America [8]

Why did we lose?

We brought it on ourselves. We deserved to lose.

Not because we were wrong. But because we were right. Of course Black people are no better and no worse than White people. Of course a woman can do anything a man can do. Of course some people just happen to be gay. Of course slavery and colonialism were bad things. Vaccines stop people getting diseases. Science works. The world is round. Scones made with margarine are lighter and healthier than scones made with butter. Civilisation can probably weather the installation of unisex toilet cubicles in night clubs.

The Left lost because the Left was right.

Of course there is nothing wrong with electing a Black man as president of America; whether you think that Obama did a good job or not. But electing a Black man as president of America was always going to provoke the kinds of people who think there is quite definitely something wrong with electing a Black man as president of America. So we shouldn’t have done so. So we have only ourselves to blame for the backlash.

Of course there is nothing wrong with being gay. But coming right out and saying that there is nothing wrong with being gay—allowing provocative slogans like “sometimes, boys have boyfriends and girls have girlfriends” into school sex-ed books—was always going to provoke the kinds of people who think there quite definitely is something wrong with it. So we have only ourselves to blame for the backlash.

If only we hadn’t kept on spooning sand into our bucket, the other bucket wouldn’t be so damn heavy all of a sudden.

Hmm. I don’t think that can be right.

Okay.

The Left lost because the Left kept going on and on about being right.

Peter Elbow said many years ago that being right was a dangerous tactic, because people who are right are often so insufferable that people prefer to carry on being wrong just to spite them.

Don’t poke a sleeping tiger. Don’t pull the puppy’s tale. Don’t put a sharp stick in a wasps nest. If half of your country are bigots, it makes no sense to hang “down with bigotry” flags on every public building.. There is really no need to organise “bigotry is bad” marches and put “we don’t agree with bigotry” stickers on all your DVDs.

Just, you know, stop being bigots and the bigots will probably stop being bigots as well.

There is something in this. Maybe if we had just removed all the bigoted laws quietly; penciled “or a man and a man or a woman and a woman” into the marriage legislation without making a song and dance routine about it; and started casting Black people in TV roles without mentioning that we thought it was a good idea to do so the bigots would have just got used to it and stopped bigoting. Maybe it’s the gay pride marches that annoy them, not the gay people themselves. Maybe if there had been “not particularly ashamed or bothered” marches instead, we wouldn’t be where we are now.

Maybe. But I think of the Comprehensive School headmaster in the 1960s who decided that he was going to stop hitting his pupils with a big stick. The other teachers were okay for the hitting to stop, but didn’t think he ought to tell the children. “You haven’t stopped until you’ve told the children” he said.

I grok what they mean by virtue signalling; I do. My Granddad had been an actual pacifist in World War II. He never went to jail, but some of his friends did. So in the 1980s my Mother had zero sympathy for people who sat next to her in church wearing CND badges and then went ahead and voted SDP at the next election. [1] “Peace” can so easily become a fashion accessory, a signifier that you are a nice person. Ray Coleman talked about John and Yoko jet-setting around the world talking about peace as if they had personally invented it. So maybe taking a knee and the rainbow crosswalks and the kids books about how everyone is different and that’s fine are just that: virtue signalling.

Yeah. And you know what else is virtue signaling?

Actual laws which make life easier for minorities.

Actually recycling waste and giving up your motor car and not using airplanes.

Actually deciding to go vegan.

Actually voting for the Labour Party and the Democratic party.

Any time a Black man, or a woman, or a gay person appears on television.

And do you know what isn’t virtue signalling?

Wearing a poppy. 

Wearing a cross. 

Wearing one of those stupid red hats. 

Putting a Union Flag or a Stars and Stripes outside your house. 

Singing the words of God Save the Queen.

Anything anyone who isn’t a Far Right lunatic does, ever.

“Virtue signalling” is just another way of saying “Why don’t you just stop filling up your bucket?”

Okay.

But can we at least agree that the Left lost not because they were right, not because they went on and on about being right, but because they were dicks about being right?

Again, there is something to this. You might as well be hung for a velociraptor as a T-Rex. If, regardless of what I do, my neighbours are going to think I worship Cthulhu, then I have nothing to lose by actually signing up to a cult.

