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Amazon.co.ukReligious intolerance might cost you your job
A senior executive of Barclaycard Europe has had to leave his job after making a bad joke that happened to include a religious term. It seems that, when it comes to sensitivity about religion, the rule is ‘zero tolerance’.
When describing his company’s performance figures, Marc Howells of Barclaycard Europe allegedly said: “The results were like Muslims – some were good, some were Shi’ite“. This was in a meeting, it was not a public statement. But the joke did the rounds of the office, as jokes will. And someone, somewhere got offended.
It was a bad joke. Bad as in naff, unfunny. Maybe even a touch crass. It may even have warranted an apology for its insensitivity. But for Howells to have to accept ‘redundancy under compromise’ is political correctness of insane proportions.
Alas, religions act as totalitarian regimes. And in a totalitarian regime you must not only accept the strict and arbitrary rules, you must internalise them, make them part of your every thought. Even when you know them to be irrational and ridiculous, you must make them part of your thought process, so that you conform to them automatically. This is Orwell’s ‘doublethink’.
This may seem too trivial a case to warrant talk of totalitarianism and doublethink, but it’s at these trivial levels that these rules work. I suspect that other people in that company will think twice about muttering the words ‘muslim’ or ‘shi’ite’ in the office, in any context, not just bad jokes. How long before this becomes a habit and they check their thoughts even in their private lives? This kind of suppression is corrosive and accumulative.
One wonders whether Howells would still have a job if the joke had been about atheists.
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