Writing in The Observer (20/03/22) Andrew Anthony was discussing whether the Social Networking ap Nextdoor promoted neighbourliness or paranoid, gated segregation (answer: both, of course!) He quoted a post on his local, West London group. Someone was reporting a door to door scam and wrote, “Had a black man knock on my door last night…”

The challenge for liberals like you and me, especially for people of colour is not to respond by saying, “That’s bloody typical of White People – always making massive, biased generalisations based on race!”

I’ve basically been making that same point over  and over again, in hundreds of posts: we become what we abhor. 

“Activist” has become a self-congratulatory term people apply to themselves. It seems to describe a sense of vocation more than a salaried job role, a sort of free-floating challenger who attaches themselves to rifts and points of friction and distress in society, and prospers from, and by increasing, that conflict. They are a bit like the extremophile microorganisms that cluster and thrive in the hot waters around thermal vents, except that micro-organisms don’t seem to do much harm. 

 Activists often operate by inserting their particular grievance into a more general injustice and then diverting the outrage caused by this injustice to fuel their own cause. Thus, Racial Justice activists insinuated themselves into the Grenfell tower tragedy. Noting that a horrifying 85% of the victims were of colour, they proclaimed this an example of Racism in Britain. This meant they could add immolating 62 people because of their race to the rap sheet that stands against Britain, a monstrously evil crime that supercharges the anti-racist campaigns with an enormous boost of outrage. 

At the same time, the Grenfell Towers protests could gain energy from the word “racist” which, as we’ve already discussed, has become one our language’s most potent condemnations, due to the hard work of previous generations of civil rights campaigners. 

As Christian faith has dwindled, that habit of anxious self-doubt, of solipsistic obsession with moral purity and righteousness has persisted. Personal Integrity has become our most important, perhaps our only moral asset: “Staying True to Yourself” and to your core values. 

We are urged to join moral crusades to demonstrate (to ourselves) that we are “On the Right Side of History,” not to get anything useful done. It becomes part of our journey of self-actualisation, and the experience of campaigning is far more important than its effectiveness. 

Criticisms and challenges of others are invariably ad hominem: you attack your opponents for who they are, rather than the errors in what they are saying, accusing them of lacking integrity or inner moral purity. “You are a white privileged male,” you might retort to someone who doubts your opinions on race, “so you don’t know what you are talking about.”

These personal attacks have proved highly effective because moral self-worth has become our most precious commodity. Since the Civil Rights movement has succeeded in making racism taboo, accusations of complicity in a racist culture have become unendurable. Modern Social Justice campaigners, using slogans such as “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” have perfected the art of recruiting people to their cause by accusing them of being vile racists, simply by not vocally expressing an absolute agreement with the activist’s theory. They imply you can only absolve yourself by joining the movement, and, as it is a protestmovement that uses personal attacks as its weapon of choice, that means finding somebody else to accuse in their turn. It is a pyramid scheme of blame. Like the Salem Witch Trials. 

Reformation and Enlightenment thought gives primacy to personal integrity and purity, even if that makes you incapable of doing any good in the world. In fact, for many Protestant believers, the link between good action and Christian piety was almost entirely severed. Salvation came, they believed, not to those who displayed compassion and did things for the benefit of their fellow humans, but to those who sincerely accepted Christ into their lives. The Calvinists’ concept of pre-destination led them to believe that an all-knowing God must have decided who would be saved even before the creation of the world. And, as God’s reasoning is beyond the reach of mere human intellect, the saved need not have any virtues that we could recognise as such. 

The problem for Christians of all sorts, then, was working out if they were one of the chosen or not. Western Christianity demanded a constant self-vigilance to guard against lapses into sin. You couldn’t simply observe the rituals of the faith. You had to constantly interrogate yourself: “Am I Sincere? Do I truly mean it?” 

I think, however, the roots of this concern for purity may go much further back into the Old Testament, to Judaism. I know little about this, so I’m happy to be corrected, but much seems to be made in Jewish law of Tahara and Tumah, the states of spiritual impurity and Purity. Ritual washing, ablution, seems to be the means of achieving such purity and was necessary before approaching God in prayer. The Bible contains reference to purification after menstruation, sex, childbirth, the preparation of the dead for burial, and so on. (Sex and Death, unsurprisingly!) Ablution must form the basis for baptism, in Christian faiths. 

