The State
of Politics in the West
Table of Contents
The role of expertise in
society
Immigration, nationality
and the rights of all
Trump, isolationism and
radical right populism.
Introduction
It is evident that there has been a lot of civil conflict
and general instability in most Western societies of late and this is such as
to have challenged and stressed the liberal democratic underpinnings of our states
inasmuch as this has, in particular, allowed various populists and demagogues
to make productive use of the notable hot button issues involved so as to
further their sordid and feckless careers. If then we might escape the further
rule of people without sincerity or any decency, and fend off the advent of an
illiberal age, it would seem helpful to identify some of the core issues of
controversy involved and to then offer the tuppence worth of ideas that one might
have so that the undertaking that aims at the de-escalation of these things
might in someways be advanced, even if only by a bit. Accordingly, it would
seem that expertise, gender, environmental issues, migration and nationality, the
broad field of what has been termed ‘woke’, and isolationism vs ‘globalism’ are particularly saliant
issues in this regard, and so each in turn will be examined in what follows. The
discussion pursued will examine if a broader understanding of these issues is
possible and through this establish if more empathy, even in this turbulent
state, can then be generated of each side for the other. This would be such as
to perhaps contribute to these inflamed issues becoming less aggressively divisive
and result therefore, one may hope, in a more widespread civic amity that may possibly
begin to return to us.
The role of expertise in society
Part of the rise of right-wing conspiracy theory type
populism seems to have been the total and complete failure of accepted
expertise to see the financial crisis beginning in 2007 coming, as well in
addition to have advocated policies that seem to have led to it in the first
place and also which hardly benefited enough people anyway, and further in also
promoting policies afterwards that seem to have put the cost of the economic
disaster on the average person in terms of bailouts, higher taxes, reduced services
and a massively increased public debt. The second and third of these especially
concerns a rough consensus that had built up in the late 1990s and 2000s, at
least within the core body of the governing classes in most western countries,
which considered that privatising a lot of everything was always good, that
regulation should be light including for credit and investment institutions,
that organised labour should not be encouraged, and that there should be
globalisation without qualification or restraint (which amongst other things
led to the outsourcing of a great many jobs in many countries, in particular in
the US and UK), and to multinationals growing to an unprecedented size so
colossal such as to be more wealthy than many countries and further that they
grew more powerful than many such sovereign states have been able to properly
police. It seems that many of these policies are not now regarded as ideal, yet
before the great recession the mainstream parties of power in the West had
become settled on the foregoing and it led to hardly any serious policy
differences being advocated in much of mainstream politics, so that the
traditional left-right binary of politics became much reduced and no longer
terribly relevant. As a consequence current affairs in this sense did indeed
become a bit beige, at best, and as having the sense that this was more
properly the province of uninspiring technocrats, especially of the economic
kind, wherein elections did not propose much in the way of real policy
differentiation by what the traditional parties of power offered, inasmuch as
the orthodoxies of economics, such as they were, were in hubristic control of
the economy. That technical expertise seemed to make strong claims about
itself, most particularly in the financial and banking sector, in terms of
claiming to know best about how economies ought to be run, to very definitely
aver that it needed hardly any oversight and regulation, and to regard any
input from outside of its narrow field, such as from many other academic
disciplines or indeed other sectors of society with their own experience to
speak to, as but mere amateur palaver and ranting that would serve only to
distract these true experts from their high thoughts and wise rule. Yet of
those who lost out from the period of liberal globalisation politics, and the
larger group of people scarred by the impact of the great recession, and the
yet larger number of those who worked their way through various austerity strategies,
many seem to have become disillusioned with regular politics by its not being
able to, or in seeming not to want to, provide prosperity for all in society.
Added to this have been now prevalent beliefs that claims to expertise, like
the forgoing and partly because of it, are as a rule bogus and indeed quite
often venal, as witnessed especially by their clueless performance in not
seeing the financial crisis coming as said, and further that this expertise
invariably tries to lump the average person with the whole cost of the problems
that arises from its incompetence and suspected corrupt purposes. As such, the
foregoing is surely to some degree partly to blame for some of the
receptiveness in parts of the publics in many western countries to right-wing
populist politics, a politics that does indeed provide an emotional and
symbolic retaliation by these aggrieved people on the likes of the expertise
mentioned above and indeed on various other targets such as those referred to
elsewhere in this essay. Yet obviously, in terms of actually having effective
policies that might improve things for anyone at all, right wing populist
‘antisystem’ politics offers in reality only muddled conspiracy theories, a
consequent perverse refusal to acknowledge plain and obvious facts, and a petty
and vindictive bigotry that tries to make those people who are indignant
mentioned above feel better about themselves by setting up certain others as
sanctioned kinds of people to hate and to blame for all that’s wrong in the
world.
Now, a short diversion seems necessary at this point, in
that an account of the above economic and political programme needs to be
stated more on its own terms, so as not to reduce its advocates to a one-dimensional
caricature, and so fail to see how history and politics generally it seems
moves by way of good intentions. As such, that programme so badly damaged by
the great recession and the later rise of right-wing populist conspiracism is
often called ‘neoliberal economics’, yet I will not use that phrase very much
and prefer rather ‘neoclassical economics’ in its place as the former has
become disparaging and more of an accusation rather than a dry description of
an economic and social programme (yet there is not it seems a perfect
equivalence between those two expressions, in terms of the exact list of
policies involved - however it will suffice for the limited purposes here). As
such I think it better not to frame coherent intellectual positions such as
this approach to economics by way of a name that has encoded into it a derisive
and contemptuous sense, as this is not to deal with matters by way of giving
reasons for beliefs and neither is to engage in proper debate where one’s
discursive partner is respected, but rather to be even a bit intellectually
uncouth dealing with them by basically name-calling, and by imputing to them
bad faith in addition. Indeed it seems at times that there can be an amount of
left-wing conspiracy theorising in holding that those who did and who still do
hold to this kind of political economy do so because they simply want to steal
from the poor and hand the results to the rich, likely because they are
personal beneficiaries of this themselves, and that further they go about their
designs as part of a wide and sinister agenda to ruin the lives of the great
majority of people on this planet as an actually intended effect. To get a
better handle on this kind of political and economic programme it seems
necessary to set out this neo-classical view more on its own terms in what
follows so that its partial implementation in pre-financial crisis might be
better seen.
As such, it is clear that a fulsome advocate of such neo-classical
policies (I will present a zealous characterisation of this kind of thinking so
as to hopefully to display its premises and argument in a more unalloyed form)
would be generally committed to the more positive belief that something like an
individualistic style of economy and society, in terms of a framework of
selfish and rational economic agency, is genuinely better for everyone, on the
basis that this maximises wealth and economic efficiency in society, due to
empirical evidence that this might be so, but also for the reason that where
everyone stands more completely on their own feet they are in better keeping
with their own true metaphysics, being the idea that persons are very much closer
to rank atoms than not. Further, for those not yet able to support themselves
fully it would be better that help would come more from private charity, given
that such would be closer to the putative ground of society, being a free
association of perfect individuals regulated solely by contract who choose to
contribute their property towards some moral but unremunerated end, and less as
aid coming from the brutish and yet unwieldy congeries of things that are
called states. Also, corporations and companies would be as a rule creative and
moral enterprises given that they too embody the principles of free and
voluntary contract, and would differ from charities only inasmuch as its
contracting parties would choose to contribute the results of their own
legitimately held property towards rather an economically productive purpose,
whereby free labour would be employed amongst other things, so that in sum a
fitting return and source of livelihood will accrue back to these sponsors. As
such, corporations, just like charities, should in principle not be encumbered
and hindered much by the artificial and arbitrary lines which are each state’s
borders, nor be impeded by externally imposed and tendentiously justified regulatory
obstacles and hurdles, and neither that the fair results of its industry be
confiscated by the forms of human organisation that perhaps do not have
universal consent, being states. Now, this would obviously be a somewhat
militant view on things that many clearly would disagree with, yet it is
undoubtably one that offers an intellectual analysis about what people and
society are that, in the western philosophical cannon, has a pedigree of good
standing given the focus there on individualism arising from Modernity, and it
gains further propriety for itself by developing the received premises of
liberal democracy, namely rank social atomism, to maybe a fuller and more
consistent conclusion than perhaps other lines of thinking do, the latter of
whom rather it seems typically to not attend much to that inconsistency. Now,
arguing against this would obviously not consist in turning away from liberal
democracy but rather involve giving a more realistic intellectual foundation to
it instead, if this be wholly needed, for such a philosophical underpinning
might not actually be urgently required given that the functioning and thriving
practice of it is something that we already know to be a good, and so we can
fuss over the right theory about why this might so at later less pressing time.
Naturally and also, arguing against ‘neoliberalism’ would it seems be more
effectively done if this be directed more at the likes of the premises
highlighted above, rather than perhaps simply denouncing its advocates as but
deliberate thieves and scheming bleeders.
In any case, the presentation above was naturally quite
radical by the standards of most actual practitioners, for it was not actually
representative for example of the third way type politics and economics once
advocated by the likes of Clinton, Schroder and Blair. For they believed rather
that a more efficient and productive economy, delivered by the likes of
neoclassical economics, would by a higher resultant tax take fund an expansive
social welfare state and so give everyone a good minimum start in life within a
society that was supposed to have no upper ceiling, in a way perhaps consistent
with John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. In this way, the feral energies of
this kind of capitalism were married to a moderate redistributive state where
an acceptable level of social justice was to be established, and as long as the
economy kept ticking along and there were enough jobs for all demographics in
all regions, and the cost of living also was tolerable, then things should have
chugged along just fine. Yet inasmuch as the dynamics of globalisation did
particular damage to the remaining manufacturing jobs in the US and UK in
particular, but also in much of continental Europe, where the workshops that
had formerly provided for the world came latterly to be abandoned and were left
standing bleakly in various rust belts, many of the people and communities
whose jobs they once were came to give up on mainstream politics for that
reason. That is, after multiple generations of relapsing and never honoured
promises that such people’s prospects would be improved and that the affected
areas would at last see some new prosperity, confidence in conventional
politics seems finally to have fallen away as a result, at first tentatively
and then it seems wholly, such as to have led many of our populations,
especially these predominantly white working class and non-college educated
communities, to have cast in their lot with that new yet ancient enemy of
democracy: populist demagoguery. The current form of this adversary presents,
in part, the seeming indifference, ineptitude and ideological stubbornness of
the neoclassical political and economic former mainstream as instead even worse
than this, being a fiendish and scheming conspiracy by the likes of liberal
metropolitan elites to not only intentionally destroy the prosperity and
dignity of proud former industrial communities over multiple generations, but
also because this devious clique would be not content with simply immiserating
the ‘real people’ in economic terms alone, such as described above, they would also
want to turn everything entirely on its head in every other respect too and so the
everyday and average people of each nation are as a consequence framed as
actual villains in society, nay the chief villains for the petty reason that
that they might not be up to satisfactory speed in terms of the most recent
progressive cause, whatever that might be, and so come to be denounced by the
newly established moralising elite of liberal society. Such causes naturally concern
making life a bit less gruelling for various minorities, such as for different LGBT
people, and various ethnic and religious groups, and for one majority too, being
women; indeed it also concerns the health of our sole planet in terms of its
climate, levels of pollution and the general condition of its ecosystems. Yet
inasmuch as many people from, for example, former industrial areas and/or those
without college education might not have as their first or only concern these
issues, given that they may feel that they have too many of their own problems
to deal with as it is, when then more comfortable classes from more affluent
locales seem to upbraid these communities or even to look down on them for not
espousing and championing these new moral causes, while at the same time
totally ignoring or discounting the former’s often long-standing plight, then it
is not altogether implausible that many might be drawn to Trump or Johnson
style politics as simply a means of perceived self-defence and as simply a way
to stick it to those who might have seem to have sneered at them.
As such, those who might feel that they have here been
slighted as something like uneducated and deficient, or who even have felt
themselves as having been entirely written off as for example unevolvable hicks,
might naturally have become quite receptive to a kind of politics which would
defend them and their basic worth, a politics that would claim to do this alas
by responding in perceived kind by keeping with an aggressive sense of moral
superiority but yet reprogrammed so as to construe this era’s real victims as
actually those who have suffered a cold and harsh judgment from this newer
liberal morality. In this way the supposed machinations of ‘liberal
metropolitan elites’ would be read as having cynically weaponised various newly
appeared and indeed promoted minorities, of whom the total perhaps doesn’t
amount to many people in reality, for the intended purpose that the lives of
the great majority of the good and plain people might be ruined, and to do this
for the perverse and nefarious reasons that can perhaps only be truly known to
the very high priests of ‘wokery’ themselves.
Purity, sexuality and gender
Indeed, of the various issues that are in contention
currently in western society perhaps gender has emerged as one of the more
prominent occasions of such conflict, given that it is one that involves these
kinds of moral condemnations, and is a vein therefore which is very productive
for right-wing populist politics to mine. That is, high feelings and moral
denunciations on this issue are often prevalent clearly, but this is exactly
the belligerent condition of things that that malignant kind of politics so
desires as its most gratifying fix. For this politics does not actually seek to
conclusively win such ‘debates’, or even think that it can, but rather knows
that it has very much achieved its objectives where simply a bleak condition of
strife such as this obtains and persists in society. For where our polities
have so become aberrantly fractured and maimed, where shared facts, shared institutions
and common decency are as a consequence so undermined, then in such weakened
disarray the way down to the rule of infamous people is so much the clearer. Accordingly,
if demagoguery and populism can keep the flames of rancour and distress going, then
it gets what it always cynically hungered for.
Now the utility of gender to populist demagoguery is clearly
on account of it being a complex issue, one that is hard to resolve, and
further that it gives rise to much valuable conflict. Perhaps all this is due
to gender, as an identity, being a very core issue for most people, and to be
of such a kind that to propose more complexity in it, so as to destabilise the traditional
view in western societies that one can only be either wholly male or wholly
female, is something that can sometimes generate strong negative emotions. This
was surely a similar issue in the earlier days of gay liberation where for many
heterosexual people the idea of two men in particular having sex was something
that did not elicit positive emotions; indeed even, for example, some of the
judiciary in many countries stated openly that it engendered disgust and issued
judgments, in part, on this basis, so as to maintain the criminalisation of this
kind of sexuality. Now, such attitudes and affects, as unwarranted and
offensive as they are, would seem to have arisen in a way consistent with Mary
Douglas’ account of the genesis of the sense of dirt and pollution. This would
be where impurity and dirt would not be so much located in the external
objectivity of things, or at least for a large share of things about which we
have these perceptions, but rather quite a lot of the feelings of unease, discomfort
or even disgust would arise more from what is perceived to be the illicit commingling
of culturally derived taxonomic categories that are supposed to be distinct
insofar as that taxonomy stands robustly. That is, strong negative feelings of even
anger and disgust can be generated where actions that violate the local
cognitive ordering of the claimed nature of things occur, inasmuch as the
presence of something which it is held to belong in one part of the ordered
landscape in another area where in principle it is not supposed to go is
something that appears as a kind of defilement and act of pollution that
‘ought’ not to exist. Douglas’s classic take on this issue concerns in part the
ancient Israelites’ view of the pig as an unclean animal who is irredeemably dirty
in God’s sight on account of this animal as having characteristics which contravened
the Israelites’ tidy view of what animals are ‘supposed’ to be like, by horror
of horrors having cloven hooves and to yet not chew the cud, and so any such
animal was automatically not at all appropriate for food for sure:
Cloven-hoofed, cud-chewing
ungulates are the model of the proper kind of food for a pastoralist…[yet] Some
animals seem to be ruminant, such as the hare and the hyrax (or rock badger),
whose constant grinding of their teeth was held to be cud-chewing. But they are
definitely not cloven-hoofed and so are excluded by name. Similarly for animals
which are cloven-hoofed but are not ruminant, the pig and the camel. Note that
this failure to conform to the two necessary criteria for defining cattle is
the only reason given in the Old Testament for avoiding the pig; nothing
whatever is said about its dirty scavenging habits… But in general the
underlying principle of cleanness in animals is that they shall conform fully
to their class. Those species are unclean which are imperfect members of their
class, or whose class itself confounds the general scheme of the world. (Douglas
2006, pgs. 68 and 69)
Now the aversion to pigs and pork in different cultures and
religions today is unlikely to be motivated by the like of a bronze age
pastoralist’s pernickety grading of animals in terms of some ideal version of
livestock given that the concerns of most people these days are generally a bit
different. Yet many cultures in having been set on this course in the distant
past still regard that animal as dirty, not so much again on account of this
animal not conforming to certain formula of anatomical traits such as mentioned
above, but rather for the reason that pigs and pork emerge as a polluted kind
of thing simply because they always have been. That is, where a taxonomy of
what should go where and of what is held to not belong anywhere at all is
established, then any of the latter cutting through into the former zone will
be met with great disquiet: “Uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be
included if a pattern is to be maintained.” (Douglas 2006, pg. 50) So everyone in
such a society would have been accustomed to hear and themselves direct highly
negative evaluations to pigs and moreover to see and display very negative
emotional reactions in addition, so that the cause of this process would turn
out it seems to be nothing less than its own result, or previous results. This would
be such as to perform the uncleanliness of this animal into existence by the sometime
conjuring powers of persons and cultures given that their ontology can be
described as circular to an extent, inasmuch as the perpetual interpretation of
history, self and others would, I venture, establish hermeneutics as one of the
basic processes by which personal and cultural objectivities are maintained in
existence. In this way, the interpretation of objects by way of their contexts
and contexts by way of their objects would involve a virtuous and processual
circle of meaning generation, and one that would exhibit quite an amount of
inertia, yet which by no means would involve permanent immobility and stasis.
As such, the perception and identification of something as polluted would be a relatively
movable incident, in that people would through slow enough adjustment it seems
be able to relearn and recondition their sensibilities so as to no longer have
feelings of aversion about what they might have formerly regarded as objectionable,
like for example with becoming accustomed to eat shellfish, or in some cultures
in coming to have dogs as pets, also indeed to have anything to do with pigs
and pork.
