Friday, August 30, 2024
Thursday, August 29, 2024
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Tuesday, August 27, 2024
Monday, August 26, 2024
Woke: the Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology (The University of Buckingham)
This 15-week course presents a theoretical, historical and social scientific analysis of cultural socialism. Uniquely among university courses worldwide, it focuses attention on the western cultural left and its accompanying symbolic system of wokeness – defined as the sacralization of minority identity.
The aim is to assess woke in an empirical and analytical manner rather than from a particular political or normative position.
The course begins by defining terms and setting out competing theories regarding the origin and reproduction of wokeness in the West. Students will obtain a grounding in the history, ideology, organizational dynamics, public opinion, electoral implications, policy aspects and philosophy of this idea. This will involve consideration of how woke interacts with classical liberalism, populism and conservatism to produce a recursive radicalizing pattern, abetting polarization. Woke will also be examined in light of global population shifts and techno-economic developments.
The course is non-credit bearing, with students able to select from one of three options:
Option A
- Self-Study.
- 15 Exclusive Lectures; Video and Audio Files
- Lecture Slides (downloadable)
- Readings based on leading research
- Price: £80
Option B
- Lecture with one 90-minute seminar per week.
- 15 Exclusive Lectures; Video and Audio Files
- Lecture Notes (downloadable)
- Readings based on leading research
- 15 Group Seminars
- Price: £480
Option C
This is for prospective students who are interested in completing:
- 1-year Master’s Degree in the Politics of Cultural Conflict based on a 35,000-word dissertation (£10,300)
OR
- PhD in the Cultural Politics based on 80-100,000 word dissertation (£8,267 per year for 3 years)
Seminars and in-person classes begin in October 2024.
Woke: the Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology | University of Buckingham
Saturday, August 24, 2024
Friday, August 23, 2024
Wednesday, August 21, 2024
Sunday, August 18, 2024
Saturday, August 17, 2024
Wednesday, August 14, 2024
Monday, August 12, 2024
How Britain ignored its
ethnic conflict This week’s riots won’t be the last (by
Aris Roussinos)
Following the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, the
aftermath, like those of other recent terrorist atrocities, was marked by what
later revealed to be a
coordinated British government policy of “controlled spontaneity”. Pre-planned
vigils and inter-faith events were rolled out, and people handed out flowers
“in apparently unprompted gestures of love and support” as part of an
information operation “to shape public responses, encouraging individuals to
focus on empathy for the victims and a sense of unity with strangers, rather
than reacting with violence and anger”. The aim was to present an image of
depoliticised community solidarity within the state’s benevolent, if not
adequately protective, embrace.
What we have seen since the Southport attack is the
precise opposite response: uncontrolled spontaneity, which
government policy is expressly designed to prevent. When Keir Starmer attended
the scene to lay flowers, he was heckled by locals demanding “change”
and accusing him of failure to keep the British people safe. Self-evidently,
Starmer, who has been in power for less than a month, bears no personal
responsibility for the attack: instead, he was derided as a representative of
Britain’s political class, and of a British state that cannot maintain a basic
level of security for its subjects.
In the same way, rioters in Southport — fuelled by
false claims the killer was a Muslim refugee — cheered when they injured police during the
violent disorder that followed the initial vigil, which included attempts to burn down the town mosque in what can
only be termed a pogrom. Like the riot that followed in Hartlepool, violence
against emissaries of the state — the police — was coupled with objectively
racist and Islamophobic actual and attempted violence against migrants.
There are strong parallels with the ongoing disorder in Ireland,
which is an explicit reaction to mass migration: last year’s Dublin riots,
sparked by the attempted murder of schoolchildren by an Algerian migrant, were
in some ways a foreshadowing for the current mass disturbances in Britain. In
Southport, the spark for the rioting — the attack itself — was swiftly absorbed
into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration: protestors carried signs demanding the state “Deport
them” and “Stop the Boats” to “Protect our kids at any cost”. As in Ireland, presumably local women were
prominent, hectoring police and
silencing wavering voices with appeals to group solidarity. While this is a
very different dynamic to previous football casuals-dominated street
mobilisation organised around Tommy Robinson — as represented by
Wednesday’s desultory clashes in Whitehall —
liberal commentators in Britain, as in Ireland, have nevertheless chosen to
portray the violence as orchestrated by Robinson, rather than him piggybacking
on it, as is also the case in Ireland.
