British merchants profited from the slave trade while outsourcing its legacy of trauma, resentment and racial tension. Slavery was enacted thousands of miles away, in Africa and America. Only the money and the cotton flowed in and out of Britain. It was a society untroubled by widespread racial friction or suspicion up until the 1950s and 60s, because, until then, it had few ethnic minority communities. 

By contrast there were huge numbers of slaves in the United States, perhaps as many as 4 million, 13% of the population at the time of emancipation^[1]. Those who benefitted from the slave trade had to witness the misery it caused. In these circumstances, innocence is a sort of privilege, because ordinary people were complicit in slavery’s systems, just by living ordinary lives.They badly needed ways to justify it. They had most need of blessing. This must have been traumatic enough, before we even get to the experience of the enslaved. 

Both the slavers and the enslaved were immigrants, so the apologists couldn’t claim the superiority of being the “true” Americans. Instead they had to turn to the even more pernicious ideas of racial science. These ideas were not necessarily American in origin, but there they found fertile ground and were nurtured with what seems like a fevered urgency.

All this is deeply damaging both socially and psychologically. American culture, an immigrant culture, is a very young tree. It has grown up and around this enormous wound at its base, one that contradicted its own founding principles in the 1791 Bill of Rights. 

The USA is a traumatised and dysfunctional society, deeply divided along racial lines, scarred by the memory of awful racial crimes, riven by alienating distrust, bitter resentment, and paranoid fear born of an unprocessed guilt.

And then you add in the guns.

But Britain is not like this. Britain is not America. 

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^[1] According to various websites, Wiki, etc. I’m such a scholar!

The vile racist trolling of Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka shames England. However, I suspect it says more about the poisonous cruelty fostered by the internet, than it says about the country’s underlying racism. Trolls seek out their victims’ vulnerabilities. There has been a rise in reported racist incidents since Brexit, and the greater awareness of racial tension in recent years seems, ironically, to have increased BAME people’s perception of that threat^[1]. Trolls exploit this to add venom to their attacks. 

British trolls are not necessarily driven by a racist ideology, although they clearly don’t find expressions of racism as repugnant as they should, implying a degree of racial segregation. In fact, I suspect trolls are untroubled by any complex thought structures, no matter how intelligent they may be. They just get a visceral thrill out of being nasty and the power it gives them to upset people. 

Trolls reinforce our perception that we live in a starkly discriminatory society. Yet racial inequality in the UK doesn’t seem to originate from a racist belief system, either. That would conflict with our core liberal humanist values. In this respect, it seems very different from the United States. It seems to have a different source: old fashioned xenophobia. 

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^[1] Only time will tell if these are the birth pangs of a better society or the beginning of a new era of alienation. Guess what I think!

We experience the world as solitary individuals, entirely isolated from each other, psychologically, competing with some and cooperate with others, to our own advantage. 

Yet we crave company and understanding. We are endowed with the extra-ordinary capacity for empathy and care, but our own experiences are immediate and overwhelming, while those of others are merely deduced and imagined. The deaths of others, their utter extinction, are merely formative experiences for us, as ours will be to those who survive us.

Such a state of affairs isn’t necessarily a sign of a dysfunctional society. To come over all “evolutionary psychologist” on your asses, selflessness could benefit a species without being of any benefit to an individual at all. A genetic advantage might be conveyed by allowing only the alphas to procreate and not weakening the species by contesting that right, which would involve your kin in costly battles. 

If such a drive existed it could be without immediate personal reward; it would probably be a puritanical aversion to self-indulgence, held by some lowly individuals^[1], while others, the more able, revelled in sybaritic pleasure and saw no reason not to. 

So we may not be able to map a simple positive correlation between benefits to a society and benefits to an individual. It may feel highly unsatisfying to do the right thing. The immediate experience of sexual fidelity, for example, is deeply upsetting, presumably as frustrated sex hormones, unreleased, rage through your blood-stream. 

This is problematic both for the utilitarian perspective, which relies on collecting a numerical majority of personal benefits, and for straightforward liberal humanism, which tells us that its systems are guaranteed to benefit us all, individually, through its concept of inalienable, individual rights. 

