Feel the suck!

And Britain's circling of the drain hole brings it a little closer to the abyss.

The Trojan horse of British secularism

Posted by Melanie Phillips

Once again, the impression has been created that secular values are a) the embodiment of civilisation and b) value neutral. Both assumptions are mistaken.

A senior English judge, Sir James Munby, President of the Family Division, has rejoiced in his view that Christianity no longer informs the judgements handed down in the courts, which now must serve a multicultural community of many faiths.
Judges, he said, must not weight one religion against another. The courts had now ‘by and large moderated their claims to speak as the defining voices of morality and of the law of marriage and the family’ because there was no longer one definition of right and wrong in the wake of the sexual revolution. He observed:

‘Happily for us, the days are past when the business of judges was the enforcement of morals or religious beliefs.’

 

The learned judge does not seem to realise that – as he himself unwittingly demonstrates – today’s judges see it as very much their business to enforce secular beliefs.
The idea that ‘oppressive’ Christian morality and ethics have been replaced – hurrah! – by a nirvana of freedom and tolerance is very wide of the mark. Traditional moral codes have merely been replaced by the modern religion of human rights, of which the English judiciary is its high priesthood.

For far from secularism being value-neutral, it promotes hyper-individualism. And far from expanding freedom, this diminishes it. For it sets up a perpetual fight for supremacy between interest groups, arbitrated in the courts by judges promoting secularism.
This actively and aggressively destroys the common bonds of history, tradition and morality that keep a society together. And it means that the weakest groups, of whom Christians are paramount, often find that their rights to uphold their own religious traditions are trampled down. For as a former Lord Chief Justice once remarked, human rights law inescapably favour minorities over the majority, which is seen (wrongly) as innately oppressive. Thus blind justice is replaced by a culture of human wrongs.

The reality – counter-intuitive as it may seem to some – is that individual liberty is only upheld and safeguarded by legal, social and cultural traditions embedded in the ethics of the Bible. Indeed, western liberty is unique in the world precisely because of those biblical roots.
Contrary to Sir James’s implication, the courts never acted as if Britain was a theocracy. But they did play a vital role as informal guardians of that Biblically-based western culture, helping transmit the common values which, as everybody understood, bound society together and helped form its identity.
If the courts have abandoned that role and are promoting instead the creed of secularism which divides rather than unites, social cohesion will inevitably fracture and the identity of a shared culture based on individual liberty will disintegrate. And onto that vacated terrain will come another creed altogether – one bent on cultural colonisation and the destruction of human rights – which will seize its opportunity to use secularism as its Trojan horse.

This is already happening. Yesterday the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced that Britain would become the first western country to issue a government-backed, Shariah-compliant ‘sukkuk’ Islamic bond.

Like Gordon Brown before him, the Prime Minister David Cameron has said he wants London to become the global centre of Islamic banking. All these men can see are the £ signs dancing before their eyes. As the FT reports:

‘The government hopes the £200 million Sharia-compliant bond or sukuk will enable the City to grab a major slice of the Sharia investment market which is estimated to be worth more than $1 trillion globally.’

 

But this money comes with a price. And that price is Britain’s identity as a western country. For ‘sharia-compliance’ is not like, say, compliance with health and safety rules. Sharia is the Islamic system of jurisprudence which does not acknowledge any legal authority other than itself and demands adherence to its own precepts.

As UKIPDaily comments:

‘For the Sukuk to remain Sharia compliant, it necessarily surrenders itself away from the jurisdiction of the UK civil courts to the Islamic courts.’

 

As Paul Goodman has so aptly observed on Conservative Home, sharp and urgent questions and concerns aired in Parliament when the power to issue such bonds was first mooted have never been addressed. Those questions and concerns were aired by the then Conservative opposition to a Labour government which seemed indifferent to the fact that it was proposing to sell Britain to Islam. Now those Conservatives are in power and are proposing to do just that – and their own questions still remain unanswered.

Maybe Sir James Munby would maintain that his secular courts would see off any such threat. But what odds would you give Sir James Munby and his fellow judges against the forces of shariah?

