Reading the Senate Torture Report, there's plenty to be incensed about. This is a document of evil and there should be no bones made about that. But what strikes me most is the way that supposedly Very Serious People working In The Real World and For Our Safety were so happy to ignore the objections and criticisms coming from the people carrying out the programme. Concerns being completely being overridden, never discussed again and being forbidden from being put into any documentary evidence is distressingly reminiscent of the practices of Nazi Germany in its darker dealings. In fact, the similarity is not limited to the repugnance of the actions but also in the general incompetence of what was being done. Supposedly Serious People dealing with The Real World should be the ones telling you that any organisation regularly ignoring expert objections from below is a broken organisation. Yet here we are with the CIA looking precisely as useless as right-wingers might tell us a big government organisation should be.
Anyone who looks at the history of large authoritarian states would hardly be surprised to discover security services becoming states within states, unaccountable and therefore prone to both morally awful and operationally disastrous courses of action (these two aspects of unaccountable government action being utterly conjoined). It is ever America's failing that it believes that having escaped history it is no longer subject to the patterns of other states. In rejecting totalitarianism and the Old World as part of the founding creed of the country, it paradoxically makes it far harder for Americans to see the seeds of those same sins in their own institutions; to do so would be to admit that America, despite the very special circumstances of its founding, is not inherently special. This has allowed putative Caesars like MacArthur and crypto-fascists like J Edgar Hoover to ride unchecked far further than would be hoped for a nation with such high ideals: to see what is in front of one's nose is, of course, a constant struggle.
The CIA is an organisation with what could be charitably called a tarnished record - the overthrow of legitimate foreign governments, warrantless surveillance, assassination, torture - this is not the record befitting a country of America's moral stature. Nor is it surprising. Give a group of men a huge budget, tell them they are Very Serious and entrusted with the Safety Of The Nation, show them the extent of the very real threats out there and you end up with a vaster version of the police violence that has animated protests this year - you have a very big, very scared man with a lot of adrenaline and a very big gun. And like Captain Renault discovering gambling in Rick's Cafe, Americans are shocked, shocked when it turns out these people overstep boundaries. Of course they do. They have immediate security concerns and can plausibly count on the continued secrecy of their actions if they are ever called out on them.
This has happened in just about every powerful security apparatus ever. The states within states that appeared in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Mubarak's Egypt, South American dictatorships and god knows where else were all originally powered not just by corruption but by many men who thought they were doing the best for their country. The CIA may work for a morally better government than these, but remove them from the cut-and-thrust of civic life, tell them they have different priorities than the pen-pushers in D.C, cast their critics as tree-hugging hippies and who is surprised that they end up torturing people? Moreover, who is surprised that they end up not terribly good at their basic job when doing so?
Here is a modest proposal, then. Given that we need intelligence services, and given that they are by their nature organised such that they will become states within states (welcome though the Senate report is, I won't hold my breath for the criminal convictions that would be required to show that America has a genuinely functioning check on executive power), we may as well write this acknowledgement into the constitutions of liberal states. In the expectation that our intelligence community will become over-mighty and contemptuous of civilian control due to the very real and respectable ever-increasing pressure of their duties, they should be subject to regular dissolution. The entire security apparatus should be closed down and reorganised every 20 years with new personnel. To prevent the loss of institutional knowledge and keep techniques refreshed, we could instigate a swap system with our allies, loaning our veteran intelligence community abroad until the locals were ready to take over again.
In doing so we could refresh the Enlightenment values of the organisations by hiring the kind of young turks who want to make a fresh start with a new, more idealistic and leaner security services. No more Hoovers or Brennans with their careers lived entirely in secrecy and fear and endless contempt of those who try to restrain them. If Obama, a constitutional law professor whose constitutional imagination I thoroughly respect, is not going to cut Brennan down to size then the threat of the CIA is simply too great. The CIA should fear the president, not the other way round. And if Obama fears them, I have little hope for his Republican successor, and certainly not for Clinton. That leaves only the forest fire approach - a burning and refertilising every few years to prevent the death of the forest. As the potential power of a security state increases in the digital age, we must be prepared for constitutional checks on our fear of terrorist attacks - if popular opinion is incapable of castigating the CIA for torture (and why would it in this terrifying ISIS ridden world) then the job falls to our constitutions. If we cannot be brave, our laws must.
In the wake of Staten Island and Ferguson, there has been the expected round of soul-searching and counter-soul-searching that has come to mark racial incidents in the age of the think-piece. Even here in Britain, protests in solidarity with the black community of America have proved quite the draw, which might seem surprising given the extremely specific nature of these two events: these are not massacres of crowds or imprisonment of journalists but rather an overstepping of the line we expect police officers to toe in the discharging of their duties. After all, no-one disputes that if justice were done both Michael Brown and Eric Garner would be tried for their petty crimes and pay their penalties.
The murkiness of at least the former case goes only to prove that the rich seam of fury that these months have unearthed, a seam that extends to these shores, has very little to do with those specifics. That police officers will overstep the violence sanctioned them on occasion is accepted by all reasonable people, that they will then find the law obsequiously flexible in punishing them is an injustice, true, but one that would have been wearily expected by populations from here to the dawn of the city-state. But it touches a civil nerve when injustice is so obviously meted out overwhelmingly to one race. This is a protest about systemic racism - which is to say, history wasn't solved in 1964 and people who live with that history's legacy every day need flashpoints to notify demographics who are comfortable pretending that it was.
The idea that this whole mess is not actually about the police at all is dispiriting in a way that I'm not sure progressive forces know how to handle. Social progress has always been best achieved by ruthless pragmatism and the swiping of low-hanging fruit, such that it could well be argued that the end of slavery in America was more a morally fortuitous by-product of Lincoln's war measures and on a larger scale the incompatibility of federal republicanism and sharply divided agricultural/industrial regional economies than anything abolitionists achieved. Votes for women resulted from war, social health insurance from Bismarck's anti-socialist machinations, and so on.
Absent a useful war or political crisis, the lowest-hanging fruit are the laws or lack thereof that entrench oppression. To call these low-hanging is perhaps to stretch to the term to insulting lengths - the struggle to enact the 1964 Civil Rights Act took quantities of grit, blood and tears so wrenching that it will remain a byword for unambiguously heroic social change for many generations yet unborn. And yet such changes in law are still the easiest thing that can be done to combat oppression. Once they are done, and with the fall of unequal marriage there are vanishingly few such laws left to target, progressives must cast about for ways to tackle the mass of human horror left to shift. They usually come up with "changing attitudes".
That phrase always strikes me as a weak one even when I use it myself. The task set is nothing less than reaching inside millions of people's thoraxes and resetting their hearts from the settings society has ingrained in them, an undertaking so ambitious as to be near-meaningless. I previously described today's progressives as "swiping at midges", which may be a tad unkind but I feel reflects a little of the frustration involved. In a case like Ferguson, where exactly is the law we can change to stop white cops being afraid of black kids? James Baldwin in 1968 was similarly despairing in his diagnosis:
"Those cats in the Harlem street, those white cops; they are scared to death and they should be scared to death. But that's how black boys die, because the police are scared. And it's not the policemen's fault; it's the country's fault."