In an analogous way, differing sexual and gender expressions
that are instinctive and inborn for certain people have in different times and places
been either an issue for others and yet at other times not an issue at all. Yet
for those religions and cultures that do not make sufficient room within their range
of sanctioned identities for minorities such as these, like the people who have
lately come out in Western society, all manner of negative attitudes tend to come
upon the scene as a result. Indeed, for more restrictive cultures, when
nonconforming and confounding actions and behaviours are detected, they can
generate not just surprise and aversion, but also indeed often anger. For these
aberrant people and their actions can challenge not just sensibilities, but
rather the whole edifice of the local cultural taxonomy which is nothing less
than the entire sense of the local understanding of the world and everyone’s
place and alignment within it. That is, aberrant actions and behaviours can
destabilise and disturb traditional social identities, and often hierarchies, by
undermining the sense and logic of the things and behaviours associated with such
a traditional setup. For the cultural taxonomies that give an account of the
kinds of human and types of behaviour that are supposed to exist will not occur
as dry theories of only abstract significance, but rather these models will be written
into the selfhood of people in the local society, as part of their inner
conceptual ingredients, and so to destabilise such taxonomies is to undermine
and unsettle these people in their own person in a sometimes serious way as
well. As such, some people with a more constrictive psycho-social position and outlook
on things can at times feel even outrage at unorthodox behaviours and actions, and
can come to feel beset and damaged by the simple presence of alternative
people, and sometimes find it hard to think of a way forward that involves
being nice to such people. This can generate for such people, even disgust, and
for sure quite a lot of anger and aggression, as various sexual and gender
minorities have known all too well throughout history, who being the frequent
subjects of violence have well understood that many people would prefer their
elimination rather than to deal with and acknowledge the full complexity of
human sexual and gender expression that has been the common experience of
humanity in all times and places, however much it has been heavily repressed.
Now it has seemed easier for most people to process
homosexuality and accept people like this as part of the normal furniture of
the social world, than for perhaps other minorities that have come around later.
This has been aided by a lot of positive visibility such as in various media,
and also in nearly everyone else coming to know members of this community in
their own lives and so to no longer regard such people as exotic. Yet it is perhaps
harder for the trans community on a number of fronts. This is because regular
homosexuality is perhaps less revolutionary given that a conventional sense of
gender is mostly retained, in that the choice of sexual partner does not seem
to involve an adjustment to the traditional sense of what it is to be a person to
such a degree that is perhaps involved with going from one gender to another,
or to be gendered other than in a binary way. As such, it has at times required
more processing for people in the sexual and gender majority to get on top of
and get comfortable with the diversity that now exists openly in gender
expression. Also, it seems harder for trans people to gain a critical mass of
positive visibility given that their percentage of the population is it seems
much lower than that of those who are gay or lesbian only and so by dint of
lower numbers perhaps not everyone in society personally knows a trans or
gender alternative person in their own lives. This would seem to result in a
lot of people having less direct experience of gender different people, and so
are more likely to consider the issue in the abstract in terms of being
persuaded by more high theoretical views that would keep to a simpler traditionalist
view on gender, while not having their comfort zone expanded by dealing with
real people of this kind who just want to live their normal lives in the only
way that is possible for them.
Perhaps part of the difficulty and controversy currently
present in society concerning this topic relates to the prominent thesis of the
wholesale arbitrariness of gender, in short that it is entirely socially
constructed, and that whatever essentialist sense that was given to gender in
its traditional binary form was in every respect wrong. Many theorists have
advanced this position, and a good representative perhaps is Judith Butler. Now,
a core concept for her is the performativity of gender, which would regard
gender as not at all what someone is but rather what someone does:
In other words, acts, gestures,
and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce
this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences
that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a
cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative
in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to
express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal
signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative
suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which
constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated
as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and fiction of a
decidedly public and social discourse… In other words, acts and gestures,
articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and
organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of
the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive
heterosexuality. [italics in original] (Butler 2007, pgs. 185 and 186)
In this way, all of gender would be completely detached from
anything like innate psychological tendencies, and rather the various accepted
(and unaccepted) gender expressions of conventional society would be but the
outworking of a system of power relations which would order social reality to so
as to create a male heterosexuality as the site of a privileged desire and
experience while in the same manoeuvre producing various other forms of gender
and sexual possibilities as only the inferior and/or forbidden background
elements, who yet exist as necessary, though serving as but the contrast that enhances
all the more so this masculinist and heterosexist power:
Neither does s/he fully fall
outside the signifying economy of masculinity. S/he is “outside” the law, but
the law maintains this “outside” within itself. In effect, s/he embodies the
law, not as an entitled subject, but as an enacted testimony to the law’s
uncanny capacity to produce only those rebellions that it can guarantee will –
out of fidelity – defeat themselves and those subjects who, utterly subjected,
have no choice but to reiterate the law of their genesis.” (Butler 2007, pg.
144)
This would be much like Foucault’s view in Madness and
Civilisation (I haven’t read his history of sexuality, but still think the
general line of thinking here is well represented in this work also) that
reason only comes into full definition insofar as unreason is separated off, in
which institutions of confinement would serve the wider social project of establishing
society as ordered and untainted precisely to the degree that its own pollution
is foisted onto and into a traduced other:
One might say that the fortresses
of confinement added to their social role of segregation and purification a
quite opposite cultural function. Even as they separated reason from unreason
on society’s surface, they preserved in depth the images where they mingled and
exchanged properties. The fortresses of confinement functioned as a great, long
silent memory; they maintained in the shadows an iconographic power that men
might have thought was exorcised; created by the new classical order, they
preserved, against it and against time, forbidden figures that could thus be
transmitted intact from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.” (Foucault
2001, pgs 198 and 199)
As such, the way forward for those belonging to the
habitually less powerful or marginal aspects of sexual and gender experience
would be not to accept the make-up of things as they now are, by chasing after
an ersatz equality between the existing gender identities that would be so compromised
through and through, but rather to subvert the entire system and to look
forward instead to a genuinely novel kind of gendered existence instead:
No longer believable as an
interior “truth” of dispositions and identity, sex will be shown to be a
performatively enacted signification (and hence not “to be”), one that,
released from its naturalized interiority and surface, can occasion the parodic
proliferation and subversive play of gendered meanings. This text continues,
then, as an effort to think through the possibility of subverting and
displacing those naturalized and reified notions of gender that support
masculine hegemony and heterosexist power, to make gender trouble… (Butler 2007,
pg.46)
An obvious consequence of this is that the various female
and gender divergent people, who having been oppressed by a patriarchal system
that sets up male heterosexuality as the default and favoured form of
subjectivity, emerge as far from being marginal in the sense of superfluity, but
turn out rather to be deeply necessary postulates of a hegemonic form of
gender-sexuality that can only establish its supremacy insofar as it set up
others to be reduced and despised. In this way, otherness and strangeness is
centrally imputed to the ‘margins’, and so all of the so-called gender
non-conforming people are generated in their ascribed weirdness by this
dialectic in just the same movement as the patriarchy contrives itself in its sly
will to power.
Yet, such an all-out idealist depiction of gender and
sexuality may state things too strongly, inasmuch as it seems that the
percentages of people who are gay and lesbian are roughly the same in all
societies, and likewise of people who find that their gender is different to
what was assigned at birth, to such a degree that one would suspect
non-cultural factors such as the natural distribution of neurobiological attributes
in human populations instead. Moreover, it is not clear in what way culture or
society might produce people as having minority gender expressions and
sexualities when the overwhelming experience for most of history of those who
find themselves as not heterosexual or cisgendered is that society has gone to
great lengths to ensure conformity; indeed most societies certainly haven’t
given the impression that they encourage diversity at all, much less require
it, and this is felt acutely by those who can’t slot into traditional
identities. For sure, there is still in much of the West at times a social
pressure for gay men who are not classically masculine to ‘butch up’, or
something along these lines, and rather to suppress what is for many their
natural and instinctively more feminine comportment; but this is of course
impossible, for no matter how cruel conservative societies have ever been no
difference is made or can be made to people’s basic personalities, and so in
general no volume of societal force and violence has ever been shown to have
been effective at producing or changing someone’s inherent gender disposition
and sexual orientation. The simple fact is that people like this have always
kept appearing and indeed stayed around despite the intensity and ferocity of a
lot of societies’ attempted efforts at conditioning or latter day conversion
therapy. So, in general, if there is some central societal mechanism or process
by which the core sexual and gender stances of certain cohorts of people are
covertly produced to be in a denigrated space so as to serve as but the sacrificial
mudguard for Respectable society, it would yet seem to hide itself perhaps too
well; indeed one might suspect that no such mechanism or process may exist at
all. Rather, it seems to me to be more plausible to consider that a certain
neuropsychological diversity that extends to sexual and gender dispositions exists
in all human populations, where those who are non-heterosexual and who are
perhaps also not conventionally masculine and feminine men and women are a
consistent minority, and those who find gender to be something that they need
to relate to in a different way that many traditional societies find to be very
serious are a yet smaller minority. Indeed considering the relative percentages
of sexual and gender minorities to be practically fixed undercuts obviously the
hoary canard that that there is a ‘danger’ in giving information to young
people, in particular, about the different kinds of people that exist, and in
their own case that it is ok to be different in these ways if that’s what they later
turn out to be. The bigots of all ages have always bleated about the perils to
society of ‘promoting’ homosexuality by talking about things like this in a
positive way, and these days just the same people are being callous to trans
people by saying that being respectful and welcoming to people like this will
lead to more children becoming trans than would otherwise have been the case
and so to have had a more complicated life that might have been necessary.
In this way, the core of sexuality and gender expression
would not be produced by cultural or environmental factors, but yet at the same
time these aspects of human existence would of course be heavily interpreted,
and very much so in terms it seems of whether they are in conformity or not
with the locally prevalent taxonomy of what kinds of human and what behaviour
are supposed to be encounterable. Now with this, obviously, there is a lot of
unwanted baggage from the past that may immediately appear at once if gender is
not held to be socially constructed in its entirety, in that certain social
gender roles were historically much essentialised needless to say, such as to
have certain denigrated characteristics be imputed to femininity generally with
the result that it was construed and produced as inferior and subservient to a
masculinity that was in the same movement manufactured to be more or less toxic
in various ways. As such, it manifestly does not make much sense to ascribe
categorical and exceptionless difference in terms of abilities, talents or
intelligence to any of the ways in which people may be gendered, in that the
achievements of feminism and female leadership in modern society clearly do not
need to be stated. This is such that the old society that was scraped has with some
haste retreated into an ignominious past on account of the awareness of the
ridicule which history now has for it. Yet essentialism in terms of a basic comportment
only, of people’s instinctive bearing and authentic presentation to the world,
is it seems gendered to some degree and essentially so, and so culture will
while not creating this basic posture will for sure interpret and try to shape
and steer it, and will do so by trying to build up a coherent and generally far-reaching
account of all such matters. For while there have always and will always be
different culturally produced ways to perform one’s gendered body, such as the rather
odd female model cat walk, the cowboy bow-legged male walk, or something less
pronounced like perhaps like the gait and bearing differences in Ireland that
might be noticed on occasion between some men from a rural farming background
in Ireland and those from a more urban locale like in parts of Dublin, yet it
does seem that nonetheless these are generally but ways of directing a fairly
stable neuropsychological gender bearing in any of the worlds that might be, and
one that ever looks for a way to express itself that finds cultural sanction.
Quite often, obviously, there have been many who have not been able to fit into
sanctioned male or female postures, like the foregoing, and indeed there are
many ways in which people might fall outside of the arrangement of things that
a society might like to have for any gender expression, and yet some societies
are more relaxed and less worked up about this issue. However in societies that
do not do this well, and so are constraining and therefore do not provide, for
example, accepted identities into which homosexual desire can be accommodated,
acceptance for those who are not classically masculine or feminine in any of
the ways possible, and equally that make no space at all for those who cannot
fit within a fixed gender binary, then this remainder will be set up with a
very a deprecated status as being those who wilfully deviate from all that is
right and proper and whose very presence will be treated as a pollution that ‘spoils’
things for everyone else. In this way, to consider that there are important
non-cultural components in gender and sexuality is for sure far indeed from saying
that culture and society have a small role in these issues.
Now problematic societies are generally highly constrictive
ones, in a name conservative ones, and they will invariably, or at least try
to, treat variant gender and sexual identities and behaviour as taboo and so
these facets of human existence will not appear in such a society’s official
media nor in normal conversation, but they will still exist of course yet on
the edges of everyday awareness, in terms of occasional offensive humour and also
the pale sense of needing to be watchful for what is held to be a persistent
human corruption, one that induces anxiety in its claimed ability to turn
anyone into anything, and which ever is seeping into and infiltrating the
jurisdiction of upright society. That is, for a fundamentalism like this there
is a sense of an indecent fifth column that constantly stalks respectability
and therefore every so often needs to be dealt with on the down low, such as by
perhaps sending young women to mother and baby homes, or of a son who might
have been told that there is place for his kind in London. In this way the
untainted ascendancy of righteousness might be preserved, and the official
fiction of there being only simple gender and sexual identities would be
maintained, and so those people who are the very unwanted leftovers and residue
of society are officially held not to actually exist at all even while they are
in the same moment tersely extinguished by such virtuous principals and
principles. As such, the furtive disciplining of sexual and gender minorities has
long been used to prop up what have been in truth quite wobbly conservative heteronormative
identities, that are unstable and anxious about themselves precisely because of
their simplistic and antiempirical stance about a whole range of normal human
sexual and gender expression. For having denied the true reality of any of this
complexity, when yet all this does inevitably appear nonetheless, the fundamentalist
attitude on gender and sexuality does not have the conceptual space to separate
off this variant behaviour into other accepted and readymade minority
identities and categories so that it might preserve its own cohesion, and so
these anomalies instead cannot help but impugn its own pretended strength and
completeness as a consequence. That is, given that conservative
heteronormativity is officially premised on no other kinds of sexual and gender
expressions being truly possible, nevermind persisting in a constant and happy way,
and that instead all this difference is held by them to be an but an inessential
yet insidious part of the world, as nothing more than a defiant perversion of
heteronormative will, then the open toleration of all of these variant gender
and sexual expressions will according to them lead simply to the spread in an
untrammelled way of such deviation, where everyone becomes marked as next for
such corruption. As such, conservative heterosexual identity is fatally subverted
by the unaccosted existence of sexual and gender diverse people. Hence the
violence that is never too far away from those that have not adjusted to these
simple facts of natural human variation, who rather than face up to the shortcomings
of their own views about themselves and of the nature of the world that they
actually live in, would rather eliminate all of these other people who don’t so
fit. As such, variant sexual and gender behaviour is rigorously policed in
conservative societies not so much as to ‘reform’ such alternative people, but rather to shore up the
viability of heterosexual identities that have been drawn in so foolish a way,
so as to preserve them from such truth as would undo them.
Indeed, conservative and simple-minded purists have always
fantasised about creating a genuinely ‘perfect’ society, in their terms, where
there would no longer be any messy complexity, ambiguity or irregularity in
humanity left, and where therefore all the wilful and wayward deviants of
former times might be at last dealt with, one way or another. From such a psychosocial
standpoint as that there is consequently a permanent urge to purge society of
any and all ‘impure’ elements, so that a fervent and severe perfection might finally
be instituted upon the Earth. Pending this, the various kinds of unwanted
people fundamentally spoil and sully things for everyone else, and so the most
lenient policy towards them from these various kinds of often religious
fanatics has been at a minimum a scowling antipathy and a not so concealed contempt.
In this way, the continued existence of
deviant kinds of people in society for such a mindset is an act of
unmerited charity that is given only for the moment and naturally without the
possibility of any guarantees for times that are in the future. Now, Douglas
correctly wrote about the susceptibility within us all of becoming induced
towards such a drive for total purity like this, given that the content of a purity
inquisition may be varied, and that yet it is naturally a very dim fool’s
errand inasmuch as such a venture sallies forth against not just reality
generally but indeed often the very character of our own bodily and material existence
with all of its various imperfections:
…of course, the yearning for
rigidity is in us all. It is part of our human condition to long for hard lines
and clear concepts. When we have them we have to either face the fact that some
realities elude them, or else blind ourselves to the inadequacy of the
concepts. (Douglas 2006, pg. 200)
and
Whenever a strict pattern of
purity is imposed on our lives it is either highly uncomfortable or it leads
into contradiction if closely followed; and if not observed, hypocrisy. That
which is negated is not thereby removed. The rest of life, which does not
tidily fit the accepted categories, is still there and demands attention. The
body, as we have tried to show, provides a basic scheme for all symbolism.
There is hardly any pollution which does not have some primary physiological
reference. (Douglas 2006, pg. 202)
Now, the work of Foucault and Butler turns all of the above on
its head by upending the direction of dependency, where far from ‘deviant and
immoral’ people being reliant on the sufferance and perhaps injudicious generosity
of the respectable and well-thought-of parts of society, instead these ‘depraved
people’ would actually emerge as the thin and only foundation on which the rest
of society, such as those mentioned, has been able to so unwisely build itself up
on top of, and the more that this whole ungainly structure grants itself its
various and ludicrous airs and graces the more does it totter in so perilous
and terminal a way. That is, Foucault and Butler hold that the deviant quality
imputed to those parts of society that are outside of the norm is not really about
these minorities themselves but rather about the controlling part of society’s
efforts to symbolically constitute itself as pure and orderly. For in order to
generate such a positive identity for the centre of society it is indeed
necessary to have a sense of what the objectionable fringe would by contrast be,
and such a positive identity would be much more so concretely established if really existing examples
of deviant people can from time to time be actually detected. In this way,
though not officially acknowledgeable in the open by reason of taboo, as
mentioned above, the sometime identification of irregular people can and does
nonetheless serve to actually strengthen conventional sexualities and genders
by way of a startled recoil, where a scurry back towards respectability happens,
even as much as in the same and confused space the latter is quite unsettled and
becomes questioned in doing so. Yet such a self finds itself perennially enticed
by such experience nonetheless on account of the perverse frisson involved,
since it as an assignation which brings conservative heteronormative selfhood
into a sharper and more excited focus, which condition would not be attainable
in a world that was entirely vanilla and commonplace in its presentation.
For example, there have been many unspoken but known institutions of
confinement for various classes of people (to include disabled people as well) around
the world, and they would seem to have served as a kind of sociopsychological scapegoat
for such conservative societies, as being the locus in social space whereby in
part ‘good’ society on the sly offloaded its ‘pollution’ and so was able by
such devious artifice to establish itself as so much the purer and decorous
than the true facts would obviously suggest. Ireland is a particular example in
this, in having many kinds of residential home institutions, such as Magdalene
Laundries, and these were far from a secret within Ireland, being rather a
fairly open one, yet at the same time naturally the existence of which was rather
unlikely to be admitted to outsiders, for obvious reasons:
Ireland’s residential home system
was as much a product of Ireland as the children it was set up to care for, the
UCD study argues [a study of the Ryan Report], while monetizing neglect and
making abuse disappear behind institutional walls. The level of knowing about
what went on inside residential institutions went far beyond the religious
orders, extending to managers, parish priests, parents, local TDs and government
– and the wider community. ‘It became very clear that people did know and the
biggest node on the network was the Department of Education,’… What’s
interesting about the UCD research is how, by reordering the information in the
Ryan Report, it links knowledge to knowers, clearing the mist of trauma and
amnesia around Ireland’s bystander landscape. In doing so, it provides new ways
of viewing institutions that Dermot Bolger suggested twenty years ago were open
secrets. ‘Washing came in, slave labour was hired out,’ wrote Bolger in 1999.
