What is the Right of Discriminate?

By

Mark Featherstone

On Friday morning Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, was interviewed on Radio 5 about his twitter posts concerning a court ruling against a landlord who refused to rent a room to a gay couple. Speaking on Nicky Campbell’s Breakfast Show, Griffin explained that British people have a ‘right to discriminate’. But what is this ‘right to discriminate’? Does it exist? Should it exist? Let’s think this through.

Essentially, Griffin sought to oppose the idea of a right to discriminate to the traditional British idea of tolerance. Here, we tolerate or accept other people, even though we may not agree with them, and it is this that makes society possible. This is the case because it is only on the basis of my acceptance of or respect for other people’s difference that I can ensure other people’s acceptance of or respect for my identity. Here, we find the basic principle of a liberal, democratic, pluralistic society, or we might say, a multicultural society, where I affirm other people’s right to their own identity. By contrast, if I refuse to tolerate or accept other people, it is likely that they will refuse to tolerate or accept me, and society will essentially become impossible. This would be the logical result of a society with a universal right to discriminate - enmity

What if, however, the right to discriminate was not universal, or democratic, and only some people held this power? This would change things. In other words, if we say that my right to discriminate against other people trumps their right to discriminate against me and that I somehow hold the essential power to discriminate then society could continue because I would essentially be setting or defining the rules of discrimination. Here, I have the power to decide. Here, I am dictator.

The political theorist who presents this argument, and best embodies Griffin’s logic, is Carl Schmitt, the German legal thinker, and member of the Nazi party until 1936, when he was ousted for his apparent careerism. In Schmitt’s work, the essence of politics resides in the ability to decide, and discriminate, between insiders and outsiders. Of course, Schmitt, the follower of the British thinker Thomas Hobbes, knew that not everybody could hold this power. If everybody could discriminate, and decide between their own insiders and outsiders, and essentially make their own law, then society would effectively disintegrate, and we would descend into civil war. Like Hobbes, who advanced the importance of the figure of the Leviathan, Schmitt argued that what was required to effectively organise society was a dictator. Somebody would have to make decisions, to decide between insiders and outsiders, and discriminate between friends and enemies.

While Schmitt made this decision, the supported Hitler and the Nazis against the background of post-crash Weimar Germany, Griffin champions authoritarianism and the right to discriminate in the context of early 21^st century democracy which seems similarly bankrupt and exhausted in the wake of economic collapse. This is why we should be concerned about Griffin’s ideas today. He is voicing them under conditions where they are likely to find a receptive audience. In other words, people listen to the politics of enmity in difficult times.

Yet even if we were to accept these ideas morally, they seem totally unrealistic because without dictatorship they would lead us towards a kind of non-society of enemies. In this warfare society, I refuse to tolerate, accept, and recognise you, and you do the same to me. We end up at each other’s throats. This is civil war, which neither Hobbes nor Schmitt could tolerate or accept. Clearly, then, the only way the right to discriminate could really work, even if this is what we desired, is in an authoritarian society. But how likely is this today?

Unfortunately, it is more likely than ever since the 1930s, because of the economic crash, recession, and current austerity measures. If we need evidence of this, we only need to look to contemporary Greece, where the extreme rightists, Golden Dawn, have gained mass support in the wake of the collapse of Greek society. This is why we should be on guard against the extreme right today because they stand poised to take advantage of social decay, collapse, and resentment caused by austerity.

Of course, the truth is that even if we went down this immoral, violent, road the rightist principle of enmity would solve nothing because capitalism and economy remains the key expression of discrimination today. In our society the principal form of discrimination is not some stupid, poorly articulated, hatred of people on the basis of their personal attributes, although we must, of course, guard against this, but rather the capitalist logic that separates, and sorts, us into winners and losers as a result of our accidental position in the economy.

It is this violent calculus which has excluded the old white working class come underclass who make up the core of Griffin’s support from normal society, as well as everybody else who finds themselves living in the merciless precarious world of contemporary capitalism. Against this decaying system, which has led the resurgence of the extreme right across Europe, I would suggest that what is required today is a turn to the left, and a left which can solve the problems of the market, rather than a toothless left which refuses to manage the economy or a new rightist politics of discrimination. Against the society of enemies, I suggest we need a society without the principle of discrimination, where nobody has the right to discriminate or exclude anybody else on the basis of the peculiarities of their identity or accident of birth. 

The mark of conviction

By Andrew Henley

Michel Foucault remarks in Discipline and Punish that “it is the conviction itself that marks the offender with the unequivocally negative sign”. In the UK, the National Policing Improvement Agency recently stated that there are currently 9.2 million people on the Police National Computer due to a previous conviction for a recordable criminal offence. This staggering statistic equates to roughly one in three men and one in five women in the working age population. The information held by the police on convictions, in addition to other data such as arrest records and ‘soft intelligence’, has been increasingly available for disclosure not only in areas such as employment but even in applications for housing, financial services and travel visas. Having a ‘criminal record’ is therefore hugely problematic for a very sizeable number of people.

Whilst the process of desistance from crime has been shown to involve a distinct shift towards a pro-social identity, being publicly labelled an ‘ex-offender’ will evidently have a conflicting impact on a reformed individual’s sense of self. The labelling of ex-offenders can often be fuelled by media constructions of criminality which can generate negative and stereotypical social views of ‘the offender’ or the ‘ex-con’ which are infused with notions of ‘dangerousness’ or ‘unreliability’. The implications of such crude labels are exacerbated for people with previous convictions by the political climate in which they occur. David Garland has described the gradual abandonment of a more welfare-oriented approach to correctional criminal justice policy in both the UK and US and a move towards a ‘culture of control’ in the late-modern or ‘risk’ society. This culture, he claims, places the risk management and containment of ex-offenders as the new objective of penal policy rather than the successful restoration and social reintegration of such individuals. This trend of ‘othering’ can also be evidenced within contemporary political discourses whereby the ‘safety of the law-abiding majority’ and the ‘rights of victims’ are often invoked to marginalise concerns over the welfare and treatment of ‘offenders’ and - perhaps by extension - ‘ex-offenders’.