That the country is on trial as opposed to the police or even Darren Wilson is a notion of which the sage of modern racial conversation, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is similarly convinced. It is the case of Coates, who I think of as one of the finest writers at work today, that fascinates me at this point, because he is capable of being every bit as eloquent with what he leaves unsaid as with what he says. For though his tweeting, writing and media appearances have made clear that structural racism is the cancer that must be healed for these incidents to stop, he is silent on what actions we might take to effect this healing.
Many commentators including Coates were quick to point out that the case which appeared to make the best argument for body cameras, in Ferguson, was immediately pursued by the case that refuted that argument, in Staten Island where the whole incident was clearly caught on camera and still failed to elicit an indictment. Oversimplifying this may be, but it is emblematic of the despair many feel on racial issues that there are simply no concrete proposals left to make. In the clip below, Coates argues that the justice system is actually only doing what the population wants it to do, so holding it out for special attention is wrong, and by extension we might suppose wholesale retraining of cops is useless.
In retraining America, too, it is difficult to see where we go from here. Laws that needed changing were easy to point out to the moderate middle, but systemic racism is harder to explain to people with no experience of it. This is the swiping at midges I refer to, trying to explain to people who think they live in an egalitarian society just how hard it is to move the remnants of centuries. And with conservative media organisations able to shout louder in their denial, the conversation is almost impossible to make progress in, just another front of the endless cold civil war. With only 16% of whites thinking race played a factor in the Ferguson decision, it is clear that the talking past each other will continue, and many will simply switch off to the he-said-she-said of it all.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is notable amongst contemporary commentators for his grasp of and obsession with history. I can think of no other American journalist for whom the past is as alive, as present as for this writer; indeed it was at Coates's recommendation that I read The Battle Cry of Freedom, and the heaviness of the Civil War era and before hangs on his writing like a construction crane's counterweight. His Atlantic piece The Case For Reparations, which has perhaps done more than any other to vault him to national attention, has another telling silence at its heart. Despite the title, no concrete case for practical reparations for slavery is made, only the suggestion that we investigate it further. I don't think reparations are practical, nor do most white people, but perhaps that misses the point - that if you look at the history of the United States, steeped in the blood of slavery as it is, then we might ask with TS Eliot: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"
The "reckoning with compounding moral debts" is his concern, and as someone who understands just how long it took to accumulate those debts, and someone mindful of how stubbornly they resist being paid, Coates is so thunderously silent on how we might find that forgiveness because there may be no solution but waiting until we are all long dead. Perhaps the balm of time is the only one appropriate. History has never cared much for the pushings and pullings of human action, but has always swept them up in its tide, and if the current state of race relations took hundreds of years to establish it will take yet more hundreds to wash away.
This is the grim undercurrent of much of Coates' writing, a gloom which stands in stark contrast to his fellow black intellectuals. Telling a crowd of progressives that they are grappling with the dread might of the ages and are probably doomed to fail is hardly going to be rabble-rousing stuff, but it is probably true, and if there is one thing that is missed in contemporary discussions of oppression, both left and right, it is just how heavy the monkey of history sits on our back. "Why is it not offensive for black people to wear whiteface?" Because history. "Why can't we expect more from our justice system?" Because history.
There have been those who have detected a blue period in Coates' writing, one that Coates is happy to acknowledge. It has waxed this year, without doubt, following Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and god knows who else. This profound gloom has concerned his former colleague Andrew Sullivan as well as his sparring partner Jonathan Chait, who think it profoundly "out of place" with the times. But I think Coates, in his eloquent silence, is far more in tune with the times than either. Because his writing is the cri-de-coeur of the scholar who is able to diagnose a structural problem without any of the tools to fix it.
Between his lines we read the reason why no-one is discussing what to do about systemic racism: because no-one has a clue. In his reparations article he lays out in forensic detail just why black America is like it is today, just how stacked against them the odds have been for blacks - but the edifice of society is so vast and so complex that there seems nowhere to start in the task of changing the fundamentals of people's hearts. The only appropriate instrument would be a time machine.
I fear this moment of despondency for Coates is just the prescient vanguard for a glum period for progressives generally, as in the coming years they increasingly bump up against their own impotence. I hope I am wrong. It is worth noting that for Coates himself, even in the depths of his funk, pessimism is not a position worth consciously adopting. Far from it. In the same video above he says this:
"In terms of avoiding fatalism, listen: I’m the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could have been born in 1820, if you were black, and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619, looked forward another 50 or 60 years and seen nothing but slaves. There was no reason to believe, at that time, that emancipation was 40 or 50 years off. And yet, folks resisted and folks fought on. So, fatalism isn’t really an option. Even if you think you won’t necessarily win the fight today, in your lifetime, in your child’s lifetime, you still have to fight. It’s kind of selfish to say you will only fight for a victory that you will live to see. As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime, or even their children’s lifetimes, or even in their grandchildren’s lifetimes."
As for Aquinas, so for Coates, despair is the only unforgivable sin. The greatest consolation of history is that the same discipline telling us why justice will be so long in coming also tells us why that shouldn't concern us. A citizen of Persia in 1215 would have had every right to think his civilisation would remain supreme in culture, wealth and military strength; a decade and a Mongol invasion later everyone that citizen ever knew would be dead and Iran would be so devastated as to not return to its former population for seven hundred years. And this is the rule, not the exception, of history. What can pessimism possibly mean in a world like that?
There is a social contract signed between those dead, those living and those yet to be born. One's place is not to try to rationalise one's own struggle in and of itself - to do so would drive you mad. You must simply fight on, with whatever tools remain, however Sisyphean the task appears, to fulfil the terms set by the dead for the unborn. As Coates later tweeted, "The challenge is for those of us who believe to keep fighting while at the same time understanding it's kinda not about us".
There's a horrible sensation, one I can only liken to having someone reach inside your abdomen and gently but firmly grasp your kidney, in reading a writer you dislike make a point you suspect might be totally valid. Reading Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator harp on about the groupthink of the modern student left angered me because I am perfectly aware that the intended audience is meant to snigger at the very premise that all the student causes are worthwhile in the first place. O'Neill is in fact just talking about a generational divide here - one man's groupthink is another man's zeitgeist, and clearly the shock is not so much that students all think the same (they do not) but that the range of acceptable opinions continues to change as it always has. Social Justice movements may well be safer than they used to be in the days when the Cold War presented a dangerous alternative, but they are also more palatable to more people, I think, and so have greater gravitational pull on youth opinion. That is an argument for another day, though.
Because this is more than just another case of Guardian reader and Spectator writer talking past each other. I have been wondering a lot about whether the Left, or rather my Left, is intellectually inferior to the movements that preceded it, and this picture of people demanding the right to be comfortable, to feel safe, to not feel offended, above all to be in the Right and have the Right opinion - all of this strikes me as distressingly familiar from my own thoughts. I'm meant to be in solidarity with everyone, of course, because that's how the Left works. But I hate feeling like a traitor just because I read through the evidence presented in the Ferguson shooting. In doing so, the ghostly ranks of Twitterjustice soldiers call over my shoulder, telling me I am denying the minority voice, ignoring my privilege, playing into the mainstream narrative. That crowd has long decided that Michael Brown's hands were up when he was shot. To say otherwise is to rhetorically kneecap all the protesters who turned the gesture into such an affecting symbol.