‘Many people knew it was against their interests to question the system. And in
truth, most Irish people felt the inmates deserved what they got.’ (Scally
2021, pgs. 164-165)
As such, whether through full institutions such as existed
in the recent past, or where things might have then existed or now exist more
in terms of discomfort and unspoken prejudice (except on Twitter), the fundamentalist
heteronormative self, being an incoherent stance full square against so much of
reality, can yet never help but to be endlessly drawn to those perils that
threaten to undo it, indeed sometimes obsessively. That is, in order to secure
itself in the precarious stability which is its upper ceiling, and manage to
sustain all its contradictions, it needs to stay in contact with that which it
purports to entirely oppose, that while it still cannot acknowledge the truly real
existence of those parts of humanity which it feigns to reject, still
nonetheless needs them recurrently for its various acts of faux repudiation so
that it can maintain such delusion about itself as being anything like pure and
ordered. As such, it would surely show more maturity and demonstrate some wisdom
to accept the obvious and inherent imperfections in us all, to forgo the ideal
of a totally sanitised and enclosed version of ourselves, and to accept the extensive
porosity without which selfhood could not be brought into existence:
…we see that disgust, which
always serves the purpose of setting us at a distance from our own animality
and mortality, easily takes as its object other persons and groups, who come to
represent what is avoided in the self. So powerful is the desire to cordon
ourselves off from our animality that we often don’t stop at faeces,
cockroaches, and slimy animals. We need a group of humans to bound ourselves
against, who will come to exemplify the boundary line between the truly human
and the basely animal. If those quasi-animals stand between us and our own
animality, then we are one step further away from being animal and mortal
ourselves. (Nussbaum 2003, pg. 347)
For reasons such as the above, the likes of Foucault and
Butler, and many obviously of the various classes of people who in history have
not enjoyed being reviled and abused, have perhaps not in every case become
well-disposed to conventional society as a result, and feel even that its
entire demolition might be desirable so that something wholly different could
be reconstituted in its place. In this context, the thesis of the total
inessentiality of sexuality and gender would seem to be advanced, whereby nothing
at all of sexuality and gender would be attributable to innate factors, where
these aspects might be part of a normal distribution of human neurodiversity, for
example. The result of this would be the relativisation and perhaps ending of each
of the categories of the traditional gender binary so as to have everyone in
consequence take on a kind of queer and ever shifting indeterminacy, such as to
make what is feminine, masculine, or even heterosexual relations, all quite
passé. Yet perhaps this thesis, though understandable in terms of its emotional
background, is perhaps too strong, and that apart from not being an entirely
good fit with all of the facts, is something that might well prove to be
politically counterproductive in the current climate, or perhaps in any, inasmuch
as it would seem to be somewhat daring to presume to, in effect, tell people
how they should comport themselves in their basic existence, particularly while
at the same time belonging to a fairly small minority that asks for its own
differences to be accepted and respected. Of course, such a direction of
argumentation is plainly an immoderate one and one that it is not on the whole
representative of the LGBT+ community, yet it would nonetheless seem to be the
upshot from some of the propositions advanced by some of the respected scholars
in the gender and sexuality studies field. Naturally there is a diversity of views
in any community, yet it might be preferable to favour those which accept the
existence of heterosexual female and male people as legitimate and accepted
kinds of person, rather than to hold that these identities are but bogus and
aggressive devices of bourgeois social power. Naturally, this can be said while
still acknowledging the great value of these scholars’ work even where one does
not go to the full extent of all of their claims.
Now it seems necessary to say the above since there do
appear to be quite a number of people these days unfortunately who are a bit
excitable and seem to have gotten the impression that support for trans people
somehow means to participate in the deletion of men and women as they have been
traditionally known, so as to feed into the extensive conspiracy theory
universe that now regrettably exists in the populism-infected West. In this
agitated context particularly, certain measures might actually, though well-intentioned,
also become a source of unnecessary discord. For example, perhaps expecting
everyone to state their pronouns will not have much staying power outside of a
specifically LGBT+ context, such as in organisations serving this community
where the practise does appear to be a good idea, given the higher percentage
of gender diverse people there, so as to make everyone feel at home and be all established
on a level playing field. This would be so since the non-LGBT+ majority of
society in particular does not generally experience gender as more complicated
than it has traditionally been viewed as being, and so for the most part might
well find such a practice redundant and even a bit unusual given that in most
instances it will be perhaps very obvious what the gender of the person is. Moreover,
most of the rest of society will not be across the various debates and current ideal
practices in an LGBT+ context, and so expecting unversed people very much outside
these circles to provide in introductions what again will appear as curious if
not eccentric additional pronominal information, might well occasion only
perplexity, and in a situation where such a measure might be unwisely advocated
in too keen a way, even a defensive anger. Needless to say, those for whom
there might be a possibility that their gender could be characterised
incorrectly can, in giving an indication of what their gender actually is,
expect on the basis of elementary manners for others to proceed on that basis,
even where those others haven’t accepted all progressive ideals.
Moreover, given that the subjectivity and identities of
gender in terms of male and female do indeed seem to be highly correlated with
binary sexual biology in the form of primary and secondary sexual
characteristics across all cultures, then it becomes somewhat problematic to neglect
traditional gendered terms such as woman, man, mother, father etc. even where
more complexity has lately been acknowledged. Naturally it is so very clear now
that there are people for whom their innate psychological gender and initial
body do not accord, and also those for whom their gender may not comfortably
sit within a gender binary and as such to also not simply align with their
starting biology, and in some cases there are people who stay with the
characteristics of their natal body while yet socially changing their gender
status, and so accommodations for all such people are of course necessary.
Naturally it is possible to grant and recognise this extra complexity in
society while seeing that in the round the great majority of people will
experience gender and sexual biology as quite closely linked and that this will
inevitably be the predominant and enduring understanding of things. As such,
there would not be a need for a wholescale redefinition of common gendered
terms such as man, woman, mother, father, etc. so as to generally include
primary and secondary sexual characteristics more normally present in one
identity being retained in another. It is indeed commonplace in this world that
our definitions might not achieve a tidy resolution and metaphysical
perfection, inasmuch as practically any field of study in being first
encountered may be reckoned simple and straightforward will yet with better
familiarity feel more akin to a journey that fails to end. As such, many things
that could be endlessly debated and parsed may not practically need such
treatment, and so in this case too the various traditional identities that
exist, while lacking an entirely exceptionless extension of their sense, would remain
as very workable terms nonetheless.
In this context, the provision of services to all people who
need them where some might not identify with the identities to which they have
been traditionally directed has become at times a source of contention. That
is, for example, the provision of maternity services of late has occasionally
led to discord where the traditional terms of mother, woman and breast feeding
might not have been utilised, given that these identities and terms are rated
as both very dear and rather important to those concerned, whereas alternative
terms that might refer to primary and secondary sexual characteristics only are
likely not. In this way, it is of course possible to provide such types of
services to all people who might need them while not going so far as to get
overly preoccupied with having a single and exact terminology that might cover
absolutely all cases, given the role that composite identities or
characteristics might play, or that those who may end up not being precisely described
are a group whose numbers are perhaps quite a great deal smaller than those who
are. Indeed it seems that the former population does not consist of many
people, and for this reason cannot therefore be something for anti-trans people
to get exercised about, neither that it could be a basis for them to try spread
disquiet in society.
Also, the issue of bathrooms and changing room access for
all those who need them has proved contentious in some quarters inasmuch as it
is falsely stated that anyone at all, such as any man, might simply gain the
right to walk into women only spaces on account of trans people not being forced
to use spaces that are for a gender that is simply not theirs, in short to be
treated with respect and dignity. As is obviously clear, trans people are not a
threat or danger to anyone, in just the same evident way that any other kind of
person in society is not collectively a hazard. Memories of the insinuations
that were directed at gay men as being collectively a risk or danger to
children or that they would communicate AIDS to others seem rather pertinent
here, and indeed one suspects that many of the more ardent antagonists against
trans people have perhaps form in terms of previous civil rights movements.
Trans people as a whole, like anyone else, just want to get on and live their
lives and so do not seek confrontation or drama for its own sake, and as such obviously
do not want to have a scene created where they are refused access to, or accosted
within, the kinds of spaces which cannot be avoided by anyone who navigates a daily
life in public. Moreover, it is evidently false that gender transition laws
that provide for self-declaration as the means by which to effect this, by way
of a statutory declaration, give a general opening to any regular man to simply
walk in off the street straight into women only spaces, for apart from the
absence of the legal instrument mentioned it could only be quite apparent to
the proper sense of others as to the implausible claims of ill-intentioned regular
men. And of course, agitating on the basis of a doubtful and peculiar scenario
so as to deny a public life to a whole class of people is not obviously an
approach that speaks to justice and decency, but rather more to fearmongering
and the rule of the mob. There are yet clearly many of goodwill who have become
anxious and alarmed about this issue on account of these unrestrained claims,
combined for sure with women’s general experience of the behaviour of not a
small number of men in terms of lewd and aggressive sexual advances, and an attempt
at an empathic and thoughtful approach that acknowledges and allays these fears
is obviously a good idea.
It seems clear that most people in any dispute do not intend
to harm others per se but rather generally seek to defend themselves from
something that they find threatening from the other side and/or to defend points
of principle related to this, and as such they will not stand for the other
side to bulldoze them off the public stage and thereby be wholly defeated by
the use of what will be seen as force and aggression. Higher and higher degrees
of passion and emotion in this context would appear to only make people dig in
further and become even less willing to consider what the different sides are
motivated by, and what it is they consider to be defending. As such, in a more charitable
way, it appears that many people here are concerned for the personal safety of
traditional women in these kinds of places and this is naturally a legitimate and
obvious concern in general, yet in the same spirit those people who are apprehensive
about trans women using female only spaces might consider how the great
majority, like any demographic, are not a threat to anyone at all, indeed the
suggestion that they are will likely cause deep offence and be indeed very upsetting,
and that moreover access to single sex spaces is essential if one is to live a
public life in society in the circumstances that one has happened to be born
into. As such, it would be particular individuals from any given category of
person who on account of a relevant criminal history, for example, would not in
consequence be afforded the confidence and rights that would normally belong to
a given demographic as a whole.
A recent case, which became prominent, in Scotland of a
criminal with a history of violence who happened to be trans being placed in a
women’s prison was an instance that was unrepresentative of trans people in
general obviously, but yet spoke to how exceptions are correctly made to
general policies on account of the singular, and negative, characteristics pertaining
to some individuals. That is, if one member of an ethnicity or religion happens
to commit an offence and is generally of low character, obviously we do not
take away all rights from every other member of that ethnicity or religion, but
rather direct our actions at the offender only. Equally, people retain many
rights in being incarcerated, in that the condition is supposed to be one only
of confinement and separation from society, and not rather one of abuse and terror,
and so in just the same way as that everyone obviously agrees the principle
that women offenders should not be put in male prisons, equally those women who
are trans who are entirely unlike the mentioned Scottish case would suffer
greatly if put in male prisons, given that this would count as a great
injustice and act of cruelty. For the history of the incarceration of gender
and sexual minorities is replete with all kinds of additional violence directed
at these vulnerable groups, to include rape obviously, and as such it hardly
counts as a great success in stopping the prospect of sexual violence in all
cases if on account of the risk posed by a bit piece of a community the
entirely of the rest is thrown to the wolves as a consequence. As such, it would
seem appropriate to send by default trans women to female prisons as a way to
better provide for everyone’s safety. Naturally it will be correct also for every
kind of prisoner of whatever gender or sexual orientation to be assessed for
the prospect of violence and so to make appropriate arrangements on a case by
case basis.
It seems also that there can be a difficulty for certain
people in single sex spaces where the presence of some trans people who might
not have wholly bodily transitioned could lead to an amount of apprehension
upon being encountered given that not everyone may be used to this. Needless to
say, in this context and any other, the great majority of any community, including
trans people, just want to live their everyday lives as normal, so do not want contention
and antagonism to enter their or other people’s worlds, and as such there is not
accordingly a general prospect of individuals who might in some way be not becoming
or to actually intend that controversy be created. Indeed trans people have
been using appropriate single sex spaces for quite a long time indeed and
people have generally been none the wiser, and so there is no need at all for
the amount of fuss that this issue has become associated with. Moreover there
was likewise a previous daft concern that gay and lesbian men and women using single
sex changing rooms would permit an inappropriate and rampant sexual element
there, yet people clearly got over their unbalanced anxieties on that issue and
it is reasonable to expect that people can get over and become more composed
about this more recent issue too.
Overall, trans people have been born into tougher
circumstances than most, and indeed these days it is very much tougher again or
rather gratuitously so. Indeed, such an amount of animosity that we see must
take but a heavy toll on anyone, and consequently trans people especially now need
and deserve everyone else’s support and respect. And yet the politics of
antagonism and discord of course wants to see such an issue stay unresolved so
as to more effectively manipulate political forces in our countries, with the
simple human dignity of trans and other people being trampled underfoot as
something of the utmost disregard.
Environmental issues
It seems that another faultline in contemporary politics
concerns what might be called environmental issues, such as what concerns
climate change and sustainability in all its forms. Now, the evidence naturally
shows that the present changing climate is anthropogenic, with the steadily
rising CO2 and methane levels in the atmosphere directly measured through ice
cores and the like, with this exactly tracking the output of human industrial
activity since the 18th century, and so for this reason it would
appear to be very evidenced that changes in human economic practices are
necessary. Moreover, it stands to reason that it would be better also to be
less wasteful in general and rather to move to a more circular economy, one
that would also use less energy and where that energy is not derived from
imported fossil fuels. Equally eating a lower meat diet is, on the basis of
evidence, both better for one’s health and for the planet in terms of carbon
emissions and the amount of arable land and water required.
Taking diet and farming first, it does seem that meat eating,
for example, will always remain part of the diet of a lot of people in
perpetuity, since arguments for or against vegetarianism/veganism/meat
consumption, whether of an ethical or environmental kind, in many places and
times in history, have long been somewhat ineffectually stated and debated, and
it seems quite unlikely that a conclusive resolution to this discussion will ever
arrive. However, it seems that most people will be satisfied and reasonably content
if animal products come from higher welfare farms, where the animals are not
subjected to intensive battery conditions and the like. Moreover, it seems
feasible to get wide-scale agreement that meat could in general be a smaller
part of our diet, especially as stated for health reasons, but also on account
of the true cost of its production (without subsidies) and in terms of its very
disproportionate use of land, water and our carbon emitting quotas. As such,
being a lesser part of our diet, there would overall be less animal farming in
general, and meat would as such become more of a luxury to be enjoyed at more
special occasions, rather than an everyday kind of thing.
However, there are those it seems who dislike anything
remotely green or environmental, such as anything to do with any climate change
talk, or what be received as hectoring about the need to use public transport more
and less a private car, to cycle more, indeed the drive to eat less meat, and
in general to move away from a life that a lot of people like just as it is,
given that anyway such people might not have been wholly convinced of the need
for and benefit of implementing anything like these disrupting green measures.
Moreover, such a way of life being lived for example in suburbs or the
countryside without much infrastructure, having a big private car or two, enjoying
an international holidays by plane or two every year, liking beef and other
kinds of meat a lot, is a life that many people it seems appreciate quite a
lot, and there are many of such a mind who are not much inclined to listen to
those who might be seen as arrogantly and patronisingly trying to tell them
what to do without waiting for their agreement. That is, it seems that many of
those who do not like green type measures consider in a stereotypical way that
those on the other side of things are at times smug, even aggressive, and just
about always sanctimonious, further that they would generally have quite a
cosseted life in a city with good infrastructure, with this contrasting with
how life is perceived to be outside of the metropolitan centres. In general it
would be held that such people do not really know enough about the rest of the
world outside of what is held to be their comfortable bubble, about the
experience of others in in different economic sectors and parts of the world,
and so would not be regarded as being in any position to give what is felt to
be arrogant directives handed down from on high to those who are declared to be
in need of enlightenment and edification. On the whole, it seems that the tone,
or perceived tone, in how these things are approached can be very important, indeed
and that where this is not right those who might have been open to discussion could
instead have been repelled and come to be committed more to anti-green beliefs
with greater emotional force.
Indeed, for some reason the issue of diet can be
particularly touchy at times in that it is prone to disproportionately strong
identifications and correspondingly high feelings. That is, for those especially
on the still to be convinced side of things in environmental matters, it seems
at times that those who are vegan or in associated movements have occasioned significantly
negative evaluations by such cohorts of people, inasmuch as there have been
claims that there is perhaps a sense of piousness and self-regard credited to
the latter, along also with the contention that there is a forcefully expressed
sureness in moral certainties to which there corresponds an associated
dismissal or even ridiculing of other points of view and people, the latter
stance being received as quite odd on account of the reasons advanced being not
regarded as especially convincing. On such a basis then there is sometimes
detected an amount of scorn or even on occasion a particular contempt directed
back at those who might adopt being vegan as their primary personal identity,
given that in so doing humanity would apparently be divided up into an
herbivorous elect with a primitive and barbarous carnivory way below, and in
such a way that there can be a suspicion that some of those so doing would
actually prefer most of society to remain meat eaters so that such an elevated
plant-based identity might always remain socially useful. This negative
portrayal would perhaps consider also that the largest number of this
movement’s adherents, and of those who are its most ardent and uncompromising
advocates, to consist of a fairly young demographic, namely perhaps those
around and under the age of thirty-five years of age or so, be generally
college educated, and have in general a level of unwarranted arrogance. As
such, there is here attached also the perennially arising friction between
those who consider themselves to be older and more experienced or even
discerning as against those who are regarded as quite young and undeveloped and
who would be even naive in thinking the world more straightforward than it
might be, and for this reason tend towards ideas and actions that are held to
be excessively one-sided and do so in too keen a way.
