11.02.1999

Unlikely martyrdom

Maurice Bernal examines the implications of the Hoddle affair

“Hoddle 0, Disabled 1 (Hoddle og)”. In some respects, the sporting metaphor in this smug and tasteless headline from The Independent (February 3) is appropriate, but the real victors in the ‘game’ of Glenn Hoddle’s forced departure from the job of England football manager were not the disabled, but the media. Another public figure excoriated, humiliated and destroyed; another scalp on the belt of a press that has come to act as judge, jury and executioner in a melodramatic tale of lynch justice.

The Hoddle affair is of interest to Marxists and worthy of some commentary and analysis because of what it reveals about the society in which we live: not merely the abysmally low level of political and ethical discourse - a reflection of the ideological black hole and glib spin-doctory that characterises New Labour - but a disturbing climate of irrationality and intolerance that seems set to permeate every level of life in civil society.

The charges on which Hoddle was arraigned and summarily tried are basically twofold: first, that his remarks about reincarnation and physical handicap were offensive to disabled people and therefore unacceptable; secondly, that his religious views were ‘wacky’, fit only to be ridiculed and condemned for their heterodoxy.

Let us begin by reminding ourselves what Hoddle actually said in his now notorious interview with sports reporter Matt Dickinson from The Times:

“You and I have been physically given two hands and two legs and a half-decent brain. Some people have not been born like that for a reason. The karma is working from another lifetime. I have nothing to hide about that. It is not only people with disabilities. What you sow, you have to reap. You have to look at things that happened in your life and ask why. It comes around” (January 30).

The sentiments are allusive, muddled and half-articulated - the implied relationship between sin and divine retribution is a western one - but Hoddle’s words are in part a recognisable restatement of an idea that is central to the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. Imagine the slavering excitement with which this utterance was received in the editorial offices not only of the tabloid rags, but also of the broadsheets: ‘Hold the front page!’

But can it be that the noble moralists of Wapping really have no recollection of an interview that Hoddle gave to BBC Radio 5 Live last year, on the eve of the World Cup, in which he expressed exactly the same ideas? The reaction then was one of indifference, so what has changed? Basically, Hoddle’s relationship with the media. Richard Williams summed it up admirably: “The tabloids were always going to get him one day. Hoddle had offended too often, by refusing to play the game their way. He had sometimes intentionally misled them, he had often let them see his contempt for them, and he had not given them the unbroken string of victories that would allow them to indulge the unfettered jingoism so pleasing to their circulation departments ... Hoddle was never quite comfortable with the beer-and-bulldog ambience of the Sun Bus, and his unease became his downfall” (The Independent February 2). The moral outrage and deluge of condemnation following Hoddle’s recent remarks seem therefore to have been based on some rather sullied motives where the media were concerned.

Did Hoddle ‘offend’ the disabled? To judge by the correspondence columns, it appears he did cause pain to some at least. But was there not something odiously patronising about the way in which groups representing the disabled, and especially politicians, leaped to their defence? The suggestion seemed to be that physical disability somehow renders its unfortunate victims incapable of discerning balderdash when they read it in the papers. People with physical disabilities are much more likely to be ‘offended’ by the fact that lack of provision for their needs in all manner of public places - including many football grounds - makes it impossible for them to lead a reasonably normal life.

No, Hoddle’s real ‘crime’ was not to offend the disabled, but to flout the canons of political correctness. Here we need to be careful: as an ideological phenomenon, PC has brought about some genuinely beneficial changes to the way society treats those who by virtue of their race, sexual orientation or other factors constitute vulnerable minorities. At the same time, however, it must be said that PC has brought about some gross and occasionally bizarre distortions, often based on sheer linguistic ignorance, in the formulation of values and concepts. More troublingly - and this is not surprising, given the fact that political correctness is an ideological product of bourgeois society - it has a tendency to replicate the contradictions and inversions inherent in the capitalists system: behind the mask of a commitment to freedom and diversity, we discover the ugly face of a quite ruthless intolerance, determined to trammel discourse within the confines of a set of values often arrived at arbitrarily or founded on the exigencies of the moment.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the conduct of politicians, especially the scions of New Labour. When a party has no real ideas - the periphrastic sermonising of the ‘third way’ can hardly be glorified with the name of an ideology - it is forced to mount every passing bandwagon in the hope of maintaining its appeal to the electorate. The outcome is a particularly unpalatable and shoddy form of populism. They test the water by examining the results of a few polls of media-generated ‘public opinion’; they listen to the phone-ins and talk shows and, having established what ‘the people’ think, they give it political endorsement.