So, a sense of well-being, personally, is not an indication of a just society, and a sense of personal misery is not necessarily indicative of the breakdown of society. 

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^[1] Some parents, especially mothers, will put themselves in danger to save their own offspring, as we all know, but this isn’t exactly what I mean. The evolutionary benefit is obvious and they are trying to ensure the survival of their own, personal genes, not benefitting the species/ genepool as a whole.

That fundamental, conceptual opposition between the individual and the collective is the great contradiction at the heart of Liberal Humanism – a belief system that aims to protect and promote the inalienable rights of the individual and yet must over-rule those rights and impose the collective will in the service of an approximate aggregate of Liberty, Equality and Community. 

We believe our societies are virtuous because they encourage a selfless generosity, even though we all fail to enact this. At the same time, by granting us inalienable rights, societies appeal to our sense of self-interest. The implication is that we will each, in our turn, benefit from the selfless generosity of others. 

However, we accept that we can’t live up to these principles, so, in practice, what we call “inalienable human rights” aren’t guarantees of safety and respect, or protections from harm, they are opportunities to complain, and feel self-righteously aggrieved, after we have been wronged. And, if we’re lucky, to extract a destructive REVENGE, which reassures us that we have regained agency and power after they were taken from us. 

When activists complain about “the N word” being used to discuss racism, rather than as an expression of racism, they are acting on principle. There is, after all, no reason for them to be personally offended. They are not being threatened, belittled or insulted. Those they are condemning are not driven by feelings of hostility. At least, not at first. 

Instead, activists are defending some hypothetical individual against the impersonal machines of a racist system.

This is, of course, a contradiction^[1]. Individuals, by definition, are the very opposite of hypothetical conceptions. Activists’ principles are founded on Liberal Humanism which aims to celebrate and protect the reality and uniqueness of each person in its care, flawed as they may be. 

The collective is also conceptually at odds with the individual. The terms form another binary opposition, and the tension between them structures and drives much of our behaviours in, and our experience of, the societies we are part of. Our desire to belong fights against our desire to stand out, be recognised and appreciated for our singular selves. 

The needs of a society, as a whole, are often at odds with the wishes of an individual. From paying taxes to waiting for medical care to keeping to the lockdown rules, to being sentenced to prison, the rights and the wishes of the individual are sacrificed for the greater good. 

The NHS must routinely make choices about who is to receive life-saving treatment and who is not, because they cannot afford to treat everyone.  Each of these choices is very like discrimination: one person is deemed worthier than another because of who they are. Medical teams make decisions based on their belief of what are the more valuable attributes: medical history, youth or age, vigour or decrepitude, ability to contribute to society, even earning potential. (These last may correlate with perceived intelligence and mental strength.) Not to be chosen is deeply dismissive: insulting. It would be a comfort, a privilege, even, to claim the deciders were driven by unfair prejudice against you, a flaw on their part. This would be far better than admitting that, despite your privileges, you are simply not good enough. 

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^[1] And, yes, I’m aware that I set it up and I’m putting words in the mouths of hypothetical activists. But hear me out, and then apply the idea to real situations you encounter, and if it never fits, then I accept I’m wrong and I apologise.

I suspect the students who objected to Adam Habib’s referential use of “The N word” (discussed in my previous post) aren’t as delicate and easily injured as their clamour suggests. They were robust enough challenge the lecturers and directors of their degree programmes in what was clearly a confrontational manner.

After a childhood dominated by parental figures who demand absolute obedience, adolescents and young adults need to break free and establish a life of their own. Challenging and questioning authority is a necessary part of healthy psychological development. In the wild, this would be the stage at which the juvenile mammals leave their mother’s lair to find a genetically dissimilar mate, breed, rear their own young and be rejected in their turn. I work in a secondary school, and, meeting ex-students in town, it is alarming how difficult, vivacious teenagers are so rapidly transformed into careworn young mothers. 

To learn about the world is to generalise about it: “once bitten, twice shy”: boiling water is ALWAYS hot. However, the human animal seems peculiarly prone to taking this one step further, into the realm of theorising: thinking and debating not only about how the world is, but also how we ought to respond to it. So, as young people assert their independence, their rejection of their parents tends to be moralistic and self-righteous. As an older, male authority figure Adam Habib is an obvious target for rebellion. 

