14: I sometimes think your man Darwin was onto something.

 I sometimes think your man Darwin was onto something.

Suppose I take a picture of Spider-Man and I make a hundred photocopies of it. And then I pick one of the copies, and make a hundred copies of that.

But my photocopier has a fault, and it distorts the colours, very slightly. A few of the copies look a bit yellowy.

And suppose I have a liking for the colour yellow, so when I pick the picture to re-copy, I am very slightly more likely to pick the ones where the white shading on Spider-Man’s eyes has come out a bit yellowish.

And suppose I do nothing for a week but make a hundred photo-copies, pick one and discard the rest, and make another hundred copies.

By the end of the week, I’ll be left with about twelve thousand reams of discarded paper, and one picture of Spider-Man with bright yellow eyes.

That, as I understand it, is the theory of evolution by natural selection Once you’ve understood it, it can’t not be true.

We only found about natural selection in the 1870s, a few years before my Granny was born; and we only found out about DNA in the 1950s, a few years before I was born. For the whole of the rest of human history, we weren’t quite sure how life got started. I don’t think that many informed people in 1870 literally believed in the Garden of Eden. Christian fundamentalism is a reaction against Darwin, not the thing Darwinism was a reaction against. But lots of Victorians definitely thought that God was involved somewhere along the line.

Darwin didn’t think that evolution abolished God. He stopped believing in God himself, but that wasn’t why. He directed annoyed Christians who wrote to him to clergymen who thought evolution and religion were compatible. Which has always been most of them.

Natural selection—stuff copies itself, and stuff which is more likely to get copied is more likely to get copied—is not so much a theory as a logical axiom. There’s no other way things could work. That which survives survives.

I think that the theory makes it preposterously unlikely that there are creatures suffering from this “consciousness” thing anywhere else in the universe; although I recognise that other people think it makes it a near certainty.

The first time I heard Richard Dawkins talking about Memes, he was talking about baseball caps.

There is no reason to wear your baseball cap back-to-front. One person flips his cap round, and someone else copies him, and before you know it, everyone has got their cap on back to front. And then the fashion dies out and reversed baseball caps are left as a symbol of the 1990s.

If the first person to start playing with a yo-yo lives on an island miles away from anywhere, then there is little chance of anyone else copying him. If he lives in a big city and takes a walk in the park every day, then there’s a very good chance that they will. And if he’s cool and good looking and related to the Queen, the chance increases exponentially. Once you’ve got the internet and TV and carrier pigeons its even easier to spread ideas. And some people, such as yo-yo manufacturers might have a vested interest in spreading the craze. So maybe there will be posters insinuating that if you learn to yo-yo you’ll be more virile and all the girls will swoon over you.

That which survives survives. That which is memorable gets remembered. Evolution is blind. Life forms mutate into forms which are good at surviving. Ideas mutate into memorable forms. Thoughts get passed on, not because they are true or beautiful or useful but because they are the kind of thoughts which get passed on.

Ideas, said the great man, spread like viruses.

The idea of computer viruses was relatively new and novel and sounded quite cutting edge. A lot of people probably thought that they were literal viruses; in the same way that some people thought that the millennium bug was actually an insect.

One very successful idea, argued the Prof, is, boo-hiss, Religion. Religion isn’t successful (he argued) because it is true or helpful or useful or pretty. It is successful because it tells people not to use birth control, to have huge families and to pass on their religious ideas to their children. And to found schools and go on missionary expeditions. And because they have memorable logos; the kinds of signs under which emperors want to conquer things. There are churches and synagogues in every village because churches and synagogues are very good at disseminating the idea that you should build churches and synagogues.

So far so axiomatic.

But then comes the fatal leap.

Ideas spread like viruses.

So we can talk about people being infected with an idea.

Religion is a very successful idea.

So we can visualise religion as a particularly virulent virus.

So we can say that a religious person is infected with the idea of religion.

So we can say that a person who has a religious belief has a diseased mind.

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13: I take it that this was the fork on which Diane Abbot wilfully impaled herself.

I take it that this was the fork on which Diane Abbot wilfully impaled herself.

