The Case of Maryam Namazie

maryamnamazie.com

As a graduate of Warwick University, I feel obliged to say something about the case of Maryam Namazie - the Iranian-born activist and campaigner against religious violence and stupidity - who has been barred from speaking on campus by the student union on the grounds that she's a highly inflammatory figure likely to incite hatred.

This ludicrous and deeply shameful attempt to suppress the right of a woman who receives vile death threats on a regular basis to challenge Islamofascism and defend the values of secular society is justified on the grounds that Muslim students have the right not to feel insulted or intimidated.

Ms Namazie is right to be angry about this; to be labelled as an extremist for opposing those who would veil half the world's population and behead a large number of the other half if they could, is peculiarly offensive and, what is more, does a great disservice to those men and women who are living under Islamic regimes and have no opportunity to dissent or speak out.  

Clearly, the University needs to step in and ensure that a few hypersensitive and politically ultra-orthodox students (or useful idiots as Richard Dawkins describes them) do not bring a highly respected centre of learning into disrepute.

The only heartening thing is to see many academics, feminists, and intellectuals come to her defence and, hopefully, with their public support, Ms Namazie will get to address the Warwick Atheists, Secularists, and Humanists' Society in October as planned. 

Afternote (28-09-15): After the University powers-that-be stepped in, the student union was forced to back down. An unequivocal apology was offered to Ms Namazie and she will now address the WASH Society as planned. Further details can be found in the Warwick SU News (click here). 

  

European Ghost Dance

Ghost Dance of the Sioux (1891)

The Ghost Dance was a last, desperate attempt by Native Americans to resist the White Man and preserve their own way of life. Performance of the dance was thought to unite the living with the spirits of the dead and enlist the latter in the fight for survival against those who came from far away with their strange customs and alien gods.

Essentially, it was a type of circle dance in which the men moved in unison with a soft, yet heavy-footed shuffle around a drum; a traditional form used by many tribes for millennia. But the ghost dance had new and deadly serious ceremonial significance and quickly spread at the end of the 19th century throughout much of the Western United States, with different peoples synthesizing aspects of the ritual dance with their own tribal beliefs.  

Of course, as we know, the dance failed to work its magic and halt white expansion; mystery religion, it seems, is ineffective in the face of guns and railways. For all their sacred and heroic effort, the Indians were doomed and their day passed.

What intrigues me, however, is this: in the face of the threat posed to their traditional culture by the mass influx of foreign bodies, will the indigenous peoples of Europe soon be the ones enacting their own version of the ghost dance (and will it be any more effective)? 

On the Human Atmosphere

Redheylin: The Human Aura 
(after a diagram by Walter J. Kilner)

Some people are convinced that all living things possess what they call a vital aura composed of psychic energies that sensitive individuals who are attuned to such can not only see - as a spectrum of colours - but also interpret; each colour being associated with some inner state of being or emotion. 

It's an attractive idea as these ideas often are, but it's nonsense, of course; as all such pseudo-scientific ideas to do with the subtle body are mystical nonsense.            

What each individual does possess, however, floating about them in a miasmatic manner, is a microbial cloud composed of the millions of microscopic particles that human beings continually shed from their hair, skin, and clothes and each cloud has a unique signature that can be read via a genetic analysis of the bacteria. In other words, investigators can identify an individual by sampling their personal germ cloud - which is pretty amazing. 

And it's equally amusing to think that - contrary to what the beautiful souls believe - we don't leave a shimmering astral imprint behind us when we exit an environment, or even a pretty, silvery trail of slime in the manner of a slug; but merely a puff of bad air like a stale fart.          

Note: readers interested in the latest scientific research on how humans differ from one another at the level of microbial clouds should click here. 

On Homeopathy

Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843): founder of homeopathy 

a practice based on the magical idea that like cures like 

(similia similibus curentur)

One of the more amusing definitions of homeopathy and the often crackpot conditions it is thought to magically cure, is given by Rod Liddle: Homeopathy, he writes, is the practice of treating a non-existent ailment with a non-existent remedy. 

This is a bit harsh inasmuch as some of the ailments are sometimes real enough, but it's spot on about homeopathy as a non-remedy (i.e., not even an honest sham cure, like snake oil); something - to again quote Liddle - of no fucking palliative use at all.

Prince Charles, Gandhi, and newly elected leader of the Labour Party, the sainted Jeremy Corbyn, may believe in the miraculous power of homeopathy and advocate its availability on the NHS - and they may have many supporters who share their faith in complementary medicines and natural alternatives to the drugs provided by the pharmaceutical industry on the back of years of scientific research and extensive clinical trials - but I would hope and trust that readers of this blog do not. 

I wouldn't want to argue that belief in homeopathy is a moral failing, as the political journalist Ian Dunt insists - stupidity isn't a sin and irrationalism doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, even if it does often lead you to make bad choices and say foolish things - but I agree that this is a serious issue and that the rebellion against Western reason, of which it's a symptom, needs to be met face on.          

Torpedo the ark means having done with judgement; but it certainly doesn't demand a sacrifice of intellect, or call for a leap into faith and superstition.   

Notes: 

Rod Liddle, Selfish, Whining Monkeys (Fourth Estate, 2015), pp. 196 and 199. 

Those interested in reading Ian Dunt's post arguing that belief in homeopathy is a moral test should click here.  

Federico Campagna: A Man of Faith and Folly

Federico Campagna identifies himself as a Sicilian philosopher based in London. Unfortunately, I'm not sure this is entirely true. He is Italian and he does work and live in London, but is he a philosopher or is he not merely a moral and political idealist who uses philosophy whenever it's convenient to do so simply to underpin his metaphysical and, indeed, quasi-mystical search for what he describes as a fundamental architecture of emancipation?

At any rate, his current work revolves around the question of contemporary nihilism, viewing the latter as something that we need to move beyond in order that we might reconstruct reality - and not merely reality as understood by science, but an enchanted or magical reality that is more originary and which supports the ontological primacy of Dasein or mankind's manifest self-understanding. 

Thus, Campagna's dreary, dated, and clichéd characterization of nihilism as a deep crisis of truth that paralyses all human action and imagination is one which I would decisively reject. If we must talk about a topic that has been so overly-discussed, then it seems to me the starting point has to be with Ray Brassier and not Ernesto de Martino, the anthropologist and historian of religions whom Campagna refers us to.     

For unlike Campagna, I don't think nihilism is something to be overcome and I certainly don't think we should attempt to do so in the name of values which, he says, reside in some kind of ethical core and stretch from the gates of Being into our everyday lives, constituting one of the mysteries of existence of which he is so fond. Rather, like Brassier, I think nihilism is a speculative opportunity, not an existential dilemma or disease; a chance to think (even if it turns out thinking has interests that do not coincide with human welfare or happiness). 

Ultimately, Campagna, by his own admission, is a man of faith. In an article published earlier this year, he explicitly tells us that faith is what we need today to accompany an ontological awakening. Faith in what? Faith in life and the intrinsic value of life, which cannot be objectively determined by science, only subjectively affirmed by the faithful individual. Only faith in life transforms Dionysian chaos into Apollonian harmony; noise into music. He writes:

"It is only the interplay of the forces of Being and faith that empower and ... will realize our new architecture of values ... And [result in] the establishment of ... an oasis of limit and freedom, where the chorus faithfully sings for its own glory and Apollo benignly looks on from beyond."  

To which we can only shout hallelujah and not know whether to laugh or cry ...


Notes: 

Federico Campagna was speaking at the 6/20 Club on Sunday the 20th of September, 2015. His paper was entitled On Magic and the Reconstruction of Reality After Nihilism. A version of this paper was given to the Art/Work Association earlier in the year and details of this presentation can be found by clicking here. 

The other paper by Campagna  to which I refer and from which I quote, is entitled After Nihilism, After Technic: Sketches for a New Philosophical Architecture. It was published in the online journal e-flux and can be read by clicking here. 

For Ray Brassier's brilliant discussion of nihilism in terms of enlightenment and extinction, see Nihil Unbound (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Reflections on The Holy Virgin Mary (1996)

Chris Ofili: The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) 

When thinking about images of the Virgin Mary - particularly images of the so-called Black Madonna - one must invariably consider Chris Ofili's controversial work of 1996.
 
The large canvas (244 x 183 cm) depicts an African woman staring directly at the observer and wearing a blue robe on a pretty, shimmering yellow-orange background. The work employs mixed media, including oil paint, glitter, and animal excrement. The central figure is surrounded by images taken from pornographic magazines of female arses and genitalia. A varnished ball of dried elephant dung forms the figure's bared breast; the painting also stands on two lumps of elephant shit, decorated with coloured pins that spell out the words Virgin and Mary.      
 
Ofili's painting was included in Charles Saatchi's Sensation exhibition; first in London (1997), then Berlin (1998), before finally moving to New York (1999), where Mayor Giuliani described it as sick and disgusting and where, despite being displayed behind a protective screen, one protester managed to smear the work with white paint; a tellingly symbolic gesture, I think, but one which thankfully caused no lasting damage.

