Natalie Bennett's interview today raises several questions, not least about what the hell the Greens were thinking when they decided to replace Caroline Lucas with her, a decision I likened on Facebook to having Napoleon march in the front rank of the infantry at Austerlitz because it would be Only Fair. I have long suspected the Greens of being a not-terribly-serious party, and this seems to further confirm it.
Many of my good friends support the party, though, because it provides a genuine leftwing alternative to the mainstream, and fair enough. Except that it is not a long-term solution to support an environmentalist party, since the new recruits of the 2015 intake will almost certainly suspect the old guard of being tie-dyed vegetarians with their heads full of soft organic cotton wool. Out of such divisions come immobilising party rifts built on mutual suspicion. Checking out the online comments of left-wingers who wanted to support the Greens, as they tear their hair out at the unpreparedness of the party for the big time, you see a vision of the future wherein the Greens become a permanent fixture of UK politics. The socialists will always blame the tree-huggers for being softies, and the party will either collapse or drift into infighting. One side will suspect that the others would let the working class drown if it meant they could keep their pious certainties, the other that the first would let the world drown if they could keep the working class in carbon-heavy jobs.
No-one really thought the future of the Left would seriously be rooted in environmentalism anyway. The labour movement has often made sympathetic noises to it, but the roots of the two are as fundamentally different as that with Liberalism and Toryism, and no longterm fusion can be made. Die Linke remain apart from Die Grünen in Germany, and they will here too. Even the workaday canvasser in UK politics is trained to separate the two parties within the Greens out: Socialist Greens and Environmentalist Greens, and you can usually tell them apart just by asking about previous votes. Everyone knows the Left has fled to the Greens because they are a port in a storm, even if the lighthouse is solar-powered and the proposed wind farms to harness the power of the storm have gone massively over-budget.
So a question: in an era of multi-party politics, what would a good party for those Socialist Greens look like? Even by Leftwing standards a three-way split would be a bit much. That said, there is definitely a space for a British Syriza or Podemos, and it needn't have anything to do with the Greens. It needn't even be especially radical - imagine a party with Joe Stiglitz or Paul Krugman (hell, even Martin Wolf) as its policy chief, and you'd have something that rejected austerity in a way that Labour has definitely not, and wanted land value taxes and graduate taxes and the sort of thing Labour has simply stopped caring about. Free from the Green and labour traditions you might also have chance to resynthesise the left.
By which I mean that perhaps like the CIA, proper procedure with every leftwing party should be to disband and reform every couple of decades. The fact that the labour movement has deep roots makes it no more useful for uniting today's more disparate Left, proud as those roots are. The working class that powered it no longer exists, but there is still and will always be a strong radical tradition. The Tories will always be Tories because they have the same constituency they always did: the powerful. But why should the left pretend to be the same? Occupiers and UK Uncutters should be able to find a party where they are welcome, and the milquetoast Labour Party is not it. Nor are the Greens.
The key to uniting the left has never really been about policy, but about vitality. Socialists will accept anti-austerian Keynesian capitalists as their leaders if they think they're pushing the country in the right direction and are going to win. Which is why Blair was right to create New Labour, although he could have called it anything - it didn't need a tradition. It was only what he did with his victory that was a failure - a decent new leftwing party would have genuinely fought establishment interests until it became inevitably bogged down and corrupt, at which point it would disband and reform to try again. That is the job of radicalism. It is the opposite of revolution because it weakens revolutionary forces by giving them just enough progress. It is probably essential to a long-term democracy, and I fear we are losing sight of it.
Yet quite what policies a New English Radical Party (or a New Chartist Party, or New Levellers or whatever you like) could agree on I don't know. It's a question I mean to ask more over the coming months, but there's a lot of space for it, and little of it is covered with Greenery.
Mental health is not a topic I particularly want to write about on this blog. It's getting talked about a lot more these days, which is excellent news, of course, but also raises new questions I'm not capable of handling. Once we're talking about it, we immediately run headfirst into how ill-fitting our vocabulary is on the subject. Who gets to be "depressed"? Who is circumstantially depressed and who is clinically depressed? Is there a difference between being perennially miserable and being depressed? Can it be possible that a quarter of our population taking medication to regulate their mood is a state of affairs we should regard as prudent and commensurate? And, whisper it in dark corners, are genuinely depressed people now able to engage in a kind of unhealthy narcissism by blogging endlessly about their innermost feelings under the worthwhile guise of ending stigma?
