Thursday, 30 January 2014

Should Feminism Be Going Out Of Fashion?

If you're a male feminist the majority of your time should be spent listening and learning. This much is obvious- you can't join a movement for the liberation of a group without taking the lead from them, or terrible things happen. Most of the time, I'm happy to do this, much as keeping quiet has never been something I'm good at. What happens when you think you can do better, though? The answer is that you probably can't. It's not impossible, but you still probably can't. Forget about it, whatever it is. Mansplaining is no fun for anyone. Yes, alright, but this one has been on my mind for a while, and I'm going to throw it out there and see what happens. Deep breath. I think there's a massive elephant in the room that feminists aren't talking about and it's wearing a £5000 ballgown.

By which I mean, we aren't talking about the fashion industry, and I don't know why. Yes, we are talking about the fashion industry in its individual scandals and misdemeanours - size zero, airbrushing and what have you. But why is no one asking why the hell the entire thing exists? Is anyone really surprised that we live in a society that exerts all kinds of regressive pressures on women based on how they look and what they should aspire to be when there's still this massive great big industry that can be traced directly back to the time when the assumption was that women were there to look pretty? It's just been a given all my life that the "women" pages of a newspaper, even broadsheet ones, feature lots of pictures of women in dresses. Indeed, Hadley Freeman, the Guardian columnist, had a section in her feminist book Be Awesome in which she played out her guilt in covering the world of fashion in the form of a dialogue between two parts of her psyche. Sadly I don't have the book to hand so can't quote but I couldn't make head or tail of it. Clearly this woman is perfectly aware of the awfulness of the industry she is playing into the hands of. Even with a raised eyebrow for all the ironic guilty pleasure readers, she's still aware that she's feeding the monster. Why is she unable, then, to just come out and admit that it has no place in a modern world in which looks shouldn't matter for either gender, but definitely shouldn't matter for one more than the other? Is the conclusion just too horrible to deal with?


Ahaha, look at us, disproportionately caring about
what women look like in 2014. What are we like?


I genuinely don't understand. Thing is, since reading sites like Jezebel as my own guilty pleasure, I've come to terms with the fact that many female feminists also really like fashion. The masthead for Jezebel reads Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing, which strikes me as disingenuous - surely you are going to get airbrushing and other excesses if you accept the norm that women (almost exclusively women) are by definition really interested in how other women look? I know from my feminist friends that many really do genuinely love clothes culture - many like style, enjoy a good clothes shop and have a look all to themself. What I don't understand is how anyone can square this, given that women liking clothes is a gender stereotype associated with passivity and prettification, with the world they want to live in.

Maybe it wasn't always this way. I remember Zadie Smith saying at a talk that she was glad she grew up in the late eighties when girls without a sense of style could get by with an androgynous mix of Doc Martens and check shirts. This could be very stylish still, but it could also be an opt-out for those who just didn't want to play the dress-up game. Now, however, it seems to be assumed that if you are female you'll like dresses to some degree. I wonder if the interest of even generally progressive female-friendly sites like ONTD in matters of clothing and red carpets and catwalks is causing women who would otherwise just not be interested to feel like they have to be a part of it. If even the feminists like fashion, after all, it must just be integral to being female! The football analogy is sometimes made for men, and indeed while I did feel like I had to like football for my primary school years, and keep "Liverpool" as bullshit default response when challenged as to who I support to this day, by the age of ten I felt fine about not liking football. I'm not sure it's as easy for girls with clothes.

Vod: an excellent role model for girls.

