The title of this book immediately catches attention because it so neatly resonates with the experience of much public discourse in Australia, where I live, but also in many other parts of the world. It also seems to me to echo some of our problems in the Anglican churches here and internationally. It is thus a book for Anglicans to read with great profit as they try to make sense of the fracturing in the church in our generation.
Blackford is not interested in the Anglican churches. Blackford is not keen on any kind of religion or any religious morality. He is an established scholar who teaches philosophy at the University of Newcastle, NSW, has published numerous academic articles and books on a broad range of subjects generally in the areas of public affairs, politics and imagination. He also writes books of fiction. In no sense is he an insider in the world of Anglicanism, but yet the issues he addresses in this book are extremely pertinent to that world of Anglicanism and the way its public conversation takes place.
He is interested in the community of liberalism. He comments on right-wing politics and government generally but they are not his concern. In this book he is ‘more concerned that my own tribe get its house in order’. His own house needs help because its liberalism is being undermined by the character of the conversation which has come to dominate current public discourse. It is not truly liberal in its classic sense. The problem he identifies with liberalism is focused on the way in which engaged conversation about important issues has degenerated into stand-off assertion of opinion. Hence the title of his book. He says he is writing from the side of freedom. To support nonconformists. He is concerned, as was his hero John Stuart Mill, not just with government induced conformity, but also with any major institution that seeks to stifle individual expression. More importantly is his treatment of what Mill called ‘the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling’. Blackford says that in this book he is alert to the tyranny of opinion.
What Mill called the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling arises in any community where there is a hegemonic set of opinions and practices. You don’t need these to be transformed into a dominating ideology for the problem of unity to be turned into a force for conformity and the suffocation of the individual. Furthermore, such a prevailing opinion does not necessarily need to be long established. The recent history of ‘populism’ is a case in point.
This focus draws him into the context of argument and disagreement within communities and how these communities handle conflict. This is clearly a political question of great significance, not just in Western societies. The revolt against institutions in the 1960s did not challenge the power of political correctness in the universities, rather it simply changed the ‘prevailing opinion’. Political correctness was alive and well in universities in the 1980s and appears once again to be resurgent.
Mill’s essay On Liberty is a constant companion throughout this book and Blackford is respectful, though not uncritical, of his literary conversationalist. That interaction is conducted in somewhat personal terms and has the tone of a friendly conversation and indirectly is a model of Blackford’s general thesis about argument. He restates Mill’s argument that limits restrictions on individual liberty if they harm others. Such freedom of thought and discussion, which is only limited if it limits the freedom of others, points immediately to the ambiguities of social relationships. Some degree of limitation easily opens the way to the growth of social conformity. It is that process that Blackford is keen to encourage his liberal friends to resist. Which in turn leads to the great current challenges of contemporary Western societies; ideologies, propaganda, organized outrage and the effects of the Internet.
This depiction of individual freedom and politics does not sit comfortably with the history and practice of many countries. In Australia there is a strong tradition built into the way elections are run that produces majoritarian rule and thus the character of governments.Footnote 1 This is different from that found in the USA and in some European countries whose systems, and the cultures they facilitate, have a more strenuous engagement with the liberal tradition narrated in this book.
However, for this journal one of most significant chapters is that dealing with Mill’s analysis of freedom of discussion and thought. In an ecclesiology such as that embedded in Anglicanism the ecclesiastical structures have always involved a collaboration between lay and clerical members of the church. In the older history of the Church of England the lay element was represented by the crown in one form or another. In modern times that collaboration between lay and clerical in church governance has been worked out in a variety of synodical arrangements. This system of synods has not meant the elimination of the tendency of institutions to move the authority they facilitate in an authoritarian direction. Moreover the cultural context in which the ecclesiastical institutions operate cannot escape the influence of the tacit assumptions and practices of that culture. Blackford, along with many others, identifies that culture, to use his title, as a tyranny of opinion. The authority of assertion. It should not surprise us that Blackford’s analysis echoes with the situation in Anglican churches and in the Anglican Communion and its notable dissenters.
The character of the modern context and the reasons for the oppressive form of current debate have been widely published. Blackford focuses on Mill’s concern with the overweening influence of opinion, tacit suppression of the kind we are familiar with in recent decades as ‘political correctness’. In a voluntary association such as an Anglican church this is the most subversive form of oppression. Anglicans don’t put people in gaols, but we do ostracize and ignore. We choose tags that are rich with historical baggage, such as fundamentalist, conservative, traditionalist, liberal, faithful, orthodox, or even apostate. When we describe ourselves or others with these adjectives, they carry much more weight than their natural meaning and they generally have the effect of deepening divisions rather than promoting understanding and respect.
One difference between the liberal of Blackford’s narrative and the conduct of Anglican churches is that Anglicans profess a faith which has a moral code of some significance in this matter. He refers to grace, civility and respect, which of course Anglicans can readily agree with. But the Christian comes to this area of controversial conversation with other moral commitments such as humility, love, counting others above yourself, in sum walking in the footsteps of the crucified Christ. What Blackford helps us to do is identify the lineaments of our situation and the necessity for us to shape our conversation in ways that manifest the moral character of the truth which we all profess. In terms of the future of Anglican churches the visible Christian character of the lives of individual Anglicans and Anglican churches is the first priority before these churches. Evangelistic projects lose their significance if this priority is not acted on by the churches.
This is a book worthy of careful attention from Anglicans around the world.