Posted on: Oct 30th

Warmy nutters

Another interesting take on the psychosis that appears to grab global warming alarmists by the throat:

By Peter Smith.
On the whole, I generally lean on the hopeful side when it comes to the current crop of existential threats. I think H L Mencken had it about right:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
 

For example, I don’t take too seriously concern about resource depletion or impending worldwide food shortages. Others do. I don’t think government debt will bring economic catastrophe, as some do; only more prolonged economic stagnation than would otherwise occur. I tend to be more sanguine about combating the threat of pandemics decimating populations than do some people.
On the other hand, I am not hopeful about everything. I am concerned when it comes to the threat Islam represents to our enlightened Western way of life. Others are not nearly as concerned.
We live in a plural society. There is often disagreement about the magnitude and extent of potential threats to our wellbeing, to our prosperity, to our way of life. But whatever our different views about the magnitude and extent of particular threats we all usually share the same hope that the threats, whatever they are, will not be realised.

I don’t believe the ban-the-bomb protesters in the 1950s hoped for nuclear holocaust. This boils down to self-preservation. It would be bizarre if numbers of people wanted bad things to happen simply to be proved right. It would amount to a death wish. We would have reason to suspect the motives and perhaps the sanity of those hoping for the worst. For example, I fervently hope that my concerns about Islam will prove to be unfounded. Why in the world would I hope to be proved right when the consequences would be potentially devastating for my children and their children?
OK then; we can say, can’t we, that people of goodwill and sound mind, who might disagree about whether this or that development represents an existential threat, nevertheless come together in hoping the threat will prove empty? Well, not always, seems to be the correct answer, if the threat of global warming is any guide.

I am not a psychologist but it seems to me that global warming shows that there is a tipping point where those warning about a particular threat become so attached to the realty of the threat that their worst fear is that it will prove empty. This phenomenon goes way beyond stubbornness in the face of contrary facts, in the manner of a Galbraithian ‘conventional wisdom’. It has much closer resonance with the world of Dr Strangelove.

The Greens, most politicians of any hue, many climate scientists and academics, ABC and Age journalists, and countless others, seem to show all the signs of having effectively fallen in love with global warming, just as Strangelove fell in love with the Bomb. Each cyclone, flood, bushfire, or drought seems to whet their appetite for yet more destructive havoc to be wreaked on the crass material world by the wrathful god of global warming. We told you so, springs readily to their salivating lips.

Am I going too far? Am I misrepresenting the situation? I don’t think so. In any event, this is my impression gained from listening to, watching, and reading, the warmists. They have boxed themselves in by accepting honours, privileges and riches; by castigating sceptics as deniers; and, most critically, by establishing global warming as an article of faith. What else is ‘settled science’ but faith? “Tony Abbott is a climate change criminal”, according to Adam Bandt. Well he should know as one of the high priests of warmism.

This is not about whether the threat of global warming is real or exaggerated or confected. It is about how and why the tipping point was reached where numbers of otherwise rational people show all the signs of (desperately) wanting it to be real. I have no ready explanation for this.....

UPDATE 16.12.13
Britain’s Mail on Sunday on the great green gravy train:

A three-month investigation shows that some of the most outspoken campaigners who demand that consumers pay the colossal price of shifting to renewable energy are also getting rich from their efforts…

Four of the nine-person Climate Change Committee, the official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until very recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions.
A new breed of lucrative green investment funds, which were set up to expand windfarm energy, are in practice a means of taking green levies paid by hard-pressed consumers and handing them to City investors and financiers.

Tales of Leprechauns & unicorns and green things at the bottom of the garden!

Those that 'administrate' the Global warming scam are making out like bandits.
No wonder they fight tooth and nail against the ever increasing body of scientific proof that shows how much of a scam it all really is. It isn't about truth its about careers, money, power and digging deep into the taxpayer funded trough. Thats the real distribution!

So, how much of that $7,555,000 - and our $513,000 - has actually gone on what the UN says the fund is for - ”providing support to developing countries to limit or reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the impacts of climate change”?

