A response to my friend Amy
This is a response to my long-time friend’s response to my original article entitled ‘Why it’s Your Patriotic Duty to Boo the Knee,’ published on my blog here on 9th June 2021. You can find Amy’s response here.
My goal in this letter isn’t to
convince Amy on every point of substance, as this isn’t how minds are changed
or how argument advances, anyway, but rather to highlight what is at stake in
these kinds of conversations. This back-and-forth isn’t just a disagreement
between two people whose intuitions differ at the level of policy, it’s a
discussion about the foundational principle upon all other innovations in
society are allowed to flourish – Liberalism -, a body of knowledge
internalised in our institutions which undergirds everything else in society,
including the freedom to have this conversation and the technology on which to
exchange ideas. To challenge Liberalism, as proponents of critical theory seek
to do is synonyms with arguing for the benefits of broomsticks over bagless vacuum
cleaners, or favouring loincloths over sportswear, or preferring to dismantle
our transportation infrastructure and installing troughs for horses along our
motorways. It’s even worse than this in fact because an attack on Liberalism
isn’t just an attack on cleaning, clothing, and commuting, it’s an attack on everything
which makes life worth living.
I’ll return to Liberalism briefly
before summing up, but first I should clear up confusion in your response to my
article, which is this: ‘Big l Liberalism’ is not the same as ‘small l
liberalism’. Liberalism (big L) is the body of knowledge invented by the
British 17th-century enlightenment philosophers such as Hume, Adam
Smith and Adam Ferguson and emerged from the tradition of the jurisprudence of the
common law. It stands for “organic, slow, half-conscious growth and an
acknowledgement that progress advancing by diagnosing mistakes of the past, and
that human reason alone cannot deliberately shape its own future,” in the words
of the political philosopher Friedman Hayek1. The other kind of
liberalism (small l) is the type you were referring to in your response, that
of political liberalism, namely being ‘on the left’, rather than ‘on the right’. It is, of course, entirely possible for a scientist to hold views from
across the political spectrum. It is even possible for a scientist to have
illiberal views (big L), like a BLM-supporting critical theory-loving scientist
who wants to dismantle the structures of oppression, including those apparent
oppressional structures defining his profession. But this scientist’s ability
to do his job and to hold one view in a community of ideas, free from the
ever-present threat of violence, is only possible due to the system within which
he exists, that of big L Liberalism.
With that in mind, I’m going to argue to that BLM should be vehemently opposed because the theory which informs its activities and organisers, critical race theory, is antithetical to the Liberal project, by nature, and in practice. I’ll make this case by touching on three main areas discussed in your response to my original article: the meaning of taking a knee, politics in sport, and historical revisionism. I’ll then circle back for some final comments on the importance of preserving Liberalism.
Kneeling as a gesture was given a new lease of life as an act of protest was 're-imagined’ by Kaepernick, to use some of the Woke buzzwordery of the day, from an act of gesticulation or subordination to one of protest. Kaepernick was clear why he has taken the knee: “I’m not going to stand for a flag that oppresses black people and people of colour… there are bodies on the streets,” he said2. “I learnt early on in fighting against systematic oppression, dehumanisation and colonisation3.” BLM, unsurprisingly, adopted the gesture wholesale to be used in marches, public demonstrations and vigils of all flavours and types. People are motivated to kneel for a multitude of reasons. Some are card-carrying Marxists. Others may be Marxist in spirit but will stop short of action jeopardising their nice house and running water. Others kneel because they want to oppose racism, they felt they were doing a morally virtuous thing. They like the new religion-like tribe, and despite understanding the first thing about Marxism, postmodernism or critical theory, they inadvertently cheerlead its ideas.
Superimposed on these motivations
are societal incentive structures which help promote kneeling or pro-BLM activism.
These include the effects of social contagion, turbo-charged by social media.
It also includes the consequences of ‘a spiral of silence,’ mentioned in my
original article, whereby even majority views can be persuaded into silence by
a minority view due to the fear of isolation and social castigation with being tone deaf4. This is particularly pertinent because of the societal
taboo which was hard-won against racism. As a result, many people, in the face
of insinuations of racism should they not show the qualifying level of support,
are passively coerced into quietude.
