Reflections inTranquillity on the Matthew Perry Encounter

At last, I have a quiet moment to reflect on the Great Clash of Monday Night, in which I attempted to argue about drugs and the law with a Hollywood actor, Matthew Perry.

 

I’m grateful for all your many comments about this, most especially the abusive ones from people who can’t think and can’t argue.  These reassure me that I am doing something worthwhile. Asked on Twitter by one such person what qualifies me to have opinions on these matters I replied, ‘Facts,  logic and not being afraid of being abused by people like you’.

 

That’s quite important. Fear of being howled down does influence people. I suspect that human knowledge would have moved much further and much faster if it were not so. As my exchange with ‘Citizen Sane’, which I have re-posted, shows, my position is not contemptible, nor is it stupid. It is certainly contentious, and it requires a willingness to think for yourself even to consider it. But that is often the case in serious arguments about major subjects, as we frequently find here.

 

My only disappointment in all this is that little of the coverage or the reaction has involved anyone saying ‘ah, perhaps this is an issue worth examining’. Conventional wisdom has survived undented. Or has it? Maybe a few tiny seeds have been sown. One must always remember Mandelson’s Law, which states that new ideas have not begun to influence the public mind until long after their promoters are heartily sick of propounding them.

 

Why do I do these things?

 

I take as my text for the day a comment from Neil Saunders : ‘I agree with Peter Hitchens on the issue of drugs, but I think he is profoundly mistaken if he imagines that appearing on mainstream TV shows in debate with ageing good-time boys who acquired bad habits while being paid far too much to appear in achingly PC, painfully unfunny and nauseatingly smug American sitcoms is a good and effective use of his time and talents. He made the same kind of mistake only the other day in Australia, opposite killer-granny Germaine, Dan "Single-Issue" Savage (whose very arguments seemed to be pumped up with steroids) and the other lady, who rather resembled Joan Rivers after a pre-frontal lobotomy. Even Mr Hitchens seemed to acknowledge this at times (e.g. "you've won", "this is a rally!").’

 

Well, hmm. On the Australian matter, the ‘Q&A’ appearance came after a couple of other non-broadcast encounters with large Sydney audiences, in a country where my ideas weren’t until then widely known. It gave me the chance to give several interviews with Australian radio and TV stations, and to write an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald(in which I now gather the Perry clash features, along with some pejorative quotes from reviews of my book, reviews discussed here some months ago). It also led to my writing a Diary or the Australia edition of the London ‘Spectator’ .

 

I might add that one mustn’t assume that studio audiences, or Twitter mobs, are wholly representative of opinion.

 

It is my good fortune that I enjoy debates, don’t mind a bit of abuse, and am prepared to say things which I know to be unpopular with large numbers of people, if I think they’re true.

 

I suspect quite a few people watching ‘Q&A’ were encouraged by some of the things that I said, and in some cases appalled by the one-sided nature of the panel and of the audience. I know from correspondence that my answer to the question on ‘dangerous ideas', that ‘The most dangerous idea in all history and philosophy is that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and rose from the dead’ resonated with many who had begun to wonder if their own Christian belief had vanished entirely from our culture.

 

I hadn’t expected the question, but when it came, there was no doubt that this is what I must say, and I would have been lacking in courage had I failed to do so.  It’s a statement of truth, which, as it happens, an atheist could equally well have made. What effect it may have had, and where and when, I don’t know. But at the moment I made it I felt that my whole journey to Australia,  a very pleasant if quite exhausting voyage, had been morally justified. There were already journalistic justifications, and personal ones. But this was even more significant. And of course because the statement was greeted with such shock by so many present, the point was made rather well that the Christian religion is in very severe decline, and has lost its power with astonishing speed. It is time the Anglosphere reased this and began to ponder its implications for our civilisation.

 

 

I am (as I’ve mentioned here before) haunted by a Chesterton remark, thrown away in a ‘Father Brown’ story that what we do here matters somewhere else; further, we do not necessarily understand our own actions properly, much like ignorant barbarians who try to puzzle out the meaning of a tapestry by studying the wrong side of it. Don’t necessarily judge this events by first appearances.

 

Something similar could be said for the ‘Newsnight’ episode. Not everyone, I think, felt Mr Perry had acquitted himself very well . In fact I know that some drug liberalisers were embarrassed by his performance. They have no idea what he meant when he said that ‘addiction’ was ‘ an allergy of the body’.

 

I rather felt I demonstrated some knowledge of the drugs courts question, that I held fast to logic and facts,  and that my opponents could not really challenge my fundamental about the deterrent purpose of criminal justice.

 

There was a wonderful three-way exchange which, alas , attracted less attention than it should have done (It’s about 3 minutes and 45 seconds into the Newsnight clip) .

 

 

Peter Hitchens:

 

‘If this is what you believe, that this is a terrible frightening disease after which they cannot stop taking drugs. If you really believe that…’

 

Perry ‘Yeah’

 

PH'... Then you would presumably think that the best thing would be that they never ever came into contact with those drugs?'

 

Baroness Meacher and Matthew Perry (almost in chorus) : ‘Of course!’

 

PH: ‘….Wouldn’t it therefore be wise to deter them from doing so…

 

Baroness Meacher : ‘Yes’

 

PH ‘…by a stern and effective

 

Baroness Meacher ‘No’

 

PH ‘…criminal justice system, which actually persuaded them it was unwise to take the drugs in the first place’.

 

 

It was at this point that Mr Perry began his direct frontal attack on me.

I love the way they both fell straight into the rather simple elephant trap I laid in front of their feet, and the different ways in which they sought to clamber out of it after they had tumbled in. If addiction is so irresistible, then surely we must protect people from it all costs. Actually, no.  They accept that deterrence is the logic of their position, but when asked to support the sort of measures which would deter, they then peel away.  Would they rather have lots of ‘addicts’ than put anyone in prison?

 

I wonder how many people have now begun to think about this subject when they hadn’t before. And I’m also grateful to Mr Perry for mentioning my book, which has until now suffered from a blanket of silence in almost all major newspapers and magazines.