politics – Becoming Human

A love letter to 2020

New Year’s Eve used to be nice.

As long as I can remember though, here where I am it’s always been pretty grim. And it seems only to get grimmer, with increasing vandalism and violence.

Worse than this, all this antisocial tumult is clearly feeding a disturbing vein of intolerance and far-right sentiment.

Viewed from one angle, the 2010s look like a lost decade. After the financial meltdown of 2008 it was clear we were at a social and economic watershed. In the 2010s, however, all we did was muddle through with a band-aid or two applied to this leaky dinghy whilst the seas only became rougher. We doubled down on our obsolete system of financial capitalism knowing full well it was long past its sell-by date. We capitulated in the face of orchestrated hate campaigns ably designed to promote our most atavistic sentiments and those prepared most grossly to incarnate them. Meanwhile the urgency of action to limit and mitigate climate change became increasingly apparent, but it seems the gulf between those who cared and those too frightened to think for themselves only widened.

The right has played a classic game of divide and conquer, but the left has cruelly disappointed. Obsessed with political correctness and the most obscure of progressive causes, it has alienated its own base and delivered them into the hands of the most cynical of its opponents. It has been largely unable to go beyond its Marxist paradigm and rethink social policy for an age in which capital formation has become redundant and the relations between capital and labor have radically shifted. Both the right and the left are committed to keeping the masses in a state of waged or unwaged serfdom.

It seems that only a fool would look forward to the 2020s, and rightly I think morosity predominates. But it does not serve us and it is full of dangers. In the end we will have the world we dream of, and if we allow ourselves to dream the dark dreams prescribed us by others, we choose the side of darkness with them.

Not so long ago, many of us were quite upbeat about social changes. We felt that, on a deeper level, consciousness was evolving. We knew that the new ideas we were striving for and so desperately needed were so alien to every concept developed in the last 10 000 years of human history that no one could ever have expected them to be articulated and adopted in the space of a few years. Yet it really seemed that we were making a start. What went wrong?

I think the alarming manifestations of human savagery we see all around us today are a consequence of the fact that these dark forces feel no longer safe in their subliminal rabbit holes. We have drawn bigotry and cynicism out into the open. With a face and a name we should be able to fight them much more easily. But we are terrified by accumulated trauma and resort, ourselves, to the tools of hate they have taught us are the only way.

The 2020s will only put humankind on a path to a better future if we stop employing the tools of our enemy. The patriarchy feeds on violence. Even when it loses, it wins.

We need to stop seeing the other as an enemy out there and start seeing it as a manifestation of our own unresolved conflicts. Something we need to understand, empathize with, learn from and heal, not try to eradicate in a paroxysm of allopathic folly. We need to be angry that things are the way they are, but not that people are the way they are. We need to reclaim civil space, but not ghettoize those who are condemned to reject us by our inability to understand and care for them.

The purveyors of violence are not a tiny minority but merely the tip of an enormous iceberg of persons given no stake in society as a result of our collective inability to imagine and navigate the transition to a post-industrial, more caring future. They haven’t failed; we have failed them. It’s time to acknowledge this.

Trump versus Clinton – political psychology and patriarchy

If the US Democratic party had chosen Bernie Sanders as their presidential candidate – which of course they didn’t, but that’s another subject – there seems little doubt that he would be on course for a landslide in today’s presidential election. Instead, we might wake up tomorrow and find that it is Donald Trump: despite his displaying an abundance of characteristics any one of which would classically have sunk the chances of any previous presidential contender. The world could very easily, therefore, have been very different from how it will now be even if Clinton wins. And yet surely any voter who would have voted for Sanders would rationally prefer Clinton to Trump. What explains the dynamics of this process?

