The problem with ill-conceived public information leaflets, and need for moral certainty in society
Over the years, public information leaflets produced by governments have tended to be received with little enthusiasm and have often given rise to far more questions than they were ever printed to answer. Perhaps most legendary – and certainly the most publicly disturbing – were the Protect and Survive leaflets distributed during the 1970s and 80s advising civilians on how best to protect themselves during an all-out nuclear attack. From creating an understairs fallout room protected by bookcases and mattresses in under four minutes (the time it was believed Russian missiles would take to get to us), to stashing baked beans, a portable radio and a couple of bottles of water, the advice reads today like a badly written stage comedy. But it didn’t get many laughs at the time, instead being ridiculed extensively by the public for its ineptitude and contemptuous approach to comprehensive human annihilation.
One might have thought that in the musty offices of public information and propaganda, some lessons had been learnt in the intervening years. Seemingly not, if Wednesday’s publication of the document entitled Understanding behaviours and expectations in the UK – a Guide for asylum seekers was meant to be taken seriously. As the title implies, this little eight-page guide includes advice and information on contemporary moral and societal norms in British society – namely Living the UK, Gender Equality, Domestic Abuse, Sex and Consent and Respect in Public.
From a profoundly naïve perspective it’s just possible to grasp how someone – or some group of individuals – managed to convince themselves that a pamphlet informing those from other cultures that – for instance – the UK doesn’t actually permit or condone rape or domestic abuse and that sex with someone under the age of 16 is actually a serious crime here might be a useful and helpful little publication. What is somewhat harder to believe is that anyone might have thought this was a good time to design something like this up and put it out there.
The reaction was of course instantaneous and obvious, with social media going into meltdown, and the unanimous outrage playing straight into all kinds of extreme and socially divisive narratives. Aside from political agendas and motives, the most obvious observation being made by many was that the very need to produce a guidebook explaining the moral limits of UK society to incomers was of itself a contradiction of recent government insistences that this problem simply doesn’t exist.
If one looks at the actual figures for sexual crimes in particular, the government might have been far wiser to have distributed this leaflet to existing citizens rather than new arrivals – Ministry of Justice data for England and Wales for instance indicates that foreign nationals accounted for just 15 percent of sexual offence convictions (including rape) over a multi-year baseline, which would mean that British nationals accounted for roughly 85% of such crimes. Of course, that’s not how someone like Reform UK leader Nigel Farage would see it – he’s on record as claiming that “An Afghan male has a 22 times more likely chance of being convicted of rape than somebody born in this country,” and also argues that “40% of sexual assaults in London over the course of the last five years have been committed by those born overseas”.
It’s a foundational requirement of any vigorous controversy that the arguments of both sides must be true, and this one’s no exception. Differing mechanisms of recording nationality can skew the data significantly, to the extent that analysing crimes committed against declared nationality or country of birth (which are both very different) can really be packaged to say whatever anyone wishes. This is no small matter – stable society abhors a vacuum and the seeming inability of successive governments to give any meaningful, honest or believable analysis of the migration issue in particular is creating nothing short of a national atmosphere of fear, prejudice and panic.
In itself this not a place you’d ever want human society to be in, but one of the problems with getting to grips with not only the migration issue but many other social tensions as well, is that responding to human and spiritual unrest requires a response built around a clear and consistent moral framework. In its simplest terms you can’t really preach to anyone that something is right or wrong unless you yourself have a clear sense of what that construct might be. Unfortunately, in recent decades both legislators and many within the public domain have been committed to a systematic denial that there should be anything as outdated and irrelevant to modern society as a general moral code – rather the emphasis has been on the individual as the arbiter of not only their own morality, but of the consequent extension of their internal moral framework into the agora of public opinion.
In layman’s terms, a broad-based public consensus about what is right or wrong has not just changed with the passage of time, it’s been overwritten completely by the conviction that however you as an individual feels about things is all that matters.
The outcome is that society begins to comprise a collection of unconnected individuals who hopefully interact positively when their personal ideologies bump randomly into each other – though of course no-one of this persuasion seems to have thought about where you go when your omnipotent outlook isn’t exactly the same as someone else’s. If one wanted to summarise the malaise of contemporary British society in a sentence it is this – that citizens are becoming increasingly locked in their own self-defined moral space and we’re thus becoming completely unable to interact with each other constructively.
For contemporary societal engineers this is remedied largely by ever more complex and restrictive legislation that seeks to control and manipulate not just the public behaviours of society, but it’s inner moral outlook as well. To offset this creeping incursion on the human spirit, governments often adopt pseudo-spiritual initiatives of their own in order to ensure the continued conformity of citizens, and it is usually when this balance breaks down that social unrest breaks out. Thus, it’s not unreasonable to frame most civil disorders and public disquiet as the result of a disruption – or undue suppression – of the spirit or soul.
In this context is also sometimes the case that unrest itself become the mechanism of compliance; in global human history there’s a long legacy of governments themselves encouraging division, antipathy and fear as a mechanism to underpin their own necessity and continuity. A particularly important precursor to this kind of governance strategy is to dismantle established and historical notions of morality, many of which were created – in particular here in the UK by Christianity – precisely as antidotes and checks to negative human behaviours. This alone has been reason enough for secular society to prioritise the dismantling of Christian values in contemporary society.
It is profoundly ironic that the very foundational moral pillars of secular society are precisely those that the early Christian fathers would not only recognise, but themselves cited as the centralities of a peaceful and prosperous human society – family care, group unity, reciprocity, courage and respect to name just some. So why are these universal human concepts no longer sufficient to hold societies together in peace and harmony? Because we have removed from them all the one thing that gave them both meaning and potence – their connection to God, and the connection it gave God to us in return. When God is in the room there is little or no opportunity for ethical wriggling space; when morals are a purely human construct the imperfection of the human mind is perfectly capable of justifying the most heinous of mistakes. The modern human mind has become dangerously adept at ethical amnesia – forgiving its own moral failings, or even worst reconstructing them so that they are no longer errors at all.
The notion of a return to the Christian foundations that British society was built upon may not sit well with secular-driven legislators – which is almost certainly why Christian apologists are increasingly being packaged in with right wing extremists – but unless there’s an acknowledgement of the God-given spiritual inner instincts that still flicker within most citizens – public social policy is never going to have any meaningful resonance, nor will it ever heal the internal moral disorders that are currently tearing society apart.
As St Thomas Aquinas observed: “Disordered self-love is the cause of every sin.” (Summa Theologiae), though this is a principle that harks right back to Augustine of Hippo (The Confessions – Book I). The notion of applying ordo amoris – rightly ordered love – to public policy decisions might seem a novelty to contemporary secular politicians, but it’s the essence of public service – and it’s certainly the pathway to reopening the human spirit to the will and comfort of God’s wisdom.
And who knows, it might even enlighten a few civil servants to think a little harder before they rush off designing ill-conceived public information leaflets.
Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and public theologian