Football Hooligans

Imagine a parallel universe, identical to this one in almost every detail. This universe contains an Earth, sitting in an identical corner of Parallel Milky Way, orbiting a Parallel Sun, at the shaky start of Parallel twenty-first century. This Earth is identical to ours in all respects save one – the circumstances of the birth of A. Subject. A. Subject was born in Earths A & B at the same time, but in different circumstances. A. Subject was a simple man, of low intelligence and high gullibility, prone to aggression and irrational violence. On Earth A, he was born to a wealthy Saudi Family, on Earth B to a working class family in a northern English town. His early years were unremarkable, extreme wealth on the one hand and relative austerity on the other. His Saudi Parents despaired of his academic failures, and worried about his penchant for bullying. His English parents thought him tough, and from a young age his father would take him to see the local football team, having been a lifelong fan. As his teenage years passed, A. Subject regularly rebelled against his parents, becoming involved in local Muslim youth groups. He often took to the street in his Northern town, hanging around with fanatical supporters of the football club, festooning his walls with memorabilia. He became enraged at the imperialistic aggression of the decadent west. He got drunk and smashed a shop window after his team was beaten in the cup. He became enthralled with a local preacher who instilled in him images of paradise and a respect for those who had given their lives to protect the faith. He mingled with groups dabbling with crime, and occasionally got in to fights at away games when the wrong person came in to the wrong pub. He began to see that the oppression of his people would only be relieved by force. He began to see other supporters at other clubs as worthless scum. One day, a war was started by the imperialist infidel on a brethren people, and he was inflamed. One day, he was at an away match when a large crowd of mixed supporters started fighting. He had pictures on his walls of those that had killed imperialists with their own life, and were thus perfect men. He organised, through social networking, the meeting of rival factions of club supporters. He took action, finding his way to the warzone, getting training from heroic men along the way. He arranged a date and time, after a big game, where the two groups of supporters could meet. He learnt how to make explosives. He learnt how to use knives and clubs. He drove a car, packed with explosives, to a military checkpoint and blew himself and eight soldiers to bits. He charged at the rival supporters, injuring three or four of them, as well as himself, and wound up in a police cell that night, awaiting a court appearance.
Modern societies are staggeringly complex. Individuals existing in society are mostly attempting to improve their own lot, responding to societal pressures according to his or her character and upbringing. Throughout history, a type a person has existed who was obsessed with an extremely narrow perspective, be it political or religious, all other perspectives being heretical and disgusting. Such men have been responsible for great evil. The profoundly narrow nationalism of the Nazis, and the attraction it thus had for the person of narrow perspective, caused the death of tens of millions of people in history’s most savage war. I shall call this person “The Narrow Man”. Assuming that “The Narrow Man” is an unavoidable statistical reality given a sufficient quantity of gathered humans, one can see that circumstances can greatly affect the capacity of “The Narrow Man” to do evil. During the Crusades, “The Narrow Man” would have been the vanguard of the pillagers. During the Inquisition, the torturer. During the Russian revolution, he would have been the most devoted and violent thug in the secret police, beating up dissidents and torturing prisoners. In Nazi Germany, he would have been a fanatical foot soldier of the SS. In the example above, he finds himself in a fanatical religion, whose extreme outer reaches condone suicide bombing. And in Northern England, he finds himself supporting a football club.
Organised sport in General, and Football in particular, are crucial to the civilised functioning of a society. With the fading of religion as a nationalistic force, and the extreme reluctance of modern western nations to engage in war with one another, sport offers a rare opportunity to satisfy whatever tribalistic longings may exist in an individual. It so happens that, possibly due to it’s working class roots and simple format, that football attracts the kind of fanatical loyalty previously reserved for religion. For this, we must be most thankful. “The Narrow Man”, in modern Britain, has his destructive tribal tendencies focused purely on a sport, and there they shall remain. Football is an essential pressure valve, where the worst characteristics of tribalism and violence can be given breathing space. A few town squares may be smashed up, some people may end up in hospital. But these things are nothing compared to the potential destructive power of “The Narrow Man”. Thank goodness for football.

