What was that again about there being more joy over one sinner who repents than all the righteous put together? Trevor Phillips, the erstwhile head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, says in a Channel 4 documentary, to be broadcast later this month, that anti-racism has become an “ugly new doctrine” that endangers lives and fosters abuse, and that he was wrong to have subscribed to it.
He started re-thinking his views, he says, after the 2005 London transport bombings which made him realise that, left to themselves, people preferred segregation. “We had reckoned without human nature,” he says.
This train of thought seems to have led him now to realise that anti-racism, like all types of political correctness, is a mind-bending ideology that under the guise of doing good instead can do harm.
Of course, in a liberal society we want to do the decent thing. We want people to be tolerant and considerate towards others who are different in some way. So we are right to have passed laws preventing expressions of racial or other kinds of prejudice. This liberal niceness, however, morphed in the 1980s into something very different. This was hate crime, rooted in identity politics — the agenda of groups who claimed to be the victims of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual proclivity or disability.
This was not a liberal concept at all. It was based instead on the Marxist concept that the whole of human society is animated by the play of power. According to this doctrine, people without power are invariably the victims of those with power.
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These victims cannot be blamed for anything because they are shaped by circumstances beyond their control. It is the powerful who are therefore blamed for any bad stuff associated with the powerless. And if the powerful try to hold the powerless responsible, that is an expression of prejudice.
Thus political correctness was born, with prejudiced hate crime its signature offence. But, of course, prejudice is highly subjective; one person’s bigotry might be another’s legitimate criticism.
The key point about prejudice is surely that it is based on untruth or distortion. Statements that are true and fair cannot embody prejudice. Which is why Mr Phillips says people should be able to say, for example, that black people are more likely to be convicted of robbery — because it is true. The problem, though, is deeper still. As Mr Phillips observes: “Campaigners like me sincerely believed that if we could prevent people expressing prejudiced ideas then eventually they would stop thinking them.”
This insight gets to the core of politically correct zealotry. It is about more than stamping out the expression of hatred. It’s about stamping out the perceived hatred itself. It’s an agenda to make better human beings. And that leads to attempted thought control.
Last week I caught up with the hit stage play The Nether. Its conceit is a dystopian world dominated by the net in which men are pursued by a cyber police force for creating a fantasy world of paedophile activity with children who exist only in the imagination. The question it asks is whether we should be called to account not just for what we do but for what we think.
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I believe morality consists in deeds not thoughts. People are capable of both good and bad; we should encourage the former and discourage the latter. But thinking is the ultimate private activity. What anti-racism tried to do, as Mr Phillips now recognises, was to regulate how people think.
Bad thoughts, however, cannot be excised from the mind. The perfection of human nature is a utopian agenda. And like all such utopian projects going back to the French Revolution, its inherent impossibility leads to tyranny.
In 1951 the political thinker J L Talmon described this as “totalitarian democracy”, in which a “vanguard of the enlightened” justified coercion against those who refused to be virtuous in order to quicken man’s progress towards perfection and social harmony.
In similar vein, Paul Edward Gottfried described in his 2002 book Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt the “strong-armed tactics” of liberal societies which camouflage bullying as “effusive caring” or the necessary response to prejudice.
Muzzling dissent has thus become viewed as imperative to combat bigotry, inconvenient facts are suppressed or distorted as acts of “inclusiveness”, and anyone who dares challenge this world view with actual evidence is punished.
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That is what Trevor Phillips has now realised. Too late.