Perhaps it is a gauche contrarianism on my part, but I am habitually suspicious of people who think they are Right. Even when I agree with them. My suspicion is that thinking you are Right betrays a lack of fluidity in thinking, such that even a forensic and tireless mind like a Glenn Greenwald can appear a flabby intellect because it singularly focusses on winning the ideological war it has set itself, such that jihadism is never, ever a threat and American power has never, ever done good in the world. My fear that the left-wingers of my day are inferior to superior ones of the past is of course not new. It turns out it has always been the case.
I turn to the writing of George Orwell for a reminder that scorn for the "pansy left", as he so charmingly calls them, is traditional for other leftwingers. And a modern critic of the Left like Freddie DeBoer hits the same points again. By simply declaring that some writers and thinkers and channels and opinions are just Wrong, and like kryptonite sear and burn all that is pure just by their very presence, the Left is shutting itself out of a dialogue with the world, and more than that is putting its younger adherents into a constant state of fear, so that all are watching everyone else for a break from orthodoxy, and watching their own mouths for saying something Not OK, resulting in all the intellectual curiosity of Stalinist Russia or Puritan Salem.
The S stands for Socialjustice
The ghost of Orwell hangs over so much of contemporary political discussion because he is determinedly non-intellectual, and he will appeal as long as there is a toothless and obfuscating Left drowning in long words and sanctimony, which is likely to be a while. I have been put in mind recently of his essay on Rudyard Kipling. Kipling is what would in the modern tumblr-verse be labelled "problematic". An unreconstructed racist, imperialist and advocate of continued white hegemony, he represents most of what I hate about my country's history. Orwell, who as a man who had seen first hand what Empire meant had more reason to hate Kipling than I, nevertheless takes him seriously as a poet. He is quite capable of seeing the guilty pleasure in Kipling's verse, and coins the term "good bad poetry" to explain the way that such poems "are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them."
About the horrid views of Kipling Orwell is clear-eyed. "Morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting" as well as a sadist, the man nevertheless is capable of producing lines of poetry we cannot help but enjoy.
"Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as: For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say, ‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’"
At least it rhymes
I don't mean to go deeply into Kipling's merits as a poet here. I find him trite myself, whatever Orwell says. But the ability to see what is good in your political opposition is sorely missing from the inheritors of Orwell. The problem of "problematic", a catch-all word that has come to mean nothing but a surrender to intellectual laziness among certain segments, is that it places cultural items and figures into a box in which you never again have to think of them. The infamous yourfaveisproblematic.tumblr exemplifies this trend, in which if a celebrity expresses an insensitive opinion (some of which are genuinely awful) they are beyond the pale.
I recognise precisely why web-based activists employ this method. Powerful cultural forces require a strong response. Benedict Cumberbatch complaining about being discriminated against for being posh must be placed straight in the problematic pile precisely because he has so much cultural power already. The ability to fight so actively and strongly against opinions that control the dialogue so often is no doubt intoxicating. The feminist societies of today's universities, for example, have an understandable defensiveness about their hard-won gains, so the urge to lash out against the forces of privilege is strong. Yet it leads all too often to the logical extreme of the kind Laci Green had to deal with.
My travels in America have made me certain that if there is a threat to civil society in the coming decades, it is not either the clamping down on freedom of speech that Mr O'Neill seems to think the PC brigade wants, nor its repressive state-sanctioned counterpart, nor even the ever present threats of racism, sexism, homophobia and the supremacy of the wealthy. Rather, it is that as people increasingly choose who they speak to, the websites they visit, the channels they watch, the reality they live in, the willingness to regard opposition as even remotely legitimate decreases. Anti-abortion activists are threatening to the mental health of women and cannot be heard. The Democratic Party are a fifth column and must be fought with eradicationist tactics lest the USA be destroyed. and so on.
There is a certain type of fortitude required to be young today that is too easily sneered at. Being endlessly surrounded by a sensory bombardment of that which can stress you out with very few quiet places to which you can retreat has doubtless contributed to a mental health timebomb. I don't doubt that the reason trigger warnings have become ubiquitous is because there are a whole bunch of people out there who are very easily triggered. It takes bravery to live in a society constantly telling you are worthless, to deal with the endless wearing away of your psyche that are widespread ignorance and prejudice and idiocy. Conservatives have sneered at this as mere cowardice, oversensitivity, and they are wrong about that. But neither should we be happy to retreat to our safe spaces, because we have to live in the nation of our oppressors, too. We must have the fortitude to share it with them, or eventually watch our society crumble.
To love your enemies is hardly going to be welcome advice today in the black communities mourning the Ferguson outcome this month. But we may not have a choice. In the Twentieth century Auden amended Jesus' commandment to "love one another or die". In the Twenty-First, the necessity of that commandment may be realised. Today's progressive forces are swiping at indistinct midges of oppression far harder to squash than the concrete laws of yesteryear, and the frustration is increasingly hard to communicate to the communities that have long benefited from those oppressions.
Yet they will need to sit on that frustration and see good in their opponents and their cultural products not because of the "politics of respectability" but because the alternative is a paralysing cold civil war from which western society may find it hard to escape. A start to this process would be the embrace of the "good bad" over the flinch of "problematic" - to accept that these cultural items exist and have merits as well as demerits. This means not being afraid of them, above all. It means being brave.
George Orwell once said that when reading any writer, you had an impression of a face somewhere behind the page. For Orwell himself the face I see is that of a man sitting across a table from a number of horrors themselves given face. There sits Kipling, the envoy of Empire and its attendant miseries. Over there sits Adolf Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich and behind them the brownshirted lackeys of fascism. At other seats still sit a gimlet-eyed Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinsky and Joseph Stalin, crowded behind by an indistinct crowd of the useful leftwing idiots murmuring affirmative nothings while not noticing they are ankle deep in blood. And Orwell sits there, smiles grimly, and says what he thinks of them to all of their faces, each in turn. And he treats them as humans.
The latest developments in the Great Islamic War have returned thoughts in the West to a problem lying at the heart of liberal society: if liberalism posits that society should include all views, and that the kind of cultural supremacism that produced Empire should be opposed, how do we defend our values when they are challenged by different cultures? Is it possible to both deplore racism and criticise Islamic society?
It's a huge issue, one that I won't go into properly here. But I find it very difficult to broach the subject partly because I am aware of my own cultural place: as a white male whose teenage intellectual heroes were white males like Clive James, George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, Will Hutton and the like who robustly defended the Enlightenment as opposed to the New Left identity politics (again, I don't use that phrase pejoratively) figures favoured by university contemporaries, the subject of cultural relativism has seemed one destined to trip me up.
When Richard Dawkins gets into trouble he generally pleads that he is merely robustly standing up for rationalism, sensitivities be damned, and I don't want to look like that kind of white male, because his unpleasantness comes across as just another type of supremacism. Saying that Trinity College Cambridge has won more Nobel Prizes than the Muslim world combined is true, but it comes across as someone terribly satisfied they happen to be in the "best" culture, so I tend to recoil even whenthe evidence is overwhelming that the Muslim world lags disastrously behind the West in terms of educational standing.
