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The Disrespect Agenda: Or How the Wrong Kind of Niceness is Making Us Weak and Unhappy

Between deference and insolence

Lincoln Allison
Social Affairs Unit, 120pp, £10,

Theodore Dalrymple

Wednesday, 23rd April 2008

Theodore Dalrymple reviews Lincoln Allison's new book

The author believes that free intellectual enquiry is both the motor of progress and one of the great pleasures of life, and that such freedom entails an attitude of healthy disrespect towards all authorities. Well, yes and no: disrespect should be properly informed if it is not to degenerate into mere egotistical insolence for its own sake. In a decent society, one should be able to assume that a professor of surgery or Egyptology knows more than oneself about these subjects. For everyone to start from the position that everyone else is an ignorant fool is unlikely to make for a pleasant society.

Clearly, by disrespect the author means healthy disrespect, but he fails to point out that the right to exercise such disrespect, as much as respect itself, ought to be earned. Indeed, it ought to grow with age and experience. To say of a child of nine that he is disrespectful is hardly complimentary.

Allison’s ideal is a society of sturdily independent individuals who judge for themselves what their ends in life should be, with as little interference from the state or other authorities as possible. He rightly decries the increasing Sovietisation of British life, with its bullying yet incompetent managerialism, and the reluctance of officialdom to leave anything to the good (or bad) sense of citizens.

But the society he favours would have to rely on a pretty widespread exercise of virtue and restraint if it were not to degenerate into the kind of chaos that makes people long for an authoritarian solution. Many social virtues have initially to be instilled by parents in their children rather than argued for as if they were participants in a Socratic dialogue; and it is difficult to see how this could be done without basic respect. So, while The Disrespect Agenda makes some valuable points, it is too sketchy and lacking in subtlety to illuminate our times or suggest solutions to our problems.

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