11: When a Doctor Who fan says that the Chris Chibnall era was woke he may just be swearing.

When a Doctor Who fan says that the Chris Chibnall era was woke he may just be swearing.

But he may be saying that the series was excessively preachy: that there were too many scenes in which the main character directly addressed the audience and explained that racism was bad or that climate change was a serious problem, often with manipulative incidental music playing in the background.

The person who uses the word in that sense is not merely swearing, but actually saying something. A show might have a left wing ideology but not, in this sense, be woke: because the political message is left implicit but not hammered home. We might say that classic Star Trek—full of moralising speeches-to-camera—was (in that sense) woke, but that the current Star Trek: Discovery (which has some characters who happen to be gay and some other characters who happen to be trans but rarely makes a big song and dance about it) is not woke.

But in practice, when someone applies the w-word to a TV show he is playing the definition game.

-Preachiness is woke.

-Woke is bad.

-Any story with an anti-racist message is preachy.

-Therefore any story with an anti-racist message is woke.

-Therefore any TV show which is not actively racist is bad.

The same circularity plays out, much more unpleasantly, around diverse and racially colorblind casting. It might be that some director has at some time cast a not-particularly good actor in a major role because he doesn’t think his show should consist entirely of white faces; and we might legitimately describe this as tokenism or virtue signalling.

I think, in practice, it works in much more subtle ways: faced with the choice between staging a very good production of Hamlet “as Shakespeare intended”—with white faces and Elizabethan ruffs and authentic Danish accents—and an equally good production of Hamlet set in Africa with a black-British cast, the theatre manager goes for the all-black production because the former has been done ten trillion times before and the latter hasn’t.

But for some people the only conceivable reason to cast a dark skinned actor in a classic play (and the only conceivable reason to cast a dark skinned actor to play a superhero who was drawn as white in the 1940s; and the only conceivable reason to create a brand new comic book character of Hispanic or Pakistani heritage) is to perform a process described as box ticking or filling quotas.

And again, the two ideas are amalgamated:

-All non-white casting is the result of diversity targets and quotas.

-Diversity targets and quotas are woke.

-Woke is bad

-Therefore all non-white casting is bad.

-Therefore you should boycott Disney and Netflix.

Why do you liberals accuse everyone you disagree with of racism?

As a matter of fact, the casting of Doctor Who does all come down to quotas.

In the 1970s, there was a quota system in place at the BBC. One category was “The percentage of lead roles played by white people.” The required quota was 100%. Tom Baker was cast as Doctor Who in order for the BBC to achieve this diversity target (0%).

The hundred per cent white, zero diversity target was in practice very difficult to achieve. The BBC resorted to affirmative action campaigns whereby, if the storyline called for a character to be Black or Asian, the character nevertheless had to be played by a white person in ridiculous make-up.

The reduction of the white quota from 100% to 70% was certainly a politically motivated decision. It had a small tendency to incrementally demolish the system which says that normal humans are always white and that those normal humans ought to be in charge of everything. People who don’t want this system demolished are entirely correct to think that this is a Bad Thing.

Whenever Chris Claremont introduced a new character into the X-Men, he would ask rhetorically “is there any good reason why this character should not be a woman?” He had his faults as a writer but there is a good deal to be said for that approach. There was certainly a period in the X-Men where we kept encountering female senators, female doctors, female trawler captains and even female scientists.

The Right (again, quite correctly from their own point of view) frame the question the other way around. Their question is always “is there any good reason why this person should be a woman—or Black, or not a ‘Christian’”. They are not against black people having jobs in the media, but they always have to be what they call “necessary”. Of course a black man can play a police officer provided his colour is important to the plot. Otherwise, it’s just virtue-ticking for the sake of box-signalling.

Why, they ask sixteen or seventeen times in the course of one article, would you cast a Black person as Hamlet if the text doesn’t require it? Why cast a trans person as Doctor Who’s assistant when the story is just about space travel and monsters and not about gender? The stock response when someone speculates about Black James Bonds or Black Supermen is but-you-wouldn’t-cast-a-white-person-as-Nelson-Mendela-or-the-Black-Panther-would-you?

