Cancelling Shakespeare.

The Master: Shakespeare’s art is of a power that at once confirms and dissolves history. In his incomparable mastery of the English language he reminds us that we are more than male and female, rich and poor, Māori and Pakeha. What this “Elizabethan playwright” reveals to us, and hopefully will go on revealing to succeeding generations until the end of time, is the wonder and woe of what it means to be human.

IT IS DIFFICULT to see the Arts Council’s decision to defund Shakespeare as anything other than “propaganda of the deed”. In the current, unusually tense, cultural climate, the idea that a decision to refuse a $30,000 grant to an organisation responsible for introducing the art of William Shakespeare to a total of 120,000 (and counting) secondary school students might, somehow, pass unnoticed and unremarked is nonsensical. The notion that the Council’s decision was a carefully targeted ideological strike is further buttressed by the comments attached to its refusal. To describe these as incendiary hardly does them justice.

Every year the Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival invites secondary school students to compete for the best interpretation of an excerpt drawn from a Shakespeare play. To date, upwards of 120,000 students have participated in this hugely popular competition. While the Arts Council’s support accounts for only a tenth of the festival’s budget, its decision to deny this year’s funding application was couched in language that has outraged English teachers, English scholars, and educated English-speakers, both here in New Zealand and around the world.

According to The Guardian, the arts funding body, Creative New Zealand, in its advisory panel’s funding assessment document, stated that: “while the festival has strong youth engagement, and a positive impact on participants”, it “did not demonstrate the relevance to the contemporary art context of Aotearoa in this time and place and landscape”.

Putting to one side the self-evident reality that a festival involving thousands of young people in acting, directing, set-designing and painting, costuming, composing and providing incidental music to a host of independent theatrical productions, offers an unassailable prima facie case for being of great relevance to New Zealand’s “contemporary art context”: how should we decode the assessment document’s gnomic formulation: “Aotearoa in this time and place and landscape”?

Given that all state institutions are now required to ensure that their decisions reflect the central cultural and political importance of te Tiriti o Waitangi, as well as their obligation to give practical expression to the Crown’s “partnership” with tangata whenua, the advisory panel’s meaning is ominously clear. At this time, and in this place, the policy landscape has no place for artistic endeavours that draw attention to the powerful and enduring cultural attachments between New Zealand and the British Isles.

Expressed more bluntly, Creative New Zealand is serving notice on applicants for state funding that, unless their projects both acknowledge and enhance the tino rangatiratanga of Māori, they will be deemed to have insufficient relevance to the “contemporary art context” to warrant public financial support.

This is even worse than it sounds. Creative New Zealand is structurally disadvantaging the 60-70 percent of New Zealanders who trace their ancestry to, and derive the greater part of their cultural identity from, the British Isles. Moreover, future applicants unable to demonstrate a genuine familiarity with Māori language and culture, will almost certainly lose out to applicants who can. In other words: “in this time and place and landscape” and absent the most powerful political and/or institutional patrons, Pakeha applicants should expect to be refused Creative New Zealand funding.

Is this drawing too long a bow? Not when the Council’s own assessment document seeks to know “whether a singular focus on an Elizabethan playwright is most relevant for a decolonising Aotearoa in the 2020s and beyond”.

A “decolonising Aotearoa”. Here exposed is the unabashed ideological bias of the Arts Council and its assessors. There is a considerable head-of-steam building among some Māori (and their Pakeha supporters in the public service, academia and the mainstream news media) for a wholesale stripping-out of the political, legal and cultural institutions of the “colonial state”, and for their replacement by the customs and the practices of te ao Māori. At present, this is the agenda of the “progressive” elites only. Certainly, no such proposition has been placed before, or ratified by, the New Zealand electorate.

Not that these same elites would feel at all comfortable about important cultural judgements being placed in the hands of the uneducated masses. Indeed, it is likely that the decision-makers at the Arts Council are entirely persuaded that an important part of their mission is to so radically reshape the cultural landscape that the “decolonising of Aotearoa” comes to be seen as entirely reasonable. If re-educating the benighted Pakeha majority means limiting its own (and its children’s) access to the works of “an Elizabethan playwright” (indisputably among the greatest artists who ever lived) then so be it.

Too much? Once again, the document released by the funding assessors, suggests otherwise.

The panel of assessors is concerned that the festival’s sponsoring organisation, the Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand, is too “paternalistic”, and that the entire Shakespearian genre it is dedicated to promoting is “located within a canon of imperialism and missed the opportunity to create a living curriculum and show relevance”.

That’s an imperialistic “canon” with one “n” – not two! Alluded to here, presumably, is the entire theatrical menu of Western Civilisation: from Aristophanes to Oscar Wilde. (Apart from Ireland, the English had no empire to speak of in Shakespeare’s time!) A cultural collection which, apparently, has no place in a “living curriculum” – from which, one can only deduce, Dead White Males have been ruthlessly purged. Only by excluding the cultural achievements of the past, the Arts Council seems to saying, can any artistic endeavour hope to “show relevance”.

To those who shake their heads in disbelief at this rejection of historical continuity, it is important to make clear just how hostile the post-modern sensibility is to the whole idea of a materially and imaginatively recoverable past – a past with the power to influence both the present and the future. The post-modernists hate the idea of History as both tether and teacher – fettering us to reality, even as it reveals the many ways our forebears have responded to the challenges of their time. When post-modernists talk about relevance, what they really mean is amnesia. Only an amnesiac can inhabit an eternal present – post-modernism’s ideal state-of-being.

Shakespeare and his works are downgraded and rejected precisely because his words and his plays connect us to the past – revealing the tragi-comic continuity of human existence. More than that, Shakespeare’s art is of a power that at once confirms and dissolves history. In his incomparable mastery of the English language he reminds us that we are more than male and female, rich and poor, Māori and Pakeha. What this “Elizabethan playwright” reveals to us, and hopefully will go on revealing to succeeding generations until the end of time, is the wonder and woe of what it means to be human.

Or, in the words of the man himself:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, 

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

A version of this essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 17 October 2022.

Democracy And Daily Life.

Everybody Having A Say: Democracy commands us to look outward; it demands our trust; it tells us what is expected of our humanity; it elevates the collective above the self; it celebrates the things we have in common; it defines our morals and values; it calculates what we owe one another; it discovers life in solidarity; and it finds heaven in, and with, other people.

IS DEMOCRACY still the guiding political doctrine of New Zealand society? In how many institutions do democratic principles still inform decision-making? Do those who wield power in our society even believe in democracy anymore? What does it mean that, over the course of the last 40 years, democratic principles have largely ceased to inspire the conduct of public affairs? When even our political parties no longer take democracy seriously, can we really call ourselves a democratic nation state?

One approach to these questions is to ask ourselves to what extent we are invited to practice democracy in our daily lives. If we are workers, do we get to participate in the decisions of the organisations that employ us? If we are students, do we have any say in the content and structure of our courses? If we are unemployed, or beneficiaries, do we have any rights at all that we are able to enforce? And, if the answer to all these questions is an emphatic “No!”, then, once again, are we truly entitled to characterise the institutions in which we spend most of our waking hours, and/or upon which we rely for our daily bread – democratic?

These are very modern questions. True, participatory, democracy has not been a feature of human existence since the species ceased to operate in small groups of hunter-gatherers and allowed itself to be caught up in the hierarchies of “civilisation” – the city-based cultures made possible by the surpluses of the agricultural revolution.

Hunter-Gatherers - the first (and only true) democrats.

For most of the past 10,000 years the very idea of democracy – of everybody having a say in the running of things – would have been laughable. That was not the way the world worked. Slaves, peasant-farmers and women: the people who kept society going, had no say whatsoever. And even in those rare city-states where “freemen” managed to carve out a political role, democracy proved to be a fragile flower. For most of human history, tyrannies, monarchies and empires have been the norm.

The idea that all human-beings might have a role to play in the governing of a civilised society is only about 300 years old.

Ironically, democracy as a “modern” idea owes much to the encounters of European settlers with the indigenous hunter-gatherer and/or proto-agricultural peoples living in the lands they had “discovered”. The freedom enjoyed by the ordinary members of these societies contrasted sharply with the downtrodden condition of the ordinary people of Europe.

As the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) famously declared: “Man is born free, and everywhere [by which he meant Europe] he is in chains.” The Great Question was thus posed: Can human-beings be both “civilised” and “free”? Throughout the Nineteenth Century, the answer was a confident and optimistic “Yes.” The bloody Twentieth Century, however, vacillated crazily between “Yes” and “No”. So far, the Twenty-First Century’s response seems to be: “What do you mean by ‘civilised’?” and “What do you mean by ‘free’?”

We should not be deceived by this “post-modern” response to The Great Question. It is nothing more than ruling-class temporising. The infamous “One Percent” have already decided that freedom and civilisation are even less compatible today than in the past. They just don’t want to admit it to the Ninety-Nine Percent.

If you would see how free we are, go out into the streets and count the number of human-beings peering into tiny screens, ear-buds inserted, listening to their Master’s voice.

And what is their Master is saying? His message is a simple one: Look inwards for the truth. Trust only your own experience. Who you are cannot be defined by other people. Refuse to be distracted from the self you have made. There is nobody like you. Your morals and values are your own. You don’t owe anything to anyone. Solidarity is death. Hell is other people. (Hat-tip to Jean-Paul Sartre for that last one.)

Democracy contradicts every one of these propositions: it commands us to look outward; it demands our trust; it tells us what is expected of our humanity; it elevates the collective above the self; it celebrates the things we have in common; it defines our morals and values; it calculates what we owe one another; it discovers life in solidarity; and it finds heaven in, and with, other people.

Set forth in this fashion, the problems associated with democracy immediately become apparent. Who wants to be a democrat if it means giving up the self-absorbed existence which the material abundance of Twenty-First Century capitalism makes possible? And Leftists, don’t put too much faith in George Orwell’s plaintiff cry of: “If there is hope … it lies in the Proles”. They want the good life, too!