In this respect, the Hoddle affair was a classic. Margaret Hodge, minister with responsibility for the disabled, felt compelled to call for Hoddle’s resignation, saying that it was “inappropriate” for such a person to have responsibility for training the nation’s football side; Tony Banks, as minister for sport, followed suit. Then it was time for the great leader himself to make his oracular pronouncement. The prime minister, who only days before had told us of his determination to distance himself and his government from all that was trivial, chose to appear on ITV’s ‘This Morning’ programme in order to give the people of Britain the benefit of his wisdom on a whole range of trivial nonsense: was Cherie terribly hurt by pictures of her cellulite in the tabloids? What did he think of Hoddle’s offensive remarks about the disabled? By telling us that Hoddle would find it very difficult to remain in his position, Blair acted like a Roman emperor of old, pointing his thumb groundwards and determining the fate of the hapless England coach.

The hypocrisy is staggering in its brazenness. Here is a prime minister whose words and deeds bear no relationship to one another. As everyone knows, only an attack of nerves in the face of public disapproval prevented him from ordering the removal of disability benefit from large numbers, perhaps even a majority, of those who currently receive it, the unspoken implication being that these people were ‘cheats’, cunningly shamming their afflictions to milk the welfare state of precious resources. Yet the feelings of these same dodgers are so important that prime ministerial intervention is needed to protect them from the misty, eclectic musings of a football manager.

Let us turn to the religious aspect of the case, and try to contain our mirth as we read the words of Tory MP Peter Bottomley, who described Hoddle’s remarks as “not Christian, scientific or acceptable” (The Independent February 2). If we did not know the eccentric and pompous Bottomley better, we would surely conclude that his implicit equation of the Christian religion with science and rationality was some kind of jest.

If Hoddle’s notions of reincarnation - shared in essence by around a billion human beings on the planet, whose religious feelings are evidently of no account to British politicians - are indeed ‘wacky’, as the press dubbed them, what are we to make of the view taken by many evangelical Christians that homosexuality is not merely an abomination in the eyes of the lord, but a disease, a sickness that can be cured through prayer and the intervention of the holy ghost?

This seems to me to be grossly ‘offensive’ to gays - apart from being an example of the worst kind of superstitious nonsense. Or what should we say about a Christian pope whose doctrinal intransigence on the subject of birth control dooms millions of the faithful in the third world to a short, brutish and impoverished existence? Is not this not ‘offensive’ to rational human beings, as well as being inconsonant with that essential dignity and worth of the human person which His Holiness places at the centre of his social teaching?

By contrast with these examples of Christian ‘rationality’, Hoddle’s ruminations on karma and the meaning of suffering in human life seem innocuous, but even if they were not, he has a right to hold and express whatever religious beliefs he likes. Our politically correct politicians appear to have forgotten that freedom of religious expression is enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights that they hold so dear. It is a mark of a civilised, mature democracy to be able to tolerate diversity of views.

There was a time not long ago when the propagation of the idea of religious freedom as a supposed hallmark of bourgeois democracy was part of the west’s ideological battle with the Soviet bloc. Government-funded anti-Soviet organisations and commentators poured forth a torrent of accusations to the effect that the USSR was curbing this fundamental human right. With the collapse of the USSR, this rhetoric has become obsolescent, but so, evidently, has bourgeois democracy’s espousal of freedom of religious expression as an important ethical value.

Of course, it rather depends who you are. If you are an ill-educated, working class footballer from Essex, then your religious ideas can be condemned as “offensive” and “unacceptable”. But if you are a bourgeois liberal intellectual from Hampstead who consciously and deliberately blasphemes against Islam in the course of your creative literary labours, then you have every right to say whatever you like on the subject of religion, and be lauded as a martyr in the cause of freedom of expression if your words cause offence.

Varying forms of religious belief and practice can clearly be differentiated in terms of their effect on human societies, but as Marxists and materialists we contend that, at a deeper level, all forms of religion stem from the same source - the alienation that gives rise to an inverted relation between subject and object, and thereby radically distorts humanity’s self-consciousness. People project facets of their own nature onto an object of their thought, then allow themselves to be dominated by this spectral being that is nothing more than a creation of the brain; the subject-object relation is inverted, so that humankind (the real and only subject) endow an object of their own thought (god) with the status of a real, existing subject and then perceive themselves as the object, the creature of this spectre. It is not god who has created man in his own image, but humanity which creates god in its own image and then bows down before its own creation.

Marx understood very well the appeal of religion to oppressed human beings: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people” (K Marx, F Engels On Religion Moscow 1957, p38). What Marx detested most about religion was that it degrades human beings by keeping them in thrall to an alien, illusory power. Therefore, “The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is debased, enslaved, abandoned and despised” (ibid p45). Only when the social conditions and relations that alienate humankind from their products, themselves and one another have been overthrown will religion lose its grip over the human mind.

Seen in this light, all forms of religious belief are, to paraphrase Mr Bottomley, “unscientific and unacceptable”. Hoddle’s notions are certainly no worse than the rest and he has become the unlikely victim and martyr of an increasingly intolerant and irrational society.