In a lot of liberal discourse, racism doesn’t mean bigotry or prejudice in general; it specifically means white supremacy. Race specifically refers to the distinction between former colonial powers and former colonised people; between former slaves and former slave owners. It is, as a children’s book I have read helpfully puts it, a story made up by white people to make them feel less bad about the bad things which other white people have done in the past.

A Jew can’t, on this definition, be the victim of racism any more than a Chinese person can be the victim of Anti-Semitism. Which is not at all the same thing as saying that chucking bricks through the windows of your local takeaway is perfectly okay.

Once the distinction was explained to me, I fully grasped it and saw it as valid. This is why I no longer wish to celebrate being white--because white means “a descendent of the people who treated Black people as livestock and industrial machinery” and Black (on this definition) means “a descendent of one of the people who was so treated”.

But I can perfectly well celebrate being a Bristolian of Kernow/Cockney heritage.

Interpreting “you can’t be racist towards Jews” as meaning “anti-Jewish bigotry is perfectly fine” is at best a wilful misunderstanding and at worst a pun.

But sending a letter to a national newspaper and not realising that the statement is inflammatory is not very bright; particularly when you are a prominent political figure.

Discussing whether or not the letter was inflammatory is also quite inflammatory, which is one of the reasons I no longer write articles of this kind.

“Asking what woke means is a woke deflection strategy used by woke people who won’t admit that woke things are woke. Woke is much too complicated an idea to explain in a single sentence, but by Trump, I know it when I see it.”

It is, in fact, perfectly possible to define complicated ideas in short sentences.

--“The branch of Christianity which holds that people are predestined to go to heaven or hell, and which emphasises the moral virtue of hard work.”

--“A political movement that believes that the state should control all the resources and share them fairly among the people.”

--“A theory of literature which holds that books contain meanings other than the ones the writer consciously intended.”

--“The Son is God, the Father is God, the Holy Ghost is God: the Son is not the Father or the Holy Spirit; the Father is not the Holy Spirit or the Son; the Holy Spirit is not the Son or the Father.”

Well: okay, maybe not the last one.

But we shouldn’t try to hold the far-right to a single definition of woke, any more than we can hold Diane Abbot to a single definition of racism.

There is no shame in sometimes using the w-word as synonym for “liberal” and at other times using it to mean “a person who believes the theory race is a story made up by white people to justify them being in charge of everything.” And it would perhaps be fairer if people like me asked “In what sense are you using the word?” rather than “What does the word mean?”

Meaning is not singular and texts require exegesis. The meaning of Lord of the Rings is not limited to what Tolkien meant by it, “but what did Tolkien mean by Lord of the Rings?” is a perfectly good question.

I don’t think Brian Michael Bendis created Miles Morales because he wanted to dismantle white supremacy.

I think he thought that “the death of Spider-Man” was a cool idea for a story that could be tried out in Ultimate Spider-Man without harming a half-century of mainstream Marvel continuity. I think he thought that Spider-Man is quintessentially a New Yorker and there are a lot of Hispanic people in New York so it would be a fun twist if Peter Parker’s replacement was a young Puerto-Rican. Peter Parker was, like his creators, very probably a non-religious Jew.

Brian Michael Bendis wasn’t part of a shadowy conspiracy, nor was he operated by a mysterious cabal of Cultural Marxists. Ultimate Spider-Man and Into The Spiderverse are not, in that sense, woke.

But, if you already believe that white supremacy is a good thing and ethnic representation is a bad thing then the Miles Morales character flies in the face of your ideology. He says, by his very existence, that not all heroes and protagonists are necessarily white. There is no reason for him to be Hispanic—the stories aren’t particularly about his ethnicity—but he surely sends a message to minority kids that they can be superheroes too.

When you say that Ultimate Spider-Man is woke, I am entitled to ask “In what sense are you using the word?”

Do you mean that the writer is part of a shadow conspiracy to dismantle white supremacy?

Or is woke merely the word you use to describe stories which feature non-white characters?

Is there a literal cabal of cultural Marxists who surreptitiously hide liberal ideas in superhero comics?

