No Platformed by my friends
As a society we are becoming more and more sectarian and less able to voice our opinions, with dangerous results, says SIMON CARR
YOUR COLUMNIST has said before that he takes an indulgent attitude towards bigots, wanting to keep on the right side of the opinion-forming population. But having recently experienced some actual bigotry, some modifications may be in order.
I’ve taken bigotry to mean an inherited or instinctive dislike, unmoveable by argument or reason. It’s the id, essentially, for which we can’t really be blamed, insofar as we keep our idiocies under control. We can usually find reasons for liking each other, if we can find common ground.
Admittedly, it’s a benign interpretation and leaves out the offensive part of active bigotry. Here was my small but direct experience of it. I was No Platformed by an old friend of mine in a restaurant the other day, and then stigmatised by him and his wife. I was pretty sure what happened was stigmatising. I didn’t like it one bit. Here are one or two snatches from the conversation.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about but I know you’re wrong.’
And then, ‘But you want to kill all Muslims.’ Self: ‘I what?’ ‘You said it, you want to kill them all.’ ‘I said no such thing, I wouldn’t even think the words!’ ‘I heard you say it!’ I appealed to my old friend, who said, ‘I heard you say something very like that.’
‘You’re not talking to me at all,’ I bleated. ‘You’re addressing some insane Republican fundamentalist you see sitting on my shoulder!’
My quotation from certain religious texts resulted in the No Platform edict and then, all of us shocked and bruised by the exchanges, we went on to talk about hiking sleeping bags.
They might have been thinking, ‘This sort of fascist thinking has to be challenged. We totally called him out.’
And I was thinking, ‘I’ve never been spoken to like that in my life!’
The very words we used to laugh at when young, as our frothing, blimpish elders recoiled from our advanced opinions.
There in that restaurant, we were a nice little capsule showing the decline of political discourse. How sectarian we are becoming. I had confessed to having a conservative temperament and had been provocative in asserting or even flaunting certain truisms in front of their progressive ideas. That I didn’t care about things I couldn’t have any practical effect on. That things outside my circumference were not really my business. They had active social consciences and took strong positions on refugees, police racism, carbon crimes, the evils of the Republican Party.
They were entitled to their ideas as I was to mine, but I’m not sure they felt the same way. It may not be reciprocal. As a climate change author said recently, ‘We’ve got to get deniers out of the discourse.’
Making my conservative confession characterised me in such a way that the rest of my ideas could be filled in automatically. Thus, if you support grammar schools you will oppose universal health care and be a selfish, elitist supporter of low, flat tax and climate change scepticism. You will countenance the disappearance of the Seychelles under rising sea levels. That’s the evil at the heart of selective education, it approves of the drowning of a whole nation. Only apologists for genocide approve of grammar schools.
That’s the stigmatising part, the colouring-in of a whole portrait from one or two details. As Lucian Freud said, ‘They’re like Nazis looking for Jewish noses.’ Talking about politics is getting more and more like that. And the sensitivities are getting more sensitive. On that Nick Griffin Question Time, in 2009, two women in the audience laid into Jack Straw: ‘We were cringing when you called us Afro-caribbeans. Cringing, we were.’ There was a moment of puzzlement and she explained, ‘We’re African-caribbean!’
The upshot of cultural competency, safe spaces, trigger warnings and the hair-trigger of offence-taking, is that we different tribes, clans and classes have become more and more wary of each other, less inclined to give the benefit of the doubt. The worry is that when our relations become so cautious and the things we say are so regulated that our authentic feelings get suppressed. And whatever it is we are struggling to say will come out later in a very different way, like a referred pain. It’s the same mechanism as Freud’s idea of neurosis.
And perhaps, voting for Donald Trump and the National Front are two examples of that.