Moreover, the green movement has been wildly caricatured, yet
there are always a few crazies, as being anti-human and seeking even the
elimination of homo sapiens from the whole of the Earth, so that the likes of
Gaia could recuperate and therefore be once and for all rid of its
anthropological plague. Even so, for some slightly less zealous theories it has
notably been advocated that there should at least be a heavy depopulation of
our species, and as such desirable that all people would choose to have less or
no children where they would otherwise have done so. This, combined with rich
and better educated societies’ below replacement fertility rates, wherever such
be on the planet, can feed into far-right conspiracy theories such as that
there would be some kind of social engineering effort to lower the population
of certain groups of people while increasing others instead. Needless to say
however, most people will think, rightly, that it is very good that humans
exist, and as such it is generally apt if our populations reasonably increase,
or at the very least to stay the same. And it does appear very much that the
foregoing can be done in a sustainable way, while respecting the limits of our
planet and all its other inhabitants, by following programmes that in
particular converts our economy from a wasteful linear carbon powered one, to a
circular non-carbon based one, amongst other achievable measures. As such, for
more green and climate emergency measures to be adopted and better accepted in all
areas of society it obviously is necessary that this movement be seen as a
pro-human one, one that is in favour of the human population, that naturally
where we restore ecosystems, rewild places and reintroduce native species, we
also pursue sustainable growth for the humans too.
Anyway, for those who are not convinced of the need of
taking stronger green measures, who are reluctant to change the life that they
enjoy now, who perhaps feel they have been patronised or slighted, and who are
perhaps convinced of the wilder depictions of the green movements and their
objectives, naturally such people will not be easily won over. Yet where in
affected demographics the perceived condescension, haughtiness and extremism
attached to the brand of what is green or environmental is successfully done
away with, then perhaps more rational forms of discussion might more often take
place, discussions that would be naturally mutually respectful and where people
could find themselves being moved by reasons other than what is or happens to
be a shibboleth for a particular side in the general cultural war that has
beset us.
Immigration, nationality and the rights of all
Immigration has become perhaps a much more difficult issue than
climate change in many countries. Various
reasons against migration have been advanced, and they have ranged from the
more supported to the outer fringes of conspiracy space, such as the adequacy
of a housing supply, the prospects of successfully integrating new immigrant
populations, the idea that immigrants are a net cost to the destination
society, the amount and kind of immigration that might lead to a dilution of
the existing national character, and indeed a fiendish plot to do away with
indigenous populations by way of a great and dastardly replacement.
Now, by way of context, it does seem that migrants of
various kinds tend to travel to countries whose economy is doing well and where
therefore their prospects are likely to be much better. This is of course quite
rational behaviour in that it would be bizarre in that being given a choice
they would go to places with hardly any prospects at all. Such a kind of
migration tends then it to be in proportion to the strength of a country’s
economy and therefore in proportion to the availability of jobs. As such, broadly
a country tends to attract all kinds of migrants, whether legal or not legal, from
those seeking to improve their economic prospects all the way to those fleeing
for their lives, when that country’s economy is doing well and where generally the
amount of jobs available is bigger than the existing society is able to supply.
Indeed, it is clear that immigrants are in general are a net economic gain to a
country in that they tend to arrive already educated and of working age. As
such, in terms of providing the economy with the labour that it needs it would
take an unusual kind of politics to choke the economy by simply pulling up the
drawbridges regardless in such a scenario. Moreover, if perchance a country’s
economy enters into a difficult period, such as a recession, then the level of
immigration does seem to fall off fairly automatically, such as with Ireland
during the financial crisis a few years ago, or before the beginning of our
prosperity in the 1990s, as people do not want to trade one kind of poverty for
another, and to therefore have spent a lot of their extended family’s money in
being smuggled so pointlessly in addition. For while it tends to be said in
some quarters that people from many less developed places want to come to
richer countries on account of the better social welfare system, the vast
majority who do come however need to send remittances home to support their
wider family, the latter of whom have often invested a large amount of their
resources in their relative’s migration for this exact purpose. Yet, where an
economy is doing well it will it seems tend to attract more irregular migration
than that economy needs.
It is clear that many parts of the world are unfortunately
struggling in some ways, and so do not in every case offer their people a good
life in all respects, and this has naturally resulted in many people from such
places trying to migrate to other countries that are currently doing better,
and to do so in either in a legal or an illegal way. When not done by legal
means the people concerned can hardly be blamed all that much given that the
choice before them is often between letting their whole life be wasted away in
perhaps dismal privation or to break some quite abstract rules in terms of
which human might live where, and to hope in any case that they may be able to
regularise their situation in their intended destination at a later point. In
this, it is not at all irrational for people who being nationals of countries
with difficult economic conditions to venture their future on the possibility
of some prospect of personal success, and indeed upon reaching destination
countries to enter into the legal regime of asylum law through which they could
have some hope of being able to have secure rights to work and build a life in
a less adverse location. Yet given that unfortunately the number of places in
the world with an undeveloped character or challenging circumstances of life is
not small and so consequently the number of people who might prefer to live in
richer societies is large, combined also with the by comparison much smaller economic
and infrastructural capacity of richer societies to absorb all potential migration,
it follows that richer states will be rationally inclined to seek the
curtailment of unrestricted migration that is not specifically sought, such as
for highly skilled people like medical workers. As such, richer states will
pragmatically tend to have border regimes that seek to control the amount of
immigration from those countries which have a large population that wish to
leave, and as such visa free travel regimes tend to take place between
countries of a similar level of economic development given that this is
associated with lower amounts of labour movement.
Overall then, it is rational for economic migrants, from
their perspective, to try to immigrate to places that offer better prospects by
many means, and yet it is equally rational in turn for those richer countries
to police their borders with a view to controlling unrestricted immigration
from those regions of the world which have a heightened propensity for the
illegal practice of this. Yet of course for migrants who arrive because of
obvious destitution, such as because of wars or natural disasters and the like,
it is indeed right that most people’s natural instinct is that refuge be readily
offered and be done so at scale. Now, this can, as with many issues, become
complex in that a very large amount of people may arrive who might never return
to their original country and so whose presence will as a consequence have a
significant and permanent demographic influence in their destination society in
ways that can have a range of perhaps positive and negative results.
That is, it is a feature of politics in many European
countries these days to consider that there is a difficult history of some
communities from an immigrant background not having in all cases become wholly
integrated and prosperous, and for which various reasons have been adduced. Normally
it is said that not much was done by the host state initially, in terms, for
example, of language classes or in actually making an effort to welcome these
new communities into civic spaces, given that governments of those states were
deluded in treating such people as temporary ‘guest workers’ and the like, and to
a similar extent also it is held that some in these newer communities had
unrealistic and unworkable expectations in thinking that they could live in largely
parallel societies with limited adaptations and linkages to the wider original society.
For these and other reasons it is now held that there is a legacy problem for
both sides in some European states in that many of these originally immigrant
communities in terms of ancestry are disproportionately marked by indices of
lower socioeconomic advancement, and this attribute has at times become
associated with these identities to an extent so as to lead to prejudice on one
side and a sense of alienation and rejection on the other. It has been noted or
indeed emphasised that many of these disparate communities are from a Muslim
background, and it has been stated that the population of those who are not
prospering is correlated with those who follow a more conservative kind of
Islam that does not make many in the way of concessions to modern secular
western society, and this is such as to result in a variance in societal values
between communities like these and wider society and to therefore bring about a
consequent separation of people into divergent or even parallel societies, to
the detriment of both.
Such an issue arises for conservative Christians also
inasmuch as people of this view often complain that modern liberal and secular
western society is not at all hospitable to them in that for example LGBT
people are now unremarkably normal and indeed part of society’s institutions,
such as with marriage, and this is such as to lead very conservative people of
any religion, those who basically don’t want this kind of minority to exist at
all really, to find the going tough when they go about their daily lives in
public given that this will invariably lead to situations which contradict their
beliefs. Of course, people can have a range of different beliefs and have the
freedom to do so, yet in sharing a society and necessarily interacting with
others from different standpoints whose claims have already been extensively
assessed, debated and then accepted by most of society, then the balance of
rights will naturally favour those whose position is held to be more evidenced,
and as such where there is a conflict between the competing rights of different
groups that position which is seen as more reasonable will prevail. This is
such that the freedom of very conservative people to live in a world of their exact
choosing will consequently be tempered by the rights of certain others to fully
exist in an unimpaired way, and as such it is considered correct by most people
for very conservative Christians to be circumscribed by measures that are
intended to speak to a balance of justice that is considered to be correctly
weighted against them, such as, for example, curricula which would provide more
evidenced sex education, outlawing conversion therapy for LGBT people, and
providing for the full equality of women to include the most senior leadership
positions in any profession.
Such considerations speak to openly coercive measures that
restrict certain conservative minorities in being able to give practical effect
to some of the beliefs that we must accept they hold on good faith, however
unjust such may objectively be. And in the vindication of the rights of those
who are held to be inequitably damaged and harmed by unrestricted conservative
religious belief, of course one does not wish to wholly expel from society the individuals
or communities of that belief, who go against the wider consensus, but rather
only to restrain particular instances on given occasions, such that obviously the
members of that minority belief are not to be generally discriminated against
in terms of employment and accommodation, as long as they are not crackers
obviously such as with a particular family recently of intemperate and loud
opinions, who are clearly all unemployable. In this way our societies while
restraining any person or community in actually harming individuals or
legitimate kinds of person, we yet correctly show tolerance for a wide and
divergent range of beliefs and practices, many of which would be regarded by
the mainstream as retrograde, weird or even outlandish. Obviously the kind of
person and practices that are considered normal and mainstream have changed in
the West over the last 100 years, and may yet do so further in the future, yet
it is clearly a good stance for any society, and not just a Western one, to
allow and provide for a real amount of weirdness and imperfection, within
judged limits, to exist in society, since this is it seems a truly ineliminable
feature of the human condition and of the societies that we will always live
in. As we have found out, sometimes what is strange and bizarre today may end
up being accepted by most of society later, but not always of course, or even
anything like most of the time. Perhaps Western societies have in recent world
history been a bit better at providing the space for people who have been
judged to be like this, yet it would be silly to not acknowledge many
impressive kinds of society in history who did this quite well also, such as indeed
many Muslim states in former times.
Now, while showing a tolerance for divergent groups in terms
of negative liberty, such as with the example of very conservative Christians, there
is of course also a positive expectation on any wider community to whom
tolerance is shown that they would involve themselves in society as well and
contribute to it, which normally such people are only too happy to do. Yet where
groups such as these are or become a significant demographic and who are
separated away from society to an excessive degree then this becomes
problematic and such as what cannot be allowed to persist permanently. It seems
correct to hold that it is important that the people of a society and state
should have some basic and shared civic commonalities, that they be on the same
page in certain fundamental respects, such as to give rise to a cohesion,
stability and resilience which serve several societal goods, given that in
their absence everyone in that society will be harmed. This does not of course
mean that everyone must be assimilated and their former identity deleted, such
as to accept the false terms of debate set by the disreputable parts of the political
right who consider ‘multiculturalism’ to mean having simply no shared society
at all, but rather to have only an incoherent menagerie of inimical social
fragments. Rather the model of multiculturalism would seem to be well enough
represented by the US in that it seems to have done integration quite well for
a long time, in bringing about a result where people are proud of their ethnic
and/or religious heritage while yet signing up to a shared American identity
and in very much identifying with its mainstream values.
As such, anyone who immigrates to a society should naturally
learn the language of the destination country well, and it would surely be
beneficial to, amongst many other things, get involved in local groups and
volunteering not just in their own ethnic or religious community but in outside
mixed groups as well, so as to make connections and friends more broadly.
Moreover immigrants should expect to be required to adopt the core values of
that society at some point and to anticipate less leeway in this than with
communities that have been here longer, such as with conservative Christians,
or Ultraorthodox Jews in Israel for example. Generally things can be considered
a success it seems if the second generation has managed to achieve a synthesis
of something like basic secular western values while retaining their heritage
and a sense of its proud distinction. In the same vein, it would seem to be a
good practice for host states to offer language classes, access to adult
education, and for local government to encourage, the various voluntary and
civic society groups to support new people and communities like these to join
them in their shared work and projects. It seems that there are many other
components that might make migration more successful for everyone. Suffice to
say that on both sides there are expectations and responses on both sides that
need to be understood and honoured.
Now, where there are longstanding communities in different
European countries that have a range of positive attributes who also have
unfortunately an amount of problems and difficulties, being the subject of
contentious politics, it might be ventured that the better approaches to the
issue would be to offer respect in the first instance by recognising the great role
of, for example, North African and Muslim societies in having contributed so
much in so many ways to the world, such that this will always be their great heritage.
Equally, it seems important to acknowledge that that such minority communities bring
many good and valuable things to their larger societies, such as in terms of food
culture and art, etc, and how in general that such communities offer a lot and
can offer more. Framed more in terms like this, where these alienated
communities might feel a bit more actively wanted and where consequently a more
respected place is offered in society, then extended interventions and supports,
such as youth programmes and adult education courses that are normally set in
place to other communities that are in parts distressed and on the margins,
would surely over the long-term be like to be more progressively successful in
helping uplift more people from these backgrounds and being in turn able to
help others in such communities. With all of the above, it is of course
appropriate to expect positive responses and active engagement such as for
everyone to meet at something like a half-way point.
Now hospitality and charity are most people will agree good
things, and they should naturally be embodied at the individual, local and
national level, and on such a basis the overwhelming majority of people in the
West recognise that offering refuge to people on account of war and other
disasters, and doing so above our economic or societal needs, is a good thing.
Now generally it seems that immigrant cultures that are more alike to the that
of the host destination will tend to provide for an integration process that is
easier and/or quicker, yet there is no culture so alien nor people so
unrecognisably other that a shared society could not be built up given a good
attitude from both parties. And there are perhaps limits to how many refugees could
be taken in on a permanent basis and for the recipient society to remain as the
same society, inasmuch as its national character might become altered. Yet it would
seem correct to accept a high ratio in any case, and an important strand in
Western culture would not consider this to be an issue at all, nor indeed would
consider cultural similarity or difference to be of much relevance either. For ever
since the French and American revolutions and their declarations of universal and
individual rights, our western societies have, in principle, had as one of
their main political orientations a deemphasis on the local, cultural and
particularist background of anyone in any respect, and to instead raise each
and all to the status of what could be called modernist subjectivity, being
that of individuals who are free and equal precisely to the extent that their
identity as rational individuals is disclosed to them, and where societies
therefore should be the renovated civic spaces of meritocratic republics. In
this way the religion or nationality, for example, of anyone is in principle
held not to be important at all in terms of how they ought to function and
prosper in these enlightenment derived republics, but rather that any
particularist colouring that people may have, like religion for example, ought
to be quite irrelevant insofar as universal and individual rights, and the
dignity arising therefrom, pertain to all humans as rational agents without
exception, and so where there is possibly a conflict with any traditional
religion to that extent is that religion objectively wrong in that regard, and
the aspect of it which so offends ought therefore to be legally curbed, and in
this a favour is done to persons affected. Indeed, such a presentation of
things conceptually tends towards something like a universal republic with a
universal citizenship, that whether by an actual unitary polity or by the
institution of a wide-ranging and prevailing governance of international law the
rights of individuals and the obligations of states would end up as pretty much
the same for everyone everywhere in any case. It was in this second sense that
Kant proposed a league of republics as the basis of a perpetual world peace as
the best way of instituting the rule of universal reason, and so it stands clearly
as a revealing example of Enlightenment ambition on this issue.
Equally, the nation-state has from the 19th century
been a relatively stable and fixed form of societal organisation in Europe,
excepting various wars obviously, and it has despite its problems become a basic
and keenly adhered to framework for people in thinking about what they regard
as their main political community, and so nationalism has become the largely accepted
organising principle by which polities are held to be ultimately grounded. Now,
such a scheme of things considers nations to be more or less linguistically and
culturally homogenous communities and that they have continuity through
history, that while things may have ultimately changed very much so indeed in
the course of time, such as for some to have even wound up speaking a different
language for example, there will nonetheless be a fairly consistent narrative
continuity considered as relating all of the various and diverse moments of its
passage through time. In this way it is not at all necessary nor indeed
desirable that nationality be grounded through the likes of biological descent
only, given that different individuals and communities can, by settlement, also
join the national narrative and contribute to it in major ways, such as with
the various individuals and ethnicities that have joined the United States and
Canada. Indeed national membership by birth is simply a sometimes useful proxy
for having been inducted into the given nationality, and as such what is more
basic is the authentic donning and sporting of the national garb, as judged
locally and/or by official state institutions by culturally defined logics. Now,
nationality, or even supra-nationality as with the EU, provides a sense of communal
agency by which one can consider that one’s local large-scale political
community so considered has had a past, and indeed a past of a particular kind
such as for it to be understood that this community has arrived into
contemporary affairs with certain inherited challenges and tasks, and from
which therefore certain futural directions are already suggested for which
there arises consequently the need for work of a particular kind in the present.
With such an arrangement of things, there is here, compared with the idea of a
republic founded on abstract universal rights alone a far more embedded and
recognisable sense of political community that has a greater chance of producing
feelings of belonging and the sense of a home, inasmuch as it offers a more tailored-made
outfit to get into. This contrasts with something like the Kantian perpetual
peace style league of republics, as above, founded on right alone and so the
simple duty to will solely what is rational as a universal law, in that this would
not perhaps offer sufficient affective and ideational affinity to potential inhabitants
in that having so totally abstracted everyone from all particularity and any background
at all what consequently results is it seems a polity of looming and even cold
enormity, and so the individual is as a consequence left standing shorn of any
distinctive temporal purpose and as being but one of a featureless multitude in
an alienated modernity.