My suspicion is unsurprisingly related to suspicions of myself - I have deliberately attempted to keep the topics of this blog as far from me personally as possible for fear of what I would do if allowed to wallow in my own emotions with an unlimited wordcount. But I do want to talk a bit about my dealings with depression now, because I think there is a time and place for it, and I feel sufficiently emerged from whatever it was I was in to be a bit more useful in my analysis now.
I received a phonecall telling me I would be doing my current job on Blue Monday, January 9th, and I appreciated the irony of being given the chance the emerge from the darkness on that day of all days, for this new job has given me a level of routine considerably better as a painkiller than any antidepressant. I resolved to write about that irony once the pills had worn off properly. But I can't put a name to whatever-it-was. My struggles with depression? I've never really liked that one, since misery makes me lazy, not in the mood to struggle. Suffering depression? That sounds like an illness, and I have long known people who are clinically depressed and don't wish to insult them by saying whatever-it-was was the same thing they had. If I "suffered" it, I'd prefer to think of it on the level of having a leg in a cast for a couple of months. Which is not the same as a proper illness.
I refer to my dealings with depression because I quite like the image of it as a shady envoy of the local mob turning up at my shop to quietly demand some protection money: not actively threatening, certainly not more so than to any other shop on the street, but just someone to watch warily from the other side of the desk. So that doesn't put me in the same camp as other genuine sufferers, but since everyday language is incapable of making the distinction (as are doctors, to be perfectly honest), it is about depression that I must write, even when good verbs to relate to it are unavailable.
What I wanted to do is put forward a thought on the subject of the West's mental health timebomb, as it is known - because as I say, there is something disturbing about the sheer number of antidepressants needed to keep our society going. It has become a fuel as precious as oil. What are we going to do about it going forward? First, I would suggest two interrelated causes of the explosion. Broadly, these are the explosion of freedom and the concurrent understanding of that freedom. A populace that, with an automated economy and liberal political rights, has a vast number of creative and interesting options to spend their lives on; whether in art, writing, humanitarianism or what have you - but also has the education and popular means of information available to show them those opportunities. Such that an average citizen of the UK has the literacy to write a song, the information from X Factor etc to imagine themselves doing it, the potential free time to write a song, and the understanding that as a democratic citizen, it is their opportunity (if not their right) to become famous as a songwriter.
Everybody's got the right to be happy...
Now, you may have noticed that the two elements of freedom and awareness of freedom are what makes up the classic existential conception of angst, and I think certain dead philosophers would see a grim satisfaction in the entire Western world collapsing in on itself in a fit of godless Kierkegaardian crisis. I don't think this will happen. I wrote before about the possibility that our virtue system is outdated (and I did so in the depths of my funk, which I think is clear from reading it) and it may take time for us to work out what to do with a society where there isn't enough work to do.
The clockmaker in Nuremberg in the 1700s may have had to worry about war and plague, and I do not suppose that his life was in any way nicer than mine. But were I him, I would have a trade for life and no popular information about what else I could be doing with my life, nor the sense of agency to make it happen even if I did. Such a man needs no antidepressants. Remove the war and the plague, add in the information and the freedom, and suddenly it seems the human constitution provides an automatic stabiliser of unhappiness, so that a free and educated population is miserable simply because it has context. The millenials are swamped in context. What is Facebook but a giant industrial engine of context. Where Jesus Christ was the Great I Am, Facebook is the Great Thou Art Not. You are not your friends, and they are living life to the full and you are not.
A society with that context at its heart is one that will deal with depression as its primary enemy, like the hungry Sparta forever eyeing the creative riches of its neighbour Athens. I am to a modest extent a preliminary victim of that struggle - I won't aggrandise myself by saying I myself struggled, because I did not; I was in the path of a historical whirlwind, and there is no struggling against weather. I have begun to accept my place as a mediocrity, which is a terrible shame given the advantages I started life with. But to dwell on the possibilities is to invite annihilation by regret, and how to deal with regret in this freedom-haunted world is a problem I and my civilisation will have to deal with. Regret has faced unfree humans for generations, it may yet threaten to drown free ones.