In this context, “the N word” becomes merely totemic or talismanic, like the McGuffin in a Hitchcock movie^[1]. Used merely as a reference to racism, it has been emptied of its original meaning, but this does not matter: it has been cast as a taboo word, and refusing to say it is an expression of piety. The piety of others can be tested by assessing how unwilling they are to say it, in the manner of the Spanish Inquisition, or Blade-runners questioning suspected replicants.  

So “the N word” has become tribal, a shibboleth, a password that reveals friends from foes^[2]

Being willing to challenge authority figures who use it also allows these moralists to impose their view of themselves as fearless warriors for justice engaged in a pitched battle against the forces of oppression (rather than being the thought police!) So the word also becomes a key to unlocking their own potential virtue and sense of self-worth. 

What a useful (non)word! What would they do without it?

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^[1] Of course, language is largely a codification of social vocalisations, as cows grazing at night will occasionally low to make sure they know where everyone is. Friends meeting in the street, no matter what words they use, are really just saying, “Friendly noise! Friendly noise!”

^[2] It also reveals a touching belief in the magical power of words in themselves. Activists are very literary people. Hurray for literature!

I recently watched a BBC documentary investigating racism in the Metropolitan Police in the 1970s. A black activist recalled the abuse black people endured in Britain, at the time. He said “You’d get called Paki, Coon, the N word…” 

It is acceptable, it seems, for a Black activist to say “Paki” and “Coon”, shockingly vile, racist terms, when testifying to his experience of racism. However, even when quoting those who persecuted him, even he feels unhappy with using “the N word.” All three words seem equally offensive, so what is the difference? 

Meanwhile, Adam Habib, the director of SOAS and himself a person of colour, had to apologise for using “The N word” while discussing complaints made by students about the use of this word by lecturers, who were, themselves, quoting (I think!)^[1]

So, if I’ve got this right, Mr Habib has had to apologise for referencing a quotation, by a 3^rd party, of the use of the “The N word” by a 4^th party. This is an astonishing situation. A reference to a quotation of a racist utterance shouldn’t offend anyone. It is at two removes. And the original racism needs to be addressed, doesn’t it? We can’t ignore it because it’s unpleasant. Should we not address offensive issues at all, for fear of making our interlocutors confront difficult issues and thereby feel momentarily less than blissfully sunny? Should we forget or deny the Holocaust because it’s an unpleasant idea?

Defining your mood or state of mind at any time is incredibly difficult. It is a subtle and nuanced experience, almost liquid in its mutability and governed by a myriad of factors each of which exerts an influence that blooms and diffuses through the others to create an incredibly complex mix that is (probably) unique to you, and changes from moment to moment. 

And, while many of these influences are external, many are internal. You can manage your mood, decide how you’re going to react to things.

People are perfectly capable of “quoting” “the N word” with malicious intent, but this will be immediately obvious. (There’s no point in being offensive if nobody notices.) However, if someone uses this word in reference or when quoting, sincerely and with probity, they are not responsible for your momentary emotional reaction to it. You do not have the right to silence other people to preserve your fragile and overly-sensitive state of mind. It is not the duty of other people to spoon feed you bliss. You have to take responsibility for your own emotional state.  

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^[1] “SOAS Students Call for Director to Resign Over Use of the N Word”, The Guardian, 12/03/21

Taboos have always altered over time as societies and language cultures have slowly evolved. We’ve discussed this before. The great, empowering revelation for social science theorists and activists, has been that, in the age of social media, taboos can be manufactured. 

In the past, it took time, possibly generations, for a word to change, or alter its associations. It had to spread through populations, by word of (literal) mouth. Many, many people had to use it repeatedly, in its newly evolving sense, for that meaning to take hold.

Now, however, the required critical mass of usage can be generated in days, due to the enormous broadcast of the internet. Plotted on a time/ population graph, usage would not rise incrementally as it travelled horizontally along the X (time) axis, it would spike suddenly upwards along the vertical Y (population) axis.

This plural usage is created not within one community, over time, and then taken into others, creeping slowly out, with years to bed into social discourse. Instead it is instantly exported across the whole dark continent that is the internet, generating the necessary levels of usage across nations rather than time, but rootlessly so, so that its meanings need to be imposed by those with apparent authority, and are highly volatile, changeable. 