Yet of course, the better way of doing things is to join something
like these two strands, as indeed the West has largely done since world war II,
and to which perhaps it needs to recommit again. That is, societies can be
formed in terms of nation-state polities and obviously be also organised in
terms of universal human rights, whether of a Kantian flavour or not, or indeed
whether the language of natural law be used instead, and so these nation-states
will therefore take the form of democracies where all citizens, whether in
elected office or not, are expected to contribute to the work of a civic
discourse that in its rational deliberations settles on considered and
thoughtful responses to the issues of the day and to do this within the
framework of the dignity and rights of all people, and moreover that such
societies be open to a broad degree to the induction of new citizens,
particularly those who are in need of refuge. This would be such that the
members of these societies might hope to be historically and socially grounded
while also being induced to expand their horizon of concern to the whole extent
of humanity, and so see the basic rights and dignity that pertain to all people
in any locale. Now, Hegel perhaps offers a better account of the joining of
these two elements, inasmuch as Kant or indeed most liberal political
philosophy have not perhaps seen this problem at all. Charles Taylor writes of
how Hegel agreed that standard liberal political philosophy is correct in what
it recommends as what is necessary but yet that its account is not at all sufficient
for an actually functioning society. He has Hegel say that:
“…the modern state must be built around the free,
rational individual. It must respect his freedom of conscience, freedom to
select his profession, the security of his property and freedom of economic
enterprise. It must allow for the dissemination of information and the
formation of public opinion. It must be founded on the rule of law… But Hegel
decisively parts company from liberalism in that he believes that these principles
are radically, indeed, disastrously inadequate as a foundation for the state. The
label ‘liberal’ is uncommonly broad and loose, but there is a central tradition
which has regarded individual liberty, equality (including the sweeping away of
unearned privileges), and the responsibility of government to the governed as
the three essential properties of a legitimate polity… The underlying belief of
the liberal tradition is that these values were the sufficient basis for a
viable society… In this sense, Hegel is most emphatically not in the liberal
tradition. A society based on these three principles is one in which men are
maximally free as individuals, with a homogenous, undifferentiated way of life,
and where government responds to the wills of these undifferentiated
individuals. But this is just the kind of society which rather deserves to be
called a ‘crowd’ (Menge) or a ‘heap’. It is a ‘formless mass’ (eine formlose
Masse). (Taylor 2005, pg. 450)
From the horse’s mouth directly, Hegel writes that the ideal
form of life is of a concord or unity between the individual and the political
community so that the transcendent principles of universal reason would become
embodied in the praxis of each person, family unit and estate of society, and
where consequently the former might achieve a tender and human form while each
of the latter would become raised to that great stature:
“The state is the actuality of
concrete freedom. But concrete freedom requires that personal
individuality [Einzelheit] and its particular interests should reach
their full development and gain recognition of their right for
itself (within the system of the family and of civil society), and also that
they should, on the one hand, pass over of their own accord into the
interest of the universal interest even as their own substantial spirit,
and actively pursue it as their ultimate end. The effect of this
is that the universal does not attain validity or fulfilment without the
interest, knowledge, and volition of the particular, and that individuals do
not live as private persons merely for these particular interests without at
the same time directing their will to a universal end.” (Hegel 2017, pg. 282)
Yet Hegel writes it seems of how the ‘State’, as a distinct historical
community separate to others, is substantially and ethically self-sufficient or
even self-referential, and so on his terms it very much seems that an
historical community that has developed to have an advanced ‘State’ form of
organisation, despite its apparently superior qualities, need not have much
regard for other communities which are at a ‘lesser’ degree of historical development,
nor indeed that it would want to or actually even could relate to others at any
relative position, such as at the same or in higher degrees also. Indeed in
Hegelian terms it is perhaps perplexing that other societies are held to exist
at all. Such an issue arises surely in the Hegelian system on account of the
metaphysical monistic interpretation of his work as providing that Geist,
the spiritual or mental principle of all reality, does all of its work
immanently as but the plain unfolding of what was already implicit within
itself from the very beginning of things, being only the simple journey back
from contradiction, such that attempting to refer to realities that are
genuinely outside of itself is not actually something that for this system can
be conceptually possible, somewhat like Leibniz’s monads. Yet, Hegel seems to
write that Geist actually has a very roving character in that it is seen
to take up residency in first one civilisation or society and then each in turn
in many others, and does this so that it might progressively raise itself to
yet higher degrees of its own acclaim. However it is not perhaps clear how or
in what manner it is that civilisations or societies are said to be sequentially
‘inhabited’ or ‘formed’ by Geist in that in one sense Geist is presented
as distinct from any society, given that the latter will have prior and
subsequent existences after Geist moves on from them, and yet Geist
is said to be not a transcendent and abstract principle but rather nothing
other than the very arrangement of any society that is held to be pioneering.
If the latter, then there is hardly a strong case to be made that Geist exists
as a continuous and definite thread that really links and causes all of the
various best stages of an historical range of societies; rather it seems that Geist
might simply be only a vague name that is applied variously to different
phases in world history where one can point to where newer societies are seen
to find new ways of doing things better in terms of some chosen criteria, which
for Hegel is the successively better societal realisation of a form of personal
freedom that has a genuinely worthy and rational content to will. As such,
wherever there is something new and interesting being done, Geist might seem
perhaps to just turn up and boldly claim the credit for things there, and yet to
get bored very easily, for when what is offered in a given locale has become for
it a bit passé it will it seems not disguise its sudden disinterest and so indeed
dump its former companions, and do so rather unceremoniously, then straight
away invite itself over to whomever it finds is doing what it has judged to be more
avant-garde and titillating, and as always, contrive things so as to be the star
in its new milieu. So on and on it does this, over and over again, until it
finally has wholly spent itself and with that has arrived in what for it is a
satisfactory place of retirement, this being, improbably, a constitutional
monarchical state that is much like 19th century Prussia. Needless
to say, there are many who do not regard the Hegelian philosophy as correct in
every respect, and so where inconsistencies and odd conclusions are detected
these are naturally not taken up, but rather as with any thinker one is quite
free to pilfer the bits that one fancies, such as elements here and some
elsewhere, while basically slighting perhaps all of the rest. In any case, the
upshot of this discussion, is that it is desirable to have an account of
political organisation that integrates more regional and exclusive forms of
communal identity with the imperatives of justice and ethical obligation which
extend beyond this in ways that are even at times limitless, and generally we
have had this at least in principle in post-WWII western states and in other
places too, and so the task now is perhaps simply to remind ourselves of the
value of what we have already got. Now this fare is very definitely spiced with
an Hegelian piquancy in that our societies, while always improvable, are very
much worth working for and contributing to, and this as the simple and willing
exercise of our own rationally informed freedom.
Individualism as the only ground of volition and
the sole approach to personal and communal advancement?
Yet another part of the present instability in the West,
perhaps in the US more so, concerns a dispute about the extent to which society
and/or the state ought to directly help individuals or particular communities
who do not have indices of prosperity and advancement as high as others, and
moreover whether the elimination of inequality should be a state objective and
by concrete measures that it by its own direct measures aim to resolve this. Perhaps
the main fulcrum around which such issues pivot is the status of the individual
and what is agreed to be the degree of solitary agency and volition available
to the lone person, such that where having a high amount it will perhaps matter
less if a person is born into various kinds of adversity, inasmuch as
differential outcomes could then be more attributable to personal agency simply,
whereas if rather less so then material and social disadvantage will be held to
not be generally surmountable by solitary willpower alone. The natural consequence
of the latter would then be that direct help to disadvantaged individuals and
communities from the richer and better off side of society may be obligatory on
the basis of justice, and perhaps not solely by voluntary charity. Relatedly,
if all social and political problems are resolvable into a complete
individualism then various social problems like racism and prejudice could be
dealt with by simply and only treating everyone as a perfect individual in
every case and not that for example concrete measures targeting certain
demographic wholes with various kinds of collective aid and interventions would
be necessary.
To attempt to address the second issue first, it does not seem
that treating everyone as a rank individual in all circumstances can be alone a
sufficient solution to dealing with various forms of discrimination, prejudice
and indeed structural problems that certain groups face. This is so given that particular
correlations between given demographics and certain attributes can at times occur
in having by the vagaries of history become prevalent, such that certain
cohorts of people may now exist as associated with various positive or negative
characteristics so as to be more less averagely educated or prosperous for
example, and so where there are populations that are distressed in ways that
impede their development it will surely be necessary to not only on the cheap treat
people as absolute individuals but also to more actively provide and indeed finance
the required extra help and services in respect of which communities like this are
finding things difficult, for example in terms of more tailored educational
programmes, employment supports or counselling services. In this way it seems impossible
to not acknowledge the real existence of certain demographic wholes that
individuals will be members of. Yet it
will hardly be the case that individuals would have no personal autonomy at all
naturally – rather it seems correct to consider people as having a double
aspect in being members of certain cohorts and that this might serve as the
framework for their agency, and equally they will of course be an individual
with moral and rational self-direction such as to take the material of such
circumstances and make their own lives from it, as best they can.
While granted that people can and do direct their own lives
in the circumstances that they have found themselves in, yet perhaps
circumstances can be so overwhelming that no amount of individual autonomy
could realistically surmount such hazards on a consistent basis. Indeed, it is
hardly plausible in principle nor much at all supported by known cases that
individuals can by naked and solitary willpower alone force their way through any
kind of adversity no matter the arduous and indeed extreme conditions, or even
if a handful of people might manage to do this somehow it is very clear that the
majority of the remaining population will not and consequently will be left to
endure a struggling condition just as before. For it is not as if the cohorts
of the population that currently are doing well are universally blessed with all
talents, moral attributes and intelligence, nor as having no troubles to deal
with, but rather do better on average in part for having attended generally nicer
schools, had better housing, lived in more contented neighbourhoods, had better
educated and more professionally successful parents, and to have grown up with more
resources to draw on in general when things become difficult ranging from
simple cash wealth to pay for things as they arise to better familial and social
networks comprised of people with various skills and attributes and indeed
connections. All in all, whether one comes from difficult circumstances or by
contrast better ones it is clear that basically all people will need to at
different times draw upon resources that are hopefully within their environment
in order to get past difficult times and events, whether these be of a material,
personal or social kind, and so where such resources are inadequate or indeed
absent it is unfortunately all too likely that the wheels on things will fall
off a bit or sometimes much more so, and this can hardly be attributed to a
weakness in the individual concerned insofar as they would be chided for not
having called down the likes of a Nietzschean might and force in order to surge
through mere hindrances such as those, that absent a concentrated will to power,
the individual alone would be left entirely to blame and fit only to be derided.
On the contrary, it is perhaps implausible to consider that volition arises
from the interior substance of a radical individual considered as a solitary and
substantial ego, but rather perhaps it would be better to account for the will
in cognitive terms as rather as what is drawn from without by intended goods
and ends, which tend to be as much social as individual, and where the volitional
agent would consequently emerge as being but a derivative and dependent term arising
from that cognitive architecture.
While it is not necessary to fully flesh out the latter
position in this essay it can nonetheless be noted in support of this thesis
that better levels of volitional movement can come about by how things are
cognitively framed where on the one hand a newly gained sense of a commendable history
that functions to conceptually set one up well in approaching the work of the
present is secured, and on the other to discover tenable purposes that can
engage with the problematic matter of the present and so provide a steady and
plausible way forward. This would contrast with a situation in which one is
unable to stand over one’s history as creditable and in where equally one can
see no worthy and plausible futural purpose that would engage with and rectify
the matter of the present. As such, part of the difficulty in surmounting the
various difficulties in a life concerns not only material impediments, such as
the lack of wealth, networks, education or other kinds of cultural capital, but
problems of personal meaning and the sense of one’s own history as well, such
as where there can be a burden associated with being a member of group that has
become known for not doing well. This might be such as to have one’s address or
ethnic or cultural background exist in a stigmatised and maligned way, so that people
from such zones might come to be discounted from the get go and indeed to have
these negative attitudes and expectations internalised as a particularly
destructive kind of shame or despair. For where a person’s origin and history
is not considered worthy of respect, from without but also by the person
themselves, this cannot fail to demoralise one in the present and so make it
very unlikely that future aspirations will be reached given that a positive
future like this must in such circumstances appear implausible, or even
ridiculous. Rather it is always necessary that a pride or confidence in one’s basic
origin and history be established, and indeed recognised by the rest of society
too, before a weight of personal developmental work can be realistically taken
on. In this way, the parts of society that are finding the going tougher generally
need the parts that historically have been doing better to recognise the
former’s basic worth and equal dignity, since the latter tend to oversee and
indeed disburse society’s hoard of esteem and value. This would seem to be an
actual structural precondition for the reasonable possibility of the wide advancement
of those demographics that have historically found the going especially tough. Examples
of this might include the advancement of black rights in the US, the
celebration of Pride by LGBT people, or the recognition of Traveler ethnicity
in Ireland. Then, given that one’s origin and past become recognised as being a
record of significant merit in core respects, one can then more easily formulate
oneself as being equal to the present undertaking inasmuch as such a recognised
past functions as a proof of history of having involved a comparable kind of
arduous or commendable work and which therefore shows a level of general constancy
sufficient for the new futural and often taxing work of renewal.
Now it is clear that people exercise volition in a more
localised way also by making simple quotidian choices and generally one is said
to successfully deploy willpower where, following the good bedfellows of Aristotle
and the people of the delay of gratification paradigm, one perseveres in a good
which is judged better, which is usually a longer term one, and so resists assenting
to a different good or goods judged to be of less value, being usually of an immediate
gratification kind. Aristotle mostly said this by writing that one ought to
pursue the better good and that the identity of what it consists in each case
is discoverable by reason where it has had the benefit of much personal experience:
Since all knowledge and every
pursuit aims at some good, what do we take to be the end of political science –
what is the highest of all practical goods? Well, so far as the name goes there
is pretty general agreement. ‘It is happiness’, say both ordinary and cultured
people; and they identify happiness with living well or doing well. But when it
comes to saying in what happiness consists, opinions differ, and the account
given by the generality of mankind is not at all like that of the wise.
(Aristotle 1975,pg. 66)
While part of the ability to will well may to a certain extent
consist in an inborn advantage in some cases, however this capacity, as the big
A said, can yet be grown by anyone by repetition and therefore by the
inculcation of habit. Equally, Mischel wrote that “Beginning early in life,
some people are better than others at self-control but almost everybody can
find ways to make it easier [by using various framing strategies]” (Mischel
2015, pg. 12). Even so, a general kind of developed fortitude or constancy for choosing
and persevering in better and often more demanding goods will however all be much
in vain if the person judges that their history has not delivered them into the
present in a tenable way, such as mentioned above, but rather such as to have arrived
sorely inequipped to face the difficult work of the found present and so as
such will find themselves wholly unequal to that present work, work that has
been levied by the delayed futural good as the only way out the present
difficulties. This would result in no faculty of volition, no matter how honed
and resilient it may have latterly become being able to maintain one on a theoretically
better course that one judges to be actually pointless and wholly fantastical
in its conception. Indeed to work in a sustained and difficult way towards a
future judged wholly implausible would not just be perverse, but cognitively
unattainable given what seems to be the basic nature of our psychology inasmuch
as there must always be a conceptual match between available agency and the
intended end, where the former would in principle be developable into the
latter, in that where this is not the case there can then be no plausible way
by which the present could be converted into the purposive future and so no way
by which this futural end could draw the agent towards itself. As such, the
basic states of personal and social existence must indeed be understood as arising
from a kind of existence which is essentially relational and which is extended
across time in a particular way, much like Heidegger said:
…whenever Dasein tacitly
understands and interprets something like Being, it does so with time as
its standpoint. Time must be brought to light – and genuinely conceived – as
the horizon for all understanding of Being and for any way of interpreting it. (Heidegger
2004, pg. 39)
Anyway, where it is the case that one is not established
well by one’s history and neither successfully entrained to a future of standing,
perhaps to a certain extent one can in an estranged and mimicked way go along
with things constructed like that for a limited while, yet living a barren existence
such as this is surely not at all something that can be long sustained or be bearable,
and so sooner or later a psychic collapse will surely ensue, and a despairing
reversion to more immediate gratification pursuits will then likely follow. As
such, the way forward then would be to work on the sense of one’s history by reinterpreting
it into something rather that does deliver one into the present in a more creditable
way, and by also, which is the same job of work, finding a new future with
which to interpret in a different way one’s history. Naturally, one needs to do
this in a way that is truthful and therefore authentic so that the new sense of
things might have some durability, that with this one will be better able to
withstand the inevitable adverse pressures and tumult that are all too likely
in the course of any stage in a life. A couple of examples might suffice: taking
a history of addiction which may have been seen only as a negative thing and reinterpreting
it as actually quite beneficial in terms of a career of counselling and social
work; someone from an historically disadvantaged minority and who experienced
adversity growing up because of this then later entering politics and grounding
their positions and presence in the light of this history; and a person who had
particular psychological or personal difficulties that might have been
sustained for a long time and which latterly became interpreted to establish
present agency as more robust and resolute than would perhaps be possible
absent such a heavy and difficult history. In all instances, of course, one
must yet push oneself and sometimes do so quite hard indeed, and this very much
remains the case even where one is set up well by discovering or having
revealed to one a favourable history and equally the good fortune to have a
worthy future to pursue. However as already stated at length, the delay of
gratification pathway alone cannot be by any means sufficient for the
sustainable movement of things even though it stands as wholly necessary. I
intend to develop this loosely sketched account of volition in more detail in a
later essay.
As such, the approach to not in every instance treat people
as rank individuals but rather to look to communal backgrounds appears well
grounded, and further if it is desired to provide a realistic path out of
adversity for people who are impaired in such contexts then sustained and
targeted measures paid for by the richer more successful part of society should
be undertaken. Moreover, it would appear necessary that society give public
recognition and respect to minorities with a legacy of marginalisation and
distress so that people from these walks might no longer be so weighed down by
difficult histories and rather have a better chance of prospering in life.
‘Wokeness’ and cancel culture
Yet there are currents in politics these days that do not
wish to do any of the above at all, and would instead forswear any public
acknowledgement of historical wrongs done to certain minorities, and moreover to
definitely work against any practical measures that might give some help to these
affected groups, such as through the modest leg-ups given by diversity,
equality and inclusion frameworks. Indeed attempts like this at promoting more
social justice in this area are sometimes lumped in with a term that is frequently
used in quite a vague and indeed very expansive way, this being ‘woke’. Indeed ‘woke’,
as a term used in general political discourse these days, can be deployed in so
broad a way that it perhaps loses any specific and identifiable content and
rather in truth become just ways of variously assailing one’s discursive
partner for not being a Trumpist, not a believer in certain bizarre conspiracy
theories, or perhaps more so as that they are not basically a member of the ‘good
plain people’ (being those who are white, heterosexual and not ‘overeducated’
with lots of liberal or leftish ideas). That is, these terms can indeed just be
used as rhetorical devices that in a lazy and yet so sharp a way attempt to
shut down legitimate dialogue about the basic need for decent and respectful treatment
for various kinds of people who have historically had a needlessly tough and
unhappy existence, and who ask now only that the rest of society might no longer
exclude and malign them, and to not therefore only use their names as slurs.