Willis Eschenbach does the sums:

When you do this kind of thing, first you have to hand out the plum jobs. Among those are the Members of the Board. Of course, then you have to pay for their travel, and a place for them to meet, for their meetings. And it turns out that three Board Meetings cost just under a million dollars....

Oh, can’t forget the Board Committees, Panels, and Working groups. They cost just under four hundred thousand. Total, a million three …
The next round of plum jobs are the people who make up the “Interim Secretariat"… [T]here’s two million in the budget to hire fifteen people…
It gets worse. They actually hire themselves to do the work, at incredible rates. For example, from the UN FCCC they are hiring one full-time and one part-time person, plus some administrative support … for a cool half million dollars. One and a half people. Half a megabuck.
And from the UN GEF, same deal, one full-time and one 60% time person, cost, another half million…
[The] Green Climate Fund has three-quarters of a million bucks in the budget for consultants, to make sure something gets done. Oh, and did I mention $200,000 per year for the Executive Director?
Now, you gotta know that you can’t have fifteen pluted bloatocrats, plus 3.1 loan-drones from other UN agencies, and three-quarters of a million dollars worth of consultants, without renting some executive-type hive to house the worker bees. Plus phones and faxes and the like, that’s a million two …
Gotta have a travel budget … three hundred grand.
Add all that up, and the “Interim Secretariat” costs $5.3 million …
Lastly, a Trust Fund needs an Interim Trustee. The Green Climate Fund hires that service from the World Bank for just under three-quarters of a million dollars per year … one trustee …IT costs … I can hardly believe it myself, but by a strange coincidence, what it costs them to run the Green Climate Fund adds up to … well … about seven and a half million dollars.
And that means that of the $7.5 million dollars donated by taxpayers all over the world, the people in the developing countries will get.......None.

Reverse gear is our only hope

The (Gramscian/Fabian) left are quite brazen about their  campaign to revolutionise education in Australia (a.k.a. the long march/gradualism) and our current scholastic malaise is both the consequence and symbol of their victory.

The new government in Australia is being attacked already for imagined system overhauls and the left are laying the groundwork (a.k.a. propaganda) for stopping any such conservative 'rebellion' from ever seeing the light of day. These generations of 'community organisers' have learned their lessons well and have secured the higher ground (a.k.a. the professional media).

The truth is that the educational establishment has become so compromised that I think it will take more than a new government to make the necessary substantial changes. It needs a completely new paradigm and that can only come through revival.

Perhaps in a new age of barbarism knowledge will retreat into the monasteries once again.

The change of government, argues Taylor, means state and territory schools will be forced to teach a “triumphalist view of the past that uncritically highlights the achievements of a free market economy, Western civilisation and Christianity”.

There is nothing surprising or new about such outbursts. Australia’s educationalists, along with those in other English-speaking nations, embarked on the cultural left’s long march through schools and universities during the late 60s and early 70s.

This was a time of the cultural revolution epitomised by Vietnam moratoriums, flower power, sexual liberation and attacks on established authorities represented by the universities, the Church and the nuclear family.

Marxists such as the Brazilian Paulo Freire argued that education had to be about liberation, in the US Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis argued that the education system reinforced inequitable capitalist hierarchies, and in England MFD Young concluded that the established disciplines are social-cultural constructs without any inherent value of meaning.

In Australia Joan Kirner, one time Victorian premier, argued that the purpose of education was to bring about the socialist transformation of society [Orwell anyone?] and the Australian Education Union argued against the traditional academic curriculum, funding to non-government schools and competitive Year 12 examinations where some passed and some failed.

Such was the cultural-left’s success that in 2005 the then-president of the Australian Education Union, Pat Byrne, boasted at the union’s annual conference “we have succeeded in influencing curriculum development in schools, education departments and universities. The conservatives have a lot of work to do to undo the progressive curriculum”.

One reason why the cultural-left has been so successful in controlling the education system is because the majority of Australia’s professional bodies, subject associations and teacher training academics are hostile to a conservative view of education epitomised by choice and diversity, an academic curriculum, meritocracy and traditional styles of teaching.