Not that there's anything wrong with liking clothes per se. I love the idea of clothes as a celebration. I myself love dressing up, especially in drag, for a special occasion - decoration and creativity are excellent endeavours to get involved in. It took a teenage girlfriend to teach me that - before I had scorned her interest in fashion until I realised she genuinely loved the creative process involved in fashioning an outfit. And I am all too aware of the male tendency to dismiss fashion as a legitimate creative art. You need only look at the number of times the Royal Wedding Dress article was deleted from Wikipedia as insufficiently important (when obscure Spider Man villains get long detailed pages) to see the contempt in which many men hold the whole thing. But I think of it like I think of makeup on women: it's great as a celebration for a special occasion, for embellishment of a "look" or for playing plague victims in stage adaptations of Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. This all should exactly equally true for guys. But when it becomes necessary to even step outside the house, there are serious societal problems going on.


Makeup should also have the power to turn you into a genius
 pianist-satirist-rationalist, but that might be wishful thinking.


Similarly, the extent to which fashion still holds sway over what we believe to be "women's interests" worries me, because you still have the cleavage of "men are interested in sport and cars and doing things, women are interested in looking pretty" bubbling under the surface of everyday life. I have no problem with fashion being an interest, but something with the enormous compulsory gravitational pull it exerts, backed up by a kid culture drowning in pink and princesses, worries me deeply. And feminists are doing nothing about it. Oh, they might claim the fashion they are into is higher class, that it's a guilty pleasure, that fashion doesn't have to mean anorexic models and consumerist bilge, but can they really look into their hearts and say that the standard issue of OK stuffed full of body shaming isn't connected to the mass-culture assumption that women's stuff is clothes and bodies stuff? And that they aren't buying into that culture with their clicks and clothing purchases? And can they really look their daughters in the eye when they discourage them from buying into princess culture after all the blogs and magazines and guilty pleasures they have consumed featuring what is little more than an adult dress-up game?

I'm not denying it's a tough issue, because I know just how much fashion, whether in magazines or what they put together themselves, means to my friends. I can only say this due to my privilege as someone who has never been forced to deal with the issue one way or the other. By my nature I'm critiquing from the outside. But sometimes that is necessary. My fear is that feminism has become so afraid of looking puritan and joyless and so many of its adherents just liked clothes and catwalks anyway that it has abandoned the issue at the root of everything to do with Page 3 and body shaming and princesses and airbrushing: women are still seen as dolls to be dressed up and be looked at, and women themselves are buying into it. Basically feminism has failed to create a new image of femininity that breaks the habit of clothes addiction.

Of course, you could argue that the solution to all of this is to create a new image of masculinity that simply embraces clothes as much as women do. But if men and women had had equality for the last four centuries, do we really imagine that men would be as interested in fashion as women are now? Given that neither gender would have spent very much time sitting around and being pretty, I suspect not.

I may be wrong about all this. I may be mansplaining. But I just don't don't get why this isn't an issue. And if you want a question answered, you've got to ask it first.

Now, before you accuse me of having an agenda to androgynise clothing to the point
 where more women look like Janelle Monae, let me assure you that is NOT the case.

Sunday, 26 January 2014

Lying Down In Front Of The Kaiser

Counterfactual history is the absolute pits, so it's a shame it's sometimes also necessary. I remember I got a book called What If? and its sequel when I was about 12, and for future reference, it is the perfect gift for a 12-year-old with an interest in history. It's for anyone older than 12 that I worry for if they're indulging in this game: it is basically an pre-adolescent fantasy trip where you skip through the corridors of history, righting wrongs or fighting battles the way they ought to have been fought, imagining the stories playing out with your own guiding hand safely turning the Mongols away from Baghdad or playing havok with a Hitler-run Europe. I am almost certain that this sort of thing appeals to male historians more than female ones. It's a case of playing slightly more sophisticated pew-pew games.

Take that, Napoleon

Nevertheless, there are times when we need it, and this year we're going to face one such time, because we really need to deal with the counterfactuals of WWI.  That's because if we're going to talk about remembrance and nobility and sacrifice, we also owe it to the past to properly critique the decisions made. We need to start thinking about what was right for Europe in 1914. And we cannot be too squeamish about the results.

