Showing posts with label alt-right. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alt-right. Show all posts

21 Jul 2018

Diversity: What Would Nietzsche Think?

Image: Scotty Hendricks (2018)  


I.

The word diversity is frequently used today, particularly by those who regard it as a value and like to signal their politico-moral correctness even if that means denigrating or disprivileging their own people, culture and history.

In order to illustrate this latter point, one might refer to the recent case of students at the University of Manchester who painted over a mural of a poem by Rudyard Kipling and replaced it with a verse by the African-American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou.

This was done in the name of anti-racism - for Kipling, a well-known British imperialist, was said to dehumanise people of colour - and in order to celebrate the diversity of a student body looking to reclaim history by - quite literally - whitewashing it.            

I don't here wish to discuss the merits (or otherwise) of either Kipling's or Maya Angelou's work; nor do I want to express my concerns about historical revisionism and literary censorship. But I would like to say something further about diversity and the idea of multiculturalism, from a post-Nietzschean perspective ...


II.

If confronted with a world in which everyone was retreating to their own safe space from which to assert an identity (on the basis, for example, of sex, gender, race or religion) whilst, at the same time, speaking about the benefits of ever-greater diversity within society and culture, I suspect that Nietzsche would feel himself compelled as a philosopher to argue that greatness belongs only to the individual or the people who find a way to stylise chaos and give birth to a dancing star - the latter being a sign of unity within diversity.

Nietzsche loves words like difference, plurality and multiplicity; he thinks of the will to power as composed of a large number of competing forces, flows, and desires. But - and this is important to understand - he doesn't affirm diversity as a good in itself nor as a goal to be aimed at.

On the contrary, Nietzsche insists that culture, for example, has to be unified; that the only alternative to such is a civilization based upon a barbarism of styles and tastes and incapable of ever producing art or sovereign individuals. Nietzsche opposes the systematic anarchy, the aggressive philistinism, and the Volkerchaos that characterise European modernity and are the symptoms of culture's extermination.

Thus, whilst he may have announced the death of God and thereby decentered and demoralised the world, he still believes in shared ethical bonds between people. His nihilism is not the same as the nihilism of those who devote themselves to free markets and money-making, or to the neo-Platonic fantasies of science and technology; those who lack the ability to act under the constraint of a single taste or - as Heidegger would say - to dwell poetically upon the earth.


III.

Deleuze is right to say that, for Nietzsche, history can be read as the process by which "reactive forces take possession of culture or divert its course in their favour". That the will to diversity can therefore be understood as part of an ongoing slave revolt in morals and the overcoding of active forces by the modern State - that coldest of all cold monsters that thrives at the expense of culture and sucks the life out of people in the name of human rights and globalism.

Nietzsche is aggressively opposed to all this and when faced with the ways in which societies become decodified and unregulated, makes no attempt at recodification. But, again, we must be careful here. For whilst Nietzsche makes no attempt to recodify along old lines or patch the holes ripped in the great social umbrella, he very much wants to bring together newly liberated forces onto what Deleuze terms a plane of consistency and regain mastery over the chaos that has been released.

Why? Because for Nietzsche culture is above all unity of style in all the expressions of a people and this requires harmonious manifoldness - not fake diversity built upon idiotic identity politics and an ugly jumble of all styles and peoples. Multiculturalism is not just a failed experiment, it's an absurd fallacy.

Of course Nietzsche's thinking has anti-democratic and illiberal implications - and he wasn't shy about saying so. But I would suggest we need to urgently think about these questions and not simply attempt to close down conversation by calling anyone who does so a fascist or a supporter of the alt-right. 


Notes

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 139.


26 Jun 2018

On Compassion Fatigue

Compassion Fatigue (2014) by Ashley Reaks


As a full-time carer for an elderly parent, 92, with Alzheimer's, I'm intrigued by - and potentially at risk from - secondary traumatic stress (STS), or, as it's commonly known, compassion fatigue; a condition characterized by a gradual hardening of the heart and increased indifference to suffering.