Which quite brilliantly illustrates the difficulty.

We can have Black characters in stories which are (to some extent) about Blackness; but in all other cases, characters must be white. The burden of proof is on the Black or Asian or female actor to justify their existence.

I think that if you are going to carry on making James Bond movies, you should treat them as historical artefacts and set them in the era that Ian Fleming envisaged: late 1950s, early 1960s; cold war glamour; air-travel a luxury available only to the fabulously rich; casual misogyny the order of the day. But if you can imagine a Bond seventy years out of his time, in a world of mobile phones and artificial intelligence, when the enemies are more likely to be Iranian terrorists than the Reds, with a female head of MI5, but can’t imagine a Bond with dark skin, then I think that it is ethnicity, not textual fidelity, you have a problem with.

We know what Superman and James Bond and for that matter Father Christmas and Jesus look like: and it is not necessarily racist to be disappointed if the character in the new film looks different from the Superman of our imagination. I myself found myself watching Wakanda Forever and finding it hard to connect the Namor I saw on the screen with the character of the Sub-Mariner as he had been established in more than seventy years of comic books.

But because I am not a racist, I didn’t think it mattered.

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10: George Orwell wrote in 1944 that the term “fascist”—which properly describes a political and economic system—had become little more than a swearword, to be applied to any group a particular speaker didn’t like.

George Orwell wrote in 1944 that the term “fascist”—which properly describes a political and economic system—had become little more than a swearword, to be applied to any group a particular speaker didn’t like.

Trotskyites called Stalinists fascists and Stalinists called Trotskyites fascists and everyone who wasn’t a Catholic called the Pope a fascist. 

“I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else”, he wrote.

What is not always remembered is that he went on to say that when an English person calls someone a fascist, it is pretty clear what they mean. They are generally saying that that person is a bully. The word may have been abused, but it was not completely meaningless.

No, I have no idea who Chiang Kai-Shek was, either.

Clearly, in the last decade, the word woke has taken on the same function as the word fascist in a lot of people’s vocabulary: a catch all swearword to apply to everything that the speaker happens not to like. I have heard it applied to cubicles in men’s public toilets; the Last Jedi; the European Court of Human Rights; non-dairy milk, and I know not what else. [*]

But—like the word fascist—it is not entirely devoid of meaning. Tony Blair (PBUH) was correct to say that ordinary people know what they mean by it.

If a schoolboy calls his PE teacher a fascist, we get that he thinks the teacher is mean and authoritarian. If he thought the teacher was weedy and effeminate, he would call him something else. If he draws a cartoon in the school paper in which a man wearing an SS uniform is saying “Ve haff vays of making you fit: ze cold showers and ze cross country run in your UNDERWEAR” we would understand the target of the satire. We don’t really think that he really thinks that compulsory rugger lessons are part of a wider plot to annex the Sudetenland.

The problem comes when PE Nazi becomes part of our mental toolkit: when we can’t think of gym classes without thinking of Swastikas. When people start to say “Sports lessons should be abolished because paramilitary groups who believe in the superiority of the Aryan race meet in secret bunkers to invent new ways of giving fat kids a hard time” then rational discourse has come to an end.

But it may still be true that Mr Hicks was a rotten teacher. And, indeed, a bully.

Someone put a little cartoon on Twitter. In the olden days, it said, on the first day of term, teacher said “I hope you enjoyed your summer vacation. Let’s do some maths.” Now, it asserted, on the first day of term, teacher says “Communism good. Capitalism bad. There are seventeen genders.” A very wise man retweeted the cartoon, adding that most American parents do not understand that this is the literal truth.

Fascist, communist and woke are often merely figures of speech; and that’s fine. The problem comes when the figure of speech becomes the thing you actually believe. You call Mr Hicks a fascist because you don’t like him: you don’t like Mr Hicks because he is a fascist. You call Keir Starmer a communist because he wants to tax high pollution vehicles; you don’t agree with a pollution tax because Keir Starmer is a communist.