We're going to be told a lot about the courage and heroism of the combatants in that war and our need to remember it. So let's start with the most difficult possibility: that courage was disastrous for Europe. Had the BEF thrown down their arms and fled at Mons and the French broken and collapsed at the Marne as they would 25 years later, we would have been spared both the Nazis and the Soviets and many millions would have lived rather than died. How can we praise the courage that doomed Europe to destruction? The Gove school of history seems to run that Imperial Germany was a threat to liberty and democracy. Of course, the French and the British ruled undemocratically over almost half the world, but broadly this is true: Germany was indeed a regressive and militaristic state. But you don't make countries progressive by beating them on the battlefield.

I would argue that the priority of Europe in 1914 was achieving a content and stable Germany. The problem of Germany's vast power compared with its European neighbours has been unsolved since the country's formation. Ironically today the problem is that Berlin has Europe on a plate in way Bismarck, Wilhelm and Hitler could only dream of, and yet refuses to take the driving seat. Acknowledging the obvious early on - that Germany was a country quite capable of taking on Britain, France and Russia and later America on its own twice in three decades, the second time from a standing start - would be to acknowledge that Germany was simply too powerful to oppose. From a balance of power point of view, it was right to let Germany win precisely because that was the correct balance of power.

The probable natural size of Germany at this time

A Germany in control of Europe after a swift war would undoubtedly follow protocol of the times - extract reparations, a couple of territorial concessions, presumably colonial (I doubt there was much more of France they wanted), demand disarmament of their enemies, and then leave, safe in the knowledge that they were safe from the other Great Powers for the time being. What then? The Kaiser might have been popular for winning a war, but there wasn't much he could have done to prevent the growing power of parliament. The business interests of a newly wealthy Germany would agitate for more political power, and without the fear of Lenin's Russian Bolsheviks it is difficult to imagine the SDP running into too much opposition either. Remember that there was universal manhood suffrage in the Reichstag, and the SDPs could only run up against Bismarckian anti-politics for so long. Eventually aristocratic power would have to relent and give way. There would be no stab in the back theory, no Jews under the bed. A country needs time to accept that the old order wasn't working, and a relatively content post-victory Germany was the place for that to happen.

What of France? Would the Nazi Party have turned up there instead? It's possible. Anti-semitism in France was virulent, and would doubtless have found its way into the post-defeat rationalisations. I doubt we'd see an exact mirror of Germany, though, for a number of reasons. Firstly, democracy was simply more ingrained in France than Germany. Fascism certainly had roots there, but the Third Republic had lasted long enough and suffered enough crises to suggest that another defeat wouldn't kill it off. The Nazis required the threat of Soviet communism to make it the more attractive out of two non-democratic options - a world with Lenin sat pontificating in Zurich would not have that threat. Secondly, the war would not have killed off millions of Frenchmen, emptied the treasury and destroyed the industrial plant. It's difficult to imagine even crippling reparations would have had the same effect as four years of war eventually did. The resentment simply wouldn't be there on the scale of Weimar. And lastly, there were fewer Jews in France. Crude, I know, but true.

Russia also does relatively well out of the counterfactual, assuming they were also crushed by the German war machine. Fewer war dead, lots of lost territory but a monarchy still intact. Probably a doomed monarchy, true, but only as far as a February revolution, not as far as an October revolution. The long descent into political reform beckons, but it does not beckon Lenin, who the Germans probably won't even let back into Russia.

Britain is largely undamaged, if humiliated, and goes back to watching its Empire decline. Wilfred Owen publishes thirty-two books of poetry, witnessing a creative peak in 1935 before succumbing to the allure of Yeats' mystic rose, whereupon he churns out tranches of junk symbology into an undignified retirement.

When he was still respectable

You see, I'm doing it already. We don't really need to go too far, though. The point is clear enough. The fact that the combatants in a war are brave is irrelevant. It's even irrelevant if they're fighting for liberalism against illiberalism, if that illiberalism would be better ironed out if it won. We must not let the poppy allow us to forget the truth, as Alan Bennett warned. This is not a question of patriotism, but of the hard truth. I love my country very dearly, but in 1914, I would rather my countrymen had dropped their rifles and surrendered.

