Peter Costello
The world of books
The present controversy over state prosecutions for blasphemy has raised once again unresolved issues concerning our libel laws, issues which really need to be settled once and for all.
On the matter of blasphemy, the law has nothing to do with the Christian Churches, but is rather an attempt to mollify Muslim opinion. The approach comes under an older notion bound up with the earlier statutes relating to libel. Yet what Muslim sects say about each other, quite contrary to the Prophet’s teachings on charity, is often far worse than what a non-Muslim could say.
People claim that to react to insults to one’s beliefs is ‘only human’. So it is, for such anger is a human failing, an aspect of man’s fallen nature. It is not a divine attribute.
If Christians believe that God is completely self-sufficient unto himself, he cannot in fact be insulted or feel the anger human beings do. All knowing, all seeing, all understanding, he is impervious to insult. To know everything is to understand everything, and to understand completely is to forgive completely, as the hidden aspects of human motivation are clear to God. That, at least, is what they taught us at school. Blasphemy is a concept which no Christian, theologically speaking, can believe in.
Leaders
The Church leaders say the blasphemy laws do not meet with their approval. But the State (or rather lawyers reluctant to abandon a source of civil actions), sees blasphemy not as an insult to God, but to persons, and that it can be the occasion of a disturbance to what the 18th Century acts would have called “the King’s peace”. Anyone familiar with the events during the anti-Catholic Gordon riots in 1780 will see the point of that.
The older laws distinguished four categories of libel. First of all there was seditious libel, an offence against the state (a crime echoed still in our own Offences against the State Act). It seems it is possible for a political theorist to countenance the overthrow of the state, which is in fact what philosophical anarchists believe. But to encourage this by the printed word led in the past to many an Irish patriot being jailed. Seditious libel was, in fact, a method for the authorities to prevent free speech.
The second category was blasphemous libel. But in a country like the United Kingdom (which included Ireland for a time), where a state religion is established, to attack the beliefs of others (as Bradlaugh and others did) is to encourage an attack on the institutions of the state. However, in Britain such actions, when taken nowadays as civil actions by individuals, never succeed.
The third category was criminal libel, which is what Oscar Wilde accused the belligerent Queensberry of; again a likely breach of the peace, involving physical violence, was involved.
The fourth category was defamatory libel, really what the person in the street, or rather in the body of the court, understands by ‘libel’.
Even the briefest survey of this tort over the last two centuries shows that it has been too often resorted to for political reasons; there were many such cases in 19th-Century Ireland. The people who most commonly sue for libel now are journalists and politicians, the rich and the influential, sensitive persons created with thinner skins than you and me.
Influential figures
You and I and old Mrs Byrne next door, we never sue people for libel. We cannot afford it. I will not suggest any names here, but anyone who reads the papers will be aware of the journalists and the influential figures who have taken such actions.
Often people are awarded a pittance, other times, as the rewards are entirely down to the juries; huge sums with costs have been awarded, on little more than a whim.
It would be better if the whole system were abolished. The notion of a ‘good name’ needs to be reconsidered. There should be no cash awards, no costs. An apology in a newspaper in a position as dominant as the original article, or (as in France), the insertion in the offending book, of a yellow slip giving the courts judgement of the complaint, that should be enough.