It's easy to see why some - perhaps most - people might initially find this work offensive and even blasphemous, combining in what the artist describes as a hip hop manner religious and artistic ideas of what constitutes the sacred with secular political concerns (to do with race, for example) and the basest of base materials. Is he having a laugh? Yes, he probably is; one is very aware of the wilful absurdity in his work.

But Ofili is also offering us a profoundly serious and sophisticated picture, in which the white-faced Queen of Heaven is transformed back into a black-skinned woman of the world; she whose immaculate heart beats beneath a warm breast of flesh and blood.    

The Holy Virgin Mary may not be his best work, but it is for me his most philosophically important; a reminder that everyday life is neither lacking in value nor authenticity and that even in a handful of elephant dung the divine is manifest.   

On the Black Virgin and the Question of Racial Fetishism

Nigra sum sed formosa 

The statues and paintings of Mary created in medieval Europe are all fascinating, but none more so than those in which the Mother of God has dark skin; the so-called Black Virgins (or Black Madonnas), of which there are several hundred located in various churches and shrines, venerated by their devotees and associated with miracles by pilgrims who come to receive a blessing.     

If I'm honest, however, what really interests is not the significance of the figure within Catholic theology, or the pagan roots of her worship, but the sexual allure of black femininity for white heterosexual males. Obviously, this is a controversial topic - perhaps more so now than ever.

In the past, the concern was with miscegenation and only decadent individuals openly flaunted their love for women of colour and were excited by the idea of transgression. Today, mixed race relationships are more commonplace and relatively accepted, but there is now a real (and legitimate) concern with racial fetishism; that is to say, with the manner in which white men view the non-white women whom they subject to their eroticized and imperial gaze.

For women of colour are not merely objectified sexually, but racially stereotyped. Their exotic otherness is not so much exaggerated and distorted as it is invented within the pornographic imagination, before being circulated and sustained within wider popular culture (via art and advertising, for example).

Angela Carter understands how this game works. In her short story, Black Venus, she describes the illicit affair between Baudelaire and his mistress Jeanne Duval (who was of mixed European and African origin), perfectly capturing the essence of the relationship and how, for the poet, this Creole woman symbolizes primitive sensuality and the promise of faraway lands.

Thus, when he's not asking her to take off her clothes and dance naked for Daddy except for the bangles and beads he loves so much - his eyes fixed upon the darkness of her skin - he's whispering like a madman into the ear of his pet:

"Baby, baby, let me take you back where you belong, back to your lovely, lazy island where the jewelled parrot rocks on the enamel tree and you can crunch sugar-cane between your strong, white teeth ... When we get there, among the lilting palm-trees, under the purple flowers, I'll love you to death. We'll go back and live together in a thatched house with a veranda over-grown with flowering vine and a little girl in a short white frock with a yellow satin bow in her kinky pigtail will wave a huge feather fan over us, stirring the languishing air as we sway in our hammock, this way and that way ... think how lovely it would be to live there." [10]

Jeanne recognises this pervy and racist fantasy for what it is: Go, where? Not there! Not the bloody parrot forest with its harsh blue sky which offers nothing to eat but bananas and yams and the occasional bit of grizzled goat to chew!

And many women of colour are rightly appalled by the way in which racism is smuggled into the bedroom disguised as something romantic and a form of positive discrimination. The young black feminist, Mysia Anderson, is quite right to say there's a history of oppression here that simply must be taken into account.

But, the problem is - for me, in my whiteness and heterosexual maleness - it still seduces. For ultimately, of course, it's a fetishistic fantasy designed to appeal to readers such as myself and not the black-thighed woman smelling of musk smeared on tobacco to whom it's spoken.

Thus, despite knowing better, I still find myself at the feet of a black goddess and still singing like Solomon about she whose beauty radiates from a skin darkened by the sun. 

Notes:

Charles Baudelaire's most famous work, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), contains several poems believed to have been written about (or inspired by) Jeanne Duval, including Sed non Satiata, Les Bijoux, Le Serpent qui danse, Parfum Exotique, and Le Chat.

Angela Carter's Black Venus was first published by Chatto and Windus (1985), but I'm quoting from the Picador edition (1986).

Mysia Anderson is a student at Stanford University majoring in African and African American Studies. Her online article entitled 'Avoid racial fetishism on Valentine's Day' was published on Feb 11, 2015 on stanforddaily.com and can be read by clicking here. 

The photo, by Barron Claiborne, was found on Lamatamu.com the site for "everything exotic", edited by Biko Beauttah.

 

Thoughts on the Proposal for a New Lawrence Statue

Greek terracotta statue of Priapus, Hellenistic period 

(c. late 4th-3rd century B.C.)

