John Carroll



IDENTITY POLITICS AND THE TYRANNY OF OPINIONJohn CarrollAs the year of identity politics, 2019, comes to an end, we should ask what has been going on. The return of medieval heresy trials, draconian Inquisition, and pseudo-religious cults preaching Apocalypse demands some interpretation. The new wars are over opinion. Belief has been separated from act. In parallel, status has shifted from property and achievement to attitudes. One manifestation of insecure identity is status anxiety. Throughout the modern period, people have compensated for doubts about their worth by showing off their wealth, displayed in large houses, luxury cars, designer clothes, and expensive holidays; living in prestigious suburbs; and sending their children to elite schools and universities. They have indulged in what Thorstein Veblen dubbed ‘conspicuous consumption’. The new snobbery, however, is not over bad taste, crude accents, cheap belongings, and the wrong schools; it is over attitudes. One boasts on Instagram that they personally carbon offset when flying #climatechange, and attract a stream of likes. Another Twitters that they support gay marriage #loveislove, and are deluged in hearts of approval. Thousands swarm against a Michael Leunig cartoon. This shift in the signals of status must, in part, be a feature of affluence—the markers of economic success matter less these days—combined with the fact that the attitudinal noise is coming almost exclusively from the ranks of the better off. In the upper middle class, comfort may be taken for granted. The root of identity politics is revealed in its designation: in identity and its discontents. Mind, there is nothing new in anxiety about self. The seventeenth-century French moralist, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, argued that self-esteem is the strongest of human motivating forces. Vanity, egoism, and fear of embarrassment and failure drive most human behaviour. In the pre-modern world, this was less universally true, for more than ninety per cent of the population had little time or energy left over from the daily grind of basic survival—getting food, shelter, and security. Concern about identity was a leisure-time luxury they could ill afford.The key to secure identity is an inner confidence underpinned by belief and belonging. Of the two, belief is primary. The German sociologist Max Weber coined the term ‘disenchantment’ to describe the central threat confronting the modern West. In a secular time that no longer believed in God, or indeed in any transcendental ordering principle, the risk was that the world would lose all its magic, and be reduced to a dull and prosaic absurdity. Humans were left to pursue pleasure, avoid pain, and little else. Samuel Beckett highlighted this condition in arguably the most important play of the twentieth century—Waiting for Godot. For Beckett’s two tramps, life has become so pointless that they talk of suicide, but can’t be bothered carrying it out. Meaning has become the modern problem.In fact, faith in God had been replaced, in the shadows, by an alternative potential commanding attachment: that there are deep and enduring truths that underpin the human condition. And further, that the good life depends on gaining some understanding of them and managing to live in harmony with them. These truths are elusive, difficult to formulate, and to enshrine—Shakespeare’s entire work may be read as a wrestling to uncover their complex texture. Things were much easier in the time of church religion, with priests, teaching orders, theology and doctrine, an absolute moral calculus, and a vast background of tradition, monumental buildings, music, and art—all dedicated to proclaiming the faith. As the West progressively moved into a post-Christian era, high culture and the universities became of vital social importance. Their guiding mission was to help ordinary people, as well as themselves, better understand their lives, and in particular bear the hardships and tragedies that beset them. They did this through telling stories about life in its manifold variety—in literature, art, music, and more recently film—and then interpreting those stories. Over the last century and a half, this mission has, in the main, been progressively abandoned. As a result, loss of faith has increasingly left a vacuum; and the anti-belief, if pressed, that there is nothing.The need for faith, or some secular equivalent, seems to be universal. Without it, there is the uprootedness of Beckett’s demoralised tramps, who have no mental chart to guide them through the day, the month, and the year. Human identity without firm and distinct shape is condemned to leading a haphazard existence, motivated by profane pleasure, and the pursuit of power. Pleasures diminish, and power is capricious. A vacancy of belief drives some to seek tranquilizers and intoxicants; others to seek militant secular faiths—substitute religions. Those pseudo-religions, in turn, are given to a paranoid polarising of the world into good and evil. The psychology at work is familiar, from earlier times, when churches, out of their own insecurity, persecuted heretics, witches, or those they deemed non-conformist. Shaky medieval religion also triggered apocalyptic sects, which we see re-emerging today in an uncanny regression to our most superstitious past. The Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg provides a case-study. Her demeanour and mode of declamation mimics that of a fundamentalist Christian preacher ranting about the end of the world. The intense eyes, the raging warnings of apocalypse, and the incantatory chant of ‘How dare you!’ pitched against the Satanic adult world, are reminiscent of some cult spawned in Waco, Texas. In fact, there was a Children’s Crusade in the early Middle Ages: something like 20,000 children set out from France to free Jerusalem from unbelievers, led by two of their own number, a crusade which, needless to say, foundered well before reaching its destination, in starvation and disaffection.There is also the other recent eruption, of Extinction Rebellion, a movement of self-styled soldiers of virtue parading as if cast from the book of Revelation. From London to Melbourne, they came hooded and garbed in bright crimson robes, faces painted masklike white, with thin red lips—looking like some cross between a medieval dance-of-death procession and spooky Hare Krishnas. The ER martyrs glue themselves to buildings, and seek arrest—that is, look for self-vindicating persecution by evil authority.Whatever the truth about climate change, the ER apocalypse is based on the radical inflation of long-term global warming forecasts, in themselves as chronically unreliable as economic forecasts, if not more so, and for the same reason, that there are far too many variables to fit into mathematical models. Eminent Harvard economist, John Kenneth Galbraith quipped that economic forecasting was invented to give astrology a good name.Greta Thunberg is not in herself of interest. What is alarming is that she has been taken seriously by the world-wide media, listened to devoutly by broad sections of the upper middle class and its cultural elites, given a platform at the United Nations, and celebrated as Time person of the year. Professional orders that are otherwise sober, serious, hard-working, and methodical in their practical lives are turning, in their leisure, to quasi-religious venting, dark paranoid fantasy, and wide-eyed righteous indignation.This crusading opinion is being generated from within a tiny social bubble. Sociologist Peter Murphy has calculated from Twitter statistics that a mere 2% of the American adult population are dealing in political opinion. The rest, who Twitter, gossip about celebrities and lifestyle—but that too may come with a malevolent thrust, as experienced by Meghan Markle, and the barrage of hate opinion she has attracted on social media, some of which has an overlapping political cast, as in slurs about her race, her social climbing, and her extravagant lifestyle. In the recent Federal election, climate change was proven to be a minority worry, playing a negligible role amongst mainstream voters, who remained uninterested.The invention of email, and later on, social media, has meant that angry opinion, which used to be limited to berating this or that political figure in a local pub, or over golf club drinks, may be broadcast instantly and world-wide. On the street, social media provide the mouthpieces for a global cacophony of hatred, malicious gossip, derision, and persecution of those who are different; and coercive opinion containing the implicit threat, agree with me, or else. Foundation stones of the modern West crack: the liberal value of freedom of individual conscience, the Enlightenment value of reasoned argument and freedom of speech, and the civilized values of moderation and courtesy. The ease of finger-tip communication has aggravated the tendency for anyone, when hot under the collar, to speak impulsively, and thoughtlessly, and to judge without mounting a clearly reasoned case. And, as people spend more of their leisure time on smart phones, and less reading books, they develop habits in themselves ill-suited to measured reflection. Addiction to social media brings with it a feverish restlessness of concentration, and, it seems, a dependency on approval. Dependency on approval is a trait that has taken centre stage with posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter receiving hearts and thumbs-up to indicate likes, even though the likes are often coming from strangers, giving the post a few passing seconds of their time. That recognition for a post comes in the form of a love-heart is suggestive of an underlying depressive strain in the culture. At the pathological extreme, this kind of brittle self-esteem links with an inability to handle criticism, as with the twenty-year old apprentice plumber whose work is corrected by his boss, sending him into a two-day sulk. Or, universities offering counselling for students whose sensitivities may have been damaged by opinion they disagree with. Or, cartoonist Bill Leak being investigated by the Human Rights Commission.Identity politics obeys the catch-cry: I emote virtuously, therefore I am. The specific content is often unimportant, as illustrated by low inclination to marshal arguments to back up opinion. The in-vogue markers of identity today—sexual orientation, race, hostility to Western civilization, and the environment—are more free-floating excuses for enthusiasm, than real personal traits, for few of the crusaders are in actuality