On Arnold Rimmers…

Are you British? Well, then, you’re not a victim of persecution. Actually, that’s a little too sweeping. You might be one of the few spouses or pensioners who are abused by partners, relatives or carers but I doubt such people have enough access to the computer to be able to stumble over this blog. You might be one of the children whose parents mete out abuse but I doubt those poor kids’ reading will have advanced enough. You might be one of the luckless members of our nation who’s been targeted by thugs in the playground, workplace or neighbourhood but I doubt it because, well, I suspect they’re too rare. The point is that you’re unlikely to be the victim of oppression because there is no broad group of people in this country who face systematic ill-treatment on such a scale as to substantially and inevitably disadvantage them. (Sorry.)

This bloke’s trolling (or, at least, I hope he’s trolling) provoked this…

I’d like to think this is a joke as in a world containing the Iraqi Christians, the Ugandan homosexuals and the North Korean North Koreans the claim that any group in 21st Century Britain is “persecuted” is, if made with a straight face, nauseating.

Sure, different groups face serious disadvantages but none of them – unless I’ve been paying no attention – are broad, violent or methodical enough to be correctly understood as systematised oppression. For example, Jewish people are more likely than members of other ethnic and religious groups to face attacks in the streets but nobody claims they’re a “persecuted minority”. The shrill, sanctimonious desire to present oneself as a victim, or, indeed, the shrill, paternalistic desire to present somebody else as a victim, leads to such clumsy, coarse and clangorous “debates” that reasonable consideration of these disadvantages is often lost. There’s also an argument to be made that some groups should be privileged but demanding entitlements makes for a less appealing argument than protesting abuse so members of such groups – like, for example, the Anglicans – suggest they’re persecuted. This initiates the arguments on such bogus premises that nothing worthwhile comes from them.

Y’know, perhaps there is a persecuted minority: the people who don’t feel they’re the victims of persecution but are forced to hear everyone else drone away.

 

All Things Not Being Equal…

Bigotry detection is, of course, a controversial science. I’d like to contribute to its sophistication. Arthur Goldwag is, as so many are, an opponent of “conspiracism”. An extract from his new book on this and related themes recounts his experiences with “9/11 Truthers”, and imputes to them a hefty racist element…

But what took me by surprise was the outsize role that Jews played in the anecdotes that so many of them related: warmongering Jewish neoconservatives in Washington, D.C.; the World Trade Center’s owner, Larry Silverstein, in New York City; even well-known Jewish leftists like Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Amy Goodman, who had stubbornly and, to their accusers’ minds, unaccountably refused to endorse the agenda of 9/11 Truth. Binding them all together was the Zionist entity of Israel.

Now, don’t get me wrong: a lot of people who’ve been involved in “9/11 Truth” have been Jew haters and, yes, that goes for just about all fringe groups: they’re attracted to them like men to broken-down cars. Yet Goldwag’s point reminds me of when people used to claim that opposition to neoconservatives is liable to be anti-semitic because, er – lots of neoconservatives are Jewish. And, indeed, when people implied that criticism of Goldman Sachs was anti-semitic because, er – lots of its employees are Jewish.

Look – members of racial, gender and sexual demographics can, in fact, be represented in different parts of societies on a scale that’s incommensurate with their actual number. And in the States that’s true men and women of Jewish descent in economic, political and intellectual life. One’s interpretration of these facts can be extremely bigoted but the mere recognition of them can’t because, well – they’re facts. So, if you criticise businessmen, politicians or intellectuals you’re pretty much bound to be criticising lots of Jews. For example, this essay by Peter Collier of FrontPageMagazine denounces leftists such as Chomsky, Goodman, Klein, Howard Zinn and John Stewart. Hrm – all Jewish, aren’t they? Does this make the longtime collaborator of David Horowitz an anti-semite!? Well – no. No more than my list of favourite comedians makes me a Judeophile. If someone’s targeting members of a particular demographic that’s deplorable, of course, but there need to be good reasons to feel that they’re targeting them because they’re members of that demographic. Otherwise you’re just mindreading. And not very well.

