Identity politics, not Covid, are the biggest threat to culture
The challenge to freedom of speech is now the cultural crisis of our age, and on Tuesday, a letter signed by such luminaries as Margaret Atwood, JK Rowling, Wynton Marsalis and Salman Rushdie brought things to a head. Published on the American Harper’s Magazine website, it warned of an “intolerant climate” taking over our culture and vile reaction was swift. The signatories were variously accused of thin-skinnedness, privilege and fear of a “loss of relevance” by those entrenched in ideologies which are now engulfing social discourse.
Make no mistake – this is not some fringe concern. The clamour from groups who insist that all human life is to be understood through the prism of identity politics is the most dangerous threat to culture I’ve known in my lifetime.
It is up to universities all over the world to rout out the lecturers (many of whom are Marxist) who are influencing young minds who seem blind to the toxicity of this way of thinking. Yes, this has been a concern since the Sixties, when many campuses seemed intent on teaching the humanities in a way dominated by ideology and relativism, but it is now inarguably mainstream as any fool on Twitter starts bandying around phrases such as “intersectionality” and “code switching”.
Such people would argue that theirs is a necessary battle cry against the illiberalism of Trump, but as the letter states, “the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument and persuasion” not by eradicating individual thought and merely spouting an alternative prejudice. While we’re at it, the insistence of the identity politics brigade that people must be defined by the apparently homogenous experience of the group to which they belong is, of course, one of the very definitions of racism.
“Resistance must not be allowed to harden into dogma or coercion,” states the letter. Of course, it already has – and it is seriously affecting the British arts scene whose leaders are terrified of these vocal forces.
Theatre, always the least reactionary of sectors, has been particularly susceptible to this. Last year, Fairview (a US play which transferred to the Young Vic in London) implored every white person in the audience to get on stage so they could be subjected to the scrutiny of black, Asian and minority ethnic spectators habitually used to the judgment of the white gaze.
Last week, the RSC pledged to examine “microaggressions” directed at non-white actors on stage and in post-show talks by their white audiences. It is as if theatre companies wish to cancel their own audiences, asking them to approach their nights out in a state of guilt. I suspect they may feel they are simply not wanted, and stay away.
The Covid pandemic has brought the opportunity for an arts “reset”, as Nicholas Serota, the chairman of Arts Council England (ACE), recently described it. The peril is that, faced with something of a cultural ground zero produced by the crisis, agenda-led programming and decision-making will take over. And now that a £1.57billion bail-out is at stake, there’s money to grab to fund it.
It is therefore crucial that those distributing the funds – specialist bodies such as ACE, the British Film Institute and the National Heritage Lottery Fund – do not become ruled by ideology when handing out the cash.
The recent noises coming from ACE is troubling in this respect. Their “Let’s Create” strategy, outlining a 10-year vision and published earlier this year, called for a radical democratisation of the arts – although they didn’t use the word “arts” at all in the document due, apparently, to its elitist associations. In this vision amateur productions in village halls, community centres and old people’s homes up and down the land could all create art with the help of ACE funding. Although support for the arts in the community should of course be looked at, the document’s phobia towards the notion of excellence, to the idea that there are skills developed over decades that have a higher call to funding than a fun idea invented in a village hall, because they will produce better art, was dismaying. My fear is that excellence is the last thing on the minds of many working within the arts sector. A recent episode of Radio 4’s Front Row arts programme (aired a couple of weeks before the bail-out announcement) aroused my suspicions. Frances Morris, head of Tate Modern, said the pressing priority post-covid was to put climate change awareness at the heart of curating and other decisions. A worthy cause, but surely placing this agenda ahead of simply delivering work that stimulates and inspires the public, and, apart from anything, gets them through the door, is wrong headed at this time?
David Jubb, a theatre director and formerly the artistic director of Battersea Arts Centre in south London, made a plea for a model, not so different from that indicated by ACE’S own strategy, in which money should be taken away from the big-hitting organisations and decisions devolved to a regional level with local decisionmaking.
Luminaries warning of an intolerant climate on Twitter were vilified
Setting aside the fact that this would create a sort of bureaucratic nightmare, it also shows a dangerous disregard for those institutions that plough money into the development of world-beating performance levels and skills, the Royal Ballet and the National Theatre among them.
Jubb was scathing that many institutions had become “addicted to production”. But surely it is production that is needed to get the arts back on their feet, and give audiences something to actually go to – not some nebulous strategy which satisfies the demands of those who think the arts is in thrall to some kind of behemothic patriarchy.
And how does this way of thinking link to the current culture wars? Because by focusing on groups whose virtue is deemed to be in their marginality, we are in danger of neglecting the root and branch of our broader common culture, and replacing it with fissured visions of a fractured society playing to groups characterised by a hostile separatism.
Minority voices in the arts have and can speak just as well as the traditional mainstream of the universal truths that the best art is about – love, death, friendship. The shift within the arts to inclusivity towards those of all backgrounds is to be celebrated.
But this shift must be to raise and develop unique voices, not reduce everyone’s experience of life and limit what they are permitted to have insight about to the accident of birth. That way only bad art lies. Allow space for tolerance as the letter suggests, and the arts can seek out subjects that can challenge and inspire us all, not set us against each other.