In 1998 the Australian Curriculum Studies Association published Going Public, described in the preface as “an unashamedly partisan book”, where public education is described as “under siege” as a result of a more market driven approach. Complaints about falling standards are rejected as a “manufactured crisis” employed to “undermine the legitimacy of public belief in state schooling and, at the same time, to deflect attention away from material problems such as youth poverty and unemployment”.

In 2000, the Australian College of Education published School Resourcing wherein Alan Reid, an academic from the University of South Australia, attacked the Howard government’s support for non-government schools.

Instead of accepting parents’ right to choose, Reid argues that school choice represents a “culture of selfish individualism where the dominating motif is competition and greedy self-interest rather than cooperation and mutual benefit.”
Reid goes on to argue that only government schools, as they are secular and supposedly open to all, serve the common good and promote social cohesion. Non-government schools on the other hand “promulgate specific or narrow points of view or represent sectional interests”.

In the book The History Wars, published in 2003 and co-authored by the ex-communist historian Stuart Macintyre, the argument is put that the then Howard government’s “conservative polemic” about a black armband view of history is simply an example of wedge politics and the desire to counteract Paul Keating’s Big Picture approach to government policy.

In 2004, the then editor of the journal of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, Wayne Sawyer, argued that the re-election of the Howard government proved that English teachers had failed to teach ex-students how to think.

After describing the conservative government’s education policies as “like Thatcher’s, ironically Stalinist”, Sawyer goes on to argue that English teachers must redouble their efforts to teach young people how to think correctly on the basis that English classrooms have “failed not only to create critical generations, but also failed to create humane ones”.

Such was the opposition to the Howard government’s concerns about falling standards that a ‘whose who’ of Australian educrats met twice in 2006 to campaign against what was described as a “conservative backlash in the media” and a “backlash in the policies of the conservative parties”.

The seminars were organised by the Australian Curriculum Studies Association and involved representatives from peak professional bodies such as the Deans of Education, state based curriculum bodies and the Australian Education Union.

The August, 2006, seminar was titled Approaches to National Curriculum Work and over 65 representatives from across Australia met to develop strategies to direct what was described as “approaches to national curriculum work between all stakeholders”.
Significant is that Tom Bentley, one-time advisor to England’s Secretary of State for Education under the Labour government and former head of Tony Blair’s favoured think tank, Demos, was invited to attend the ACSA seminar. Bentley went on to work as a senior advisor to Julia Gillard, when education minister, and is partly responsible for importing Blair’s failed education polices involving increased government regulation and micromanagement.

Given ACSA’s campaign, it shouldn’t surprise that the Rudd/Gillard inspired national curriculum provides further evidence of the cultural-left nature of Australia’s education establishment. Every subject has to be taught through environmental, Indigenous and Asian perspectives where new-age, 21^st century generic skills and competencies undermine academic content.

Instead of acknowledging that “direct instruction”, championed by Noel Pearson and endorsed by the US study Project Follow Through, is the most effective way to teach, the national curriculum embraces an inquiry-based, child-centred view of learning.
Unlike in Finland, a world leader in international tests, where teachers adopt a more formal approach to classroom pedagogy, Australian teachers are told to be facilitators, to base learning on the child’s world and to embrace open classrooms and activity based learning.

The draft civics and citizenship curriculum air brushes Christianity from the nation’s civic life and institutions and adopts a postmodern, subjective definition of citizenship, one where “citizenship means different things to people at different times and depending on personal perspectives, their social situation and where they live”.

The history curriculum, in addition to uncritically promoting diversity and difference instead of what binds us a community and a nation, undervalues Western civilisation and the significance of Judeo-Christian values to our institutions and way of life.

As previously reported in The Australian, the English national curriculum adopts an exploded definition of literature, one where classic works from the literary canon jostle for attention along side SMS messages, film posters, graffiti and multi-modal texts.
While nodding in the direction of teaching phonics and phonemic awareness, where children are taught the relationship between letters and groups of letters and sounds in a more formal, structured way, the English curriculum also favours “whole language”, where children are taught to look and guess.

