Liberal Society - Conservative Community

Sensitive Souls


The August 2011 riots that swept first through London, then Britain's other major cities, were a tremendous shock and a severe psychological blow to much of the population. They were not, after all, 'riots', in the political sense. They were in fact simply orgies of looting similar to what we saw on our televisions occuring in Bagdad in 2003.

In 2011 we watched and were transfixed by scenes occurring within our own country, faithfully recorded by the CCTV cameras that we'd installed for our security, as groups of hooded and masked youths rampaged through the streets with impunity, smashing, looting and setting fire to shops. We stared as they humiliated, robbed and beat anonymous citizens, all without protection or recourse to the law. And we watched the mobs rally and organize, coordinated by twitter, facebook and blackberry, with youths on bikes scouting out for opportunities.

And oh how we watched. For the the biggest psychological hit of the whole affair was the fact that it went on day after day, night after night, morphing from a weekend dust up into something that did not seem to want to end.

That was the biggest shock to the country. The fact that it lasted four days.

It was amusing to watch many of the liberals in the BBC or commentating in the Guardian change their tone as the chaos spread. The majority of journalists of course live and work in London, and thus it was more of a shock for them to see smashed glass and flames engulf streets that they recognised. It was dangerously close to the Latte-serving cafes that they patronised. And even more of a shock to them was to witness the Police, whom they had criticised for decades for their brutality, trying to police the mobs in a nicer, more consensual way, as they had been ordered to do so many times. And the mob just taunted them, threw things at them and looted shops in front of them. And the police simply 'held the line', rather than go in swinging their batons.
'The police must do everything in their power to restore order to the streets' the liberals cried, throwing their civil liberties arguments out of the window as they watched the mobs spread through their favourite city. They soon forgot their social justice arguments too as the youths were described first as 'the underclass', then simply 'yobs', and finally as 'vile scum'. For fear had started to take hold in places it had not been seen before.

And we who watched agreed with them. For most of us are liberals too, even those who claim (erroneously) to be conservatives, for we all believe in the sanctity of the individual, and the fear we felt was the fear of the individual, alone before the mob - and possibly its next victim.

And that is the problem of the liberal individual - extreme sensitivity. For the individual is alone, so of course one will be sensitive to one's own fears. They will be sensitive to the power of the State and the Police, in case that power is directed at one. And they will also be sensitive to the power of the mob (or the yob). And there is no paradox. Until you require one to protect you from the other.


Softness

Although Liberalism is a recognised philosophy, most people simply don't understand it or take its main tenets for granted, for liberalism has become, in the UK, the mainstream. The term 'liberal' has also become a euphemism for 'softness'. But the truth is, we have all become soft. Softness too is mainstream. And this is natural.

This is a prosperous society, and a liberal one. Prosperity and urbanization lead naturally to liberalism, for it gifts us with the chance to be free from small community norms and the culture of the twitching net curtain. We don't need to identify ourselves according to what group we belong to. The ties that bind us to our neighbours are loosened, giving us greater personal freedom. That is what liberalism means - freedom.

We embrace the prosperity and urbanization because it gives us pleasures. And the State protects our freedom to be consumers, to be single, to be gay, to be whatever we want. And while this does not always work out the way we want, it nevertheless leads to us being more able to relax. It leads to softness, for softness, mark you, is actually a sign of success.

It is the aim of any civilization to rise up to the stage where it can actually be soft, for softness is pleasant, whereas hardness is not.


Community

 And herein lies the problem with a soft, liberal, atomized society. The majority of people watched or suffered in the riots without really knowing what to do. They were helpless. Softness was going up in smoke.

The Turkish, Kurd, Sikh and Muslim communities of London however knew exactly what to do. They didn't need 'social media' to organise. Their neighbours are right next door, and a phone call was sufficient to contact extended family members. Temples and Mosques served as simple rallying points. While other people flapped about, leaderless, shocked and struggling to comprehend, the asian ethnic communities - the only real communities in the UK today - were out in front of their shops and businesses with knives, baseball bats, hockey sticks and swords. They felt no sympathy for the 'underclass' and their social justice problems or their underpriviliged backgrounds. And they certainly did not suffer from guilt at the fact that most of the rioters were black.
No, the message from these tightknit communities was a simple one - 'If you come down here then we don't care whether you're a gora or a kalay, we'll break your legs.'

And in that strange week when it all happened, they received much praise for doing precisely that.