Wednesday, 22 January 2014

What Non-Believers Should Admit

"We want to hijack your religion. Take it as a compliment."

I went to church again on Sunday alongside a Christian friend of mine. Nothing much new occurred to me, but I have been meaning to note down for a while that with all the objections us atheists have to religion, you just can't deny that sitting down once a week to consider moral matters is probably good for you. It doesn't make the religion you follow any more true, and I remain of the Quaker dispensation that it's probably much more efficient spiritually speaking to just shut up for an hour than have all the preaching. Still, when asked to bow my head and pray, I did get some proper thinking done, and the sermon did make me think about various excesses and temptations in life, even if it was drearily predictably framed in the image of guilt and shame.

 You can do all that stuff without religion, but a scheduled group meeting to do so makes it much easier and harder to put off, which, let's face it, we would otherwise do. I don't know if religious people are statistically more moral than non-religious, but it wouldn't surprise me, because reflection on moral matters is built into their schedule. We as atheists shouldn't be afraid of admitting this- it is, after all, reasonable. It's just what we do about it that's a problem. I appreciate the atheist church idea, but it's still basically laughable, and you can't ask people to gather based on something we reject. Nor can we really hijack Quakerism in good faith. Quakerism is basically what we need, though, so maybe we could have a grand atheist Council of Nicea at some point where we meet with the Quakers, who hopefully would be up for this sort of thing, and hash out a specific branch for non-believers. A humanism with a weekly meet-up for quiet reflection which could also organise for good works would be a great advance in modern Western culture. Worth considering.

(Also, I just learned that Bayard Rustin was a Quaker, so you can add another hero to the "Quakers are probably just the best people ever" thesis)


Tuesday, 21 January 2014

A Time for Huttonism?

No one seems to be a very big fan of the Observer columnist Will Hutton, at least that I've heard of. Not for him the sexy nu-resistance of a Laurie Penny or Owen Jones, the spluttering clickbaitery of a Peter Hitchens or the reliable old war drum of a Toynbee. He also left the Work Foundation in a bit of a mess and probably made a fair bit of money doing so, so he's not all clean. Nevertheless, when I had to introduce my political philosophy to my social democrat kitchen sharer (something of an Owen Jones to-be) over a boiling pot of penne in fresher's term, I coined the term "Huttonism", because I couldn't think of anything better to say. What this basically means is that he's a left winger with an actual history of business experience and is interested in business.

Now, this is often given as a panacea by right-wingers of the Mitt-Romney-knows-how-to-fix-economies-cos-he's-rich school. I distrust it normally, but the fact is that I simply can't think of any other prominent left wing voices talking about business, and so I am left with Hutton to fill what is frankly quite a massive gap in the market. Thing is, there are practically no mainstream leftwingers remaining who favour a socialist economy. What is remaining, hardly anyone bothers to remind us, is a capitalist one. It seems to me grossly irresponsible to be embarrassed by the fact of capitalism if you don't have a better solution. You can look across the web and find thousands of blogs excoriating the government for its destruction of the benefits system or the encroaching privatisation of the NHS or what have you.

This is good and important work. But if you accept the capitalist system, even grudgingly, it can only be half the equation. Half of it must also be looking for ways to create the wealth necessary to support the benefits system being defended. To leave wealth creation to the greedy is to let capitalism run amok as you are meant to oppose. You don't think capitalism can be restrained? Fine, then campaign for a socialist economy. But if not, you really have no excuse not to be interested in the business of economics and the economics of business.

My feeling is that the Left feels betrayed by the academic subject of economics. The Marxist stuff all sounds a bit tired now, and since the fall of the Old Left the movement has been much more comfortable with the language of victimhood and identity (most people use these words pejoratively, I, on the other hand, think them vital subjects of study even if, again, only half the battle). They have never by nature been very interested in business studies, because they've accepted that business is something greedy right-wingers do.