The criticism that by Enlightenment standards the Muslim world is doing terribly is a difficult one to make. I can criticise the headscarf, for instance, as essentially punishing women for having hair. There are plenty of defences of it, some very eloquent, and the modern feminist movement has to a great degree stepped up its intersectional game and embraced it. But I will never be convinced that it isn't a misogynist item that impinges ludicrously greater burdens of modesty on women than men. Occam's razor alone suggests that if the rule for women is an old one, it's probably a misogynist one.
Now, in making that argument I either treat humans in a vacuum, with everyone on an equal playing field judged by the utilitarian consequences of their actions, and cultural expressions mere opinions held to the same scrutiny of all opinions, in which case the headscarf comes out badly, as does wider Muslim culture, (stats on apostasy opinion polling bear this out) or I don't because I can't judge other cultures without indulging in supremacism. Usually I favour the former, chiefly because the colossal damage done worldwide by white supremacy seems to me to make white culture come out fairly badly out of history, counteracting any superiority it might have in professed Enlightenment. Nevertheless, applying my values to others with different cultural backgrounds reminds me of the one of the first times I thought religion was stupid as a kid - "Isn't it lucky for you that of all the places you could have been born, they happened to have the right opinion?"
In defending liberal values, then, any good liberal has to convince themself they're not actually just chuffed about being in the right culture. One justification that caught me while listening to A History of the World in 100 Objects runs as follows: human history has varying start dates proposed. But let's take evolution into our current form 200,000 years ago as our start point. If there can be a moral system that applies to all humans, it is that of who does the least harm and contributes the most to human dignity, liberty and happiness. Looking at human history as a race to get to that system, I think you can come to the conclusion that Western European culture got to a good system before anyone else did.
The modern liberal state tries to manage a number of problems: it curbs abuses of power using a mix of rule of law and electoral democracy, with freedom of speech and protection of basic rights it ensures no single opinion, ideology or group is assumed to be worth fighting or dying for, and it generally favours the kind of progressive acquisition of those rights for groups that in older societies were denied them. This provides for a good deal more happiness than a theocracy. So far you could easily be a Niall Feguson-type Western supremacist tub thumper for believing this.
But all those features came about as the result of a new literate middle class that could demand them. The refusal of the liberal state to regard any doctrine as supreme as a theocratic state does is chiefly a result of having to manage too many varying opinions with actual power behind them. It is tied to an economic model that provided for that class. And that economic model is tied indivisibly to imperialism. A vast bulk of the new capital that furnished the banks that in turn furnished the Industrial Revolution came from the rape of resources from all over the non-European world. The great irony of the Enlightenment was that it was built on the back of disastrously unenlightened activity - the decimation of entire Mesoamerican civilisations, the enslavement of African populations, the disembowelling of Indian natural wealth.
In other words, the West got to the Enlightenment by being ruthless enough to get there first. Had Africans, as in Malorie Blackman's alternate history, by a quirk of continental fate gained the technological advantages Europeans eventually enjoyed they would have done exactly the same thing - enslaved and plundered everywhere they went until they got to the Enlightenment because the Enlightenment is merely a pragmatic response to dealing with a bunch of citizens who have money all of a sudden. But the fact these values come from brutality doesn't mean they're wrong. Nor is it wise to be proud of coming from the society that just happened to get there first.
Moreover, as I said, it's 200,000 years of history we're talking about here, with at best 500 years of Europeans moving toward the liberal state. Being impressed that your bunch got there first is like crowing over winning a race by a millimetre. It's crass.
All of which is my personal justification for being a forthright liberal. The modern Left is uncomfortable with this kind of liberalism because of its commitment to a pluralist society, which is admirable but can so easily miss the wood for the trees - watch Seamus Milne or Glenn Greenwald excoriate Western imperialism while totally ignoring the actual threat of jihadism and you'll see what I mean. The wish to accommodate many cultures is right. But we don't have to be embarrassed about being right about being liberal either. And I wish more liberals would accept that their own values apply to everyone, whatever culture, in every part of the world. We are indeed a human family. They'll get there without your help, they've been running race as long as you have, and you're a fraction of a second ahead. And don't forget you cheated to get there.
I wanted to write a little about the Donmar Henry IV, since along with director Phyllida Llloyd's Julius Caesar and the as-yet unannounced third part of Shakespeare-in-women's-prison trilogy it forms a cheerfully independent-spirited stab in the side of the Shakespeare industry, not intellectualised or trendy enough to be tarred with the avant-garde brush while still quite capable of making white male critics smash their monocles in outrage that this sort of thing gets public funding.
Foucault would have a field day what with all the sexuality and prisons involved, but the production is so swift and light on its feet (everyone's favourite Shakesperean characters the Messengers refreshingly enter and exit so fast they practically shatter their kneecaps on the walls) that to get too bogged down in continental frippery would seem to miss the point. This is clear and breezy Shakespeare that gets the text across without dwelling too much on Interpretation, and that can only be a good thing. That said, certain elements of the text are highlighted by the prison setting not so much through brilliance of conceit as simple stripping away of pageantry and nonsense.
What had never occurred to me about the play, but what removing the trumpets and swords and expansive battlefields clearly reveals, is just how depressive almost everyone in it can appear. Falstaff as played by Ashley McGuirre is a lifer in this production, old age creeping up on her without anything to show for the years spent behind bars but what social standing she can muster amongst the other inmates. The jokes and the ribaldry, the childish need to have the last word and never be sincere conceal a deep pain and fear of advancing time. What is in that word honour? Substitute the word honour for just about anything that might be considered worth having for a prisoner and you start to see the hopelessness of Falstaff's situation. What's the point of taking life seriously when it has nothing to offer you?
what is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead.
The overwhelming pointlessness of counting out each day and pretending to care are spat out painfully clearly by McGuirre's delivery, her "No"s combining the petulance of a child with the weariness of one old enough to know the child is right to be petulant.
Or take King Henry himself, as played by Harriet Walter. "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown" indeed, but never has this seemed less general and more particular than in Walter's telling. This isn't about the heaviness of rule when set in a prison; this is about trying to escape the past. Henry seeks to "steep his senses in forgetfulness" because his previous deeds won't let him go; as Henry he regrets his treatment of Richard; as a convict she cannot escape her sins. Depression means that being weighted down by your own being, being unable to escape except in sleep and lusting after a Jerusalem that means absolution and will never come.
Hotspur meanwhile is down on the Wikipedia page for PTSD as being the first recorded sufferer:
Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth, And start so often when thou sit'st alone? Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks; And given my treasures and my rights of thee To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?
asks his wife, and indeed this version of Hotspur is never quite in the room with us: Jade Anouka is a whirlwind of energy, completely ignoring his poor wife's entreaties and focussing above all on action, action, action. At one point he starts an unnecessary series of situps while discussing an upcoming battle - we get the sense that Hotspur's method of dealing with depression and PTSD is just to do things and never reflect, which is why eventually, perhaps, he is not the equal of Harry Monmouth. His father is played as withdrawn in his sickness, apparently another casualty of nameless horrors.