Protestantism promoted the idea of having a personal, inner relationship with God through reading and contemplating the Bible, so the concern with an inward-looking moral cleanliness persisted, but now the simple, physical rituals of purification held no power. All that was left was the habit of fearful self-scrutiny, the yearning to be pure and good, but without the easy means of acquiring it or being certain that you had it. 

In fact, Jesus, himself warns against the dangers of becoming too bound by a sense of your own piety and the need to preserve it. In the story of The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25), both a priest and a Levite (a priest’s assistant) do not go to the aid of a man who’s been mugged and left lying by the road. The rules on ritual purity forbade priests from having contact with the dead (or with spilt blood, perhaps?) It is left to a hated Samaritan, presumably inherently an unclean creature, to come to the man’s aid.  

Importantly, this is all part of a discussion on how to achieve “eternal life”: salvation. (I’m using the King James Version of the Bible, because its archaic language is more fun and more sonorous.) Jewish law states that you must “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself” (10:27) Asked, then, who one’s neighbour is, Jesus tells the parable. On finishing, Jesus asks, “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among thieves?” When he is given the answer, “He that shewed mercy”, Jesus replied, “Go, and do thou likewise.”

“Do,” not “Be…” Not “Identify as…” Do. 

Marina Ovsyannikova reminds us of the true, self-sacrificing moral courage of the Russian people at their best. I am in awe of her. We should all follow her example.

Then came The Enlightenment to save us from ourselves. It assuaged existential dread by declaring that the purpose of life was self-discovery: becoming the Best You that you could be, thus Living your Best Life, through self-improvement.  If we were permanently marooned on the Island of ourselves, at least we could explore it, whatever the difficulties presented to us.  Through striving and aspiration, each person could achieve all their goals, could achieve a glorious mastery and dominance over their environment. 

But this creed is dangerously self-centred. It surrenders to the difficulty of connecting with other people, rather than struggling to overcome it. We respect and value the individuality of others but see them as resolutely alien from ourselves. We see them as equal to us, in some essential way, but sadly acknowledge that we must, inevitably, be the centre of our own universes, while they remain our inscrutable satellites, their experience of life essentially unknowable to us, as ours is to them.

The concept of “White Privilege” relies on this idea: white people can have no idea of the experience of people of colour because they are white. No concession is made to human communication or empathy, to the possibility of human solidarity, based on the myriad characteristics and human experiences we share. No one accepts the idea that a white person might be able to remember how they felt when excluded or discriminated against (on some other grounds than race) and could extrapolate from that a little of what a person of colour might experience. We are unreachably sundered. 

That is the hypocritical contradiction at the heart of that creed: millions of people (most of the population, in the UK, in fact) are condemned as racially prejudiced and ignorant. The entire basis of this dismissal is prejudiced assumptions made about their race. People of colour are encouraged to see all white people as one-dimensional racist clones. Their humanity is degraded.

This is wrong-headed. You can’t condemn a refusal to acknowledge individual worth by refusing to acknowledge individual worth. We dismantle the racist patriarchy by breaking down hierarchies and refusing to use racialised generalisations, not by simply changing which groups are privileged and swapping our terms of abuse. Social justice activists are simply mirroring, and thus replicating and endorsing, the whole mindset of racism. 

It galls me to say this about a British Conservative MP, but Kemi Badenoch, “Minister of State for Equalities” (whatever that means) is correct when she implied, in The Spectator, that Reni Eddoh-Lodge has promoted racial segregation. I’ve read ms Eddoh-Lodge’s book more than once. (Why I am No Longer Talking to White People about Race, 2018, London: Bloomsbury). It’s all there in the title and it doesn’t get better than that. 

We should resist the biased and unjust generalisation that our society encourages us to make. We should do this by valuing and accepting individuals as the complicated creatures they are, more than just a type. Failure to do this is the definition of prejudice. 

So, protestants were concerned, above all, with their own, individual relationship with God, which they achieved through reading and interpreting the Bible for themselves. Bible groups are an essential part of any truly sincere protestant faith, I think. Religion was no longer a set of collective rituals that reinforced a sense of community. Your faith was yours alone.