Paedophiles

Hysteria is a dangerous beast. Hysteria removes the ability of rational people to make informed judgements on a particular problem. An example of the corrosive effects of hysteria is the diplomatic violation, gross infringement of freedom of speech and outbreaks of general violence following the publication of ‘blasphemous’ cartoons by a Danish Newspaper. The hysteria in this case enabled fear to dominate the liberal agenda, with the advocating of culls on freedom of speech in the interests of appeasing religious fanaticism, rather than the sturdy, courageous response in defence of free speech that would be more beneficial to us in the long run. A similar example of the dangers of hysteria surrounds the issue of paedophilia.
Hysteria in the case of paedophilia is entirely understandable. Society and the state must be obligated to take all possible measures to protect children. Moreover, a person who is a paedophile who fails to control their urges must be dealt with by the full dispatch of the law; some may even advocate the death penalty. This is all to the good; dangerous persons must be removed from situations where they may be a threat to children.
There is, however, a problem. Hysteria has caused the whole subject to be taboo, immune from discussion with those unfortunate enough to be encumbered with this most evil of sexualities inevitably labelled as perverts and monsters. I propose that this attitude increases the risk to children in society, and diminishes the well being of society as a whole.
I will start with the assumption that a person who is a paedophile has no more control over their sexuality that does a heterosexual or homosexual. Any objections to this assumption can be countered by the question of why anyone would choose to be a paedophile. Following from this assumption is a further one; given that child abuse appears to have occurred throughout history, there will always be a certain percentage of the population that are paedophiles. With this in mind, one can paint a picture of someone born into a life and a sexuality that would be, to put it mildly, a living hell.
Imagine a person who was a paedophile. This person has no control over his or her sexuality. This person is also a decent human being, and knows that his or her sexual urges can never, under any circumstances, be satisfied, as to satisfy them would be to commit a horrific crime. This person exists in a society which teems with children; they go to schools, they are the children of friends, colleagues and neighbours. Wherever the person turned, he or she would be continually confronted by images of that which is forever forbidden. Imagine for a moment knowing that the immensely powerful urges that can dominate a human being can never, ever be satisfied. A third assumption I would make would be that such people exist, and have for all their lives fought their sexuality. It leads me to wonder if there are people who have gone a lifetime suppressing their sexuality in order to avoid a terrible crime. Such people would be worthy of the highest praise; indeed, such moral strength would be inspiring.
Now let us imagine the man or woman who has less moral fibre. A weakness of this sort would be tolerated in people of normal sexuality, perhaps manifesting in minor moral transgressions. For the paedophile of this sort, they may never actually abuse a child, but they may at some time look at child pornography, maybe ignoring the fact that the children in the images are being abused.
Further down the scale would be the weakest person, someone for whom the strength of the urge simply outweighs morality, or someone who has no morals at all. This person would be concerned with simply avoiding capture, and may never abuse a child in their home town or country, but may travel overseas as a so called ‘sex tourist’, where secrecy and the ability to objectify an individual of a different culture weakens moral constraints. Or they might create elaborate plans to ensnare children in their own countries. Such cases form the prevalent popular imagery, monsters whose crimes fuel the hysteria surrounding the issue.
In order to help the first person, restrain the second and control the third, the hysteria generated taboo need to be removed from the subject. Branding all paedophiles as monsters retards progress. The moral first example will forever be surrounded by secrecy, never able to come forward and admit to their sexuality. It is for people like this that I believe a ‘cure’ should be sought for. It is unclear whether the libido of a human being can be chemically or surgically removed, but strenuous attempts should be made with this goal in mind. If such a ‘cure’ were possible, a paedophile could go to their doctor and openly discuss their sexuality. If an effective combination of therapy, drugs and surgery could be available, then the moral person of the first example could find relief from their hell and become a functioning member of society. The same would apply to the person of the second example. The person of the third example, having waived their rights by their actions, could have the treatment enforced on them. In all cases, the benefit to society would be a huge reduction in the threat level to children, and the improvement in the general well being of people of this sexuality.
In summary, restraining the hysteria and breaking the taboo would allow high profile research in a medical cure to be publicly endorsed. If a cure could then be found, and people could come forward to a medical program, a substantial improvement would be made in the well being of society.

