The really interesting issue raised by the Amis-Eagleton spat is not Islamophobia, or racism. It is the question of how honest one should be.
What happened is this. Amis gave an interview, just over a year ago, in which he wondered how we can make a future act of Islamic terrorism less likely. “What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”
This was used by Terry Eagleton as evidence of Amis’s reactionary political views. Amis has recently responded: “I was not ‘advocating’ anything. I was conversationally describing an urge ... that soon wore off. And I hereby declare that ‘harassing the Muslim community in Britain’ would be neither moral nor efficacious.” He reiterated this self-defense on Channel 4 News the other night. Of course this has not placated his critics: Soumaya Ghannoushi insists that Islamophobia is not mitigated by the supposedly “conversational” nature of its expression. To a large extent, I agree. But I don’t think it’s as black and white as she makes out.
The question is whether the sort of utterance that Amis made in that interview is legitimate. Is one allowed to express a view, and then back off from it, to say that it forms part of an internal debate? Can one say something on an emotive issue, and hold one’s speech at arm’s length? Is it legitimate to flirt with a viewpoint, to play at holding it? Effectively, Amis is claiming the right to give expression to an aggressively Islamophobic voice in his head — a persona that must not, he insists, be identified with himself. It is just a maverick part of himself — and that day he happened to be in the mood to indulge it a bit. The question is: Is one allowed to speak in this way — to ventriloquize an inner impulse, an alternative self?
In this instance, surely not: Amis was naive, thinking he could voice blatant Islamophobia and then put up his hands all innocent. On such a sensitive issue, you can’t do that. You can’t “conversationally describe an urge” of this sort, in public. In certain contexts, you have no right to this sort of freedom of speech. For words on this topic are charged with a special power. They have the power to intimidate a community. As an influential public figure, Amis is culpable for speaking in way that is likely to be heard as intimidating, whether he meant it to be or not (he should apologize).
But what makes this little episode so fascinating is that there is something laudable as well as objectionable about the psychological honesty that Amis exhibited. For the fact is that real human beings tend to have inner debates, and to have impulses that must be resisted. There is something laudable about Amis’ effective admission of inner conflict, of susceptibility to prejudice. Ninety-nine percent of commentators would never dream of being so honest. As a result, public discourse is psychologically dishonest; it gives the impression that normal healthy people have no dodgy impulses, that we’re all pure in heart.
Yet it is dangerous to be honest about these dark thoughts — and not just because one is likely to be condemned for it. The more profound danger is that one might be tempted to indulge this part of oneself, for the sake of seeming honest, interesting, brave. There is nothing intrinsically good about honesty: As Shakespeare and Milton knew, it can be the cover for demonic impulses.
So the conundrum is that we should be honest about our susceptibility to prejudice, but should not give free expression to our inner bigot. Sorry to get all thought-for-the-day-ish, but it seems to me that Christian faith knows how to square this circle. It says that we must admit our susceptibility to evil impulses. And also that we must not indulge them in the name of honesty, but must pray to be delivered from them.