There's already a life-size bronze statue of D. H. Lawrence, by Diana Thomson, standing in the grounds of Nottingham University; a barefoot figure with his trousers rolled up (don't ask me why) and rather awkwardly holding a blue flower. In addition, there's a bronze bust of Lawrence, also by Thomson, situated in the Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery. 

However, increasingly proud of their local boy - or, rather, increasingly hopeful that such works attract visitors and that they might capitalize on his controversial reputation and continuing popularity - plans are being made for a new work to be erected in his hometown of Eastwood.

Lawrence scholars, members of the D. H. Lawrence Society, and staff at the Lawrence Heritage Centre, all met recently with representatives of the borough council to discuss ideas. Also present - and spearheading the campaign for a new statue - was super-glamorous local MP, Gloria De Piero, who, according to a press report, thinks it ridiculous that the Lawrence name isn't being exploited to the maximum; never mind what he contributed to English letters, just think what he can do for jobs and business!       

My own view on this matter is rather closer to that of Lawrence activist David Brock, who argues that if there's to be a new statue, then it needs to be a creatively challenging work that isn't there simply to attract tourists and amuse the locals. If it were up to me, I would go for a Classical style nude terracotta figure, sans fig-leaf, but with an erection of priapic proportions from which hung a sign saying: The phallus is the bridge to the future.  

This, I think, would be true to the Lawrence who wanted to shock what he described as people's castrated spirituality and remind us that the phallus is a great sacred symbol of potency and the active life which has been denied to us within Christian moral culture.

Rod Liddle: My Enemy's Enemy

Cover of the paperback edition (Fourth Estate, 2015)

I suppose, in many ways, I have quite a lot in common with Rod Liddle; we belong to the same generation and the same class and, although both born in the South, our hearts belong to the North of England, where our families originated. I even think we had the same (or at any rate similar) tinplate aeroplane to play with as children. 

These things don't necessarily make me like him, but they make me at least want to like him; to find in him a comrade of some sort; a brother-in-arms. Also, the fact that physically he suggests something of my friend Simon, albeit an older, greyer, even more disheveled version, also makes me gravitate towards him (without necessarily wishing to cruise his body, as Barthes would say).

But what of his work, I hear you ask: and what of those nasty prejudices that are said to poison his writing and ultimately make it little more than the sometimes witty but mostly just offensive and tedious ranting of an unusually erudite pub bore - Richard Littlejohn with a social degree (to paraphrase Jaz Coleman).

Well, to be honest, I'm not very familiar with his work; either as a journalist or a writer of fiction. But I have just finished reading his most recent book - Selfish, Whining Monkeys (2014) - and I enjoyed it very much. What's more, I found myself pretty much in agreement with its central argument that, for all the many things we have gained during the last fifty years, we have unintentionally lost something - and something pretty important at that; something which you rather suspect he would like to call our soul, but describes instead as social cohesion and cultural unity. 

That's, when you think about it, quite a conservative claim to make - and, inasmuch as its one that I suspect a majority of people would agree with, pretty uncontroversial too. This professional provocateur may like to swear and throw around terms designed to outrage those who are always looking to police language and correct those ways of thinking they deem unacceptable, but, actually, he's a nostalgic moralist at heart who regrets the passing of values that his parents - and my parents - lived their lives by (although, importantly, he at no time advocates a return to the past, or a getting back to basics).

This makes him sound a bit like Tony Parsons, but he's so much funnier and more interesting - and so much less prone to sentiment - than the latter (who I might also be said to have a fair bit in common with, but for whom I feel no affection).

Of course, I don't share Liddle's nominal Christianity which underpins this book and, for me, the trouble with atheism is that unless it becomes a fairly aggressive anti-theism it doesn't go far enough. That said, I can understand why Richard Dawkins might irritate with his pomposity and smiled at Liddle's disdain for the ridiculous Alain de Botton and his 'Tower of Arse'. 

And what I certainly do share is Liddle's insistence on returning to the subject of class - and, if I'm honest, a good many of his hatreds; of those who have had their struggles too, the super-smug London elite and those on what he describes as the faux-left.

We might not, were we to meet, ever become true friends in a positive sense; but, in desperate times, my enemy's enemy ... 

Submission (On Christianity, Islam and the European Migrant Crisis)

Cover of the Hungarian edition of 

Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission (2015)

These are strange times indeed! 

So strange, that one even finds oneself in agreement with Peter Hitchens - yes, the slightly younger, much less lovable brother of Christopher Hitchens - on an increasing number of questions, including the European migrant crisis. 

For he's right, surely, to argue that we in the West will not solve this apparently insoluble problem, or be in a position to help anyone, if we destroy our own continent with its own unique history, culture and system of values in the process, or simply give it away, as he writes, "to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves". 