This is why Huttonism should be a thing, even if Hutton isn't the best commentator, or, indeed, the best economist in the world. There should be more progressive talk about what a productive economy looks like. The irony is that if evidence from Scandinavia and various US States is anything to go by, it's quite left-wing. Hutton's column on Sunday  makes this point very clearly. The point, it seems, is that as trade unions have weakened and employment flexibility increased along with a failure of wages to keep up with growth, money in businesses and the economy in general has been moving into shareholders. Shareholders and the shareholder class are able to reward themself more and more at the expense of any entrepreneurial activity. Money quote:

Entrepreneurs are the engine room of a capitalist society, at best making fortunes on the back of genuine risk-taking, usually when they bet their assets and reputation on some innovation. They can also lose everything. But as companies found their profits rising sharply, executives at the top sold the unwarranted proposition that it was because they too were entrepreneurial, rather than the beneficiaries of weakened trade unions. They should, they claimed, receive entrepreneurial returns , even if they risked nothing.
The Right is capable of all the bitching about entrepreneurship and free enterprise they want, but it won't change the fact that their economic policies hinder both things. A large and wealthy middle class that actually buys things companies make, shareholders hungry for increased productivity rather than greater cash prizes for themselves, R&D departments with more priority than the marketing or equity departments - these are things that will drive a modern capitalist economy, and they are precisely the things discouraged by the most enthusiastic capitalist reformers of the last 30 years. The play-it-safe management class we have now are utterly useless as boosters of capitalism, and those who want redistributionist tax policy, strong housing and employment rights, tax-funded higher education and a bunch of other left-wing wish-list items actually are cheerleaders of capitalism. Because capitalism works best in an equitable society. 

There's much more to say about this, chiefly about the fact that modern technology growth simply isn't capable of supporting the kind of capitalism our grandparents profited from, but the main point is this: the acquisition of money  and profit, as long as it's done supporting greater productivity and isn't merely a reward for more acquisition, is not a dirty idea. Well, it might be, if you're a socialist and don't like the idea of profit. But if you're not, then you'd better get interested in the subject of how businesses make money, because currently conversation on the topic seems to have been left to people who look like they know what they're doing and are actually incompetent.

Friday, 17 January 2014

Hurrah, Boys, Hurrah (Or, The Active Approach To Liberal Guilt)




As an addendum to my previous post, I'd like to mention that I've had a song running round and round my head this last week. I get that a lot, but it's not often that the song is an American Civil War marching song. Marching songs seem especially difficult to dislodge - you tend to fall into them just in resuming a walking pace. Since singing it out loud isn't doing the trick of exorcising it, I'll put it down here to see if it goes away.

The song is The Battle Cry of Freedom, and I first heard it last year in the movie Lincoln, in the scene when the Thirteenth Amendment is finally passed. A couple of the Congressman start singing it as a victory chant and it is taken up by the rest of the triumphant Republicans. The Union forever, hurrah, boys, hurrah! Down with the traitors and up with the Star! Give him his due, Spielberg knows when to break out the big guns - like the Marseillaise in Casablanca, a good martial song deployed at the right moment can give history a good kick up the backside.

Alright, so why has a fairly inconsequential moment like that stuck with me, then? Well it hadn't until I saw 12 Years a Slave. Soon after walking out of the film, the tune came unbidden to my head. I hummed it, then looked up the lyrics, and started singing it. Down with the traitors and up with the Star. Now, I imagine I had some need to find something redemptive in all that mess. White guilt, or whatever it is, has one salve when it comes to American Slavery: in the end, the white Northerners did march South and visit destruction on the slavers due to their intransigence. It is not often remembered in those terms in America, for good reason: you can't see the Southerners as the bad guys if you want to get along as a country, God knows it's hard enough as it is. But as an Englishman descended from Southerners, I do see it that way, and when in Slave Brad Pitt's Canadian carpenter warns of the time of reckoning to come, all I could think of were the muddy plains of Gettysburg and Antietam, where the horror of slavery would beaten out of the nation in the mud and the blood.

