Identity Politics

 There is an unfortunate tendency in the UK to import social movements from the US, where society, and history, is very different.

Amongst these tendencies has been the substitution of identity politics for community politics. Instead of everyone uniting for the common good, this philosophy incites competitive victimhood amongst arbitrary groupings, focussing on what divides society (or can be made to divide it) rather than on what unites us. The foolish assumption is, that all people sharing a particular common characteristic are the same and have the same problems, needs and complaints.

The secondary, even more insidious, message is that non-members of the said arbitrary group have historically cherished enmity to its members and continue to discriminate against them today.

I cannot speak to the relevance of such thinking to The USA, though it seems to me that it can hardly be constructive anywhere. I do believe, however, that having crossed the Atlantic and found themselves largely irrelevant to British society, such movements have focussed on exaggerating any problems that can be found in order to justify their own continued existence.

Moreover, by taking the sort of public protest action that creates maximum annoyance and irritation to the uninvolved general public, they are succeeding in creating, by way of backlash, precisely the problems against which they supposedly protest.

I am reminded that, over a century ago, Booker T. Washington pointed out what one might today regard as the beginnings of the race relations industry. There were people, he said, who made it their business to complain about problems, but did not actually want them solved, because the problems provided them with influence and income as protesters.

Holier than thou

Over a century ago, Booker T Washington pointed out that a number of those engaged in the race question in the USA had, in fact, no interest in solving it, since it was the continued existence of the problem that gave them their employment and their public profile. If you have no interest in solving a problem, then the last thing you want is rational debate.

Political correctness is a totalitarian ideology that (so far) differs from earlier forms of dictatorship only in degree, not in kind. So many people are continually on the lookout for ways to be offended. They are greatly offended simply by other people having the nerve to disagree with them. Their own views are so viscerally-held that they cannot entertain rational debate and seek every opportunity to close it down.

The largely, but not exclusively, leftist modern fashion for identity-based, rather than issue-based, politics is the same fault that Washington discerned, but now elevated to an industrial scale. The elimination of victimhood would eliminate the protest industry based upon it, so if it should, by any chance, happen that some particular emancipatory objective were accidentally achieved, it would be necessary immediately to identify a new objective in order to preserve the perceived victim status and with it the platform for the group’s self-appointed advocates. That reorientation would involve mental effort and is to be avoided if possible.

It has been correctly observed that politically-correct intolerance regards disagreement as not just rationally wrong but morally bad. Since any given principle of the activist is self-evidently true, it follows that it needs no rational defence. Those who do not hold it are therefore guilty of wilfully disregarding the obvious and thus evil. Since everyone with the welfare of society at heart would necessarily agree with the activist, dissenters must have foul personal motives, especially their own gain or sadistic pleasures.

Thus, failure to support a campaign for a particular group of ‘victims’ is equated with opposition to that group. We have acquired a whole lexicon of neologisms ending in ‘phobic’ or ‘ist’ which are thrown around like confetti on social media. The objective in every case is to stifle rational discussion by the use of pejorative labels. Abuse, rather than rational engagement, has become the first response to opponents.

The denial of platform movement, which is ostensibly the desire to 'protect' other people against being offended, is a particularly egregious offence against freedom of speech. The politically-correct also see no reason not to pursue those who disagree with them into their homes or workplaces. Dissenters have no right to a family life or employment; they must be publicly shamed until they are forced to recant by the sheer weight of opprobrium heaped upon them. Torquemada would be a hero today, provided he chose the politically-correct side.

John Stuart Mill made the limits of freedom of speech clear a century and a half ago in On Liberty. There exists absolutely no right not to be offended. People who claim to be offended by the peacefully-expressed views of other people are out of order. People who claim the right to be offended on behalf of other people by the peacefully-expressed views of another person are especially out of order.