Here it is worth noting that you accused me of
harbouring a “multitude of other potentially harmful views,” for my description
of BLM’s spread as being “birthed from BLM’s hoary vagina.” Now, while I admit
this certainly isn’t the most elegant of metaphors ever dreamed up from my
silly brainbox, it was written for comedic effect and was not a commentary on
anything outside of the disdain I have for BLM as an organisation. But in this accusation,
you appear to be proving my point that critics of BLM regularly face
insinuations of ulterior motives, and the whiff of racism in the views of the
outspoken BLM activist minority, platformed by the media class, is enough of a stench to empty the room and send one swiftly home from work with a termination of contract.
I work at a university in South Korea which has less Woke penetration than the UK, but I suspect, for fear of being introduced to a brown-shirted ‘equity officer,' I might think twice about discussing this topic. And it's not hard to see why: people like having jobs and being not cancelled. They like not being called racists, either explicitly or by way of hallway whispers, water-cooler talk or tweet storms. So, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind clarifying this if only to unload the weight of evidence from the side of the scale which seems to be tipping the favour of the argument advanced here.
Besides the fear of challenging
BLM, and the motivations of those consciously or unconsciously further critical
theories, the Marxist meme takes another hit of the crack pipe with every kneel
at a football game, every column inch of media coverage and every corporate
letter of solidarity. You don’t have to believe in the existence of seasonal
flu to be a carrier and spreader of seasonal flu, the virus can spread through
the population regardless of the epistemology of the flesh body it's carried
around in. This was also very much the case with Soviet propaganda technique known as the ‘Firehouse of Falsehoods’
which concealed lies among half-truths and ejected it with such bamboozling
regularity and precision that separating facts from ‘alternative facts’ became all but
impossible5. So, although I know it was added for the funnies,
Trippier and Henderson standing on a soapbox reading Das Capital is the
strawiest of strawmen, for very good people can spread very bad ideas, should
the incentives so aligned to do so. I will concede that the Henderson and
Trippier metaphor is true in two ways, however. Firstly, bad ideas are often
spread by a society’s weaker players (those without the knowledge of how to
perform better) just like Hendo, and bad ideas are often intruding into places
they have no business being in, like on the far-left side of society’s pitch,
in our universities, much like Tripps. (If this makes no sense to you, Dear Reader, please see: England Vs. Croatia, Euro 2020).
Let’s move on to our second of
our topics, politics and sport. You make the case for politics belonging in
sport because “politics is about all of us, everywhere, all of the time," and
therefore “politics and football should [not my italics] be dancing a
very sultry and intimate rumba”. Here, you do appear to be advocating the personal epistemology of every drunk uncle irritating his long-suffering extended family at a BBQ, with his outmoded political views, spouted from the tongue and shot from the hip whenever the mood suits. But besides this point, there are two main
problems with the delicate politics-sporting rumba you describe. The first problem is that it’s deeply unpopular. Admittedly, this isn’t a knockdown
argument against anything. There have been plenty of political gestures throughout history which
have been unpopular and subsequently proven right; we only have to look as look
at the activism of Emmeline Pankhurst and the Suffragettes, morally heroic civil
rights campaigners like MLK, or LGBT activists like Peter Tatchell, all of whom
had great successes from sustained activism at times when the bulk of society
opposed them.
But a majority not wanting
something isn't to be sniffed at either, and it’s clear that the majority of
fans don’t want overt political messages shoved down their throats at football
matches. Footballers should have the
freedom to choose to kneel, and fans should be free to boo it. In some ways, it
is just as simple as putting pineapple on your pizza. Some believe it should be
there, and others feel sick to their stomach at the mere thought of it (I
happen to be in this camp). However, we should ask ourselves how ‘free’ this
‘free choice' is if pizza companies, advertisers, the media and universities
all believe that people should have pineapple on their pizza, and tell you
regularly using the full force of their institutional megaphone. Moreover, if your pizza comes already loaded with pineapple, you can pick it off,
but it’s not the same as having a pineapple-less pizza, and why should you have to pick it off? Now replace the pineapple with a laxative
or rat poison to witness the full scale of the problem.