In addition to subject associations and professional bodies, another factor explaining the cultural left’s success is the fact that education in Australia is controlled by a handful of educrats whose disposition, if not hostile, is unsympathetic to the conservative cause.
Tony Mackay, appointed by the ALP government as head of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership and deputy-chair of Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, has close connections with the London based think tank Demos favoured by Tony Blair. Mackay also was involved in introducing the discredited outcomes-based education (OBE) model of curriculum when the US-based father of OBE, William Spady, visited Australia to conduct a number of seminars.

Barry McGaw, appointed by Julia Gillard as chairman of ACARA and similar to Alan Reid from the University of South Australia, also questions the existence of non-government schools when he argues they contribute to social fragmentation and loss of social capital.
In a 2006 speech titled Education and Social Cohesion McGaw argues that the increase in non-government school enrolments is leading to an unsatisfactory situation where schools “frequently divide on the basis of gender, faith, social background, wealth, geography and so on”.

Also of interest, during the 2007 federal election campaign, is that McGaw was involved in the launch of Kevin Rudd’s education policy at The University of Melbourne and that he is a strong advocate of the cultural-left’s argument that socioeconomic background is the main reason why disadvantaged students underperform.

Geoff Masters, the head of the Australian Council for Educational Research, also displays a cultural-left disposition when, as a participant at the February 2006 ACSA sponsored conference, he argues the profession must recapture the debate from those seeking to “manufacture a feeling of crisis”.

At the height of concerns about Australia’s adoption of outcomes based education, a model of curriculum the then Howard government education minister Brendan Nelson described as a cancer, Masters leapt to its defence. In a comment piece in The Australian, published on November 23, 2005 (and available here), Masters argues there is no substance to the claim that “standards are plunging” or that Australia’s adoption of OBE “should lead to a decline in standards”.

In the months before the September election, shadow education minister Christopher Pyne argued in favour of Direct Instruction and criticised the national history curriculum for embracing a cultural-left bias.
The Coalition also supports the existence of non-government schools and agrees that they should be properly funded. Much to the chagrin of cultural-left critics the Coalition’s education policy supports a phonics and phonemic awareness approach to teaching reading and greater diversity and choice in education where there is less government regulation and control.

The reality, like the ABC, is that those in control of Australia’s education system exhibit a PC group mentality and a cultural-left disposition. With Christopher Pyne as education minister it looks as if the educrats are about to be challenged and Australian schools will be freed from ideological interference and unnecessary centralised and bureaucratic control.
 

Let us hope that the last paragraph is true and that Pyne will be able to crack the ideological carapace that has formed around education in this country...he is going to need much prayer and moral support.

Aesthetics down the gurgler.

More on the increasing irrationality of what is termed the 'art-world' today. I blame Marcel Duchamp!

It is a tad sad and very depressing to those of us who not only believe in art and its benefits, but also in craftsmanship, talent, hard work and finding a market for ones work.

The tax payer funded roundabout where 'artists' indulge their fantastical/narcissistic/obtuse/immoral impetuses to seek the frisson of the ‘outlaw'(anti-bourgeoisie); an impulse that devalues art in the eyes of the public which then leads to the public rebelling against original art which then leads to the public’s taste becoming a little more devalued which leads to the elite (taxpayer funded) artist accusing ‘ordinary folk’ of being 'philistines'.

A self-fulfilling prophecy married to a downward spiral.

Worth Every Penny.....by David Thompson

Readers may have noted the NowhereIsland art project, in which assorted radical freeloaders – referred to as a “think tank” - were shipped to the Arctic at public expense to ponder the possibilities of progressive utopia and generally engorge their cultural glands. While moored at Nyskjaeret, an apparently unclaimed island the size of a football pitch, our merry band of thinkers gathered sand and rock and loaded it onto a barge, thereby creating a floating “visual sculpture” of tremendous, indeed profound, political significance. Said work will subsequently “tour” the south coast of Britain, leaving better, more enlightened people in its wake.
The project’s intellectual lynchpin, artist Alex Hartley, has explained why his subsidised trip was so imperative:

It will gather ideas around climate change, land grab, colonialism, migration… all of these issues that can be put onto the blank canvas of this new land… My plan is to take a part of the island into international waters and declare it as a micro-nation so people can register to become citizens… We have just declared our statehood. This moment marks seven years of work inspired by a simple question: What if an Arctic island went south in search of its people?

