Mrs Murphy and the New Constitution

​Caldwell's Age of Entitlement (great book, google it) is a book about two American constitutions – the 1788 constitution that everyone thinks of as ‘the Constitution’ protecting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the 1964 constitution that was drafted during the civil rights era and now functions, in practice, as the real constitution protecting equal opportunities, equal outcomes, diversity, and non-discrimination in all walks of life. Thus when people debate how to interpret ‘the constitution’, they often have two entirely different constitutions in mind:

​The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible – and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out.

Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement, p. 6.

​The UK has no written constitution, but there are laws with constitutional significance: Magna Carta, for example, reflects similar values to the 1788 US Constitution, while the Human Rights Act 1998 and Equality Act 2010 very much reflect the ethos of America’s 1964 civil rights ‘rival constitution’. The incompatibility referred to by Caldwell can be seen in the daily efforts to ‘balance’ free speech rights (old-style constitutional rights) with people’s right not to be offended in circumstances which could potentially be in breach of the Equality Act (new-style constitutional rights). Under the new constitution you still have a right freely to express your thoughts, but only if nobody will feel offended by what you have said. The Equality Act identifies protected groups of people that have the right not to be offended by someone saying offensive things about them. This could be defined as harassment based on protected grounds, which is unlawful and in breach of the new constitutional order.

Under the old constitution, the role of a university was to create an 'intellectual space'. Under the new constitution, the role of a university is to create a 'safe space', a 'home' where historically marginalised groups can feel welcome and be guaranteed that nobody will do or say anything which they might find offensive.

It is not exactly clear how this new constitutional order emerged, especially when you consider that most people still seem to be under the erroneous impression that the original constitution is still in force. People go about quoting Voltaire in defence of the right to offend others, without realising that Voltaire is actually banned under the new constitution. Reading Voltaire is banned, because promoting diversity requires the decolonisation of literature, from which it follows that it is unlawful and in fact highly likely to spark a constitutional crisis if you read books written by DWMs (Ed: Dead White Men), a class of which Voltaire is a fine example and so everything he wrote must be treated as suspect. Just don't read it, or put it on your reading lists, to be on the safe side. Better check your library, and if you find Voltaire lurking there, you know what to do. No, a bonfire would not be an excess of caution on your part. It might sound very Dark Ages, but I'd rather be seen burning books than be found guilty of failing to decolonise my mind.

How did we get here? Caldwell suggests that the constitutional revolution in the US started innocuously as a way of safeguarding ‘justice and humanity’. Everybody wants to promote justice and humanity, right? Before long, it unexpectedly gathered speed and momentum and transformed itself into what we see now: ‘the all-embracing ideology of diversity’. This growth was fed by ‘moral prestige’ (what we think of now as virtue signalling or the exhibiting of woke credentials) and ‘practical resources’ (lots of money kindly volunteered by the taxpayers to help advance the cause of social justice). And voila: a new constitution! 

It’s very satisfying to be able to achieve a social and political revolution in this way, without a single shot being fired. But that does not mean there was no cost to be paid. Nothing in life is free, and somehow somebody somewhere would have to pay the price for this new constitution. Folk like the hypothetical Mrs Murphy. 

​Senators sceptical of civil rights legislation hinted that “Mrs. Murphy” – a hypothetical old widow who rented out a room in her house in a northern city – might wind up bearing the brunt of federal surveillance and law enforcement if she got too picky about whom she accepted as a tenant.

Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement, p. 17.
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Mrs Murphy is a racist woman who, when she decides to take in a lodger to help make ends meet, screens applicants based on their race. She wants someone of the same race as her, because obviously she’s a racist and this is how racists think. I know, shocking. Nothing in life is free so there is, of course, a cost to being racist and Mrs Murphy will have to pay that cost.

​If an individual has a "taste for discrimination," he must act as if he were willing to pay something, either directly or in the form of a reduced income, to be associated with some persons instead of others.

​When actual discrimination occurs, he must, in fact, either pay or forfeit income for this privilege.