The second problem of politics in sport is that the performative tedium is entirely subject to the faddish revolutionary whims of the day. Applying your argument, there is nothing to stop a political alternative from coming along and impinging, to whatever degree it decides best, on something that otherwise imbues regular people's lives with meaning. Let’s illuminate this with an allegory.
Suppose that
instead of the viral spread of CRT through society, the vegetarian cause
proliferated instead, prompted by a seed incident, a viral video showing a carnivore murdering a vegetarian in
broad daylight. The video shakes the world and leads to an outpouring of support
for vegetarians. The execution prompts protests, demonstrations, riots, the death
of both and civilians, and it causes millions of dollars of economic damage and
destroys the properties and businesses of many vegetarians themselves.
Corporations, perhaps sensing an opportunity, jump on board and dedicate a
large part of their marketing budget to oppose violence against vegetarians
everywhere. They put out statements condemning it and vow, in solidarity with
People of Vegetables, to opposing all mistreatment of them from now on. The media
too run wall-to-wall coverage of events and invite experts who speak of a
society that at its core is fundamentally oppressing vegetarians.
As a result, children’s books
are written to educate children on there about how to carnivore privilege.
Bestselling books entitled ‘Carnivore Fragility’ and ‘How To Be an
Anti-Meatist,’ ask readers to analyse the complex interplay between their dietary status and those of a historically oppressed diet and notions such as
the 'carnivore collective,’ ‘the carnivore voice,’ ‘the carnivore worldview,’
and ‘the carnivore experience’ all need to be defined and problematised,
in what becomes a hugely lucrative multi-million dollar cottage industry.
This allegory is of course
facetious in an important way: there has been no historical repression of
vegetarians by carnivores, nor is there repression of vegetarians by carnivores
today, as there was once subjugation of black people. The world would be a very different place if society one day decided
that everything of importance in the world is borne from the interaction of the
dominant oppressor class, the carnivore, and the repressed underclass, the
vegetarian. The story’s purpose though is to flesh out (pun intended) how easy
it would be to assert this should these arbitrary categories become pertinent
to a section of society. If anti-carnivorism did become the mainstream view, how
could you oppose it? History, in your view, “is not fixed, unchallengeable and
immutable,” after all, so would one have any place to stand to oppose the
repression of vegetarianism as defined by Critical Diet Theory? Indeed, if we
can only interpret history “through stories which have been repurposed,
repackaged and retold,” how can we have the grounds to make any meaningful
claims to knowledge? Spoiler alert: we can’t.
The crucial point to be made here though isn’t about what constitutes ‘political’ or how much ‘political’ should sexy-dance with ‘non-political,’ it goes deeper than that. It’s deeper than that because critical theory touches everything, by design. All we need to do is replace the word ‘politics’ in your earlier statement about the ‘intimate rumba’ with ‘critical theory,’ to illustrate the point: “critical theory [emphasis added] is about all of us, everywhere, all of the time;” therefore “critical theory [emphasis added] and football should [not my italics] be dancing a very sultry and intimate rumba.” You can do the same with the phrases ‘racial injustice,’ ‘systematic oppression’ ‘the violence of inequity,’ or any other Woke jargon of your choice, and you begin to see that the rumba you’re advocating is not a mutualistic ensemble between two willing dancers, but the last dance of a madman holding a ballroom dancer at gunpoint.