If this all sounds a little familiar, you may be thinking of this comedic excursion from 2009.
The project’s mission statement tells us,

NowhereIsland is established in response to the failure of nation states to adequately address interconnected global crises, such as environmental exploitation… NowhereIsland embodies the global potential of a new borderless nation, which offers citizenship to all; a space in which all are welcome and in which all have the right to be heard.

Others have taken a less sympathetic view. Among them, Geoffrey Cox, Conservative MP for Torridge and West Devon, who referred to the project as an “extraordinary folly”:

I think my constituents are going to find it quite astonishing that… we are spending half a million pounds digging up earth from somewhere in Norway and floating it down the South West coast.

Having survived this two-week taxpayer-funded odyssey in radical conjecture and dirt relocation, Laurie Penny - for ‘tis she - shares her thoughts:

I met a polar bear, a whale, some reindeer, several fat seals, an arctic fox, many drunk Russians, a statue of Lenin, and a very dear and well-meaning collection of British academics, activists and journalists… Crammed on a ship trying to teach everyone consensus decision-making whilst we held down our lunches as the Noorderlicht dived through the waves, trying to group-write a theoretical constitution for a speculative nation.

Good times. Though there were of course a few issues to contend with.

Every single one of us was white and middle-class.

Luckily, rote identity politics soon gave way to the romance of it all.

As we discussed our ideal society… it really did feel like the last colony ship off a burning planet - like we were the chosen, special ones strapped to a cosy life-shuttle, looking for a new world at the touching point of symbol and substance. This, surely, is how the privileged will experience the end times.

The chosen, special ones. And not, say, the ‘B’ Ark.

I found myself becoming more and more committed to our airy utopia, as we talked and talked and talked about what this NowhereIsland society might look like.

Time is money, people. Tick, tock. Can we cut to the good stuff? Share we us, please, the insights we’ve paid for.

I discovered that the world is full of bright, decent people doing important, beautiful things, and because of that, it might not be too late to build a better one. I also discovered that Geography professors CAN dance to dubstep.

We’ll sleep easier tonight, then.
Laurie’s reflections are, however, tinged with sadness. Not least regarding the notes of public disapproval:

Of all the myriad problems with the NowhereIsland project, the press have inevitably focused on the most anodine [sic] and inconsequential: the money… I believe in art, and folly, and dreams. I believe that if we can’t collectively subsidise artists to imagine new worlds for us, we have no business speaking of social progress.

Yes, I know. It’s so unexpected. Pretentious taxpayer-funded noodling is vital, says beneficiary of pretentious taxpayer-funded noodling. Because Laurie believes in folly, see, ideally when done at someone else’s expense and regardless of their objections. And because without the Arts Council and its politically generic freeloading caste, all human progress would simply grind to a halt. Besides, grumbling about the extortion and misuse of other people’s money - half a million pounds of it - is anodyne and inconsequential.
Out of her way, you little people.

Update, via the comments:
A reader, Newbie, asks: “If money is so ‘inconsequential,’ why do these parasites always expect to be given loads of someone else’s?”
Why indeed? Presumably, taxpayers shouldn’t trouble themselves with how their earnings are expropriated and pissed away by their betters. Artists, it seems, are visionaries, not made of mortal flesh, and so sacrifice is necessary - yours, of course, not theirs. Laurie illustrates this point unwittingly and with her usual grandiose sorrow: “Is this what human progress has come to? Fighting over the scraps of money left as the markets crumble?” Oh, the indignity of not being given all the money you want just because you want it.
There are two things worth noting here. Firstly, Laurie equates the fatuous, self-aggrandising relocation of dirt with “human progress.” Apparently, NowhereIsland is exactly the kind of progressive project that will drag us in its wake to a brighter, more enlightened tomorrow. (It only looks like the usual cliquey freeloaders’ talking shop, in which the same self-selected caste of middle-class lefties pretend to be pivotal to human advancement. Because, hey, they’re that important.)
Secondly, the notion that artists might actually consider earning a living doesn’t register at all. There’s not even the briefest flickering of that possibility. The idea that artists might endeavour to produce work that their customers would pay for voluntarily, without Arts Council coercion and political vetting, appears to be unworthy, and perhaps unthinkable. Artists are much too important to waste their time making beautiful things that people want to buy. According to Laurie, their role is political and much, much grander - to “imagine a culture beyond the control of capital and the nation state.”
This, of course, is simply asserted. As so much is in Laurie’s world.