Shocked by the jolt to their worldview, British
liberals, for whom the depoliticisation of the political choice of mass
migration is a central moral cause, have also blamed Nigel Farage, the media,
the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Vladimir Putin for the rioting, rather
than the explicitly articulated motivations of the rioters themselves. But
there is a matter-of-fact social-scientific term for the ongoing disorder:
ethnic conflict, a usage studiously avoided by the British state for fear of
its political implications. As the academic Elaine Thomas observed in in her 1998 essay “Muting
Interethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain”, the British state is unusual in
Europe for being “exceptionally liberal in granting political rights to new
arrivals” while dampening interethnic conflict by simply refusing to talk about
the issue at all, and placing social sanctions on those who do. When it works,
it works: “Interethnic conflict has never been as severe, prolonged, or violent
in Britain as it has been in many other countries” — for which we should be
thankful.
But as Thomas notes, sometimes it doesn’t work, as
in Enoch Powell’s famous intervention, supported by 74% of British respondents
polled at the time, when, “once the silence was broken and public debate was
opened, the liberals found themselves in a weak position. Having focused on
silencing the issue, they had not developed a discourse to address it,” and
found themselves discomfited by demonstrations in support of Powell. The Labour
government of the day dealt with with the rising tensions surrounding
immigration by rushing through emergency legislation that imposed an effective
moratorium on extra-European immigration via the 1968 Commonwealth
Immigrants Act, with the aim of assimilating migrants already here
and dampening nascent violence by preventing others arriving.
Under New Labour, however, this mostly successful
policy was torn up, with the
conscious intention of transforming Britain into a specifically multi-ethnic —
rather than multiracial — society, largely derived from the era’s brief
enthusiasm for globalisation. Downstream of then-fashionable
social-scientific theories on the
simultaneous inevitability and desirability of such a transformation, policy
papers like the Runnymede Trust’s influential report “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” pushed
to reshape Britain as “a community of communities”, a genuinely multicultural
state that rejected the “narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition
of the nation”. Ethnic identities — of which the British one was framed as one
among many — were to be embraced, within the parameters of the newly
multicultural state, and immigration restrictions lifted to achieve this goal.
Yet Labour’s shift towards an explicitly ethnic
understanding of community relations would not last long. Following the 2001 ethnic riots in
Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, the Labour government performed a dramatic
about-turn. As the Tunisian academic Hassen Zriba observed: “All
of a sudden, multiculturalism became the disease that needed urgent solution.”
Blair’s government commissioned five separate reports, all of which declared
“that excessive cultural diversity is a hindrance to inter-racial harmony, and
that community cohesion is the best solution.”
This emphasis on community cohesion was heightened
by the mass casualty jihadist attacks of the 2000s and 2010s, leading
inexorably — along with the Prevent programme, widened state powers of coercion
and surveillance, and the accelerated construction of a civic conception of
Britishness — to the “controlled spontaneity” project, the terminus of which we
witnessed in Southport. While the other northwest European states which adopted
a multicultural ethos, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, have since abandoned it,
rhetorically the British state is still committed to multiculturalism.
In practice, however, the British state has quietly
adopted a revived version of assimilationism. Over the past two decades, a
capacious version of Britishness has been
constructed around little more than superficial national symbolism and the
desire to avoid ethnic conflict, euphemised as “British values”.
Interestingly, Blair himself, who now rejects multiculturalism,
has recently become an advocate of Lee Kuan Yew, in whose political philosophy
Singapore’s ethnic diversity is, rather than a strength, an undesirable hindrance derived
from well-meaning British colonial intentions.
“In practice,
however, the British state has quietly adopted a revived version of
assimilationism.”
But latent authoritarianism aside, Starmer is no
Lee Kuan Yew. His faltering attempt to steer the discourse following the
Southport attack towards tackling “knife crime” — itself a British state
euphemism — highlights the state’s ideological inability to address ethnic
tensions frankly, and so manage them effectively. If it were happening in
another country, British journalists and politicians would discuss such
dynamics matter-of-factly. This is, after all, simply the nature of human
societies. Indeed, it is one of the primary reasons refugees flee their
countries for Britain in the first place.
Yet when they occur in our own country, such
dynamics are too dangerous to even name. Instead, ethnic groups are
euphemistically termed “communities”, and the state-managed avoidance of ethnic
conflict is termed “community relations”. When Balkan Roma rioted in Leeds
recently, it was as an ethnic group responding to what it saw as the British
state’s interference in its lives: the British state, in return, addressed its
response to the nebulous “Harehills community”. When Hindus and Muslims engaged
in violent intercommunal clashes in Leicester two years ago, it was as rival
ethnoreligious groups, and was again responded to by the British state as an
issue to be dealt with by “community leaders” — the state euphemism for its
chosen intermediaries, in a form of indirect rule carried over from colonial
governance.