Assimilation

Over the years there has been much talk about immigrant communities not 'assimilating'. These stubborn people have held onto their beliefs, their cohesiveness and their suspicious disdain of liberalism. Their children are still pressured to conform to (small) society norms. Their girls are still under pressure to marry, and marry within the community or religion. The libertine freedoms that are not only celebrated, but actually encouraged and taught, in Britain are scratching against the conservative walls of these communities, eroding them but not yet overwhelming them.

During the riots however there turned out to be many people who were glad they hadn't assimilated. When the shit hit the fan, suddenly these kinds of people were needed.


What does this say about the UK today?

Are we really liberal? Or are we just soft? If liberalism means simply wanting things to be 'nice', is it really a 'value' any more?

If softness means that we don't actually consider any value worth being 'hard' about, then are we doomed to always hand over the mandate for our protection to whoever happens to be passing as soon as things become unpleasant?

If so, do we treasure softness and pleasure so much that we are prepared to barter liberal freedoms for protection? Are we not caught therefore in a dreadful paradox?

Is this the paradox that all successful civilizations encounter?

Are we Romans handing over first the leadership, then the republic, to the Germanic tribes?

'I'm also very aware why very masculine men are not represented in academe. Very masculine men cannot sit still long enough. And so all the ideology of feminism is coming out of these women who are married to wordsmith men, who are not that combative or confrontational to begin with, because the really masculine men, the high-testosterone men, are so restless they can hardly sit still in class.

'People of the white upper-middle-class professional elite have very little direct contact with working-class men, even though the working-class men are everywhere around them and are keeping everything going. They are the ones who are the janitors, the construction workers, the plumbers, the police and firemen, and so on. It's everywhere.
But the world that those men have created works so well, they maintain it so assiduously, that there has been a contempt on the part of these complacent, pampered, coddled upper-middle-class people who are spouting a lot of this rhetoric. There's this arrogance that masculinity isn't something that we need anymore--this is the Gloria Steinem line: Masculinity is something that is pernicious and is the cause of all wars and destruction and violence and battering against women, and slowly we're going to be programming it out of our youth.

'I said it in the Playboy interview: All it takes is one natural disaster for that entire artificial world to come crumbling down, and suddenly everyone will be screaming and yelling for the plumbers and the construction workers. Only masculine men of the working class will hold the civilization together.

'I'm very, very worried about this new kind of bourgeois imperialism which predicates the ultimate human type as someone who is good at sitting still at a desk.'
Camille Paglia

'Leftism should be about the people. That's how it began. Instead, what it has become in the last 20 years is a white upper-middle-class elitism which preaches to the people and says, "Oh, you don't agree with us? You're homophobic, you're so uneducated. You're in the darkness. You need us to bring light and truth to you."'

Camille Paglia

The Greens

The Green instruction to 'lower your carbon footprint' is an exhortation to heat less, consume less, travel less, spend less. This is how the poor live. Green exhortations therefore are for wealthy people to live like the poor - by choice.

It's a nice idea, but I don't think it will catch on. Jesus preached something like this, as did Buddha. Confucius did too. Religions have, for millennia, tried to get humans to live within limits - moral limits, limits to hubris, to ego, to extravagance. Considering all the effort that went into these religions, holding back natural human impulses is clearly hard work, like a child trying to hold back a 600 pound rhino.

Libya - Lies, damned lies and our own Media.

I've got an itch that, no matter how I scratch it, just won't stop itching.

Libya - an open and shut case, right? A brutal dictator unleashes his forces upon his own people, besieging rebels in their last stronghold. The international community fears a massacre and calls for a ceasefire and a no-fly zone, and then decisively enforces it. To save innocent lives.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Call it Liberal Interventionism if you like.

Maybe it's all about oil - no small thing since it actually underpins all modern civilizations. Rome fought for Grain, Spain fought for Silver, we fight for Oil. Business as usual, since even the most sentimental liberal needs it for their cosmopolitan, urban lifestyle. Tofu won't power ipads.

Or call it empathy. We can't just stand by and do nothing while a dictator suppresses freedom.

Media commentators of all stripes have had fun with all of the above. And yet too many details are still being missed.

