A discursive meander around some things that bug me about ‘the culture’.
How much of what you think is what you think, as opposed to what you just ambiently absorbed from the environment?
Realising that you lie to yourself - and consequently to everyone else - about why you believe what you do and about how the underpinning assumptions on which those beliefs are founded were first rooted...
That shit is good and bad.
It's good, because it's liberating and opens up a more interesting world.
It's bad, because it comes with consequences which are often social.
In extremis it gets people cancelled and loses them friends.
You can't say that. Is what you're told, if you do say whatever it is you notice or wonder about. Or you just keep schtum, because it's understood that them's the rules. The data keep mounting to show that large numbers of people in the anglophone academe in particular are keeping schtum on many issues on which dissent has been crushed by the 'intelligentsia' [aka the new priest class, perhaps best labelled The Elect].
Fuck that shit.
In fact, I now believe it's impossible to have a nourishing life without first deconstructing yourself. Doing at least some work. Which is not to be confused by the work blithely referenced in the Great Awokening. This work and their work have categorically different objectives. This is about being true to the self. Not to establish special snowflakeness, but to be authentic. Theirs is about establishing good standing in a group.
Mimetic theory shot into fashion in the past couple of years, unlocking all of this for many of us. Couple it with evolutionary biology and suddenly you realise how little you think for yourself, unless you actually try.
The connection between our hunter gatherer instincts and browsing the most perfect digital addiction machine yet invented is one of the most fascinating recent epiphanies I can name. We cannot help being what we are unless we’re prepared to look at what we are. Dopamine junkies and cowards.
As post-Enlightenment atheism gives way to the para-religious cult of Wokeism and the rapid feminisation of public life (Hillary Clinton of course famously acknowledging this direction of travel) there seem to be two types of response.
One is to go along with it. Because (reasons really ranging mostly from incuriosity, ignorance, fear, need for good standing etc) that's just progress.
The other is not to go along with it. Be the child, glancing askance at the emperor, and asking the reasonable questions that any sane human being must ask. Such as ̶w̶h̶y̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶a̶d̶m̶i̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶c̶l̶o̶t̶h̶e̶s̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶d̶r̶e̶s̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶ what the fuck is this shit about a song?
They're admiring his outfit because of mimesis. They're moaning about a song because salvation can only come when there is not a single reference to harms that really sometimes happen in the real world ever. And you must hate women if you love a melodramatic song that mentions killing one. And you want to fit in. You can’t risk standing out.
Unless you don’t care.
So, let's pause to celebrate the best version of Delilah while I quietly reflect on what sharing this says about me and my obvious desire to turn a blind eye to femicide.
[A passing thought. Zal Cleminson looks quite non-binary, so maybe there's an intersectional argument to be mounted that SAHB's version of Delilah is actually OK. IDK. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ]
Yes, it's tough when it's hard to take progress seriously.
And it's hard to take seriously a culture that is stupid, however well-intentioned it may have begun its life.
And it's hard to really like or respect the people who promote it. So I largely don’t.
I won't believe ridiculous things for anyone.
This is my privilege and I guard it jealously.
Any rights-promoting movement that refuses to acknowledge that not all rights are compatible is kind of disingenuous and intellectually broken
I quite dislike modern cultural liberalism, its shouty outriders and its silent incurious passengers. There, I said it.
I like really smart people, even those with whom I disagree. But people who think they're smart, but aren't? Nah.
People who think they're smart AND good. They’re the worst. Especially when they are really just copying other people, to remain in good standing with the hegemonic Elect. Those people are entitled to compassion (it's scary to duck out and be yourself) but not much in the way of respect.
A strange thing has happened here, in the past 3 years. I looked at the culture instead of being carried along with the culture and something changed. The culture began to look anything but how things must be and are right to be.
And then I saw it. The mimesis. The endless signalling. It was revealed by a sneering tone that betokens an unwillingness to engage in justification. Sneering is possibly the biggest red flag I can name as the most reliable sign of an intellectual void.
It's the predominant tone popular with liberal 'intelligentsia' which is used when discussing the talking points of those who won't conform to the ideology. It's designed to shut you up. Reduce your confidence to speak, when you notice things.
It's a sneering scornfulness. A world-weary they just don't get it kind of vibe. They in this case being the 'ordinary' or 'little' people.
What's amusing about this sneering is that, for me, it reeks of a kind of intellectual blindness and laziness. An unwillingness to engage in the harder work of understanding as opposed to knowing stuff. These people tend to have lots of instrumental knowledge but manifest next to nothing in the way of wisdom.
