UCL Press Chapter Title: Dissenting conscience: the intimate politics of objection in Second World War Britain Chapter Author(s): Tobias Kelly Book Title: The Intimate Life of Dissent Book Subtitle: Anthropological Perspectives Book Editor(s): Harini Amarasuriya, Tobias Kelly, Sidharthan Maunaguru, Galina Oustinova- Stjepanovic, Jonathan Spencer Published by: UCL Press. (2020) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv13xprk8.10 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. 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UCL Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Intimate Life of Dissent This content downloaded from 143.107.252.199 on Mon, 12 Oct 2020 09:11:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Chapter 6 Dissenting conscience: the intimate politics of objection in Second World War Britain Tobias Kelly There is a contested tradition that runs through the Protestant Reformation, liberal constitutionalism and certain forms of human rights activism which makes conscience an archetypal and valorised form of dissent.1 Dissent here is understood as a vital good – a powerful way of fostering both public reason and an individual’s capacity for self- realisation. And conscience is widely seen as supplying the grounds for such acts of virtuous opposition, speaking from beyond narrow self- interest or instrumental calculation. In this vision, conscience should be protected because it is at the heart of a person’s most deeply felt sense of self (Maclure and Taylor 2011). In popular culture, those who seem to make a stand on issues of conscience – people such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Václav Havel, Martin Luther King and (until recently at least, and instructively so) Aung San Suu Kyi, are held up as heroic moral exemplars. From such a perspective, the dissenting conscience represents not only the basis of individual freedom, but also the last residue of the ability to do good in the world in the face of otherwise overwhelming pressure and wrongdoing. To talk about conscience is usually to talk the language of high principle. But, as we argued in the introduction to this book, those who dissent are not simply people of public ideals; they are also enmeshed in other intimate aspirations and ties. Commitments are never just abstrac- tions, but are also produced and take shape through personal ties marked by reflection and obligation. We can only understand the commitments people make – as well as the intensities, tensions and meanings of these commitments – if we view them from the perspective of the thick social relations in which they take place. People of conscience are also husbands, wives, sons, daughters, friends and neighbours. Public acts 112 THE InTIMATE LIFE OF DISSE nT This content downloaded from 143.107.252.199 on Mon, 12 Oct 2020 09:11:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 112 30/07/2020 13:31 and private beliefs cannot be easily separated. We might therefore ask, in line with the introduction to this book, what is the intimate life of dissent? This chapter explores what happens when a very particular under- standing of conscience is woven through dense social relations. The point here is not to define conscience nor to treat it as a transcendent or universal form of moral agency. Rather, it is to bracket off such questions in order to examine a contingent and historically embedded way of understanding and valuing conscience. This involves exploring the specific cultural life of an ethical category that claims universal valence; focusing on the ways in which it gains meaning, significance and purchase within the context of particular relationships – and the commitments, attachments and conflicts that are produced along the way. The chapter focuses on the experiences of British conscientious objectors (COs) to military service in the Second World War. If conscience is an archetypal form of dissent, the British conscientious objectors of this period represent a particularly acute angle through which to explore the social and cultural life of conscience. In 1916 Britain became the first state to grant the right to conscientious objection during wartime, and to do so on formally secular grounds. During the Second World War over 60,000 people were granted exemption from fighting on these grounds. Those who opposed the First World War in Britain, and later the Vietnam War in the US, are sometimes held up as heroes, at least on the broadly liberal left. They are viewed as principled and insightful individuals who saw through the fog of war and manufactured patriotism to talk of the waste and injustice of the trenches and jungle warfare, and made great sacrifices in doing so (see, for example, Brock and Young 1999). In contrast, the conscientious objectors of the 1930s and 1940s have a much more ambiguous position in popular memory for refusing to take up arms against fascism. It is for this reason that they have perhaps largely slipped from popular memory, presenting an awkward reminder of where following our conscience may take us. British conscientious objectors of the middle of the twentieth century therefore speak to the limits, potentials and conflicts of conscience as grounds for dissent. If other chapters in this collection examine forms of dissent under various types of socialism or post-colonial nationalism, this chapter seeks to contribute to debates about the limits of dissent under liberal regimes. The category of conscience has played a key role in the history of liberalism. The philosopher John Rawls went to so far as to observe that liberty of conscience is at the historical and normative core of ‘political liberalism’, providing the grounds for moral autonomy and particular forms of dissent DissenTInG conSCIEnCE 113 This content downloaded from 143.107.252.199 on Mon, 12 Oct 2020 09:11:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 113 30/07/2020 13:31 (1993, 154). The conscientious objectors described in this chapter held commitments to a range of political and religious traditions, but they all sought to participate in a public debate about conviction, sacrifice and exemption dominated by broadly liberal assumptions. This chapter can therefore be understood as part of the anthropology of actually existing liberalism. Liberalism is treated here as a varied and historically contingent set of discourses and practices, rather than a defined set of philosophical abstractions or analytical straw man. Numerous scholars have pointed to the ways in which liberal political regimes can tightly circumscribe the forms of dissent that are acknowledged as legitimate (Mahmood 2012; Povinelli 2002). What counted as a persuasive conscience certainly reproduced narrowly masculine, bourgeois and Protestant ways of being in the world. What I am also interested in here, however, is not just the outer limit of liberal dissent, but its anxious and uncertain core (Walzer 1970; Weiss 2012). Hesitations about claims of conscience are not only produced at the edges of liberal cultures, but at their very heart. The issue is not so much the exclusion of liberalism at its edges, but the anxieties, reversals and instabilities that lie at its heart. The central argument of this chapter is that claims of conscience are Janus- faced – both valorised and mistrusted, the grounds for sociality yet also socially corrosive. As McGranahan and others have argued, acts of dissent and refusal can not only sever ties, but also create new ties, affiliations and obligations (2016). At one level, throughout large parts of the liberal tradition, conscience is one of the ways in which individuals contribute positively to public life. However, at the same time conscience can also appear egotistical and self- indulgent – perhaps even antisocial. The philosopher Susan Wolf has argued more broadly that a morally pure life seems to lack a human quality (1982; see also MacFarquhar 2015). For Wolf, ‘moral saints’ have no friends, family, lovers, comrades or even acquaintances. They are unappealing to others, as they are not driven by affection and joy, but by a stark devotion. The point here is not simply that forms of conscientious dissent are not all equal – although that is the case too – but also that all claims of conscience can themselves create unease. Perhaps no one captured this ambiguity better than Susan Sontag, in her review of Simone Weil’s collected essays (1963). The culture- heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti- liberal and anti-bourgeois; … of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence…. No 114 THE InTIMATE LIFE OF DISSE nT This content downloaded from 143.107.252.199 on Mon, 12 Oct 2020 09:11:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms AMARASURIYA 9781787357792 PRINT.indd 114 30/07/2020 13:31 one who loves life would wish to imitate [Weil’s] dedication to martyrdom, nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it.