You might, I suppose, declare that from now on the word communist refers to any system of taxation, so anyone who believes in increased taxation is a communist by definition. You might announce that the word fascist is defined as “the belief that fourth-former’s should run three laps of the playing field on Tuesday afternoons, even if it is raining”. But that’s merely a kind of lexical inflation. If you declare that infinite means big then mathematicians will need a new word when they actually want to talk about infinity.

If a 1980s student union politician had called Margaret Thatcher a Nazi, we would understand them to be saying that she was “very right wing” and that being very right wing was very bad.

Since we knew that left wing student union politicians thought that right wing people were bad, this didn’t convey a whole lot of information. And that particular rhetorical tick never became mainstream: it was the province of Neil on the Young Ones as opposed to Guardian leader writers.

There would have been no point, in the 1980s, in saying that Michael Foot was left wing because he supported the Trades Unions. Everyone knew he supported the Trades Unions. And everyone knew that he was left wing. If you thought that Michael Foot was a wrong ‘un, you would have had to at least go through the motions of explaining why you thought organised labour was a Bad Thing.

But the vast incantatory power of the w-word is that it yokes the two concepts, left-ness and wrong-ness together. The logic goes like this: 

*All left wing opinions are woke.

*All woke opinions are left wing.

*All woke opinions are wrong.

*Therefore all left wing opinions are wrong

*And more excitingly: therefore all wrong opinions are left wing.

Ironically, George Orwell’s name is one of the words which has been reduced to a swear which can be applied to anyone you don’t like. But if it hadn’t been, I should be incline to describe the incantatory use of the W-word as Owellian.

[*] This week it was "woke" that the makes of the Simpsons lampshaded the fact that they had stopped using the visual gag about Homer strangling Bart 

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9: It is entirely possible to think that the Atlantic Slave Trade is quite a serious stain on Britain’s national history; and to simultaneously believe that street furniture should not be summarily removed as part of a popular demonstration.

It is entirely possible to think that the Atlantic Slave Trade is quite a serious stain on Britain’s national history; and to simultaneously believe that street furniture should not be summarily removed as part of a popular demonstration.

It is entirely possible to think that covering your mouth with gauze during a ‘flu epidemic is a sensible precaution, and to simultaneously think that governments have got no right to make laws telling people what to do with their faces.

It is equally possible to think that the medical evidence that masks inhibited the spread of Covid was pretty shaky and to simultaneously think that the government was doing the best it could under very difficult circumstances and we should all have stuck to the rules, even Boris Johnson.

It is entirely possible to think that it would be a good idea for the British Labour Party to have adopted a socialist programme, but to simultaneously believe that Mr Jeremy Corbyn campaigned inadequately during the European referendum and said some very ill-considered things about Jewish people.

It is equally possible to think that Jeremy Corbyn was a man of integrity and honesty, that the Jew thing was obvious bollocks from start to finish and to simultaneously think that Momentum’s socialist manifesto would have been a disaster in twenty first century Britain.

There are two sides two every argument, apart from the one about who created the Silver Surfer.

But a substantial minority of the human race believes that Covid Masks were part of a global conspiracy. A substantial minority of the human race believes that Jews (or space aliens, or Democrats, or the globalists, but when you scratch it, it usually comes down to the Jews) wanted me to wear a breath mask in order to acclimatise me to doing exactly what the government tells me. And to symbolise the fact that I have no right to free speech. And to show that white people are the real slaves and Black people are the real masters.

Or that someone in a high place just invented a pointless and irksome rule because he gets off on making pointless and irksome rules.

And a much larger group of people, people who don’t consciously subscribe to conspiracy theories, have picked up a general vibe that wearing masks is liberal, or left wing, or, as it is generally framed nowadays, woke. And that refusing to wear masks is the proper freedom loving commie hating stand up to authority back to blighty common sense spirit of the Blitz thing to do.

And I know that they think that.

And they know that I know.

And Sir Kier Starmer knows that I know that they know that I know.

So when I mask-up, I am not simply obeying perfectly sensible public health advice. I am also sticking it, very firmly, up the un-vaccinated bottoms of right wing conspiracy theorists.