But when the rioting is carried out by ethnic
British participants, as is now the case, the limitations of this strategy
reveal itself: the perception of an ethnic, rather than civic British or
English, identity is actively guarded against as state policy, just as is the
emergence of ethnic British “community leaders”. As such, political advocates
of a British ethnic identity are isolated from mainstream discourse, as has
been state policy since the Powell affair: any expression of such feeling is
what Starmer means by “the far-Right”, rather than any traditionally
defined desire to conduct genocides or conquer neighbouring countries. This
mainland state of affairs, incidentally, is in strong contrast to Northern
Ireland, where the existence of rival Irish and British ethnic groups is the
basis of the political system, reified by the British state through the ethnic
power-sharing apparatus of the Stormont parliament. In Northern Ireland,
Britishness is an ethnic identity: across the Irish Sea, it is a firmly civic
one: that these constructions differ is a function of political expediency
rather than logical consistency.
This ambivalence over referring to Britain’s
various ethnic groups is contrasted by the British state’s deep engagement with
identity groups based on race, a cultural quirk that academics have long highlighted, and which distinguishes Britain from its
European neighbours. Even today, political discourse in Britain evades
ethnicity for a focus on race in a way unusual outside America, where it stems
from an almost uniquely stratified slave economy, overlaid on a settler
colonial society deriving from genocide. Yet British liberals squeamish at
ethnic identities — especially their own — instead obsess over the politics of
race. Ethnic conflict is taboo to even discuss in the abstract: but minority
racial rioting, even over imported grievances, is viewed sympathetically.
Perhaps well-intentioned, the assimilationist aim
of this dynamic was counteracted by the British state’s parallel promotion of
the new “BAME” identity, assembling various geographically unconnected ethnic
groups together in one political whole solely by virtue of their non-European
origin. Instead of reflecting our lived reality of a country now composed of
multiple ethnicities, among which are the majority native British, an entirely
artificial racialised binary was constructed for ideological purposes, in which
the ethnic British, along with other Europeans, were merely white, while
non-white Britons were encouraged to self-identify as a counterbalancing force.
I am legally, but not ethnically British — like most descendants of migrants, I
am perfectly happy with my own inherited ethnic identity — but in pursuit of
its own convoluted logic, the British state instead chooses to define me as
white, an identity of no interest to me. The long-term contribution to social
harmony of this explicitly racialised innovation was, as both the ethnic
conflict literature and common sense suggest, doubtful in the extreme, and the
government dropped the BAME label in 2022:
its mooted replacement, “global majority” is,
if anything, more problematic.
The British state’s differing strategies to
ethnic-minority rioting, on the one hand, and British ethnic-majority rioting
on the other, are, as conservative commentators observe, markedly disproportionate. This may not
be “fair”, but it is not intended to be. The function of British policing such
tensions is increasingly not to prevent crime — as anyone living in Britain can
see — but simply to dampen interethnic violence, in which the shrinking ethnic majority population is,
as the literature is
clear, analytically the most obvious and potentially volatile actor. In the words of the sociologist John Rex, whose
advocacy for a new multicultural Britain was highly influential during
the Nineties, the fundamental task of multi-ethnic governance is the twofold
desire to “ensure that those who will come are peacefully integrated and that
their coming does not lead to the collapse of the post-1945 political order”.
That is, after all, the logic of “controlled
spontaneity”: to prevent a backlash to sudden atrocities or a generalised sense
of insecurity that would detach the ethnic majority from Britain’s post-Blair
settlement and potentially lead to the formation of
ethnic parties. Indeed, the formation of explicitly ethnic parties is the
deciding factor in what academics term the
shift from a pluralist society — in which ethnic conflict is managed within the
existing political order, as in mainland Britain — to a plural one, where the
political system revolves around ethnic rivalries, as in Northern Ireland. We
are not there yet, though the formation of notionally Muslim (but
de facto Pakistani and Bangladeshi) political groupings is a step in that
direction, as is Reform’s entry to Parliament, understood by Farage’s voters
and opponents alike as a tacit ethnic British party, though one with a strong
post-war assimilationist rather than ethnic exclusionist bent.
The government’s alarm aside, the potential for
serious ethnic violence seems limited, as few of the precipitating factors listed
by academic specialists exist: the British state retains vast coercive power,
sympathetic elites aspiring to lead majority ethnic mobilisation do not exist,
and, in any case, the most heated divisions on the validity of the British
ethnic group remain within the British ethnic group itself.
Instead, like the daily drumbeat of violent disorder so
new to British life, but now accepted as the norm, occasional outbursts of
ethnic violence, whether currently by the British or by other ethnic groups acting
in their perceived communal interests, will become commonplace, as in other diverse societies.
To manage such conflicts, the state will become more coercive, as Starmer
now promises his supporters.
But modern Britain isn’t hell: for the most part it works, better than most
places in the world, even if it is far less orderly or safe than the country we
grew up in. There will be no violent rupture, no radical new dispensation:
things will continue as they are, only more so. This is the nature of most
post-colonial societies, and now it is the nature of our own.
***
This article was updated on 5 August to clarify the
chronology of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.
Sunday, August 11, 2024
The rhythms of a star system inspire a pianist’s transfixing performance
The cool red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, which is located some 40 light-years
from Earth, was first discovered in 1999. Its seven known exoplanets, which are
all close to Earth-like in size, were discovered in 2016 and 2017. In this
video, the French American pianist Dan Tepfer harnesses what he calls the
‘unusually harmonious’ orbital ratios of these planets for a unique musical
performance. He introduces the planets one at a time on his keyboard, with each
body’s orbit captured in both the frequency and rhythm of the notes. As he
plays, visuals of the star system and his accompanying improvisations swirl
around the screen, making for a transfixing melding of art and science. For
more from Tepfer, watch his work TriadSculpture.
Video by Dan Tepfer
The rhythms of a star system inspire a pianist’s transfixing performance | Aeon Videos
Three sisters craft a
lyrical tribute to their mother from old family VHS tapes
The UK filmmaker Jay Stephen’s mother, Aju, had known her
future husband for just seven hours before they were married in an arranged
ceremony in India in 1987. At 22 years old, her life’s path seemed
laid out without her input. Soon, she was pursuing the ‘great British dream’ in
London, caught between identities as she adopted a Westernised look and tried
to hide her accent. Her three daughters became the ‘three legs of a tripod’
used to stabilise the wobbly foundation of her marriage.
In the short film Brown Brit, each of these
three ‘legs’ celebrates their mother’s love, sacrifice and, later, her brave
decision to make her own path. For the work, Stephen and her filmmaking partner
Ralph Briscoe, who together form The Romantix, repurposed 12 years of
family VHS footage to tell Aju’s story. In the rich fabric of the work, these
pixelated, colourful scenes function as powerful signifiers of private moments
in time and place, while evoking the haziness of memory.
The images are paired with a lyrical essay by Stephen’s
sister, Ashica Stephen, which conjures turmeric-stained hands and pashminas tied
over Levi’s jeans as it describes Aju’s stifling life – and her ultimate
decision to break free of it. The third sister, Deepica Stephen, provides an
emotive voiceover and depicts Aju in the newly shot scenes that close out the
film. An accomplished work of personal filmmaking, the piece is both a loving
tribute to one mother’s strength and a powerful testament to the ripple effect
of a parent’s choices across generations.
Directors: Jay Stephen, Ralph Briscoe
Writer: Ashica Stephen
Narrator: Deepica Stephen
Website: The Romantix
Saturday, August 10, 2024
Friday, August 9, 2024
Thursday, August 8, 2024
𝗖𝗵𝗼𝗶𝗰𝗲 (by Lynn Ungar)
There isn’t a right answer.
There just isn’t. The game show
where the bells ring and the points
go up and the confetti falls
because you got the answer
is a lie. The preacher who would
assure you
of how to attain salvation
is making it all up. The doctor
who knows just how to fix
what ails you will be sure
of something else tomorrow.
Every choice will
wound someone, heal someone,
build a wall and open a conversation.
Things will always happen
that you can’t foresee.
But you have to choose.
It’s all we have—that little rudder
that we employ in the midst
of all the eddies and rapids,
the current that pulls us
inexorably toward the sea.
The fact that you are swept along
by the river is no excuse.
Watch where you are going.
Lean in toward what you love.
When in doubt, tell the truth.
Wednesday, August 7, 2024
Tuesday, August 6, 2024
Monday, August 5, 2024
'Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.'
~ Karl Popper
Saturday, August 3, 2024
Thursday, August 1, 2024
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