Update: Arthur Goldwag clarifies his comments in the, er – comments.

 

How I Read Ann Widdecombe And Didn’t Go Gay Bashing…

There’s a lot to dislike in Éoin Clarke’s tirade against the likeable if not always congenial former MP and Renaissance woman Ann Widdecombe. So outraged was its author by one of her columns that he battered out a response that called her “Anne” – understandable – named the paper she was writing in “The Epxress” – sloppy – and insisted that she “think[s] [gays] have an illness that needs cured” – er, what? I’m not a member of the Gestypo but if someone writes such a denunciatory piece that’s so characterised by errors it leads me to feel that they either haven’t cared – in which case I suspect it’s not a matter of as much importance as their adjectives imply – or that they’re so consumed by rage that their critical faculties have left them – in which case I’m mightily sceptical about their claims.

With good reason. Widdecombe’s Express column argued that gays should have the right to seek treatment to change their sexual inclinations if they’re unhappy with the ones they’re experiencing. The idea that gays might feel so miserable in their sexuality as to look to change it is unpleasant to me, and I doubt that “treating” it would do them any good, but perhaps it is their choice to make. It’s not something I’ve thought about. The author, though, feels the very idea is…

…a breach of the ethical standards of journalism [and] an incitement to anti-gay verbal and physical attacks.

In his view it…

…feeds into a worrying rise in a Tea Party style movement in the UK, and it is crucial our national leaders seek to defuse it.

He thinks…

David Cameron should show leadership by taking steps to expel Widdecombe from the Conservative Party.

To conclude…

…we live in a democratic state where the majority are overwhelmingly supportive of protecting gay rights, and that includes protecting them from the prejudice of Tory MPs who think they have an illness that needs cured.

It’s not my place to speak for Britain’s gays but, still, I think it’s pretty condescending to assume they’re so fragile, so sensitive that they need “protecting” from the words of a person who was neither advocating treatment for them nor passing judgement against themselves and their behaviour and, besides, whose ideas are as fashionable as the mullet. They’re big boys and girls. They can cope.

What I find disturbing is Clarke’s assertion that the words of Widdecombe represent “incitement to anti-gay verbal and physical attacks” because in that case they’d be illegal. Well, they don’t – and the elision of disapproving and threatening sentiments is a danger to our freedom of expression; rendering ideas the people find unpleasant as illegitimate. “Incitement”, to me, is when you actually promote a course of action in the hope that people take it. Are there cases of unspoken and even unconscious incitement? I guess. But it depends. Self-appointed wardens of our discourse cleave to the idea that if your words criticism of or disapproval towards people they can be defined as “incitement” simply because they might contribute towards a broader social phenomenon of disapproval towards people that could lead to insults, physical attacks and so on. (Did you get all that?) This, to me, depends on the nature of your disapproval and the context in which it’s expressed. If you declared your loathing for the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994  you’d be hard pressed to argue that you were merely stating a personal preference. You’d be contributing towards a genocidal mindset. If you say you disapprove of homosexuality in England in 2012 – which, to be clear, Widdecombe didn’t even do – the only thing you’re likely to “incite” is a liberal’s bile ducts. The English are, in the main, a placid enough people to read somebody’s opinions without turning into psychopaths. Long may that endure.

I don’t believe that anyone becomes so energised merely on reading an opinion they disapprove of. (Thinking back to days when I’d shower the columns of Hitchens, Phillips, McKinstry et al with hot invective I suspect I was pleased to encounter writing I disliked – it gave me material.) These blustering condemnations aren’t just one of the most unpleasant features of our discourse because they’re overreactions, then, but because they’re so artificial – the rhetorical equivalent of the footballers who’ll mob the referee, wailing in anxiety, at the slightest trangression from the opposing players. People do say unpleasant and even dangerous things but let’s talk about it like adults. Adults who aren’t footballers.

 

How To Be Smart And Stupid…

Here’s news of another paper on the relative unintelligence of people who hold conservative views. Cue chortling from liberals and left-wingers (some of whom only seem to accept the validity of IQ when it’s used to suggest that conservatives are dumb). That the less intelligent often believe in dumb things is true, of course – someone hand me a Nobel Prize! – but those higher up the IQ spectrum shouldn’t bask in their smugness.

The idea that smart people need hold sensible opinions is, in fact, stupid. Some of the most destructive notions of our history were the preserve of intellectual elites who spread their views throughout the educated middle classes. This, of course, is also true of some of its most valuable ideas. Dreaming up and comprehending the sort of theories that are likely to be influential tends to demand an intellectual curiosity, transgressive spirit and sophistication of thought that calls for one to be pretty smart. So, as we’re considering the less agreeable ones, communists were smart; neoconservatives are brainy and rampant free marketeers are often bloody geniuses. Once ideas have gained traction among the intellectual classes they’ll take root within the academia; the think tanks; the foundations. Smart young people will be taught and come to accept them.

Again, I’m not suggesting that the products of these mechanisms have to be malign, but there’s clearly room for bogus notions to catch on; especially in fields where the value of ideas is hard to test ‘til they’re inflicted on the world. The point is that smart people needn’t accept theories for smart reasons. They can have appealed to other features associated with smartness and smart people: the curiosity and impudence that attracts one to the original and the subversive; the egotism that endears one to groundbreaking ideas; the cerebral nature that can lead one to be so entranced by theories that their relation to human consequences is forgotten. And, more simply, they can be things their smart friends believe. Smart people are also marked by the tribalism and personal prejudice that all of us deal with, but their skills at rationalisation and rhetoric equip them to shape their biased perspective into more credible, persuasive forms. Thus, you’ll find a thousand suited gentlemen and ladies taking tostands at forums and debates across our civilisation, offering eloquent, impassioned and compelling speeches on behalf of total crap.

Don’t trust smart people, in other words. Or anyone. Especially yourself.

 

Fact Firster…

Some Americans are getting hot and bothered over people using the term “Israel firster”. According to them it was invented and popularised by a load of Nazis. Fair enough. I’m cool with it being dumped into the trashcan of linguistic history.

Nonetheless, and while I have no desire to be involved in any arguments where accusations of mixed loyalties are being hurled about because they sound as edifying as iced spam, I feel compelled to note that they’re neither inherently disgraceful or, well – wrong. People are just as or more devoted to other nations or people than the nation and people they live in and with. I’ve no doubt that’s true of some Jewish Americans. I’ve no doubt that’s true of some Arabic Americans. Hell, I’ve no doubt that’s true of some American Americans. Is that arguable? The irony is that people seem most dubious about the mention of this fact at a time when the idea of holding no particular loyalty to the nation of one’s residence or birth is at its least controversial. Lots of people think nationalism is a dirty word. If we accept the notion that some of our fellow citizens aren’t too invested in the wellbeing of our country it’s absurd to say it’s inconceivable that they’d care as or more deeply for another.

I’m not dense. I know that there’s a grim history of citizens facing horrendous treatment for supposed or suspected disloyalty: the Japanese in the United States, for example, or, yes, a lot of Jews at the hands of neo-Nazis. Yet in a world where different people are commingling and different nations are butting into eachother’s interests the notion of mixed loyalties is actually relevant. (A small example: according to leaked cables the government took up the cause of the beleagured Tamils as a lot of refugees were living in marginals.) To assume that somebody is more invested in the wellbeing of the people of their fathers than the people they reside among is unpleasant; reducing them to no more than the bare fact of their ethnicity and cultural heritage. To argue that they’re more invested in that people, or some part of that people, and to support that argument with substantive reasoning, however, can illustrate the simple fact that one’s heritage can, in fact, hold a powerful sway over one’s emotions. Or, indeed, that one’s idiosyncratic prejudices lead one to favour the cause of a nation that’s not one’s own. I’m sure there are Americans and Brits, born and bred, who nonetheless have somehow come to invest their feeling in, say, Chad.