I shall have to return to this topic, unfortunately, since I think it is important. But I don't regard it as therapy, or an expiation, or a release. I just think it's there. I'm looking at that little mobster over the other side of the table, wondering exactly who he is and just how dangerous he might become.
I went to school in a place called Sevenoaks, the very exemplar of those strange little Home Counties towns built to store rich people within an amenable commuting distance of London. As a child who had grown up on a farm, I found the city of London intoxicating - it meant the Natural History Museum, dinosaurs, hustle and bustle, ships, skyscrapers and adventure. I also loved the Sussex countryside, its brooks and copses, the smell of cut grass and the distant sound of a propeller plane. But in between the two was a place that thoroughly disquieted me: suburbia. And in that town of Sevenoaks I had the most excellent education possible in quite where that disquiet came from, spending much time as I did wandering those streets on the way to a friends' house.
The threat of suburbia to me was not so much the watching from behind curtains familiar to English stereotype, though that scared me, nor was it the creepy nighttime hum of the streetlight in such a determinedly quiet place, though that scared me too. It was a slightly more existential fear, looking back on it, that got to me. I had been told by Harry Potter and other examples of the cheerfully anarchic strain of English children's literature that every house in the suburbs looked the same. Yet in Sevenoaks they all looked different, every one. So consciously different, in fact, that they entered the uncanny valley of domestic architecture: too different to be recognisably suburban, too deliberate in their difference to be individual. The fabulously wealthy bankers and lawyers had bought their little slice of identity, and it looked the same as everyone else's.
Oh, sure, there was a conservatory here, mock Tudor there, skylights and big modernist extensions and a couple of Doric columns there, but it was all papering over the fact that every plot was the same size and not one architect had thought of anything interesting to do. Nor would the owners have wanted them to. The point is to have individuality, because rich people can afford individuality, but not to actually be interesting with it, just make a point of it. These people were satisfied with their plot and their regular lives, their black labradors and four-by-fours and private tutors for their kids. With the grandness of their individual home they had tapped into the aristocracy's stately home tradition, and were happy to think no more of it. And walking down those streets, I felt both an immense pity and the occasional fleeting wish for a bulldozer.
I mention all this because a similarly Sevenoaks-educated friend who has subsequently joined the fine enfants terribles et riches tradition of George Orwell, Tony Benn and Charlie Gilmour of becoming a socialist (upon leaving that school I quipped that if you weren't a diehard Marxist after seven years of private education you hadn't been paying attention, a glib line that I nevertheless still suspect might be correct) just posted an interesting piece on stately architecture. I don't mean to combat its admirably balanced points too stridently here - though I can't help thinking that were he a young Chinese man surrounded by the noise of the Cultural Revolution the side of his mind that favours the bulldozer might outbalance the one that likes the cathedral.
Its relatively straightforward Marxism aside, I feel a great deal of sympathy for the desire to demolish the houses of the wealthy, if only because they are not only so incredibly dull, but dull in a quite terrifying way - no one can even think of a new style for gargantuan wealth, so just relives old Tudor cliches. I remember visiting an American mansion in Washington DC and being horrified to discover that each room had a different "Old Europe" theme - Renaissance Italy, Belle Epoque France, Georgian Enlgand - as if the owner had decided that wealth just looked Old, so wanted as many kinds of Old as money could buy. It's like going to the opera and realising that so many corporate freebies there are bored stiff but are happy to be there because opera is what rich people do. If all wealth can buy you is an extra slice of your own mediocrity, then it is not just futile, but hatefully futile.
All of which raises an interesting question. 99% of human architecture that has survived a century or more is the preserve of very wealthy people. The built environment of England, the country I feel so patriotic towards and so at home in, is dominated by the remains of people I hate - clergy, aristocrats, slavers, bankers. Yet I love country houses and love country churches. I gain a great sense of peace from an English landscape garden. And indeed the works of Shakespeare and Milton, and just about every artist who ever gained the money to work in any civilisation, were for and in deference to a horrid aristocracy. How can you possibly divorce architecture from the people whose stories it tells? You can't, which is why being an English patriot is a business so tricky most people give up the nuance for a bad job and embrace the flag and the monarch and Downton Abbey despite knowing how stupid it all is. And I must admit, I am mystified as to how a vicious hatred of the class system and monarchy especially can coexist in my imagination with a genuine stirring feeling at the sight of King Theoden leading his knights against orc armies on the big screen.