cross-gender, members of native peoples, Gandhi-like ascetics, or Greenpeace sailors. The enthusiasm is then expressed as high voltage opinion—on social media, during political demonstrations, and in graffiti.The logic of this type of depressive narcissism finds its main reward in the tick of approval. The thumbs-up or love heart is inflated in the imagination, as recognition for the lonely self as a whole, the sum total of its identity, which is more than the specifics of its opinions. At the same time, self-esteem has become so fragile, the ego so lacking in confidence, that the mere whisper of a dissident view pricks the emoting bubble.Even major institutions have taken to emoting virtuously. In part this has been to cover up the fact that they have excluded while they have embraced. The mission statements of corporations, universities, and sporting bodies proudly boast of inclusiveness, tolerance, diversity, and innovation. But the more they do so, the more they have practiced discrimination, intolerance, and politically correct conformism. Freud termed this pathological syndrome ‘negation’, as in the aggressive smile—‘to smile and smile and be a villain.’ Negation was illustrated politically by the former East Germany, one of the nastiest dictatorships of the modern era, which called itself the German Democratic Republic. It is not surprising, then, that belief has become separated from act. Others are judged by what they believe, not by what they do. Israel Folau and Margaret Court have been chosen as the local scapegoats. Rugby Australia, it seems, preferred, in 2019, to signal its own virtue than concern itself with the wellbeing of its sport, either in on-field performance or its own balance sheet. Mimicking medieval religious fanaticism, it chose to persecute its best player for his unmodish beliefs—likely picking on him because he was their best player, the more brilliant his rugby performance, the more evil his character. Many, if not most, professional footballers, if grilled on their attitudes, would not pass the heresy test. What has separated Folau out from the others is, firstly, rugby super-stardom; and secondly, the unusual fact today that he strongly believes in something. His faith is confronting and irritating. He is a rebel with a cause. For the minority who are themselves fanatical believers, like ER and the devotees of Greta Thunberg, Folau is a true heretic, worshipping the wrong god.Likewise with Margaret Court. The fact she was the nation’s best woman tennis player ever, and arguably the world’s best, makes her a beacon of sporting excellence. She has to be burnt at the stake because she lends authority to heresy—even though that heresy is the traditional view of marriage held by most of the Western world until very recently, and still held by a sizeable minority of Australians. The Folau and Court cases tell us something more. The moral views at issue are not particularly shocking, for the public heat has gone out of both domains. Folau’s attitude to homosexuals is, to most minds, ludicrous even laughable, as is his belief in Hell; and the same-sex marriage controversy is over, and decided, so who should care what Margaret Court thinks. But crusading religion needs its devils to feed off, even if they are rather quaint and feeble devils. The sniff of evil provides blood energy. Let me switch from belief to belonging. Communal belonging has traditionally proved the most successful way to compensate for the insecure identity that derives from the lack of much to believe in. What sociologists call ‘anomie’ results when community ties break down—anomie is the sense that the world lacks cohesive norms and values. Strong community binds people together with shared purposes and common beliefs, providing a kind of collective glue which helps its members to feel at home in their world, with confidence about what they should do, and how they should live their lives. Today, the nuclear family provides the most common and successful example; with a lesser, supporting role played by schools, clubs, and other associations. The virtual community enabled by social media is not an entirely satisfactory substitute. It is, in general, less stable and enduring than the family, less tightly bound, and it mobilises a fickle, less cohesive legitimacy. More, it encourages aggregates of shared opinion, rather than shared doing, or face-to-face gathering together.The disenchantment that follows from lack of belief in any fundamental truths anchoring the human condition has led, in recent times, to some malign compensations. It has unhinged the all-too-human search for security of individual identity. Hell has gone, but not the belief in satanic forces and their incarnations. Christ the Saviour has gone, but not the belief in redemptive politics. The more that atheist ranks have grown, the more we have seen, with religion, a Freudian return of the repressed. The best of secular values—freedom of conscience and opinion—underwritten by a liberal-democratic order, are suffering under an onslaught from the worst excesses of religion—the tyranny of righteous opinion, fanatical preaching, and the persecution of heresy.John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University. ................
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