[The obsession with instrumental knowledge and the fetishisation of expertise is a topic all of its own. But for another time]
A very liberal legal blogger who really came to prominence during Britain's Brexit referendum uses this tone a lot. One of the challenges of absorbing a pluralism of perspectives is that I have to overcome a certain irritation to read him. But, he really knows his stuff, so frequent irritation is the price of admission.
One of his hobby horses is the 'populist' distaste or mistrust for certain laws. He is inevitably dismissive of this and never engages in discussion about such misgivings in good faith.
[‘Populist’ - aka normal desires and worries that don't fit with the neoliberal trick of blending the most brutal version of capitalism with high morality. That's another one, for another time]
It doesn't matter whether a point made by the wrong people has a basis in reason, it must be contemptuously dismissed as being founded on stupidity and a failure to understand how things really are.
This is pretty much how all politics is now
In Britain they have a big problem right now with tens of thousands of people arriving from France on small boats.
These people have travelled through Europe and want to be in a country where they can use English and there isn't a national identity card. More opportunities to work 'on the black' (as it's known, here in France, for living outside the system).
They would doubtless have a safer and more comfortable life in the UK, so their attempts to reach Britain by whatever means possible are rational and understandable.
Some of them are fleeing war zones. Some of these war zones are war zones because Britain, America and others wanted to bomb Democracy into them, or otherwise manipulate those countries into being more like our countries. Many of them are coming from a very badly run and deeply corrupt country, which is not at war, but where it's very hard to live prosperously and safely.
Only a heartless idiot wouldn’t sympathise with their plight. But it doesn't seem obvious to me that Britain should be obliged to accommodate them.
This is a verboten opinion. It's an opinion typically expressed (albeit often in more vulgar terms) by 'gammons' and 'thick people'.
The opinion is also voiced by certain conservative politicians.
In response, clever legal bloggers, Guardian writers and their readers, people with lots of time and inclination to tweet out their personal moral principles all the time, plus all the incurious outriders who unthinkingly identify with 21st century western culture without ever really questioning its precepts roll their eyes, sigh and gesture toward legal instruments such as the European Court of Human Rights and Article 14(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
For their part, conservative commentators and politicians talk about 'activist lawyers' - legal professionals who make it their business to ensure that those instruments are applied to as many people as possible when requesting something like asylum.
So far, so good. Everyone has their view. Activists gonna activate. Lawyers gonna legalise.
But the clever legal bloggers, Guardian readers and the like then roll their eyes, sigh and say there is no such thing as 'activist lawyers' because there is just The Law. The implication being that if you don't accept the law, you are either a very bad or a very stupid person.
This is one of the least edifying or constructive conversations in British political culture and also one of the reasons that I first came to question the idea of actively identifying as a 'modern liberal', or anything else. It's just so obviously debatable, whether or not it's reasonable to welcome all the 'small boats' people, that the refusal to even permit challenge singles hardcore liberals out as zealous bigots themselves.
I used to think that 'conservative' views were stupid and somehow morally corrupt. I often still do. But what has changed is that I also think that many modern liberal views are equivalently ignorant and morally corrupt.
When the rights of different people are obviously not harmonious and you won't discuss it without name-calling, you aren't the clever one. You're actually the thicko.
If you blithely determine that one person's rights (who you so obviously prefer) are above another person's rights (who you obviously don't like) you are exactly the same as your enemy.
Another reason why I identify as post-partisan at this point. The libs and the gammons deserve each other because they are actually the same.
Rights, though...you can't be against rights
Somewhat weirdly, it seems to me that modern liberal culture has become authoritarian in its crushing of dissent or even discussion of certain totemic issues. And religious in its preparedness to define reality as that which was established as modern liberal principle.
'Refugees welcome', 'there are no illegal humans', say the banners waved by people who refuse to acknowledge the huge problems that are imported into countries alongside refugees of certain kinds.
Hang on a minute. We're all for helping people in need, but what about us and our hard-pressed communities, say the people who worry about the 300-ish uninvited arrivals in 2018 growing to more than 28,000 in 2022, and they're vilified as selfish racist xenophobes.
It seems childlike to me, that the worries of an indigenous population are cast by supposedly intelligent people in such terms. Whether or not they're even 'right' to be worried (and the evidence from just about everywhere that takes in large numbers of asylum seekers suggest that they aren't wrong to worry) those worries are natural and justified by the data.
Even Europe's extremely liberal Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) acknowledges this.
But when lawyers who specialise in forcing countries to retain people on their soil that they don't want are correctly described as 'activist lawyers' the smug admonition that it's just the law is just another thing that rankles about 21st century liberal ideals.
Ideology is arbitrary in its application of 'reason'. Which I've come to see as one of the best-founded problems that conservatives have with the direction of travel.