This brings us to the final pernicious way totalitarian theories spread, by historical revisionism. History, in your view, “is not something that we can treat as an observable science,” but rather a “complex tapestry of beliefs” that can and should be retold to sit the prevailing tastes of the day. And while I agree that the emphasis we give to stories, including the decision to teach certain histories, is culturally dependent to an extent, this caveat does not reach into the heart of a historic truth itself. Erroneous information can be discarded through backwards triangulation, detailed source analysis, text translation, the geological and archaeological record, and the principle of parsimony, among other methods, to get to the closest approximation of truth allowable with limited information. In this sense, a statement either has historicity, or it doesn’t. It’s either supported by the weight of evidence, or it isn’t. Either Jesus rose from the dead in Jerusalem in 36 A.D., or he didn’t. Either the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 or it wasn’t. Either racism was at the heart of the founding of the United States, or it's a pernicious lie.
This postmodern stance gives us the monstrosity of the 1619 project which I'm alluding to; a dishonest project created by New York Times magazine which aims to “reframe American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at its centre6,” and which has already infiltrated the Chicago school system and that of Buffalo, New York7. These outlandish claim, that Americans only revolted against the British to preserve slavery, (a claim made by Nicole Hannah Jones who is still employed by the NY Times), was not made by historians but by critical theorists. Slavery is described as the reason for the cruelty of the criminal justice system, the lack of universal healthcare, and the brutality of American capitalism, despite the fact that in the case of the former, that mass incarceration began in the 1970s, 100 years after the abolishment of slavery.
This is not an honest attempt to
educate, but a product of Theory’s attempt to view the world only in hues of
black and white. One of the authors, as highlighted by Coleman Hughes (who
happens to be black), Matthew Desmond wrote “when a mid-level manager spends an
afternoon filling in rows and columns of an Excel spreadsheet, they’re
repeating business procedures whose roots and procedures twist back to slave
labour camps8.” Excel spreadsheets are rooted in slavery because
some slaveowners used rows and columns to tabulate the profits of slave labour.
When one rubbishes the importance of historicity, excel spreadsheets become
racist. I wonder if this will give you pause the next time you pull up your balance sheet? It shouldn’t.
This historical revisionism is part of a wider revolution. To date, more than one hundred statues in the USA have already been toppled in the last year alone, including states of well-known Nazis. Mahatma Gandhi in Davis, California and even the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York9. The toppling and destruction of relics and artefacts, like the desecration of Churchill and Colston is a hallmark of cultural revolutions, such as the big one in China10 or smaller ones like the destruction of irreplaceable cultural relics in Palmyra and Bamiyan, by ISIL11. These represent a kind of hardware update that seeks to eliminate any iconography inconsistent with the software running on the regimes data processor. Is this the kind of retelling of history you have in mind?
Socialism is an entirely
respectable way of being in a Liberal system, but critical theory isn’t,
because, unlike socialism or conservatism, critical theory opposes the very
system which platforms it, opposing, as it does, logic, rationality, argument,
justice, merit and the rule of law. You
can either be a socialist or a critical theorist, but you cannot be both. It’s
not possible to be a socialist on a Monday (a political leaning I am very sympathetic
to), and then put your pronouns and power fist in your bio, don your Lenin hat on a Tuesday
and behave as if there’s no contradiction. As we’ve discovered, it’s possible
to advance critical theory without being a critical theorist (by kneeling,
supporting BLM, protesting etc). This isn’t an enviable position to be in
because it speaks to a large degree of ignorance about the theory itself. So
which one is it Amy, socialist, critical theorist or a hammer and sickle
wearing Schrodinger’s cat combination of the two?
Liberalism was an innovation of
civilisational import. Before Liberalism, disputes were settled by violence,
societies operated according to codes of honour, rather than the rule of law. Going
back further, tribal violence involved the raiding of rival clans, murder,
rape, pillaging, child sex slaves, and much more. Gifting the state a monopoly
on violence was an innovation because it removed the logic of violence by
installing a deterrent in something bigger and stronger than any individual and
incentivising individuals away from wanton violence and into surviving in a
complex social stratum. As Steven Pinker put it in ‘The Better Angels of Our
Nature,’ “Once Leviathan was in charge, the rules of the game changed…the court,
basically a government bureaucracy, had no use for hotheads and loose cannons,
but sought responsible custodians to run its provinces12”.