Continue reading “Trump versus Clinton – political psychology and patriarchy”

Zwarte Piet

As always around this time of year, some people are getting upset about the Dutch Saint Nicholas tradition of “Zwarte Piet” (Black Pete). Although it is pretty clear that the origins of this character have nothing to do with racism (some say it goes back to two black ravens who accompanied Wotan in Germanic mythology), and it is even more obvious that it also has nothing to do with racism today, it seems that some people nevertheless take offense at it, thereby playing into the hands of the Dutch political far right and their hate-filled discourse of an immigrant threat to Dutch culture.

Not, I think, very smart, particularly as Black Pete lost his role of tormentor of bad children a while ago, at least in “official” traditions. This hardly seems like the worst social ill one could imagine to protest against, and its elimination would do nothing to promote non-racist attitudes on the part of those stupid enough to have such attitudes in the first place. I venture to suggest that the only reason the Zwarte Piet tradition attracts criticism is because it is an easy but irrelevant target for a complex problem. In other words, this is the availability heuristic at work. During the decades it might take to shame the tradition into submission, actual important issues around say education, policing and discrimination will receive less attention than they could and should. It is easier to blame Zwarte Piet. In fact, the word in everyday Dutch has become a byword for a symbolic figure made to carry the weight of society’s ills: a scapegoat.

The myth does bear deconstruction, however. Although it is said that the contemporary figure no longer has this association, older Zwarte Piet songs make clear that his role, at a certain moment in history in any case, was to punish children who misbehaved and therefore did not merit the rewards that Saint Nicholas was set to bring. It seems that this role separated out from an earlier ambiguity in the person of St Nicholas himself, who, as a saint, was felt to be too good to inflict punishment, a role that therefore needed to be delegated to another character, even if one whose scope of operations was closely linked to that of St Nicholas himself and bore no signs of autonomy. That such a menacing figure is portrayed as being black might constitute or at least contribute to racial stereotyping, but I venture to suggest this is not really the point. The point is that he exists at all. In other words, that we fail to criticize the way in which we fabricate myths in order to control the behavior of children, and then don’t even take responsibility for it by delegating the dirty jobs to someone else.

Zwarte Piet is just one incarnation of this universal bogeyman who happens, unlike the German “Schwarzer Mann“, to be literally, and entirely incidentally, black. His scarcely critized social purpose is to allow adults to manipulate children through the threat of unspoken evil consequences vectored by the agency of omnipotent spirits which inexplicably have not, however, vented their disapproval on the adults in questions rather than their kids.

The Bogeyman has a lot in common with the devil or the demiurge, figures who crystallized out of the ambiguity of traditional representations of God as both loving and savage. He also lives on in adult imaginations, infusing the sinister powers of any public institution that is there to enforce supposedly moral order, and frequently also other more nebulous spirits.

That can lead to real psychic damage, and it’s a game we should stop playing, whatever the color of the skin of the personality we delegate it to. If a compliance-figure has any role, he or she should take moral responsibility for all of his or her decisions, favorable and unfavorable. Better yet, we should not delegate the enforcement of necessary social norms to any fantasy personality at all, whose actions are beyond reasoning and debate. I am as guilty of it as anyone, but God and Father Christmas have crystallized out of the same dissociation that subsequently produced the devil and Zwarte Piet as mere second-order emanations of our inability to reconcile what we think we need to do with how we want to feel about it and how we want our children to view us. We would do better simply to reunite moral authority and enforcement in the same flesh and blood person, quite able to reconcile these diverse roles, ourselves.

A new political paradigm?

Interviewed recently on BBC’s Newsnight program, Russell Brand has achieved a feat that had for so long been unseen it seemed to have become impossible: ignited the political imagination of a generation.