The white liberals did in the end march south with guns and fury. And perhaps that's how I subconsciously wanted to see myself, the only way you could bring something noble out of it in your mind's eye - the army marching to relive the Solomons of the world from their torment. We are springing to the call of our brothers gone before / and we'll fill their vacant ranks with a million free men more. It's a childish fantasy of course. It was a childish sentiment when the song was written, too - the North was not a noble crusading faction but an industrial power unable to live alongside its agricultural near-neighbour. To call the South "traitors" has always seemed to me bizarre - if a nation wants to secede in my book it has the right to do so. To see the constitution as a legally binding document is a legal fiction, as Thomas Paine had pointed out in Rights of Man seventy years previously:

The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of man change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.

How could the South be traitors to a document written by those long dead? And yet sing it out loud, down with the traitors and you know you aren't talking about the constitution. You're calling them traitors to humanity, traitors because they enslaved someone without any right. Childish, yes, but by God does it put a spring in your step. Down with the traitors. Wars need a bit of childishness to get you to go and fight, and if it happens that you're fighting some genuinely awful people, well, a song like that can hold up well over time.

We will welcome to our ranks all the loyal, true and brave / and although they may be poor not a man shall be a slave. The reason I sing it is that it is not just a pushback against the horror I've seen, something in the major key, but it also reminds me that there was a time when the moral path was not jut clear, but had millions of fighting men marching down it, men with guns and artillery and martial songs. I had the ghost of that feeling when Gaddafi's tanks were being torn to shreds by British cruise missiles, sic semper tyrannis indeed. The idea of an armoured fist of liberalism is tempting to the Blairs of this world, and we must be wary of it. But listening to a recent World Service report embedded with the AU armies in Somalia, I started humming it again. Hurrah, boys, hurrah. And what exactly are Al Shabab traitors to, I wonder.

It is part of the need to tell stories to oneself, the need to define enemies, the need to feel you're moving in a direction and with company, that give the great revolutionary and martial songs force. We should be careful it's not distracting us from actual suffering; no doubt the idea of slavery was so awful to me the inner seven-year old wanted to fight it like a Darth Vader baddie. Yet at the same time it is good to remember that liberalism is not only about talking and hand-wringing. If I were an American liberal, I would want to reclaim The Battle Cry of Freedom and The Battle Hymn of the Republic as liberal standards. It may be a bit much to call your political opponents traitors, but freedom does indeed have a battle cry, and after looking on horror it can be good to shout it.

Monday, 13 January 2014

The Inadequacy of Liberal Guilt



I am not going to review the film 12 Years a Slave here; writers far more accomplished than I can do so with more insight and vigour. It is an essential film, though. Watching it is akin to a religious experience, I think - it has a great purging power, a sense of witness, pain and revelation linked in the same way that the more ecstatic monastic orders presumably sought after with self-flagellation and fasting. There is indeed a scene, near the end, of flagellation so horrible to watch that I realised I was actively choking down a full scream, something I have never before felt in any artistic medium. What was I screaming for? Did I feel implicated in some way in that violence?

As the Civil War drew to its conclusion, Lincoln ended his Inaugural Address with what has struck me as a chilling premonition:

 "...if God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Every drop drawn by the lash. As it happened, the war was indeed over, and although Lincoln's own blood would be drawn within the month, added to the great lake already spilt in recompense, it was the last time Americans would go to war with each other over the issue. But the wealth of America was not sunk, and the blood drawn by the lash was not yet repaid. The sins of the father have been inherited by the children, and to this day the shadow of slavery hangs over America, suffocating that ever-hopeful nation with the dreadful knowledge of a debt as yet unpaid, and forever unpayable.

