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It's also interesting considering how students might square this with the messages they receive in their other classes. In both secondary and primary school, a lot of the material we covered preached the virtues of civil disobedience, using the canonical examples of MLK Jr., Rosa Parks, Gandhi and to a lesser extent the suffragettes. I can't imagine present-day British schoolchildren are receiving fewer lessons about MLK et al. than my generation did, and it isn't hard to imagine how this could induce a sensation of cognitive dissonance: history class at 10 a.m., in which you learn the importance of civil disobedience against clearly unjust laws; followed immediately by civics class at 11, in which you learn that a good British subject follows all laws to the letter, no matter how ridiculous they are on their face. (Being arrested for watching a political video?)
It's another reminder of how woke people reflexively arrogate to themselves a monopoly on virtue. Paul Graham once posed a rhetorical question to his students: "do you hold any opinions which you would feel uncomfortable expressing in front of any of your friends or family?" If you answer in the negative, you're most likely a conformist, and it stands to reason that if you'd lived in the antebellum south or Nazi Germany, you would have gone along with what everyone else was doing. It's easy to be an Oskar Schindler in hindsight.
Woke apparatchiks in the British civil service commend to the high heavens historical examples of civil disobedience against Jim Crow etc., but this does not inspire in them any methodic doubt in whether any modern laws are unjust. The attitude seems to be that disobeying unjust laws is heroic and noble – but, in a staggering coincidence, we just so happen to live in an unprecedented era wholly devoid of unjust laws, and in which the only speech the government censors is speech which deserves to be censored.
I'll go on a slight tangent and say that I've had a similar experience in religious contexts. I was raised in a liberal mainline Protestant church, and as I grew older came to understand more of theology, more of the meaning of the Christian tradition I came to hold close, and this required developing practices of skepticism and resistance. The church I was raised in, on the institutional level, frequently erred, so I had to strengthen my ability to resist.
At times I have been tempted to become Catholic; if nothing else, there is more, proportionally, that the Catholics are right about than that my original church is right about. Proportionally, they do a better job of holding to the gospel.
But - they demand a kind of total submission of the intellect, a "free choice to trust in the Church's religious authority". A probabilistic judgement that on balance the Catholic Church gets more things right than such-and-such Protestant church is explicitly not enough.
I feel a bit of the same tension here. Let's grant that my resistance against the institutional authority I was raised with was justified. Boy, isn't it convenient that this other one is the perfect, correct institutional authority, against which resistance is never required? How wonderful for Catholics to be part of the one tradition wholly devoid of error, confusion, or misrepresentation. How amazing that the erring heart of man is present everywhere but among the doctrinal pronouncements of the magisterium!
All right, so, the Catholics have an answer to that one - the Holy Spirit infallibly preserves the church from error. I am Protestant enough in my bones that I don't think it works like that, or at least, not nearly so expansively as they think it does.
But to return to the secular - His Majesty's Government is not infallibly defended by the Holy Spirit. It's even less plausible that they are the one authority that must never be questioned or resisted. They don't even claim some sort of divine thumb on the scales. So why is it heroic to follow the demands of conscience and in every case but this one? What makes them the exception? Is it some naive faith in historical progress? Modernity or secular rationality functioning like a kind of revelation? That sounds more like the liberal optimism of a century ago. It is something more deconstructive or postmodernist? But then why should any one authority be immune to deconstruction? Whence comes the certainty lurking beneath the surface here?
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It's that Norm MacDonald meme: “It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?”
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