October 29, 2020 - 7:00am
The old Left versus Right view of politics is on its last legs, but what to replace it with? Liberty versus Authority? Progress versus Tradition? Open versus Closed?
Thomas Chatterton Williams, the American journalist and cultural critic, has a new proposal:
every day i'm more convinced that the real binary is less left vs. right than the universal vs. the identitarian (present on both the left and the right).
we need new vocabulary and new coalitions.
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) October 25, 2020
Williams is an anti-woke liberal, so I can see why he’d want to distinguish himself both from the woke Left and the populist Right. His proposed “binary” not only achieves that, but it also pulls off the trick of grouping the extremists together. It’s a new take on the old horseshoe theory of politics in which the political spectrum isn’t a straight line, but bent round so that two extremes nearly touch one another.
But for all the similarities between swivel-eyed ideologues of whatever stripe, I don’t think we’ll ever see the political spectrum redefined in the way Williams would like.
Politics is always and everywhere defined by identities — it is never a contest between those who embrace and those who reject identity as a general ideological concept. For most people identity isn’t a matter of ideology at all, but more about feelings of belonging and solidarity. The specific divide varies with time and place. For instance, it might be class-based or generational or geographical, but whatever the distinction, any ideological labels are of secondary importance. Indeed, you might see a group of voters switch from a party on one side of the ideological spectrum to a party on the other if they feel that would better reflect their identity. The result of the 2019 UK general election is a prime example of that.
Another reason why we won’t see politics reorganised around universalist and identitarian poles is that these two positions aren’t quite so opposed as they might seem. Obviously, there’s a fundamental divide between those who recognise the full humanity of every person and those who don’t, but within the envelope of decency — one has to recognise that we naturally identify more closely with our own family than other families and with our own nation more than other nations. There are many precious things that are universally true of all human beings and the need for special connections is one of them.
Obviously, our loyalties to those with whom we most identity can be twisted into something hideous, but then so can universalism. A society where no one has any special loyalties except to society as a whole would be deeply dystopian. Indeed, it would resemble Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where “everyone belongs to everyone else”.
So, if there really is a political spectrum between identity and the universal, then put me down as middle-of-the-road.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
peterfranklin_
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SubscribeGood, when they out themselves and group up they are easier to deal with.
Israel does not target hospitals, or schools, or mosques. We target war rooms, command centres and terrorist units that commandeer such places. The Hamas and Islamic Jihad criminals who surround themselves with non-combatant human shields are entirely responsible for the casualties that inevitably are sustained by their helpless victims.
Let us make no excuses for Israel, their conduct is horrible. This awful nation needs to learn human rights from the muslim world, and start treating the Palestinians exactly like the Turks treated Armenians/ Christians (20% of population to 0.2% over the past decades) or how Pakistanis treated Hindu / Sikhs (15% to 1%).
That’s the only way to peace, stop the genocide of the muslim population that has resulted in 7x population growth in Gaza, and start treating them like Jews are in Iraq or Algeria. That’s the only route to ensuring minority rights the halal way, no minority = no more problems.
If you can’t live together you can’t live together.
Yes, that hideous comment immediately made me wonder about the value of the whole article.
In fairness I think he’s phrasing it to show how young disaffected moslems see things, and why they might thus become tomorrow’s jihadis, rather than stating a personal opinion.
“the media appears outraged by Russian targeting of hospitals in Ukraine but relatively indifferent when the IDF targets hospitals in Gaza”
What utter rubbish. What media seems indifferent to the bombing of hospitals by the IDF?
I could argue that our MSM has tired of the war in Ukraine. Its attention is firmly on the war in Gaza and its condemnation of the IDF is pretty transparent.
Maybe I’m watching the wrong channels.
You could also wonder why muslims in the West, mostly from other parts like Pakistan or Turkey, care so much about “Gaza” but seems to be quite happy with what happened with Hindus in Pakistan or Christians in Turkey, or happily overlook terror attacks or grooming gangs by their own community in their own countries…not that they consider Britain, France etc to be “their” countries.
Yet.
Ha!
Also… deathly silence from the media about Hamas collocating HQs and military forces in hospitals and schools, using their countrymen as human shields.
Russia is deliberately targeting civilians in Ukraine. Israel tries very hard to limit collateral damage.
Chalk and cheese.
The very fact there still is a “muslim world” that remains “theirs” makes muslims othered. Conformance to an absolutist monotheism and continued displacement of non-believers from muslim spaces is the definition of being other: sectarian, resolutely standing apart, refusing reformation of identity and religion.
The rise of the influence of Al-Shabaab amongst young muslims in the West has nothing to do with what non-muslims do or don’t do. It is entirely correlated with the simple increase of there being young muslims in the West. It is an imported problem, a fundamentist problem that has impaired the development of muslim countries. The fight for dominance and purity is baked into an unreformed Islam and we now all know its name: jihad. Al-Shabaab are just yet more jihadis doing what jihadis have done for 1400 years across Africa, Asia, the Middle East – and Europe before they were removed. Now its followers are back in Europe jihad too has returned.