Freedom of speech is vital to civilised society. Reasoned debate is important; the rational clash of ideas brings enlightenment; recitation of dogma destroys initiative; universal conformity is the enemy of progress. I believe it may have been Alfred P Sloan who once commenced a board meeting at General Motors with the words, “Gentlemen, I take it we are all agreed on what has to be done here.” Receiving nods of assent all around the table, he continued, “Then I propose to adjourn discussion until we can find some reason to disagree, and then we shall come back and talk about it sensibly.”

Once upon a time I stood as a Liberal parliamentary candidate. I am a long way from being a right wing populist. Yet even I have found myself quailing before the all-consuming passion and aggression of the self-righteous. Since I am advancing my view peacefully and rationally, I am in order. And if my view offends anyone, then that person needs to think more and emote less. Those who want to shut down the sort of moderate debate they get from people like me, inevitably invite eventual repayment in their own coin.

What worries me about UK politics.

To begin with, let me declare an interest. In 1979 I stood for election to parliament as a Liberal, back in the days when there was a Liberal Party. I was one of the 100 prominent Liberals (‘prominent’ being a relative term in this context) whose names were listed in the press as opponents of the Lib-Lab Pact.

There is no longer any British political party representing my broadly centrist position. I have to say with regret that since the merger with the Social Democrats my former party has turned into something neither liberal (in the classic sense) nor democratic (as demonstrated by its attitude to the EU Referendum result). For me, this explains its failure to fill the vacuum in moderate politics created by the polarisation of the two main UK parties and the rise of fissiparous nationalism in Scotland.

I am troubled by the seemingly inexorable rise of identity politics. In politics, I do not care about a person’s identity, I care about the quality and rationality of his or her ideas. To value ideas only insofar as they are uttered by an approved sort of person and to dismiss ideas uttered by any disapproved sort is a classic ad hominem fallacy, offering no hope of reaching the truth. Identity politics emphasizes irrelevant divisions and breaks down social cohesion to our collective diminution as citizens.

Another major concern is the diminishing respect for free speech. Extreme political correctness is the new fascism. No-platforming, shouting down, political violence and other forms of mob censorship are rapidly destroying our free society. I find it so tragic that things for which my father’s generation fought and died are so little valued and so lightly cast away by people who have the nerve to call themselves liberals. I’m sorry, but such people do not know the meaning of liberalism; they should read JS Mill’s On Liberty and learn what it is.

I value social media. Living as I do in rural isolation, forums such as this allow me to feel close to people all over the world. At the same time, I worry about the apparently deliberate policy of some media to create what has been called ‘echo chambers’; self-reinforcing factions rarely exposed to alternative views. When the certainty of one’s own righteousness becomes intense, there is an unfortunate tendency to respond to contrary views with hostility and belligerence rather than reasoned argument.

(In passing, may I mention that as a former philosophy teacher I know a thing or two about rational discussion. It was frequently necessary for me to play devil’s advocate, putting forward arguments for a view I didn’t actually support because it was necessary that someone should. You cannot convincingly claim to be correct if you are not familiar with the main objections to your view and able to offer reasoned refutations thereof. Without this there is only emotion and prejudice.)

I am disturbed by an increasing willingness to define ourselves by what we are against, rather than what we are for. Admittedly, this is often instinctive and reactionary. During the Scottish Independence referendum the unionist campaign understandably resorted to playing down the prospects of an independent Scotland but I would have preferred to see far more emphasis on what the UK had achieved and could in future achieve through integration. Likewise, the Remain campaign’s scaremongering about the dangers of leaving the EU was far more prominent than any enumeration of the benefits of membership.

I know politics has always been a bear pit. Confrontation is the nature of the beast. Yet it is vital to keep in sight the underlying truth that the UK collectively is far more than the sum of its parts. Split its countries or its society apart and we all suffer.

I wish I could have said the same for the EU. Sadly I can’t. The direction it has chosen is one which benefits just some citizens at the almost unbearable expense of others.