In this climate, a criminal record has therefore been likened to a stigma but to date the ‘mark of the conviction’ to which Foucault referred has remained relatively under-researched in the UK when compared to other possible areas of criminological inquiry. My PhD research at Keele University is intended to help address this academic shortfall. Over the next three years, I will be conducting interviews and case studies with members of the award-winning charity UNLOCK, the National Association of Reformed Offenders. The charity campaigns for greater equality of opportunity for people who have not only served their sentences but crucially have committed themselves to living a life free from crime in the future. I will be exploring questions such as how the stigmatising effects of previous convictions might manifest themselves in everyday social relations and how this impacts on people in terms of their sense of self and emotional well-being.

For a broader look at issues relating to desistance from crime, readers may be interested in the documentary The Road From Crime, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and George Mason University. 


Andrew Henley is a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant in Criminology

The Clash of Civilizations: The Muhammad Film and the Media Response

By Siobhan Holohan

You only need to watch a few seconds of the controversial film Innocence of Muslims to see how bad it is; bad as in unwatchable nonsense that is. But being bad does not stop it from being dangerous. The film depicts Muhammad as a womaniser, a homosexual, and suggests he engaged in acts of paedophilia. Of course this will be highly offensive to many Muslims; perhaps in the same way that many Christians were outraged by the 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ (dir. Martin Scorsese) which depicted Jesus as a fallible human being. That film was also subject to violent protests by Christian groups who succeeded in delaying its release and persuading cinemas to pull the film from their screens. In fact the film remains banned in some countries.

Unlike The Last Temptation of Christ, however, Innocence of Muslims is not an attempt to interpret and understand a theological text, and I doubt it will ever be nominated for an Academy Award. Instead it was funded by an anti-Islamic group and its release on YouTube was dubbed into Arabic in a clear attempt to offend and incite violence in that part of the world. However, what is interesting about this clumsy attack on Islam is the response to the film. Not so much the protests, which were perhaps inevitable, but the reaction by Western news agencies and politicians. News agencies have for the most part squandered the opportunity to present a balanced account of the unfurling events in Egypt and Libya in the context of recent internal and external political events, and have instead fallen back on stereotypical imagery of bearded men burning flags and hyperbolic debate about repressive states versus the freedom of expression. This has been supported by public figures such as Tony Blair who have argued that while the film was "wrong and offensive [and] also laughable as a piece of film-making", goes on to state that "what is very dangerous and very wrong is the [Islamist] reaction to it" (BBC News Online).

This is a typical narrative turn that locates the blame for violence firmly back in the Muslim camp, while playing down the role that Western agencies may have had in the escalating events. The news coverage replicates what we have seen countless times before by showing Muslims to be irrational, violent 'religious fundamentalists' against some kind of idealised form of Western rationality. And until we can recognise this discursive trap we will be in danger of repeating it forever.

What is Sociology?

By Mark Featherstone

Sociology is the study of society and social relationships. It allows us to understand individual problems in their proper social context and reflect upon the ways in which everyday life concerns, such as family relationships, education, and work, are conditioned by forms of social organisation and social systems. For example, we may believe that the forms our relationships with other people take are absolutely about who we are, but for sociologists the way we relate to other people is characterised and conditioned by social norms and values about how we should behave in relation to other people. Similarly, we may imagine that the career we choose, and the amount of money we earn, is about our individual ability, but for sociologists this is conditioned by shifts in the labour market which take place beyond the individual in the social sphere. This is, of course, hard to see in everyday life because in our society we imagine that our fate is determined by our own individual behaviour.

The objective of Sociology is to show us that nobody is an island and that our fates are inter-related. We live in society, which sociologists conceive as the totality of social relations that make up our lives as family members, friends, neighbours, citizens of nations, and finally human beings. It is the object of sociology to study these different scales of sociability in order to allow us to understand why our lives and the lives of others are the way they are. However, Sociology is not simply descriptive, and sociologists do not simply produce accounts of social systems. Sociology is also concerned to produce sociological accounts of individual problems by understanding the social roots of phenomenon such as divorce or unemployment. In this way, Sociology is a diagnostic discipline. It diagnoses social problems with a view to critically analysing sociological conditions. In other words, we may ask why are there such high levels of unemployment in society and what it is about society and the labour market that means that people struggle to find work. In this respect Sociology is also a critical discipline because it asks us to critically analysis society and social conditions in order to be able to understand why problems, such as unemployment, exist in the first place. Although critique is valuable for its own sake, because it is important to have critically engaged citizens in democratic society, the final objective of Sociology is to suggest productive interventions into social problems and design social policies that may make our society a better place.

In this way Sociology comprises three phases (diagnosis, critique, and intervention) that require us to first, exercise our imaginations in order to understand individual problems sociologically; second, think ethically and make judgements about fairness so that we can critically analyse social systems; and third, construct practical interventions that will make a real difference to people’s lives. It is this three phase approach to the study of society which makes Sociology essential for the 21st century when our world is more complex than ever before. It is this three phase approach to Sociology which informs the practice of the discipline at Keele.