Unfortunately, Hitchens doesn't examine this emotional spasm gripping the political leaders of Europe, the media, bleeding-heart celebrities, and, apparently, large numbers of the British public who were moved by a single photo. And, of course, the reason he doesn't examine it is because it's rooted precisely in the Christian moral tradition of which he is such a vocal exponent. Thus Hitchens is on tricky ground and his analysis of current events is compromised ultimately by his own faith. 

In other words, what I'm suggesting is that it is our own idealism - particularly the ideal of self-sacrifice - that is at play here; we are still attempting to imitate Christ hanging on the Cross and commit one final auto-da-fé en masse so that we too can whisper with our dying breath and face turned towards heaven consummatum est. 

It is finished; meaning, our time as a people is finally over; we give up, let those who are younger, stronger, more devout, more numerous, have a go at running things. Michel Houellebecq understands this suicidal and sentimental fatigue and how our will to love has effectively undermined our will to survival. In his novel, Soumission (2015), he writes perfectly convincingly of how a near-future France easily transforms into an Islamic society.   

It's a book that Hitchens has read and admires. But, again, I don't think he quite understands the work or sees why it is Europe has adopted this submissive position; how what he describes as weakness and cowardice is, in fact, the result of our corrosive and toxic virtues including: pity, charity, and humility.

The sad and terrifying fact is that we would rather turn the other cheek and love our enemies, even when they want to murder us, than be seen to be unkind or unjust in any way. Just as Jesus died for our sins, we want to die for the sins of others. And so we hold open the gates and meekly smile and clap hands as hundreds of thousands of migrants push past and give thanks to Allah for the soft stupidity of the kuffar. 

          

Notes: 

Peter Hitchens's recent Mail on Sunday piece entitled 'We won't save refugees by destroying our own country' can be read here. 

Michel Houellebecq's novel has been translated into English as Submission, by Lorin Stein, (William Heinemann, 2015). 

Obviously, Nietzsche - not an author I suspect Peter Hitchens has much time for - identified Christianity as more harmful than any vice over a century ago and predicted what would happen to Europeans as a result of adopting this slave morality and attempting to put it into practice. That we have not repudiated this creed once and for all not only does us no credit, but it brings down a curse upon us. And if Islam despises the Christian West, writes Nietzsche, "it is a thousand times right to do so: for Islam presupposes men ..." [The Anti-Christ, section 59.]

On Entering and Exiting the Fourth Dimension with Gedvile Bunikyte

Portrait of the Artist Gedvile Bunikyte (a.k.a. Grace B) 

by Helena Wimmer (2015)

For those of us who do not belong to the art world and have only limited knowledge of what goes on in this realm where lines and colours and large sums of money reign supreme, there's long been a belief that Suprematism died sometime shortly after Socialist Realism triumphed over geometric abstraction; i.e., when the brutal expression of political ideology negated pure artistic feeling.

Apparently, however, that wasn't the case: Suprematism survived - and still lives on to this day, as we discover in the fascinating work of Gedvile Bunikyte, a.k.a. Grace B., over whose pictures the ghost of Malevich lingers.  

Using a few basic shapes and a limited range of colours, Gedvile takes us back to the future and dares us to experience again the intensity of emotion that belongs to art whenever it frees itself from the banal attempt to visually depict objective reality and allows itself to dream of unseen worlds and vibrate to strange rhythms and possibilities of being.

Miss Bunikyte is, we might say - using a rather old-fashioned idea - an artist of the fourth dimension. In other words, whilst she wants to make some kind of real (but withdrawn) presence immediately visible within the realm of time and space, thereby introducing into our field of vision  something which is neither optical nor merely symbolic, she wants also to transport us to a very different space that is, if you like, outside the gate. 

Nietzsche thought of this space as one of dangerous knowledge, full of tigers and rattle snakes and all the other wonders that the hot sun hatches. But for Gedvile, it needn't be quite such a savage exteriority and contains not only wild beasts, but mathematical equations and beautiful abstractions; a creative realm in which things come to perfection and new forces and forms arise.  

Now, all this might sound suspiciously like the worst kind of mysticism or idealism; an attempt to leave behind the real world of things. However, I'm tempted to think that we might better interpret Miss Bunikyte's work as a weird and speculative form of realism; albeit one concerned with virtual objects rather than actual entities. Thus, unlike those who find all forms of geometric abstraction puerile, I think there's something philosophically interesting and contemporary about her work.     

Gedvile tries to find her own way forward governed by a certain precision, clarity, and discipline. But so too is there a rhythmic violence and an experience of chaos in her work, adding to its beauty and its power. Follow the rhythm and plunge into the chaos and you'll reach the point at which lived experience confronts its limit.