• Politicians now over-use the phrase 'protecting civilians'. Yet the rebels are armed combatants, albeit incompetent ones. And the 'opposition' is not one opposition and has no apparent leader. Robert Fisk of The Independent has already identified the Benghazi rebels as warriors from the Senoussi Tribe.
• Gaddafi is said to have broken the ceasefire, thus warranting immediate military action. But the aircraft that was shot down graphically over Benghazi has been identified by The Guardian and Al Jazeera as a rebel plane. It is not clear who shot it down, but it is clear that the rebels, who called for and then cheered the no-fly zone yesterday, breached that no-fly zone today. But western forces have begun attacking Gaddafi's forces.
• French aircraft have already destroyed four Libyan government tanks. But France is not neutral in this - it has formally recognised the Benghazi 'opposition' as a defacto government. France is thus not enforcing a ceasefire - it is aggressively flying top cover for a recognised client. And it was France that led the charge to have this brought before the UN Security Council.
• Fears of a massacre by Gaddafi's forces have been cited as a motivation for protecting Benghazi. Yet Gaddafi's forces have already overrun several 'rebel held' towns, and yet nobody has even hinted at any massacres, ethnic cleansing or fleeing columns of refugees from those towns. And Benghazi is a big city, while Gaddafi's 'beseiging' forces are barely Brigade sized. Nor, according to footage so far, are they particularly well equipped, disciplined or anything like what one expects a militaristic dictator's army to look like. In fact, they don't look that much different from the rebels themselves.
• Aircraft and cruise missiles have already hit numerous targets all over Libya, including Tripoli. A curiously zealous way to protect a ceasefire in Benghazi, with little evidence of a ceasefire breach to prompt such haste. Serbia was given far more time to pull back before NATO was unleashed in Bosnia and Kosovo.
• The Arab nations have apparently given their assent to this. Yet where are they? Egypt has funnelled arms to the rebels, but will not take part in the enforcement of the no-fly zone. Egypt, among others, has benefited from billions of dollars of US advanced aircraft, Abrams tanks and training. Why so coy about enforcing a UN resolution right next door? Why is France so keen to jump in when it dragged its feet so famously over Iraq? Iraq had oil too.
• If it is about oil, why not let Gaddafi do what he has always done, and then just continue to buy the oil from him, just as we have always done? If it is about supporting democratic revolution, then who are the budding democratic parties and why have they not been more clearly lauded? If it's about civilian lives, why have we so clearly taken one side in what may be a tribal war and begun a 'Shock and Awe' air and missile campaign, with its attendant risks of collateral damage?

What is really going on, and if the majority of our media is truly not being so mendacious, doesn't that instead just make them look stunningly incompetent? We pride ourselves in the West on our free press on the assumption that it is more likely to tell the truth. But is it really impartial or even worth a damn?

Liberalism is the freeing of the individual from the tyranny of tribe, class, caste or community.

Science Fiction is big on evolution, namely the evolution of humanity - either from long term exposure to the freakiness of space, or conscious evolution by tampering with genes. Either way it's seen as the ultimate solution to the secular version of original sin (how terribly nasty we humans can be), or the inevitability of the ongoing march of science.

So, will space change humans? Unlikely, simply because of our passion for technology. Humans have always used technology. Clothing is a form of technology - it is not natural, it is a deliberate manipulation of nature. The Naked Ape set out from Africa for colder regions long ago and, via the invention of clothing, took its environment with it, keeping its body at the same required temperature. Astronauts also take their environment with them - via spacesuits, oxygen tanks and, as will be likely, centrifugal gravity habs. All this negates the need to biologically adapt to the environment. Did the Inuit evolve hairy bodies like the polar bear, or blubbery skin like the walrus? No, they developed suitable clothing and, after thousands of years, remain recognizably human in all their traits and features. When Europeans encountered them after millennia of separation, they did not encounter aliens. Hereditary changes have been negligable and we remain, as a species, unchanged.

What about conscious evolution then? Will we, with the technology that, supposedly, will soon be within our grasp, change ourselves into post-humans? Well, the problem with this thesis is that humans have been able to alter biological features for thousands of years - pre-dating even civilization. We did it with selective breeding - of dogs, cattle and wheat grains. No lab coats were necessary for this, yet we've never done it to ourselves. And it's not because we've been too humane or moral to do it either. Humans have routinely slaughtered, enslaved and eaten other humans. Infanticide was a common method of birth control. So why have we never bred or created 'new' human types from slaves or unwanted children, the way we've done with dogs? Clearly there has to be a reason, an enduring reason that has lasted thousands of years. What that reason is, I do not know. But it's not an idle question and until we can answer it, we cannot take the idea of conscious evolution for granted.