 

PC Gone Meta…

Last year Flying Rodent made a point I thought was interesting. He discussed the reportage on “grooming” by Asian men in Britain…

And then I notice the single common factor to each piece (I’ll paraphrase, since the Times is paywalled) in that almost every one – report, leader, opinion piece – starts with the premise that the topic is taboo; that discussing it in racial/religious terms opens the speaker up to malicious attacks from the Politically Correct mob; that, in short, the Times isn’t allowed to discuss this stuff in these terms.

Wait a minute, I think.  You’re the nation’s paper of record, and you’re telling your readership that you’re not allowed to report on the things which you are in fact reporting on, in the specific terms in which you’re reporting upon them?

That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I meant to write something about this phenomenon last year but, er – forgot. Something Nick Cohen scribbled in a column that I took a dig at recently brought it to mind, though…

Last year, members of the British Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, which is not made up of the “rightwing extremists” of Larsson’s conspiratorial imagination, provided details of thousands of threats, abduction, acid attacks, beatings, forced marriage, mutilations and murders men had inflicted on Muslim and ex-Muslim women. If the victims had been white, the left would have gone wild.

…

Liberal opinion would have demanded that the police make tackling “honour” violence a priority and accused chief constables of sexist prejudice if they refused. As the victims were British Indians, Bengalis, Pakistanis, Kurds, Somalis, Arabs and Iranians, a nervous silence descended. Too few were willing to endure the accusations of racism from Stieg Larsson’s successors a consistent defence of women’s rights would have brought.

So, I turned to Google in search of Cohen’s writings on this consequential matter – here’s mine if you’re bothered – and found that his only comment seems to be this whinge about “liberal opinion” failing to give it due prominence. In other words, this widely-read and influential columnist insults people for their silence on matters he himself fails to discuss. There is, I’d suggest, a good reason for that: it’s easier to tell someone to do something than it is to do it. It’s easier to tell people to summon up a “defence of women’s rights” but harder to establish what it might entail. This, I’d guess, is also why the Times preferred to ramble on about the “taboo” status of the issue they considered; because pondering its significance and devising solutions would be a far more ticklish matter than reducing it to squabbles over p’l’t’cal c’rrectness. Ironically, then, one’s opposition to political correctness can, in fact, be a measure for the curbing of one’s own thought processes. It’s become such a pervasive and, in a sense, uncontroversial opinion that it’s easy to fall back on.

 

Against Political Prudery…

The Guardian’s in-house ‘70s nostalgia act Neil Clark wrote a spiteful obituary for Václav Havel, which included these claims…

Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe…Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

Ed West of the Telegraph responded…

Imagine the uproar if a Telegraph comment piece contained the words ‘fascism, for all its faults’…

Okay, this is a poor example because Clark’s assertion is wrong as well as callous. Yet there needn’t be anything indecorous to acknowledging the merits of a thing, however bad the thing.

Years ago I spoiled a visit to the British Museum by dwelling on the thought of starving and enslaved Egyptians who’d spilled blood for artifacts I was supposed to admire. This was dumb. Yes, their system was a vicious and destructive one, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t also rich in creative and intellectual flair. Things contain multitudes. Humans more than most.

If some of the products of an otherwise abhorrent system remain valuable why should we, as Hitchens put it in his essay on Irving, “react like a virgin who is suddenly confronted by a man in a filthy raincoat”? Here’s an extreme example: I once wrote a series of posts on Unit 731 – Imperial Japan’s centre of murderous medical experimentation – and the efforts of victorious American occupiers to cover up the scientists’ crimes to get their hands on their results. (I should note – to drive home how appalling this was – that they weren’t seeking insights into medical practices but biological weaponry.) I noted how strange it was that research into frostbite – which, apparently, was obtained by freezing Chinese prisoners – is still occasionally cited in medical literature. This is creepy, yes, but if it’s useful in aiding the victims of this grim phenomenon it would be crazy to ignore it for the sake of the purity of our associations.