Tragic liberalism, which means taking seriously the degradations of the past while accepting that horror is the lot of humanity, might be a cure for this. My friend gives a series of principles for the good Marxist when viewing our heritage:
Keep anything that you can reuse. Preserve any objects of purely aesthetic value as purely aesthetic objects. Do not let the built environment of the past constrict your conception of what the future might be. Bulldoze anything that does so.
I wince any time the bulldozer is invoked as a positive good. I know where that instinct comes from, and I distrust it. Like it or not we live with the sins of the past, however much the Marxist might believe we can transcend them. People will be cruel to each other in utopia, too. I would suggest that these rules betray a lack of imagination: to believe that the conceptions of the future are weak enough to be subverted by the built environment, to the point that its destruction is required, is to betray a lack of faith in them. The populace is not a slave to what they see around them. Or on some level we all are, indeed, but this is not something to be willed away by wrecking balls. It is something to be stared at in the face. I keep my faith in human imagination.
I am put in mind of George Orwell (again):
The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.
When I go into those National Trust properties now, those same properties my friend believes have been turned into a theme parks rather than the empirical academic antique of aristocracy they should be, I do indeed see children playing in them. That seems quite a radical subversion to me. Not quite children's holiday camps, perhaps, but getting there, and god knows what they are imagining as they slide and play tag through the gardens built on the blood and lucre of England's corpulent war booty. I like to think their imaginations might be freer than mine or my schoolfriends of English public-school suburbia could ever have been.
If history had a screenwriter, they would be extremely bad at remembering to make things comprehensible to the casual viewer. Case in point is given by Wolf Hall, a show I am enjoying immensely but which has the unforgivable sin of featuring no less than four principal characters (including the lead) with the name Thomas: those surnamed More, Wolsey, Cromwell and Cranmer. Even George RR Martin, when attempting to create a totally convincing alternate medieval world didn't go as far as extending the realism to naming practices, or there would have been about twenty-one characters in Game of Thrones called Rickard. If viewers are having a hard time following Wolf Hall, then at the very least history's disregard for simplicity isn't helping.
Behind the scenes, too, there is a lack of nominative diversity, with Peters Kosminsky and Straughan, director and screenwriter respectively. Both of these men have the requisite back-catalogue to match the literary stature of Hilary Mantel or the dramatic heft of Mark Rylance and Anton Lesser, but it is Straughan's back-catalogue that suggested the most intriguing comparison to Wolf Hall to me: for he also wrote one of my favourite films of the last decade, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There is a running joke on the Kermode and Mayo show about this John Le Carre adaptation not being about spying in the same way Jaws isn't about sharks - this is possibly why the film hasn't had the lasting impact it deserved, because it was marketed as a thriller instead of what it is, a portrait of a decaying England with the last embers of Empire fizzling out and no idea of where it's headed. Tired old men choking down cigarette smoke in beige rooms, distrusting each other.
Tudor England is a rather different place to Cold War Britain - true, Europe is torn apart by a war of ideas, spies are everywhere and foreign powers are not to be trusted, but there is always a boisterous energy associated with the reign of Henry VIII - England looks like it might finally become a power to be reckoned with, springing out of the backwaters rather than sliding back in as George Smiley's country seemed to be. And yet Smiley, in Mantel and Straughan's telling, has a close forebear in Thomas Cromwell. These are an unexpected pairing, perhaps, the Machiavellian lawyer with the zeal of the reformer and the battered old spy, but they are two faces of an unsung archetype in the English imagination: the grey blur, the creature of the system, the man who could become Stalin or Karla or Smiley. I am intrigued, and worried, by the idea that so many Thomases became key Tudor players because no-one could remember which was which. Anonymity is a weapon in the hands of clever men.