The demotic nature of the internet is of benefit to the theorists, activists and language mavens. It is genuinely less hierarchical, more egalitarian, but that makes it much more difficult to work out who has genuine expertise and who is a quack, a snake-oil salesman. Authority is reduced to an assertive way of talking, a confident, declarative manner. 

“Tragedy teaches [that] you can have affliction without a villain” Howard Jacobson, Point of View, BBC Radio 4. 18/06/21

This is exactly what is happening in the declaration, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” This is sloganeering as hollowed out as “Get Brexit Done.” It is so reassuringly simple that it sounds like common sense unless you interrogate it.

Then you might ask yourself, “whose ‘solution’ is this? Who came up with it? What happens if I question it, because I think there may be a different solution?” 

If somebody believes passionately in racial equality (say), and that our similarities far out-weigh our differences, and tries to live by that belief, but doesn’t share your view of the solution to the problem of racism, in what way are they part of the problem? They may be part of the reason you aren’t getting your own way, but in a society of equals, that isn’t the problem. 

By attributing culpable agency to a whole section of society, as if they were a single racist individual, you can blame them. And if they object to that, well, that’s further evidence of their racism. Thus, your solution becomes unchallengeable and entirely, tyrannically, domineering. Any interrogation or discussion of it at all becomes taboo.

And taboos are enforced with extraordinary virulence. In her book, White Fragility (Penguin, 2019) Robin DiAngelo, a white woman, mentions that when she accuses other white women of being racist and makes them cry, they are sometimes defended by black male colleagues. Robin DiAngelo claims they do this because of the memory of the brutal racist murder of Emmett Till in 1955! In other words, the sight of a white woman crying taps into such a deep-rooted internalised terror of the consequences, for black men, that they fear they will be lynched if they don’t back her up! 

Ms DiAngelo is perfectly happy to employ this horrifying event and idea simply as a piece of emotional blackmail to crush a tearful and unimportant opponent, and a troubled conciliator, in an insignificant training programme. It is an act of psychological intimidation worthy of a Klansman. 

Such slogans and their taboos are forms of enforced conscription. If white people disagree with you, they are racist; if people of colour disagree with you they have internalised their enslavement and are betraying their own people. These are big sticks to beat people with. It takes almost impossible strength and independence to stand against them.

The final irony is that all this denial of individuality is done in the service of a creed that is supposed to value and protect universal individuality, plurality and equality. 

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality” – T.S. Eliot “Burnt Norton”

As with incomprehensible numbers, so too with incomprehensible people. We can be pretty good at 1:1 relationships, (given that we have no direct access to each other’s thoughts), but the human brain has difficulty keeping track of pluralities. Any more than three other people, all running around in different directions, bizarrely and waywardly doing their own varied and inconsistent things, and we’re flummoxed. 

It is far easier if we can treat them like a single entity, all acting in unison, in lockstep, if we can apply a generalised theory, a formula, to everyone in a category: a narrative. A story. We can lock a whole group into one body and then imagine it relating to others as if it was a single person and this makes it so much easier to understand^[1], just as “a million” becomes a word-symbol that can relate in specific grammatical ways to other enormous numbers and leave us with the illusion of understanding. 

This is fine if people can be used interchangeably. The predator needs to predict the movement of the herd only well enough to catch any one of its members. The problem begins when we start to generalise about societies numbering in millions, discounting any variation or individuality as anomalous, and then impose our averaged-out conclusions back onto the individual members of that group. 

This is a particularly pernicious practice^[2] when you are investigating something as evanescent as attitudes and states of mind. Then, if any of your subjects has doubts about what you are attributing to them, you can claim that they are unaware of their own “unconscious bias”. Then your conclusions, no matter how erroneous, cannot be falsified. That makes your argument scientifically invalid, of course, and yet, ironically, makes it appear unassailable. 

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^[1] Singularising whole ethnic groups used to be a perfectly respectable way of talking about them: “The Pathan is a man of strange, brutal honour”, the Victorians or Edwardians might have said, “The Oriental is a wily chap.”

^[2] Alliteration!