Dear Diary:
A number of things have piqued my interest of late - all a bit separate, but all connected in some way or another. Firstly, those unsolicited enquiries about whether I am right-wing. My response: I have no label - it took long enough to shed the label 'Buddhist', and I'm not going to take on any other label in a hurry, especially a highly charged political one. And how the question itself was curious: what might make me right-wing in anyone's eyes anyhow? And the fact that I didn't know what 'right wing' and 'left wing' signified, nowadays, and maybe for ever. If these terms mean anything at all, that meaning has changed radically over the past twenty or thirty years.
And then there was a comment from a friend of mine about how, referring to a Hillman quote that I used, he preferred 'fairness' to 'profit', and clearly felt that these were descriptive of left and right wing respectively. And how I felt this was not really the case, not now in 2019.
This, dear diary, is my meander through the highways and byways of my mind, consequent to these initial little puzzles.
Part Two
'Politics': it's changed. A decade ago, and when this blog first started up, it was pretty much a non-starter. Nothing to say. In the UK, there was only one political party: LibLabCon, as it was sometimes called. A few details were different, but the underlying belief systems, the ideology, were pretty much identical.
Who came and went? I barely recall their spectral images. Miliband, Brown, Cameron; Clegg, May. In Scotland, we also had the SNP and Salmond. But though these ghostly personages were pretty good at slinging mud at one another if expected, they were all signed up to an identical vision of the world: globalism and all that it implies, including a blind devotion to 'multiculturalism' (whatever that may mean) and the strictures of political correctness. This was what it was all about, and if that meant subservience of local (eg national) interests to those of supranational concerns, so be it.
Democracy under LibLabCon offered no choice. The sham is well described in a quote from Naom Chomsky. "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." I talked about it in terms of 'apples and pears'. You go into a fruit shop, and they tell you that they sell fruit. You have a choice: you can have apples or pears. That's all very well. But if you ask for a mango, they will tell you that you can't have a mango. Ask for an apricot, and you'll be told not to be ridiculous, apricots don't exist. Ask for a strawberry and the cops will be knocking on the door at 5 in the morning to take you away.
Then, as if by a miracle, two things happened that were not on the agenda at all - Trump and Brexit -, and all hell was let loose. It was as if the owner of the fruit shop went in to open up one day, and found all his nice neat trays of tasteless Golden Delicious on the floor, and a bunch of unwelcome new fruit doing a tango on the shelves. A gooseberry, maybe. A classical English fruit, common in my youth but almost an endangered species nowadays. Sour and prickly if you treat it carelessly, but sweet and tasty if cooked properly.
In the UK, LibLabCon with their buddies in the media went apeshit, as did their equivalents in the USA. For twenty years they had had everything their own way; suddenly spanners were in the works, and they showed their true colours. They were not good losers, and tried every trick in the book, democratic or undemocratic, honest or underhand, to stop the Trump-and-Brexit party pooping.
But with these new developments, politics suddenly and clearly became relevant again to the likes of me. What had been the case for a while was now thrown into full and inescapable relief. What politics was really about, in the UK, USA, and Europe north of the Alps at least (it possibly remains less so in many nations elsewhere). Money - 'fairness or profit' - is a marginal concern in the political world of today. The new politics is not about economics; it is about what can be termed 'culture'.
Part Three
Let's return, dear diary, to James Hillman's statement of 'more fairness, less profit' as characterising the left-wing. On examination, it's not very clever at all. First up, it's a false dichotomy: you can have both fairness (whatever you decide that vague term may mean) and profit simultaneously. In fact, you need some profit in order to have anything to be fair with. This has been the problem for various communistic regimes over the years: 'we'd be fair, but we haven't got any money to be fair with'.
What's more, profit is not the prerogative of the right nowadays. In the USA it's super clear. The various big tech companies make enormous profits, as well as exercising enormous influence and power. But they are all paid-up supporters of the Democrats, who by American standards might constitute the more left wing. Conversely, the 'far right' Trump has the support of many of the poorer folk in the country.
The 'left' and 'right' of the past are unrecognisable today. Thirty years ago, if you were anti-censorship, pro-free speech as a priority for a civilised society, it would be the left to whom you would turn. No more. The left - as in certain factions of Labour in the UK, and elements in the Democratic Party in the USA - are highly censorious in approach. Freedom of expression is fine, provided your 'free speech' does not go against the political programme - Chomsky again. If you are politically incorrect, your freedom will be precarious, and likely be curtailed - it happens on a daily basis. Personal freedom comes a poor second to the Big Agenda. Thus, any upholder of freedom of speech finds themselves curiously lumped in with folk who are, in groupthink terms, named 'conservative', 'right'. If you want kindred spirits for freedom of speech, you need to turn to Sargon of Akkad, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Morrissey.
But, to reiterate: economics is not the lynchpin of politics any longer. That went out twenty years ago. Maybe economics should feature more focally. Who would have thought, twenty five years ago, that Britain would have food banks, for crissake? And that's a development that has occurred, not under the devious authority of right-wing governments, but those of the centre and centre-left (so-called).
What is important these days, dear diary, is identity politics. Political correctness. Globalism. They all go together, by the way. This is what the headlines are full of, day after day. Racist tweets, sexist Facebook posts, Islamophobe politicians, LGBT rights, you name it. If you want to destroy your reputation, your livelihood, your career, in one fell swoop, all you need is one little misconstrued sentence on Facebook, and BBC and the Guardian will gleefully pick it up and crucify you publicly. It's their mission. They love it. And why not? That's what it's all about today.