In a curious way, our self-centred, hyper-technologised, post-modern existence closes the circle on democracy. Originally, in our species’ hunter-gatherer mode, all discussion and debate was focused on the practicalities and purposes of survival. The business of being human was the business of staying alive for another day. Ten-thousand years later, it still is. The only difference, now, is that we believe we can do it on our own.

Democracy will flourish again only after we discover that we can’t.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 29 July 2022.

A Bodyguard of Truths.

One, Two, Many Truths: With the collapse of “actually existing socialism” in 1991, the universities of the West found themselves saddled with a new mission. With their ideological competitors now soundly defeated they were no longer required to demonstrate the superiority of capitalist values. Their job now was to cement in place the crushing victory of free-market capitalism. Intellectual pluralism was out and unchallengeable dogma was in. As far as the academic community was concerned, it was a case of: “We are all commissars now!”

WHAT’S HAPPENED to our universities? That is the question which New Zealanders educated in the universities of the 1970s and early 1980s are asking themselves. Their search for answers has been prompted by the failure of at least two of New Zealand’s academic institutions to defend the principle of free speech on their campuses. Such a dramatic departure from the academic values of the second half of the twentieth century, while disturbing, is surely inseparable from the many other changes that have transformed our universities over the course of the past 35 years. What’s happening on today’s campuses has been brewing for a long time.

What sort of world was it that required our universities to be centres of intellectual pluralism: places where different ideologies contended with one another openly and without undue rancour? First and foremost it was a world in which the struggle between market-driven and market-suppressing ideologies was ongoing. In the 1970s and well into the 1980s the outcome of the Cold War was still in doubt. Vast swathes of the planet and hundred-of-millions of workers remained off-limits to capitalism. No matter how truncated and unfree, there was still an alternative to the free market – and, as any good capitalist will tell you, competition enhances performance.

Universities, like all the other important institutions of capitalist society, had to demonstrate the superiority of capitalist values over communist ideology. If Soviet universities were hidebound bastions of unchallengeable dogma where intellectual unorthodoxy wasn’t simply unwise but punishable by dismissal, imprisonment, or worse, then the West’s universities had to be showcases of intellectual ferment and free debate.

Censorship and the suppression of free speech might be attempted by misguided university authorities (as they were in the early 1960s on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley) but all such attempts were stoutly resisted by staff and students. The Berkeley “Free Speech Movement” marked the beginning of the campus upheavals that made students a by-word for radical dissent throughout the 1960s and 70s.

With the collapse of “actually existing socialism” in 1991, the universities of the West found themselves saddled with a new mission. With their ideological competitors now soundly defeated they were no longer required to demonstrate the superiority of capitalist values. Their job now was to cement in place the crushing victory of free-market capitalism. Intellectual pluralism was out and unchallengeable dogma was in. As far as the academic community was concerned, it was a case of: “We are all commissars now!”

For students, the new regime was even more rigorous. The intellectual leaders of free-market capitalism had noted the effects of heavily state-subsidised or even “free” tertiary education on students. From the perspective of the free-market capitalist, giving young people the space and time to think about the world they were about to enter had proved a near fatal mistake. High fees and crippling student loans were their answer to the radical dissent of the 60s, 70s and 80s. Serendipitously, the policy of “User-Pays” turned out to be a genuine “twofer”. Not only did it transform students from scholars into paying customers; but also, by requiring university staff to give these “customers” what they were paying for, it undermined academic freedom. Students won’t pay for exams that are “too hard”, or enrol in courses that are of “no use”.

That only left the pesky problem of “Truth”. Traditionally, this was the whole point of attending university: learning how to approach, ever more closely, the true nature of things. For the free-market capitalist, however, the only truth worth pursuing was the truth of free-market capitalism. But, how to establish that truth without encouraging the growth of a counter-truth? That was the problem.

The survival strategy free-market capitalism came up with was nothing less than brilliant – and astonishingly successful. To protect the brutal realities of capitalism it was necessary to conceal them behind one, two, many realities. Turn the whole idea of a single truth into a monstrous and authoritarian notion – like the communist ideology of the now defunct Soviet Union. What this meant in practical terms was that while in the STEM disciplines 2+2 had to remain 4; in the humanities 2+2 could equal whatever the hell you liked!

Henceforth, and in perfect conformity with the individualistic ethos of free-market capitalism, each human-being would be given the right to determine their own truths. Naturally, these would be derived from their own insight and experience. The sum total of these insights and experiences constituted an individual’s “identity”. Protecting one’s personal truths and protecting one’s identity were thus made one and the same. Anyone attempting to impose an unwanted and/or false identity upon the individual: one that did not accord with the truths they had derived from their own insight and experience; was to be resisted as an “oppressor”.

Since free-market capitalism can only be overthrown when people are willing to subsume their own individual identities in a collective identity arising out of such all-embracing categories as “human-being”, “citizen”, or “worker”, the irretrievably divisive politics of identity have emerged as free-market capitalism’s surest defence. The only injustice capable of uniting these diverse identities is the wicked lie that there are causes around which it is possible for diverse identities to unite.