For the fact is, nothing is limitless - not even love - and, sooner or later, everyone involved in providing care for the sick, the vulnerable, the poor, the feckless, or the otherwise needy and dependent, reaches the limits of their patience and concern (even if they are professionally trained to work with such people and cope with traumatic conditions).

It's little wonder then that the highest idealism often results in the most grotesque forms of abuse; for in the end, caring makes sadists of us all ... As does the endless moral insistence by the liberal elite that we in the West should assume responsibility for the entire world.

Arguably, it's not people like Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini who are inuring ordinary people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty, as some suggest. Rather, ironically, it's the bleeding-heart news media that has caused widespread compassion fatigue by constantly broadcasting graphic images of starving children, drowning migrants, and the victims of catastrophic natural events, making us all feel helpless and hopeless and, ultimately, resentful.
      
Desensitised and depressed by global suffering, it's understandable that many people eventually think fuck 'em and look away, deaf to all further cries for help, or appeals to their charity.

And it's this, I think, that explains the rise of populism; figures on the so-called alt-right understand how tired and fed up and anxious and angry people are already feeling, in a way that those on the self-righteous left refuse to. 


Note: this post was partly written in response to an article by the Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole in The Irish Times (26 June, 2018): click here to read online. Many thanks to Simon Solomon for bringing this piece to my attention.


31 Jan 2018

Yellow Fever (Notes on the Politics of Asian Girl Fetish)

Bérénice Lim Marloe as Sévérine 

There's something about Asian girls. They're cute. They're smart. 
They have a kind of thing going on.


A friend asked who was my favourite Bond Girl ...

When I replied it was the character Sévérine, portrayed by the beautiful French actress Bérénice Marloe in the 2012 film Skyfall, she smiled and said that this exposed my Asian Girl Fetish (Marloe's father is of Cambodian and Chinese descent) and that this in turn indicated I had politically suspect views and subscribed to a number of pernicious racial and sexual stereotypes.

This may or may not be true, but it kind of made me wish I'd answered differently - although if, for example, I'd named Britt Ekland as Mary Goodnight in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), couldn't this be said to reveal my Nordic Girl Fetish and indicate subscription to an equal number of stereotypes, perhaps even more pernicious and politically suspect in character ...?          

However, happy to play along, I asked what she meant. And she explained that many men who identify as members of the so-called alt-right have a particular penchant for dating women of SE Asian origin, despite their fantasies of white supremacy and purity of blood.

Not surprisingly, this topic has caused heated debate on various white nationalist and neo-Nazi websites and demonstrates to many commentators that there's an amusing level of erotico-ideological confusion within the alt-right world. But, as Audrea Lim points out, there is, actually, no real contradiction in this Asian fetish when one realises how it arises at the intersection of two popular racial myths:

"First is the idea of the 'model minority,' in which Asian-Americans are painted as all hard-working, high-achieving and sufficiently well-behaved to assimilate. If Asians are the model minority [...] then perhaps that opens the door to acceptance from white supremacists.
      The second myth is that of the subservient, hypersexual Asian woman."

For many misogynysts, across the political spectrum, the sad fact is that most white women are - thanks to feminism - simply too much trouble; i.e., too unwilling to serve and to pleasure their menfolk. Asian girls, in contrast, are so much more amenable - and - whisper it - far more uninhibited in the bedroom. This idea - deeply ingrained within the pornographic imagination - has its roots in America's post-war experiences in the bars and brothels of Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

Thus it is that the alt-right Asian fetish combines these ideas and "highlights a tension within the project of white supremacism as America grows more diverse [...] The new, ugly truth? Maintaining white power may require some compromises on white purity".

May require, indeed, sleeping with the enemy ...


See: Audrea Lim, 'The Alt-Right's Asian Fetish', New York Times (Jan 6, 2018): click here to read online.