We are introduced to both Smiley and Cromwell in shots that have them to the side, the men who in another movie would be functionaries, extras, the men who hand the clipboard to the hero. They are at the right hand of their master and apparent focus of the scene: John Hurt's Control and Jonathan Pryce's Wolsey. They are immensely loyal to the point of sentimentality to both, a pathetic father figure for men well past their middle-age for whom the system is a better family than they ever had themselves. Neither say much or emote much. Their words are careful, slow, with only the occasional bite of wit coming through to hint at the whirring machinery behind the eyes.
Drama, for me, is defined as not knowing what is going to happen next. The reason these characters make for such good drama is that they hide so much that they could be capable of anything. Even for those who know the Le Carre novel or know what became of Cromwell, the idea that Smiley might suddenly lash out from that cage of a face or Cromwell might express a human desire at any moment keeps you on your toes. It's like watching an action scene on someone's face. The tension is not in the plot, for in both books the plot is too close to reality to be sensational, but in when and how these men will move when they choose to.
It is only actors of the absolute first rank who can firstly succeed in making silence and greyness fascinating, and secondly succeed in convincing an executive that audiences will be enraptured by it. It is for this reason we see so few heroes as lugubrious as Oldman and Rylance (it's worth remembering that Rylance is almost exclusively a theatre man unable to count on the small gesture while Oldman is capable of this) and they are clearly revelling in their rare opportunity to dial things down.
The moment at the end of the most recent episode of Wolf Hall when Cromwell responds to a wish for God to wreak revenge on Boleyn and her cronies with "no need to trouble God - I'll take it in hand" is stunning TV precisely because the audience have been waiting so long for this sad-eyed man to reveal that hand. And Oldman's Smiley too has only a couple of moments where he properly emotes - one when he's drunk and imagining his nemesis Karla, and another one that stays with me most, for some reason. When he finally has the mole imprisoned and at his mercy, the man who stole his wife away, who drove his adopted father Control to his death, who betrayed everything Smiley believes in, Smiley still refuses to show anything. And then, in retort to Bill Haydon's protest that he isn't Karla's "office boy", Smiley raises his voice, just a little: "What are you then, Bill?" Why this line reverberates around my head I don't know. But the rage of the quiet man is something awful and awesome to behold.
As with Cromwell's threat of revenge, isn't there something terrifying about the idea that the little grey man who stands in the corner of the room and takes notes or offers the odd point to his superior - that that man is plotting to destroy you? It is the snake in the grass, the unseen terror in the dark woods. Those who keep their eyes grey are to be feared. And both Cromwell the historical figure and Smiley the fictional one are terrifically good at their jobs. Are they good or bad people? Smiley and Karla work for different systems, but are mirrors of each other. Cromwell's reputation shifts depending on who's doing the telling. And Stalin killed millions. Could any of these men have become the others? We cannot know, because we have so little to read. And that's why they are scary, impressive, and make for such good drama.
I like the fact that Straughan has found the strands linking these little grey Englishmen. As I keep saying, the memory of England is poor, our Empire conquered by accident and never properly justified, mainly due to the work of the Smileys and Cromwells, not the slightly befuddled inbred aristocrats who line Whitehall in bronze. Our greatness, if you want to call it that, is drawn in a series of grey blurs: cunning merchants, conniving lawyers who can outmanoeuvre Imperial China, and civil servants who had the foresight to build education systems to teach locals why their subservient state was just. These men do not make morally great heroes. But they do make good heroes for television. Let us have more of them.
NB: I now remember that the other Peter, Kosminsky, also directed Rylance as a slightly more heroic grey blur, weapons inspector David Kelly. A man who found himself in the history books almost by accident, but no less tenacious and impressive for that.
Tomorrow marks the end of Germany: Memories of a Nation at the British Museum, an exhibition so good it has proved in my mind that a well-curated museum can do more for your understanding than reading three history books on the same subject. I say "well curated" because the exhibition was also the first in which I can remember noticing the skill of the curator in the same way you would note the skill of a playwright or painter; truly Neil MacGregor is a master of his craft and deserves every honour and book sale bestowed on him. Much as with his Radio 4 series to go with it, his ability to draw entire stories from objects is the work of a supreme raconteur: the implications behind the Jewish prayer bag emblazoned with the imperial eagle of the Hapsburgs or the threatening, bizarre figure of Bismarck as a blacksmith at the forge.