This is what the liberal arts faculties of our universities have become: institutions dedicated to the investigation, celebration and protection of personal, sexual, ethnic and gender identity. While the STEM faculties crank out the technologists needed to keep the free-market capitalist machine running, its commissars in the humanities make sure that the monstrous, planet-destroying reality of its existence remains hidden behind a bodyguard of truths. Each of them ready to use the thug’s veto against anyone foolhardy enough to raise their voice in opposition.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 18 October 2019.

The Revolutionary Logic Of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The Harbinger: What lies beyond the cultural logic of late-capitalism? The revolutionary logic of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

FOR AS LONG as socialism constituted a genuine threat, red-baiting remained a constant feature of United States politics. With the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, red-baiting eased-off. Global capitalism was in a triumphant mood and its celebrants looked upon those who still espoused the socialist cause with a mixture of condescension and pity. In their eyes, at least, the socialists had missed history’s bus. The traditional Left had been left behind.

Taking the place of the old-fashioned, Soviet-style Marxist-Leninists in triumphalist capitalism’s new line-up of people to hate were the so-called “Cultural Marxists”. Their mission was said to be nothing less that the complete undermining of Western Society: its values; its traditions; its institutions.

Exactly why the cultural Marxists would want to do this was never made entirely clear. The traditional Marxists had sought to replace the exploitation and individualism of capitalist society with the co-operation and collectivism of socialism. Highly contentious though this goal may have been, it was also reassuringly rational. Cultural Marxism, on the other hand, was presented as being wholly negative. What the cultural Marxists appeared to want was the utter destruction of the system which had defeated “actually existing socialism” in 1991. It was a nihilistic quest for political vengeance – nothing more.

What the triumphalist capitalists failed to grasp was that the new philosophy they mis-named Cultural Marxism was in fact the ferocious enemy of all grand ideological narratives – especially Marxism. Post-modernism, far from being the enemy of the free market, was its principal protector. In a famous essay, published in 1984, the American literary critic and political theorist, Fredric Jameson, described post-modernism as “the cultural logic of late-capitalism”.

Fittingly, it was Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto, who best described capitalism’s terrifying capacity for cultural corrosion:

“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Post-modernism provides the sort of philosophical architecture in which a ruling-class determined to strip society of its most cherished assumptions can find refuge. The triumph of global corporate culture has, however, left maladaptive conservative intellectuals stranded. To them, the world feels as though it is under attack from their worst (i.e. Marxist) enemies. The conservative mind, which clings so tenaciously to “ancient and venerable prejudices”, simply cannot accept that it is capitalism itself which is dictating the dissolution of moral certainty and the indiscriminate mixing of the present with the past. Post-modernism is the surest means of keeping “late-capitalism’s” opponents – the Right as well as the Left – off balance. People cannot walk on air.

People can, however, “face with sober senses” the “real conditions of life” and the real relationships within which they are enmeshed. And it is precisely at such moments: when culturally and politically people are freed from the myths that have constrained their lives; when the post-modernist Wizard of Oz is exposed for the charlatan he is; when reality shatters the screens onto which late-capitalism’s unrealities have been projected; that the politically impossible happens and a 28-year-old Hispanic woman espousing “democratic socialism” defeats the candidate of the Democratic Party machine in the primary election for New York's 14th Congressional District.

What lies beyond the cultural logic of late-capitalism? The revolutionary logic of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Red-baiting is about to be given a new lease on life.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 3 July 2018.

“Convergence Des Luttes” – A Convergence Of Struggles

Is History About To Rhyme? Fifty years ago, exactly, Paris erupted in what looked like (and, by all accounts, felt like) a revolution. Fifty years on, the same groups that convulsed France in May-June 1968 are again occupying universities and participating in mass strikes.

EMMANUEL MACRON will be hoping that Mark Twain was wrong about history. In the French President’s ears, the celebrated American novelist’s famous observation that although history does not repeat itself, it sometimes rhymes, can hardly be reassuring.

Fifty years ago, exactly, Paris erupted in what looked like (and, by all accounts, felt like) a revolution. Fifty years on, the same groups that convulsed France in May-June 1968 are again occupying universities and participating in mass strikes.

There is, however, one feature of the 2018 situation that differs very greatly from 1968. Fifty years ago, the key strategic priority was to extend the political struggle into all sectors of French society. Today, the priority is to draw the divergent campaigns of students and workers closer together. Or, as the French Left put it: convergence des luttes – a convergence of struggles.

That the Left is required to reiterate the most fundamental tenet of collective action: unity is strength; is in many ways symbolic of what was won and lost in the upheavals of May-June 1968.

Crucial to achieving a proper understanding of “68” is accepting that politically it was a colossal failure. Convulsed France may have been by a succession of running street battles between university students and the feared French riot police, mass protest demonstrations, factory occupations and a wave of crippling strikes, but the overwhelming majority of French voters were not persuaded that revolutionary change was necessary. In the snap legislative elections of June 1968, called in response to the tumult in the streets, the government of the day won 353 of 486 seats in the Chamber of Deputies.

But, if “68” was not a political revolution, it most certainly heralded revolutionary changes in French society and culture and, thanks to France’s enormous influence on the world’s intellectual and artistic life, our own.