It is possible that some people were so upset at being told they couldn’t display the Union Flag or wear a Poppy or say Happy Christmas, and so bored with the Left calling them fascists if they did so, that they said, well, all right then, I might as well become a fascist. [2]

The Right are obsessed with purity: who sings the words of the national anthem and whether you put your hand over your heart and if you bowed low enough and wore your poppy for long enough and cheered loudly enough.

But maybe, I don’t know, the Left fell into this trap as well: so that wearing the right badge and using the right hashtag and choosing the right words became more important than actually, you know, not being a fascist?

I have heard Centrists—people who stand at our end of the see-saw but draw the line at actually putting any sand into the bucket—complaining that me and Jeremy Corbyn care more about doctrinal purity than we do about winning elections. Maybe we do. Some of our lot said we’d rather lose the election than win it under Starmer. But Tony Blair himself said in very nearly so many words that he’d rather lose the election than win under Corbyn.

Maybe we became too willing to call the other side bad names? Maybe if we hadn’t been so inclined to call people who thought that on the whole the EU was a mistake “little Englanders”; and to call people who want to maybe tighten up our immigration policy “Gammons”; and to call people who are embarrassed about ladies maybe catching a glimpse of men weeing “TERFS” then we wouldn’t be where we are today? Because the Brexit supporters and the anti-immigration advocates and the gender denialists are famously moderate and diplomatic in their language towards us, after all.

I am in favour of civilised discourse. When there is a good faith difference of opinion, even a very strong one, there can usually be a good faith compromise. Not every bad piece of homework necessarily has to get an F: there are D’s and C minuses available. There is some old footage on YouTube of Jonathan Miller debating with Enoch Powell. They both clearly hate each other’s guts, but are managing to be civil about it. David Frost took the trouble to ask Oswald Mosley questions, rather than moving directly to a James O’Brien style interrogation. [3]

But if your opponent is a barbarian, I am not sure that you can have a civilised discourse with them.

Yesterday on Facebook a user openly posted “Fuck Ramadan” under a news item about a local mosque. It took Facebook less than two seconds to decide that this didn’t violate its rules about hate speech. On Threads, which was the site I escaped too when Twitter became—what Twitter has become —I saw someone complaining literally in so many words that he went to hospital and was seen by a “witch doctor” instead of a proper medic and that it’s the fact that we employ “primitives” that has created the NHS crisis. I have seen an AI generated video about what London will be like in twenty five years time. I am not going to describe it, but I do not think that I am exaggerating here, it is far more extreme than anything in Mien Kampf.

And yes, maybe, these people were more like a little puppy dog yapping and biting than someone with an actual point of view; more like a little boy pulling his knickers down to get a rise out of the big folks than an actual exhibitionist.

But can it really be the case that children are only naughty because grown ups have told them they mustn’t be? Can I really not call these people out? Do I really have to say that the person who thinks when the Islams take over the streets of London will literally flow with shit has a perfect right to express his legitimate concerns?

Racism doesn’t exist.

What’s the reason?

Because when it exists, liberals think it is not very polite to call it racism.

[1]  The Gang of Four had split from the Labour Party because they didn’t agree with Michael Foot’s anti-nuclear policy, more or less guaranteeing that Mrs Thatcher remained in power.


[2] No one at any time told anybody that they couldn’t display the Union Flag or wear a Poppy or say Happy Christmas. Birmingham is not under sharia law; praying is not illegal; pub landlords do not have to employ PC inspectors and if you say you are English, no-one comes and throws you in jail.

[3]  “So. Bit of a Nazi aren’t you? Are you a Nazi? It’s a simple question. A Nazi? Are you a Nazi? Are you a Nazi? Are you a Nazi?”

Supporters of my Patreon have already read all ten parts of this long form essay.

Why not join them?

America [7]

Conan the Barbarian said that barbarism was the natural state of mankind. “Civilisation is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”

CS Lewis said that we were too inclined to believe that Chivalry was part of the natural order: that you would automatically expect someone who is very skilled at beheading Saracens in the crusades and awfully adept at blowing up Germans in the Somme to be very polite and humble and gentle the rest of the time. But this is untrue: we spent centuries artificially hammering into soldiers the idea that if you were merciful and honourable and magnanimous, you were not only a better person, but actually a better soldier: that it was macho to be kind. We came up with this ridiculous notion precisely to rein in the natural tendency of single men in uniforms to act like psychopaths.