On my recent trip to America, I learned that my ancestry includes genuine Virginian slave-owners. I forgot that, possibly deliberately, during the film. I remembered at the end, and with horror remembered the name of those ancestors, the Eppes - not so far from Michael Fassbender's psychotic Epps in the film. I doubt we are related, though it is possible. Does it matter?

Does it matter? And there you have it. This is what I want to talk about, because I've wanted to talk about guilt for a while now. There are doubtless many sins committed by my antecedents. I am not culpable for them. I will feel no guilt for things I did not do. Yet the discussion about 12 Years a Slave, wherever it is reviewed online, always jumps immediately, inevitably to that one word -  guilt. Right-wingers are absolutely convinced that the only reason this film could be made is to induce that great slur, "liberal guilt", in its viewers. But I don't understand what they mean. How could we feel guilty for something we did not do? Is it not they who must feel guilty to bring this idea up, because it doesn't make any sense. The frequency and voracity with which the concept is repeated - look on just about any online review and people underneath will be accusing the filmmakers of it, while demanding that a film be made about the white slave trade - means there is a strong sense that white people might engage in self-hatred about the sins of colonialism and general domination. I as a liberal do not, yet these are the words for some reason put into my mouth.

Bernard Williams famously distinguished between shame and guilt. Guilt, he said, was the condition of being aware that something one had done was inadequate, not up to the ideal picture of oneself. But shame was far worse because it was the sense of who you are being bad, corrupted or useless. This distinction is essential when we talk about liberal guilt. "Liberal Guilt", if it exists at all, is neither shame nor guilt. I am not involved in slavery or colonialism and never have been. Nor do I feel too much guilt at profiting from an inherently imbalanced global economic system that stems from colonialism: only by existing as a hermit could any human being not contribute in some way to someone's oppression; the only question is of degree. Nor does the fact of my race or my family change who I am, because while I share elements of genetic code with the slaveowners, nothing in that is integral to owning slaves or, in the case of my direct patrilinear descent, administrating India. We need another word, then, one that is neither shame nor guilt, for what a liberal white English male feels when he looks at a world shaped in his image on the back of violence, cruelty and racist oppression.

I'll have to leave that one to the philosophers. The fact is that we have not adequately dealt with the concept of inheritance in our society. One can be extremely uncomfortable with what one has inherited without feeling implicated in the crimes of that inheritance. Identity in a pluralistic late-capitalist liberal democracy is an incredibly fraught and complex subject, far more so than the cheap reduction to liberal guilt and self loathing allows. When Lupita Nyong'o is whipped on screen, I identify with her to the extent that I have to stop myself echoing her cry of pain. Do I also identify with the man holding the whip, the man who shares the name of my ancestor? Can both form a part of my identity? The film tells us that our freedom is dependent only on the good graces of our fellow man. If tomorrow all those with hazel eyes were declared to be subhuman I could lose everything and be a slave for the rest of my life. And all my descendants who inherited my eye colour, even should another great war be fought to free them, would have that iris pigment as their prime defining identity forever, whether they cared about it or not. Perhaps I screamed because but for the grace of God I am Patsey as much as I am Epps.

Aeschylus talked of the "strife in the blood", the wound in the family that could only be cured by the children of the family. He is potent, but wrong; we feel there is something morally important about our genes when there is not. I carry nothing from my ancestors but their physical looks, and their sins are not my sins. I am extraordinarily lucky to be white and male and straight, and the reasons for this luck have been bought by military dominance and patriarchal oppresion for many hundreds of years. But I will not disown the luck because of it. Rather, I choose to remain aware of it. And the reason that we must keep making works of art like 12 Years a Slave is not to reinforce liberal guilt but to overcome it. When you view the degradations of the past, so close to you that you know that few generations ago that was you standing there with a whip, when you view them without fear or denial, then you can lift your head and say quietly I am not those men. And after wading through the blood and the filth of the truth about how you came to be where you are, after staring deep into the abyss, you might just come out beaming on the other side.