It was in 1968 that the great “metanarratives” of the 20th Century – socialism and communism in particular – began their long, slow fade into the cultural twilight. In the years that followed, the entire modernist project underwent a similar dissolution.

In its place arose a new project – “post-modernism”. The failure of the grand metanarratives to deliver on their promises had encouraged the growth of an all-encompassing scepticism towards any person or party claiming to have a lock on “The Truth”. Indeed, the whole notion that “The Truth” could even be unlocked was subjected to unrelenting challenge. The idea that there might be as many truths as there were people to identify them won widespread philosophical acceptance. That there was just one universal and unchallengeable definition of reality was derided as the thinking of dead, white, males.

With the 1989-91 collapse of “actually existing socialism” in Eastern Europe and Russia, the forces of intellectual and cultural divergence gathered even more momentum. Questions of individual identity in a world where all kinds of boundaries were becoming blurred, or dissolving altogether, became increasingly important, and the prospect of maintaining, let alone forging, collective political unity was rendered increasingly problematic.

In what the French situationist philosopher, Guy Debord, dubbed the “society of the spectacle”, however, one crucial feature of the post-modernist condition had become harder and harder to discern. Capitalism, in the absence of its rival metanarratives – socialism and communism – had grown immeasurably stronger in a fast-changing world where, in Karl Marx’s famous phrase, “all that is solid melts into air”.

Capitalist technology’s frightening capacity to re-define humanity’s self-perceptions hid effortlessly in plain sight: its universal presence making it all the more difficult to see. Not without cause did the American literary critic and political philosopher, Fredric Jameson, describe post-modernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism”. If everything can be true, then it becomes increasingly difficult to describe anything as false. If late capitalism’s cultural logic gave us post-modernism, then Donald Trump and his “fake news” can only be its logical outcome.

Except, of course, the social and economic consequences of late capitalism are not fake news – they are only too real. No matter how high capitalism’s apologists turn up the static, the blunt facts of joblessness and/or precarious employment; chronic indebtedness; unaffordable housing; rising poverty and in-your-face social inequality continue to constitute the lived experience of a growing percentage of the world’s citizens – even in its wealthiest nations. The society of the spectacle may constantly be driving them apart, but the inescapable reality of their daily lives is, with equal constancy, generating what the old Soviet communists used to call “the objective conditions” for their coming together.

One of the most memorable slogans of the 1968 “revolution that never happened” was the surrealist graffiti Sous les pavés, la plage! (Under the paving stones, the beach.) It captured perfectly the widespread feeling, especially among the young, that for all its materialistic “success”, the post-war world was one from which everything sensual and life-affirming had been bled out. The attributes that made them human, made life worth living, had been drained of colour; buried beneath tons of grey concrete; reduced to an unbearable sameness. In order to find the beach, they had first to tear up the paving-stones – and hurl them at the police.

Divergence, in 1968, made perfect psychic sense. But, politically, it made no sense at all. Emancipation, if it is to endure, must be a collective enterprise. The students and workers of 1968 only railed against the capitalism of their time in various – albeit highly imaginative – ways: the point was to change it.

Fifty years later, convergence des luttes – a convergence of struggles – is the only slogan that offers any hope of sparking a genuine and enduring revolution.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 8 May 2018.

Why Isn’t An Injury To One Sister An Injury To All?

Barred Vision: The problem for western feminists is that, in spite of their cultural and political self-denying ordinances against criticising the treatment of women in other, non-western, societies, the only garden of equality currently showing unequivocal signs of flourishing, is their own. Across vast regions of the planet, not only are women’s rights not flourishing, they are being diminished.

ONE OF THE MOST PERPLEXING political phenomena of the twenty-first century is feminism’s silence in the face of Islamist oppression. For nearly a quarter-of-a-century, as the evidence of weaponised misogyny across the Islamic world has mounted, the absence of globalised feminist resistance has become increasingly difficult to ignore. The contrast between global feminism’s muted response to the oppression of women in the Islamic world, and its ongoing campaign against the sexist excesses of western males, is stark. Why one, and not the other?

To gain some appreciation of the discrepancy’s magnitude, it is instructive to compare the world’s reaction to the imposition of apartheid on South African blacks and the imposition of Islamic fundamentalism on Afghan women.

As news of deliberate and vicious gender discrimination filtered out of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, western women and men recoiled in shocked disbelief. Girls were being sent home from school. Women professionals: doctors, scientists, engineers, teachers and nurses were being dismissed from their jobs and ordered back behind the doors of enforced domesticity. Any woman found walking the streets unchaperoned, or wearing Western dress, ran the risk of being whipped (or worse) by the Taliban’s religious police. Women found guilty of adultery were being publicly executed in soccer stadiums.

Like something out of The Handmaid's Tale. Women faced public execution under the rule of the Taliban.

There was, of course, some feminist criticism of the Taliban regime, but it was sparse and uncoordinated. Those who waited for the leaders of second-wave feminism to place themselves in the vanguard of an international movement modeled on the global campaign against Apartheid, waited in vain.

When US forces and their Afghan allies finally overthrew the Taliban regime in the aftermath of 9/11, most of the women who openly and unashamedly celebrated its demise – and the liberation of their sisters – came from the Right.