The fact is that laws made in good faith, with the best of intentions, are constantly exploited to achieve the outcomes that activists desire. No matter how smugly my extremely liberal legal blogger source dismisses any notion that 'the law' might not always balance competing interests appropriately, it's a real issue and people know it.
Especially when it comes to 'rights'.
Rights are totemic in liberal culture (in interesting opposition to responsibilities in conservative culture).
They seem to come with a halo of goodness. Who, after all, would want to deny anyone their rights.
Here, it seems, rights have become very much a feelings-led concept. My intuition is that they are so bound up with the harm/care intuition, as described in Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations theory that rational discussion of them is futile.
So, what happens is that lawyers who are adept at exploiting laws designed for another era to force the hands of governments to act against their own citizens' wishes, are either cast as 'good guys' operating a completely neutral principle known as The Law or 'activists' manipulating bad laws.
It was amusing when the very liberal British (and wonderful, it must be said) Private Eye magazine recently acknowledged this distinction, in the context of a court very obviously acting against the interests of ordinary European citizens, in the name of rights.
In this instance the European Court of Justice removed the rights of these people, across all the countries of the EU, to know where rich people are hiding their wealth (and thus avoiding paying the taxes required for running public services that the ordinary people use).
All done using the language of Rights. Except here the rights were transferred from the little people (and their governments) to the extremely wealthy. The right to information transparency enjoyed by the majority was supplanted by the right to 'privacy' for the wealthy few.
As Private Eye points out, back in the Brexit referendum when the Remain side insisted that the ECJ was a completely fair and independent upholder of essential standards of corporate and state behaviour, acting in all European citizens' interests, they were wrong. Fortunately, as it turns out, especially for tax dodgers and money launderers.
The wider point is, I used to assume that transnational protections for citizens from their own states were wonderful. The international rules-based order. As a fully bought-in member of the sneering right-thinking class I simply didn't grasp why some people don't like institutions that override the wishes of their elected representatives. And now I do.
I used to accept the slogans and tics that were required to be a cosmopolitan liberal and now they seem questionable.
Where will this end? Am I already Nazi-adjacent?
Tune in next time for the 'genocide is actually fine if you don't like the look of some people' edition.
But in the end this is really just another realisation that ideology is blinkered. And liberal ideology creates special interest groups with 'rights' that supplant the justifiable interests and desires of others. The more honestly I interrogate the ideological positions I once accepted without question, the more they dissolve into nothing more than membership cards to a class that I no longer respect or even like very much.
Perhaps 21st century liberalism remains the most desirable - or least bad - framework within which to live. But also, maybe not. Seeing inherent flaws and internal contradictions which seem to inevitably result in 'rights' battles (real women vs trans women, Albanian criminals vs British working class communities, for example) does make me wonder.
Too bad the last place you'll find answers is among a liberal intelligentsia, too busy feeling superior to really justify why their feelings about things are more important than anyone else's.
A tiny toe-dip into some moral philosophy I’m confused about
Rarely Certain has some readers with an intellectually philosophical background or bent. I'm wondering if any of them might help with an idle musing that popped up, on a morning walk this week.
I'm interacting with the cows that live in a neighbouring field (there's always a couple who'll wander over for a scratch and a hand-lick, apparently having grown familiar with this particular bipedal hominid who makes noises at them) and reflecting on their lives. It matters because I grow fond of them.
They live well, while they're here. This year it's 11 young heifers and they seem to be enjoying their days. Were I to predict how contented animals manifest, they'd be doing exactly what I'm seeing. The other evening they suddenly started gambolling, like lambs.
I know they'll move on, probably in September. It's always a sad moment when they're trailered away, squashed together, eyes bulging in alarm. I might be anthropomorphising but it seems a reasonable reading of their demeanour that they're alarmed and fearful at this sudden development.
Knowing that they're destined for a much harsher life, presumably as calf and milk producers, I always wonder whether it would have been better had they never lived at all.
One of the least persuasive arguments I sometimes hear about the ethics of beef and dairy is but they wouldn't exist at all, otherwise.
What's interesting about this point is the assumption that there is positive value in a life.
That if a life exists, that's automatically a net positive.
It doesn't seem to follow at all, at least rationally. Thought experiments to invoke the repugnant conclusion or mere addition paradox are too easily summoned.
So it must be a feelings-based moral foundation.
Just as 'fairness' beats 'sanctity' for liberal minds, for no better reason than just being wired one way rather than the other, the innate value of a life existing presumably beats the null state in which the life never happened, for people who think this.
So, let's say my cow neighbours have fantastic cow lives for six months followed by up to six miserable years, ending in slaughter 10 - 15 years before their natural time is up, how do you decide?
Is it better that they're living now or not?
Kind of hoping
might weigh in here, along with several others.