Gary Becker, The Economics of Discrimination (University of Chicago Press, 1971) p. 14.
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We don't know why Mrs Murphy is racist, whether that's because of ignorance (she doesn't know anything about the lodger's race and she's too shy or scared to find out, in case she doesn't like what she discovers) or whether it's because of prejudice (she doesn't care about the lodger's characteristics, she has simply taken against him based on a conspiracy theory she read on the dark web) or whether it's simply her personal taste whether bad (she likes being mean to others, dishing out a little bit of humiliation every day) or perfectly fine (she simply feels more comfortable in a psychic sense if she lives with people who look and sound like her). We also don't know whether Mrs Murphy is motivated by hatred for those not of her race and thus a desire to harm them, or by love for those of her own race and thus a desire to prefer them.

​A theory based on "hatred" of one group is not easily distinguished empirically from one based on "love" of the other group. Thus these two theories can be used interchangeably for most problems in positive economic analysis; at the same time, one's conclusions about normative issues may greatly depend on whether "hatred" or "love" is assumed to motivate decisions.

Becker,  The Economics of Discrimination, p. 160.

At this point Mrs Murphy is not aware that making a racist choice in her private domain is illegal, immoral and unconstitutional. It will soon be time for payback. When her neighbours find out, they’ll all ostracise her. Her own family will be ashamed of her. The twitterati will pile in on her. Under the new constitution, she should be happy to live with anyone, regardless of their race or nationality, right? It’s the law. Now the racist Mrs Murphy is stuck: she has to take in the lodger who has pitched up on her doorstep because if she turns him away for being the wrong race she will have to pay punitive damages as compensation and she really doesn’t have any money to cover that. But nobody feels sorry for Mrs Murphy at all. That’s just the price to be paid, for the new society we are building in which nobody is allowed to be a racist. ​

​​Our Mrs Murphy seems to have thought that whomever she chooses to welcome into her home is her private business, but under the new constitution there is no such thing as private business. Everything is public business, because otherwise how will we know whether somebody somewhere is being racist? We have to know, so that if necessary we can call the police and have them arrested and locked up, or at least file a lawsuit for some compensation, and also so we can publicly shame them when their mugshot appears in the local newspaper under the headline ‘Racist!’. Send a copy to her employer, that should get her fired. Oh dear, Mrs. Murphy, you should have thought of the risk to your job before deciding to be a racist shouldn’t you. Bet you regret that now. If you don't want to suffer unhappy consequences, just don't be a racist. Simple. Most of us manage to get through life without being racist to anyone, and so should Mrs. Murphy! There's no excuse for it, under this new constitution.

Everyone needs to get on board with the new social order. As was said by the social justice activists who ushered in this new age:

​"Real freedom will require many changes in the nation’s political and social philosophies and institutions. For one thing we must destroy the notion that Mrs. Murphy’s property rights include the right to humiliate me because of the color of my skin. The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality."

Quoted in Age of Entitlement, p.18.
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​The old constitution defends the sanctity of private property, but the new constitution defends the sanctity of ‘human personality’. The sanctity of human personality is given effect under the Equality Act by identifying 9 deserving personal characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership and pregnancy and maternity. If your personality is lucky enough to exhibit any of these protected traits, congratulations! The new constitution defends your right to take up rooms with Mrs. Murphy regardless of her opinion of you.

​If Mrs. Murphy so much as looks at you the wrong way, or fails to make eye contact with you at all, you can report her to the authorities for committing a micro-aggression. A micro-aggression is anything that makes you feel humiliated. Obviously the lodger turned away from the doorstep by Mrs. Murphy would feel humiliated, and he has a right not to feel humiliated as he goes about his search for accommodation. We all want our experience of house-hunting to be a pleasant one, devoid of humiliating interactions. So, Mrs. Murphy will have to let the room to him. She will just have to find a way to live with that. She needs to understand that freedom does not include freedom to make personal choices that make other people feel bad, and if she expresses her racist thoughts her lodger will feel really really bad. Nobody deserves to feel bad (well, except Mrs. Murphy, she deserves to feel very bad, for what she did).

If your personality doesn’t exhibit any legally protected characteristics, don’t worry. These days you can change your race any time by just saying what race you identify as, so it should be fairly easy to show up as the opposite of Mrs. Murphy’s traits, and bingo, she’s stuck with you whether she likes it or not. Serves her right anyway, for being a racist.

This is why the new constitution is far superior to the old. Defending private property is inherently unfair, because not everybody has property or has the ability to acquire as much property as other people. Private property leads to inequality and unfairness. But everybody has the protected elements of ‘human personality’, or can easily acquire them as needed, so it’s much more fair. This way, everyone has an equal chance.