Undoubtedly, left-wing western feminists were also thrilled to see the back of the hateful Taliban government and its religious police, but they were hesitant to say so too loudly for fear of giving the impression that they in any way supported the military adventurism of President George W. Bush. The presence of US forces in Afghanistan, regardless of its collateral benefits, was proof that western imperialism was alive and well. In the Left’s hierarchy of oppression, white people lording it over brown people was considered a more egregious sin than brown men lording it over brown women.

Correcting the violent sexism of brown men was not the responsibility of privileged white women. The only people who could, legitimately, liberate the women of the Third World, were Third World women. If white women were looking for sexist male dragons to slay, then they need look no further than their own workplaces – and homes.

Western Feminism checks its privilege.

Furthermore, the whole notion of there being a universal definition of right and wrong, by which the many and diverse peoples of the world could be judged, had itself fallen under left-wing suspicion.

Westerners might be entitled to judge other westerners by how closely they adhered to the moral precepts of their common culture. Much less certain, however, was their entitlement to judge the behaviour of people from other, non-western, cultures.

Among western leftists, morality had become culture-specific. If imperialism’s victims asked for support, then they would be given it, unquestioningly. If not, then they would tend to their own political gardens exclusively.

The problem for western feminists is that, in spite of these cultural and political self-denying ordinances, the only garden currently showing unequivocal signs of flourishing, is their own. Across vast regions of the planet, not only are women’s rights not flourishing, they are being diminished.

In the patriarchal cultures the western left consistently refuses to condemn, the misogynists look on with a combination of scorn and fear as powerful western men are forced to account for their past and present abuse of women. “There but for the grace of God, and our own unyielding adherence to His laws”, they mutter, “goes our own religious and political power.”

Just because western leftists turn a blind eye to the depredations of their brothers in the Islamic world does not mean that Muslim fundamentalists are similarly blind to the consequences of treating women as equal human-beings.

Prior to the American Civil War, the southern states argued for continued tolerance of their “peculiar institution”. Northern abolitionists rejected utterly the slave-owners’ self-serving cultural relativism.

Western feminists owe their Islamic sisters nothing less.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 January 2018.

Very Different Personages: Vladislav Surkov - Putin's Puppet-Master.

 

The Kremlin Demiurge: "[Vladislav] Surkov is the real genius of the Putin era. Understand him and you understand not only contemporary Russia but a new type of power politics, a breed of authoritarianism far subtler than the 20th-century strains.” - Peter Pomerantsev

 

ADAM CURTIS is a documentary-maker whose work has a way of making the world look and feel completely different. The secret to the success of series as varied as Century of the Self (2002), The Power of Nightmares (2004), and his most recent work, BitterLake (2015), is Curtis’s ability to bring what’s been hidden in History’s shadows into the light.

 

The nineteenth century British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, remarked that: “The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” Curtis not only takes us behind the scenes, he introduces us to the personages.

 

The latest personage to whom Curtis’s viewers have been introduced is Vladislav Surkov – Vladimir Putin’s political impresario. In the words of Peter Pomerantsev, writing in The London Review of Books: “Surkov is the real genius of the Putin era. Understand him and you understand not only contemporary Russia but a new type of power politics, a breed of authoritarianism far subtler than the 20th-century strains.”

 

Surkov’s great insight into the character of the post-Soviet era was that it would be an epoch devoid of ideological conviction. A society in which all of the grand narratives of the 20th Century (from Absolutism to Socialism to Capitalism) have been tried and found wanting. A place where cynicism and irony will ride shotgun for an amoral authoritarianism whose twinned priorities of self-enrichment and self-aggrandisement recognise no limits.

 

It is a world that fosters in its hapless citizens feeling of vertiginous disorientation. According to Pomerantsev’s chilling description:

 

“[T]he stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.”

 

If all this is beginning to sound unsettlingly familiar, Pomerantsev has more. Surkov, he says, has perfected what he calls “sovereign democracy”, a new form of governance “in which democratic institutions are maintained without any democratic freedoms”. Surkov was also “the man who [turned] television into a kitsch Putin-worshipping propaganda machine”.

 

If you think that’s coming uncomfortably close to a description of New Zealand television (substituting “Key” for “Putin”) then you’re not alone.

 

Obviously, New Zealanders are not ruled over by a political beast as big or as dangerous as Putin, but Pomerantsev’s depiction of a political environment subject to continuous and disorienting shifts of perspective; of leaders performing on a revolving stage whose sets and props are constantly changing; rings more than a few Kiwi bells.

 

Certainly it is Curtis’s view that the curiously “post-modern” style of politics that has distinguished the UK under David Cameron and George Osborne owes a great deal to the political ideas and methods of Vladislav Surkov. (Curtis illustrates his point by advancing video images of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and then rolling them backward – providing a potent visual representation of Osborne’s black is white, 2 + 2 = 5 political style.)