I wanted to write something about the series and the exhibition, but there's not a lot for me to add, other than my newfound conviction that Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Barlach may be the artistic pairing best placed to sum up the 20th century for future generations. I was interested, however, to note that there was a gap in the exhibition possibly there deliberately, possibly because it is impossible to fill. It is the gap between the dark and light sides of German history, and it occurs about two thirds of the way through the exhibition. From the sunny all-encompassing optimism of Goethe's world to the technical achievements of golden mechanical galleons and chronometers, Germany for much of this story has a forward thinking energy and verve quite intoxicating to behold. It's there in that prayer bag and in the Hebrew on coins and decorations - a reminder that many Jews felt safer in Germany than anywhere else in Europe.
The turn towards darkness is of course dominated by the Nazis, but intelligently MacGregor ensures it isn't a purely chronological shift - the pain of the First World War's famine is mixed in with it, and almost small enough to miss alongside that a print from the Thirty Years' War of a mass lynching, a cold reminder that the horrors of 20th Century Germany were history rhyming. Yet the Thirty Years' War is something quite unusual in the history of an Empire that for all its absurdities often proved a more peaceful and stable arrangement than its European contemporaries. I took to wonder whether German history was brighter than I often imagine it. Long periods of urban civic life whether in the Hanseatic league or the university towns along the rivers, unencumbered by imperial intervention, come across as pretty nice places to live if your alternative is, say, Hundred Years War France or Hungary under the Ottomans.
And yet, and yet, the gates of Buchenwald loom heavy over the whole thing. Are there hints of what will come in the insecurity and identity crises of the 18th and 19th centuries, the attempt to find a true "German"ness? Historians have been attempting to explain the Holocaust almost since the last oven went cold, and I don't claim that thee exhibition gives a new insight into it. But going by MacGregor's telling of the country's history, there is no slow slide into darkness and barbarism, no slowly building catastrophe, no attempt to use the power of hindsight to pick out the seeds of the slaughter in medieval or Enlightenment or Romantic thought. There is just that implicit warning that barbarism can come out of nowhere, at any time, to a free people who can write the St Matthew Passion with their heads and build moving golden galleons with their hands.
A riddle: how many times must you poke a Muslim before he becomes used to it? I have no answer to that one, actually. Neither do any of the papers and tweeters continuing to share the images of Muhammed from this week's Charlie Hebdo, which is a shame because it is the question they all implicitly ask with their "defiance". My original response to the attacks was that the cartoons should be reposted as many times as humanly possible on the basis that Islamists wouldn't be able to kill everyone who shared these drawings and therefore might at some point get tired of trying to do so. Similarly to when Twitter users reposted a Twitter joke that got a man convicted with the hashtag #iamspartacus in order to point out that since the law couldn't prosecute everyone who did it, the conviction was by definition unjust, I felt that maximum visibility of the cartoons would point out to Islamists that any attempt at redress was pointless. The problem is that basically one of my ignorance, yet again. I don't hold anything sacred myself, though my empathy can just about stretch to, say, imagining being a black person seeing a caricature of black people as monkeys and feeling offended by that. To make that leap I can draw on times when I have felt belittled myself, and imagine what it is like to feel my very personhood diminished by association with a caricature - in that case I can understand the pain caused. But I have no reference point at all for the pain felt by Muslims when they see the prophet depicted. They tell us they feel that pain and we must believe them. But because I can't empathise, just believing them isn't really enough. I can nod along and say we must respect their sensitivities, but deep down nothing will stop the voice saying it's a bloody picture! A picture, incidentally, that hasn't even beenforbidden throughout Muslim history! I don't deep down believe the picture can be offensive, and yet clearly it is painful to some people, so who am I to say whether we should or shouldn't post the image? Because to a large degree I am relying on my own flawed empathy, I assume that once Muslims have seen enough Muhammeds they must get used to it, like getting used to insect bites on holiday. After all, it's not like it can hurt that much. The effort involved in getting angry every time someone publicly mocks the prophet will just exhaust them, and after getting slapped around the face seventy times seven, they'll throw up their hands and forgive. Obviously, understanding that this course of action will leave Muslims feeling humiliated and marginalised, we would need to add some kind of "we love you really" disclaimer to it all. I'm sure they'll understand that if they just stopped being offended, we'd stop it and we could all be friends. Once again I am reminded of the following exchange from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
Galahad: Let us taunt [the killer rabbit]. It may become so cross that it will make a mistake.
Arthur: Like what?
The progressive response to just enrage conservative forces until they either make an error or give up is always tempting, but rarely good strategy. The wells of rage and resentment are deep, and self-replenishing. It is quite possibly the Muslim citizens of the west simply get more and more angry, which solves no one's problem. A considerably more complex solution is required than just thumbing our noses, even if Spartacusing is legitimate as far as it goes.
In any case, whether liberals provoke them or not, Muslims are going to have to get used to having their faith routinely insulted. The Terry Jones fiasco of 2012 demonstrates that there's not much of a way of stopping racists and nutjobs from insulting the religion in a free society, nor much of way of explaining to mobs around the world the difference between a citizen doing it and the state endorsing it. Since Muslims live in a world where technology if not states allow for anyone to say anything, they physically can't stop these insults from happening. The target is too massive. Arabs don't have the energy to riot every time someone somewhere does or says something Islamophobic, and the quicker they realise that the quicker they can come up with a new less violent strategy of redress.
Whatever the intentions behind retweeting or reprinting these cartoons, it may well be that repeated viewings of offensive material are the surest way to smooth Islam's titanic collision with modernity in all its messy and confusing glory.
We've seen a bunch of paeans in the wake of Paris to the wonder of satire in western culture, to how we have always responded so bravely to evil by mocking it. Our hero is Charlie Chaplin for doing the globe dance in The Great Dictator. But every hero we are bringing forward today: Voltaire, or Chaplin, or Twain - they are all useless in the face of yesterday's carnage. They all mocked the power structure in their own societies. Monty Python could mock Christianity because they understood it. They had all been to schools where the religion was drummed into them.
But in Holy Flying Circus, the post-modern docudrama on the reaction to Life of Brian, the following scene makes a very important point:
However much the Daily Mail may moan, there is a reason we don't satirise Islam. We don't know anything about it.
Since Voltaire is being brought up so much, what would he have done today? He would have been as powerless as the rest of us. His enemy was Christianity and monarchy, and Chaplin's enemy was fascism, and Private Eye's enemy is government. All things we understand, come from our own cultural context, and have power over us.
The reason Charlie Hebdo wasn't funny enough was simply because it broke the cardinal rule of comedy: don't punch down. Muslims are poor and dispossessed in France, and in insulting their prophet they come across racist, ignorant bullies. The problem is that Islam is also powerful and for that reason deserves mockery. But we are not the ones to do it, because it will never be clear enough just where our fury comes from whether bigotry or righteousness, and that doubt is enough to fatally wound well-delivered satire.
The horror we must now face is that our greatest strength as a civilisation, our boisterous open free-for-all of irreverence, is completely useless against the greatest threat to liberalism in the world today (though I would say there is a tight contest between wealth inequality and Salafism for that title). And there is very little in the recent history of global Islam to suggest that such a culture of righteous mockery will emerge from within it, although there is perhaps more further back in history to give us some hope on that front.
We like to say that the gunmen attacked the cartoonists because they were a threat. If so, they were wrong. Western satire is no threat to Islam of any stripe. Satire only works when directed at its own culture, or it fails in its primary task of being funny. The jihadis needn't have bothered.
It is with great regret and not a little fury that I follow a post about France and its ability to withstand endless punches by marking a genuine gut punch, not just to that indefatigable country but to all the liberal world. You could not dream up a more telling, more brutal, more slavishly, thuddingly dull response to the boisterousness of the open society than a massacre of cartoonists. Cultures that cannot stand laughter have never lasted long, for laughter bubbles out from human existence as irrepressibly and inevitably as air escaping a tyre, and those creeds that would deny it will spend their time in an endless chase of covering up this or that puncture to the point of exhaustion. That such a culture as Salafist Islam could last as long as it has is only a function of it being on the margins, forever spurned by a majority or using force to keep itself in place, forever broiling in resentment and forever doomed to stay there.
