POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Contents

SCROLL DOWN FOR THE ESSAYS BELOW

 

What an Insult - As a society we are beginning to fight against insult, but what kind of world would we live in if no one could insult another person? Could it be that banning insult is a form of totalitarianism in itself?

 

Whigging It - For centuries British politics has been a battle between traditionalist and modernist. At the centre of each battle has been a down-trodden element of society, which was then ditched. Should modern minorities watch out?

 

Uni-Cult -Universities used to take only the top academic potential from schools. Now almost anyone can go. Does the university experience now leave us with a mediocrisy rather than able professionals?

 

Picasso Rising - People used to use commonsense in everyday life. Today, it seems as if commonsense is being left behind. But this is not the case. Rather, commonsense has been politicised. But can society work with a politicisation of such an important function?

 

what an insult

 

   The Nanny State encroaches on and on. Slowly - apathetically - we are abandoning our right to be individuals, family members and thinking human beings. We used to say that the personal is the political. We never dreamt that it would become a reality, with politicians doing the thinking for us. And if such thinking should be done by anyone, it certainly shouldn't be politicians.

   Nowhere is this problem more obvious than in the moves towards new laws on insult. Taking viable standards that insist we don't insult racial or sexual groups to the extreme, we will soon be unable to express an opinion. Already we are attuned to the idea that a criticism of any sort is a personal insult. And when this becomes the norm, free speech will have become a thing of the past.

   Following on from an inability to insult will come an onward march towards curbing insulting behaviour. Take the beloved cleavage put on display by so many today. This will insult a whole host of religions. Elderly people kissing tends to be frowned upon by the young. Sayings such as Hocus Pocus and Mumbo Jumbo are insults to Catholicism and African religions respectively. The westernised Halloween party is an insult to paganism. Even left and right wing politics can be seen as insulting to the other.

   The time could well come when all these valid acts and behaviour could be classed as unlawful through insult. In Britain alone we could be dealing with a hundred million thought crimes a day. We will all be criminals then.

   Of course, that is the ultimate. But unless we make it clear that forms of insult are a natural consequence of people having a particular lifestyle, our supposed freedoms from insult will result in an inability to do anything at all.

   Two strains of thought seem to be pervading such laws of insult. The first is a creeping politicisation of commonsense. In the past, people have instinctively known what is, or is not, an acceptable insult. This divide no longer seems clear. Such a problem is becoming endemic to society. But the second train of thought is even more worrying. More and more the authorities are attempting to place a sense of guilt upon our actions and thoughts.

   Making us all feel guilty about everything is an important political tool, conditioning us to certain degrees of compliance. Medieval Europe perfected the behavioural model in proscribing certain behaviour as against the Will of God. Such empowerment of the political over the personal is the road to totalitarianism, with the State as parent, and the population a new form of mental serf. There is no greater insult to freedom than that.

 

(c) Anthony North, February 2005

 

whigging it

 

   British politics has a natural order of traditionalist and modernist. This system had become well formed by the Middle Ages, with the monarch and aristocracy forming the traditionalists, and a growing modernist movement in local elders and the great Guilds. The traditionalists ruled by keeping down the peasant population in Feudalism. Eventually the modernists began to gain ground over the traditionalist rulers in the growth of city cooperatives, giving wealth to a fledgling middleclass.

   The eventual outcome of this natural political order was the Whigs and Tories, representing modernist and traditionalist values in Parliament. The Whigs won the day, causing the middleclass revolution that was the Industrial Revolution. This was paved by convincing the poor that their lot would improve due to industrialization. The upshot was, of course, more poverty and squalor as the class they claimed to help was enchained in a system that gave the middleclass control. However, traditional values again triumphed in the modern Conservative Party, with the Whigs going into decline with the creation of Labour.