The Red Herring of Religious Morality

Human morality, despite being a subjective and nebulous abstraction, is approached by both atheists and theists as a zero-sum game. You often hear it contested amongst the polemicists and charlatans that debate the subject ad nauseum that either a person of faith acts ethically only in the face of divine inducements, or morality is an absolute that is meaningless in the absence of God. Typically, religio-ethical debates centre on this issue as one of the last boltholes of scientific un-clarity, where a person of faith can feel they might be on more solid ground than the literal interpretation of scripture that only makes them look foolish. Since scriptural literacy is irreconcilable with everything we know about the workings of reality, it is chiefly in this moral domain that the real contention still lies (at least amongst the reasonable). The absolutes postulated by both sides are both, I believe, in error.
In the red corner, we have the atheist, secure in his iron tower of reason. He sees the claims of the religious as at best inconsistent, at worst immoral – the immorality of vicarious redemption, the abdication of personal responsibility etc. He thus accuses the theist of morality under duress, a continual cowering beneath the gaze of a divinity which guides the theist and without which, in the view of the atheist, the theist would have no conception of morality and would spend his time casually murdering passing strangers. Thus, the theist is, by definition, immoral.
In the blue corner, we have the theist. He feels that morality is an absolute that has been ingrained in to his ‘soul’ at the moment of his creation by God, perhaps as a gift to separate him from the ‘lower’ animals. By a willing rejection of this heavenly absolute, the atheist is left with only his subjectivity, leading axiomatically to ethical corruption, and (they never quite say this, but it is inferred) possible genocide (leaving aside the historical inaccuracies of this claim). Thus the atheist is, by definition, immoral.
Here we have a problem. Imagine that the atheist and theist are both decent people; helping out at the local school, giving to charity and recycling their kitchen waste. They do what they can to minimise their carbon footprint. They save for the future, call their mothers regularly and help their kids with that tricky maths homework. An unbiased observer might be forgiven for thinking that the two are morally identical. Can it therefore be said that both get their morality from different sources?
The problem with the theistic view of morality, and we must be abundantly clear about this, is that it bears no correlation with reality. I intend to prove this by dabbling in the scientific method.
Image you believe in an all loving, all powerful and all merciful God. You believe that this God created everything, and built the universe as a suitable home for his beloved humans. Unfortunately for you, it seems He built the world in such a manner as to be blighted by regular natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis and the like) that each take a devastating death toll of the humans He apparently loves so much. As a Theist, the occurrence of such natural disasters makes no sense, and thus must be ascribed to His mysterious ways, or, in a rather more sinister way, to the wilful rejection of His will by those that died, warranting their punishment. However, if you are an Atheist, particularly an Atheist with a scientific interest who has some understanding of the origins and formation of the Earth, you know that Plate Tectonics causes the build up of pressure along a plate boundary that eventually causes that boundary to fail, releasing large amounts of energy in the form of an earthquake. From this point of view, the earthquake, tragic as it is, makes perfect sense as simply a feature of the planet we happen to live on.
The natural disaster therefore makes no sense if you are a Theist, but perfect sense if you are an Atheist. And so it is with morality.
If all humans were imbued at their conception with an unalterable sense of the immutable moral laws, one could make predictions about the behaviour of those humans. If these humans had free will (a contradictory and inconsistent claim that I will leave aside for now), they could either choose to abide by, or rebel against, those laws. Further, if those laws were divinely revealed, then any human who accepted the law of God would necessarily be a moral person. For the sake of this argument, let us assume that the same moral law is available to all branches of the three great desert dogmas. Now, using the hypothesis that morality is an absolute that has been imbued in humans by God and that was revealed by His word, the prediction should be that all people of faith are, and have always been, paragons of morality. Now, let’s check this against the evidence. One piece of evidence alone is enough to disprove this hypothesis. For three hundred years, the maritime powers of Europe engaged in that great stain on the history of our species, the transatlantic slave trade. The participants in this moral abhorrence were extremely pious, religious societies, for example, Catholic Spain. Thus the hypothesis is disproved, or, if it is true that all men of faith act on their divinely inspired morals, then we can conclude that the average Human Being living almost anywhere on Earth at the start of the 21st Century has superior morals to God.
Now, another hypothesis. Human beings are an emergent phenomena, the result of thousands of centuries of Evolution by Natural Selection. It was to our survival advantage to live in groups, and thus we would display altruistic behaviour and feel empathy towards members of our own tribes, and react aggressively to intrusion or perceived threat from other tribes. As the race grew larger, the tribes became more complex, eventually becoming nation states and religious groupings. Now, using this hypothesis, I make the prediction that large complex conglomerations of humans in modern society display inconsistent morality based on who they identify as a member of their tribe. Some behave savagely, especially under duress. Others do not, and, in the pursuit of wealth, some even begin to see the race in its entirety as their “tribe”, enabling good relations and charity to cross previously impervious ethnic boundaries. And this indeed, is what we see.
So, just as earthquakes make no sense from a theistic point of view, neither does morality. The next time a theist says to you that the Holocaust was as a result of an atheistic rejection of God, say to them that the Holocaust, in all its epic savagery, is precisely what we would expect to happen at some point in human history if the theory that we are an evolved tribal animal, with no creator god, is true. The Holocaust happened precisely because there is no God. Not that they’ll listen, of course. They never do.