But, crucially, rhythm also relates closely to the question of sympathy - a concept central to modernism - and, by her own confession, Miss Bunikyte is primarily interested in exploring how colours and shapes can express a physiology of feeling. In other words, she's an artist who wants us to feel our way into tomorrow and who, via a series of ever more fascinating abstractions, attests to the intrusion of an occluded realm into the visual world of figuration. 

By providing an artistic medium between natural science, esoteric philosophy, and personal fantasy, Gedvile has created a visionary system and an uncanny paraspace that is both inspirational and transformational; pulsing with real and imaginary energies, her geometrical abstractions challenge and reconfigure the earlier fourth dimensional constructions of late nineteenth and early-twentieth century art.

Like Ouspensky whom she so admires, Gedvile provides us with a small key to the enigmas of the universe. And for that we should be grateful.

Planets, Mountains and Mystical Planes (2014)

Note: those interested in knowing more about Miss Bunikyte and seeing further examples of her work should visit her website: studiogedvilebunikyte.com 

We're All Austrians Now (Reflections Beneath a Black Sun)

No one knows for sure how the current migrant crisis in Europe will unfold or what consequences it might entail; as I have said elsewhere, it's a wicked problem and a real mess. However, it seems to me that one of the things that might result is the recreation of the social and political conditions in Europe as a whole that were last witnessed in Austria in the 19th century and that the potential for a new form of völkisch nationalism (or fascism) is thus a very real possibility. 

Such a desperate and virulent reaction might not be welcome or prove to be very helpful, but it is perhaps understandable when mass immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Arab world results in what Jean Baudrillard once described as the internal exile of the European citizen in their own society. 

This sense of alienation and the perceived threat to the future of Europeans as an ethnically and culturally distinct group with their own history and traditions is almost certain to grow and, far from being a paranoid and pessimistic fantasy on behalf of a small number of individuals, there is clear evidence from the maternity wards that the continent is undergoing a rapid and major demographic change. As one critic notes:

"In 1900 the white European races constituted some thirty-five percent  of world population. Owing to declining birth rates among whites in advanced industrial nations, coupled with the explosion of the Third World population ... the figure is now just under ten percent in global terms." [1]

What is more, these same nations are accommodating ever larger numbers of immigrants, having committed themselves with ideological fervour to their own fantasy of multiculturalism no matter what the cost. For those Europeans concerned about their own identity - whether that's primarily based on racial, national, cultural, or religious grounds (and regardless of the fact that those grounds might be entirely spurious) - this places them in much the same position as the German-speaking Austrians during the final years of the Habsburg Empire; i.e., one of perceived disadvantage and ever-decreasing influence.

This, as Al Gore might say, is an inconvenient truth that is rarely addressed or even acknowledged within the dominant and self-legitimating forms of political discourse. To even raise the issue not only offends the sensibilities of the age, but risks legal action under the highly dubious law of incitement to hatred. As Martin Amis writes, any acknowledgement of white anxiety about becoming a numerical minority within Europe invariably results in accusations of racism. But this isn't simply about race, it's also about political values and ethics:

"If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are; but if some of them believe in sharia ... then the numbers are clearly crucial." [2]

What has become clear, is that commentators on the far right have a much more radical and astute understanding of what's going on and what's at stake; they might arrive at deeply troubling solutions, but they identify genuine problems and concerns. Baudrillard offers a painfully revisionist explanation of why the left have failed us and why the right today possess the last remnants of political interest:

"The right once embodied moral values and the left, in opposition, embodied a certain historical and political urgency. Today, however, stripped of its political energy, the left has become a pure moral injunction, the embodiment of universal values, the champion of the reign of virtue and the keeper of the antiquated values of the Good and the True ..." [3]

In short, the left has become ... boring! Political correctness, on which the left now prides itself, has reduced politics to a zero-point of moral and intellectual banality. This has resulted not only in the abject surrender of the left, but also in a defeat for critical thinking.

And so, today, in this transpolitcal era, if politics can be said to exist at all, it has slid over to the far right. Rather shamefully, it's Europe's neo-conservatives and neo-fascists who still have something to say worth hearing; all other discourses are moral or pedagogical, says Baudrillard, and made by a mixture of lesson-givers, aid workers, and bleeding heart celebrities who believe in peace and love and a universal humanity.

This doesn't mean you should all rush out and vote for those on the far right, but it does mean that if you really want to hear a wild analysis of the times in which we live, there's little point in listening to those on the left - including its more colourful figures, such as Russell Brand - who always speak with a tremor in their voice either of righteous anger, or full of pity for the suffering of the world. If these idiots fail to see things clearly it's partly due to the permanent presence of tears in their eyes.