   This modern period of politics was thought to break the mould of the traditionalist/modernist struggle. But the reality can better be seen in extending politics back into the Middle Ages as above. If we do so, then Labour becomes just another weapon in the modernist fight against tradition. Which brings us, of course, to modern New Labour.

   New Labour appears, today, very similar to the old modernist movement, maybe because that is what it has always been. And in realising that New Labour is a natural continuance of the modernist ideal, we can begin to see where the party is coming from. Seeming determined to trash every element of traditional power in this country, it claims to do so in the name of minority rights, allowing them to reclaim respect from centuries of persecution.

   Unfortunately, politics has never been so sweet, as can be seen by the requirement to keep down Mediaeval peasantry and working class factory workers, even though the authorities said it was for their benefit. The purpose of the New Labour onslaught upon traditionalism is the same as it was in the Industrial Revolution - an attempt to grab power from the natural, traditional powerbase of this country.

   Agreed, often the traditional wing of British politics has been dictatorial and just as keen to grab power as the modernist. But let us not let their failings hide what is really going on in the modernist mindset; for if oppressed minorities such as gays and ethnic minorities think for a moment that the modernists really care about them, then they are living a dream, just as naïve as the working class in times past.

   Persecuted minorities are presently being used as stooges in the eternal political balance between tradition and the modern. And believe me, when their usefulness is over - when they have diluted traditional values to the point that they cannot fight back - the minorities will be cast aside as worthless. And there will be the danger that their persecution will begin all over again.

   I, for one, would hate that to happen.

 

(c) Anthony North, July 2004

 

uni-cult

 

No one is more boring than an intellectual. By the millions we ignore them, advising they get a life, or take up something less dangerous such as stamp collecting. Usually single-minded, they can spend their life on the accumulation of data for a specific hypothesis, or pore over the works of a particular previous intellectual who is invariably brighter than they will ever be. Certainly they are needed, but we should really put guards on those ivory towers.

   Before being accused of glorifying the idea of dumbing-down, I must put a proviso. Intellectualism should be followed by as many people as possible - exercise for the mind does wonders. But are today's intellectuals really bright, or are they just playing? Further, is modern intellectualism a valid use of free-thinking, or has something sinister been creeping into our universities.

   In previous times, few people reached the heady heights of intellectualism. As such, those who did had a brain that was up to the task. In today's world of shoving everyone in a university who has ever opened a book, we can argue that their intellectual capacity to think independently of their lecturers must be diminished. And this could well be leading to a disturbing phenomenon in wider society.

   Every now and again a cult will hit the headlines because they've committed mass suicide or shot-up a bunch of US agents. The secret of cultism is that a charismatic guru hooks a number of middleclass, reasonably intelligent kids who are searching for something in life. Bombarded by ideas of a world how the guru sees it, a form of subservience grows, with the guru feeding off their adoration, and the kids feeding off his purpose.

   The above description of cultism shares many similarities to the modern lecturer/student relationship. Intelligent, but without the capacity for free-thinking, the student can, today, suffer a form of brainwashing, taking a specific mentality out into the professional world he will later inhabit. Wrapped up in the academic process, this mentality will have little in the way of understanding of normal life. Hence, when this new professional middleclass begins to impose their standards on the rest, it will be of a different order to what most people understand.

   The result is that a gulf grows wider and wider between those who govern and the governed. Whereas in the past the intellectuals were few in number, and usually stereotyped as eccentric, the new intellectualism wears a suit and ingrains itself in every area of life. With an essentially liberal credo, the uni-cult disciples then go on to wreak havoc with society, imposing such abominations as rampant political correctness, and, as with the cult disciple, unable to see the damage because they cannot conceive that they, or their lecturers, are wrong.

 

(c) Anthony North, March 2005

 

picasso rising

 

The 18th century Enlightenment confirmed mankind as a thinking, reasoning machine. At least, that is what we are told. But perhaps we simply swapped one form of thinking for another. For instance, the success of the Enlightenment was the success of science. Through science, man learnt that he could sort out his problems himself without relying on God.

