For Civility, Public Life, and Reason
Against feral rebels
I’m not at my best when writing in a harsh tone. I much prefer to state positions and ideals positively in terms of principle and its relation to practice. But there are often occasions when plain, blunt speaking is required. And the quiet need to be less quiet. I think politics is heading in the wrong direction, and I feel the need to say so plainly.
I would like to begin with a number of quotes from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, each of them worthy of being pondered in themselves, all of them together indicating the human predicament in any time and place. The words apply particularly in light of current affairs.
“To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.”
“Surrender one hair, and you'll end up beardless.”
“But it is human to be outraged by injustice, even to the point of courting destruction!”
“It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.”
“If only there were evil people out there insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were just simple, we could separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who among us is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart.”
“The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.”
“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.”
There will be people who will say that society is already built on a violence that is concealed by a lie. The domination and exploitation of some by others has ever been by force and fraud. That’s the cynical view of politics. It is the view that Machiavelli presented so forthrightly in The Prince. That view contradicts the ancient notion of politics as a creative and common flourishing within a public life and community. To reduce politics to force and fraud and seek to challenge and overturn the prevailing power by the very same means is no victory for truth, justice, and equality, merely a confirmation of their denial by a continuation of the old sophist rule of power as might.
Violence, lawlessness, and anarchy is being loosened, and it is apparent that people, society, and government have lost the internal and external capacity to exercise the restraints, inhibitions, and brakes to check against escalation.
The loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework has meant that morality in the modern world is no more than the competition of rival goods in the moral marketplace, an irreducible subjective opinion in which there are no ways of evaluating and adjudicating between rival claims. Each person is able to choose the good as he or she sees fit, so long as it does no harm to other persons. So far, so liberatory. The problem is that morality can never be merely personal but possesses an ineliminable social dimension. When it comes to the universal claims that society needs in order to advise, guide, and direct its common affairs, the limitations of a subjectivist ethics (whether we call this emotivism or expressivism) become apparent. Until now, the political realm has been able to mediate the intractable conflicts that arise from the trading of incommensurate values in the moral marketplace. In conditions of broad equality, or at least a commitment to a redistributive politics that move in the direction of less inequality, and a stable and expanding economy, the lack of a moral compass is survivable and politics can perform the task of mediation. But that condition is precarious, parasitic upon circumstances that can no longer be guaranteed. A continued and deepening economic crisis, entrenched and intensified social divisions, and pervasive insecurity and instability have combined to expose the lack of universality and commonality in the political, social, and moral fabric. Crisis exposes this lack to be glaring. When taken into the public square, these incommensurate values turn politics into outright intractable war with no peace and reconciliation possible.
The conventional political sphere is paralysed in face of myriad and converging crises, and has been for some time now. Too few are prepared to analyse the material roots and class dynamics behind the contemporary crisis of the capital system. Instead, there is a complacent believe that the system which has delivered material largesse in such quantities – which it has, however unevenly distributed – can continue in perpetuity. Those days have gone. On one side, there is a denial of crisis, on the other there is an insistence on change to resolve crisis. The ruling class won this battle within conventional politics, and have secured politics against the need for radical social transformation. At the same time, those pressing for such change have not been able to formulate a programme that is remotely plausible in electoral terms.
But crisis and need for change there certainly is. The peaceful, reasonable, creative, and positive way to resolve the issue has, for one reason or another, been blocked. Politics is now increasingly spilling out into the streets. Groups convinced that they have truth and justice on their side are now no longer willing to play the game of dialogue and negotiation, having seen their cases obstructed, distorted, and ignored for so long. We have seen this this past year with Extinction Rebellion. I have criticized the extra-legal strategy as an anti-politics. When you ‘tell the truth’ to politics, there is nothing to discuss or negotiation. Since the ends are pre-determined, all that there is for people and politics to do is work out the means. The idea that the political process of engagement and dialogue can draw out the truths of any given situation is precluded. This isn’t politics, it is the end of politics. To deliberately break the law to advance such an anti-politics is utterly irresponsible and dangerous, for the reason that, to the extent it succeeds, it does so by weakening the authority of and respect in the public institutions required to carry out what, in the case of climate action, can only be public action. Once you have demonstrated the weakness of public authority, so that with sufficient pressure you can enforce your particular concerns onto the public agenda, other groups are free to follow suit. The complacent presumption is that only our kind of people, with truth and rightness on their side, have the privilege to flout the law. Only we, the non-violent and peaceful protestors, can engage in a concerted programme of disobedience. The problem is that when the rules can be broken, they can be broken without clause and qualification. Who says that law-breaking must be peaceful and non-violent?
We now see politics being taken to the streets, with one large mass of loud and self-righteous protestors exchanging insults – and often projectiles – at each other, police in between and the public caught in the crossfire. In the aftermath we have to go through the charade of crowd estimates, as if numbers prove the rightness of the cause one way or the other. We have a way of determining the legitimacy of competing platforms in politics by counting support – they are called elections. It is startling to consider how little has been learned by the recent election defeats of Labour. The Left has become disconnected from and lost an awful lot of working class people, with formerly solid Labour towns voting Conservative at the last general election. Somewhere, the Left and its intelligentsia and activists have abandoned working class people, and those people are now abandoning the Left. One very strong reason for this, I would suggest, is the switch from socio-economic issues and class interests to culture and identity, which results in a politics that is detached from the bread-and-butter common-or-garden mundane issues of everyday common concern to ‘ordinary’ people. These things have dropped down the list of priorities, and in many cases dropped off that list. And people have accordingly dropped off in the level of their support for Left politics. Minority issues and identity politics can never converge to sum to form a genuine public, no matter how hard the intellectuals of this new Left may try with terms like inter-sectionality. It’s not working and we know that it’s not working from the fact that the Left in politics is dwindling away as a serious force for real, effective, and constructive change. The distance from socio-economic realities is telling, and reveals the extent to which this so-called Left is no Left at all, but a liberalism in a decadent phase. There is no structural force behind the demands, no roots in the working class, no programme for system-change. System-change is merely a slogan. Look closely, there are no realistic proposals for real change, certainly none that have any structural capacity on the part of real agents behind them. There are paper proposals to be enacted by government and new business. That reveals the extent to which there is no substantive politics here, only a pressure group politics on steroids, levelling up demands on government and business, basically demanding reparations and redistribution with respect to a fundamentally unchanged economy.
With respect to the now increasing and repeated disorder in public places, the clashes with police and the destruction and defacement of public monuments, this is violence pure and simple, contradicting any principle the perpetrators purport to support and advance. When police officers with shields and riot gear struggle to contain the violence a short distance from the heart of government, even turn tail and run, being kicked up the backside, under a hail of bottles, then we are not far from a collapse of authority, law, and order. The flagrant disrespect of constituted authority shouldn’t be surprising – the devaluation and diminution of the public realm has been systematically engineered by those promoting a neoliberal agenda to unleash the global anarchy of the rich and powerful. Here we see how that anti-public morality has trickled down into a society that can no longer recognize common bonds and solidarities – because there are none. ‘There is no such thing as society,’ declared Margaret Thatcher, ‘only individuals.’ Individuals and particular groups pushing agendas. Without a commitment to legitimate public authority, this conflict is limitless and endless, and any demands being made cannot be met. There can be no constructive politics on this basis, this kind of anti-politics is entirely destructive, involving the constant raising of impossible demands until the public realm gives. That may be the reasoning on the part of some, the deliberate destruction of the prevailing order so that the new, somehow, emerges. The constructive work of the new social order is conspicuous by its absence, certainly with respect to platforms that are offered publicly for deliberation, support and assent.
This is concerted law-breaking. The extent to which it is co-ordinated can be debated. There are groups who plan and organize these events, many are a criminal anti-public rabble who join in, to assault police and the public realm, to rob and loot and commit violence. There are actually anti-social people who enjoy doing that kind of thing, who test the limits of the authorities to see how far they can go. Any weakness in response, and they go further.
The part that interests me is the extent to which white liberal comfortable middle class people have not merely been complicit but permissive and even supportive.
I have seen footage of business men and women trying to protect their premises from looters, many being viciously assaulted in the process. At the same time, I have seen people on social media, plainly from comfortable backgrounds, safe in their compounds, no doubt having lived a life on which they can presume police protection as and when they should ever need it, post memes such as this:
‘You don’t like looting? You will hate the British Museum.’
They compare ‘amateur looters’ with ‘world-class looters.’
This is just a modish and utterly fake radicalism on the part of people who I know for a fact shun any radical programmes for structural change involving the material organisations of the working class. Time and again I have posted my work on Marx, socialism, and system change, getting into the structures and institutions of the capital system. These people give the issue not a second glance, and the reason is obvious – radical chic is easy, it is easy in both theory and practice. It is also complacent. There is a lot of complacency in this society. And it is dangerous. In fact, it is politically suicidal for the Left – people will distance themselves in droves - and socially suicidal – society will implode from within if these negative and destructive attitudes are not checked. Basically, there is a naïve cynicism on the part of the decadent left liberal crowd, because they really don’t commit to the hard yards of real political change, they despair of actually ever persuading people to their platforms, so they drift ever further into impossibilities and ideal detached from their means of realisation, inviting rejection and defeat. It’s a naïve cynicism because the ideals are set at the impossible level to invite a defeat that is sure to come, ensuring remediable problems get progressively worse, allowing the idealists to tell us ‘I told you so.’
For the record, I have consistently argued, at length and in depth, for the practical restitution of social power alienated to extraneous forms of governance and accumulative economic provision. I am at pains to emphasize that this involves far more than the simplistic notion of ‘expropriating the expropriators,’ something which is easily enough done in the first instance, by force, but which in itself does nothing to change the underlying relation and logic of capital. Get system change wrong here and you will find yourselves presiding over either a destroyed economy or a continued capital form, under the authoritarian rule of the state.
So I find this complacent attitude towards looting an utter abomination for at least two reasons.
In the first place, it indicates how utterly shallow and dangerously simplistic the radicalism of such radicals actually is. They are socio-economic and institutional illiterates. Bring down a social order on this basis of this, and the reinstitution of order by way of tyranny via chaos is entirely predictable. In other words, such people are not serious about the constructive demands of building a new social order and haven’t the first idea how to engage in institution building. They have no interest in it, and no interest in building a genuinely mass movement and collective agency. Their passive support at a safe distance plays into the hands of vandals and wreckers hell-bent on destruction, with a view to riding chaos to power.
In the second place, I do object very much to looting. To excuse ‘amateur’ looting by pointing to the professional large-scale looting by capitalist enclosure and expropriation is merely to normalize looting. That totally undercuts the argument for socialism as entailing a practical reappropriation of alienated power, as against the systemic appropriation of labour and land. It seems we are all looters now. Some are good at it, some not so good. The rich are doing it, so the rest of us can do it. But instead of the concerted, coordinated programme of restitution, which is how I present socialism, involving the transformation of social relations and structures, there is a justification of the ‘amateurs’ helping themselves to local businesses and properties. It is the destruction of local community, telling all those who put a shift in to make those communities healthy and vital that they are available to be predated upon. Once those businesses go, they go – I have seen it in my own community, when people have been subject to robbery and violence. And people stop putting the effort in. Communities with and die.
So, yes, I do dislike looting, and I dislike, too, the complacent, permissive attitude of people who, at a safe distance, no doubt able to count on the protection of the police, as all nice middle class people have been able to do throughout their lives, apologize for a looting and a violence that impacts upon others. What is most startling of all to witness is this odious alliance of pampered middle class liberals – incredibly privileged if we wish to play that game – with feral elements of working class communities, the people who prey and predate upon ordinary, decent, hard-working members of those communities.
You want an end to professional looting? Then become a socialist, put a shift in, join with working class people and their organisations and trade unions, and seek to win people to your political platform, win numbers, build a constituency.
Such people confess ‘white privilege’ often enough, without giving anything up at the same time, expecting society in general to make the sacrifices on their behalf. Instead of asking ‘government,’ that is people in general, make reparations, how about the white people who are most vocal on slavery empty their accounts and sell their properties and hand over their money, if they are so passionate about justice.
It’s an old issue
And then there is the staggering hypobook entitled Divided Societiescrisy at the level of principle. The liberal left have been most vocal in demanding and justifying early and prompt action on Covid-19, demanding lockdown, constantly monitoring the behaviour of people who, for one reason or another, have been breaking the rules while the R-rate hovers close to one. This was all immediately thrown aside when it came to mass protest.
The rioting and violence was predictable from the start and became inevitable when prominent figures fell over themselves to signal their support for Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the authorities followed suit and caved in in face of demonstrations that involved behaviour that went beyond the pale. The noble cause of justice has been hijacked and turned to political ends quite detached from the specific case.
These demonstrations and protests are in flagrant defiance of lockdown guidelines and have spilled over into violence and destruction involving injury to police officers and destruction of public monuments and private property. The evidence of a pathological hypocrisy is impossible to ignore, not merely for the hypocrisy it is in this instance but for the indication of the extent to which we are in the presence of a politics that is duplicitous, employing principles and values merely as adjuncts of power. That these principles and values – justice, non-violence, lockdown etc – can be betrayed so quickly and so easily, and either ignored or rationalized away, indicates that we are in the presence of a politics that will betray the liberty, health, and happiness of people without compunction.
In trying to reach out and build bridges, public authority revealed itself to be weak and vulnerable. This is not surprising. We have had four decades and more of a systematic denigration of the public realm. Government has been captured by people with an ideological predisposition against the use of government for the public good. Instead, we have been taught that freedom and happiness are functions of private interests and private choices. We now see that public authority in all its institutional forms lacks confidence, clarity, identity, purpose, and direction. When called upon to restate public purpose, it could not do so – it has lost fluency in the language.
The police in some cases kneeled before the mob, but were still assaulted for their obeisance and had to turn and run as the mob turned violent. There is some hope in the fact that members of the public have yet to give in and accept such sights as the new normal, and expressed anger to demand that law and order be properly enforced and respected. Once lawlessness is permitted, even encouraged, then more of the same follows. A couple of years ago I wrote a hard-hitting piece entitled ‘Liberal society – immoral and lawless.’ That is a controversial title, not least because it would appear to express views that contradict my consistently leftist politics. But the anarchy that is being loosened in social and public life is not accidental, it is in the subjectivist, ultimately nihilistic, DNA of modern moral culture. The middle class liberal radicals playing with matches on this have no idea of the fires they are lighting, they have a very complacent view of social order. Basically, they take law and order for granted.
These are dangerous times when the Cenotaph in Whitehall is attacked on D-Day. That shows the extent to which, when the public realm retreats, how little public unity and consensus there actually is in society. Official occasions give the impression of unity through pomp and ceremony, but it’s an organized illusion. Society is split from head to toe. Reinstituting authority cannot be by force. If you try to maintain unity and order by force and fraud alone, the day will come when it will all crack apart. We have seen this in recent weeks. You have to establish commonality and universality at the heart of social relationships, recovering the associational space of civil society. In 1989 Ralph Miliband published a book entitled Divided Societies. The divisions have deepened and intensified since then. We are now living in the aftermath of 1980s privatisation and deregulation, 1990s corporatisation and globalisation, the 2000s economic crash, and 2010s austerity. The rich and powerful and their apologists – many of whom who are now most vocal about the breakdown of law and order – have presided over this era, playing fast and loose with the bonds and ties of civil society. Now is the time to advance a politics of socialisation aimed at restoring publicity, civility, and unity, around universal issues of justice and equality. What is most despairing for me is seeing how very easily and quickly this so-called left can blow it, for the reason that they seem congenitally incapable of throwing off the politics of permanent protest. When a real politics of substantive transformation is called for, involving organisation and engagement with people in building a mass constituency, we get the street politics of protest and pressure groups on steroids – more of the same only louder and harder. This goes two ways – you exhaust the public, who throw their weight behind an authoritarian pushback, or the whole public order collapses. If you think anything progressively leftist or emancipatory follows then you are a fool.
A debate on police racism in the US over the actions of one police officer and his three colleagues has turned into an attack on almost everything in Britain’s past. This overspill is dangerous, but indicates the presence of something ill-balanced in contemporary society and culture.
I am basically making myself miserable and hopeless doing this, revealing as they do how shallow the radicalism and principles of people are. They are really opening the doors to barbarism from below, a barbarism that those have been preparing from above for decades now. There are people who are now saying that the quiet majority now need to find their voice. Because if they don’t, not only will their wishes be overlooked, crushed, their numbers will in time fall away as many just give up hope of ever seeing public decency and morality being defended. The boundaries will have been transgressed so often for so long that they no longer exist. Isn’t that precisely what has happened within popular culture? All the sex and violence in music and entertainment that was once considered transgressive is now utterly conformist and conventional. The backlash may well come from within the basic sense of decency in people at large. When the authorities give up the ghost, then the common moral decency of the people is our last and maybe only hope.
The problem is not the people who feel racism an inhuman injustice to be eradicated, it is the people who raise this and any issue as the single most important issue, overriding all other concerns, proceeding to portray Britain – and the United States – as an irredeemable hell-hole riven with an ‘institutional racism’ that is incapable of reform. The whole building must be burned down, and all those complicit in it too.
The protest and discussion is accompanied by statements which say that Britain needs to debate its past. I rather thought this debate and discussion had been taking place. From university courses, school lessons, to television shows, the ‘hidden’ view of history has been out in the open. Good grief, it seems that the exposé of the myths and secrets of history has been the only way to have a television programme about history made in recent times. Lucy Worsley’s ‘History’s Biggest Fibs’ from a few years ago indicates the dominant theme.
Here’s the thing about debate, just because you air issues and make demands doesn’t meant that everyone is obliged to agree. You don’t necessarily get the general acceptance and broad change you want. Imposing views and enforcing change so that your view prevails is not the same thing as debate. People are free to disagree, you are not free to impose truth. So where is the commitment to open debate and discussion?
An indication of the pernicious effects of the drip-drip of a one-sided, acidic, deconstructive approach over time can be seen in the overspill in which protests against the abhorrent murder of an unarmed black man by a Minnesota policeman leads to assaults on the police, the defacement of public monuments, and destruction of property in the UK and elsewhere. The fact is that the authorities are caught in a catch-22 which demands clear strong leadership. If they respond appropriately to the assault on public space, they stand accused of racism. They reached out in the interests of public peace and were met with assault. The authorities need to stand firm, not stand by, when confronted with deliberate mass law-breaking.
It is one short step from unravelling the past to unravelling the present, as society loses its common bearings and moorings. The laws protect all, when they are dissolved society is a free-for-all in which predators roam in search of easy pickings. If you remain quiet in the hope of an easy life, you will find life becoming less and less easy.
The way in which the authorities stood back in face of law-breaking indicated a loss of nerve. This is an inevitable result of the general corruption of society from within. Like people in general, like politicians, like the media, the authorities now fear breaking a herd mentality that has been cultivated around certain issues. On this issue, they fear that taking any action undertaken in the name of BLM will lead to accusations of racism and hence justify the claims of the protests and generate further protests. It is difficult to avoid creating a destructive cycle either way. Hence the need for authority to command authority, stake out its case, reclaim the public good, and give a lead in hope and expectation that the general population will be on its side. Without that firm leadership, the public finally collapses in a state of hopelessness in the face of lawlessness.
We are now witnessing the consequences of the long retreat from moral community, civility, public interest, and reason over recent decades. The destruction of the public realm and of the public imagination has been engineered from above as a political project aimed at redistributing wealth and power to the possessing class. This is trickle down economics at work in practice, with the money being siphoned upwards to the super-rich as the anti-public immorality trickles downwards. No wonder people rip public space apart, given the lead that has been set by the dominant class. I would say a plague on all their houses were it not for the fact I now fine well that this plague will fall on all of us. The defacement of public monuments mirrors the destruction of public space, the mob rule on our streets is a physical expression of the seething mob who foment hatred and nurture grievance daily on the internet.
The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis was abhorrent, the actions of the policemen involved callous and indefensible. I have yet to hear anyone who disagrees. All involved are now in custody awaiting justice. So why the protest? What more is demanded beyond the justice meted out in the courts? The overspill is the worrying issue, the speed with which so many people have been ready to apportion the blame so far and so wide as to catch so many in the net of racism. From the discrete actions of one policeman and three of his colleagues in Minnesota (all of whom have been charged with murder and are in custody awaiting trial) people are demanding collective contrition for the past, accompanied by the complete elimination of those parts of history and culture they see fit to eliminate. Demands without debate. We’ve had the debate and nothing has been done has been one response. Debate doesn’t necessarily mean that all parties will agree with your platform. On the contrary, they may disagree, and are perfectly entitled to. Change comes in time, if it needs to.
Entirely contrary to the spirit of disagreement with a view to possible agreement is the attempt to reshape culture and society in the image of active, organized groups of ideologues. This is done by undermining dialogue, denying the legitimacy of contrary voices and alternate platforms, deterring dissent by cultivating loyalty around non-negotiable truths, and engaging in intellectual bullying and moral intimidation.
In time, people feel the need to join in, lest their silence be construed as not merely disagreement, but as support for the actions being protested. I noted this pernicious, and utterly self-destructive trait, in the politics of protest last year, and I continue to underline how it betrays the normative commitments and public goals of the Left in politics. That makes me such a lone voice on the Left that many will conclude, simply, that I am not on the Left at all. I really don’t care about names, my loyalties are to the principles rather than the symbols. Beyond political division and the loyalties of left and right, I have never been one to follow a herd. I have been semi-detached and pretty much on my own my entire life. It became clear in discussion with my doctor last year that in all likelihood I have Asperger’s, and an extreme case at that. I have lived a life in exile and have faced abuse from people, and contempt, when not being ignored in complete indifference. I really don’t intimidate easily in face of intimidation and bullying, spot the pressures very easily and very early, and don’t join in in order to maintain a safe place among the herd. I have never had a safe place, for the reason I have never been a member of the herd. I have never had a tribe, I have always walked alone. I am free to call things out clearly. Not only do I not fear the shaming and intimidation and threats and punishments, I take them on. And I will never join in parroting slogans and performing ritual acts of enforced solidarity for fear of standing apart.
Why has our culture dissolved like this?
People who ask that question seem genuinely perplexed. The only thing that perplexes me is that people
haven’t seen the dissolution of our society and culture coming from way back; and
even now can’t read the writing on the wall.
Whatever happened to polite disagreement? Whatever happened to healthy debate? I don’t know how seriously to take conservative critics who ask these questions, given the extent to which they have been involved in abusing alternative platforms in politics – long before Corbyn the same people were presenting Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock, and Ed Miliband as extreme left. The same sources also portrayed Gordon Brown, for crying out loud, as a Bolshevik. There has been little healthy about political disagreement and debate for a long, long time. You have raised a public in your image. As part of a movement advancing environmentalist issues I have long experience of hard-right voices spreading misinformation, obstructing debate, splitting people up.
It’s politics, identify an enemy and neutralize it. That works only in a culture and a community that is stable around broadly shared norms and ideals. Remove those, and the politics of division and competition spills over to encompass the entire moral and intellectual fabric of society.
Toppled statues, burned flags, defaced monuments, looted shops, social media activism.
None of these is the way to create the common good. Not only are these acts wrong in themselves, they foster an attitude and a mentality, a psyche of immunity with impunity, that is the very antithesis of public virtue. People are crying out for a genuine public community but very few have much of an idea – let alone much capacity – to create it. In fact, it seems that very people even know what a good, flourishing society looks like, as a genuine public life beyond their own private wishes, still less how to create one.
I have set out my views on the common good in a range of works, and refer people to those. Underlying my work in philosophy, politics, environmentalism, and social theory is a commitment to holding the connection between reason and freedom leading to public happiness.
The fracturing comes from the irreducible ethical and social conflict at the heart of the modern society. Human beings are divided into classes with structurally competing and contradictory interests. Instead of a stakeholder society, we live in divided societies. I argued this from the first in my work on Marx, seeking a Marxist way out. In time I came to realize that the problem goes deeper than the socio-economic structure and a transformation limited to material things – ‘things’ owned and shared in common are no substitute for a God that enfolds all things. The problem is that there is no overarching substantive good, only a plurality of different goods as a matter of subjective preference and choice; morality has become no more than irreducible subjective opinion.
My work thus seeks to branch out from the socio-economic structure to encompass the moral infrastructure. Interestingly, some such thing has also happened on the Left, but with very different motivations and ends. I have sought to establish the grounds for universality and commonality in deeper and more enduring ways than are possible through economic interests and social actions, taking me into the areas of moral character, conduct, and community. None of that implies an abandonment of issues of class, exploitation, material organisation, only that these be set in a wider ethical and associative frame in a society in which individuals can practise self-restraint and self-governance, setting the economics of socialism within a sociology and morality of social-ism. Those who struggle to understand that could try to envisage it as a blend of Marx and Tocqueville.
I sought to take the universality and commonality to be achieved by way of socio-economic transformation into an explicitly ethical and social realm, emphasising the creation of warm, affective bonds and ties and communities of virtuous practice. In other words, my approach is based on a commitment to universal principles, common ends, and transcendent standards, and seeks their realisation through appropriate communal forms. This is consistent with my initial investigations of Marx, seeking to relate the struggle for socialism to the principles and ends of the just and egalitarian social order. In other words, I was concerned to identify the point and purpose of political struggle and render this explicit at the level of a regulative principle capable of inspiring and guiding practice. That led me into ethics and into social practice and modes of character and conduct as the means by which the good and flourishing society is constituted and maintained.
As against this, the new Left of recent decades have taken a very different approach, effectively abandoning the socio-economic struggle for cultural struggle. The revolutionary proletariat – let’s just say ‘the common people,’ ‘ordinary’ men and women concerned, not unreasonably, with bread and butter issues - continue to disappoint those with high ideals and ambitious agendas, settling for a place within the prevailing social order rather than destroying it all root and branch in favour of the vagaries of an alternative future. In the absence of constructive models of that future, let alone the practical means and mechanisms of delivering that future, people will rightly remain sceptical, even hostile the more unbelievable the claims become.
Those failures make it even easier for those defending a status quo, seeking to entrench and extend the sources of iniquitous power in order to obstruct change in the conventional political realm. The old levers of socialist transformation had stopped working long ago – politics, economics, and proletariat had all become immune to a socialism that had ossified in sterile forms. I had seen the blockage in these areas, and the general retreat from Marx and socialism, and decided to excavate the ethical and intellectual roots of Left politics in order to recover and rejuvenate the point and principle. That involved searching into the transcendent sources of principles of reason, truth, and justice and coming back with a different way of constituting true order. It may well be that in taking that tack, I ended up breaking with socialism and the Left. My view is that there are underlying assumptions in Marx’s work that Marx himself took for granted – the commitment to truth and justice, the commitment to human self-realisation, the idea that each person counts equally, the Judaeo-Christian inheritance. These were either historical achievements that Marx assumed to be part of the permanent human record, to be developed and enriched, or transcendentals in any other name. In developing Marx and socialism in this way, there is a very good chance that I have left the Left to embrace whatever politics is consistent with living in accordance with the three transcendentals. Either way, there is no doubt that I am out of kilter with this new Left. I see it as a liberalism in extremis and decadence, the liberatory claims in the modern project of self-creation taken to extremes. The same with the anarchistic economic libertarian of the right, which is inimical to all communitarian purpose and collective bonds, other than extraneous impositions of unity to maintain law and order.
Instead of digging into principles and purposes and cleaving to those, the Left retained the commitment to overthrow capitalism and took the struggle into the cultural realm. It did this not to create, but to destroy. The constructive work of building the new social republic within the shell of the old, which characterised the socialist movement in its early stages, continued to dwindle away. The rot started with the switch to a party political socialism aiming at government power, in both Social (parliamentary) Democratic and Communist incarnations. It was all about ‘the party’ and the cadre, and not working class self-activity and self-organisation. That rot set in decades ago. And perhaps it set in because the working class were not, and never were, the revolutionary class Marx thought they were. Values, ideals, purposes, and ambitions were projected upon working people who thought and acted differently. I was at pains to show that that is not actually how Marx argued his case for socialism, situating the struggle within processes of self-emancipation under the authorship and control of the working class themselves. The switch within socialism was actually announced in the very early stages of socialism as a political movement. That the switch characterised both revolutionary and reformist positions puts an end to the idea that the problem lay with the one and is resolved by the other. Lenin the Communist followed Kautsky the Social Democrat in asserting that, alone and unaided, the working class is able to attain only a ‘trade union’ or economistic consciousness, and that socialism needs to be brought into the workers’ movement ‘from the outside,’ by the intelligentsia, the professional, educated cadre trained in correct ideology. The switch from socio-economic issues and self-organisation to culture and extraneous organisation was there from the very beginning of the twentieth century. The twentieth century was thus a story of a long retreat from and defeat of socialism. There were gains. Much that is celebrated as the triumph of capitalism, in terms of wealth and democracy, is actually a result of adaptation and incorporation in response to the socialist challenge. But the upshot is that capitalist institutions and relations remain very much intact and in place, and most decidedly not overthrown.
I have continued to argue for socialism. In 2018, on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Marx, I made a strong argument for the continued cogency of Marx’s critique of the capital system. That work is firmly focused on the socio-economic terrain, on institutional analysis, the rule and logic of capital, and the process of self-emancipation. I may be living in fantasy land, given the absence of a broad, mass proletarian movement, as distinct from concerted, continuous protest. The difference is that the former builds a new social order, the latter wears the old order down. I want to see work of construction in the process of destruction, so that one order rises as one dissolves. To focus on the destruction in the belief that a new order will arise spontaneously is, at best, a romantic delusion, but in the main a nihilistic fancy on the part of people who
The position is based on a profound pessimism. Deep down, activists know that the people are not with them and suspect that their views, however convinced they are of their fundamental rightness, have no future; they use the force of activism because they lack faith in the persuasive power of their ideas.
Or, more accurately, they understand that the power to persuade in the public realm of politics requires the cultivation of new norms, values, and mentalities in the realm of communication and interaction. Hence the switch to the cultural dimension.
This could certainly be constructive and educative work, and in many respects has been such. In the long run, the modalities based on increasingly outmoded mentalities will fall away. To work, though, there has to be genuinely constructive work, creating new ethical, psychic, and social supports in place of the ones to be uprooted. All things destroyed stand in need of replacement, supplanting the old instead of merely destroying it.
This is where I become nervous and leery. My commitment to an alternate social order is one that is predicated on constructive efforts, modes of conduct, and participatory structures under the control of the people themselves, and not their self-appointed educators. My Tocquevillian instincts kick-in here to emphasize habits of the heart formed and maintained in associational space. Is this where I have left the Left and become conservative? In truth, I don’t really care, given that I am a member of no political party and hence without a dog in the fight.
The basic institutions of the social order have been targeted in a seek-and-destroy mission, either colonized and subverted from within – with respect to media, education, the academy – or plain assaulted from the outside – the family, the churches, and religion. The direct assault upon the socio-economic centres of capitalist power blocked, energies were switched to an indirect assault on the social and cultural supports of the capitalist social order. Severed from work of reconstruction, such
The problem is that these centres are also the essential supports of any viable society; they must be replaced in the process of destruction. To destroy these without replacing them brings only division and anarchy in a lawless wasteland in which the worst elements predate on society – that is breakdown and barbarism.
The goal of uprooting capitalism with a view to constituting a unified and just social order is something I have advanced my entire life as a positive emancipatory project that realizes immanent potentialities. That is precisely the argument I made forcefully in 2018 in Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx. When I first studied Marx in depth, Leszek Kolakowski’s immense three volumes of Main Currents in Marxism was a huge study to contend with.
Leszek Kolakowski, one of the world’s foremost students—and critics—of Marxism, thought he had buried the communist idea as long ago as 1974. “The only medicine communism has invented—the centralized, beyond social control, state ownership of the national wealth and one-party rule—is worse than the illness it is supposed to cure,” he wrote in a damning open letter published in the Socialist Register. Arguing that the communist idea could never be successfully modified or revived, he concluded: “This skull will never smile again.”
In writing on Marx, I sought to make the skull smile, and maybe for the first time, in an effort to rescue Marx’s politics from the Communist prison into which they continually fall. In seeking to rescue Marx’s emancipatory commitments from the Communist ruins, I had to make clear that state centralisation and authoritarian tyranny were not necessary developments of Marxist politics. The last chapter of Kolakowski’s third volumes opens with this passage:
Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century. It was a dream offering the prospect of a society of perfect unity, in which all human aspirations would be fulfilled and all values reconciled. It took over Hegel's theory of the 'contradictions of progress', but also the liberal-evolutionist belief that 'in the last resort' the course of history was inevitably for the better, and that man's increasing command over nature would, after an interval, be matched by increasing freedom. It owed much of its success to the combination of Messianic fantasies with a specific and genuine social cause, the struggle of the European working class against poverty and exploitation. This combination was expressed in a coherent doctrine with the absurd name (derived from Proudhon) of 'scientific socialism'—absurd because the means of attaining an end may be scientific, but not the choice of the end itself. The name, however, reflected more than the mere cult of science which Marx shared with the rest of his generation. [It expressed the belief, discussed critically more than once in the course of the present work, that human knowledge and human practice, directed by the will, must ultimately coincide and become inseparable in a perfect unity: so that the choice of ends would indeed become identical with the cognitive and practical means of attaining them. The natural consequence of this confusion was the idea that the success of a particular social movement was a proof that it was scientifically 'true', or, in effect, that whoever proved to be stronger must have 'science' on his side. This idea is largely responsible for all the anti-scientific and anti-intellectual features of Marxism in its particular guise as the ideology of Communism.
Against this, I am at pains in my Marx studies to emphasise how Marx argues precisely with respect to material processes, contradictory dynamics, class relations, and, of immense importance, the nature of critique as practical, participatory, and experiential – there is no extraneous truth for the masses to bow down to and worship. At the same time, I was always aware of the possibilities of political short-cuts opening up a democratic deficit, and have become increasingly aware of the dangers of this tendency. This refers specifically to the tendencies of people whom Marx called ‘workers’ dictators,’ ‘would be universal reformers,’ and ‘alchemists of revolution’ seeking to fast-forward the revolutionary process mechanically by way of their organized intervention and force. It is in this way that the goal of socialist revolution – human emancipation in general – comes to be distorted in being reduced to the destruction and overthrow of capitalism as something irremediably corrupt and evil. Marx did indeed believe the crises of capital to be endemic and systemic, and hence contradictions that could not be just reformed away. At the same time, Marx engaged in an immanent critique, seeing the potentialities for socialism as inherent in existing lines of development. The socialist revolution was therefore an organic process, albeit it with a quick, qualitative change, a midwifery. It is not a nihilistic process of destruction wiping out the existent. Those who think it is seem to think that the new social order will appear by way of some spontaneous magic out of the ruins. If they think at all. There is a curious parallel here with disaster capitalism. Instead of a progressive realisation of immanent potentialities there is a deliberate engineering of chaos in the hope that the There is precious little, if any, constructive work going on, and little activity, effort, and organisation beyond endless protest as a war of attrition designed to wear resistance down. To the extent that that pressure is maintained to force government into taking action and undertaking commitments on certain issues, it is a dangerous game, and one that overestimates the power of government within the capital system. The state is capital’s political command centre, one of capital’s second order mediations, integral to the functioning and reproduction of the system; it is not and can never be the agency of system change, and to compel it to play that role is either naïve or cynical – naïve because there will be no change this way, cynical because those pushing in this direction know this fine well and are basically employing radical rhetoric to engineer transition to a green accumulation. Against this are those who identify the state and capital as enemies to be extirpated. That, I insist, is a very different notion to the practical restitution of power alienated to the state and capital to social bodies. Without a whole organisational infrastructure rooted in popular organs of control, the project is so fantastical as to be a dangerous delusion.
The movement has become almost entirely destructive, unable to relate the struggle against the capital system with the necessary work of institutional, social, and ethical reconstruction. I thoroughly reject any accusation that I have abandoned the Left project of social justice and socialism. I maintain that Marx himself would dissociate himself from a movement that has become so preoccupied with the task of destruction as to pay next to no attention to reconstruction. Marx would be asking questions of organisational and structural capacity to act; he would want to know about the roots of any politics in the material organisations and interests of ordinary working people. I see little of these roots. I see an obsession with words and intellectual constructs which leaves ordinary people cold when it doesn’t anger them. I see no genuine universality; I see the end of the Left.
The cultural turn is no turn to true culture at all. Instead it weaponizes culture, seeing in culture no more than a means of education and indoctrination, reducing it to a tool of politics and a technology of power. This results in a divisive culture within society, a closing down of the imagination. Instead of freeing people to let the imagination wander, a herd mentality is cultivated so that people are conformed to certain views. This results in a society in which individuals, for fear of being isolated and becoming targets themselves, have to condemn other people to avert the threat of being condemned in turn.
deranged behaviour
The behaviour of the crowd present at the dismantling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was unhinged. I’m not going to stand bail for Colston or whoever. I dislike the politics of mobs. Having been pretty much on the outside my entire life, having never found a group or a party or a tribe of my own, I appreciate rules, law, order, due process in order to have any voice at all. We can debate the rights and wrong of this statue and others, but the manner in which it was pulled down, and others defaced, was shocking. It is not just the acts but the manner of them. There is something deranged about it all. I don’t know whether to be reassured or even more alarmed by the fact that these assaults are organised and show evidence of planning. At least that shows an element of rationality that indicates we are not quite standing at the brink of barbarism. But it is scant consolation. Looking into the actions of the crowd, and seeing their reactions, is nothing less than worrying. There is a frenzy and an ecstasy that is orgiastic. There is a sexual thrill and perversion in the taste for aggression and force. This is not the rational public sphere with which I identified the Left in politics. There is none of the force of the better argument at work in such exchanges, only the imposition of an argument on the assumption that it just is the better argument, to which all must submit. The sight of the crowd jumping up and down on toppled statues, setting them alight, dragging them through streets, dumping them in rivers or fountains, is unhinged. You would think they had been living under jackbooted oppression for decades and were toppling Hitler.
This mentality spills over into dealings with real flesh and blood people. People and police officers are being assaulted. Take a look at the video of the policewoman being unhorsed in the Trafalgar Square demonstrations. She was hospitalized after a high-speed collision hitting her head on traffic lights. The crowd are cheering and whooping wildly. This is pathological. Take a look at the video of the police officer being assaulted in the street, his female colleague too as she tries to prevent the assault. Instead of helping, members of the public film the assault, celebrate it, laugh and jeer, and even dance for joy. If that doesn’t worry people, then it ought to. This is the route to lawless violence.
Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes.
cowardice and complicity
What has been even more shocking has been the cowardice and compliance of the authorities, including the police. Police chiefs have clearly taken the decision to avoid confrontation and not respond to provocation. They may well have realized that they had a powder keg on their hands, with a crowd spoiling for a fight. Had the police responded to preserve public order they risked being accused of racism. So the police held back and stood by. That may have been a wise decision that averted a scene that could have entrenched and intensified divisions, leading to further violent confrontation. The authorities may be buying time to recover. They could also be showing a weakness that encourages further violent encroachment on public space. We should know by way of historical experience that there are elements in crowds of this kind who are concerned most of all to test the limits and wear down the patience of the authorities, seeing how far they are allowed to go, weakening resolve so as to go further.
That the police leadership will know this leaves one of two conclusions to be drawn: 1) the need to be cautious to avoid the kind of conflict that will give grounds for further conflict; 2) cowardice and/or paralysis, not knowing what to do or not having the guts to do it.
The attempts to topple statues, or deface them, have been widespread, and has spilled over into the field of film and entertainment. Not a day goes by without people making statements demonstrating their credentials, ratcheting up the pressure. All the time, there is further overspill until the dissection becomes pervasive.
history
Things once considered uncontroversial and unthreatening, even in the recent past, are now considered so offensive as to require banning and censorship through a relentlessly unreasonable cultural purge.
Members of Minneapolis City Council have announced their intention to ‘dismantle’ the city’s police department. Seattle is now showing us what the absence of law and order looks like. Jeremiah Ellison, a member of the city council, has announced a ‘dramatic rethink’ on ‘how we approach public safety.’ I fear a Committee on Public Safety comprising those figures who always come to the fore in chaos. They will not be democratically accountable, they never are. I saw one person in Seattle being asked about the people who have been attacked and had their businesses looted. The response was instructive in what it reveals about the selective approach to justice being applied – imagine what it is like for a black person to be killed by a police officer. In other words, there is no justice that encompasses all anymore, a particular instance of justice has come to occupy a position of overall significance, effectively constituting justice as such. Business owners or whoever now suffering injustice perpetrated by looters and thugs are not entitled to justice in this new law and order.
Those charged with instituting justice through public authority need to recognize the situation we face and recover control of public space.
Unquestionably, most people are protesting injustice. And without doubt, there have been powerful people at work blocking the remedy of that injustice for a long time now. The problem is there are always people, without legitimacy and without support for their own causes, looking to hijack a popular issue and movement and divert it its own way. These are people with an extremely hostile view of the prevailing social order, people who are more possessed by a hatred of the status quo than by a concern with a just alternative future. Such people want chaos and will not stop until they have destroyed as much of the present and past as they can. They are out to create a vacuum that they can then step into. They will never be elected to power, and they know it. So they seek to organize an extra-legal counter-force outside of conventional politics, and exploit issues of social injustice, environment, etc which all command public support and generate widespread interest to take leading positions. That is a hijacking of emancipatory causes of freedom and justice.
I dissociate myself and the Left I stand for completely from such people and such movements. That’s how easily socialism is derailed and diverted and turned into its opposite. The real possibilities for socialism – which the conservative right fight tooth and nail against, blocking moderate, peaceful transition – become distorted and inverted and destroy the principles and purposes supposedly being served.
I am trying to choose my words carefully, to avoid the appearance of some nostalgic conservativism, even reactionary politics, on my part. There are traps and snares all over this ‘debate,’ and it is well-nigh impossible to navigate the terrain without causing upset and outrage.
Last night I had to force myself not to intervene in a social media ‘discussion’ in which the peace, freedom, and love hippie crowd all indulged their prejudice and bigotry concerning the Church and Christianity as racist, sexist and all manner of other evils to the core. I nearly intervened to point out the violence and aggression in those charges, how specific negative instances from centuries of history, themselves twisted further to be shown in even worse light, were being generalized over all Christians. People like me were being expected to take the burden of every crime committed in history on our shoulders and express guilt, shame, remorse and dismantle our Churches. How does this work? In reporting on crime, it is inadmissible to mention the colour or religion of the perpetrator, lest people generalize that all black people or all muslims are bad people. It’s all about contextualizing events, say people who provide no context and generalize wildly when they have the opportunity to indulge their own prejudice and bigotry. And that prejudice and bigotry is assuming monstrous proportions at present.
They will go as far as they can in dismantling the things they dislike – which is plenty. I don’t much care for Dr. Taylor Marshall, I find his views reactionary. But here’s a point to consider: when Left voices are silent for fear of breaking ranks with the dominant Left voice, when moderate conservative voices seek to appease vociferous critics in the hope of keeping the peace, then that leaves only reactionaries left speaking up. I received this from Dr. Taylor Marshall in my Inbox:
‘On Sunday’s Youtube Livestream, I explained how activists would not stop at statues of Junípero Serra, but would soon call for the destructing and desecration of all religious images, but especially those of the cross and of Christ. Well, it happened faster than I expected. Monday, June 23, 2020, leader @ShaunnKing called for a new wave of iconoclasm that will include not only statues but also murals and stained glass. Will bishops resist or stand by as they storm churches, cathedrals, and museums with rocks, bricks, ropes, and spray paint?’
Is he exaggerating? I have not heard of my Church being threatened. But what if it did come to be threatened in this way, who would come to its defence? It is a largely elderly congregation. Could they count on the authorities? It was this issue that social media ‘debates’ were all about. One person, who prides herself on her love of all humanity and nature …. Spoke in the most biased and bigoted terms in issuing her demands on the Church:
"Oooh, the White Jesus take-down. So overdue.
And while they're at it, they could also put the Book of Mary (Magdalene) back into the Bible, reinstate women's equality, honor her as Jesus' top disciple, preach peace, turn over the money tables, and organize the churches on egalitarian and horizontal principles, not hierarchical ones. Oh, and rescind the Papal Bulls, the Doctrine of Discovery, and apologize to the women of Europe for the witch hunts and to the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island for conquest and genocide.
But yeah, the White Jesus make-over is a good place to start. If they need help with that, I recommend Queer Eye for the job.
Not that this woman is remotely interested in the reform of the Church, proudly declaring herself a non-Christian. Let’s be honest, this is anti-Christian, a concerted attack on Christianity. That’s not so much a history that is presented there so much as a demonology. Everything is presented in its worst aspect, there are no redeeming features, none. The approach is entirely unforgiving. Christianity is presented as an evil with which there can be no compromise.
Every Christmas I have to suffer the same people telling me that Jesus Christ never existed, that there is scant evidence for his existence, he is a myth in the worst sense. Now they are telling me he is definitely black and that all images of white Jesus have to be destroyed. These are people who are big on peace and love, by the way, and the love of all humanity. Their commitment is abstract, they don't practice what they preach in their words and deeds.
I have worked in interfaith (and nonfaith) spaces for decades. In fact, until as recently as 2010 my argument was implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) atheist. In 2010 I gave a number of talks on spirituality and goddess worship that tapped into the old nature religions, looking at the open air temples and figurines of the Mycenaean civilisation, to take one instance. These talks were based on visits of the group to Liverpool Museum. I was making general arguments about our relation to nature as in part a reverential one. It therefore troubles me that any group of people, for any reason, would incite for the destruction of any religious symbols, of any faith. We have seen throughout history the terrible things that people can do when such thinking is unleashed. I have seen little plastic Jesus’ made in China and looking very Chinese. Some people like little mementoes and souvenirs when they visit some shrine, and can’t always afford to be tasteful. I don’t like the idea of destroying an image of Jesus, even a little plastic Jesus as a Chinaman. It strikes me as some kind of sacrilege. The same with respect to Mohammed or Buddha or those little Mycenaean figurines from 2,000 years BC.
There really are other ways of moving forwards. But there’s the problem, there have always been people have been more interested in having their own way prevail over all others. And, yes, that is what critics will say Christianity has been doing from the first. Rome was tolerant of religion. What worried Rome about Christianity was its claims to be the one true religion. Rome saw this as likely to threaten the civil peace as religious space became a battle ground. We have to get beyond that. Aggressive threats and demands is merely lighting the fire underneath an already incendiary terrain. And we have to face the truth that there are people who are quite happy to incite conflict and disorder, to bring down something they dislike, and advance their own likes. Such people think nothing of public space, only themselves.
The Jesus in my local Church doesn’t look white at all. In fact, crucified on a wooden cross hung over the altar, he looks very brown to me. The same with the stations of the cross. But I have never been concerned with skin colour in worship. I think I can speak for the congregation in saying we are colour blind. It’s not important. The message of Jesus’ words and example is what is important. Destroying things and causing upset contradicts that message. I support all the white, black, Asian, and all manner of other Jesus symbols that may exist in the world, and hope that they may increase in number, to the extent that they inspire one and all to embrace the heart of the gospels and live the core message. I’m seeing little of that spirit in those obsessing over symbols.
I am reading some seriously nasty and divisive rhetoric on social media. I know that comes with the terrain, but the hypocrisy of some people is breath-taking to the point of pathological. It indicates the fomenting of some very unhealthy mentalities within the cultural terrain, which cannot but have harmful public consequences. Something I have consistently noted is the extent to which some of those people who have the most to say about peace and freedom, claiming to love all humanity as well as the simplicities of Sun and Earth, demonstrating what beautiful human beings they are in the process, reveal themselves to be just as bigoted and prejudiced as those they criticize. Their words open up all manner of nastiness and division. ‘Organised religion is for sheep,’ writes one person who claims that the love of all humanity is her religion. We know the type almost as a caricature, the people who love human beings in the abstract but object to them in the actual.
Instead of going so big and being unforgiving on the past sins of others, people should try examining their own lives and confessing some sins of their own. Such people display all the overconfident hubris of a generation that thinks it has superseded all the sins of the past and are now, through their superior knowledge, unstained by the sins of our forbears. Naivety of such a level leaves us vulnerable to the all-too human frailties that are our permanent condition. Such thinking is based on the conceit that because we know something that past generations didn’t, it makes us better people. Such people commit sin righteously. There is a need for people to take a good hard look at the genocide that is being perpetrated today, in various ways, and see how complicit they are in it. The idea that we have achieved a level of moral progress within modernity as to make us better than the people who have preceded us is betrayed by the facts. It is the easiest thing in the world to go backwards and condemn people for views and actions which do not meet today’s standards. There really is no mystery as to why human history is full of murder and violence. Not when the non-violent peace love hippies with all their back to the earth and sun simplicities/stupidities are as quick to spread hatred and sow division as easily as this. But I am speaking in an ill-mood now, and have been throughout this piece. I am having to remind myself of the words of the Buddha: ‘Don’t mix bad words with your bad mood. You’ll have many opportunities to change your mood, but you’ll never get the opportunity to replace the words you spoke.’
‘Before you speak, let your words pass through these three gates:
Is it true?
Is it necessary?
Is it kind?’
To which I say that there are controversial issues to be addressed, and it is often necessary to be, if not cruel, then courageous and judicious to be kind.
I am a historian by training. I like history. I trace the past into the present. I take an organic approach to history and society and value a living and enabling tradition and narrativity. Life is a social and cultural evolution that human beings as active agents navigate by way of experience. We can be critical of past actions, we can value past actions, life is a continuous and open debate with it all. This affirms a process view of life in its evolution, one which recognizes the ambiguities of being implicated in certain practices, even as we try to negotiate our way out of them. I argue for this often paradoxical always difficult negotiation as against the short-circuiting of the entire process by cultural revolutionaries who arrogate to themselves the right to impose their one-sided and extreme version of history on the public space and culture. That’s not a genuine culture enriched by a diversity of historically emergent resources but a monoculture manufactured by ideological imposition.
I don’t believe that the UK and the US are the most racist societies on Earth. To the contrary, it is the very freedom and openness of these countries that makes strong and vociferous protest allowable. Which other countries are more diverse and more open? The problem with the aggressive militant approach is that it destroys the very culture that makes freedom and openness possible. If such countries are so bad, why do so many want to enter them to live and work?
We cannot put society, culture, and governance in hands of mobs bent on destruction and disorder. They claim to want to dismantle capitalism. I argue for transitioning to a post-capitalist economy. I also argue for uprooting the systemic dynamic of the capital economy. That identifies me as one who would destroy the economy. Not so. The economy is a universal, the capital system is a particular. I am arguing for the supplanting of the capital by a new economic system. That is a constructive project that is based on efficient systems of provision which work by way of economic agents. That is very different from merely destroying an economic system merely because it doesn’t fit ideological requirements. The same with respect to culture.
This site is my wild space where I am able to speak freely. I know that if I was to express myself openly in public space there would be outrage, abuse, and objection. I have received some over the years, from all kinds of people, both Marxists and anti-marxists, atheists and theists. I don’t need such rancour in my life. I will admit that I am not much of a one for debate. In my defence, I don’t really intervene in public debate much, if at all. It rarely ends well. People, I find, have an axe to grind, and feel free to grind it into the heads of others, should said others offer the opportunity. So I don’t offer myself for assault. I have been advised not to censor my views by people who see the views I express on social media as somewhat bland and insipid, lacking the sharpness and forthrightness of my real views. I don’t need to be drawn into the world of talking heads, shouting heads. Then again, self-censorship is itself a mechanism of control and suppression, a tacit surrender to the cultural herding that is underway.
So, who knows, maybe this site is my own Benedict Option, a space in which certain intellectual and moral virtues are preserved in a culture that is drawing to its inevitable demise. In which case the writing here is the articulation of the despair at the heart of society, a cultural exile’s soliloquy in face of the end as it draws near.
When I was a teenager I remember the Quatermas television show, 1979. I remember the Planet People on there, people who had lost touch with realities, no doubt on account of the complicity of the ‘real world’ of politics, industry, and technology in the destruction of the planetary ecology. The Planet People advocated a return to the Sun and the Earth, the basic simplicities which, when lived in any organised social life, are utterly naive stupidities. It’s an escape and an evasion, and no solution.
I mention this because I see a detachment from political and economic realities on the part of many expressing an environmental concern.
I am reading on David Dorn, a retired police officer who was killed whilst attempting to prevent looting and protect citizens and businesses from the looters.
Retired St. Louis Police captain killed after responding to a pawnshop alarm during looting
David Dorn is black and worked with the St. Louis Police Department for 38 years.
"Throughout the night, we made 25 arrests for various charges. And then there were 55 businesses and counting that were burglarized and had property damage," St. Louis Police Chief John Hayden told reporters.
Dorn's son Brian Powell told the station that Dorn had been a father of five and had 10 grandchildren.
Dorn had been passionate about helping young people, Powell said, and he believed his father would have forgiven those behind the violence and tried to talk to them.
"Because he was real big on trying to talk to youth. And mentoring young people as well. He tried to get them on the straight and narrow and everything," Powell told KTVI.
"The person who pulled the trigger, my message to them would just simply be, just step back from what you're doing. Know the real reason that you're protesting. Let's do it in a positive manner. We don't have to go out and loot and do all the other things," Powell said.
Powell's reflections were echoed in a tweet by the Ethical Society of Police, which read, "(Dorn) was murdered by looters at a pawnshop. He was the type of brother that would've given his life to save them if he had to. Violence is not the answer, whether it's a citizen or officer. RIP Captain!"
There are many examples I could give of persons protecting their businesses being attacked, and businesses being looted. On my social media pages I saw none of this. Maybe others don’t post for the reason I don’t post, for fear of being identified as pro-police and therefore, by definition, racist. This is the kind of distortion that is now taking place. If you post a tribute to and defence of police officers protecting the public, you are making a political statement at a time when most others are sharing clips of police attacking black people and protestors. The issue is fractured in that pernicious way, with politics intervening to prevent a rounded and reasonable view. Social media does this in being so reductive.
What I did see was a lot of ‘friends,’ whom I know for a fact come from comfortable backgrounds, expressing the view that ‘if you object to looting you won’t like the British Museum.’
I loathe the abject complacency and complicit of that view, coming from people who, clearly, have no idea of what it is to live in communities exposed to the criminal activities of others. Two years ago I had to fight off five thugs who came to the house to rob it. They had robbed my dad of £500 the previous day and returned for more. They were brutal and aggressive and didn’t give a damn about the cruelty and callousness of their behaviour. My dad had a chronic illness, his medication was there to be seen. They took this weakness and vulnerability as an invitation. That’s how looting is. So I do object to looting, and very strongly, and I despise the flaccid moralising of comfortable people who pontificate at a safe remove from within their compounds, no doubt presuming that they can count on police protection should they ever need it. I don’t engage in false equivalences in which ‘x’ is employed in order to blunt the condemnation of ‘y,’ to effectively apologise for it.
I wonder if the people who are engaged in this apologetics for robbery, vandalism, and violence would care to make their locations, even their addresses, public, invite looters round mob handed at their houses and help themselves. I wonder how they would feel, should they object, if they were told they had no cause for complaint since there is a much greater crime for legitimate concern committed. That is the random and chaotic world of arbitrary standards that beckons once we go down this route. The complacency of some people is breath-taking, they plainly take the law and order they benefit from for granted, as if it appears by magic and doesn’t require support from government and people. The permissive attitude towards those forces that first of all contribute nothing to the healthy functioning of public life, and secondly actively work to undermine it is nothing less than pernicious. The public have some strange heroes today.
Living in a working class community blighted by unemployment, deprivation, and drugs, I nurture a particular loathing for those white middle class liberals who are quick to apologize for, and even justify, destruction, violence, and vandalism. These are people who are secluded and gated off from the rest of society, and who are therefore free to indulge their permissive principles at a safe distance. They have in far too many cases been willing on the destruction that has been unleashed in the society beyond their compounds. I wonder whether these people are capable of feeling the shame they ought, given the way they whipped these events on from the beginning after seeing unwatchable footage like that and much more.
There are always people around who will push this kind of disorder and destruction, just as there are always people around who will apologize for it. There may be many reasons behind such attitudes, but one of them is the detachment from realities. Such people are aware that the world is not as it ought to be. That indicates a moral conscience and a philosophical temper – philosophy does its best work in the gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought-to-be.’ But for that ‘ought’ to be something more than a wild fantasy, there has to be a realistic grasp of the ‘is,’ and a connection to the people within in. When that goes missing, there is oblivion to the consequences of actions, an unawareness of the unrealism of the demands being made. Such people are so convinced by the justness of their cause that they feel no need to contend with the reality that certain actions harm people and society. Should they ever be confronted with the damaging consequences of these actions, they will cite a principle of such overriding concern that all other concerns cease to exit. The danger of reducing these issues to politics is that it becomes easy to label this or that a left or a right issue or viewpoint, and thereby dismiss it on account of expressing the wrong politics. Someone who protests the death of a black man at the hands of the police becomes a left-wing person, someone who protests the death of a policeman or the assault of a businessman or woman at the hands of a looter becomes a right-win person. As a result, we can never come to view actual incidents and events without the distortion of a political filter. You have to wonder where the human roots have gone in a political game such as this. It is a realm of the damned, and it threatens to engulf us all.
When idealism runs far ahead of realities in politics, the ends can come to be considered of such overriding importance that any means will do. In this situation, people can become blinded to the extent to which means invariably become enlarged to displace the ends. Idealists blinded to realities too easily become fanatics who are blinded to people. They can be fanatical directly, in their activism, or indirectly, rationalizing destructive activity away, engaging in a kind of passive fanaticism. Whether active or passive, there is a steadfast refusal to contend with realities, and should critics ever confront them these, they will respond with the eternal get-out clause used by all political cowards and moral frauds – ‘you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ The classic response is that of George Orwell: ‘where is your omelette?’
Where is the evidence of constructive work? If all you can see is the destruction, if all you can see is a passion for protest and demonstration, and an antipathy for constructive work with respect to economic systems and forms of governance, we are entitled to think that an omelette is not in the offing.
On every issue there will be people who, when faced with difficult questions with respect to practical consequences of actions, will respond by saying that it is impossible to uproot injustice, oppression, and domination without some people suffering along the way. To which, we have to ask, who is anyone to sacrifice the lives of anyone in the making of an omelette? And ask again, were is this damned omelette that has been used to justify all this disturbance and disorder? Where is this wonderful society of perfect justice and freedom you have promised, making all the robbery, vandalism, violence, and deaths worthwhile? Because after all of that turmoil, this end product had better be a damned good and damned beautiful thing. I can’t even see an omelette in the making. At best, I see demands being levelled on government, and demands for compensation and reparation. And demands that the public faces of cities be changed. I hear demands that people and politicians dance to the voices of those playing a certain tune. But they haven’t got anything beyond bullying and pressure. They just threaten chaos and disorder, leaving cities in flames and ruins, imposing a cultural lockdown until government and people give in and accede to the demands.
I have heard this phrase being repeated by people time and again over the years - the left eats itself.
If you warn so long and so hard, and the warnings go unheeded, then the only conclusion to draw is that there is a congenital incapacity on the part of ‘the left’ to actually take a wider purview than its own obsessions – hooked on the means of conflict, they lose sight of the end of peace, certainly of the justice that bring peace.
But the problem goes much deeper than politics and goes into the heart of the Enlightenment project. Rather than say that the left eats itself, I have analysed the impossibilities of an entirely self-created, self-authored existence by way of human reason and labour alone. In other words, I am concerned with the self-defeating nature of an emancipatory project based on a self-legislating reason that discards transcendent standards. You cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too. This is the fatal flaw of Marx’s emancipatory project, to the extent that the values and principles to be realized become no more than human self-creations. Such a project cannot but consume itself in being self-referential and self-validating.
But the evidence of events backfiring on ‘the left’ are many. CNN egged the protests on only to find the mob paying its office in Atlanta a visit, daubing graffiti all over the front, smashing the glass front, and hurling missiles into the building. The people laying siege to the CNN HQ were not right-wing Trump supporters. In fact, it was the institutional racists themselves, the police, who came to the rescue and formed a protective cordon to stop events from degenerating further. Not that CNN has either given thanks were thanks are due, nor been concerned to condemn the perpetrators of the attack. What would have provoked an outcry had events been perpetrated by Trump supporters was met with silence. And cowardice and complicity.
Looters are excused for having a legitimate grievance, as if it is injustice that motivates their helping themselves at the expense of local businesses. These pathological double-standards expose the rotten roots of contemporary society, particular the way that basic facts are scotomized, selected in accordance with predetermined views to present a narrative. Realities that don’t fit the narrative don’t exist. That’s the approach that leaves people feeling that they are living in a society and a culture which is blind to their views. That fixing of narratives renders people voiceless. Who spoke for David Dorn this week? There was close to universal concern expressed for George Floyd. The only dissent I noticed was on the part of those who pointed out his criminal record, and this not to excuse his murder, but to question his elevation to martyrdom. I saw little concern for David Dorn.
George Floyd didn't deserve to be killed at the hands of that cop, but he is not a martyr. He was a career criminal, who had been in and out of prison for violent crime and drug related crime. One of his crimes was to storm a pregnant women's home with five accomplices. He held a gun to her belly as her house was ransacked. This is a matter of public record so research for yourselves. In the video taken of his arrest, he is also seen dropping a bag of white powder to the floor as he sits, handcuffed on the sidewalk. Review the video for yourself.
He most certainly did not deserve to be killed, and the cop who killed him needs to be sent to prison, but the narrative that Floyd was some kind of angel is utter nonsense, and I guarantee, the 99% of people have no idea about the lives he negatively affected.
Spare a thought for that pregnant lady.
As to what you think the general consensus of opinion is, it depends on where you look, and where you are prepared to look. Plenty look but don’t listen, ruling out contrary views for the simple reason they do not conform to the one and only true ideology. Cue abuse of people as stupid, ignorant, and bigoted. I work in the local community and meet ‘ordinary’ folk face to face, listen to their views on issues without any political prompting and guidance on my part. The sense I get is that no-one thinks that the death of George Floyd was anything other than reprehensible. But they are leery about the protests. They all say the same thing, that there is a right to protest, but not to be violent and destructive. I think I may be the only one who now sees protest as a public nuisance, active minorities of all persuasions encroaching on the public space of others, as well as draining the time and resources of public servants. I think we have a free society of public spaces and democratic institutions yielding ample opportunities for political activity and participation. I would suggest that people channel their political energies in those directions. But I have yet to hear anyone go so far as to suggest that demonstrations and protests be banned. They may be essential to a free society, but when they become a regular politics rather than an exceptional event, then they lose their force and sting, they become routine.
I reject emotional blackmail and political bullying; I seek a genuine politics that constitutes a public as against cultivating a conformist herd. We see the classic tactics of sloganeering and repetition, cueing clear responses and soliciting expressions. This is all designed to spread the web of complicity. There are people who wouldn’t normally make public statements about politics of any kind, but who now feel the need now so to do lest their silence be construed as disagreement, deviance, and opposition to the dominant line. This is how conformity and complicity is cultivated, preying on people’s fears of being singled out and separated from the herd, isolated and excommunicated. It is a natural instinct to fear being alone in the world, wondering how we will survive when cut off from others. Balancing that, there have always been people who have been prepared to go it alone, speak and act independently, and not conform to pressure and find their own way of living, without the need for recognition and validation on the part of the herd. The people who are prepared to live without the cover of the herd have been the engines of new ideas and initiatives, the people who have made a difference. I remember reading that Bertrand Russell’s favourite text of the Bible was ‘never follow a multitude to do evil.’ It is a natural instinct for human beings as social beings to place themselves firmly within the multitude and bury themselves deep in its midst in search of the quiet life. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a virtue in the common view or in communal feeling, quite the contrary. But constituting a commonality and publicity that is healthy requires a degree of conscious critical thought and reflection, as against some blind unthinking conformity and sheer cowardice.
Social media is encouraging a herd mentality as against a genuine commonality. Within your groups, you learn that there are views you are meant to express, agree with, like, and repeat. To do otherwise is to invite an incessant online pressure that soon brings you back in line. You learn the parameters, internalize them and remain within them. When posting your views, you are well aware of the things that people will want to hear and support, and the things that will be considered controversial. What you do from there depends upon what you want from social media connection. If you want a quiet life without contention, with the reassurance that you are part of a herd, then you learn to censor your views.
Herds are not only vulnerable to panics and stampedes, they are susceptible to the cries and alarms of those with an interest in causing panics and stampedes. People join in out of fear of not only being left behind but becoming a target in turn. This is not the route to a quiet life. The problem is that once you start running in life, you never stop. When those in positions of influence and authority, be it in the media, government, or police, join in in an attempt to ease and appease the situation, they reveal themselves to be weak and pathetic, rendering themselves vulnerable to even further pressure. The more that limits recede when being tested, the more those doing the testing will ratchet up the demands and the pressure. You will be forever dancing to the tune being played, letting through any number of false claims, illegitimate demands, and plain falsehoods that should be checked immediately. Appeasement never leads to peace, only a greater war that is harmful to the public good.
After agreeing that the US police is this, as a result of the actions of some rogue elements, then you will be asked that UK police are that, all police, in fact all white people. Once you accede to one set of illegitimate claims and demands, you will be expected to accede to others, and onwards, until you are just dancing to a tune being played outside of legitimate public institutions and processes. It is thoroughly undemocratic and totally undercuts the voice of the people, people in politics and people in their local communities.
You can never appease the mob. As for the elements in the liberal establishment, they don’t seem to understand that they are playing with matches; they think the safe conventions of a licensed left liberal radicalism will hold, and support for such street politics will bring down right governments and usher in ‘moderate’ left(ish) governments. Encourage the mob to burn down one building, and they may one day burn the whole city down, you included. When the mob pitches up outside of your building, who will the rebels call for their protection but the institutional racists themselves.
This is a game for the toy-town revolutionaries who, having nurtured their resentment and grievance in minority platforms, without a hope in hell of ever winning an electoral victory – ‘ordinary’ people don’t support them, never have and never will – now see an opportunity to spread disorder and chaos and weaken authority and institutional resilience from within. There is no constitution of legitimate public community going on here. There is no interest in such a thing. Take the Brixton riots of today (24/25 June). There was an illegal party being held, effectively holding the entire neighbourhood under siege, an appropriation of an entire area for the use and abuse of some. The police are called and are met with violence and have to retreat. The police are having to enforce a law with respect to people who respect no law but their own demands, but having to do so without the backing of effective force for fear of being accused of being racist. They are accused of being racist in any case. The losers are the ordinary members of the public who, as the police retreat and withdraw, are consigned to life at the whim of others in a lawless community. These are not communities, they are no-go areas.
The question before us is whether a legitimate public life and community based on a law and order that encompasses, covers, and protects each and all equally prevails, or random power. The rich will protect themselves. The rest of us? We will be at the mercy of the dregs of society. If the law does not hold, ceases to command respect, then citizens and their property is up for grabs.
As for the political games being played, it does seem that some, having nurtured their fantasies away from the centres of real politics – and real people who plainly give short shrift to their views – really do believe that out of the chaos that unleashed by destruction of prevailing institutions and standards some great utopia follows. I can’t believe that so many would be so naïve, though, maybe some of the green liberals whose first love is an idealised nature, but not most, surely. It could just be plain old cynical hard-left Leninism and Stalinism, peddling their disastrous politics of ‘the worse the better.’ Such people are comfortable in a world divided between Communism and Fascism, forcing us to pick sides between rival murderous tyrannies and totalitarianisms. What is most interesting about this is the way that they have, through identity politics, found a way of seducing the complicity, actually the vocal support, of the usually timorous liberal middle class, the people who normally run a mile from the class politics that I consider the meat and potatoes of a genuine socialist movement. The culture wars are a fertile breeding ground for totalitarianism, not only in their reductive and divisive nature, but in the way they seduce people into being complicit by way of worthy and just causes that all right minded people support.
Then there are the people who just get a thrill out of chaos and violence, the people who loathe the world around them – and themselves too – so much that they want it destroyed. It gives their empty, meaningless lives a meaning and a purpose, it allows them to feel that they are a part of something, and are able to do something substantial. It gives them a feeling of belonging, meaning, and power. The taste for destruction is an expression of lack and deficiency. It is a neurotic, nihilistic impulse which yields a thrill right up to the moment of self-destruction.
Whatever the precisely constitution of this motley group of destructive forces, those committed to legitimate democratic public life and moral community need to unite in just cause and constructive purpose, and firmly resist and marginalize those who want to light the fire and burn the world up. Reclaiming public purpose and remedying social divisions and injustices would be a good place to start.
There is a determinate and destructive political agenda behind this wave of radicalism which takes incidents and events and exploits them for political ends. The protests are completely divorced from the original issue. People are united in their condemnation of the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minnesota policeman. True, there is a strong case for arguing that this unity is itself the result of protest and backlash. Many other black people have been killed by rogue policeman, with little reaction and redress. The policeman in this instance, and his three colleagues, were not charged and held in custody until after the protests began. So the authorities bear a lot of responsibility here. The result is an invitation to overspill, with entirely legitimate protest generalising the issue so that the actions of one policeman renders whole areas of life ripe for destruction – police, academia, entertainment, everything. This is insane.
There is also the pathological hypocrisy of people breaking the lockdown, and supporting those breaking the lockdown. The united front which was holding in face of Covid-19, against the libertarians of the right who want to sacrifice public health for ‘the economy’ (private business interests) cracked. In fact, it didn’t just crack, it was thrown under the bus by people who never need be taken seriously in politics ever again. Because they are not serious, they are not principled, they are not consistent; they are random, pampered, entitled, and think that they have the right to do as they please; they break with impunity the principles which they seek to impose on others. I’ll come back to this, but I see this mentality as lying deep in the psyche of a modernity living in light of Nietszche’s ‘death of God,’ with individuals now seeing themselves as the deified authors of their own projects, Nietzschean ‘supermen’ as an aristocratic elitism that is beyond good and evil. The laws are whatever they say they are. The plebs are bound by the laws established by their betters, but not the betters themselves.
But there it is, the lockdown that the world had been told was so vital was totally and utterly violated, openly, with impunity. With an hypocrisy that was not merely breath-taking but pathological in its (self-)deceit, the same people who have been most vocal in their condemnation of US and UK governments for their tardy response to the threat of Covid-19 still tried to take the high ground by claiming protestors were wearing masks and respecting social distancing! Pathological deceit and self-deception of that scale can only be explained as some Nietzschean fantasy of overmen and overwomen. Either way, it betrays a mentality that is utterly detached from realities and real people. The very same people who condemned libertarian protestors who asserted liberty as the prime value, insisting upon public health, now find a value of overriding significance of their own, and betray the united front they have been the most vocal in pushing for on the coronavirus. In this, they have rendered their politics entirely arbitrary. In fact, they have simply and clearly expressed that the roots of this conflict lie in the absence of an overarching and authoritative standard of the good that is able to command common assent – precisely what is entailed by Nietzsche’s ‘death of God.’ Morality is irreducible subjective opinion, a condition in which every individual is himself or herself a god; and gods can do as they please.
The ease with which alternate voices and platforms are silenced and, with this, the pressure to ensure the compliance of the public voice, is another noticeable aspect.
There has been a strange schizophrenia observed in the media, with the threat of Covid-19 still uppermost, and warnings and cautions being issued, at the same time as being almost completely ignored when it comes to mass protest. Is the threat real or not? Does coronavirus go away when protestors protest, recognizing the overriding justice of the cause? Had this been some other issue, the media – and substantial numbers of those now involved in the protests - would be condemning people for their selfishness and stupidity in putting public health at risk. In fact they are still doing this, condemning Trump’s election rally, for instance, at the very same time they are backing mass protests.
The duplicity and double-standards is explained by the hard political agenda at work – the promotion of an end of such overriding significance as to silence doubt and criticism. This is about racial injustice and therefore there can be no dissent and no opposition, no contrary voice, and no higher end. You can neither criticize nor object; indeed, you are required to show support lest your silence be construed as illegitimate opposition. The authorities, the media, the police, the people are blackmailed, bullied, gagged, and bound.
The police are caught in an impossible situation. If they enforce the law, there is resistance and conflict. If they meet that resistance and conflict with force, they are accused of racism. So they retreat. That merely encourages further lawlessness. At some point, the police will abandon a society that has abandoned them, leaving whole areas without law. The people who suffer most will not be the rich and powerful, the people the revolutionary dreamers think they have at bay, but ordinary folk, who will live at the mercy of the lawless. I don’t envy the police and I don’t envy the ordinary folk; I do loathe the societal pusillanimity on the part of people whose complicity and support has turned a just cause into a thuggish anti-politics.
In fact, the problem is worse than a silencing. People are being forced to make public statements and take public actions, lest their silence be taken as support for racial injustice. All over social media people are demanding to know why others haven’t expressed support and condemnation, and at the same time agreed to all the clauses and demands that are layered on top of these requirements, haven’t spoken out using all the exact correct words the exact correct way, thereby proving that they are closet objective racists complicit in the pervasive racism of society.
The approach is intimidatory and aggressive and is designed to have people cough up statements of support, confessing remorse and guilt with respect to all charges. If you dissent, then you stand open to the accusation of approving of the murder of black people. This has nothing to do with just but expresses a whole raft of ideological claims, appropriating the standard of justice for political ends, reducing it to power and political interests. That is not justice but its destruction by way of reduction, dissolving it into the power play of political interests.
The accusation of racism for failing to support a particular political cause is also a despicable innuendo that cannot but embed divisions in society.
As a society under law and custom, there are clearly established and accepted limits on public thoughts and deeds. Whilst there are all manner of things – and people – who irritate and even offend us, we don’t take the law into our own hands and override the public peace and the public good. We may object to things, but there are public channels at all levels for us to give expression to our objections. It is inadmissible to riot, loot, destroy property, assault policemen, break the law, deface public monuments. People cannot just destroy that which they dislike. We once lived in a society that understood that and recognised that. That sense is being lost, and the results will not be pleasant for ordinary folk.
Public destruction and defacement of things with (or without, as it transpired with respect to the Penny Lane street signs) connections to the slave trade was not, of course, limited, as the defacing of the Cenotaph and the statue of Winston Churchill indicates. A society that cannot defend itself when under this kind of assault is a society that will not last. The testing of the boundaries on the part of protestors (and vandals and looters) is the occasion to establish them boundaries all the more clearly, and enforce them effectively. Fail to do that and the boundaries will be dissolved to leave nothing but arbitrary power and rule.
The problem is not just the acts of public violation but the fact that there are so many people who are prepared to excuse first one act and then other acts, until eventually all acts are tolerated, for the very reason there are no limits left. That indicates a lawless state and it will lead to an intolerable social existence. There is now a campaign for the authorities not to prosecute those involved in public defacement, saying it is not in the public interest. It is very much in the public interest to demonstrate that law-breaking will not be tolerated. Once mobs claim the right to take the law into their hands, the law ceases to exist.
And I don’t think these mobs are remotely outraged by these statues, but that these statues are merely the targets of an outrage they have nurtured elsewhere. Does anyone think that the mobs will be any less outraged if every statue in the US and the UK is pulled down? Me neither. Long before then, though, they will have incited a conflagration so great as to have us involved in pulling each other down, or absorbing all our energies in maintaining the civil peace. Climate change anyone? Anyone give a damn as to what dear Greta says anymore? Or will we be told that if we completely dismantle society to achieve racial justice (as defined in accordance with political ideology and not transcendent standards of justice) we will save the planet. Just as if we dismantle the family and patriarchy, the church and religion, capitalism and private property, we will save the planet. I’m all for an integral approach, but this is not such an approach – it’s a nihilists hit-list designed to destroy. The only way that this project will help address the crisis in the climate system is in furthering human self-destruction.
The scenes we witnessed were deranged, with everybody’s passions and pent-up hatreds going wild, jumping up and down in a frenzy on statues, setting them alight. People who do this to statues will do this to people, whom they see merely as objects in the way of their ends. Analogies are being drawn to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The behaviour of the masses in dismantling the wall was sober, not deranged. And there is the not inconsiderable difference that the US and the UK are very far from being the Eastern bloc. People haven’t the first idea what repression is. Behind it all it is very easy to spot the political agendas being advanced, of the very kind that lead to things like the Berlin Wall being erected in the first place. To see people on the extreme left drawing analogies with the Berlin Wall, whilst promoting the very politics that characterised Stalinism, indicates nothing less than dangerous delusion. Such people are capable of anything, their politics is untempered by any connection with justice. They see the world in simplistic Manichean divisions. We know from history how events like this pan out, when mobs start to set the terms of political debate, and go without check. The more permissive society, the more emboldened the mobs become, sapping the strength and confidence of prevailing institutions.
It’s been coming, and is a follow-on from a libertarianism in politics and economics, subjective projection in ethics, the diminution of constraint and public bonds, the freeing of inhibitions, the unravelling of ties, loyalties, and solidarities, the withdrawal from associations, the break-up of family structures. Politics can no longer mediate the intractable ethical conflicts and social divisions; the police force is now tasked with imposing a unity and maintaining a peace that society itself cannot achieve. It’s an impossible task. Years ago, I argued that moral and social implosion will come long before ecological implosion, and here are the warning signs. The authorities and the police may well retreat from here. It is a test for people and society, to see whether they themselves have the nerve, the character, and the gumption to exercise self-control and self-governance. These issues are not, first and foremost, policing issues, and to the extent that they become so indicates the extent to which society is at a stage of advanced malady. that has become cowered by them, particularly young people, particularly young men throughout history have this. They test what the limits of violence are, they test what their elders are going to allow them to get away with and once they have got away with one thing they try to get away with the next and there seems to be no quarter to give on this because there are very interesting and important discussions to happen about our past, but they are not this one-directional mob behaviour to tell us what our past was and the worst way in which you can have an actually meaningful discussion about that is to a group of people to act like thugs and start smashing things and start attacking policemen. And also for the media in this country to be so cowed [cowardly], not everywhere, but so significantly coward [and complicit] that people in the media even are fearful of saying this is mob behaviour, this is thug behaviour and we don’t tolerate it on any issue. But clearly we do tolerate it on specific issues and if you speak out about it the mob will come with you.
I'm taking down notes here, for future comment:
Tearing down statues, defacing, criticizing everything in our past, the reality is we have never lived in a better time, there has never been a better time to be alive in terms of our freedoms and our economic prosperity. And when we try to impose the values and the beliefs and the laws we have now [and which brought this freedom and prosperity about]
And when we impose these values and beliefs on our past whether it is back to the 40s we make a mock our past, you cannot judge the people of the past certainly not centuries ago based on our social and moral values now [or if you can you can do so only by reference to transcendent standardsm which apply now]
But these people are trying to and they are doing so in a manner of incredible hostility to our country [its people, past and institutions which will subvert the public space] it’s not looking at us and looking at them for a fair estimation of our past, it is an incredibly hostile attack [destructive and acidic on publicity in the present] it’s a hostile and intense interrogation of our past and the great irony of all this is that they do so in the countries that are the most free and most desirable to live in as they are the most tolerant. And what has happened in lockdown is that we see the morbidities [and pathologies] that exist in a society and one of the morbidities in British society is this pretence that we are a fantastically racist terrible country when in fact the people who say that kind of thing have got away with saying it without enough opposition for too long and the result is the wounded policemen on the streets who have nothing to do with Minnesota policemen [looted shops, assaulted businessmen and women] who are being attacked and assaulted and our monuments attacked and pulled down and Winston Churchill’s statue defaced all because so many people for such a long time have allowed people to get away with lying about this country’s past and lying about its present.
Notes from Douglas Murray:
Called out by a community for not getting in line with everything they are saying
I don’t like when I hear white because it returns us to race, because if you open up that chasm there is hell in there, we should step back from there.
The way in which white in white privilege is weaponized disturbs me enormously because I know what is going to be played back down the road. I have seen it. there is already a playback happening in every country I go to, everybody is talking about IQ. People are fed up with being told they are privileged because they are white. And they are starting to look into what is the ugliest discussion in the world, which is inherited IQ differentials, and that might be a weapon some people might use to hit back, a bigger weapon. Can we just before that happens avoid this whole thing, can we go back to equal, can we not have people’s skin pigmentation being used.
Then we get on to being male, I can think of lots of communities around the world where there are plenty of men who have never worked or worked intermittently, have provided to the extent they can for their familieis. Do you think they are privileged? [look at the ill health, disease and early deaths associated with employment and its loss] you think that white men in the north of England in former mill [and mine] towns are privileged. You think all my forbears are privileged. And then you get to the level beneath this which is who is to call any of this anyway, what the hell do you know about the person you are doing this to.
You have white male privilege, work out in every single situation the legitimacy of that claim today.
Cameron memoires death of Guardian editorial – his first son died, even that wasn’t as bad as it wiould be for other people because he had privilege – that’s the kind of dehumanisation we go down, you end up judging to which a father has a right to mourn his child because you are playing the privilege game.
This game can never be played because it can’t be won, because it can’t be solved, it can’t be ended. [It is an irreducible game based on the impossibility of communication]
We don’t know hour by hour where we might be in this hierarchy
Is the person who inherited a huge amount of money is naturally privileged? They are advantaged here but in every other aspect of life, say they have a terrible personal life, an addiction, or their child or wife does, where do they go in this hierarchy?
Why didn’t people see the First World War coming and stop it?
Because they didn’t know it was going to be the first world war.
[life is lived forwards]
And we have this version all the time
Because everyone in history does things we look back on and say what were they thinking, the productive thing is to work out what we are doing now and [assume] that we will be doing things that people after us say what were they thinking. Try to work them out now in order to avoid doing them. That’s a productive thing to do, that’s more productive than doing this strange thing to trawl through history to find victims, and to find perpetrators and work out exactly the cash balance that people should get as a result.
All ignoring the fact that most of history was held for everyone and that that to be born now is to have absolutely won the historical lottery, unbelievable luck
[enveloping aura and mystique
On transcendent standards, they are plainly a projection, an exercise in self-justification and reassurance, an enveloping illusion and concealing cloud as Nietzsche put it. And we have become smart enough to see through it. The result is acidic, a species that has cornered itself in an irreducible power game. The Dante book is doomed to failure; it is really a lament for a failed species, more of a human tragedy than a divine comedy. Given that I have always been on the outside looking in, in the vain hope that there may one day actually be an inside, a shared space, a genuine public life, I should have known. It’s not there, unless people commit to something greater. And they won’t. So it fractures. Society is just people being horrible to each other, getting their way, and inventing principles by way of self-justification. I don’t feel the need to peddle illusions any more.
Politics is about who gets to die first
The sight of vociferous and unrepresentative activists resorting to extra-legal, extra-political force to put pressure on timorous authorities and dismantle institutions, culture and the national historical heritage is the very antithesis of a public life in which different people of different persuasions negotiate the terms on which a common life can be undertaken. Once society becomes no more than a place in which different groups of activists are forever hunting down that which they find objectionable and demand that these things be torn down – or do the tearing down themselves – it ceases to be a society. It will be untenable to have any public symbol, icon, or statement in place – we are all implicated in history and culture, no one is unstained in a fallen condition – there will always be grounds for offense and objection. Everyone in the past will have said things and done things which may now be considered objectionable. But here is the key point for me – the overconfident hubris in which people who now claim to know better, and on account of that knowledge claim to be better people, denotes a condescension, an arrogance, and an ignorance that positively invites the committing of the worst sins. It is a fake religion, one in which the unimpeachably right and good take a judgmental and punitive approach to the irredeemably evil. That’s a world without mercy and forgiveness, a world based on a fatal conceit that the possession of certain knowledge and ideology overcomes our fallen nature.
Most people like public art and statues, plaques provide context. Blowing things up and tearing things down doesn’t sit well with me, not merely as a historian by training but most of all as a citizen in a public realm that is immersed in culture. ‘And the idea that by ripping away layers you will get to a better understanding of our past is completely bonkers.’ (Dominic Sandbrook, historian). Quite. But understanding and justice are not the goals here, the imposition of one view over all others is.
The people of the past are human beings with the flaws and weaknesses that are common to all human beings, not just those of whom we disapprove. This is true of all human beings, such is the nature of the human condition. The idea that people now, knowing better, are uniquely virtuous and can look at all our sinful predecessors and root out the sin is deeply unsettling. It’s not just the hypocrisy that is wrong, it is the dangerous conceit – people who build on the efforts of past generations turn on those generations with contempt, and act as if they themselves are incapable of sin. It’s the certain path to error.
It's amazing how clearly we see everything when he take the trouble to open our eyes.
If the attempts to transform society this way go wrong, they go badly wrong. They don’t just fail, they turn monstrously into the opposite intended. The ideal is hollowed out and pressed into service as a rationalization of a power strategy. The ideals and values are appropriated and made servants of the priorities of power.
People are not reasonable, they are not generous, their constant engagement in politics has hardened their hearts. They are cold and unforgiving to others.
The attempts to overthrow capitalism keep reaching the stumbling block that the working classes are not the revolutionary proletarians Marx thought they were, and are not rising up. The working classes are always a disappointment to revolutionary idealists, and so are written off; they have been subservient to the revolutionary vanguard since the Kautsky-Lenin thesis that socialism is introduced into the workers’ movement ‘from the outside.’ Now the vanguard is a cultural one. Capitalism can’t be brought down by a frontal socio-economic assault, so a different way to the same objectives is being sought by attacking the cultural underpinnings of society: capitalism, democracy, the nation state, Christianity and the churches, and family.
The great losers in this are the younger generations, who are being badly misled, by both authorities too weak to give a lead – decades of diminishing the public realm and the public imagination in favour of private interests has left them not knowing the public good let alone being able to defend it – and by radicals, progressives, and leftists whose obsession is with destruction but who are rather less keen and creative when it comes to constructive efforts. This politics of endless contestation can tear down a society, but not build and sustain one.
The ones who dominate politics and culture are hopeless.
I find the whole terrain rotten. I'm encouraged that people outside of the talking heads seem on the whole sane, sociable, and reasonable. I’ll end with a comment on the appalling abuse that J.K. Rowling has faced. ‘People who menstruate, who could this be, women,’ said Rowling. For the statement of this simple biological fact – a fact that isn’t even discussed let alone questioned by 99% of sane people in the country – she was abused in the most abominable way.
There was a great uproar and outcry. To its credit, her literary agency the Blair Partnership have stood up to the pressure. Four of their writers protested and declared they were going to leave on account of the agency not showing an appropriate commitment to transgender rights and equality. I’ll praise the agency, hoping that this is not a case of Rowling simply being too big to ditch. The problem with pressure as great as this is that the rest of us are not multi-millionaires, and can be thrown aside. People need to stand up firmly to say this and state clearly that they are not going to be bullied and pressured into saying and doing the things that activists want them to say and do.
Rowling has been hounded for a while now, it seems, for stating the view that there are biological differences between men and women. There are. I suspected as much when I was young and found out that I was right. And I don’t feel obliged to know about the oppression and repression suffered by every person a culture increasingly reducing itself self-assertive egos and identities. I approach the issue from the other end and affirm the moral and ontological ultimacy of each person equally. Start from the other end and you are soon embroiled in an irreducible game, forever having to learn the new arbitrary standards and terms. No communication and no society is possible on that basis – it’s just the cultural version of Hobbes’ war of all against all. I don’t waste time on it, I have more important issues to contend with and so do most other people.
This is identitarian insanity writ large over society. People need to stand firm and not submit to a re-education undertaken by a small, unrepresentative, and self-appointed group of activists who cajole, pressure, bully, censor, and abuse in order to get their way. People need to find the courage to do that and do it firmly in the face of this woke tyranny. We won’t be re-educated, we won’t submit to having our minds changed, and we won’t self-censor. And we need to back those who do find the nerve to speak up.
If I am anything, then I am a writer. I see how in the public realm I am forever having to watch the words I use in case they can be misrepresented. Very many people out there are looking to take offence so as to have an excuse to ride their hobby horse across public space again. That there are people who exploit the terrain of free expression to narrow the parameters of what can be said is bad enough, the cowardice of those who let them do this instead of calling them out beggars belief. Those who remain silent in the hope of a peaceful life for themselves will find themselves living in a constantly and maybe permanently attritional society. That so many supposedly clever and enlightened people not only go along with this but are in the vanguard of it is bizarre. Maybe they are not as clever and as enlightened that their fancy terms we all have to understand make them appear. This is not left politics at all, it is a liberalism in its decadent phase, a liberalism that has turned incredibly illiberal, turning quickly to banning people and things, hounding and harassing people, censorship, making people question the words coming out of their mouths, apologize for their complicity in an iniquitous society – their very existence in fact. By being alive and present in society we are all guilty. I prefer the old approach to sin. Drive out religion through the front door and it comes back in bastardized form by the back door, full of judgement and punishment but entirely without redemption after the purgation.
This censoring, silencing, and education - ‘re-education’ as ideological indoctrination is a form of tyranny. This tyranny is enforced in the first instance by culture, in time by state and law, and it is utterly reactionary. And Orwellian, of course. It’s an age of Orwellian chanting on the part of mobilized masses (the very antithesis of a citizen body). I’ll not labour the examples, but every movement has chants which, under investigation, are shown to express a particular politics rather than a universal ethic: ‘Follow the science’ reduces to governments enacting specific policies via specific agents, ‘Black Lives Matter’ applies to black deaths at the hands of police officers but not the far greater numbers of deaths of black people at the hands of black people, ‘trans women are women’ … except when it comes to entry into women only spaces, such as domestic violence refuges, changing rooms, etc. It’s lunacy and unless the citizen body find their voice and force government to recover public authority, we have had it. A lot of people do not believe that people with male biology and male appendages are women, and repeating it as a mantra to enforce compliance and conformity is the very antithesis of a civil society and public life. People are bullied into silence to maintain the civil peace. It is not just a handful of people who don’t believe this, it is the vast majority. And it is not a question of believing, it is a statement of fact. This kind of nonsense renders the whole area of belief odious. The truth is that transwomen are transwomen and should, like all persons, be treated with absolute respect and kindness. State that universal ethic clearly, and we come out of the mire of identity politics. The abuse that Rowling received for stating that women are women and men are men is unconscionable and indicates this culture is now in a bad place. It’s no longer a time for warning of bad times to come unless we turn back before the abyss – we are in it and need to firm up and speak up. This should not be a controversial issue.
Maybe the tide will now turn, now the pressuring is becoming pervasive, and people will stand up and say no more, we are not allowing it.
If Rowling made a mistake, she did so by being polite and reasonable and paying people the courtesy of a lengthy argument, respecting their reason. She learned that this has nothing to do with truth-seeking. She pandered to the identity politics mob and they tore her apart.
Rowling is too big and too rich to be cancelled, too big and too established, but the rest of us aren’t. The fact that her agency has supported her may be money and power rather than morals talking. In which case, there is no victory here, just the victory of the greater money and power, which is the same sophist politics in a nutshell. Others can be brought down. But we can be hopeful that the various organisations and institutions comprising civil society may be seeing how vulnerable they are in the long run to this kind of assault and may be finding some backbone and taking a stance. The statement that they will not undertake being re-educated may be evidence of that.
We can laugh at the idiocy, but the bigger agenda here is no laughing matter; it is nothing less than a concerted effort to get rid of contrary views and destroy alternate voices. There is no peaceful life as a result of silence here. This kind of politics will not blow over. The quiet have to find their voice, even if it is only to support the authorities and pressure them in finding theirs. You have to be firm in the face of this kind of pressure, since it can spread like a contagion throughout the culture of a society – in fact, it has done. This is a form of bullying, with people pushing a line all the time. It is a war of attrition, and the first sign of weakness causes an even bigger push. Compromise is appeasement and is taken as a sign of weakness, leading to the scaling up of the pressure.
“The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.”
There’s a method to their madness they are tearing down/erasing history to replace it with a new story, with a highly tendentious relation to the facts. To build a new world you must first erase the old one.
No history. No future. Only the never-ending present where the party is always right.
Year zero.
These are the bastard children of postmodernism and postructuralism, and far from being Left are an extreme attempt to realize an unrealizable liberalism, asserting rights and identities that are constructed and imposed on a recalcitrant reality and people.
JK Rowling recently published an eminently reasonable, heartfelt treatise, outlining why it is important to preserve the category of woman. There’s only one thing wrong with it: it assumes a rational interlocutor. Rowling outlines why the biological and legal category of sex is important: in sports, in rape crisis shelters, in prisons, in toilets and changing rooms, for lesbians who want to sleep with natal women only and at the level of reality in general. Rowling marshals her experiences as an androgynous girl, as a domestic violence and sexual assault survivor and as someone familiar with the emotional perils of social media, in ways that have resonated with many women (and men). Her writing is clear, unpretentious, thoughtful, moving, vulnerable and honest. At no point does she use exclusionary or hostile language or say that trans women do not exist, have no right to exist or that she wants to rob them of their rights. Her position is that natal women exist and have a right to limit access to their political and personal spaces. Period.
Of course, to assume that her missive would be engaged with in the spirit in which it was intended, is to make the mistake of imagining that the identitarian left is broadly committed to secular, rational discourse. It is not. Its activist component has transmogrified into a religious movement, which brooks no opposition and no discussion. You must agree with every tenet or else you’re a racist, sexist, transphobic bigot, etc. Because its followers are fanatics, Rowling is being subjected to an extraordinary level of abuse. There seems to be no cognitive dissonance among those who accuse her of insensitivity and then proceed to call her a cunt, bitch or hag and insist that they want to assault and even kill her (see this compilation of tweets on Medium).
Nice company, nice people. Not. Let me say, I don't really care about the nuances of the argument here: I do care about the way in which the argument is conducted. Rowling was civil and reasonable in a way that others were not. Too many others. Not company I want to be keeping, and not people to hand over public space and public ethics to. You don’t remain quiet in the fact of this kind of pressure, you first of all resist it, you stand firm, and then you fight hard to push it back.
This is all so odious that I am just going to quote from the article, I really have no time for such things, I prefer to state a public ethic positively and forcefully. I will just say that I am very glad to have opposed postmodernist modes of thought and identitarian politics from the 1990s, and stated clearly there and then it would consume the left.
Rowling has been accused of ruining childhoods. Some even claim that the actor Daniel Radcliffe wrote the Harry Potter books—reality has become optional for some of these identitarians. Rowling’s age, menstrual status and vagina come in for particularly nasty attention and many trans women (or those masquerading as such) write of wanting to sexually assault her with lady cock, as a punishment for speaking out. I haven’t seen misogyny like this since Julia Gillard became our prime minister.
The Balkanisation of culture into silos of unreason means that the responses have not followed what might be loosely called the pre-digital rules of discourse. These rules assume that the purpose of public debate is to discern truth and that interlocutors on opposing sides—a reductionist bifurcation, because, in fact, there are many sides—engage in argument because they are interested in something higher than themselves: an ideal of truth, no matter how complicated, multifaceted and evolving. While in-group preferences and biases are inevitable, these exist within an overarching deliberative framework. This style of dialogue assumes the validity of a persuasive argument grounded in reason and evidence, even if—as Rowling does—it also utilises experience and feeling. By default, it assumes that civil conflict and opposition are essential devices in the pursuit of truth.
Three decades of postmodernism and ten years of Twitter have destroyed these conventions and, together with them, the shared norms by which we create and sustain social consensus. There is no grounding metanarrative, there are no binding norms of civil discourse in the digital age. Indeed, as Jaron Lanier shows with his bummer paradigm (Behaviours of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent) social media is destroying the fabric of our personal and political lives (although, with a different business model and more robust regulation, it need not do so). The algorithm searching for and recording your every click, like and share, your every purchase, search term, conversation, movement, facial expression, social connection and preference rewards engagement above all else—which means that your feed—an aptly infantile descriptor—will quickly become full of the things you and others like you are most likely to be motivated to click, like and share. Outrage is a more effective mechanism through which to foster engagement than almost anything else. In Lanier’s terms, this produces a “menagerie of wraiths”—a bunch of digitised dementors: fake and bad actors, paid troll armies and dyspeptic bots—designed to confect mob outrage.
The norms of civil discourse are being eroded, as we increasingly inhabit individualised media ecosystems, designed to addict, distract, absorb, outrage, manipulate and incite us. These internecine culture wars damage us all. As Lanier notes, social media is biased “not towards the left or right but downwards.” As a result, we are witnessing a catastrophic decline in the standards of our democratic institutions and discourse. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contemporary culture wars around the trans question, where confected outrage is the norm.
This is why the furore over Rowling’s blog post misses the point: whether we agree with her or not, the problem is the collapse of our capacity to disagree constructively. If you deal primarily in subjective experience and impulse-driven reaction, under the assumption that you occupy the undisputed moral high ground, and you’ve been incited by fake news and want to signal your allegiances to your social media friends, then you can’t engage in rational discussion with your opponent. Your stock in trade will be unsubstantiated accusations and social shaming.
In this discombobulating universe, sex-based rights are turned into insults against trans people. Gender-critical feminists are recast as immoral bigots, engaged in deliberately hurtful, even life-threatening, speech. Rowling is not who we thought she was, her ex-fans wail, her characters and plots conceal hidden reservoirs of homophobia and bigotry. A few grandstanders attempt to distinguish themselves by saying that they have always been able to smell a rat—no, not Scabbers—and therefore hated the books from the outset. Nowhere amid this morass of moral grandstanding and outrage is there any serious engagement with her ideas.
Those of us on the left—and left-wing feminists in particular—who find trans ideology fraught, for all the reasons Rowling outlines, are a very small group. While Rowling is clearly privileged, she has also become the figurehead of a rapidly dwindling and increasingly vilified group of feminists, pejoratively labelled terfs, who want to preserve women’s sex-based rights and spaces. Although our arguments align with centrist, conservative and common sense positions, ours is not the prevailing view in academia, public service or the media, arts and culture industries, where we are most likely to be located (when we are not at home with our children). In most of these workplaces, a sex-based rights position is defined a priori as bigoted, indeed as hate speech. It can get us fired, attacked, socially ostracised and even assaulted.
As leftist thinkers who believe in freedom of speech and thought, who find creeping ideological and bureaucratic control alarming, we are horrified by these increasingly vicious denunciations by the left. The centre right and libertarians—the neo-cons, post-liberals and the IDW—are invariably smug about how funny it is to watch the left eat itself. But it’s true: some progressive circles are now defined by a call out/cancel culture to rival that of the most repressive of totalitarian states. Historically, it was progressives who fought against limits on freedom of speech and action. But the digital–identitarian left split off from the old print-based left some time ago, and has become its own beast. A contingent of us are deeply critical of these new directions.
Only a few on the left have had the gumption to speak up for us. Few have even defended our right to express our opinions. Those who have spoken out include former media darlings Germaine Greer and Michael Leunig. Many reader comments on left-leaning news sites claim that Rowling is to blame for the ill treatment she is suffering. Rowling can bask in the consequences of her free speech, they claim, as if having a different opinion from the woke majority means that she is no longer entitled to respect, and that any and all abuse is warranted—or, at least, to be expected. Where is the outrage on her behalf? Where are the writers, film makers, actors and artists defending her right to speak her mind?
Of course, the actors from the Harry Potter films are under no obligation to agree with JK Rowling just because she made them famous. They don’t owe her their ideological fealty: but they owe her better forms of disagreement. When Daniel Radcliffe repeats the nonsensical chant trans women are women, he’s not developing an argument, he’s reciting a mantra. When he invokes experts, who supposedly know more about the subject than Rowling, he betrays his ignorance of how contested the topic of transgender medicine actually is: for example, within endocrinology, paediatrics, psychiatry, sociology, and psychology (the controversies within the latter discipline have been demonstrated by the numerous recent resignations from the prestigious Tavistock and Portman gender identity clinic). The experts are a long way from consensus in what remains a politically fraught field.
Trans women are women is not an engaged reply. It is a mere arrangement of words, which presupposes a faith that cannot be questioned. To question it, we are told, causes harm—an assertion that transforms discussion into a thought crime. If questioning this orthodoxy is tantamount to abuse, then feminists and other dissenters have been gaslit out of the discussion before they can even enter it. This is especially pernicious because feminists in the west have been fighting patriarchy for several hundred years and we do not intend our cause to be derailed at the eleventh hour by an infinitesimal number of natal males, who have decided that they are women. Now, we are told, trans women are women, but natal females are menstruators. I can’t imagine what the suffragists would have made of this patently absurd turn of events.
There has been a cacophony of apologies to the trans community for Rowling’s apparently tendentious and hate-filled words. But no one has paused to apologise to Rowling for the torrent of abuse she has suffered and for being mischaracterised so profoundly.
So, I’m sorry, JK Rowling. I’m sorry that you will not receive the respectful disagreement you deserve: disagreement with your ideas not your person, disagreement with your politics, rather than accusations of wrongspeak. I’m sorry that schools, publishing staff and fan clubs are now cancelling you. And I’m sorry that you will be punished—because cancel culture is all about punishment. I’m sorry that you are being burned at the digital stake for expressing an opinion that goes against the grain.
But remember this, JK—however counterintuitive this may seem to progressives, whose natural home is on the fringe—most people are looking on incredulously at the disconnect between culture and reality. Despite raucous protestations to the contrary, you are on the right side of history—not just because of the points you make, but because of how you make them.
I’ll end with some other comments and interventions on my part on these issues in recent weeks. I lent my support to MP Jonathan Gullis’ campaign against desecration:
“DESECRATION OF WAR MEMORIALS
“Every war memorial in every village, every town and every city across our country is sacred and serves to remind us of the immeasurable gratitude that we must afford to our armed forces, both past and present.
The passage of time always presents the danger of dimmed collective recollections. Let us not forget the sacrifice and bravery of those who paid the ultimate price: young men and women who gave up their futures, loves, lives and dreams to ensure that the freedoms they once knew were protected from tyranny—for us, the unborn generations, who now sit idly by as monuments dedicated to their eternal memory are desecrated.
I will not sit idly by, and neither will I be silent.
Those who vandalise and abuse these monuments do not have the capacity to comprehend the strength, courage and bravery that it must have taken.
Memorials stand in great, solemn, eternal remembrance of the glorious dead. We cannot bring back those lives, or erase the grief of families and communities, but the least we can do is ensure that memorials are adequately protected, and punish those who would deface, urinate on, spit on, defile, or graffiti them.
Such actions, which have included swastikas spray-painted on statues, and Nazi salutes in 2020 before the Cenotaph, are the price we pay for ignorance and inaction.
A blessed bond is formed between our present and our past through memorials. We see ourselves in the names and images of our fallen heroes, and perhaps we pause to reflect whether we would have had their courage and their nerves of steel in the face of evil itself.
I am delighted, however, to represent the great town of Kidsgrove, where the Kidsgrove & Districts Royal British Legion, on its own initiative, has set up a beautiful war memorial garden that is used every November to lay wreaths and remember our fallen.
It has been an undoubted pleasure to attend the veterans breakfast club in Smallthorne, run by Martyn Hunt and Paul Horton, which serves all veterans across Stoke-on-Trent as a way of bringing our heroes together to share their stories and lend support to one another.
I am asking the House of Commons to do the respectable thing—the right thing—and back this Bill to create an explicit offence, distinguishable from damage to public property.”
Very well said. We need more people prepared to speak up. And more leadership. Last week I was honoured to be part of the Guard of Honour for Raymond Rush, 96 year old D-Day veteran and the last surviving member of the 1st Battalion of the South Lancashire regiment, known as “The Expendables.” Contemplating the sacrifices people had made for the freedom of others and for the public of good with the contempt shown by those preoccupied with their own obsessions and concerns is stark. That blessed bond between the present and the past needs to be nurtured and preserved and revered by those of know and understand the connection.
I was lucky to have that Christian upbringing, meaning that, after a long wandering and wondering journey, I was always able to find the right path and hence find the way home. It may well be more difficult for many in the years to come.
The danger is that when transcendent standards of justice get drawn into politics, the ends and means not only separate, those in pursuit of justice become addicted to means that not only contradict the ends but replace. In my work I am now doubling-down hard on conforming the will to transcendent standards – basically God’s plan of justice. Those standards are not for us to appropriate and use according to our own ends, but to serve.
The goals are indeed Biblical. The clear conclusion I have drawn is that Marx’s work is a Judaeo-Christian heresy. There is much that is of value in there, and I frequently argue it. But there is a terrible danger of inversion contained in the emancipatory ambitions, a fatal switch, which is common to all Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment modernisms – the switch which sees human beings as perfectible by way of the knowledge and power to manipulate and transform the world – and themselves and others, delivering us to a self-created world based on a prideful self-worship. That is an old conceit, and it is one that seduces people. We see it very much at present in the contemptuous attitude towards the past on the part who has little grasp of history, not seeing how they are now in a position to know so much and be so much precisely on account of the efforts and actions of the people in the past they now so imperiously denounce. The conceit is that people of the past were guilty of sinful views and behaviours whereas we, on account of our superior knowledge, are unstained – not only without sin but incapable of sinning, which is precisely the overconfident hubris that invites the worst of sins on the part of imperfect, fallen beings.
There is a potential tragedy unfolding here, and it is a consequence of the loss of a true religious sense. It is a fatal conceit.
The great danger in the modern project is that it involves human beings supplanting God and becoming authors of their own destiny. It sounds liberatory until you realize that once transcendent standards of justice are absorbed into human practice and relations, they become mere functions of power. We lose the critical standards to judge between good and bad, so much so that the emancipatory claims of radicals can no longer be sustained. As in the sophism of Thrasymachus, justice is the interests of the strongest.
Marx is the pinnacle of this thinking, really, an optimistic view of human beings creating a Heaven on Earth. It will turn out to be the old delusion of men as goods. His vision is remarkably similar to, for example, pro-capitalist liberals like Adam Smith and John Locke. People may be surprised to learn, but there is a radical individualism secreted within Marx’s work. Both sides envisage the Earth as a hedonistic paradise, they just differ on the economic mechanisms.
The great danger lies in humans eating up those transcendent standards until they are gone, leaving only power. This expands the means to displace true ends to deliver not a universal brotherhood but a universal hatred.
Every rebellion that was successful was successful through peace and love and the steadfastness to hold on to that which is good against that which is evil. This is absolutely true. I issued a piece of work entitled “The Ecology of Good.” It should have been “Good and Evil.” I was incorporating insights from Andreas Kinneging’s book “The Geography of Good and Evil” into my own work, trying to redeem the emancipatory commitments of the moderns by way of a restoration of a traditional morality which emphasizes transcendent standards of justice.
‘The anarchists haven’t learned that, they desire the same things.’ I fear that the closer to political success and power the ‘radicals’ become, the more they lose sight of the ends on account of fetishizing the means. They live for the politics. I have been shocked at the taste for destruction that has been shown. Constructive work is more difficult, more mundane, and requires patience and effort.
A couple of years ago I was at the book launch of my friend Jonathan Clatworthy’s “Why progressives need God.” I’m afraid to say that we both had a terribly difficult time with green friends that day, who simply wanted to re-run sterile old debates about ‘proof’ for God. I simply told them that philosophical reason undercuts itself, is debilitating when it comes to inspiring effort and sustaining social practice, and that any victory won by reason here is a Phyrric victory – if the world really is so meaningless, then nothing is more so than the philosophical reason that says it is so. Basically, one position cannot refute the other intellectually, so it comes down to which side can offer the most plausible and persuasive account of human life and its meaning. Human beings have a cosmic longing for meaning, they seek justice – the world has been made intelligible to intelligent beings. Truth-seeking is a theological concept. If the world is objectively meaningless and valueless, then there is no reason to seek truth – we are merely rationalizing beings. It takes that Greater Love to draw us out of the ego and identify with a larger purpose. We have been living through an age of scientism, and its paradoxes and failures are becoming increasingly apparent (environmentalists who are atheists will say there is no God, no inherent meaning or purpose, and that nature is cold and indifferent – and then beseech us to ‘save the planet!’ It is an utterly incoherent position. That appeal only works on the basis of a belief in a personal God, a God of Love and personal relationships beyond the processes of the physical Creation. If there is anything I try to bring to radicals, it is that view, reuniting fact and value.
Maybe it will take time for those lessons to sink in. I am getting terribly angry at people these days. I need to settle back and hope that people read and trust that those who do get the message will pass it on.
People need to be won over by love and not by anger.
I get the feeling a lot of people are being misguided, they are so keen for change, but they are being misled. I should speak out more, people may listen more to someone coming from my background. But I am afraid I don't really have a 'popular' touch when it comes to communication. I suspect people have noted that I have refused to conform to demands to show support for BLM and Greta Thunberg 'follow the science' last year. I have been tagged on FB to express support and have pointedly refused. I like principles of authority to be properly established, and not arbitrarily imposed. I will kneel at my Church. I note the inverted religion at work, which leads to religion at its worst, the most judgemental and punitive kind, cut off from mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. For the long term, I am encouraged by the evidence that human beings cannot live without religion, Chase out true religion by the front door, and it will return as bad religion by the back door. That's not a position that will make me popular in the present age. But it's the right one. I'm afraid this is how the left always betrays its principles to their opposite, I feel powerless to stop it and feel in part culpable - my arguments are very nuanced and academic, but there's a need for clarity now. I never thought the day would come when I would be part of a campaign to protect the statue of Winston Churchill, whose politics are not mine - but the case for reason, civility and public discourse against anarchic mobs has to be made. I've been away from FB recently, I have had some fierce words with people over their support for these destructive protests. I make this point a) because I don't like destruction and disrespect period and b) because, as one who has argued for left causes, these are the means that betray the ends time and again. My overall position is that, beyond left and right, we are all are bound by transcendent standards of truth and justice, otherwise the universal brotherhood people claim to be aiming for (and I am less sure that many make that claim any more, there is so much hatred and demonisation of others, not least on the part of the people who claim to 'love all humanity') will descend into universal hatred.
I would suggest that if you are all so smart and so clever that you now start to built a culture and a civilisation – there are myriad crises to be resolving, resolving those crises, rather than settling scores at a safe distance from the past, is the real challenge of the times. It is, of course, easier to destroy than to build, not least when destruction is parasitic on the comforts of a civilisation people claim to despise. This is not serious politics, nothing of any enduring significance will issue from it. A common ruination, perhaps, but nothing comparable to the civil order those past generations of unforgivable sinners put together. It’s the culture and the politics of the pampered, the semi-educated, and the pathetic.