Unfortunately, globalization doesn't merely unleash massive flows of capital, information, and skills across borders, but also disease, crime, and barbarism. Nation states are compromised and traditional cultures are confronted with unfamiliar customs and values that many find threatening and unwelcome. Thus defensive and reactionary ideologies begin to emerge based on notions of identity and in violent opposition to pretty much everything that is going on around them.

"We cannot know", writes Goodrick-Clarke, "what the future holds for Western multicultural societies, but the experiment did not fare well in Austria-Hungary ..." [4]


Notes:

[1] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, (New York University Press, 2003), p. 2.
[2] Martin Amis, 'Demographics', in The Second Plane, (Jonathan cape, 2008), p. 157.
[3] Jean Baudrillard, 'A Conjuration of Imbeciles', in The Conspiracy of Art, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext[e], 2005), p. 31. 
[4] Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, p. 306. 

This post is a revised version of the opening remarks to an essay I wrote in 2008 entitled 'On the Spirit of Terrorism', in Reflections beneath a Black Sun, Volume IV of The Treadwell's Papers, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010).

The Second Coming (Notes on the European Migrant Crisis)

Those politicians and commentators who insist that the European migrant crisis is a moral dilemma are naively mistaken, for there really is no right or wrong solution to this influx of people. And this is precisely why it's known philosophically as a wicked problem. That is to say, a problem which seems obvious to everyone, but for which there is no definitive formulation or answer.

A crisis such as the one unfolding in Europe today, involving millions of people, is, by its very nature, a fast-moving, wild and unpredictable situation, with numerous causes and constantly shifting parameters, thus making it resistant to resolution - no matter how hard Angela Merkel stamps her foot and demands that more must be done by her European partners to tackle the problem and share the burden.

Those who ask themselves when will it all end have also failed to grasp the true nature of what's happening; it won't end - wicked events have no internal stopping mechanism. Likewise, it's a laughable fantasy to believe there's a historical reset button. The fact is, Europe has irrevocably been changed this summer (demographically, socially, and culturally).       

It is - to use another technical term - a real mess. All problems interact with one another in an endless cycle and no one knows what's going on, or what's going to happen next. Those who are supposed to be in charge appear clueless and incapable of acting; or, if they do act, they invariably make things worse. 

And so it seems that Yeats was right and his poetic prophecy is finally coming true:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ... 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity.

Notes: 

Those interested in reading in full Yeats's magnificent verse, 'The Second Coming' (1920), should click here. 

Those interested in knowing more about wicked problems are advised to read Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, 'Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning', in Developments in Design Methodology, ed. N. Cross, (J. Wiley and Sons, 1984), pp. 135-44. 

This post is dedicated to Dr Maria Thanassa; my favourite Yeats scholar. 

Lady Chatterley and the Case of Meenakshi Kumari

Holliday Grainger and Richard Madden as Connie and Mellors 

in the BBC's Lady Chatterley's Lover. 

Photo: Josh Barratt/BBC Pictures/Hartswood Films (2015)

The BBC is soon to broadcast a new adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover, written and directed by Jed Mercurio, starring Holliday Grainger as Connie and Richard Madden as Mellors. 

The story, as most people know, is one of social division and sexual politics in post-War England, in which a gamekeeper fucks, impregnates, and runs off with his upper-class employer's wife. Connie thus abandons (and brings shame upon) not only her husband, Clifford, but her own class; more than merely a private act of infidelity, hers is a public scandal that challenges convention, authority, and the old order.

Clifford is not surprisingly upset and outraged at her betrayal of him and her wilful attempt to destroy the very fabric of civilized society. In his view, she ought to be "wiped off the face of the earth!" He then goes on to tell Connie that she's abnormal and not in her right senses: "You're one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity".

Interestingly, Clifford also holds Connie's sister, Hilda, partly to blame, and informs his runaway wife "I have no doubt she has connived at your desertion of your duties and responsibilities, so do not expect me to show pleasure in seeing her".

But what Clifford doesn't do is demand that Hilda be raped and paraded naked through the streets with her face blackened, which is the fate that has befallen Meenakshi Kumari and her fifteen-year-old sister, following the decision of an all-male village council of elders in India.

The girls face this disgusting punishment because their brother eloped - à la Mellors - with a married woman from a higher caste. Such decrees, made by unelected council members, are illegal, but punishments are often carried out regardless of the law of the land. 