Similarly, we invented the absurd idea that while nothing matters more than Sports and the whole of your national and local prestige depends on how good you are at Sportsing; nevertheless if you come second in the Sports you have to pretend that you don’t really mind. And we did it for the same reason: if sixteen rugger-buggers got cross every time they lost a match, the grounds-men at Twickenham would spend all their time clearing dead bodies off the pitch. The riot police still have to be on standby every time there is a significant soccer match.

So pick your side:

1. People are naturally good but it is possible, through lies and propaganda, to cause them to temporarily become bad.
2. People are naturally bad, but it is possible, through education and religion, to cause them to temporarily become good.
3. Some people are naturally good and some people are naturally bad and at any one time one group may have the ascendancy.
4. “Goodness” and “Badness” are meaningless terms. Your choice of Alignment is a preference for shiny armour or chaos death spiky bits and nothing else.

By all means quibble with words. You can say that by “good” I mean “the collective; the idea of sharing” and that by “evil” I mean “individuality, egotism, the idea of advancing yourself” and that I can only ask which position is better and which position is worse because I have already decided the answer.

Must barbarism always ultimately triumph? 

I see your Robert E Howard and raise you a Michael Moorcock. If everyone were what I call good then we would all sit around listening to the Incredible String Band and drinking diet coke, and nothing would ever get made, and we would all starve. But if everyone were what I call evil, then every game of football would turn into a genocidal race war, and we would all end up in the gutter eating each other’s corpses. We need to find a path down the middle: we need some sort of, I don’t know, Cosmic Balance that will keep the collective and the individual in some kind of equilibrium.

Or is Ursula K Le Guin a higher court than Michael Moorcock? Good wouldn’t be good if it didn’t contain a little dot of evil and evil wouldn’t be evil if it didn’t contain a little spot of good and the black fish and the white fish are engaged in a kind of dance and you can’t think of one without the other.

Or are we, after all, going to have to do God?

Perhaps we are not talking about good and evil, law and chaos, yin and yang or the collective and the individual. Perhaps we should be thinking in terms of the Divine Image and Original Sin. Humans aren’t good or evil but fallen; not a bad thing, but a good thing spoiled. We are neither psychotic apes nor altruistic angels: we are more like stupendous works of art on to which some bastard has daubed a great big penis.

Which still seems to me like the most plausible way forward. Humans fuck things up because they have cut themselves off from The Force; and rather than trying very, very hard to be nice they ought first to try to get back in touch with The Force whereupon they will find that the niceness comes naturally. The first part of getting back in touch with The Force is wanting to get in touch with The Force, or, in the jargon, Faith. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you.

Whether this necessarily leads to Christmas and Easter and the Vicar of Dibley we can leave for another occasion.

But that doesn’t tell me how to act in my present situation. Do the Spirituals simply preach Salvation to the Non-Spirituals? Do they live us much like a Spiritual as they can even if there isn’t any Spirit? Do they retreat into caves in the desert and wait for everyone to become as Spiritual as they are? Or do they take up arms and by opposing slaughter all the Non-Spirituals?

Different groups have at different times literally taken all four positions, and none seem intrinsically illogical.

I have a Mr Dawkins on the phone. He says that a belief in original sin inexorably and necessarily leads to crusades and pogroms, and that a belief in spirituality necessarily leads to a belief in original sin, and therefore we should drop the whole idea and become materialists.

“But if materialism is right, what are our grounds for saying that crusades and pogroms are a bad thing? Might they not conceivably be precisely what the principle of Survival of the Fittest requires?”