 

Our own Prime Minister and Finance Minister display a similar, loose, relationship with reality. John Key, in particular, seems able to shift his shape almost at will. From the saccharine family man ordering in Saturday night pizza; to the jokey-blokey sports-lover trading wisecracks with commercial radio shock-jocks; to the dead-eyed critic of Nicky Hager’s latest revelations daring the Press Gallery to contradict him; our own post-modern performance artist makes it easy to see from whence his fine-arts student daughter draws her inspiration.

 

Pomerantsev offers us a frightening glimpse of the sort of world to which Surkovian politics is leading us:

 

“In Soviet Russia you would have been forced to give up any notion of artistic freedom if you wanted a slice of the pie. In today’s Russia, if you’re talented and clever, you can have both. This makes for a unique fusion of primitive feudal poses and arch, postmodern irony. A property ad displayed all over central Moscow earlier this year [2011] captured the mood perfectly. Got up in the style of a Nazi poster, it showed two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan ‘Life Is Getting Better’. It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it’s not quite serious either. It’s sort of both. It’s saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we’re just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we’re making money playing it and won’t let anyone subvert its rules). A few months ago there was a huge ‘Putin party’ at Moscow’s most glamorous club. Strippers writhed around poles chanting: ‘I want you, prime minister.’ It’s the same logic. The sucking-up to the master is completely genuine, but as we’re all liberated 21st-century people who enjoy Coen brothers films, we’ll do our sucking up with an ironic grin while acknowledging that if we were ever to cross you we would quite quickly be dead.”

 

To which, as Adam Curtis rightly observes, we can only say: “Oh Dear.”

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road blogsites on Tuesday, 24 March 2015.

Welcome To Middle Earth

Re-imagining New Zealand: Forty years of official biculturalism and assertive indigeneity have failed to suppress the colonisers' desire to refashion their new world in the image of the old. In this regard, "Middle Earth" has proved to be a much more comfortable cultural fit than "Aotearoa".

 

ONE HUNDRED PERCENT Middle Earth. That’s how the tourism industry has decided to promote New Zealand. Our national airline has even contributed one of its airliners, emblazoned nose to tail with images from The Hobbit movie, to elevate the promotional cause. This flying billboard will wow those attending the film’s “red carpet” premiere with a low-level fly-past.

 

Asked by a local journalist for his response to Air New Zealand’s generosity, an executive from the movie’s maker, Warner Bros, didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or titter. His consternation is understandable. Very few countries have been as willing to abase themselves quite so completely to the “soft-power” of Hollywood as we poor deluded Kiwis.

 

Having successfully persuaded New Zealand’s government to re-word its labour and immigration laws to industry specifications, increase its financial incentives and provide Warner Bros with millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity, the Hollywood moguls should be blushing with shame. More likely they’re kicking themselves for not demanding more.

 

And considering what we’ve been willing to do unasked – who could blame them! A friend of mine, returning from a trip to the United States, told me of his cringing embarrassment upon discovering that Air New Zealand’s passenger safety instructional video now doubles as a trailer for The Hobbit (complete with the Gollum character crawling up the aisle in search of  his “Prescioussss” – presumably the nearest exit!)

 

Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why are we so quick to dismiss even the slightest criticism of the Middle Earth franchise? How has The Hobbit’s director, Sir Peter Jackson, acquired such a powerful grip upon the public’s imagination and affection, and thus upon the direction of Government policy? What has caused a little nation located in the South Pacific to expend so much time, energy and money transforming itself into a bucolic version of medieval England?

 

Perhaps, after nearly forty years of official decolonisation, Sir Peter’s masterful adaptation of Tolkien’s masterpieces has opened a long-locked door to the colonisers’ cultural storehouse. Most New Zealanders are, when all is said and done, English speakers and (as Maori have been telling us for nearly forty years) culture and language are inextricably linked.

 

Transported half way across the planet our ancestors lost little time in reshaping Aotearoa’s natural landscape with flora and fauna appropriate to their vocabulary. And alongside the oaks and elms, sheep and cattle they’d introduced, they also constructed churches, schools, town halls and railway stations designed to “age” their young colony. It’s why the centre of Christchurch used to, and the heart of Dunedin still does, look like it’s stood there for centuries.

 

Ageing The Colony: St Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Auckland: "A baroque tower in Symonds Street that appears to have stood there since 1730." (Photo by Chris Harris)

 

Two great waves of cultural change have laid much of this “Better Britain” flat. The first was the wave of brutal modernist architecture which reduced the neo-classical and Gothic buildings of our Victorian forebears to rubble. And as modernism flattened New Zealand’s constructed landscape, so the second great wave: officially sanctioned bi-culturalism and assertive indigeneity; deconstructed its fondest cultural assumptions and undermined its intellectual confidence.

 

This great laying to waste of the West’s best stories, which goes by the name of Post-Modernism, is described by the social theorist, Frederic Jameson, as “the cultural logic of late-capitalism”. It’s most devastating characteristic is its power to dissolve boundaries. High and popular culture mingle promiscuously in the post-modern societies of the 21^st Century; as do past and present, fact and fiction, science and religion.

