48]

Page references are to On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government, Basil Blackwell Oxford edition (1946).

Bob Churchill is Head of Membership and Promotion and the British Humanist Association