Or is woke simply the word you use to describe liberal ideas?

Does the Woke Mob exist?

Or are they simply a figure of speech?

If people believe the devil exists, then some of them will become satanists and black magicians.

But hardly any of them will become atheists, and lots of them will be forewarned against possible diabolical temptations.

If people don’t believe in the devil, then it is easier for the devil to tempt them into mortal sin and easier to make them deny God as well. But on the down side, hardly any of them will become witches or devil worshippers.

So argues Screwtape in a letter to his nephew.

But Hell, he says, is developing it’s ultimate weapon; the Materialist Magician, the human who worships Satan but doesn’t believe that Satan exists. When this is achieved, he says, victory in the war against Heaven will be in nearly won.

It isn’t clear if C.S Lewis had seen the Usual Suspects when he wrote this line. He’d probably read Baudelaire: he’d read everything. He’s mainly scoring a cheap point against people like Bernard Shaw and HG Wells who didn’t believe in God but were prepared to talk about a pantheistic life-force; and perhaps also against soft-scientists like Freud and Jung who sometimes drifted into mystical and religious language.

The Woke Mob doesn’t exist: any more than the Political Correctness Brigade or the Social Justice Warriors exist. I suppose that if members of the Democratic Party were really baby-eating-alien-space-lizards there would be a way of finding out; say by running a midichlorian count or pointing Rom’s energy analyser at them. 

There really was an American Communist party in the 1950s and some of its members really did carry cards.

If there is no actually existing organisation you can prove controls the colour of chocolate beans and the configurations of public toilets, then the word woke is no use to you. It’s just one more synonym for liberal. “Liberal things are liberal because they are liberal” is not a great rallying call. We fear the Woke Mob and the Political Correctness Brigade and the Social Justice Warriors because they have power and agency and malicious intent.

But they don’t exist. There is no shadowy confederacy of Jews plotting the downfall of civilisation from a secret Volcano base in Frankfurt. There is no man in an office painting the Smarties pink.

But suppose you could both believe in the Woke Mob and not believe in it?

Suppose it was a real malign entity, distinct from people whose opinions just happen to be to the left of yours?

Suppose it was like the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Doctor Strange’s Ectoplasmic Self?

Suppose that it was like the tongues of fire at Pentecost.

Free floating. Invisible. Malignant. Real.

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12: There are two other possible usages of the W-word

 There are two other possible usages of the W-word.

It might specifically refer to the belief-system I outlined above. If you think that we live in a white, male “Christian” world, and that literally everything either reinforces this state of affairs or contributes to its demolition, you are woke. If you disagree, then you are anti-woke.

Now, this definition has the great advantage of being true, or at any rate of being not entirely devoid of meaning. Little boys really are brought up to believe that pink is an effeminate colour and that effeminacy is bad. So the decision to sell nice chocolates with pink food colouring in them and to say that it’s fine—even cool—for little boys to eat them does in a tiny small way break down the idea that male is the natural, default state of humanity and that female is a weird deviation that any normal person would want to avoid. Pink Smarties really are, to that extent, and on that definition, woke. And Rowntrees very probably knew that when they added them to the Smartie tube. Casting Ncuti Gawa as Doctor Who is woke, in that it in a tiny almost insignificant incremental way pushes back at the idea that all the important and cool jobs would naturally and automatically be done by white people. Remembering to say eid mubarak to your Muslim colleagues is woke because it scratches away at the idea that “Christian” festivals (Christmas, Pancake Day, Easter, Saint Valentines Day, Whitsuntide, Guy Fawkes Night, All Hallows Eve) are neutral, universal, human festivals, where Eid and Yom Kippur and Diwali are alien and exotic and threatening—which in turn breaks down the idea that you would naturally expect white “Christians” to be in charge of everything. Pink Smarties and gay Doctors and inclusive festivals really do move us closer to the world that the so terrifies the Right—the world in which people are just people and the colour of your skin, the shape of your genitals and your word, if any, for God, don’t convey any particular advantage or disadvantage.

Many people seem to honestly believe that there is a man in a biscuit factory whose whole job is to make Wagon Wheels smaller.