As the World turns...

"Nothing sums up the demented nature of the modern left better than a soi-disant socialist party that supports taxing janitors in Leeds to give money to millionaire luvvies in London, so they can make films about how folk in Yorkshire are ignorant bigots."[David Thompson January 15, 2012]

At the Altar

An interesting excerpt from an important article discussing the tendency of lefties to worship at the altar of fame, celebrity and conformity and how it is clear to see what those on the left oppose, but less clear to see what they encourage:

Our criticism of Butler was quite independent of the merits or lack thereof of Derrida - but perhaps a criticism of his defender amounts to a criticism of him and is therefore not allowed. At any rate, Butler's open letter to the Times is a classic example of precisely this evasive non-substantive suggestion of impropriety that you mention. It's basically an argument from celebrity. 'How dare you publish such a snide obituary, Derrida was hugely influential, he was celebrated, he was a big deal.' Well - an impartial observer might think, reading her letter, that if she is an example of his influence, it wasn't much to boast about. It's a shocking thing to read, in a way - the combination of evasiveness, empty rhetoric, in-groupy outrage, and gormless awe at fame is not what one wants to read in someone who is routinely described as 'an academic star' (and to her shame she doesn't repudiate the description).

This perhaps seems like a side path, but I think it isn't. I think the whole subject is mixed up with celebrity-worship, fandom, star-hugging, fashion, trendiness, attention-seeking, in a truly depressing and distasteful (albeit morbidly fascinating) way. I think there wouldn't be those bizarre reactions of affront and indignation otherwise.

But what on earth is 'left' about that? Nothing, I would say. The only connection I've been able to come up with is that the left is generally a fan of reform and change and improvement and therefore drawn to the new, the best latest thing, thus susceptible to being over impressed by the trendy. But that doesn't really satisfy - it's not as respectable as that. It seems more like just plain childish fandom and star-worship. I have no idea what is 'left' about that.

DT:  Well, as to what’s ‘left’ about the worship of dubious figures, I’m inclined to cough and mutter “Marx”, “Castro”, “Chavez” and “Che Guevara T-shirts.” Communist societies are surprisingly big on idolatry, aren’t they? It seems to be a practical consequence of egalitarian philosophy applied in the real world. Keeping everyone equally miserable requires some kind of deity, usually one with a firm hand. How many times have we seen Mao depicted as a god, complete with radiation beaming from his head, like some Communist Godzilla?

As a teenager I remember seeing CCCP badges and the people wearing them didn’t seem too concerned with the connotations of that project. Likewise, those on the left who seem smitten by Castro or Guevara don’t seem unduly bothered by the Cuban concentration camps for roqueros and other “bohemian elements.”

I suppose it’s not too much of a leap from identifying with Castro or Chavez because of their opposition to capitalism or American “hegemony” and identifying with the contortions of Derrida and Foucault for not dissimilar reasons. Both are postures of rebellion with no obvious moral foundation or practical usefulness. Ditto the white middle-class lefties who wave placards announcing “We are all Hizballah now.” I guess it’s something to do with “giving it to the man” or not liking one’s parents or something. It all seems a tad narcissistic to me, and just a little depraved.
 

....... I’ve some sympathy with Stephen Hicks, whose Explaining Postmodernism I read alongside Why Truth Matters. Crudely summarised, Hicks sees the rise of relativism, obscurantism and censoriousness on the left as marking a crisis of faith and a retreat from reality. As a practical blueprint, Socialism has been refuted. The question is what’s been left in the space it used to occupy, other than confusion, narcissism and a state of denial.
 

http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2007/02/pomo_terry_eagl_1.html