Let Them Sing Carols

Ding dong merrily on high ...

The phrase Let them eat cake may never have passed the lips of Marie Antoinette, but it's still commonly attributed to her and has significantly helped tarnish her reputation within the popular imagination. 

Similarly, Angela Merkel's suggestion this week that German citizens address their growing anxiety over the perceived threat posed by Islamism to their way of life - be it secular-liberal or Christian-conservative in character - by singing a few Christmas carols accompanied by someone playing a flute, is likely to prove something she'll never live down and which will be remembered long after her disastrous Chancellorship has ended.

Admitting there are very real concerns - and very real grounds for concern - over her policy of admitting over a million Muslim refugees into Germany last year alone, Merkel told an emergency congress of CDU members in Wittenberg that the way to counter terrorism, rising crime and the creeping Islamisation of European culture, was for German families to gather round and break into a rendition of Silent Night.

Unfortunately, however, all isn't calm and all isn't bright and we can none of us afford to sleep in heavenly peace whilst the barbarians are at the gates and the enemy is already within ...   

Love and Hate in a Very Cold Climate

Katja Hietala: founder of the Sisters of Kyllikki

Photo: AFP/Sam Kingsley 

For idealists, driven by a will to love and insistent upon the notion of a universal humanity, the acceptance of strangers and embrace of foreignness is a desperate moral duty.  

Thus it is, for example, that the Sisters of Kyllikki in a determined effort to make migrants feel welcome and demonstrate what a kind and tolerant people the Finns are, have taken to the streets distributing smiles and heart-shaped cards that grant permission to hug and carry other positive messages. 

Quite what the women of Cologne and other German cities who were assaulted on New Year's Eve think of this one can only wonder. But I do know that despite what the Sisters of Kyllikki may believe, not everyone wants to be assimilated into a coercive system of reciprocated emotion in which they have no choice but to love and be loved; a system which is happy to generate superficial difference and cultural diversity, but which refuses to conceive of genuine otherness. That is to say, a form of radical alterity that may very well be violently antagonistic. 

Why can't privileged white liberals ever quite accept that not everyone wants to be like them? That many feel an almost visceral aversion towards them and what they represent, decisively rejecting what they have to offer. This feeling of hate might be rooted in class, race, religion or a combination of these things. But it's a profound and authentic form of passion that makes our own feelings and values look pale and feeble in comparison. 

Baudrillard understands the hate of the un-Enlightened Other better than anyone. In an interview with François Ewald, he says:

"There's something irremediable, irreducible in this. We can offer them all the universal charity we are capable of, try to understand them, try to love them - but there is in them a kind of radical alterity that does not want to be understood, and that will not be understood."

Ominously, Baudrillard warns:

"I have the impression that the gulf is hardening and deepening between a culture of the universal and those singularities that remain. These people cannot allow themselves offensive passions; they don't have the means for them. But contempt is still available to them. I believe they have a profound contempt for us; they dislike us with an irreducible feeling of rejection." 

    

Islamic terrorism is only the most extreme and overt form of this contempt; "a passion of radical vengeance, a kind of absolute reversion that's not about to subside" anytime soon. But, I would suggest, the imported phenomenon of taharrush gamea can also be analysed from the theoretical perspective of hate.      

Thus, despite the good offices of Angela Merkel and the huggy women of Finland, one suspects things are going to become increasingly ambiguous in Europe as we wake up to the fact that the world is governed not by a principle of Love and Unity, but by the irreconcilability of evil.


See: Jean Baudrillard, 'Hate: A Last Sign of Life', interview with François Ewald, trans. Brent Edwards, in From Hyperreality to Disappearance, ed. Richard G. Smith and David B. Clarke, (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 132-42. Lines quoted are on pp. 133-34.

Like the Circles That You Find in the Windmills of Your Mind

According to recent research, how you see the above geometric shape reveals your political personality: if you see it as a circle (more or less), you are inclined to be liberal in your thinking (inclusive, tolerant, non-judgemental, etc.); if, on the other hand, you see it as it is and describe it as such - an imperfect or irregular ellipse - then you are more likely to be conservative in your thinking (sensitive to difference, wary of deviance, disturbed by things that don't quite fit, etc.).

This tells us something crucial about moral humanists and how they view the world - mistakenly. Or, more accurately and ultimately more dangerously, they see things not as they are, but as they would ideally wish them to be. Liberals are almost wilfully blind to any facts that don't coincide with or reinforce their own political wisdom and moral prejudice. 

And this, as Rod Liddle notes in his own inimitable manner, means they suffer from a severe mental impairment - one that effectively makes them self-deluded morons. 

I was reminded of this when, shockingly - but not surprisingly to those of us who don't fantasise a great Family of Man all happily holding hands in a circle - news began to slowly emerge of the New Year's Eve events in Cologne, involving large gangs of non-German males systematically and violently assaulting young women. 

Because idealists like Mrs Merkel refused to listen to those who voiced legitimate concerns about admitting over a million immigrants from the Islamic world and refused to acknowledge that not everything in this world is perfectly smooth, perfectly round, and perfectly compatible with life in a modern, secular society, female friends of mine in cities across Germany now feel concerned for their safety and for the future. And, to be honest, I don't blame them ...


Notes

For those interested in reading the study by Tyler G. Okimoto and Dena M. Gromet on how 'Differences in Sensitivity to Deviance Partly Explain Ideological Divides in Social Policy Support', should pick up a copy of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, (American Psychological Association, Nov. 16, 2015).  

For those interested in reading Rod Liddle's article in The Spectator (2 Jan 2016) in which he discusses the 'political wisdom of people who don't even know what a circle is', click here.  

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.