Liberalism holds within its plentiful bosom the hushed and dignified acknowledgement that knowledge can be found in the whole, rather than the individual. It is a system as described by the political thinker Benjamin Constant as the système de principes, an overarching system on which everything else – government action, law, legislation – is based; an ideal that according to Friedrich Hayek in ‘The Constitution of Liberty’ “will not be preserved unless it is itself accepted as an overriding principle and that “although we must strive to improve our institutions, we can never aim to remark them as a whole13."
 |
| A very intimate rumba: a modern take on Lady Justice and Lady Liberty enjoying each other's company. |
Let’s take stock of the arguments put forward then. Firstly, I argued that taking the knee has become a deeply political message which advances critical theory, whether knowingly or unknowingly. I argue, firstly, that politics cosying up to sport is highly unpopular, like an uncouth imposition like a drunk uncle’s political diatribes at a family BBQ, and secondly that when dementor of religious-political opinion is invited into the house of sport (or other domains), you have to host all goblins and ghouls, all radical religions, barmy theories and illiberal creeds.
I finally argue that your flirtation with postmodernism and the
resulting rejection of historicity has the potential to threaten the very
fabric of Liberal order itself. So, in this sense, your article not only, like Kyle Walker, covered a lot of ground at speed, but also proved defensively suspect and prone to frequent mishit passes. We must stand up for the oppression,
downbeat, downtrodden and marginalised everywhere, of all races and skin tones,
and indeed regardless whatever shade of colour we are, and we must do so while at the same time
standing up for the greatest invention, we’ve ever had the dumb luck to stumble upon: Liberalism, the
project which has given us everything we value, and the giant upon whose shoulders our society's house of cards precariously stands.
Citations
1.
Hayek, F.A., & Stelzer, I.M. The Constitution of Liberty.
Reprint, Routledge,
2010, p. 51.
2. Wyche,
S. “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat during National Anthem.” NFL.Com,
https://www.nfl.com/news/colin-kaepernick-explains-why-he-sat-during-national-anthem-0ap3000000691077
Accessed 16 June 2021.
3. Kesslen,
B. “Colin Kaepernick Is Writing a Memoir That Will Answer, ‘Why Did I Do It?’”
NBC News,
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/colin-kaepernick-writing-memoir-will-answer-why-did-i-do-n1136226. Accessed 16 June 2021.
4. Neumann-Noelle,
E. Spiral of Silence. https://noelle-neumann.de/scientific-
work/spiral-of-silence/.
Accessed 16 June 2021.
5. Brendon,
P. “Death of Truth: When Propaganda and ‘alternative Facts’ First Gripped the
World.” The
Guardian, 11 Mar.
2017, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/mar/11/death-truth-propaganda-alternative-facts-gripped-world.
Accessed 16 June 2021.
6. Silverstein,
J. “Why We Published The 1619 Project.” The New York Times, 20 Dec. 2019.
NYTimes.com,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html.
7. Rufo,
C. F. “Buffalo Public Schools’ Critical Race Theory Curriculum.” City Journal,
23 Feb. 2021, https://www.city-journal.org/buffalo-public-schools-critical-race-theory-curriculum.
8. Hughes,
C. The 1619 Project and the Legacy of Slavery - [Bonus Partial Episode].
www.youtube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q98bm64QWTc. Accessed 16 June 2021.
9. “List
of Monuments and Memorials Removed during the George Floyd Protests.”
Wikipedia,
14 June 2021. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_monuments_and_memorials_removed_during_the_George_Floyd_protests&oldid=1028582207.
10. Rohr,
H. China’s Destruction of Cultural Sites During the Cultural Revolution -
Nspirement.
11.
Williams, A.R. “ISIS Smashes Priceless, Ancient
Statues in Iraq.” National Geographic,
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/search. Accessed 16 June 2021
12.
Pinker, S. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why
Violence Has Declined. Penguin Books,
2012, p. 75.
13.
Hayek, F.A., & Stelzer, I.M. The Constitution of Liberty.
Reprint, Routledge,
2010, p. 57.