 

I would encourage readers of this post and viewers of the forthcoming BBC drama to sign Amnesty International's petition demanding that the Indian authorities intervene and offer protection to Meenakshi, her sister, and their family. Click here to go to the relevant page of the Amnesty website. Or text SAVE3 to 70505 with your full name.

         

Note: The quotes from D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, can be found on pp. 296 and 293 of the Cambridge University Press edition (1993), ed. Michael Squires. It's amazing how this novel remains vital and culturally relevant almost ninety years after it was written and first published.     

Planet of the Apes and the Negro of Banyoles

 El negre de Banyoles (1916-1997)

One of the more shocking moments in Planet of the Apes (1968) is when Taylor - attempting to escape from his simian captors - finds himself in the Natural Science Museum and encounters the stuffed corpse of his fellow astronaut, Dodge, mounted on public display. 

But the question is: why was Dodge sent to the taxidermist and displayed in this manner? Why Dodge and not Landon? 

The answer is given in the novelization of the sequel, Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), where it's revealed that the apes - having never seen a black man before - were intrigued by Dodge's skin colour. This adds an interesting further level of complexity and controversy to a franchise that is already often viewed in terms of racial politics. 

I recalled this scene after recently reading about the Negro of Banyoles, a stuffed human figure which, for many years, was exhibited at the Darder Museum, Spain. 

The striking and rather fearsome-looking piece was produced by the Verreaux brothers; famous 19th century French naturalists, collectors, and dealers of exotic specimens. It was acquired by the small museum in Catalonia in 1916 and soon widely became known as el negre de Banyoles - much loved by locals and tourists alike.

However, in October 1991, the mayor of Banyoles received a letter from Alphonse Arcelin demanding that the figure be permanently removed from display. Arcelin, a doctor, originally from Haiti, thought the figure an unacceptable relic from a colonial era steeped in racism and argued that its continued display was an affront to humanity (and particularly to persons of colour, such as himself).

Unfortunately for Snr. Arcelin, the mayor, the council, the museum staff, and the townspeople all disagreed with him and so he was forced to take things further. The subsequent hoo-ha attracted extensive media coverage and political reaction. Eventually, the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, became personally involved with the case and also wrote to the mayor of Banyoles to express his outrage and disappointment with the town's refusal to remove the figure. 

Other African heads of state also contributed to the debate and pressed for the Negro to be allowed to return to his homeland where he might finally be allowed to rest in peace. The fact that no one really knew where this homeland was and that he was actually an it didn't seem to deter them. 

Finally, in 1997, after six years of international pressure and wrangling, the figure was stripped of its loincloth and feathered headdress and sent to the National Museum of Anthropology in Madrid, where all artificial components were removed, including the wooden spine, glass eyes, artificial hair, and fake genitals. What remained - basically just dried skin and bone - was then placed in a coffin and shipped over to Botswana, for ceremonial burial in a national park.

Whether this constitutes a moral victory and a dignified end to the story of the Negro of Banyoles, is debatable. Obviously, like Dodge, the figure was displayed as an oddity and no one cared about the fact that it had once been a living man with a name. But then we don't care either about Egyptian mummies, or the bodies of saints preserved and displayed as religious relics ...

   

Ultimately, the question is whether corpses retain their human status and identities and should, therefore, share the same rights as the living. Personally, I don't quite see it. For whilst the living might be construed as very rare and unusual objects, it's a stretch to think of the dead as genuine subjects (particularly bodies that have been artificially preserved and turned into rather creepy exhibits).           

On Synthetic Biology (With Reference to the Case of the Spider-Goat)

Illustration by Benjamin Karis-Nix

As regular readers will know, I've long been fascinated by molecular bestiality and the creation of interspecies hybrids. 

And, thanks to astonishing advances in what is known as synthetic biology, the perverse fantasy of all organisms being able to promiscuously swap genes with one another - and not just fuck with their own kind - is fast becoming a reality.

Indeed, we can already marvel at the fact that we live in a world in which spider-goats are producing large quantities of incredibly strong silk in their milk thanks to a transplanted gene from an orb weaving arachnid. 

Such a procedure - described by opponents as Frankenstein science, or a crime against Nature - works because of the convenient truth that all life rests upon the same fourfold protein molecule arranged in various sequences. Thus the genetic code for making silk in a spider is written in exactly the same language as the genetic code for making milk in a goat. Since we now know the language, we can splice bits of code from one species to another.  

This effectively enables us not only to rewrite old forms of life, but to create previously unimagined new forms - things that Nature failed to conceive of despite having millions of years to do so.  

Now, it might be the case that there are important questions concerning this issue which deserve to be carefully and intelligently addressed. But I would invite those with moral concerns and anti-scientific prejudices to examine the facts, think of the potential, and dare to become just a little more bio-curious.