And when you don’t mask up, you are not simply ignoring public health advice that you think is a bit silly. You are also refusing to take the knee to the liberal woke politically correct elites.

When the next pandemic comes—probably in time for Christmas—the government of the day will not make its choices based on finely balanced scientific advise. Not only. They will be consciously aware that masks are “a bit left wing” and not wearing masks is “a bit right wing”. And that will influence their decision.

They might say “We don’t care about the symbolism; we’ll just follow the science.” That would be the sensible thing to say. But “not following the symbolism and just following the science” itself has a symbolic value. To some people, the whole idea of being sensible is ‘a bit left wing’.

This is not a new situation. We are human beings; we have consciousness and language and we make up stories; we inhabit a universe of symbols as well as a universe of objects. Crosses and masks and shamrocks and poppies and lions and vegan sausages have powerful symbolic meanings about which people are prepared to go to war and write jolly stiff letters to the Daily Telegraph.

But we increasingly inhabit a symbolic universe which consists, not of complex texts to be interpreted by priests and shaman; but as collections of singular, irreducible nuggets of meaning.

I get that fuck and nigger and gollywogs and men’s dicks and Harry Potter are dirty or racist or pornographic or transphobic regardless of context. But we increasingly aspire to a conceptual universe where everything has context-free meaning.

There is no neutral space.

There are no actions which are not symbolic.

There are no thoughts outside of language.

Whoever is not with us is against us.

If you aren’t actively punching Nazis then you are sticking it to the Libtards.

Or very possibly vice versa.

Some time ago I wrote a short book, which I entitled One Hundred And Forty Characters In Search of an Argument.

It would now have to be titled “Two hundred and eighty characters in search of an argument or four thousand if you have a blue tick.”

I argued that the site formally known as Twitter tends to turn all debate into a game of “What side are you on?” It doesn’t really matter whether arguments are wrong or right, correct or incorrect, sensible or stupid. Arguments function only as bugle calls, as badges of identity, as signifiers of tribal orientation.

I reject your argument, not because it is illogical or factually incorrect, nor even because it is based on a false ideology. Rightness and wrongness are not qualities that arguments have. I reject your argument because it is the kind of thing that the kind of person who believes the kind of thing you believe might be expected to believe.

I happen to think that it would be a good idea for the UK to maintain free trade with the continent we are geographically part of. But there are good arguments against this.

I happen to think that it was quite a good idea for a female person to essay the role of Doctor Who. But there are good arguments against this.

I think that the rich should be slightly poorer and the poor should be slightly richer. But there are good arguments against this.

I think that women should have the final say about abortion. I don’t think that even nurses who murder babies should be hanged. I don’t think teachers should be allowed to beat students with sticks. Or indeed with anything else. I think that we need to radically reduce the amount of fossil fuel we burn. I think that Jack Kirby created the Silver Surfer. But there are good arguments against all these points. Except the last one.

But even quite serious politicians are increasingly reluctant to tell me what the good arguments are. They would rather tell me that the kinds of people who agree with me are lefties or remoaners or corbynites or wokies.

Since I wrote that book, the argument about identity and privilege has moved on. 

Or very possibly it has stayed in exactly the same place and I have caught up with it.

I now understand that European and American society is built primarily on white supremacy, and secondarily on patriarchy and also on a “Christian” hegemony. “The Left” now broadly means those who think that this is a bad thing and should be dismantled. “The Right” now broadly means those who benefit from the present state of affairs and want to maintain it. This is essentially the only political dividing line which matters. Every opinion, every action, every episode of Doctor Who and every flavour of Walkers Crisps is to be understood according to where it fits into that power struggle.

White supremacy does not mean “white people are in charge of every single interaction and every single organisation.” It doesn’t mean “people in military uniforms or with bedsheets over their heads burning crosses”. It means something more like “treating whiteness as the default state”; assuming that everything is or should be white unless it has a very good excuse not to be.

When I studied A level English literature in school every single book I studied was written by a white author. Every single character we studied was a white character. Except one. And he strangled his wife.

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