It is an imported problem
As I was reading the article it occurred to me that not only is it an imported problem as you say, but it has been going on for centuries. One doesn’t have to be a historian to look at maps of the world and which religions were/are dominant in the past to see how Christianity and Islam have been advancing and retreating for a very long time. It’s as if we, who barely live a century, cannot see the forest for the trees.
This conflict is not new and it’s never going to stop. This struggle of cultures has been around a long time. A large chunk of Islam, from what I have learned, isn’t interested in peaceful coexistence and they’re not shy about saying so.
Absolutely, to which i’d add: the answer to Islamism isn’t to increase Christianity, because both sects are part of the same ‘religiosity’ problem; two sides of a coin, if you like.
There’s only one useful answer, and that’s the banishment of religiosity from human thought. This will take many more centuries – unless we annihilate ourselves in the meantime – but at least a start has been made in some sections of the world. I can hear the cries from the “god-fearers” that that’s what’s making the West weaker. It’s absolutely not – it’s tolerance of religious fanatics that’s making it weaker – tolerance, of course, being a Christian ‘virtue’. Why “be kind” to those who’re trying to destroy very hard-won democratic freedoms?
There is a distinction to be drawn between religion and human spirituality, an intuitive understanding of how precious life is and ever greater insights into the cosmos which surrounds us, of which we’re an infinitesimally small part; of how courage, generosity and yes, love, are entirely human inclinations and need no religious underpinning.
Organised religion was a serious mis-step in early civilisational development, arising out of both a misunderstanding of the cosmos and a desire to control populations. Be gone, and a plague on all your houses.
If you ban religion you’ll just get people clustering fervently around other extreme views such as the extreme Trans rights activists. They are the new Puritans.
No. The change of mindset would require an understanding of how we can be ‘captured’ by other similarly restrictive ways of thinking. Transactivism is just one of the current manifestations.
Anyone who (for instance) believes in transubstantiation as a matter of ‘faith’ is of entirely the same mindset.
The New Atheists believed that an increasing secularization in society would naturally be accompanied by a decrease in the irrational behaviours they associated with organized religions.
Society is increasingly more secular, but the NA’s have been proved emphatically false in a short space of time.
Some NAs haven’t even noticed. Shows how rational they are.
The ‘banishment if religiosity from human thought.’
This kind of hubrustic secular fundamentalist sounds exactly like a religious fanatic.
Nonsense. It’s the antithesis of fanaticism.
It’s about the ability to think for oneself. I entirely understand why religionists wouldn’t understand that, just as you haven’t.
Assuming that religion is an expression of many evolved human traits, then religiosity is also an evolved characteristic innate in humans. And the idea that it can simply ‘be banished’ over a period of ‘many centuries’ would involve a disbelief in the normal processes of Darwinian evolution, which are kind of random and unpredictable.
It’s an idea which bears more in common with religious faith in human perfectibility and purification than a scientific understanding of Darwinian evolution.
And it’s also comically similar to the sort of rhetoric used by secular fanatics– e.g.–Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin.
You almost got through the writing without showing your true face there! So close – the IDF targets places where terrorists have taken over civilian infrastructure, like schools and hospitals, so they legitimately become military targets at that point, often using their civilians as human shields for maximum ‘civilian deaths’. You rather missed those facts there, can’t imagine why????
You use lies and misinformation to spread anti-Israel, antisemitic propaganda. You are a liar, defending and supporting genocidal barbaric terrorists.
Exactly my reaction.
Say: “Like the war leaders of old,
I cherished great plans for victory.”
Britain has been fighting this same battle, in the same place, with effectively the same people since we first intruded ourselves into the Horn of Africa in the 1870s – ironically to protect Somali independence from Ethiopian Imperialism.
Who now reads about the Dervish war, about Muḥammad ibn ‘Abdallāh Hassan, ‘The Mad Mullah’? Who has read his poem (quoted above) of 1913, The Death of Richard Corfield, about the Jihadist killing of the commander of the Somaliland Camel Constabulary
“You have died, Corfield, and are no longer in this world,
a merciless journey was your portion.
When, Hell-destined, you set out for the Other World,
tell them how God tried you.”
I assure you, the Somali remembers, ‘with advantages’, so to speak, both in the Ogaden and North London. Just because we say history is finished and the old legers are wiped does not make it so.
The choices that present themselves now are precisely the same which presented themselves in 1870, 1890. 1915 etc etc. We must either police the interior – too costly then and now – or we must contain the violence by locking up the Jihadists in their fastnesses – then the interior desert, now simply keeping them ‘out’ of Britain.
Essentially the choice is between exercising mastery abroad or secure borders at home. WIthout borders, however there is no such thing as ‘foreign policy’ because there is no distinction between Home and Abroad.