'I think the true agenda of the old is the agenda of the left: more fairness and less profit; more restoration and less development; community care, not more prescriptions; restoration of nature, not more harvesting from it; ……. investment in schools to teach the young, not prisons that let them languish; more friendliness rather than user-friendly electronics; and peace, not guns.'
This is a quotation from James Hillman's book 'The Force of Character', focussing on aspects of what happens as we age. It was written as Hillman was an ageing citizen himself, and was published in 1999.
When I first came across this quote recently, 'by accident', I thought that it would well serve to illustrate the point of 'the paradigm shift'. As I've read it over and over, I've started to feel that it's just not a very good piece of thinking by Hillman. Anyhow, let's see how we go...…
We can ask what 'the left' is in the first place nowadays, and probably enter a period of dumbfounded silence. In Britain at least. But I shall suggest that 'left' and 'centre left' are the meat of the majority of mainstream politicians in positions of power, along with most of the mainstream media. Their lead comes from the more 'radical left', which core is a small minority of the total population, but whose influence is highly disproportionate. Having clarified, slightly, what we are talking about, now let's check out Hillman's characteristics of 'the left' from twenty years ago.
More fairness, less profit: today's 'left' are in large part middle-class, affluent people, typical of those who appear on BBC Breakfast programmes. They have done pretty well for themselves, but like to make snide comments about others. They are scathing about and dismissive of the people formerly represented by the left, ie more traditionally working class folk, people who do useful jobs like plumbing. Especially scathing if the proles do things like vote for Brexit.
More restoration, less development: our modern 'left' is as keen as anyone else on advancing 'development' such as plastering wild places with windfarms, destroying countryside with housing estates, and the rest. More profoundly, they seem to have a disdain for western civilisation in general, despite being products of it themselves. 'Restoration' is counter to their game. The same goes for 'restoration of nature, not more harvesting from it'. Much leftist environmental thinking is shallow, sometimes misguided, based on abstraction, ideology and hysteria rather than cool reflection.
Investment in schools to teach the young: education, under the rule of new left principles, has little to do with true education. Instead, it is largely indoctrination. It does not teach children to think and feel for themselves. It aims to churn out good, obedient, 'responsible' citizens. Children who are immune from the perils of 'wrongthink' 1984-style. Children who know all about their rights, about LGBT, who feel guilty about destroying the Amazon rainforest. They are not taught to be aspiring individual miracles, but to be little social justice warriors.
More friendliness rather than user-friendly electronics. Wrong again, Mr Hillman. 'Leftist' ideas spread like viruses through electronics. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. They work, not through saying anything constructive or intelligent, since they have little constructive or intelligent to say. No. Their main game is attempting to destroy the reputations and careers of anybody who is bold enough to disagree with them. Name-calling, insulting, accusations of being this '-ist' or that '-phobe' are their stock-in-trade. 'Hate speech' is their catch-all meaningless favourite. Nothing is too low for them to try and discredit their opponents. It's started with Boris Johnson now. So predictable, so tiresome, so poisonous.
Part Two
The past twenty years or so has seen a vast paradigm shift. I tend to date the time when it really took off to the coronation of Dark Lord Tony Blair back in the late 1990s. There was a time when 'the left' did indeed stand for fairness, and for that most precious quality, freedom of speech. No more. The opposite is true. It seeks to smother dissent by calling out its catalogue of vague, mis-used categories of political correctness. Just call someone a far-right racist Islamophobe. Call them out for 'hate speech', when you are the one doing the hatred. That's all you need to do, almost regardless of what the object of your tirades might really be saying.
There is nothing very novel or clever about what I have just written. As far as Tony Blair goes, even Wicked-pedia concurs. "Blair declared support for a new conception that he referred to as 'social-ism', involving politics that recognised individuals as socially interdependent, and advocated social justice, cohesion, the equal worth of each citizen, and equal opportunity."
Social justice = constant pitting of different groups of people against each other, fuelling endless and unnecessary tensions. Cohesion = enforced conformity, apart from for the 'liberal elite, who do whatever they want. The equal worth of every citizen = all are equal, except that some are more equal than others. Equal opportunity = equal outcome, manipulated by law if need be.
So this is what is meant by the paradigm shift. It's glaringly obvious, but it's a trick still missed by a good many folk, of my generation in particular. Think 'socialism', 'left-wing', and they still think good old Uncle Michael Foot, looking after the working classes. No more. When people addicted to labels use the expressions 'right-wing' and 'left-wing', I no longer have any idea what they are talking about. The terms no longer fit.
And this is, maybe, one of the reasons why I am going on about this stuff again - and again, and again. There is this element, of calling out those deceiving bearers of darkness, who clothe ignorance and the wish to control others in the language of acceptability. Just call yourself a guardian of social justice and all will be well. But it is also a lament. A lament for so many of my generation. People who supported, fought for, even, the end to discriminations when such an end was needed. Who like to think they helped to usher in freedom of speech, who played their part in overturning a good deal of censorship. But these are people who have now got lost, who are stuck in the old paradigm, and have been easy meat for a new and very different kind of social shaping under the umbrella of 'left wing'. A new paradigm, where overcoming -isms and -phobias is no longer a pragmatic move in the direction of a more humane society. Where these have become something else: dogmas, ideologies, capable of never-ending exploitation in the service of nefarious ends.
There was a time when those championing the freedom of the individual looked to the left. No more. The 'radical left', the social justice warriors, are singularly intolerant, hell-bent on silencing anybody who happens to disagree with them. They are the vanguard of the society portrayed in Orwell's '1984'. The parallels are chilling. So I lament those of decent heart and good intent, who have been duped. I should not feel overmuch sympathy: it is blindness and laziness that permit such deception. But once more I find myself walking alone, my past reconsidered, let go of, drifting away into mists of personal antiquity. So be it. Like the magic phoenix, we may always arise afresh, anew.
Postscript: OK. This morning I discovered that I have an ally in all this; there is a like mind. Vladimir Putin. He gave an interview in the Kremlin just before heading off to the meeting of big boys and girls, in which he said that western-style liberalism is obsolete. 'Obsolete' is the perfect word, and I think he is talking about the same things as in this blog piece. In fact he articulates things extremely clearly in this interview. So, thanks Vlad.
Photos: The British working class.
Morrissey, a modern working class hero, that most rare of species.