Er…He seems to have hung up. [1]

There is a version of Catholicism that says that Catholicism is not actually true, but that the essence of being a Catholic is behaving as if it was. (You are allowed to pretend it is true while you are talking to children and the uneducated.) Plato said that he wasn’t quite sure that it was true that human souls contained all the knowledge and truth in the universe but that we’d all have a better time if we assumed it was. Terry Pratchett thought that believing in made-up things like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy was good practice for believing in more important made-up things like Truth and Democracy. So perhaps we should pragmatically assume that my second option is correct. Human beings are, in the natural state, psychotic apes. Hatred and self-interest are what we talk about when we talk about human nature. But it is possible, through education and culture—through religion and social action—through pride flags and equality programmes—through state funded art and free school meals—through folk music and the playing of Dungeons and Dragons—very possibly through cricket and long walks in the country—maybe even through rugby, cold showers and the cane—to artificially construct a version of humanity which believes—or acts as if it believes—that being nice is a better option. And that when a powerful person dismantles those artificial structures the flood gates open and people start openly saying that we ought to just leave those Samaritan bastards to die in a pool of their own blood.

“But Andrew: if barbarian Nazism is the normal state of the human race; and liberalism was only ever the product of liberal propaganda, whence comes your right to impose liberal propaganda on the rest of the human race?”

SLARTIBARTFAST VOICE: “I know. That’s where it all breaks down, of course.”

[1] That the only part of this essay I will get any feedback on, you mark my words.

Supporters of my Patreon have already read all ten parts of this long form essay.

Why not join them?

America [6]

We lost.

We didn’t just lose an election in America. We don’t just happen to be living at a time where the current incumbent is a little further to the Right than we would like him to be. The current incumbent is always a little further to the right than we would like him to be. As a matter of fact, as a socialist and a democrat I think the current incumbent ought to be a little further to the right than I would like them to be.

Pete Seeger said that politics was like a see-saw. On one end there was this huge heavy weight, on the other, a big old empty bucket. And every day, a few kids walked past the see-saw, and put a teaspoon full of earth in the bucket. And for months and months it didn’t make any difference. But one day, of course, there was enough earth in the bucket, and the balance shifted, and the light end went down and the heavy end went up. And everyone said “How did the see-saw move so suddenly?”

I am not quite sure I agree with him. I think maybe there are buckets at both ends, and both sides are perpetually spooning earth into them; and the see-saw stays more or less on an even keel. Sometimes more in one direction than the other. But it is always the people at the heavy end who say “But if you like balance; if you think an even keel is the best for everybody, then the best thing you can do is obviously to stop filling your bucket altogether.”

As long as politics is a matter of opinion—even of deeply held and significant opinion—then absolutely we should go for balance. I want a 100% supertax and you want to abolish tax altogether: so we compromise. Tax is lower than I would like it to be and higher than you would like it to be. When my side gets in it goes up a little bit, but when your side gets in it goes down a little bit. A compromise is by definition an arrangement which both sides are equally annoyed with. I want to abolish the armed forces and you want universal conscription, and we end up with a bigger army than I would have liked and a smaller army than you would have liked, with increased defense spending when your lot are in and military cutbacks when my lot are in.

This is even true of some hot-button issues. Not every one who thinks that some criminals ought to be killed is a bloodthirsty psychopath, although most bloodthirsty psychopaths think that some criminals should be killed. People on both ends of the see-saw agree that there should be due process and proportionality and that we definitely shouldn’t kill innocent people. Not every American who agrees with the Second Amendment is a psychotic trigger-happy cowboy. Questions around gender and sexuality are more problematic: there is no room for compromise around a marginalised group’s existence. But I would still be in favour of sitting down and saying “Well, JayKay, what specifically is your issue and how might it be addressed?”

It could even be that both sides were advancing in broadly the same direction by widely divergent routes. It could even be that the distinction was never between the Left and the Right but between the idealists and the pragmatists. We both want wars to come to an end: it’s just that I think we should get rid of nearly all our weapons tomorrow; and you think that unilateral disarmament would probably trigger Armageddon almost straight away. It’s only the psychopath in the corner who thinks that peace is for wusses and the true emancipation of the human spirit comes through conflict. We both want to abolish poverty; it’s just that I think that we could have a wealth tax and some judicious welfare spending and no child would go to bed hungry ever again; and you think that without a certain amount of competition we’d all go bankrupt and there would be nothing to eat for anyone. It’s only the psychopath in the corner who thinks that poverty and starvation are positively good things because they weed out the unproductive work units.

The trouble comes when the psychopath in the corner takes control of an entire continent.

Why did we lose?