Yet it seems unfortunately that an amount of unnecessary bad
feeling and resistance has been generated where these worthy objectives may have
been pursued at times in too ardent or even shrill a way, and moreover where these
more recent moral causes might have been advocated in a seemingly one-sided and
exclusive way such as to have perhaps passed over various other cohorts of
people who are also it seems distressed and whose difficulties would also be legitimate
and worthy of mention. That is, where there are existing cohorts of people who
feel perhaps they have not got as much attention in recent years as the various
LGBT, racial and ethnic minority groups, or environmental causes, and who yet
feel that the condition of things for them has not been all that easy but to
not get much in the way of material aid for this and neither to receive any
societal commendation for having borne their hardships, then perhaps it is not
impossible to understand why an amount of resentment has become prevalent in
some quarters such as to feed into a new regressive kind of politics. The
example of former industrial communities has already been mentioned above; indeed
it has been noted that large segments in many countries of what might be called
the white working class, along with many of those without college education,
have recently put in their lot with the various populists and demagogues that
are attempting these days to plainly bury liberal democracy. Possibly giving a
degree of impetus to such political choices is perhaps the commonly held viewpoint
that in general life is rarely easy for anyone, in that it seems quite atypical
that people from any background will find things entirely plain sailing,
inasmuch as just about everyone, whether members of named minorities or not, will
experience their lives as having needed sustained and difficult work such as to
have involved the surmounting of various trying difficulties, and as such it is
usually by persevering in perhaps an unostentatious and unsung way that most people
will have built themselves up into a better condition. This would be such that there
might be a misapprehension on the side of politics that is attracted to
populist political figures that the various minorities championed by liberal
and left politics would be handed things that they would not in fact have
earned, in that they would possibly receive an undue preference for jobs or for
places in academia, that there would be an inappropriate degree of influence
and on occasion public funding for NGOs that advocate to governments for
policies that may be significantly ahead of the wider public, and in general that
there would be a disproportionate representation of such groups and their
topics in the media and wider culture such as to be in excess of their
population numbers or warranted need.
To such concerns it can be said that naturally it is a good
thing that there is now positive visibility for groups that were actively
suppressed and silenced in the past so as to maintain the silly pretence that LGBT+
people, for example, didn’t exist at all. As such, it is quite normal and
correct these that there now be an amount of minority characters and people in
films and public life, so that the normal variation of humanity might be fittingly
displayed and that positive examples and role models for people with these
identities be provided, who lacking this would not see people like them in
admired positions in culture and leadership. The experience of Whoopi Goldberg,
who was as much surprised as inspired by seeing Lieutenant Uhura in the original
Star Trek, as the first black tv character that she had seen who wasn’t a maid,
is obviously not an isolated case, and clearly not only in terms of racial or
ethnic identities, but equally for all the many kinds of people who have over
the last couple of decades become unbound in their own cases. In this way it is
quite correct that various kinds of newly visible people appear regularly in
various media; people, who if judging by the tv and film industries of previous
times, apparently didn’t exist at all, or who at best were put in a lowly caste.
As such, there is now a situation where things have indeed ramped up quite
quickly but from a standing start, for which reason the magnitude of various
minority groups presence in media may seem bigger than it may perhaps truly be,
and this may be surprising to some people. At the same time one might detect an
amount of continuing compensation in extensively representing some groups these
days which may no longer in every case be necessary to that extent given that
the condition of things in most western countries has become quite positive,
such as with gay rights and for some other minorities, while yet at the same
time very much noting how difficult it still regrettably is for some other groups,
such as for trans people.
Concerning the idea that that there is an inappropriate influence
from the NGO sector in advocating policies that a sufficient mass of the public
may not yet have assented to or where the prospect of doing so is not imminent,
and moreover where such public policy advocacy work might be funded by foreign backers
or equally by public money which draws on the taxes of those citizens who may
wholly disagree with their recommendations, it can be said generally that there
are many ‘NGOs’ in this world with a wide range of views and objectives who
gain all kinds of governmental access, with many kinds of source funding which
are not free from query, and who are not at all on the side of ‘woke’
objectives. For example many very right-wing anti-statist ‘think tanks’ exist like
the Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK or indeed where in the US there are
now hardly any restrictions on private and corporate money in donating to
political causes or in the tendentious advocacy for certain objectives that are
not at all publicly supported. This is naturally a concern given that few
people would agree that just because someone or some entity might be
exceedingly rich, to have even billions, that they should consequently be able
to exert a large amount of control over the politics of a country by virtue of this
crude wealth alone, so that they might through this get ever closer to simply buying
elections and governmental policies. On this basis then, the above must be seen
as having low legitimacy and as tending towards disrepute. By contrast, it
seems quite appropriate that there be public funding for the self-organising
groups of minority communities where they provide a range of valuable services
to their own communities, given that this is a very cost-effective way for the
state to achieve its educational, social, and health, both physical and mental,
objectives in these populations. Moreover, it is surely correct that these
bodies do this work through frameworks suggested by serious scholarship
provided by universities, being also publicly funded, inasmuch as a sustained
intellectual examination of each group’s history, present condition and
preferred future would lead in general to better decision making within the community
and also a more articulate and comprehensive representation of this group and
its needs to the rest of society and indeed to government. And obviously, this
part of society will indeed speak to its own evidenced needs and preferences so
identified, and it does not perhaps matter all that much if other parts of
society have an unreasonable and contrarian opinion concerning this. On such a
basis then, where a state has the objective of itself bringing about better
outcomes for all populations in society, and where in these cases it is
fortunate that it finds certain communities that organise themselves
effectively, and who through scholarship are reflective and articulate, then it
is indeed a good use of public money to support and foster the work of these
communities and their bodies, such as in terms of the NGOs set there. Further,
in those countries that are more conservative in terms of even persecuting gay
people for example, then NGOs in such countries that work for the alleviation
of this will inevitably obtain much of their funding from abroad, even from
individually rich benefactors. Now this is not ideal, inasmuch as it would
indeed be preferable for each society to do its own work and organise itself
from within its own resources, given that no one or no country should in
general be in the business of dictating things to others in most cases, yet
sometimes the societal and legal regime in some places can be so hostile and
yet the basic rights need for very many is so pressing that it would surely be quite
wrong not to fund from without, even wholly. Overall then, ‘wokeish’ NGOs can
in general make quite a good case for themselves.
On the issue of DEI measures such as perhaps quotas for the
likes of jobs and academic places, it is sometimes stated that one has to
choose between either these DEI measures or merit as the basis for assessing
people, yet such an opposed binary is forced inasmuch as people who come from
more difficult backgrounds in terms of their own personal history who in coming
up to say the same level of achievement as others whose lives have had perhaps
more advantages will naturally by virtue of this display more merit in having
covered more ground to get to that position. As such, where things are at the
same level in terms of some standard and uncontextual criteria, it will be a
rational choice on the basis of merit to select that candidate who encountered
more obstacles and who generally travelled further to get to that level, and
who therefore by virtue of that suggests greater future potential as well. Now,
it is indeed noted that certain minority communities, depending on the country,
exist currently with a higher correlation to adverse circumstances, and so it
follows that the beneficiaries of a broader understanding of merit will indeed
tend on average to be those from some minority communities, which depending on
the country might be racial, ethnic, gender, or some other groups, like white
communities with a difficult socioeconomic condition. In any case, it seems
that the implementation of such an expanded understanding of merit is generally
implemented for but a certain portion of an intake, in that the remainder or
indeed majority of places will be secured on the basis of uncontextualized merit.
Further, it is hard perhaps to sustain the view by contrast that simply because
a candidate belongs to a certain group or identity, such as a racial, sexual or
gender one, that they should for this reason alone be preferred, since this
would not be to be sensitive to the personal qualities of the individual
concerned, in terms of the level of their actual contextual and personal
achievement. This is so naturally on account of correlations between adversity
and various minority groups being far from complete, for obviously there are
many in any identity whose situation and experience might be wholly different
from the majority in that group, such as to range between being behind or ahead
of the average there. Yet sometimes it seems it can be quite a valuable social
statement to prefer a candidate from a background that has not been in a public
leadership position before in a given institution, like the head of a
university. This would perhaps be done in the situation where there are many
candidates available to choose from who would be basically equal in personal
merit, but if amongst them there is or are candidates from backgrounds who have
not ‘had a turn yet’ and whose elevation might well give encouragement or even
an emotional uplift to a portion of the population who may have had more
troubles than most, where one of their own is seen to take up a position at the
top of society, then it will be apparent that it will not be foolish for people
of that background to have ambition for the likes of this and to therefore to
take on the amount of work required for things like that. As such, it seems
possible that we might have widespread agreement that this is a good thing to
do.
Concerning ‘cancel culture’, it is held by some these days that
that there is a newly established and actually menacing orthodoxy that harshly
disciplines anything less than a perfect adherence to the very most recent liberal
and left ideas about what is right and correct and this by a mandatory shunning
or indeed a swift social death. It is considered that this lynching regime has
been steadily built up by liberal and left movements which at the beginning of
their work many years ago asked rather only for mere tolerance for those people
who have lives and identities different to what were traditionally accepted
norms, equally that the cultural and racial differences of immigrant and
minority communities might simply find a respectful acceptance, but now rather
with this kind of politics having become so much more ascendent in society of
late it is held that the mask that asked only for forbearance and sufferance
very much dropped off completely and the true colours of this movement became
revealed as of a kind that actually plotted all along to institute their harsh
and brutal rule, and all this for the perverse desire of the doyens of wokery
to rule and break ‘the people’, being such scheming enemies of them.
Yet it will be pointed out that most people will readily agree
that it is not acceptable now in our societies, and rightly so, to impute or
propose to impute the various negative slurs and appalling claims that had been
historically directed, depending on the country, at gay, Black, Jewish, disabled
and so many other kinds of people, given that for amongst other reasons, lots
of societal work in many places was done that overturned this, in the form of various
political campaigns and reform movements of great significance, not to mention so
much literature, art, science, and philosophy that was instrumental in this
also. As such, in the people of these various groups having thereby been
abundantly shown to be fundamentally the same kind of person as anyone else, as
having just the same kind of normal and vulnerable self subject to the same
kind of worries and sources of distress, and meant for the same aspirations and
causes of love, that to then dare say that they should be actually repudiated and
cancelled in this their basic humanity and dignity is something therefore that
must give rise to a moral anger and a resultant impetus to defend these people
who have been so attacked, equally to see a just accounting for the actions of
the assailant.
For it seems that in every locale certain kinds of people will
have been recognised as correctly belonging to the whole human community as
equal and valued members of it, and this would contrast with the identities of
those who would be held to have fallen short in terms of some expected standard
of conduct and so will be seen as but deficient kinds of person and not a valid
category in their own right, like in being an active criminal or in being
generally known for serious immorality such as in terms of habitual cruelty for
example. Equally it would contrast with those who are held not to be ‘people
like us’, to which empathy has not been extended at all, and of which there
have indeed been very many examples in history of religious and ethnic groups
not making it into people’s circle of concern. Now,
where accepted kinds of people are found to have been subject to an unjust
attack that targets their identity by questioning the legitimacy of their very
membership in this moral community, then it will in general be correct to be
moved to an anger that works for the defence of the injured party and indeed for
the maintenance of that view of society, and which consequently seeks some kind
of restitution or retribution from the assailant. That is, while the actual
values that societies may be constituted by have been quite diverse in the
course of history, yet in all cases, where such core values are contradicted,
by for example if the bearers of certain social identities are treated in a way
that is not their allotted due, for instance by not recognising appropriate seniority
or indeed by not treating someone as equal where this is rather important, or also
where people are held to not conduct themselves in a way in keeping with their
social and personal roles, such as by being a good neighbour, colleague,
friend, mother, example of one’s profession, or indeed at times to be male or
female in the ‘right’ way, then morally reactive attitudes of varying strengths
will be generated against the transgressor. As such, in our own culture, which thankfully
values equality amongst other things, various parts of society which had a
difficult time before the recent enough past are now treated better and are fortunately
regarded as equal to anyone else and due the rights and respect resultant from
the common human dignity that we all share in, and so where it might be suggested
or even directly proposed that such people be not accorded this basic respect
as valued members of our human community, then it is altogether inevitable that
a moral reaction will ensue against those who would have attacked such groups
and who equally because of this have basically profaned against the whole moral
architecture of society, as having offended the sense of all that is good and
decent.
In this context then, where many in the LGBT+ community, ethnic
and religious or non-religious minorities, etc, depending on the country, have been
inducted as legitimate and recognised kinds of people into the wider moral
economy and who therefore will have gained the assurance and guarantee of the greater
body of society, then proposals and/or actions which would scorn or even propose
to exclude people like this once again will surely bring about a moral reaction
in the defence of people like this in the form of an anger directed at those
who instigate this, to include various sanctions even up to the likes of cancelation
at times. That is, where it has been convincingly shown to the great majority
in society that a certain group is a normal part of human diversity and are
fundamentally just like other people, and as such that it is therefore quite
unreasonable to still hold contrary views, then a basic arms-length tolerance
will not in many situations be a socially or societally acceptable way of
interacting with a minority like this, and as such a more positive and active
acceptance of people like this will be the norm instead, from which dissent
will at best be seen as eccentric. As such, far from a conniving grand plan to trick
the mainstream of society to get something that somehow was not their due, by
the use of the trojan horse of ‘tolerance’, rather the various minority groups
were willing to take any progress that was achievable in the past and so took
mere tolerance when it was offered while obviously not in doing this conceding for
even one moment that they were somehow the repellent kinds of being that a
grudging tolerance directed their way would suggest, that they would actually have
been inherently offensive to any ‘normal’ type of person who might put up with
them only out of a profligate sufferance. Instead, such groups in having shown,
as stated above, to be people like any others, as having the same basic dignity
and value as anyone else, are naturally not at all likely to take latter day
efforts to undo all that progress lying down, but rather to more actively
defend themselves.
Now, it would appear that in most of the West the argument
for the acceptance of homosexuality, for example, has indeed been convincingly
won, however the complexities in relation to gender that have followed on from
this did not and perhaps have not reached a threshold of majority acceptance
such as to generally end discussion about what is the right understanding of
this issue and what indeed are the true kinds and characteristics of people in
this respect. For it seems that in gay and lesbian people having become accepted
as part of the mainstream of society that other parts of the LGBT+ community,
such as trans people for example, also naturally wished to be recognised as
part of the normal diversity of humanity, and moreover became perhaps adamant
that this should be done quickly not least because of the wish that the all too
long and bitter history of persecution and maltreatment that has been this
group’s unfortunate and so undeserved lot might be ended straight away. Yet
perhaps in various civil society groups and NGOs having successfully advocated to
governments and professional bodies to adopt policies and practices that would
no longer gratuitously make trans people’s lives so unnecessarily unhappy in
important respects that such groups perhaps neglected to also work to bring the
wider public understanding on this issue with them to a sufficient degree at
the same time. The result of this has perhaps been that the official state and
institutional policy direction may have proceeded substantially ahead of where
a significant part of the population might have at that time found comfortable,
and yet on this issue and it may be said others too, such as in relation to a
wider human rights platform, where tentative concerns and worries were articulated,
the response from some NGOs, academic bodies, and perhaps more metropolitan cohorts
of people with cultural capital might have been characterised as being
high-handed or even scolding where the latter would have maintained that they
were the experts at discerning such matters and that therefore it was quite
unacceptable for those in far less knowledgeable walks of life to presume to
second guess what had been proposed by erudite people like these. Indeed, every
so often it has perhaps been seen that when some contentious issue is being
debated in society that the likes of recourse to proof by obscure human rights
committee is sometimes invoked, inasmuch as it may be stated that perhaps a not
widely known UN committee of academics has ruled on the issue and that there is
then the expectation of automatic compliance, or more generally where a formula
of words is used such as that ‘we are required by our international human
rights obligations’ to do such and such. Yet it seems that the argumentative
force of such grounds may be weaker in rhetorical effect than their proponents
may believe, inasmuch as efforts like this can perhaps come across as
patronising or even as attempts to infantilise, and as actually being reminiscent
of previous eras, depending on the country, when a different kind of intellectual
estate presumed at times to be the only one who would rule on the great moral
issues of the day and who on occasion gave the impression that the rest of
society outside of the clerical state would have their thinking more capably done
for them by such a setup. Rather, it seems that it is quite important in a
democracy, whatever the cultural, religious or civic context, to treat people
as discursive equals and so to respectfully make the case to all for what is
proposed, without jargon or references to off-stage authority, and to listen as
well obviously, so that each person can themselves employ their own moral
reasoning and give their true consent if so convinced. It seems that the reform
of marriage in Ireland to include LGBT+ people was decided on this basis, where
the successful appeal to the public was to consider the depth and importance of
love to all and yet of how society in recognising this for most of its citizens
but not indeed for all was a condition of things that was seriously unjust. Equally
the abortion referendum was it seems decided more in terms of considering the
situational distress and emotional complexity that is often involved in
pregnancies that will not go to term or which otherwise occur in circumstances
that are determined to be not viable, and of how in general it seems that the
more that is known about each case the less relevant and useful it seems are the
opinions of those other than the woman concerned. In this way, recourse to high
theology did not do very much for these referenda, and neither surely did reference,
by most people’s reckoning, to remote or even esoteric bodies of international
human rights thought, despite the sometimes insistent invocations.
Now, the argument is often made that people’s fundamental
rights should not be voted on at all, and this is of course tautologically
correct, yet it seems that at different times and in different societies what
are accepted as fundamental rights have been and will differ. Indeed, the
judiciary of different eras in different countries have had starkly different
views on such issues, in that it seems that they will generally base their
judgements that update the codification of what is considered just at any given
time by reference to the work already done in a society, such as in terms of
laws passed, the results of scientific, journalistic, academic, literary and
artistic investigations, international influences from like societies, and in
general on the basis of prominent social and cultural change construed in a
broad way. Indeed it is wholly necessary that things proceed in the foregoing
way since neither the judiciary nor any other civic institution has any special
and clairvoyant access to the likes of a Platonic world of Forms where Justice
itself would proclaim its splendour and radiant virtues, but rather all are
condemned to labour in the messy and sometimes muddled way of working out what
in fact is truly just and ethically best to do. In this way it seems that emergent
views in many parts of a society on what constitutes fundamental rights will in
general precede formal consideration by a legal system where it has the power
of judicial review, or at least it is highly desirable that this be so given the
above and also that judges invariably do not want to be lumped with the job of
deciding highly contentious issues without proper civic guidance. That is, the
likes of this would be better teased out through the democratic process in
terms of societal debates and elections to office. Of course, where a society
has lost its unity and ability to achieve even a rough consensus, such as to
have descended into opposing and even warring camps, then the likes of supreme
courts will have to issue such rulings regardless, and they ought naturally to
do so on the basis of the side of a culture war that, depending on the issue, displays
more evidenced, reasoned and thoughtful conclusions, as opposed to a side which
may at times be quite given to chauvinism, volatility or even conspiracy
theorising.