Just about the only character not dealing with the kind of hopelessness that characterises severe institutionalised depression is Hal - and in this production, he is the only inmate we know is about to get out soon. His final rejection of Falstaff is accompanied by the return of the prison guards as the remaining inmates once again face another day of oblivion and the bright light Hal represented ascends to kingship. Strip away the historical trappings of the History Plays and you're faced with human drama of people facing their own mortality and pointlessness every bit as much as Macbeth sees "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow". For those who find the tavern scenes and low comedy of these plays tedious, this a bracingly bleak reminder of the tattered and bruised humanity that Shakespeare ometimes seemed incapable of leaving out of his plays.
The under 30s world can be divided into those who played point-and-click adventure games as children and those who have known nothing but shooting and football on some godforsaken TV-based console; it will surprise you neither that I believe the former group are our future statesmen, philosophers and pioneers nor that I belong very much to the former group. King amongst the point-and-click games, of course, was Monkey Island, the rakish, mad, three-headed monkey infested series that made you feel cleverer than you should for essentially doing nothing but rubbing every item in your inventory against every surface in the area until something worked.
Most famous of those games' mechanics was probably the insult sword-fighting system. This most cerebral of martial arts functioned on the ingenious insight that since in old swashbuckling movies the banter between duellists was far more fun, suspenseful and basically more the point of the film than the distinctly impractical clash of weapons, it should be the purpose of combat in the game to outdo your opponent in witty repartee.
The way it worked was that you wandered around the forest or the ocean or whatever finding new pirates to fight. As you fight you swap insults, with each insult having an appropriate rejoinder which gives you the advantage again, so "You fight like a dairy farmer" is met with "How appropriate, you fight like a cow". At first you don't know any insults or rejoinders at all, and are promptly beaten in every contest. As time passes however, you collect more insults and become a force to be reckoned with until you're good enough to beat the final boss. It remains the only game I can think of that forces you to lose most of your battles, which gives winning an extra sense of satisfaction.
I wonder whether we should approach arguing this way. Usually an argument is framed as a straight contest between two sides, often with each person in standing as a champion for some wider community or tribe: when arguing against the case for God with a Christian, for instance, I know that a lot of the pride involved derives from the fact that we both represent larger communities that we want to gain victory for. We also want to win because we so desperately want to be right that we've already basically decided that we are before the argument begins so as to avoid the pain of accepting that we're wrong, rendering 99% of arguments fundamentally pointless. Nobody is playing fair.
We are so used to this model of argument by now that no one even notices their premises going in: it is simply accepted that arguments are a matter of pride and since arguments never have the kind of definitive, knockout-punch victory that characterises most human contests it is quite possible to grind them down to a stalemate, usually involving long digressions about the exact semantics or the methodology of the Laffer curve or what have you. Everything else is mainly about the verbal Flynning - the equivalent of the moves movie swordfighters make to make things impressive, be it quips or comebacks or clever metaphors. But when pride is at stake, nobody wants to lose the argument and so, because no-one ever actually plays entirely fairly, no ever entirely does.
But remove pride from the equation and arguing becomes a totally different endeavour. Looked at in terms of who gains what, the "loser" of the argument is in fact normally the winner. The traditional "winner" has not actually learned anything new. She has presented the information she already knows, let us say about the effects of Keynesian stimulus spending, and it has proved to trump the opinion of her opponent about the ineffectiveness of such measures. She has gained nothing from the encounter other than the satisfaction of educating another human being. Her opponent however, now knows more than she did beforehand. Having been defeated in this idealised rational back-and-forth, she now moves on ready to face her next opponent much the wiser.
Note that this rarely means that fundamental values are altered. A liberal can lose to conservative evidence-based arguments a dozen times in a row and still maintain the priority to redistribute power from the weak to the strong, and her conservative opponents will still want to maintain traditional power structures. It is simply that the arguments about methods will henceforth be better. As I grow older I find myself happier and happier to lose arguments because I am more secure in my progressivism, not less. The basic leftish impulse is to redistribute power from the top to the bottom, and everything else is commentary. Because I know that bedrock is not going anywhere, I don't feel that admitting an opponent is correct is a tacit admission I'm becoming a Tory. That, I think, is the very understandable fear of a lot of people who argue - that by losing they risk becoming their worst nightmare.
The thing is, basic principles aren't part of a rational argument. I couldn't tell you why I think the redistribution of power and the promotion of human equality, dignity and happiness is my priority. It just seems bloody obvious. It's not going to be displaced by argument. Therefore, really, I should go into every argument wanting to lose. I'll put forward my best case, but if I see that someone has better evidence and better logic, I'll admit it and come out wiser than I was before. The cleverest woman in the world would be the one who has lost every single argument she has been in but never had to fight the same one twice.
Treating arguing like insult sword fighting is not going to catch on any time soon. We all have far too much pride bound up in our identities of religion and politics and everything else to admit that we're wrong. But the least we can do is admit to ourselves before going into an argument that our paradigm for rational back-and-forth is hopelessly broken and that we are engaging in a farce. That way, we might stop focussing, even for a few moments, on just how we can beat our opponent, and ask what they can teach us instead. It is the most you are going to get out of it, since you're certainly not going to change their mind.
"The object we hope to accomplish is to convert all Pagan nations... There is no secrecy in this... Our mission [is] to convert the world—including the inhabitants of the United States—the people of the cities, and the people of the country... the Legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all!"
Not an ISIS recruiting pamphlet, but the Catholic Archbishop of New York, John Hughes, in 1850. I'm taking to blogging bits and pieces from Battle Cry of Freedom when they strike me, and the fears of Catholic immigration in 19th Century America seem apposite right now considering similar fears regarding Muslims today. The basic trope is the same: condemned out their own mouth, they have admitted that theirs is a totalising ideology that will admit nothing less than utter domination of the earth's peoples, that their tendency to breed at a faster rate than the established population makes them an existential threat to that population's liberty (demographics being the mortal fear of all racists, since the only thing the primitive can definitely do better than us is breed), and that they can never be trusted as loyal citizens while their allegiance is given to a religious hierarchy far from our borders.
On more than one occasion while travelling America a local has helpfully told me that the UK is in danger of falling to the sway of sharia law by dint of demographics. Judging by the tone of the Mail and the Express, the sentiment is shared by many of my countrymen, although they are unlikely to tell you so with the breezy matter-of-factness common across the pond. I have already written about the fact that Islam is currently dominated by a profoundly anti-modern discourse (it is worth pointing out that Hughes' superior Pius IX believed it impossible "for the Roman pontiff to reconcile himself with and agree to progress, liberalism and modern civilisation") and I am under no illusions that this represents a problem in the short-term. But looking at the history of migration, it seems unlikely that future generations of Muslims will be any more of a threat to the modernity of Britain than Irish Catholics turned out to be to America.