And so were your doubts.

Perhaps this is when the profound atomisation and alienation of Western cultures began and we became too aware of the gulf between people, too doubtful of our paltry languages’ abilities to bridge the gap, of the miraculous human capacity for immediate imaginative empathy with our fellows. “Do the words you hear,” we asked, “have the same meanings as the words I say? Is your blue the same colour as mine?”

This alienation only seems to have grown, over time. It has even reached back into the brain and the self, as science revealed that the whole external world only exists as sense data in our own heads: the firing of our own neurons, and its fictions, from phantom limb pain to recovered memories, can be entirely convincing, so why not all? Perhaps the entire phenomenological realm only exists in the play and trickery of our own brains. Perhaps it’s all a vast, self-deluding neurological scam.  

If you’ve read my previous post, you’ll have noticed that I felt compelled to state my moral position on the conflict in Ukraine, and to condemn Vladimir Putin in the strongest terms. This makes me feel that I’ve done something useful, like signing a petition, whereas, in reality, I have achieved nothing at all.

That’s the zeitgeist: everybody’s trying to establish and express themselves, trying to start or join movements (including me), but far fewer are doing anything of practical use to help our communities and our fellow human beings. (Donate to the DEC Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal, people!)

The famous connectivity of the internet seems, ironically, to have encouraged us to abandon our unsatisfactory real communities, for less awkward online relationships. These are more tailored to our personal needs, but are tenuous, performative and largely fictional. The internet is a powerful atomising force. It leaves us isolated and alone.

Western societies have been heading in this direction for centuries. Who knows when the rot first set in? Perhaps it was in The Renaissance, with the rediscovery of Classical thought and its focus on individual self-development. Then the invention of the printing press allowed for the spread of costs across whole print runs, and the production of many more affordable books. Literacy increased. Bibles started to appear in native languages, rather than Latin. The church’s monopoly on transcendence was broken: the godly could now pursue a personal relationship with their deity in their own words and voices, without the mediation of the priest. 

A good thing, surely?  But personal autonomy came at the cost of spiritual community. The possibility of coming to your own conclusions promoted personal integrity, and dissent, but it also led to schism and conflict. After the first protesting declarations of personal belief, communities of faith fragmented further as disagreement with authorities became a possibility for everyone. Were protestants the first special interest groups, brought together by a shared vision, across distances, enabled by improved communications? Were they the first to reject the misfortunes of geography, the idiocy of their neighbours, to hope for something better?

Sorry I’ve been off-line for so long. Russian Military forces have invaded Ukraine. The last thing the world needs is another angry little blogger shooting his mouth off:

                        On Being Asked for a War Poem

            I think it better that in times like these

            A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth

            We have no gift to set a statesman right;

            He has had enough of meddling who can please

            A young girl in the indolence of her youth,

            Or an old man upon a winter’s night. 

• William Butler Yeats

But I am not a poet, and this feels so momentous, so world-changing that to say nothing would be to reveal the childish frivolity of anything I chose to say instead. 

So, I will just state, for the record, that I wholly condemn this nakedly evil, inexcusable act. Vladimir Putin has cold-bloodedly decided to visit violent death and misery upon countless Ukrainian and Russian people, and to seriously damage the world economy, putting millions of lives at risk of further hardship and food and fuel shortage. He has wreaked havoc on international relationships and started a new cold war by threatening nuclear attacks against anyone who attempts to stop him. By violating international laws, codes and agreements, without even attempting a valid excuse, openly invading a sovereign, democratic nation to impose his will upon them, he is encouraging and enabling all other violent and irrational actors, so that international and national politics could become a bearpit of violence and immoral self-interest, where only might is right and war becomes more much more common.

Finally, his actions will derail the absolutely urgent, necessary international work of combatting climate change and global poverty and inequality as all nations turn their attention to the problems created by this war, and take money from development work and climate projects to try to mitigate the damage it has done.

In other words, Mr Putin’s actions will damage the very fabric of civil, moral and political society across the globe. In fact, he’s been doing this for years. The murder of Russian dissidents, such as Alexander Litvinenko (and the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal); the annexation of the Crimea, the fostering of conflict between Georgia and South Ossetia, all can be laid at his door.  

