The Harassment Tapes

At first glance, laws such as this seem like a good thing, after all nobody wants to be plagued by boorish idiots when they are trying to go about their daily work.

However, two points….

The first is the most trivial, the Laborg entity put up to defend this on the PM programme yesterday (31/03/2008), sorry I can’t remember what name the entity used, said by way of illustration that it would help if some member of staff in a pub or hotel was called ‘darling’, or something like that.

Sorry, but to me that is not an insult, nowhere near such a thing. I would - either if I was working in a place like a hotel or a pub, or more usually when I interact with people who work in such places - much prefer terms like ‘darling’, ‘love’, ‘pet’, ‘mate’, ‘pal’ or whatever to the more formal terms of address like ‘sir’, ‘Mr Hadley’ and so on.

This brings us to the more important point, which is related to the first point above. Whether such terms as ‘love’, or ‘pet’ or whatever are insulting, demeaning and so forth depends on both the intent of the person uttering them and on the attitude of the person they are directed towards. What to one can be harmless light-hearted banter can be a grievous insult to another. This is why laws to outlaw ‘hate speech’ and other such forms of disparagement are unfair, unjust and in the end unworkable. Unfair because they can penalise an innocent who misreads a social situation, like attempting banter where a more formal approach would be more appropriate. Unjust because laws like this can be used maliciously. For example, it could be used by those with an agenda against a particular person or type of person, almost as a form of entrapment. Unworkable because in the end it increase distrust between people who always have to be on their guard against a slip of the tongue, saying something ‘inappropriate’ and so forth, which will one day just have to collapse or explode.

Another example of a similar phenomenon has been the recent outburst by ‘gay’ activists and their fellow-travellers over the use by teenagers of the word ‘gay’ to mean something is ‘lame’, uncool, poor, broken or just not very good. This demonstrates that no-one has control over what a word means, so that any claim that a word or phrase is being used to demean someone does depend on so much beyond the word itself, context, meaning, situation, the mental state of the utterer and the intended recipient, or for that matter anyone who overhears it.

There is a third (or fourth) point as well, though, now I come to think about it. This is why should it be felt necessary for there to be a law prescribing what should – and shouldn’t – be allowed in an area of what always used to be normal daily politeness? Rude customers can always be barred, banned, thrown out and so on by the management, and the staff have the long tradition of giving bad customers the ‘special’ soup and so forth. But – in general – people used to know how to behave – more or less – towards each other so that we could all rub along as best we could without the relationships all having to be formalised within this legally-proscribed fencing. Of course, if left to our on devices like that then we may not act in the way that the governing class wants us to act, so there have to be laws to make sure we do things their way, and not ours. This, in the end, says something about the left’s attempts at social engineering, for, as any (non-social) engineer knows materials can only bend so far before they snap.