I have little else to say on the matter except that I have never felt as French or at least as European as today. Solidarity often means so little, but here I feel strangely as close to the front line as those who were murdered. They were killed for expressing opinions, and they let me live only because I was not visibly expressing those opinions, which hardly seems a decent reason to outlive them. Part of me wants to run onto that Paris street neck bared like Cicero shouting to empty space "kill me too", since I am equally as guilty in the eyes of these killers for denying that Muhammed is the prophet of God. These cartoonists merely made that more apparent than me. Solidarity, it seems, is linked extremely closely to survivors' guilt.
One other thing. I say "front line" very carefully here. I know very little about the thinking of the Salafists or Qutbists or whatever these people can be called, but the more I learn about Islamic history the more I realise just how grand is the narrative these little shits think they're playing in. This is a grand battle played out in the shadow of the end-times, Ishmaelites fighting Israelites, the whole shebang. The whole Salafist ideology requires that the West is set up as a mighty enemy paradoxically always on the verge of collapse, our liberalism and institutions doomed to fail by their basis in man's and not God's law. As Simon Jenkins says today,
To them, western democracy is skin deep in its freedoms, while the simple disciplines of their form of Islam are more powerful, more courageous, more lasting.
They are engaged in a war we don't even recognise. ISIS garnered ridicule for promising to "march on Rome" from people who didn't understand that "Rome" has variously meant Rome, Constantinople, Vienna, or whatever the nearest bulwark of the West is at the time. And the shellshocked response this Paris attack has elicited is that of one side in a war that only the other side actually imagines is being fought. Deep in their hearts, and for all the impressive firepower deployed by the West over the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is probably a part of the jihadis thinking "Is this it?" Is this all the massed armies of Rome have to offer? Where are the mighty hordes we fought at Yarmuk and Hattin and Mohács? We're meant to be fighting an apocalyptic total war, not a bunch of half-hearted counterinsurgencies.
For them the defence of their prophet, as they see this attack, is an attempt to have us ride forth to meet them on an appropriately impressive battlefield. It must disappoint them that we simply howl in impotent rage at them, being such spoilsports as to not understand the terribly important epochal battle we're meant to be fighting. We should remember that we are essentially engaged in battle with especially vicious LARPers eternally annoyed that we don't get what elves and orcs are or why we're supposed to care about them.
How do you fight a battle where the whole battle is not getting pulled into a battle? I don't know. But we cannot be brought to violence by all this. We must laugh at them and mock them and show them that if they want to slaughter people who mock their religion they're going to have quite a heavy workload ahead. But we must not fight. We must dance around their rage and make them feel ever more stupid, pathetic and closer to what they must on some level know themselves to be - overgrown children playing Cowboys and Indians with inappropriately deadly weaponry.
Via Krugman, this chart points out just how bad the UK has had it under Osborne's economic stewardship. Looking forward to May, I am reminded of the dictum that the perfect election strategy is to deliberately collapse the economy for four years so when growth comes in the fifth you can point to your resounding success. Never mind. It's how France has fared that really interests me here.
Yes, France seems have done surprisingly well from the 2007 basepoint, despite being shackled to a horrible currency and suffering the innumerable problems of high unemployment, stagnant labour market, low competitiveness and everything else traditional for France. That's sort of my point, really. Even under a very poor leader with a weak political system and terrible economic times, France seems congenitally incapable of actually going into decline. God knows it's been threatening to since at least the time of Louis XIV.
If you quickly skim over the history of France, it can at times seem to be the history of permanent crisis. Even the period from 1780-1815 on its own should have been capable of knocking the country out of the running for Great Power status. Bankruptcy, famine, revolution, civil war, political turmoil, fighting absolutely everyone else on the continent for twenty years and losing most of your money and manpower in the process should put paid to a country. Later years involve being devastated by Germany three times in a row, a political system that could very rarely be called stable, expensive colonial wars, and on and on. And yet after seemingly being on the edge of terminal decline for pretty much two centuries, here they still are. Never was Adam Smith's "much ruin in a nation" quip more apt than for France.
As 2015 begins I am strangely sanguine about the future of Europe if only because the French experience proves that morale very rarely has an impact on the long-term prospects anyway. France, despite pessimism, sclerotic institutions, incompetence and instability has continued to win at history in the long term. I would be quite happy if the future of a united Europe was merely a rolling barrage of disaster, since that seems to have served one of its largest countries pretty well.
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.