And nobody wanted this war apart from Vladimir Putin. It is a consequence of his pursuit of his own personal and nonsensical wishes. Those aims are largely the result of Mr Putin’s paranoid and fictional world view, and thus the benefits of the conflict are wholly imaginary, and for him, alone.

That’s the problem with allowing individuals so much personal power. We saw that with Donald Trump. What do you do when a nutter gets the missile codes? Institutions like democracy or international agreements are not moral in themselves. The democratic process doesn’t transform a nasty or immoral activity into a good one by being voted in by MPs in parliament, or the people in referenda. 

However, these institutions are the frameworks within which moral activity can be fostered and protected.  

So, our cognitive reliance on the internet has fostered rigid, fixative obsessions with identity and categorization.  Yet we cannot deny that each human being has many different facets and fulfils many different roles in society. As we all know, a daughter may also (simultaneously) be a sister, a mother, a cousin, an aunt, and so on. Each of these roles will endow this person with different qualities, features and expectations. 

In truth, different aspects of the self interact, moderating and negotiating with each other, so that individual identity is much more fluid and indeterminate, and more changeable. Different attributes bloom or dwindle in different environments or under different demands, while still being tinged by the influence of other parts of who you are. 

Web-enabled Social Justice warriors are reluctant to do this, though. Fixed identities are their most valuable, realisable (or weaponizable) assets, because they allow campaigners to argue that certain types of people (usually themselves) have been persecuted and oppressed due to their membership of a particular reviled category, and that this has been done not by misguided individuals, but by our whole society and the way it has been  structured. This necessitates the heroic campaigns through which they find purpose, admiration and importance.

Of course, they are entirely correct, and these reformative campaigns need to be fought, but they fear that if identities are more protean, they might morph into different ones and slip through the bars of their prisons. Not enough people could claim that their negative experiences or their lack of success was attributable to a particular type of discrimination. The mass power of a movement would break down and be squandered in individual squabbles with individual prejudiced scum-bags. 

Of course, activists blame the elites and majorities for creating these constructs, but their arguments rely on the existence and maintenance of the categories. Their evidence of discrimination comes, in great part, from categorised statistics gleaned from whole populations, backed up by personal anecdotes. Taken alone, any individual’s experience is likely to be patchy and inconsistent and may be unrepresentative, with many acts of kindness and openness to confuse the picture of a prejudiced society. Luckily, the data-gathering juggernauts of social-media platforms make enormous, complex data sets available, as we’ve already noted.

To account, then, for the complexities of identity, activists have turned to the idea of “Intersectionality”, a suitably abstract term for an alienated, data-driven population more at home with computer screens than warm, human company: online experience is not grounded in the real or tangible.

Intersectionality is an attempt to explain how one person can occupy various “social and political identities” (according to Wiki) ad was, of course, coined by a sociology academic, the masters of theoretical and unreal, Kimberle Cranshaw. Theorists claim that the model helps them to discuss how these selves interact, although I see little sign of this in their debates. The concept is often illustrated with images of Venn diagrams. Where the classes overlap, so that one data point is in more than one circle, is a point of intersectionality. 

Fundamentally, this theory presents us with fixed points that represent unchanging identities. However, each person can acquire an ever-increasing number of characteristics from whatever different groups they may belong to: ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, disability, and so on.

Rather than seeing all these aspects as operating on each other to form unique personalities, activists merely bank them as items on their growing lists of grievances to use in their attacks on parts of the society they consider more privileged than they are. “Intersectionality”, from its very first iteration, has been concerned only with “different modes of discrimination and privilege” and how “intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing” (I’m quoting from the Wikipedia entry for Intersectionality, again.) In other words, the playground politics of the aggrieved. 

An interesting theory has been reduced to the simplest arithmetic of resentment – adding or subtracting  ways you have been wronged, like a revenge obsessed psychopath. Constructive debate has degenerated into infantile point-scoring and one-upmanship. (“You may be an unemployed single mother, but at least you’re not a BLACK single mother: etc. etc.) I’ve called it under-privilege Top-Trumps, in the past.