Growing up in Britain in the 1970’s, from a lower middle class background but happily spared the ravages of inner city social decay, I never felt myself drawn to the left. My political philosophy always has been, and I would say still is, a liberal one. When later I discovered the post-modern social liberalism of philosopher Richard Rorty in the 1990’s, I found him to be articulating the kind of political values I had always believed in. Philosophically this was a comfortable home. Politically, liberalism in the UK, and most other places, was of marginal relevance, caught in a squeeze between the self-interested conservatism of the empowered classes and the equally self-interested socialism of the struggling working class masses. Somehow, these two opposing political forces managed to run the country in alternation, with a good deal of unpleasant rivalry but without either of them going totally off the rails. The left knew its place and was seduced by power, the right had a tradition of social concern, albeit with a dose of condescension and paternalism. Marxists railed on the left wing of the Labour Party in the 1980’s, while Mrs Thatcher foisted an alien set of values on the party of the landed classes whose attitudes had become too archaic and whose appeal had become too limited to address mounting social unrest. Then Tony Blair introduced third-way socialism, in its origins an attempt constructively to engage with the economics of wealth creation which attracted many social liberals to its ranks. But Blair never won over the radical heart of his party, only its pragmatic head, and in hindsight his agenda seems naive, or at best inadequate.

I mistrusted the Left for the reasons most people did who grew up during the Cold War: the spectre of collectivism crushing human individuality and turning all of society into a grey, joyless, paranoid dystopia. This was not, of course, the progressive Left my parents knew. But the fear of nuclear annihilation hung heavily over my generation, and a political system that so elevated ideology over human community could never be my home. To this day, the soul and direction of the Left has seemed to me fatally compromised by its inner ideological struggles. Brand, who by background knows the social reality of the so-called working, increasingly however rather unemployed and economically marginalized, classes much better than I do, sums this up succinctly in his piece in the New Statesman, which is an angry, brilliantly poetic, iconoclastic yet supremely humanistic, epochal rant: the Right has always sought converts, while the Left has looked for traitors.

Brand’s passion for social justice is unquestionable, and at the same time he manages to nail what have always been my misgivings about the British Left. Paraphrasing what I see to be his key message, the Left has always remained in thrall to a system and a political class that embody values which have been taken by the British public to be quasi-constitutional, as the precondition of social stability, values which in fact, however, have never made a clean break from their feudal origins. There is no vision of a new humanity, of a new coexistence. Underlying this strange cohabitation, and it is excruciatingly obvious when it is pointed out, is not just the cult of production but the one unifying institution which bridges, or bridged, the Left-right divide: the church. Today though, it has lost its power to compel acquiescence in a supposedly divinely ordained political order which pretty well every thinking person realizes is no longer fit for purpose, and will not secure any continued human existence, never mind coexistence. There is a gaping hole, increasing angry impatience with the positivist social myth of progress we have been brought up on, and this crisis is not just spiritual and individual, but political and collective. Marxism has failed because it, too, exalted work and production over spirit and community (and fun).

Brand does the unthinkable: he marries the imperative of inner transformation known to us from the mystic core of all religions, but which has always had to seek shelter within and therefore accommodate itself to a hierarchical social order, with a call for radical social change. He seeks to refound the progressive left on essentially a completely novel spiritual basis. Unto Caesar will not be rendered that which is Caesar’s, because nothing is Caesar’s: all that is his is ours. This is truly a prophetic moment, a call for a spiritual democracy from a spiritual demos, a spirituality which itself is phenomenological, unmediated, unimposable, effervescent and evanescent, different in every moment but real, alive, because intrinsically, biologically, shared by every conscious human soul.

There is no doubt that Brand is right, that this is the direction we must take, and there is no doubt either that he is right that revolution is coming whether we like it or not, and the longer we unimaginatively hold on to stale repeat episodes of the old political sitcoms the more painful for everyone that change will be. The direction of change, though, is uncertain, in no way preordained. Contemporary spirituality, the preserve of fortunate middle classes, is far from yet ready for the task. Brand knows it. Those he grew up with have mostly no inkling of this dimension, no idea of this alternative. They are still living as slaves within an archaic paradigm. Or so, at least, I assume. Contemporary spirituality is an ethereal consumer good out of their financial reach and with almost no outreach to them. What they do see and read, if anything, is dumbed down and pious. The media and the marketing engine still have huge influence. Thus modern spirituality at best may inspire a new way of thought; it is, de facto, politically irrelevant. That is a major work ahead of us.