On Doing (and Not Doing) the White Thing

Having earlier this year evicted lesbians from their store in Brighton for kissing in the aisles and taken the decision to exploit the tragedy of the Great War for a Christmas ad in order to flog a few extra bars of chocolate, Sainsbury's seem eager to now demonstrate their racial insensitivity with a new poster campaign designed to promote its company values. Paying a marginally fairer price to British dairy farmers for their milk than some others in the retail sector, is just one way in which Sainsbury's are, apparently, doing the white thing.

Obviously, I get it: it's a pun that even has something of a history to it. One recalls, for example, a popular campaign launched several years ago by the National Dairy Council in which various celebrities encouraged us to drink more of the white stuff. However, speaking as a black man, I have to say I do find the Sainsbury's ad to be contentious at the very least - if not overtly offensive.

For unlike the Dairy Council slogan, the Sainsbury's one crosses a fine line and passes onto extremely unpleasant territory. One can't help thinking of skin colour and normative Aryan values, rather than a pint of semi-skimmed; can't help recalling a long and depressing history of racism in which all of the ancient virtues were associated with fairness of complexion. Nietzsche writes of this in the Genealogy (I. 5).

And so Sainsbury's should stop using this slogan and they should apologise to their non-white staff and customers. They should, in other words, do the right thing by all of us who reject entirely the false and pernicious equivalence made between skin colour, purity of blood, and nobility of spirit - all of us who have no wish to play the white man. 

A Brief Note on Heaven and Hell

The Amusement of the Saints in Heaven

by Watson Heston

Proponents of heaven and hell usually have very little to tell us about the former; white clouds and robes, unfading flowers, and choirs of angels singing the praises of a God who sits on a large golden throne ... It's a place most memorably described by Christopher Hitchens as a celestial North Korea.

It's the latter destination, hell, that really excites the pornographic imagination of believers; all kinds of obscene torture, violent punishment and sexual humiliation are said to take place there, to say nothing of those caves and ragged clothing and the heat - my God the heat! - that so terrifies Elaine Benes.

And, to top it all off, above the gates of hell is a sign which, according to Dante, reads: Built in the Name of Eternal Love - words even more chilling than Arbeit macht frei.

Nietzsche, however, disputes this and says it displays a certain philosophical naivety on the part of the Italian poet. There is a sign, but it's placed rather above the entrance to heaven and the inscription reads: Built in the Name of Everlasting Hate.

For what guarantees the bliss of those in paradise is nothing other than the spectacle of suffering provided by those unfortunates - including family members and friends - burning below: Beati in regno colesti videbunt poenas damnatorum ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat, as Thomas Aquinas, the great Christian teacher and saint writes in pious Latin. The English translation reads:

"The blessed in the kingdom of heaven shall view the torment of the damned, so that they may better enjoy their own salvation." [Summa Theologiae]

Christianity did not discover cruelty as one of the great festive joys of mankind, nor did it invent the idea of an underworld, but only the Church sanctified cruelty in this manner and gloried perversely in torture porn as a form of moral righteousness.

La tyrannie de la pénitence

Princeton University Press (2010)

Described by Douglas Murray as one of the landmark books of our time, Pascal Bruckner's The Tyranny of Guilt develops a line of argument that he first advanced two decades earlier in The Tears of the White Man. Namely, that the Western world has spent the last sixty years so consumed by remorse for its own history that it is now on the verge of apologizing itself out of existence.    

Our self-hatred and self-contempt is matched only by our sentimental insistence on the innocence and innate moral goodness of those peoples upon whom we once imposed our imperial values and the evils of slavery, racism, and genocide; evils which, mistakenly, the West now believes it invented and have a monopoly on.

Nietzsche describes this pathology of guilt, shame, and self-division as bad conscience and whilst Bruckner doesn't refer directly to the second essay of the Genealogy, he acknowledges that Nietzsche understood better than most how the internalization of cruelty, practiced so remorselessly within Judeo-Christian culture, was continuing within secular liberal society; intensifying the pain and creating a duty of repentance.       

Bruckner seeks to understand this phenomenon and how it unfolds in the world today. And, importantly, he attempts to counter it by offering us some theoretical tools of opposition. Of course, to his enemies - and he has many - this attempt at a revaluation of values within the West is seen as reactionary and ethnocentric. He is accused in France of neo-conservatism and Islamophobia due to his opposition to multiculturalism, his staunch defence of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and his admiration for the United States. 

But accusations such as this are as tiresome and as trite as they are predictable. Bruckner may not get everything right, but he deserves to be read and taken seriously. The Tyranny of Guilt is a brave, lucid, and provocative text that challenges readers not only to think - but to care and be concerned about the world in which they live. 

 
Note: Pascal Bruckner studied under Roland Barthes and belongs to that generation of French intellectuals who emerged during the 1970s known as les nouveaux philosophes. He is the award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novel Lunes de fiel (1981), which was made into a little remembered film, Bitter Moon (1992), directed by Roman Polanski, starring Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas.