As divisions become starker, especially in the combat zones of social-media, open conflict becomes more common and thus expected. Nobody tries to come to a negotiated compromise. Opposing groups are pushed to extremes. This exacerbates their alienation from each other.

One of the prime sites for increased alienation is the socio-political schism between many young people and their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. As we’ve seen, the young are highly likely to make and hold morally and politically principled positions. And they have every reason to be left-wing. 

Older people, on the other hand, are more likely to nurse a defeated cynicism. They realise society is doomed, and that all their own efforts as young radicals were arrogant and futile. They were never going to save the world. Humanitarian efforts are always pathetic and insignificant. Older people have sheepishly abandoned the struggle, aiming, now, only to save themselves and their immediate family, who they bear responsibility for. They are grateful for what little property they have managed to salvage from the rising floodwaters of misfortune and catastrophe, and are determined to hang on to it, to protect themselves from the murderously despairing and doomed hordes of the poor, for whom they can do nothing. 

These are the people who have brought up the next generation, and thus who have dominated their lives for their first two decades or so. After so long doing what they’re told, the young need to rebel, to forge out on their own and come to their own terms with their own existence and their world. They need to make up their own theories and values, create their own identities. 

The parent-child relationship is inherently anti-egalitarian and becomes increasingly at odds with the underlying liberal-humanist values of our society as a child grows and becomes more autonomous and capable of surviving without their parents’ protection. Why should your dad get to decide what time you go to bed? 

By turning their attention to the protection of their families rather than the betterment of society, successful parents and grandparents bring up children with the confidence to question their cultures and communities.  They may even have the security to attempt violent, experimental changes. 

Their infuriated parents are victims of their own success! Of course, within a loving family, the disagreements, no matter how vehement, tend to be repairable. On social media, with other people’s parents, the gloves can come off.

To recap, then: in exploring and coming to understand their world, it is necessary and inevitable that people will theorise, generalise, and make assumptions. That is all part of learning. HOWEVER, there is a vital second step to this procedure: we must be willing to test our theory and, if it doesn’t work, to revise or even abandon it. You might even have to do a complete u turn. Without this second part, our mental processes are a recipe for prejudice and bigotry. 

Unfortunately, ours is a world of polarised politics and opinions. Uncompromising conflict is celebrated and total pig-headed refusal to see somebody else’s point of view is honoured as courageous and principled. From Parliament to Facebook, the moment an opinion has been voiced, no matter how thoughtless or off the cuff, it is likely to bring down furious, hate-filled condemnation and derision, and so must be furiously defended. At once and without compromise. That vague half-thought instantly becomes fixed and rigid. 

We, on the left, are “The People of the Theory” (just as Muslims, Christians and Jews used to be known as “The People of the Book.”) We like to formulate our own moral-political philosophies, theorising on how human society and psychology operate.

I think this is why left-wing politics is so often associated with younger demographics. Younger people are still exploring their world, working out its social systems and procedures, its political and ideological structures. 

Ironically, this is a natural extension of how the human brain learns and develops. A baby experiences a physical phenomenon, a child or an adult encounters a plausible idea or fact, and we assume this is evidence of a universal truth. Then we generalise and apply this to the whole world. If a toddler falls over and hurts themselves, they conclude that falling is a cause of soreness, and they should be careful not to do it again.  If we didn’t do this we would never learn and would constantly make the same errors, ultimately compromising our chances of survival. Generalisation and assumption are vital and necessary parts of cognition.

It is a wise cognitive strategy, but all human mental processes are fallible. It is inevitable, then, that we will frequently overgeneralise and make prejudicial assumptions. In English language acquisition, children always go through a stage when they over-generalise the regular form of the past tense, once they have learnt it (“-ed”), so they say “he go-ed” and “we sleep-ed”. 

In adults, the same cognitive process is in operation when we are cut up while driving in France and  conclude that “The French are terrible drivers” or have an argumentative male colleague, and so decide “men are more aggressive than women” or encounter complacent and thoughtless entitlement among some feminists who are white, and thus believe “White feminism betrays women of colour”: you identify a type or class (of person, in this case) outside yourself and then attribute one characteristic of one member of the type to all its members. 

The difference between children and adults is that child learners keep learning and so self-correct, whereas older people often stick doggedly to their over-generalised assumptions and prejudices, and even reinforce them in each other, if they help to cement tribal unity. Our minds are already less plastic and flexible, even by our twenties. Old Lefties like me and Jeremy Corbyn aren’t principled, we are just stuck in our ways, our atrophied brains rigid as arthritic claws. 

So, self-identifying Left-wing activists have good reason to believe they are the only ones with principle and probity, or, at least, the only ones who strive to act in a principled way. On the other hand, if you are pursuing a moral activity so you can worship at the altar of your own virtue, integrity is nothing but selfishness and self-indulgence. Nobody benefits but yourself, if your campaigns to change society stay true to your principles, but antagonise and alienate everyone else. People are the substance society is made of, and they’re all going to disagree with you about something. You need to persuade them if you are going to change society. Imposing change is persecution, coercion, and suppression. 

This is the error made by Jeremy Corbyn’s sanctimonious leadership of the Labour party. By making himself unelectable, he simply allowed another Conservative government to continue to dismantle any last remnants of progressive policy and legislation. He colluded in Conservative rule. 

Unfortunately, campaigning groups have always existed in bubbles, even before the rise of social media. Surrounding ourselves with like-minded people, for safety and comfort, all we hear back are rousing cheers of support. We think we are talking for the masses until the election results come in.

As Andrew Rawnsley said of Tony Blair’s New Labour, “It is sometimes said their key insight was that principles are redundant without power. This could only be called an insight in reference to Labour, a party too often populated with people who believe winning elections has to entail betraying their values. To Tories, it is not an insight to say that achieving office matters. It is a statement of the bleeding obvious.” (The Observer, 01/05/22)

And anyway, surely one of the core principles of left-wing Humanist Liberalism, part of the principle of equality itself, is that other people’s political beliefs and opinions are as valid as your own and should have as much weight. To forcibly impose your principles on others, assuming they are always entirely superior, is a form of imperialism. Being willing negotiate and compromise, to alter your position and your legislation to accommodate some of your opponent’s beliefs is, itself, a higher principle. 

The long and uninterrupted tradition of political antagonism has also led both left and right to assume that their portfolios of contradictory ideas have the coherence of a systematic ideology. In truth, they are just pick-and-mix bags of emotional responses to each other that they’ve collected over the years. Jeremy Corbyn, for example, has said that opposing war and violence has been “the whole purpose of his life” (“Are You a Pacifist? Labour Leader Speaks to Sky” Sky News, 25^th September 2015), yet maintains a position on Irish Republicanism that is basically an endorsement of violence and of people prepared to use it against their contrary neighbours to promote their own interests. As long as his positions are all anti-establishment, Mr Corbyn thinks he has a political philosophy. 

This has always been a particular problem for the Left. Left wing groups are reformist social movements. They aim to change the world: the whole of society’s thinking and attitudes as well as its legislation. Left-wing parliamentary parties tend to be adjuncts of wider grass-roots organisations, which have much more ambitious social aims and aspirations than merely forming a 4 year administration.

In contrast, the British Conservative party is more akin to a lobby group (I realise this characterisation doesn’t work for right-wing parliamentary parties world-wide.) They first came together to defend the principles and mechanisms of inequality against what they saw as reckless social experimentation. They have handed down that sacred duty to each successive political generation, through different iterations of privilege. They are therefore much more focussed on parliamentary procedure and the maintenance of legislation than their leftist counterparts, because that is how they restrain change, and their rank and file voters seem motivated by feeling, rather than theory: patriotism and tribal loyalty, and antipathy towards the left who they see as attacking them. A conservative friend of mine recently told me that the main difference between Labour and Conservative voters was that most Conservative voters weren’t very interested in politics. 

Labourites accuse Conservative politicians of cynical self-interest and corruption; Conservatives accuse Labour politicians of self-righteous naivety or hypocrisy and corruption. Both have their point. 

The original factional split in the modern British parliament was between the Tories and the Whigs during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679. These groups were affiliations of like-minded MPs who had been elected as individuals on their own “merits”(!) The Whigs wished to legally exclude the catholic James, Duke of York, from succeeding to the British throne. The Tories opposed this because, while many of them were similarly anti-Catholic, they believed that inheritance from parents was the basis of a stable society.  Tory sentiments led to the formation of the Conservative Party in 1834, making it, today, the oldest continuous political party in British politics. 

Our legislature has remained rigidly binary, oppositional, and combative ever since, although it has been through many versions, most importantly when the newly formed Labour party took over from the Liberals as the main opposition to the Conservatives in the 1920s. 

The stability of British society has led the British people, and its parliamentary representatives, to assume such an adversarial system is natural and inevitable. We assume that there is honour in a blind and destructive refusal to compromise or negotiate, that only by rejecting any other points of view, attempting to wholly defeat them, by whatever means prove effective, do we demonstrate our integrity and sense of principle.

On reflection, I’m being unfair to the political Left by suggesting they are deliberately collaborating with the Right. It is more likely, I think, that they are simply confused. 

We are emotional, not rational animals, as I’m ALWAYS saying, and our beliefs and opinions are the products more of sentimental impulse than ratiocination. Our opinions on politics seem to be picked up from the prevailing assumptions of our communities and cemented by our tribal identities and loyalty to family, friends, and community. These are feelings not soberly deduced conclusions, and they are reinforced by other emotional responses: pity and empathy for those we feel solidarity with; anger, fear or resentment towards those who threaten or oppose us.  

Political loyalties seem to be held with peculiar strength. It’s very difficult to admit that you’ve made a mistake in choosing your tribe or casting your vote. This must be partly to do with the accusatory and oppositional nature of the politics in Britain. I think it will be very difficult for the Labour party to win back the Northern Brexiteer voters they lost when they were led by Jeremy Corbyn. Acts of angry renunciation become instantly entrenched. Nobody likes to come crawling back. 

Emmanuel Macron secured a second term as president of France in the election of 25^th April this year. In the last days of campaigning, he claimed that his rival Marine le Pen’s far-right party, Rassemblement National, “lives off fear and anger to create resentment… It says excluding parts of society is the answer.” He also claimed their plans to prioritise French nationals’ rights and opportunities over those of immigrants “abandons the founding texts of Europe that protect individuals, human rights and freedoms.” 

In the United Kingdom, our Right-wingers make similar capital from division, but, surprisingly, we can level the same accusations at our own Social Justice activists, the supposedly most left-wing members of our society who should stand for justice, equality, and respect for all. 

What’s worse, our left-wing activists are turning their vitriol on the general public, accusing them of complicity. It’s an attempt to galvanise and recruit us, and it seems to have worked very well, as millions of well-meaning liberals (and we are all liberals of one sort or another) scramble to re-affirm their credentials and virtue-signal themselves out of danger, by accusing others further down the moral pecking order. 

Many people take offense, of course, as Robin DiAngelo has chronicled in her 2019 Book White Fragility(London: Penguin). They feel misunderstood and badly treated, even betrayed, and this can push some of them further to the right, which can appear (Dear God!) more forgiving, more flexible, more reasonable, at least towards them. Witness the cases of Lionel Shriver who has moved from writing for the Left-wing Guardian to the very Right-wing Spectator, and Kathleen Stock, who has moved from The University of Sussex to The Right-leaning University of Austin. 

This doesn’t seem to bother the leaders and theorists of the Social Justice movements. Their coercive recruitment drives have been successful enough to bear some wastage. They think they have goaded these apostates into revealing the true colours they had kept hidden from us, (for reasons that are not explained) and that we’re better off without them. 

We aren’t. Without moderating, questioning voices among our own ranks, our movements just become more doctrinaire, inflexible and extreme, more misled. 

In truth, conflict benefits both the fundamentalist Left and Right. As in warfare, the real difference is between the combatants and non-combatants. The zealots are co-operating to establish a market-place where they can hustle and barter with each other for our support, likes, admiration and loyalty over the tops of our heads. We are the docile cattle in the cattle-market of ideas, not the buyers and sellers. The activists and extremists are colluding with each other. They are the ones who are complicit. 

The actor Sam Beckinsale, star of ITV’s London’s Burning, is one of the faces of Allie Crewe’s photography project I Am, aimed at drawing attention to the problem of Domestic Abuse. Interviewed in The Observer (24^thApril 2022) Ms. Beckinsale said, “Even when the cage door is open, it’s difficult to step out, but I’m stepping out now by doing this project. Whether there will be a backlash, what the outcome might be, I have no idea. I do feel vulnerable, but knowing what I know about coercive control, if I don’t speak up, my silence is complicit.” 

She is to be applauded for her courage, but this talk of complicity is nonsense. It may feel restorative and empowering to become involved in a project like this, but the victims of domestic abuse should feel under no obligation to rush back into the battlefield of hostility and online abuse that comes with all campaigning, these days. 

Survivors, of all people, should be entitled to a little quiet time recuperating. They are neither enabling nor profiting from domestic abuse by doing so. Domestic abuse is universally condemned, so its persistence must have some other cause than not being abhorred. By calling herself “complicit”, Sam Beckinsale is straying remarkably close to the self-blame that domestic abusers rely on to prevent their victims from asking for help or walking away. Is this evidence of the lasting harm her abuser has done her, psychologically?

I suspect, in searching for the words to explain her situation and her involvement in Allie Crewe’s project, Ms Beckinsale simply reached for the buzzword of the age. Modern Social Justice campaigns no longer target only those who oppose them. Now innocent bystanders, even allies are to be coerced into supporting the cause, to give it power and traction. Blame, shame and angry accusation are the cattle prods used to keep us in line and docile; the threat of condemnation and social exclusion are the whips that drive us stumbling forward.

The advice columnist Philipa Perry, writing in The Observer Magazine (24/04/22), says “There is a part of you (and me, and all of us) destined to remain alone, unseen… Because of this feeling of it not being possible for our inner world to be truly known and seen by others, when asked, most people feel that they often believe themselves to be not in the centre of a group, but more towards the edges.” 

Yet the internet age is supposed to be the era of interconnectivity. Every one is trying to belong, to work their way into the bosom of their tribe. Is this the reason many members of Britain’s minorities feel marginalised or othered by “micro-aggressions”, subtleties, and vaguely perceived “attitudes” of the putative majority? Have their concrete experiences of racist rejection made them even more sensitive to the existential isolation we all suffer from? 

Of course, the leaders and spokespeople of these tribes snuggle up right at the centre of the group. Is this what they seek: a sense of doing something useful for their people and thus being recognised and valued as indispensable? Is this all about belonging? About Existential angst?