To connoisseurs of really good television police dramas the title Between The Lines will be familiar. It’s a British series about a trio of metropolitan detectives who eventually fall out with their bosses and go private. The series has what could be described as a John le Carre authenticity, its characters and situations are compelling.
In a recent rerun of the series an episode dealt with, among other things, the awful death of the wife of one of the main protagonists, who was suffering from a debilitating and painful cancer. During her last weeks of life she persists in her request to her husband that he go away for a few days so that she may have some precious last time to herself. He does and when he comes back, a little earlier than expected, it is to find her dying from an overdose of drugs she has taken.
The husband’s first reaction is to call for medical help, but in her last moments his wife prevails on him to let her die and be released from the pain and humiliation of her illness. In an action of supreme humanity, he relents and allows her to die.
The next visit to this thread of the story is to see a woman doctor — the couple’s general practitioner — pontificating to a senior police officer she has summoned to the deathbed. “For obvious reasons,” she says primly, “I cannot issue a death certificate in this case. If her husband had telephoned us when he discovered that she had taken an overdose we could well have saved this woman’s life.” When the police officer tries to explain, the doctor grows even more self-righteous and delivers her triumphant final line: “There cannot be one law for the police and another for the rest of us.” She exits haughtily.
It is to the great credit of the script, the acting and direction that, television story or not, you feel a urgent need to somehow get to that particular doctor and, taking infinite pleasure in the process, slowly kick in her sanctimonious head. Of course she was being ethically aligned, but it was far less any sympathy for the suffering woman and far more her own legal impunity that she held paramount. She didn’t want to be caught out behaving like a human. After all, as any lawyer will tell you, legal propriety is an all-purpose camouflage, sometimes for the most savage of indifference.
But it is not only for that reason that you have such a strong reaction. It is more because the doctor in the scene is the embodiment of the sort of the tweezer-lipped rectitude that has become so fashionable these days, in this cold era where human kindness is being supplanted by sorrow-by-numbers values.
The brilliantly written and portrayed obdurate doctor in the Between The Lines series is a figure functioning within what has steadily been eroding common human values; a debased and artificial public morality that has become the exchange of numberless promoters of what might generally be called liberal colonialism. It obeys a bleak doctrine where every tear may be measured in micrograms, every agony or loss jockeyed into its predetermined emotional or legal position: an impenetrable greyness where sympathy is strategised and sheer indifference disguised as overarching charity of intention.
Another name for liberal colonialism is, of course, political correctness, a numbing treatise that had its origins on second-rate North American campuses and which now has been adopted in its principal appointment as the new censorship. Every second voice on the radio, every second writer in the papers, every single politician who now has adopted this near meaningless cant of “democracy” and “human rights” and “individual dignity” and all the rest of the solemn catchphrases, is suspect. You only have to tune into the radio or television to hear them as they scatter the grand words, like farmers’ wives feeding the poultry.
These are the liberal colonists no longer satisfied with mere territory, but who wish to encroach upon our minds and emotions as well. Theirs is a kind of elitism in which they seek to impose their carefully assembled theories of compassion to the exclusion of the very substances of personal grief and loss. As just one by-product we now have “counsellors”, adept and trained to stitch and bandage any emotional emergency with the suave language of popular psychology.
Since such intrusive arrangements attempt to codify the intricate complexities of human faculties, they are in every sense a form of censorship. Where the government-appointed censor tells us what we may or may not read or watch, these new bureaucrats would administer our very feelings, to knock them into the sort of synthetic alter-world that is the Orwellian nightmare.
Personal choice is particularly at risk. We are being told that we are morally incompetent if, say, we don’t loudly approve what is held to be socially or politically in vogue. As Nat Hentoff once said: censorship is one of the prime human instincts.
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