BY SEAN WALSH
Before doing the relevant analytical deeper dive let me make two remarks, by way of qualification.
First, the condition known as “Tourette’s Syndrome” should not be trivialised, and it’s not my intention to do so here; second, what I suppose we must call “BAFTAgate” (or maybe “f@@@@@g BAFTAgate”, given the subject matter) is the funniest thing to happen at an awards ceremony since Will Smith bitch-slapped the ungentlemanly Chris Rock (and that was possibly fake so might not count anyway).
In case you missed it, the details are set out here.
By the way, it won’t be long until the influential and restless activists for linguistic sectarianism insist that the expression “the N-word” is as offensive as the word itself (unless, of course, it is spoken by members of the approved demographic). It hasn’t happened yet, but only because the censors are both busy and hard of thinking. But there is an opportunity here for layering on yet more thought crime so they’ll get to it at some point. Although those of us in favour of giving offence in service of moral correction will still have the use/mention distinction to have fun with.
Getting back to the BAFTA incident how can it not be funny, though? A very worthy film is made about an embarrassing medical condition, the organisers of an event worthily use the occasion to celebrate the film, and the guy who is the subject of the film, Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson, shows his appreciation in a way that was entirely predictable….because of the condition.
I suspect that all involved are secretly hoping that somebody else will be the first to laugh.
And then the inevitable quest to find who was responsible, because in the paradoxical new age of “no judgement” somebody must always be blamed.
Does it ever occur to anyone these days that sometimes stuff just happens? Or that if there is a reason why it happens then the finite mind might lack the ability to see what that reason is?
I didn’t know before this that Tourette’s can be richly context sensitive and occasionally involves saying the most insensitive thing in a given situation. Which, you could argue, confers on the sufferer a certain absolution from any charge of specific hatefulness. If the presenter of the award had a Scottish accent, for example, instead of “the N-word” Mr Davidson could have asked “do ya want an Irn Bru ya ginger t@@t?”. Or, had the ceremony been filmed in a mosque (only a matter of time, let’s face it), he could have shouted “Which way’s the f@@@@@g bar!?”.
The serious point being that there is no intention to offend, and those who claim to be offended are therefore doing most of the hard work themselves.
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919-2001)…probably not a Tourette’s victim.
By chance, I was thinking about this issue the other day, as I prepared to make a video with my friend Gavin Ashenden on the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. Miss Anscombe, a favourite pupil of Wittgenstein (she was his literary executor) coined the term consequentialism to describe the family of ethical theories (including but not restricted to utilitarianism) which have as a common premise the claim that the moral content of an action is to be assessed only in terms of the consequences of that action.
She argued that such theories are inadequate, not least because to make such an assessment central to the moral life necessitates a theory of what counts as an action in the first place. And what makes something an action rather than an event depends on whether or not it is intended, which seems to be also dependent on how it is described.
That last point needs amplification. In On Intention Miss Anscombe, adapting Wittgenstein’s later technique of philosophy as anthropology, suggests that there is no single quality or feature of a mental act which must be present for some behaviour to count as an “intentional” action. Instead of looking for this phenomenological unicorn therefore, we should instead attend to the “grammar” of those real situations in which we think that this person did this thing deliberately.
Now, the usual examples in the philosophy of action can be pretty boring, and involve the spilling of drinks or something mundane like that. I was thinking about presenting Gavin with the Elon Musk was-it-or-wasn’t-it-a-Hitler-salute? example (we talk about Nazis sometimes) but “f@@@ing BAFTAgate” is too good to pass up.
Under one description it seems as if Mr Davidson is heckling the presenters of that award in a pretty disgusting way. But under another description (the one which takes account of his condition) no such thing is happening at all because he is not acting (in the sense of being an agent) at all.
Incidentally, I once had lunch with Elizabeth Anscombe. I don’t think she was suffering from Tourette’s on that occasion, but I’m not completely certain. Wine was involved and the evidence was neither one way nor the other.
The comedian Norm MacDonald, in a brilliant routine about AA, said that if alcoholism is a disease, then at least it’s the best disease to have. I feel qualified to push back on just how “best” it is. But maybe Tourette’s is a strong runner-up.
Here’s Larry David, helping a sufferer out of potential embarrassment, not for the faint of heart: