Time to turn towards common humanity..
WE live in dangerous times. Two deadly wars rage on the edges of Europe, threatening to escalate into World War Three.
Presidential assassinations, political threats and intimidation, terror attacks at concerts, racist riots across the UK.
It’s heart-sinking to see reports of cars and businesses owned by immigrants being burnt out in Belfast, the city they’ve made their home.
Such ugly scenes of chairs thrown and windows smashed in a trail of vandalism and destruction.
My first thought was Kristallnacht. An extreme comparison, but the parallels are evident.
After much progress on civil rights issues, it’s a sickening backslide.
Up to, say, the late 2000s, we had reached a height of harmonious equality among different groups.
When I was a teenager in the 1990s, there was no big issue about race or gender or sexual preference, people were accepted and it was normal and natural.
You didn’t expect a medal either for saying you were anti-racist or a feminist or whatever. It’d be weird not to be.
So how did we get here? I think it comes down to modern society and an oppressive culture since 2014 that was always going to backfire horribly.
The world supposedly became more progressive and inclusive, but it got less liberal and tolerant.
Today’s events are a sad and predictable consequence of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction.
That’s why some of us were against it in the first place, though you were wilfully misconstrued for saying it.
At the root of all this is the decadelong, obsessive focus on a toxic form of identity politics that did no one any favours and was always going to cause more harm than good.
It was irresponsibly supported by politicians, big business, academia and media, because it gave power and made them look good without having to do anything. They never had a word to say about class, even though it’s the greatest definer of life outcome of all.
Who would bear the brunt in a backlash? Not the privileged clerisy pushing their “woke” agenda. It was laid out by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and
co-author Greg Lukianoff in the most prescient book of the 2010s, The Coddling of The American Mind.
Haidt and Lukianoff pointed out the fault-line lay in a move away from a common humanity, championed by Martin Luther King so memorably in his speech about being judged not on the colour of skin but on the content of character.
In its place was one towards common enemy politics, a zero-sum game, and a system of shaming, punishment, cancellation, silencing. Haidt and Lukianoff warned about the constant highlighting of differences, writing: “The more you separate people and point out differences among them, the more divided and less trusting they will become.
“But the more you emphasise common goals and common humanity, the more they will see each other as fellow human beings, treat each other well and appreciate each other.”
True liberals never believed in forcing views and opinions down people’s throats. That’s not the way to win hearts and minds.
Like the Metoo movement didn’t stop actual rapists, it just terrorised decent men into being afraid of women, similarly, calling everyone and everything racist won’t have any effect on real racists and fascists.
They just use it to stir up fear, chaos and division. We need to turn our backs on common enemy politics, and look towards a common humanity once again.