We can be easily scared by anyone who claims they want to take over the world. It's a completely stupid claim to make, of course. History has shown that even the most successful conquerors and proselytisers have run into obstacles rather a long time before they hit the edge of the map; Genghis Khan's grandsons divided an empire between them, Napoleon found Russia a little too cold for his liking, and Muslims and Christians both found it surprisingly hard to make much headway converting each other en masse to the correct religion. For some reason, though, if you claim that world domination is your aim and you have funny clothes and an ancient religion to cite and a certain look in your eye and just enough followers to prove that you're not a raving hermit in the wilderness, people start to panic. The effect relies also on the suspicion that one's own civilisation is ripe for the pillage - Hughes, in his lecture entitled The Decline of Protestantism and its Causes, taunts Protestant culture as being weak, effete, stagnant - all the things conservatives fear is true about modern liberal Britain. Say what you like about Hughes, but he knew how to push his opponents' buttons as well as ISIS does.
The sly dog
I'm no historian of Catholic immigration to the US, but my assumption is that Catholicism did not have the feared effects on the US chiefly because Catholics themselves simply lacked the zeal required. Most people want to be left alone and make enough for themselves and their family, and attempting to convert large numbers of Protestants is just too much of a bother in the everyday run of things. Today Catholicism is the largest single denomination in the US, fulfilling the fears of the No-Nothings in the mid 19th Century, and has manifestly failed to do much to alter the character of the country. Unless we've all been taken for a ride and Pope Francis is about to command his 80 million servants to execute Order 66 whereupon all Protestants will be shot in the back with concealed laser rifles, we're laughing.
We easily forget that the modern British state is essentially founded on anti-Catholic prejudice. We imported a foreign monarchy (twice) rather than undergo even the threat of a Catholic on the throne, a fact which to me casts the House of Hanover-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Windsor in a distinctly ugly light. We excluded Catholics from universities, positions of power and influence, from voting, we rioted in the streets when the newspapers told us they were up to no good. Today anti-Catholicism exists only in echoes, a folk memory we've never entirely come to terms with. You catch it in the occasional sniffy comment of the aristocracy about a cousin shamed by "fleeing to Rome", you get a whiff of it in the dark jokes about Catholic priests and child abuse, and certain old saws about large families and Catholic guilt that you feel really ought to be the preserve of people who actually from that community.
Once, eating lunch in hall as a student, jokes about the Catholic church were flying around when it became clear that we were greatly offending the sole Catholic amongst us. I immediately felt shamed by having joined in, but Catholics had seemed a legitimate target; wealthy and powerful as a church, a righteous target for liberals with their divorce and abortion restrictions, wearing stupid clothes and generally a symbol of the corrupt Old World. And yet, I couldn't help noticing that we were making these jokes in an institution that didn't let Catholics in for four centuries, that existed in one sense to bolster the power of the Anglican aristocracy and in which the jokes we were making were centuries-old echoes of those of our forebears. No one remembers what Fireworks Night is about, but like other Anti-Catholic feeling in this country, the embers of its meaning still glow somewhere in our consciousness.
Caricaturing Catholics as insufferably smug is a tired stereotype
That there existed Catholics who genuinely did want to convert us all should not be in doubt. Our existential fear of them needed at least some degree of foundation to make sense. But in the end they were so far from conquering and converting us that today it is difficult to see what so much of the fuss in our history is about. It seems a joke, which is why we joke about it. Our uneasy coexistence with 21st Century Islam is likely to be similar, and I have little doubt that a hundred years from now, children in an ever browner Britain will be slightly confused as to what the vaguely anti-Muslim jokes they are repeating actually mean, still less think anything malicious of them, or understand them as echoes of a more fearful time.
My first couple of weeks on Twitter have been exhilarating. Having binged on following notable journalists, scientists, economists, radicals, comedians, theatres and friends, the opening few days represented a kind of sensory overload: buckets of links to interesting stuff speeding past at a rate of knots, debates spiralling out into the ether in tiny 140 character bubbles, the business of the day being consumed so fast that societal indigestion seemed a probable outcome, all punctuated by @big_ben_clock's helpful BONGS as suitably atmospheric background. What it brings into focus more than anything else, though, is just how little I can be arsed.
I'm a liberal left winger interested in inequality and education reform and foreign intervention and censorship and racial injustice and God knows what else. But I don't really do anything about any of it. I sign petitions occasionally, give money to certain causes, post hectoring statuses about things when I think my HectorQuotient is sufficiently replenished, but I am not as radical as I am being asked to be by the constant drumbeat presented to me by Facebook and Twitter. Everything clamours for our attention and it is simply not attention we can afford to give it to the exclusion of everything else. You could spend your entire life signing petitions for worthy causes shared online. Focus E15 are occupying a housing association in Newham. I agree that London is forcing out poor people, so, going by the amount of Twitterbadgering Josie Long is giving me, I should be sharing their story, donating to their cause, turning up to show solidarity. But I don't because I could also be protesting against further intervention in Iraq or against BP or the Catholic Church or others in the rogue's gallery.
My work is cut out picketing Dark Lords
Twitter contributes to the grand desensitisation to good causes that the social media age represents. Our conscience is pricked so frequently it starts to resemble a colander, and leaks out resolve accordingly. A week ago a Facebook friend of mine wrote an essay entitled The English Education System In The Age Of Neoliberalism,the thoughts of a Marxist on being a teacher today. Being not-a-Marxist myself, my natural instinct was to engage, to argue, to learn from it where I could, but eventually to oppose. And yet since I hadn't the time or the experience to bring a truly nuanced view to the whole thing, I sat it out. And I felt angry with myself for doing this.
I felt angry because what was being presented was the implicit jab that I didn't care enough. By writing that the entire education system was at risk of being drowned in market-orientated stupidity, the challenge is made to the reader to either present an alternative take or be responsible by inaction for watching the destruction of good, decent things. And this, I get the feeling, is where an awful lot of reactionary thinking comes from. Your average non-bleeding-heart liberal is confronted with a world of gigantic injustice and is asked to care about it all. There is racism and sexism, homophobia, inequality, human rights abuses, environmental degradation, and you have to Care about it all, or you're a Bad person. The easiest reaction to all this is to simply deny that any of these things exist. It's the liberals and the socialists and the radicals who are the reverse-racists, the true sexists, the real aristocrats.
The real polluters
Because deep down, none of us want to believe that we are a bad person. The use of "do-gooder" as an insult tells you something about the mindset of reactionary thinking: the dislike of those whose first instinct is to do good in all situations is a concealed fury that one's own largely blameless life is being implicitly called into question simply because you don't share that instinct. Political Correctness is so despised because it holds default behaviour and language to account; while all things being equal most people would see the logic in not using certain language in individual cases, as a lifestyle demand the need to hold yourself to a decent standard of liberal behaviour is grating enough that PCness itself is deemed ill-founded, an enemy to freedom and honest people everywhere.
I feel twinges of this fury when reading my Facebook or Twitter feeds. How can I possibly be expected to care about all this stuff with the attention it deserves? I feel under fire from everyone more radical than me, that I'm some kind of quisling for the establishment, simply because I'm not shouting as loudly as they are about every injustice under the sun. This is an illusion, but a telling one. I'm not as impressively feminist as some, not as forceful about racial stuff as some, not as left-wing as some. And all that makes me want to spend my time arguing with those people to validate myself, indeed probably taking deliberately more centrist opinions just to annoy those bastards implying I'm a bad person, rather than facing those powerful interests who are probably far more of a threat to my beliefs.
Anonymous board members being ironically harder to hate than Anonymous
But in the end I am happy just not giving as much of a shit as other people. And that, I think, is a perfectly defensible stance. Progressive change needs a large reserve force of people only marginally interested in every issue who aren't put off by feeling they should be more involved. These are the troops of attrition, the people who, for example, reject the homophobia of previous generations and so gradually outnumber and marginalise the forces of reaction without going on a single march. If women's power and dignity is to move forward in the coming century, it will be because a vast number of otherwise moderate, uninterested people take up the cause of feminism by default, the sort of process that much as I hate to admit it Emma Watson and Upworthy contribute to.
Radicals require the help of more moderate people like me because solidarity is how change happens. I am an ally of progressive forces, and I will do more than just sit on the sidelines, but I will do so on my own terms. My duty is not to be needled by the endless pin pricks to my ego that Twitter activism represents, but rather stand at a distance, respectfully disagreeing, but always remembering that overall I want them to win. We all have to not be arsed about quite a lot of stuff. The trick is ensuring that when someone tells you you can't be arsed, you don't get so annoyed you forget that they're probably right.
A theme I seem to come back to a lot is the gap in the English cultural memory when it comes to our own heyday. As I said before, there was a time when the British were extremely capable at administrating large foreign populations, having supreme undemocratic power over a quarter of the world's people for many years. Yet that colossal power, matched in history only by the Romans, the Mongols and the Han, has not grafted itself onto the historical imagination in the way that the other great powers of history clearly have done. Walking down Whitehall today, you have to struggle to remind yourself that the men who once trudged to work in that square kilometre of buildings each day had power of life and death over the tea planter in Bengal, the diamond miner in Johannesburg, the fisherman in Newfoundland. It was a power exercised with little pomp and considerable deference to circumstance, but it was supreme power nonetheless.
Whitehall is not a good fit for the centrepiece of global empire. It tries to ape the grandest of European imperial neo-classicism and might, but almost seems to bottle out in a very English manner: the buildings are large, certainly, but none of them excessively so, the style impressive but never florid, even the course of the street is not straight like a Parisian boulevard but bends like all things to the awkwardness of English property rights. Strangely Washington DC would be better as the centre of such an Empire; there is a city that understands the grand gesture, the concealed fist inside the velvet glove of monument. London just can't give off the sense of threat that a good imperial city needs. No Forbidden City here, no Colosseum, no Carthaginian warship prows displayed as archaeological versions of heads on spikes (Mongols and Timurids didn't really need this kind of grand capital, on the basis that being able to build mountains of skulls was probably better imperial PR than anything you could build out of stone).
Hitler's proposed Berlin would have implied the mountains of skulls rather effectively
The British self-image never really found a way to incorporate the Empire in the same way the other great Empires of history found themselves irrevocably lashed to their own mythos: Rome could never go back to being a city-state after being an Empire any more than the Chinese knew what to do with an Empire that had been humiliated by a few mercantile gunboats that thousands of years had told them should be nothing more than barbaric irritations. But the British never really knew what to do with an Empire they could only justify retrospectively. Perhaps the reason for Britain's lacuna is suggested by Orwell:
It was not possible that nineteenth-century England should produce a book like War and Peace, or like Tolstoy's minor stories of army life, such as Sebastopol or The Cossacks, not because the talent was necessarily lacking but because no one with sufficient sensitiveness to write such books would ever have made the appropriate contacts. Tolstoy lived in a great military empire in which it seemed natural for almost any young man of family to spend a few years in the army, whereas the British Empire was and still is demilitarized to a degree which continental observers find almost incredible. Civilized men do not readily move away from the centres of civilization, and in most languages there is a great dearth of what one might call colonial literature. That is to say, the people who might have made something culturally significant of the Empire were in the gentlemen's Clubs of Pall Mall rather than experiencing the colonies first hand. Far easier to build a St Petersburg when you feel that ethnic Russians from across your vast Empire would come to and be awed by its splendour - there would be no point in making London feel like the city that ruled all of India, because how many Indians would ever see London?
All this is in my mind because I visited the Reform Club today as part of London Open House Weekend, and what shocked me was the insouciance of the power which once resided in old Clubland. Our guide was keen to tell us that everything inside was theatrical, essentially for show: Barry had created a strange mix of Italian Renaissance interiors with scagliola pillars and trompe l'oeil ceilings; a fantasy of decadence for gentlemen who had no shortage of it in their home lives but needed a different kind to escape to. The men who attended these clubs were stupendously powerful, not just in terms of the political power wielded over Imperial dominions but also in the movement of capital across the globe, and yet unlike other times at which so much power has concentrated in a single ruling class, no style emerges out of it other than the desire for a bit of comfort and decent tea. These weren't the immensely ritualised lives of Chang'an bureaucrats nor the aesthetically refined indulgence of Medici or Ottoman courts. Just enough wealth is conjured by the surroundings to show you're upper class, but it is as thick as a coat of paint. It certainly doesn't imply anyone rules over millions of lives, just as Buckingham Palace is little more than a modest townhouse compared to a Versailles or a Winter Palace.
One of the rooms I saw was a secret room off the main dining area, a small chamber hidden behind a fake wall for more minor gatherings. In here, I was told, Asquith's War Cabinet would frequently meet since they were all Liberals and this was their favourite club. The meaning of this only hit me after leaving. In that tiny room I had just stood in, decisions were made in such horribly convivial surrounding that sent a million men to their deaths on the barbed wire of Flanders. It is at the points where the actual might of Britain and its armed forces meets the silliness of so much of its aristocracy when true horror begins to seep in. When Churchill makes decisions through a fog of cigars, brandy and witticisms, or when Haig is agreed by men in a tiny room in the back of the Reform Club to be a decent sort whose inability to stop the working class being slaughtered doesn't suggest he is incapable. As a symbol of its time period, then, Clubland is almost completely unsatisfying. To try and touch what made the British Empire the way it was, to find a connection to the period that defines our country today in so many ways is inevitably frustrating. The facts of Empire and the way it was run were so far divorced from each other that the connection between the two is completely unmade in the collective memory, which is why the crimes of colonialism are so apt to be forgot. The Reform Club was built with profits from the Hudson Bay Company, but nothing of Canada exists in the building. At least the Romans had the good grace to bring back bits of Carthaginian ship to remind everyone where the money to build the Forum had come from. But Empire is all but invisible in the heart of London, and the bowler-hatted mandarins doing silly walks remain able to commit atrocities without ever looking like they cared about more than the wax in their moustache.
I suppose that Pall Mall is the closest to the heart of the Empire you can get, and yet I am afraid that nothing really remains of this massive historical fact, since it wasn't real to the people who were involved. The memory of Empire, though, is vital. And my thoughts for some reason travelled, in that place, back to Iraq, and the memories of old empires there. Nothing concentrates the mind quite like the declaration of a new caliphate. Now there's an empire that remembers its own history. The Umayyad Empire is comparable in terms of world population conquered with the British, but it brought its culture with it. Muslims haven't forgotten the caliphate because the caliphate knew how to justify itself to itself; it took the Mongols to wipe out the last true caliph, some six hundred years after the first. Walking around that bizarre Disneyland of Italianate Victoriana, I couldn't help but think our Empire a flash in the pan in comparison, a tawdry little imitation Empire keen to forget itself. With China and India on the move and Islam fighting 7th century battles, the remnants of the 19th century West look increasingly prone to slide back into the backwaters of history, their sheepish glory and their buckets of blood and lucre forgiven by the default of cultural amnesia.