Now, it is indeed quite apparent that there are a number of
issues animating the political culture of the West concerning which it has not
yet been possible to come to a resolution. Clearly there are parts of the
population who are not currently on board with certain societal changes, and whose
dissent may notably not have perhaps been appropriately and respectfully
received, while noting that this is a greater or lesser problem depending on
the country, with the likes of the USA and UK being in particularly bad
straights. This, along with other things, has resulted it seems in a prominent reaction
against these social changes and the people and institutions who have supported
them, such as to have contributed towards our general state of culture war, from
which consequently it is rather hard to come to a consensus or for institutions
that are supposed to be a source of unity, like judiciaries, to be able to go
about their work in a practicable way and such as to gain widespread respect. For
apart from the disagreement on the various issues, it seems that many people
opposed to recent social changes, such as perhaps those concerning gender most
acutely, have rightly or wrongly felt that directions of various kinds have
been handed down from liberal and left heights, such as stated above, and that
they have then been expected to obediently fall into the new line by believing
things that they really don’t currently assent to, and who in this might
possibly even have experienced various kinds of social punishments and
sanctions being summarily inflicted on them, like those famed cancellations. Given
this scenario, such people will surely feel seriously maltreated and aggrieved and
so perhaps become quite willing to sign up to a very different kind of politics
that would work towards a strong backlash against all of the foregoing and indeed
more besides. For, when a person may have expressed doubts about trans rights
for example, and where they might have been then swiftly condemned for this,
their doubts and uncertainties may have then actually disappeared and rather may
well have wound up with very firm and indignant anti-trans beliefs instead.
Moreover, in having on this issue been placed very much on the outside of the
liberal and left moral community of virtuous and upright people, as having seemingly
been barred in principle from metropolitan milieus of cultural esteem and
social power, such people may then come round to the company of others with an
actually malign and menacing political platform, being of a kind that would
oppose many of the rights for sexual, gender or racial minorities, who would oppose
any environmental measures, abandon social justice policies, and stoke fear and
contempt of migrants. Yet in being accepted, welcomed and in finding a
community in dodgy political circles like that, where they may find that they are
respected and supported, as opposed to where they perhaps were previously even socially
knifed, the ordinary people concerned may well find themselves automatically moving
wholesale into that concerning political territory by virtue of our common
human psychology which does not like dissonance. That is, the necessary
cognitive adjustments that are required for such a commitment will tend to come
about in order to preserve that preferred commitment, with the people concerned
incorrectly believing that their reasoning process was guided solely by the
epistemological warrant of each of the relevant propositions considered independently,
and to do all of this even to the extent of taking on a range of wild
conspiracy theories, general paranoia and indeed irrational hatred of
librarians, etc. At such unhinged cost, the far right populist platform would
be made internally coherent.
As such, it seems that an unwise impulse to peremptorily reprimand
and punish people by proceeding to a full social shunning straight away, which
has more recently been termed cancellation, would arise where it is held that the
wrongdoer affected would have seriously offended against the accuser’s idea of
the basic moral architecture of society, that out of defence of the kind of
people that might have been illegitimately harmed and equally to secure the
moral order of society as conceived, the accuser will attempt to banish the
transgressor from the community of morally upright and respectable people so
that they are cast out into a disreputable wilderness. Consequently, while this
moral behaviour sequence can indeed be a normal and correct part of a healthy moral
psychology, yet it is rather important to get one’s facts right and to in
general exercise great care and judgment in its use given its potentially
extreme consequences, and not just for the target of the shunning, but also in that
there will surely be a reckoning for those who are quite eager to basically socially
murder someone else. In this context, it seems that there may have been a
significant mismatch in social discourse between different people’s views about
what are settled issues and what for others may not be, and that whereas one
side might consider the possibility of debate about things to be very firmly closed,
the other may from their own standpoint see it as very much still open, indeed
as requiring further discussion.
It seems that such a scenario has arisen on occasion where
some cohorts of people who may not have wholly assented to the most recent
progressive consensus concerning various identity based groups for example, indeed
that they would have significant doubts about what may have been advanced and
yet who are not actually motivated by some unreconstructable reactionary and
fundamentalist agenda, may have been unwisely spoken to with the language of coercion
and high moral indignation, and so because of this may now have been
inadvertently and very unnecessarily pushed into the populist right wing camp.
For on some issues there has indeed been a lot of recent and significant
change, and besides this talk of more in addition which may not turn out to be actually
supportable in the end, such as that there would be no essentialism to gender
at all, that maximalist environmental policies might be adopted straightaway at
whatever cost to someone else’s livelihood, that any amount of unsolicited
migration might be permitted, and perhaps other more uncompromising proposals
besides, and so of course people outside of various advocacy circles and various
kinds of milieu who would be more up on such developments may not consequently be
on the same page of things as a result. As such, it is of course the job of
people who feel that their own views are currently better and therefore more
worthy of implementation to respectfully make the argument to others, as equals,
and naturally to listen to different views that might even lead to a compromise
at times, and moreover in all things to regard the great majority of people as
morally decent people with no particular agenda, and as not generally intending
harm to anyone on purpose. Of course, there are plenty of topics that are these
days correctly off limits, as not concerning things that are decently subject
to debate, such as the equality of races and ethnicities, the normality and
acceptance of gay people, the equality and leadership of women, the full
membership of disabled people in society, and a few other topics. The latter principles
are not appropriately subject to debate as our societies and culture have
already and very extensively debated and parsed such things with the result
that a very conclusive and hugely evidenced conclusion on the matter was
reached long ago, and about which the great majority of all walks of life have
willingly adopted, nay brought about. As such, it is correctly held now that
there is not much of an excuse left to have views that directly contradict the
settled view on the above. At the same time, generally one should not go
nuclear straight away or even within a medium amount of time in proceeding to serious
social sanctions, like shunning, but rather people should be given a reasonable
amount of leeway to occasionally make the odd mistake and misjudged joke or
comment, or indeed to be assessed to see if they might actually be unwell in
some way. Moreover, it is obviously often an expression of familiarity and
affection to sometimes make off-colour jokes that concern for example a
friend’s particular characteristics, while noting that the context in these
things is obviously important. All said, the settled view on such matters should
of course prevail in the final account given that it truly is the moral
architecture of our agreed society.
Yet unfortunately it seems we do not yet have that kind of societal
consensus on some important contemporary issues, which is in part surely explicable
in the pace of change having rapidly increased such as to leave many people
behind, and therefore we have not it seems already built up a great corpus of socially
available evidence that has been processed by a threshold amount of people. Unfortunately
it seems that more complex issues to do with gender for example, such as to
regrettably involve Trans people in particular, are caught in this space, and
this is naturally difficult for the people concerned to bear, that on top of each
of their own stories, which have an amount of unnecessary sadness in some respects,
this having been brought about by a conservative view of gender that very much
doesn’t fit all the facts, that they would now be asked to wait yet longer for
the day where they and their evident existence are no longer bandied about as
topics of jarring debate. Naturally, gay and lesbian people before did not much
enjoy previous decades where they and their lives were likewise discussed and
analysed like specimens in a lab, yet unfortunately such a phase as this seems
to be only way that societies can begin to evolve their views about what kinds
of people properly constitute a society, that only at a later stage after this
such groups might afterwards come to enjoy a more completely agreeable and happy
existence.
Yet in all
cases naturally, people will not ever want to have their basic humanity, fundamental
dignity and equal place in society actually questioned or impugned by others in
a substantive way such that they would be turned into lesser kinds of being
below that of ‘proper people’, and so it will of course be a normal and correct
reaction on the part of those affected to robustly challenge this by way of
much of the means that may be available to them. For such a scenario hardly
concerns simple and mere offence, in the sense of where it might be given or
taken, in that such would generally concern the causing of lesser forms of social
damage and loss of face, such as where someone might have been spoken to or
treated in the way that does not befit their accepted status and role. Now, it
will helpful to see how offence seems to be generally caused and as such to see
how it would appear to substantially differ from efforts that would propose to
remove a whole kind of people from their place in society in the way mentioned
above. So, for offence as described above, where people are not treated in a
way consistent with their status and role, the following examples might
suffice: where substantial advice is given in a context in which it will imply
that the advised is not doing their expected work at all well such as to
require outside and indeed crisis intervention such as with a colleague in a
professional setting concerning the claimed quality of their work or with a
parent about how their child is being raised; with someone who asks excessively
familiar questions that are not in keeping with their status in relation to the
one queried such as with inappropriate and invasive questions concerning that
person’s sex life; or additionally in simply suggesting that another is quite
plain and fit only for a job in radio with this indicating that this person
would seem to fall short of a proposed minimum standard of presentability that
has to be satisfied in order for anyone to be allowed participate in wider society.
Equally offense can be caused, by contrast, where the cause of offense is
occasioned by not performing such roles well and by generally not acting in a
way befitting one’s status, with this as the cause rather than with an
accusation or suggestion that this be so, such that those offended are those
who have a legitimate entitlement to the expected work and activity of the
former. Such examples might include perhaps a paying student considering that
their teacher is generally not sufficiently prepared or competent or both for
their classes; one considering that a friend has not acted as such where they
might not have made time for one on an occasion of distress; or with the case
of a neighbour who often plays music loudly and generally makes a lot of noise
at night, who leaves rubbish in common areas, or who engages in an amount of
crime by selling illicit things. In general then, one always ought to be a good
example of the kind of agent that one duly is, so that neither will one offend
those who are to be the recipients of the activity that ought to proceed by
virtue of one’s recognised role, nor equally should one illegitimately and
without pressing reason trespass into the proper province and affairs of others
as indicated by their established status and standing. Now, in such matters
offence is seen to be generated on account of the perception of infringements
concerning expected role performances and in failing to respect the social
boundaries that pertain to the status of others, with all this being
contextually wrong behaviour, and such as to result in morally reactive
attitudes. That morality should be linked to role, purpose and social status is
something naturally that virtue ethics has long argued for, and on account of
which therefore its advocates have ever regarded the opinion that ‘ought’ and ‘is’
don’t and can’t meet as not at all well founded. Alasdair MacIntyre writes:
Aristotle takes it as a starting-point for ethical
enquiry that the relationship of ‘man’ to ‘living well’ is analogous to that of
‘harpist’ to ‘playing the harp well’ (Nicomachean Ethics, 1095a 16).
But the use of ‘man’ as a functional concept is far older than Aristotle and it
does not initially derive from Aristotle’s metaphysical biology. It is rooted
in the forms of social life to which the theorists of the classical tradition
give expression. For according to that tradition to be a man is to fill a set
of roles each of which has its own point and purpose: member of a family,
citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of God. It is only when man is thought
of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that ‘man’ ceases to be a
functional concept….So the ‘No “ought” conclusion from “is” premises principle
becomes an inescapable truth for philosophers whose culture possesses only the impoverished
moral vocabulary which results from the episodes I have recounted. That it was
taken to be a timeless logical truth was a sign of a deep lack of historical
consciousness which then informed and even now infects too much of moral
philosophy… [For] once the notion of essential human purposes or functions
disappears from morality, it begins to appear implausible to treat moral
judgments as factual statements. (MacIntyre 2003, pg. 58 and 59)
Now, where
the above relates to offence such as to lead to a moral reaction, it may indeed
be said that this will result on account of having been held to be not a good
example of one’s kind, in terms of social role and status, yet this contrasts
surely in the case where it is said that a whole kind of person ought not to
exist at all or equally to propose that they should have at best a very
deprecated existence. When actually intended, that the people affected may be
offended is a matter of course, but mere offence would not seem to capture the
degree of reaction that would be proportionate to such an aggressive proposal.
For to actually suggest that people of a certain racial or religious
background, or that gay and lesbian people, that women, disabled people, or
people of a certain class should not be allowed to play a full and equal role
in society, but rather be removed to a servile and degraded condition, is
something that most people will rightly regard as shocking and indeed obscene.
In this context, most European countries have laws that treat public
expressions of such assertions that exceed a significant threshold as a crime,
and by the name of hate crime, and it would indeed seem that the involvement of
the criminal law is warranted in these serious cases. For sustained and voluble
attacks on a certain kind of person’s right to exist, or as to their equal
standing in society, goes beyond reasonable speech that is compatible with
public order and the rights of others not to be subjected to unjustifiable and
simple abuse which does not criticise on account of moral failings or which reprimands
for deficiencies in conduct or reasoning but that rather calls for serious
social violence in the form of this person’s and all of their kind’s very removal
from society. For where such kinds of people are recognised as part of the
basic architecture of society, and where there is a blatant, public and substantial
proposal that attacks this status, then not just the people directly concerned will
have been menaced but the fundamental moral order which provides for society as
being inclusive in this way, which is encoded into the core moral sensibilities
of the vast majority of people, will very much have been threatened and
challenged too, and so be such a serious transgression against the prevalent
view of justice that it will be necessary to deal with such behaviour by way of
the criminal law. Of course the threshold for involving the law in this way
should not at all be set low, and that by whatever formula this would be implemented
it should have the effect of only targeting those instances that are very
voluble, sustained and public in a widespread way, and be such as to of course examine
personal evidence only by way of a warrant issued by a court apprised of the
given situation. Sometimes the idea and principle of free speech is held to
trump everything else, yet it has never of course been considered permissible
to call for physical violence, and so here too surely it cannot be used to
justify the urging of such social violence that, all can agree, would have an
exceptionally serious and destructive effect on the named targets, in expelling
them from society. Now, naturally some issues relating to gender belong in this
space also, for most regrettably trans people in this moment in time are it is
fair to say finding things particularly difficult in a way that is perhaps
similar to how gay men found 1980s Britain and other places, or rather in some
ways worse than that. And while there might not yet it seems be as
comprehensive an agreement in our societies on this issue as there may be on
others, it is evident that everyone can get by by engaging with everyone else
on the basis of simple courtesy and civic consideration, such as by using
preferred pronouns and current names for example, for this does not in itself
commit anyone to particular beliefs regarding the true status of any issue. For
non-religious people find it untaxing to extend their courtesy to people who
for religious reasons change their names, like with members of religious orders
and seniormost clerics, and by using titles such as ‘father’, ‘sister’ or ‘brother’
and do so thankfully without complaint. So, the contrary of a civic courtesy is
obviously to persecute and hound individual people by trying to drive them out
of society entirely, people who are just trying to live their own lives and
support the community that they belong to. As such, obsessive and cruel
behaviour that, like the above, is sustained, voluble and done in a public
forum, such as on social media, should naturally be covered by hate crime laws.
For those
situations that fall below any legal threshold of action which yet may occasion
social and unofficial sanctions in some quarters, the determination of what is
held to be legitimate free-speech and what might actually be truly outside the
pale of acceptable public discourse should of course not be carried out in a
vigilante way, such as at university campuses, for it should not be up to sometime
haphazard associations of students, for example, to intemperately attempt to censor
whoever or whatever it is that they may at times be excessively exercised
about. For no-platforming can indeed quickly descend into a mob-rule of those
who hold zealous and inadequately comprehensive beliefs that are not at all representative
of the rest of everyone else’s, and in so doing would therefore attempt to
usurp quite a lot of coercive political power by appointing themselves alone as
the arbiter of who should be allowed to speak or not. In this way, it would
seem desirable that in any context that there would be a structured and broader
consultation, such as within a student union, that might consequently lead to more
settled and accepted conclusions before peremptory action with not much of a
mandate is undertaken.
Trump, isolationism and radical right populism.
Trump seems
to be one of the most intelligent people to have ever lived in some respects. Firstly,
his ability to entertainingly skewer political opponents with cutting and mocking
descriptions, in the form of very effective and often quite amusing put downs
and jabs, is something that can often very effectively puncture and deflate just
about anyone’s whole political enterprise, with the palpable result that they are
collapsed onto the key vulnerability that he so insightfully perceived. Equally,
he is astonishingly good at directing attention onto himself and making himself
the centre of everyone’s thinking and action, inasmuch as he combines his genuinely
entertaining and comedic persona with his semi-intentional offences against moral
and political orthodoxies, that by degrees obscene and/or shocking tend to
redefine the political and journalistic landscape with him emerging as at the
centre of it. Indeed, it was surely the intensely outraged and scandalised reactions
from more liberal and left kinds of people against this very long history of
tactless gaffes and indecencies that did much to confirm him to himself as belonging
to the very right of politics, given that his ego is not especially robust clearly
and seems therefore to impel him to wherever and to whomever it is that will
afford him a safe, uncritical and supportive space. For sure, he has supported
many political parties in the past, including the Democrats, and so on such a
basis alone it does not seem that his political convictions are in any way
principled nor much in the way of coherent. Yet even so he displays great
intelligence in advancing the kind of politics that he has latterly come to support
and for which he is now best known for, that through his mordant attacks on perhaps
the at times haughty and condescending grandees of various cultural and
professional heights, to his scornful and copious profaning against various liberal
and left pieties, he is rather well known now as the global champion in a
campaign against all of that which is ‘woke’, or indeed nearly anything
conventional such as his proposed abandonment of NATO and multilateralism
generally.
For sure, it
seems that quite a lot of people throughout the West seem to really love Trump’s
ability to offend and get the goat of people who are described as precious,
condescending, self-important, and/or who would regard themselves as always
correct in every matter, such as to on countless occasions really get them all
hot and bothered in such a satisfying way. Moreover many people in the US love
him because he has made them feel good about who they understand themselves to
be, people who might broadly include those who live outside of prosperous and
thriving metropolitan type areas, such as perhaps various rust belts or even
whole ‘overflight states’, whose primary concern may be their and their
families’ economic stagnation, and so who may not therefore be all that
motivated to stay up to date regarding the latest minority cause, given the
perception that the liberal side of politics has not helped them much in recent
decades or even that it has sneered in their general direction for quite a long
time. Equally, socially conservative people who might be doing well
economically seem to much enjoy having a contender who would send progressive
and secular notables into a flap, and who very much value his coalition that tends
to bring about certain policy goals, such as to do with abortion. And there are
of course not a few of Trump’s supporters who are just plain racists, who have actually
menacing aims for LGBT+ people, who similarly seek the subjugation of women,
and who generally are involved in all manner of unsavoury and disgraceful agendas,
and who therefore very much appreciate him coming out against basically any of
the human rights and moral progress that have been made in the last century or
so.
So the Trump
and populist right coalition is quite broad. And he puts on a good show for all
of them, especially at his rallies and events, which it seems invariably have a
joyful and upbeat character inasmuch as he presents himself here, and
elsewhere, as their enduring and successful hero who, on their behalf, ever does
battle against the perennial and noxious enemies of the people, the
‘globalists’, LGBT people, critical race theorists, various ‘leftists and
Marxists’, environmentalists, etc. His invariably happy, upbeat and high-energy
stage presence confirms the attendees belief in him and makes them in turn energised
in the conviction that they will prevail against their ‘enemies’, however
misconstrued or wholly imaginary such may be. They find him credible for many
reasons, but especially on account of his claimed status as a billionaire and
all round successful businessman, yet it seems that he may be neither if one
goes by his tax records which show that he has not been able to make any money
at all for as long as the records are available, being bailed out by his family
on occasion, and that indeed the Trump organisation, where it was successful,
seems to have been so on account of the executive management personnel that he
inherited from his father, or by simply licensing out his celebrity brand name
to other actually enterprising businesses, and that rather where he was
directly involved in ventures, such as with his Casino and ‘University’
projects, that they bombed is clearly too mild an expression to describe them.