It is perfectly natural to ascribe agency to things that you don’t like. If you get a wart on your nose and you don’t understand where warts come from then why not believe it was put there by that weird old lady who lives by herself with a broomstick and cat? (Before the invention of the Dyson bagless vacuum cleaner, every old lady owned a broomstick.) There are whole Facebook groups dedicated to talking about how much better television was in the Olden Days, which indeed it was, but it only takes a paragraph or two before “Wasn’t the Generation Game marvellous?” morphs into “Why did they cancel the Generation Game” and thence “Of course they banned the Generation Game because it wasn’t woke.”

We are familiar with the process:

-People are coining neologisms to make terminology more inclusive.

-Some of these neologisms are a bit silly.

-They won’t let me call cripples cripples any more.

-The Political Correctness Brigade won’t let me call cripples cripples any more.

-The Political Correctness Brigade is a front for the Cultural Marxists (which is to say, the Jews).

-The Cultural Marxists (which is to say, the Jews) are plotting to destroy civilisation.

-The idea that we should avoid demeaning language is part of a Jewish plot to destroy civilisation: it is more or less your patriotic duty to call disabled people cripples and dumb and spastics.

A man on the internet told me that Anti-Semitism means the belief that there is a secret cabal of Jews controlling the world, or at any rate trying to, and that terms like Globalist and the Rothschilds are coded Anti-Semitism.

Tropes about Jews having big noses, or being avaricious, or liking chicken soup—even blaming them for killing Jesus—are bigoted and racist and nasty, but they are not, strictly speaking Anti-Semitic.

This definition makes sense. Talk about the Israel Lobby controlling Hollywood or having too much influence over American foreign policy is Anti-Semitic. The Gringots Goblins, not so much. A statement is Anti-Semitic by virtue of the fact that it contains Anti-Semitic tropes: you don’t get to insinuate that Jews inveigle themselves into positions of power and then let yourself off the hook because some of your best friends are Jews. (Even if some of you best friends are, in fact, Jews.) Jeremy Corbyn may very well have been anti-racist (he was) and may very well have seen anti-Jewish bigotry as a particularly nasty form of racism (he did) but pictures of Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the back of Africans are Anti-Semitic in themselves, and Anti-Semite is the name we give to people who disseminate those kinds of images.

But this isn’t the only way the word is ever used. If I say “Some people are reluctant to stage the musical Oliver! because Fagin is a bit of an Anti-Semitic caricature” then there would not be a great deal of point in saying “Har-har that’s not what the word even means.”

But it might be helpful to say “In what sense are you using that word?”

The narrower definition leads us into counter-intuitive positions. You could perfectly well attend synagogue every Sabbath, observe the high holy days, keep a kosher kitchen and also speak about the state of Israel in a way which implied the existence of a shadowy international plot: in which case you could perhaps be described as a Jewish Anti-Semite. Saying that many of the people who have been kicked out of the Labour party are themselves Jewish isn’t the “gotcha” I once thought it was.

Socialists think that rich people exploit the poor; and that banks and financial institutions are mostly run by rich people. They think that taking power away from the bankers and giving it to ordinary people would be a good thing. I think it overwhelmingly likely that when Corbyn disseminated images of the anti-Jewish mural he sincerely believed that he was disseminating an image of an anti-capitalist mural. That is certainly how I understood the image when it was first drawn to my attention. But once it was pointed out to me, I saw that the image was anti-Semitic whether I understood it or not.

Since Jews have been historically stereotyped as rich and greedy, there is a danger that any attack on rich, greedy people could be misinterpreted as an attack on Jews.

But equally, it is possible that genuine Anti-Semites might frame their propaganda as anti-banker or anti-landlord, in order to give themselves an air of plausible deniability.

And the bankers and landlords might accuse anyone being critical of them of being secret Jew-haters.

There is even a danger that we would start to say that socialism is in itself Anti-Semitic; and a person saying “there is no room for Anti-Semitism in this party” really meant “there is no room for socialism in this party.”

It would remain true that Anti-Semitism exists and that Anti-Semitism is horrible. On any definition.

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