We're rolling out the guns again, hurrah, hurrah
We're rolling out the guns again, hurrah, hurrah
We're rolling out the guns again
To fight the evil ones again
But we're going to need your sons again
Johnny what's it to ya?
Praise belongs to God, the Lord of all Being,
The All-merciful, the All-compassionate,
The Master of the Day of Doom.
Thee only we serve; to Thee alone we pray for succour.
Guide us in the straight path, the path of those
Whom Thou hast blessed, not of those against
Whom Thou art wrathful, nor of those who are astray.
So begins the Quran,
a document secular Westerners spend a lot of time talking about without ever
actually reading. It's been sitting on my Kindle for ages resolutely unread,
however many times I make the pledge to get started on it. I imagine I'm not alone in this. There is the desire to know but none of the dedication. So many conversations since 2001 have revolved around Islam and what they actually believe, but a familiar hesitancy creeps into the voice of anyone who isn't either a scholar or a bigot as the conversation continues. Doesn't it condone beheading? Aren't there seventy-two virgins in there somewhere? I remember reading something somewhere... never mind. Because none of us have a clue what's in it. Of course we don't - none of us can be arsed to read it.
We should have long ago, as a country, had a "let's all read the Quran" month, or two or three or however long it took. We should have all just bitten the bullet and got it done, because there seems little sign we're going to stop the conversation any time soon, what with a new birth of Salafi butchery in Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Nigeria stalking our headlines, not to mention Rotherham and assorted other Muslim-related problem areas. We ought to have those lines inscribed in our head as firmly as "In the beginning God created the heavens..." because it is considerably more relevant to our current debates.
"Yeah, but the thing about the hadiths regarding zakat is..."
The fact is that Islam is having a pretty tough time of it right now, and only Muslims themselves know the way out. However much the opinion of the average Daily Mail (and Guardian) online commenter holds that the entire religion is at the root of the problem, it is of course irrelevant as far as solutions go - Muslims are not going to give up their religion because they've seen the worst excesses of it any more than the Siege of Munster was going to convince Protestants that the whole Reformation thing was not worth the effort. Almost all talk about the current jihadi problem talks around the issue - it's either about the wisdom or lack thereof of Western intervention in the Levant, or it's about how Saudi Arabia is to blame for the whole thing, or it's about immigration policy in the UK. Seeing as you can't bomb people into moderation (whatever Netanyahu believes) and you can't kill every militant, this problem only ends when jihadi recruitment from a young male population across the world dries up.
And the reason we don't talk about that is that we don't know anything about what that would look like. We don't know what the average British Muslim's life looks like. We might hear the routine condemnations of what's going on from Muslim communities, but the nightly news never gives them space to say anything more than "not in my name". My suspicion is that the process of migration over the last half century has led to a vast number of sub-par imams - the settlement into new areas gives imams extra authority as guardians of the "traditional" way leading to poorly-educated clerics from rural Pakistan, say, who aren't capable of dealing with the demands of their young charges. This seems to be common-sense - but how would I know what a good imam looks like? I could tell you what I think a good priest might be like, but I have no starting context for the Muslim equivalent because I have no Muslim acquaintances.
Isn't that extraordinary? A full five percent of the English population, and a greater percentage than that in my age group, and not a soul to be found in my contact list. I don't know who is to blame for this - there are certainly not enough British Pakistani students at Cambridge, for one thing, and I went to a private school where that demographic is even scarcer on the ground. I'm not going to blame myself for not going and actively looking for Muslim friends - it is no one's responsibility to create heterogeneous social groups, only to not resist them.
According to stock photos, that's not hard.
In any case I'm not alone in having little to no actual contact with Islam on anything more than a cursory basis - plenty of people might have Muslim co-workers and friends, but the fear of getting into hot water prevents us from enquiring too far about the practices, let alone the scripture and belief. There is no mainstream depiction of Muslim life on TV, no adept media spokesmen who have any time to do anything but blurt condemnations of atrocities, no niche in the cultural sphere for a character like Omid Djalili's Mahmud in The Infidel, coasting in the comfortable contradictions of going to mosque, listening to rock music and occasionally having a beer. I actually think a country in which we could make more jokes about Islam would be a better one, because as Dara O'Briain says, the reason we don't is because no one knows a sodding thing about Islam.
Liberals get a rough press in the West because they've won most of their battles, so now they come across as hand-wringing and spineless. But the essential truth they fought for - that no one race, class, religion or creed has such authority that it deserves us to unquestioningly kill for it rather than argue for it - took slaughter from the Wars of Religion to the First World War to drum into the public conciousness. Liberalism is hard. And Liberal Islam faces an almost unimaginably tough task in the parlous state of the Muslim world today. Wars and insurgencies almost unbroken from Nigeria to Indonesia should have shown us by now that we are facing a massive generational cataclysm, the result of the failure of Arab liberalism, Arab nationalism, Arab autocracy, and Arab economic policy over a century. Western policy has been harmful but not instrumental; believing that these wars will end due to a change in our stance is naive.
In fifty years' time, the Islamic State or its successors will either still be going strong or will have ceased to exist as a significant threat to global peace. If it has failed, it will not be because the current generation ever gave up the fight (they are true believers) and it won't be because they were all killed by drones (if the full force of the world's strongest military cannot defeat an insurgency over a decade in one country what chance has it against twenty?). It will have failed because the recruits dried up. It will fail because it ceased to appeal to young men because it was supplanted by something more attractive. Salafism has had all the momentum in Islamic discourse for decades now. That is not to say it commands anything near a majority of Muslim opinion, but simply that it "mainstream Islam", whatever that is, is largely inert and reactive, a vacuum leaking young hearts to its more confident wild-eyed cousin.
The old Beltway line "if you're explaining you're losing" extends to religion as much as it does to politics. The various imams who have placed a fatwa on ISIS are playing catchup, unable to provide a compelling vision of their own religion that allows them to do anything more than condemn the jihadis as "unIslamic". But the new caliph would say the same of them, of course. And anyone who's been in a message war of any kind knows that when it's one person's word against another, the more dynamic one wins.
What does a dynamic, attractive, liberal Islam that appeals to the young and can outpace Salafism and its cohorts look like? Will a form of ijtihadi thinking gain a sheen equivalent to that of the American evangelicals of the past fifty years? Will something closer to Sufism eventually appeal to a youth weary of the bloodshed and the endless calls for more struggle? I don't know. I have no idea. None of us non-Muslims do. But simply because we don't know anything about Islam doesn't mean we can't acknowledge that that is the central issue in resolving this crisis. There is a generational war to be fought, and we have to sit on the sidelines. Nevertheless, it might still be helpful to read the Quran at some point. We're going to be talking about it for a while longer.
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