The Left is inclined to see every victory as decisive; the Right are inclined to see every defeat as a temporary setback. Britain voted (decisively) to remain in Europe in 1975: the Right spent the next forty years spreading myths about Europe and trying to overturn the decision. Britain voted (narrowly) to leave Europe in 2016, and the Left said “that concludes the argument; we can’t ever possibly talk about rejoining because will-people.” Britain decided (gradually) that some men happened to prefer men and some women happened to prefer women and that’s no-one’s business but theirs. The Left said “Good, we’ve finally won that argument, let’s move on to something else”; the Right said “How can we insidiously and subtly undermine the public’s trust in gay people, so that in ten, twenty, or thirty years we can re-criminalise them?” In 1966 the Left said “Thank God: we have finally consigned the gallows to the dark ages, where it always belonged”. The Right continued to run “string ‘em up” headlines every time some murdering happened. [1] And so on, and so forth. Schools are chaos because of this strange and temporary blip which prevents teachers from hitting children with big sticks. [2] Mosques and curry houses are exotic and temporary incursions into a naturally mono-cultural high street. The BBC have, for some ulterior motive, banned black-face comedy, but one day soon we will get our sense of humour back.

The Left lost because once the bucket was full, they thought they could go home and go to bed, and didn’t notice that the populist authoritarian ethno-nationalists had teaspoons of their own.

Not all Americans are part of the MAGA cult. As we have seen, a bit more than half of them are not. It is alarming that one in ten Brits supported Nigel Farage’s ludicrous Dad’s Army cos-play club at the last election, but reassuring that nine out of ten of us did not. And not everyone who voted for Trump, and not everyone who might vote for Farage, is necessarily a populist authoritarian ethno-nationalist. They may merely be stupid. They may have fallen victim to clever propaganda. They may have decided to vote for the authoritarian ethno-nationalist in order to give the other side a jolly good kick up the pink knickers.

From now on, all Germans will be wise. From now on, all Germans will be good. From now on, all Germans will be Nazis. But only two out of these three will ever be true of a single person.

Anne Frank said that she believed that, despite it all, “people” were really good at heart. What did she mean? Did she charitably believe that the Nazis who wanted to kill her were good people? That there was some excuse for them because they honestly and truthfully believed that killing Jews was a good and noble thing to do? Would she have accepted the defense that the people doing the killing didn’t really mean it and were only obeying orders? Caiaphas was in his own mind a benefactor to mankind. Or did she mean that Nazism was an aberration and a corruption: that these people were not born monsters, but were coerced or misled or manipulated into becoming monstrous?

It makes a difference. I am inclined to think that if you hurt and belittle and abuse a child then that child will very likely grow up to be an adult who hurts and belittles and abuses children. And I believe that adults can be cured and educated and learn to do better. [3] I am inclined to think that all aberrant behaviour can be approached therapeutically. [4]

Frodo wanted to kill Gollum: Gandalf said that the elves were treating him with as much kindness as they could find in the noble hearts, and that an attempt to cure him should be made, even though it probably wouldn’t work. That’s your actual Tolkien, and far more “woke” than contemplating the possibility that some very short people might have dark skin.

But right here, right now, that abused and badly educated child who watched Andrew Tate videos while his granny was being turned out of her council flat is standing outside an asylum hostel with a Molotov cocktail shouting “Who the fuck is Allah?”

And I am not.

The plinth of That Statue still stands in Bristol. “The best and wisest of Bristol’s sons” it says. Either he knew what he was doing, or he didn’t. If he didn’t know, he wasn’t wise; if he did know and did it anyway, he wasn’t good.

Epicurus said the same thing about God.

I think that all Anne Frank meant was that although there are Nazis in the world, most people are not Nazis.

I am no longer completely sure if she was right.

[1]   I have no idea whether or not Lucy Letby dunnit, but if she were to be exonerated I would smile sarcastically at the “surely she of all people ought to be hung” department.

[2]   Schools are not chaos. No more than they have ever been.

[3]  It was truthfully said in my schooldays that the teachers who really did believe in hitting kids with big sticks—the ones who picked children up by their ears and made them kick balls between posts in their underwear—had been in the actual army in an actual war and in some cases in actual Japanese prisoner of war camps.

[4]  What, all?

Yes, all.

What all?

Well, nearly all.

Supporters of my Patreon have already read all ten parts of this long form essay.

Why not join them?