 

Sir Peter Jackson floats freely in this post-modern world – as his mischievous 1995 faux documentary, Forgotten Silver, made very clear. Who better, then, to overlay Tolkien’s Middle Earth upon a New Zealand landscape already transformed by the ecological imperialism of its Victorian colonisers? The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and now The Hobbit, may “only” be movies, but that has not prevented them from turning Mt Ngaurahoe into “Mt Doom” and Matamata into “Hobbiton”.

 

Tolkein’s writings may be fictional but they possess a cultural power that is very real. And thanks to the cinematographic skills of Sir Peter Jackson and the digital magic of Weta Workshops, Pakeha New Zealanders have been given reference points that owe nothing to their country’s indigenous culture. In our post-modern world, where reality has taken on an alarmingly subjective quality, “Middle Earth” is a much more comfortable fit than “Aotearoa”.

 

More comfortable, too, for dwellers in a “West” beset with economic, political, environmental and cultural challenges. A West in whose eyes New Zealand stands as a refuge every bit as wholesome and protected as “The Shire”. New Zealanders’ desire for cultural reassurance and comfort is thus reinforced by an international audience desperate to escape the daunting challenges of multiculturalism and austerity.

 

No, the tourism industry and Air New Zealand should have little difficulty in filling those airliners. Not while Middle Earth is so much more enjoyable than the real one.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 27^th November 2012.

Tolerating Islam

Meetings Of Minds: In the great trading cities of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, Islamic civilisation florished for close to 300 years. How did a culture once synonymous with tolerance and learning become so closely associated with violence and fanaticism?

THERE WAS A TIME when tolerance, compassion and the search for enlightenment were the singular virtues of Islam. When the peoples of Christendom still bent their knees to brutal mounted warriors, and the Papacy was little more than a trophy for the corrupt inheritors of Rome’s decaying grandeur, Islamic civilisation was the wonder of the world.

In the space of barely three centuries the followers of the Prophet Mohammed blended the best of the classical era’s legacy with the strict moral discipline and judicious social organisation of the Islamic faith.

 

In the Muslim Caliphate, which stretched from the Euphrates River to the Rock of Gilbraltar, Muslims, Christians and Jews co-existed in relative harmony. In return for a modest tax, the adherents of non-Islamic faiths were allowed to live in peace. In this tolerant environment scholars and craftsmen were encouraged to extend the boundaries of knowledge and technology. The resulting cultural flowering, subsidised by the immense wealth of the Caliphate’s trading centres, ushered in a golden age. Islamic merchants and traders dominated the exchange of the raw products of Europe and Africa for the finished goods of China and India.

 

Indeed, it might almost be said that the military and economic success of Islamic civilisation was the goad that drove Christendom to embark on its epic voyages of exploration, its exploitation of Africa and the Americas, and the rapid development of the mercantile and industrial expertise which ultimately permitted the peoples of Europe to dominate the planet.

 

Westerners all-too-easily forget that when Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos de la Fonterra on 3 August 1492, the Eurasian landmass was dominated by two vast super-powers: the Ottoman and Chinese empires. The kingdoms and principalities of Christendom were bit-players.

 

The beliefs and institutions we prize most highly: the essential equality and “inalienable rights” of all human-beings; the primacy of reason and the scientific method over religious faith and “primitive” superstition; our democratic system of government, within which, alone, human equality and individual liberty, especially the freedom of expression, can hope to survive; all are the product of the West’s relatively brief (300 years) sojourn as global hegemon.

 

But all around us are signs that the era of Western hegemony is waning. Islam has become the vector of its decline – and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

 

From the First Crusade of 1096-99 to the Sykes-Picot “Agreement” of 1916, Westerners have disposed of the lands of Muslim peoples with breath-taking arrogance. The latter’s singular misfortune to live on top of the world’s most productive oil fields has only whetted the West’s appetite for domination. A resource which could have led to the flowering of a new golden age of Islamic civilisation has been sequestered for the United States and its allies by a vicious congeries of kleptomaniacal kings, sultans, emirs and military strongmen – all watched over by the garrison state of Israel.

 

Are we truly surprised that the West’s history of invasion, occupation and exploitation in Muslim lands has armed the most regressive and murderous interpreters of Mohammed’s message? What chance had moderation in the face of Western imperialism? Who else but the Wahabbists, Salafists and Jihadis were likely to benefit from the depredations of the Western powers?

 

While these extremists batter at the gates of the West: pronouncing fatwas on novelists, murdering artists and, as we have seen over the past fortnight, attacking US embassies and clamouring for the head of the film-maker responsible for the risible Innocence of Muslims; the cultural confidence of the West, its adherence to Enlightenment values, has already given way. Post-imperial guilt has given birth to the pernicious cultural relativism of post-modernism, and transformed the intellectual guardians of the West’s egalitarian and libertarian traditions into militant Islam’s fifth column.

 

Within the space of twenty years, the world will likely witness the ratification of a United Nations’ international convention, sponsored by the United States and its allies, outlawing the defamation and/or scandalising of the world’s faith communities. Once adopted by national legislatures, it will be a crime to write a novel like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, or make a film like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.

 

Let this paraphrase of W. B. Yeats’ The Second Coming be Freedom of Expression’s epitaph:

 

The best lacked all conviction, while the worst

Were full of passionate intensity.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 September 2012.