It is just the same with the notable and recent stock market success of ‘Truth
Social’, in that this is not a business with much of a userbase, turnover, or
any ability to make a profit, but rather an example of investors in stock
markets behaving in particular psychological ways inasmuch as this company has
functioned more as a subscription and monetary demonstration of allegiance to a
Donald Trump and MAGA fan club. That this company has nothing at all like a
business operation which would financially justify the unlikely share price is
something that will obviously precipitate a share price crash sooner or later,
and that will be borne by the people who have so unwisely bet their house on
Trump, while he of course will have pocketed the cash value beforehand. Now, what
is clear through all this is that Trump has a very desperate psychological need
to be seen by others as successful in business and indeed as a self-made
billionaire, and while he was never actually able to make good on these claims,
he has made a good fist at the pretence of it. Yet forasmuch as Trump displays
a preternatural intelligence for certain beguiling ways, he is much more so an
utter moron in terms of variously being able to read briefs, being capable of
implementing consistent policy, being able for even the basics of general administration
and organisational leadership, indeed to actually have chaos as his management ‘technique’,
but not as a deliberate choice, instead being a reflection of his own peculiar
psychology. For of course his general temper screams of various unreconciled
inferiority complexes as exhibited by his very embarrassing emotional and
mental instability, which as is painfully obvious lurches from one unhinged emotion
to the next and from one bizarre course of action to yet another, and that when
combined with his extreme failings of character and a total lack of
intellectual curiosity results most regrettably in his profound lack of self-awareness
and personal insight. The resultant carnage, being the gross interior of his
own self, is of a kind then that is incapable of not vomiting itself out onto
the outside world no matter the interpersonal and societal cost. With such feebleness
and low achievement is the American Republic befouled, and the standing and
repute of this great nation made so low! This polity so famed for its dazzling
productivity and hard graft, its ingenuity and distinction, its wide sway and consequence,
is of late, to everyone’s utmost surprise, deserving only of an astonished pity
and indeed at times an actual contempt. That this place which once held itself
up to the rest of the world as a shining city on a hill might now permanently
lose all ambition for itself by reelecting the likes of that person, with the
consequent retreat from all other countries such as to live out the remainder
of its days as a disappointment in useless isolation would be a rather unusual
way for way for a great power to end its presence on the world stage, given
that most in history have not so voluntarily and prematurely hung up their
boots but rather lived out the whole of the proper lifespan which had been
allotted to them, of however long and unending a period that might be.
Now, the
populist right does indeed have a strong dislike of alliances, multilateralism,
of mutually beneficial cooperation, and for sure supranationalism such as with
the EU. The view would seem to be that there should only be a puritanical kind
of nation state so that each state should have an absolute sovereignty and keep
it to itself in all cases. On this view, cooperating on a permanently
structured basis by, for example, pooling sovereignty for shared purposes,
would be something that reeks of ‘globalism’ and basically ‘rootless
cosmopolitanism’, in that here the true essence of each nation would necessarily
become adulterated and tainted, inasmuch as the less ‘vigorous’ nations will be
enthusiastic about attaching themselves to the ‘strong’ and thereby weaken the
latter, and indeed where the former obtains there is invariably much migration too,
such as to have the peoples of the world become shuffled and placed in strange
and ill-fitting locations. On this basis, each nation state, and especially the
rich western ones, should preserve their ‘national purity’ by not cross
pollinating themselves with any other by entering into deep cooperation with
them, and neither to accept in migrants who are in any way culturally different
at all. By such means the metaphysically right order of things would be at last
established, and accordingly the unencumbered ascent of those nations with
better stock would surely come about, such as to leave behind the other
also-ran nations to whatever fate it is that they are suited to.
Yet it would
seem that such an absolutist view of sovereignty, conceived of in terms of
formal rights alone, where each state would be able to exert its will but only in
principle, would perhaps not by this necessarily provide the actual economic,
diplomatic, or military power to do much at all, and so it would seem that small
and medium sized countries will find themselves being pushed around quite a lot
in very illegitimate and thuggish ways, whatever the formal constitutional
status that they have might be. Moreover, cooperation for shared ongoing
objectives, where such objectives are better provided for by cooperation, is
clearly a better course of action for everyone involved. Yet there are times of
course where one party might contribute more and others gain more from an
arrangement, at least in the short and medium term, and this can be said to
have occurred in many respects in the setup of the world after WWII where the
USA deliberately sought to support the rest of the capitalist world, in terms
of financing, trade, assorted political supports, military alliances and
guarantees so that that a large part of the world would not again succumb to
the sundry kinds of aggressive dictatorships that had formerly taken over
there. That is, the USA became the lynchpin of the new international liberal
democratic and capitalist order and did this because it felt that basically the
world tended to go to shit without its involvement in this way, and get so bad indeed
that the problems of the outside world will invariably grow so large and
extreme that they eventually all end up avalanching into North America in a
much worse way, just like in WWII, being at that point obviously so much harder
to fix as compared to if such had been tackled earlier on or better yet
proactively avoided by fostering world stability instead. For this reason the
United States supported nay subsidised Western Europe, and other countries such
as Japan in the Cold War, lest communism take hold of them, and following which
outcome Africa and the rest of Asia would surely not have been far behind in being
dragged down to such an understanding of tyranny also. The result of this would
have been the prospect of the entirety of the Old World becoming but one giant
and menacing supercontinent, far greater in resources and might than the
Americas could ever possibly hope to muster, and as such an eventuality that
was rather important to head off by prudent strategy. Of course nowadays,
Europe is generally quite a prosperous and stable area of the world comparatively,
notwithstanding the Russian war of conquest of Ukraine, and it certainly has
the financial potential to provide for its own defence and generally to stand
on its own feet in an example like that or in any other. However, since the end
of the cold war, it was hoped that there would be a permanent and lasting peace
on the continent and so it was not felt necessary to maintain much military
capacity, and the USA did provide security and support to the continent in any
case at a high enough level, so many European countries both felt that there
was not much of a pressing need for military expenditure and what need there
was was provided by the USA more or less on the house. As such, many European
countries did not feel inclined to spend money when there was, in terms of
their own pockets, a more thrifty way to do things. Yet such an arrangement can
hardly remain permanently uncontested, and if Donald Trump gets reelected it
may indeed be abrogated in a reckless and immediate way obviously. In this
context, even where that very stable genius doesn’t get elected, it would seem
best for Europe to begin to take full responsibility for its own affairs now, since
attaining this objective was both Europe’s and the USA’s plan all along from
the end of WWII, and that this can and should be responsibly achieved over
something like the next 15 years by way of a definite plan with a deadline.
This would obviously not mean the end of the transatlantic alliance, for there
would in particular still be the shelter of the United States global security canopy,
but rather would be a partnership that is more financially equitable and
reasonable and thus one that will stand more durably.
In general
then, promoting the development of a lot of the world to be more prosperous,
better ruled and generally stable has a big pay off for all concerned, for it
is amongst other things a lot cheaper than if a whole region might reach a
threshold of complete destabilisation, and indeed to then destabilise the rest
of the world in train. This obviously doesn’t concern boots on the ground
nation building, but rather where the USA, amongst others, might permanently involve
themselves in global trade, financial, wider economic, political and military
alliances, to generally promote prosperity and stability, to in short do the
very opposite of isolationism. Now such reasoning operates on the basis of a
mild version of democratic peace theory, which would hold that some kind of liberal
democratic system pairs quite well with not excessively regulated markets, that
with a reasonably healthy civic culture as the seasoning, will very likely result
in a reasonably durable stability and prosperity, and it may be said that such
modest proposition is convincing. Of course, there are other opinions in the
world that would not be on the whole favourable to the United States model of
development, and those even who do not think that it even intended for all
parts of the world to become either prosperous or democratic at all, yet it is
of course rational for the United States to pursue its interests on the bases
that it considers true, both in terms of worldview and regarding its assessment
of the particular facts of this world, and moreover to not disbelieve its own broad
purposes even though there may have been from time to time irregular polices
implemented on the basis of what was reckoned a surer bet rather than always
holding out for what might have been considered ideal yet improbable, or even
where on occasion an amount of less defensible things were done. As such, the
core interests of the United States surely were and will be better provided for
where less of the world becomes a serious problem to itself and therefore for
the USA in consequence, and all this because of the long-term strategy of engaging
with and supporting much of the world by permanent involvement in regional and
global alliances and lasting agreements and institutions.
Regarding the
view of national ‘purity’, as being against multilateralism, that right wing
populism agitates about, the USA is a very good example of a multiethnic yet quite
culturally homogenous country that while in one sense very diverse indeed is
yet quite well bound together, even despite the intense division in recent
years, and this in terms of a shared devotion to individualism in the form of (philosophically
negative) freedom, being a freedom from external constraints, where this emerges
as the central and organising value:
Much of what we Americans see as unique diversity is
neither as diverse nor as unique as we like to believe. What is singular
about the United States is the way that individual difference and autonomy are
glorified, and the paradoxical manner our faith in personal distinctiveness and
freedom unities the whole society. As the social theorist Robert Bellah and his
colleagues have noted, ‘the idea we have of ourselves as individuals on our
own, who earn everything we get, accept no handouts or gifts, and free ourselves
from our families of origin turns out, ironically enough, to be one of the
things that holds us together.’ (Lindholm 2010, 374)
On such a
basis, all are expected to integrate and establish themselves, and moreover to
profess fidelity to the sacred form of the moral community in terms of the high
symbols of the US constitution and flag. Similarly, and yet differently, it
would seem that European societies prefer to view themselves as more homogenous
and, in their view, cohesive, and so have at times in principle, if not in
fact, given more weight to the value of equality and more positive kinds of
freedom in addition, such as in providing all with better prospects on average
on account of health, education and other kinds of universal service provision,
and in doing this and much else besides expect all those who were fostered and
sustained in this way to demonstrate an amount of constancy and affinity to the
state in return. Now all of the above affords less conceptual space for a high
degree of immigration that is held to undermine societal coherence and it is implausibly
claimed that this occurs where nation-states are signed up to the likes of the
EU, the UN, European Court of Human Rights, international law, or indeed any
kind of institutional body which ‘suppresses’ national sovereignty. For it
seems that societies that are at a similar level of economic development and who
are economically and politically integrated, such as through multilateral
agreements like the above, will tend to have but modest amounts of migration
between them, and be such as to have very welcome, enjoyable and educational effects
that enrich both host society and newer arrivals. This holds naturally for migration
from any country or place too, but for places where large amounts of people
regrettably wish to leave on account of the various kinds of acute reasons that
may obtain there it may be necessary to manage inflows by way of border
controls and visa limitations. Treating appropriate migration then as an
enriching and stimulating occurrence is a sign of a healthy and confident culture
that it is happy in itself and one that emerges as able to grow into the future
by revitalising itself with new elements, often from abroad, while of course
staying authentic to the course of its own history. This would be such that
every culture and indeed person needs to constantly move and reinvent
themselves to some degree in passing through time so that they might be able to
stay authentically the same in faring well and not rather refuse to grow out of
frayed clothes and former developmental stages. By contrast, a nervous and
troubled culture will shy away from others and in an infertile and vain way tend
to look backwards into only its own history by hauling out from that past forms
of life which do not now engage at all well with the needs and purposes of the
present time but rather serve only to bedizen itself with rather unusual and
amusing attempts at period attire and which, being in that condition, make it indeed
fit to receive much in the way of cargo from unsound and insular cults. Examples
of this surely would include the likes of Francoist Spain and many aspects of Brexit
Britain.
Yet the
forces of reaction and illiberalism do very much fulminate against
multilateralism, internationalism, supranationalism and indeed multiculturalism,
and see them all as but devious attempts by conniving ‘globalists’ to dilute
and kill off all the nations of the Earth such as to better advance the rest of
an even more sinister and faithless agenda. Of course such lurid and high
pitched misrepresentations of liberal internationalism are as tendentious as
they are moronic and are for sure allied to other kinds of suspect and strange
beliefs and proclivities, namely that there would be no need at all for checks
and balances in politics, neither that there should be division of
institutional powers, for where one has a sworn and bewitching strongman that
might successfully cudgel an entire path through all principled opposition and
institutions then to that victor will belong the entirety of the spoils. That
is, there is always a contempt in the suspect right for the very idea of
inclusive debate which discusses issues in a broad and intellectually serious
way, and that rather it tends to portray any attempt to see issues as more
complicated than they might unreflectively first appear, or as having more than
one side such as to have no easy or cost-free solutions, as but rambling and
worthless speechifying by effete academicians and verbose pundits who will always
prefer their interminable abstractions over simple action, which alone would be
decisive and which would require simply a resolute and definite will. On this
view therefore, the cause of all problems of whatever kind would involve
apparently a sort of linguistic confusion and moral turpitude, in that too much
license would have been given to weak-willed and dawdling partisans of futile
speculations who will ever fuss over inconsequence, and that rather, on the
basis of a metaphysical voluntarism, the resolution of all problems whether
concerning theory, action or morals, would consist simply and only in summoning
the forceful exercise of individual volition, and so if there were but a few
vigorous ‘men of destiny’ (and it is always men) who would just seize the direction
of things and clarify them by way of their resolve and intensity, then all other
extraneous matters would fall into place of their own accord. Such thoughts
originate with Nietzsche:
Zarathustra seeks fellow-creators, fellow-harvesters, and
fellow-rejoicers: what has he to do with herds and herdsmen and corpses!... I
will not be a herdsman or gravedigger. I will not speak again to the people: I
have spoken to a dead man for the last time… I make for my goal, I go my way; I
shall leap over the hesitating and the indolent. Thus may my going-forward be
their going-down! (Nietzsche 2003, pg. 52,)
Of course,
Trump is very far from a Nietzschean superman, and while he is a terrible
person he is yet not Adolf Hitler either. However the psychological and
political directions of his and his right wing populist and nativist groupies
often go rather far from the idea of a shared society that is based on mutual
respect and the dignity of all, sincerity in attempting to resolve differences
by way of reasoned and evidenced debate, and the ability to acknowledge the
complexity of problems when they actually are complex, in being of such a
nature that they can’t be dealt with just by increasing the volume of one’s
shouting. All of the aspirations of the foregoing are discarded by right wing
populism, and instead what is left is only the cynical weaponisation of
controversial and complicated issues, endless scheming in using these hot
button issues to play one demographic off against others, and but a profound
contempt for the very proposition that good government can come from democracy,
being the rule of a reasonable, thoughtful and considerate citizenry of, by and
for itself, to paraphrase Lincoln.
Now while
Nietzsche above put things rather strongly, and we indeed didn’t have a great
20th century partly on account of the influence of his ideas, there
is yet merit of course in recognising that someone like Hamlet is not an
example of someone who plays out his life well. For not everyone, least of all
politicians, should devote all of their time to perpetual debate and
philosophical intellections, neither should anyone go too far down excessively
narrow intellectual rabbit holes, and rather it will be the experience of most
that a definitive and perfect answer to what one ought to do will frequently be
absent, and so at best one will have to deal with mere probabilities instead
and yet bear the full consequences just the same. Naturally it must be up the
judgement of each person, and indeed society, to weigh the benefits of
discoursing further as against proceeding to action at a particular point, and
this will be such that each arbiter will require an amount of resolution and
decisiveness as virtues, and yet one would hope that there will be none so
foolish and brainless as to not from time to time reflect on what might be
better courses of action, or to in general step back to better appreciate the true
complexities of things that may be before one. And yet, it does not seem that
any culture or wisdom tradition actually required Nietzsche to tell them that
there should be a balance between reflection and action, and so to that extent
his originality and real contribution to praxis may not be anything like as original
as he may have been convinced himself as was required for the world. Anyway, and
with that said, one may legitimately hope for a civic culture and political
leadership that might be reflective, pragmatic, and attentive to the troubles
of the world, for which reason the future of our societies is not at all cursed
and on such account is it by no means inevitable that that troupe of meagre and
wretched populists will again taint our societies with their buffoonish rule.
Conclusion
Clearly, one would not say of so-called political debate in
the wider West these days that it generally proceeds in an inspiring and
uplifting way. Rather, it seems that just about all of the positions on various
topics that each side might be for or against and what it likes and dislikes has
becomes reified into a cohesive political personality both on its own side and
a maligned and reviled Other on that other side, and this seems to motivate a
disinclination to examine hardly any issue at all on its own merits in terms of
dry facts and composed reasoning but rather to consider these issues as but code
and as only shibboleths that demarcate the separate and warring clans into
which people have fallen, and be such that public discourse has lamentably become
reduced to the simple assertion of factional identity only. In this condition,
disreputable political agents are able to work profitably by pressing all the societal
buttons that now so vulnerably exist and in doing this easily inflame the
existing discord and so perpetuate it to their conniving advantage. The result
of this is to advance the careers of these fundamentally meagre and crooked
people and equally to give license to the sundry kinds of actually candid but politically
nefarious actors, who draw inspiration from the wrong side of WWII, to crawl
out from their more usual underground habitats into an unfamiliar daylight, and
be such as to think that their revolting cravings for a world made in their
image might actually now have a chance of coming down on us all over again. Moreover,
such instability and civil strife is indeed pleasing to many an aggressive and
predatory dictatorship, and is such that can be fruitfully used to make more of
the world unsafe from tyranny and a new dystopia. Of course, the descriptions above
are not at all applicable to the vast majority of those who currently feel that
populist right politics better articulates an amount of their wider beliefs, more
capably understands the difficulties that they have faced in their lives, and
which gives them a sense of a political home where they find a respect and even
a sense of dignity. Rather, on the immediately aforementioned counts should a
better politics make sincere and humble overtures, so that if the basic political
needs of all people, namely to be respected and have their dignity be provided
for, to be listened to and have a real influence on decisions so as to feel
some agency, and of course to make visible progress on longstanding issues,
such as in securing prosperity in all areas of a country, are better met by a
public-spirited and sincere politics, then the going will not nearly be as easy
for demagogues, the various kinds of people with extreme politics, nor for any
despot on our borders. To this end, a broader and more empathetic examination
of how the various sides seem to see different issues ought to be helpful in
bridging the various gaps that exist politically, such that it might become
perhaps easier for that better politics to appeal to far more of the
disaffected public than it has heretofore been able to of late. As such, the
content of this interminable screed was a rough attempt to contribute to even a
limited decontamination of these notable and fairly radioactive issues, so prevalent
in the wider Western world, if such be possible, yet if so is then an uncertain
and very bit contribution to the broad efforts of so many to stave off a looming
disaster, in which case we might then be able to look forward to a more buoyant
future where our civic comity and confident purposes have been gratefully regained.
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