Part Four
So, Diary, we've finally got there. Identity and politics. In truth, how did we get here in the first place? Take a step back, and you'll see what a bizarre, unreal juncture we have indeed arrived at.
The politics of identity. Political correctness (they go hand-in-hand). I've put time in recently. Videos. Books. Articles. Mulling things over, allowing things to sink in. Listening, learning. Turns out that it's not really a politics of universal love and peace after all. The opposite, in fact. Politics of Identity is the politics of never-ending conflict. The politics of hate.
There was a time when championing certain groups of people was sorely needed. Fifty, sixty years ago, discrimination based upon colour of skin, gender, race, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, was real. It is a triumph that such prejudices have been largely removed by now, certainly socially and legally. There are, I'm sure, bits of tweaking here and there which could still be done. But, speaking generally, the battles have been fought and won, and society is all the better for it (remember, oh Diary, I am focussing on the UK and the USA here). In fact, minority groups are sometimes legislated for advantageously today.
But instead of rejoicing and moving on, 'getting a life' as the saying goes, our minority group activists have hung in there, like limpets on the side of a hull, hardening their position and morphing into something altogether more sinister. What was once (I assumed, anyway) a pragmatic movement for 'equal rights' is now an ideology, an entire way of interpreting the world of human affairs. People are now no longer unique, marvellous individuals. They are identified according to their group: straight, gay, transgender, black, white, Hispanic, abled, disabled, Muslim, Christian. You name it, you're part of a group with its own group interests. And your group will be pitted endlessly against other groups, which will create an interminable cycle of bad feeling.
All of this is unnecessary. In Britain, most people rub along together more-or-less OK. Problems are more likely to arise because your neighbour plays music loud at night, or their dog poos in your front garden, than anything concerned with race, sex, and the rest. Yet the 'political establishment' doesn't care about this stuff, and continues to obsess about Facebook posts, joking tweets, searching desperately for ways to accuse and demean those who 'deserve it' (primarily critics of their politics of identity fanaticism).
It's not a level playing field. There are good guys and bad guys. Minority groups are labelled as helpless victims, while majority groups are marked as oppressors. What's more, they can be put onto a scale of wickedness, an activity known as intersectionalism. As a white, English, predominantly heterosexual male, I find myself on the very bottom rung of the ladder, along with other white, English, predominantly heterosexual friends and acquaintances. We are evil personified, the cause of all injustice and wickedness on the planet. Imperialists, heartless oppressors. Funny, really. I look at these guys and find them not too bad at all.
It is against this background that Trump was elected, and the EU referendum went the way it did. Vast numbers of people (and not just white, English etc...) felt desperately let down - forgotten - by decades of politicians more intent on being generous with 'minorities' and appeasing faceless, unaccountable EU bureaucrats than with doing anything to benefit 'ordinary working folk'. People just trying to get on with their lives, normally quite conventionally, but being ignored by government after government. "What about me?" "Shut up, white privileged bastard."
Part Five
We are nearing this journey's end. The truth now stares us in the face. The politics of identity, with its mind-numbing correctness, and the will to globalism are one and the same thing. At least they are inextricably interwoven. Group identity is the most potent of weapons in the drive towards globalisation - which is a polite term for one-world government and control.
'Divide and conquer': one of the oldest tricks in the book. Insert a whole variety of 'groups' into a host culture, indoctrinate the unwary into the goods and evils of their respective labels, stand back, and watch the whole thing descend into hate-fuelled conflict. It's a matrix, a synthetic mental construct, placed upon the natural flow of events between people. It is a weird, artificial, and wholly perverse way of looking at the world, designed for chaos, break-up, breakdown.
It is, some say, a continuation of the Marxist will to power. That's a suitably bizarre proposal; but bizarre situations sometimes require bizarre explanations. The traditional Marxist view of history didn't work out, so the theory goes: the proletariat refused to do their revolutionary thing in the western world. Even after being decimated by two world wars, they refused to rise up against their oppressors. The opposite was true, if anything. After World War Two, they wanted nothing more than a job, a house, and a family, ushering in a generation of stultifying conventionality.
Thus, with the proletariat a complete disappointment, a new tactic for the revolution was needed. The emphasis shifted from 'economics' to 'culture'. The oppressors were no longer the bourgeoisie, but western culture. It was hoped that 'minority groups' would succeed where the proles had failed so miserably. Mass immigration would be a prime tool in the new revolution, especially immigration from cultures at considerable variance with the host. With its unique blend of guilt and personal responsibility, western culture was perfect to be infected with a sense of its own sinfulness, and would acquiesce willingly to its own destruction. If your aim is 'globalisation', if you find this to be a good prospect, then niceties such as the west's unique nurturing of creativity, responsible for most of what people like these days, and the west's freedom of speech (they go hand-in-hand) can be happily sacrificed for the 'greater good'.
Though strange and seemingly far-fetched, the theory succeeds in offering some explanation for the extraordinary mentality which holds sway over much of the western world today. I have come across no other explanation of our current weirdness.
So that's it for now. Signing off. Putting the diary to bed. Sleep tight.....
Images: Gooseberries; Cezanne's fruit; the original Sargon; Antifa, a face of radical socialism today