   This was achieved by the realisation that the world was adaptable to scientific law. And once such a law was established - such as universal gravitation - the universe obeyed the law ad infinitum.

   Through such reasoning, man's laws were soon transferred from the scientific realm to the socio-political; for if the world behaved in uniform fashion, surely laws could be established to guarantee the same from mankind. However, in the intellectual’s absolute belief that he was right, could it be that, rather than making man think for the first time, he actually destroyed a mode of thinking that had lasted man for millenia?

   Previous to the Enlightenment, the supernatural tended to rule, coming from a world parallel to the physical, and guiding man on his perilous path through life. Today, we dismiss this attitude as superstition. But whilst there were many abuses of this system in terms of hierarchy, at the grass roots level what was the supernatural all about?

   In essence, we can best see the supernatural as a form of storytelling, the spirituality it produced bonding man to his fellow man and environment. Through a system of taboo and ritual, man realised constraints which allowed his society and environment to function.

   In return for this, man achieved a sense of belonging and direction. We can see why the liberal would not like this world, for it reduces individualism. But this world did contain one vital ingredient that was left behind by enlightened thought and scientific methodology. In the tales pre-Enlightenment people told each other, the practicalities of commonsense were passed on from person to person. In the Old Wives' Tale, etc, commonsense ruled the grass roots intellect. And many possible traumas of life were avoided.

   Science never liked commonsense, and obviously did not like the pre-Enlightenment world where it belonged. Commonsense often got in the way of scientific theory. For although commonsense may dictate a certain action be taken, if science cannot find data to prove the hypothesis, then commonsense has to be ignored until data can be accumulated. This almost robotic attitude was similarly passed into socio-political scientific law.

   The people, however, thought different. As in the times of Christendom - when European hierarchy was Christian and the people remained pagan - commonsense remained on the street whilst enlightened intellectuals began to build their ivory towers. And commonsense remained until, at last, liberal enlightened idiots found a practical way to banish commonsense from the streets and impose a top to bottom enlightened ethic that could really do the job.

   The secret was to wrap noble sentiments into a package which conned the people that it was good for them. For instance, it is right not to be racist or homophobic or sexist; it is right to want to be as safe as possible at work, at play and in the home; it is right that we should have fundamental human rights which guarantee our freedom from authority and abuse. But by use of such noble sentiments, a politically authorised triple force of political correctness, Health and Safety legislation and human rights lawyers formed a triple commissariat to grasp commonsense from the people and place it in the hands of authority.

   Today we live in a world ruled by the politicisation of commonsense. Believing that before the Enlightenment we didn't really think, the new liberalism has decided that without their guidance, we cannot be allowed to think at all. With authority becoming the nanny and jailer of society, only their dictats can be classed as commonsense, us poor, unintelligent masses unable to grasp essential points which could allow our lives to be better. Only through their politicisations can life really be better and fulfilling.

   The problem with this is that commonsense dictates that a solution to any problem must come from a reaction to the problem at the personal, or local, level. Commonsense cannot be tied to general rules, but requires mentation within the individual to a given situation. Hence, a politicisation of commonsense into general rules becomes the opposite of commonsense - in effect, an absurdity.

   Because a general appreciation of commonsense can never be specific to a given situation, all that commonsense at this level can achieve is an image; and in applying it across the board, high and low cultural interpretation are mixed. The end result is a shallow form of commonsense which reverses the definite rationality behind the concept. Nothing becomes of value in terms of judgment, and we end up living in a surreal world where nothing quite makes sense.

   This is the world when commonsense is taken from the people and placed in the hands of authority. It is an upside-down world of absurdity and surrealism. We live, in effect, as a pale image of a Picasso masterpiece, and nothing makes any sense to anyone. Which makes thinking no longer common, and it certainly has no sense.

 

© Anthony North, March 2005