I’ll qualify this. If you’re saying a man, institution or philosophy has or had valuable insights and achievements, despite serious faults, you shouldn’t use a formulation as blithe as “for all its faults”. It sounds like it came from a lazy film review. If its faults were so dramatic that they have to be acknowledged before you progress to its achievements you should make clear how grave they were. This ensures the reader has an accurate perception of whatever it might be, and nullifies the charge that you’re a sly apologist. If its benefits are also inextricable from its defects this has to be accepted. It might be true, for example, that the bombing of civilians precipitated the end of World War 2. It would be dim, if that’s correct, to brush over the fact that that’s a worthwhile consequence. But, still, that’s no excuse for doing it again.

 

Take Your Helmet Off…

Corey Robin turfs up a few unpalatable quotes from the late Christopher Hitchens. Here’s one of them…

I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out to be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy—theocratic barbarism—in plain view…. I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.

This may, of course, be evidence of a genocidal imagination. Part of me suspects, however, that the man was eagerly awaiting not the conflicts of the guns and bombs but of the pens and speech; that he was a spoiling for a fight, yes – one of rhetoric. Julia Galef once commented on the intrusion of militaristic sentiments into argumentation…

…in the way we talk about “attacking” an idea, “shooting down” arguments, and “defending” a position. Thinking of arguments as battles comes with all sorts of unhelpful baggage. It’s zero-sum, meaning that one person’s gain is necessarily the other’s loss. That precludes any view of the argument as a collaborative effort to find the truth. The war-metaphor also primes us emotionally, stimulating pride, aggression, and the desire to dominate — none of which are conducive to rational discussion.

It’s these combative arguments that Hitchens thrived upon. As I’ve said, he was a skilled debater and rhetorician but the style of modern arguments mean these aren’t necessarily virtues to applaud – it is a medium that prizes conflict over collective endeavours; moralistic stands over cool-headed inquiry; all-or-nothing struggles over prudent compromise. And enthusiasts for a medium that’s premised on conflict seek out real conflicts to appropriate – that, I think, is one reason why you’ll find “public intellectuals” involved in arguments surrounding wars and revolutions and not, say, environmental policy. They’ve come to see the problems of the world as being those of easily distinguishable “sides” – to be resolved by the victory of one and the vanquishing of another.

The world doesn’t work that way, of course, but the cocktail party, Oxford Union debate and exchange of letters in the New York Times Review of Books might give a different impression.

 

Multicultural Muddles…

The author of a study of contemporary opposition to multiculturalism argues that racial supremacy is masquerading as the critique of culture…

Most opposition to multiculturalism today is not grounded in a well-founded critique of prescriptive multiculturalism such as has existed in – patchy – multicultural policy. It is, rather, an attack on what some have described as the lived multiculture that has come to shape the experience of many, if not most, Europeans, whatever their cultural background.

To some extent this is actually true. There are exceptions – and I’ve tried to keep my analysis of both phenomena separate – but a lot of people who believe themselves to be too liberal and tolerant and nice to cast aspersions at a faith or ethnic group, or criticise liberal policies of migration or freedom of association will take careful aim at them, then wheel around and fire their abuse at a strawman named “multiculturalism”. This is silly. Right or wrong, people should say what they mean.

The facile reduction of the political struggles that produced multiculturalism – an imperfect and flawed response to racism – to the straw man of cultural relativism has facilitated the powerful idea, at the core of anti-multiculturalism, that objecting to an-other’s culture is wholly different to a rejection on “racial” grounds. Culture is rhetorically separated from the individuals who practice it, while paradoxically made to stand for everything they are. Care is always taken by the “Eurabianists” to separate between Muslims and “Islamism”, for example. Yet the slippage from generalised cultural critique to the targeting of particular populations associated with unpalatable cultural practices is easy. The effect is to make these practices intrinsic to groups such as Muslims, whom this essentialization and resultant marginalization racializes. Nevertheless, the avoidance – or indeed the outright rejection – of discredited race thinking, expunged from the public discourse of even the most outspoken opponents of multiculturalism, immigration and Islam in Europe, creates a neat separation between sensible resistance to multicultural excess and the irrational racism of a bygone era.

Again, I’ll agree that some people attack the ill-defined phenomenon of “Islamism” when they’re really addressing broad theological and cultural trends. It feels easier to “oppose” a nefarious political movement that some pleasant individual’s sincere beliefs. But, nonetheless, it’s silly. Say what you mean.

The trouble with this column is that it assumes – and, yes, it really does assume; there’s no argument to bolster these points – that if such people were more honest about what and who concerns them they’d be mistaken; comparable to – if not exactly the same as – the age-old racists. This implication is asserted with terms like “essentialization” – something, one infers, that’s common to both racists and today’s cultural critics. But the question is how much someone “essentialis[es]” people by a physical or ideological feature and how much it is, in fact, an essential part of them – a determining factor in their behaviour that seems, for present purposes, inextricable. Observation only becomes “essentialization” when the analysis of that determinism and that inextricability becomes irrational. Judgements based on people’s skin are held to be irrational because a person’s pigmentation isn’t influential. A person’s religious belief, and their allegiance to a cultural heritage, can be a significant factor. You can’t, in other words, essentialise judgements of group characteristics as, er, essentialising – some do; others don’t.

 

The Mechanics Of Outrage…

I commend the ever-interesting Kenan Malik on the “marketplace of outrage”…

Outrage these days has become almost a means of defining oneself, of marking out one’s identity. I know who I am because I am outraged by this, you know who you are because you are outraged by that. Muslims, Christians, atheists, liberals, conservatives –  for every group outrage has become an expression of self-definition. The mark of identity is the possession of a thin skin.

He quotes Monica Ali…

What we have developed today is a marketplace of outrage. And if you set up a marketplace of outrage you have to expect everyone to enter it. Everyone now wants to say, “My feelings are more hurt than yours”.’

Let’s be clear: there’s nothing wrong with an impassioned response to an offence. If you stopped me in town and said, “Hey, Ben, you’re a cock” I’d be inclined to give a fiercer reaction than, say, “Interesting theory, though I doubt its conclusions”. There’s nothing wrong with a collective response to an offence against a group, either. If all are being targeted why shouldn’t all respond?

Still, I agree with Malik that people can be too quick to take offence, and too vociferous offence, nowadays; using it as a means of establishing communality within a group and intimidating its rivals. The Left could find examples from the Right; the Right from the Left; atheists from Christians; Christians from nonbelievers; cultural conservatives from Islamic activists; pro-Palestine campaigners from Israeli advocacy groups. Basically everyone has been afflicted with hypersensitivity.

I’d like to comment on some of the more organic reasons why this has become a more pronounced phenomenon. As C. Brooker writes in a preview to his drama The National Anthem, it’s illustrated rather vividly on the noo meeja. These are mediums that allow people to find tribes they identify with, and lend themselves to an intense form of communication where the vehemence of your speech, and the speed at which it comes, grants you attention. Let’s say a man – let’s call him “Carman” – made a clumsy joke that somebody excised from context. This is what may go down on twitter…

Carman: X, Y, Z

@loudmouth1: OMG! Carman said X!

@loudmouth2: OMG! @loudmouth1 says Carman said X. The bastard!

@loudmouth3: The cock!

@loudmouth4: The shit!

@loudmouth5: The weasel-screwing pencil-sitter!

@loudmouth6: Sign this petition to complain about Carman saying X…

It’s also worth remembering that these are hundreds of thousands of – let’s face it – inexpert observers – and I’m one of them! – who’ve been offered platforms for opinions they’d have once had to restrict to the pub. It’s quite hard to argue about, say, pensions, inflation and the deficit – they’re complicated things – and it’s very easy to, say, call a TV presenter out on their opinions. The vehemence serves to reinforce one’s offerings in lieu of substance. This combination of emotiveness and ultimate triviality explain why the press is so fond of these bogus controversies, and why a certain frizzy-haired gasbag was the object of as many column inches as the largest strike in yonks.