Six thought-terminating cliches which reduced progressive discourse to mush

A critique of mantras

Crowd of protestors holding signs by Life Matters. Image free to use via Pexels.com

People can struggle to accept that the things which really motivate them may be wildly specific in nature, and squarely out of time; that you may not, for example, be inspired by any of the political ideologies currently being widely discussed, and the demand to take a position on them, but by more obscure details such as, for example, the need for good outdoor green spaces in your local area.

Similarly, after a great deal of my life spent engaging with different political propositions, I have concluded, or perhaps admitted, that beyond my general hope that people are as kind or at least not unnecessarily cruel to each other as is possible, what I really care about is the maintenance of high standards of written and spoken English.

There are many things awful about our modern world, things absolutely worth taking a stand over, but what I care more about is that the language it’s all being expressed in is of such poor standard. And I don’t see AI helping. Even if it sounds eccentric, I’m allowed to have that be the thing which I care about – in my small way, I am trying to upkeep some kind of standards for the world’s outstanding lingua franca and for clarity in writing.

This in no small part explains my ongoing alienation from the progressive left, which has in recent years sunk into a morass of what the American psychiatrist R.J Lifton called ‘thought-terminating clichés’. These are sort of frequently quoted linguistic placeholders which tho sounding – and not always even sounding – profound are actually designed to close off enquiry. The mantra is intoned; your fellow progressives signal appreciation, and the real business, the search for heretics, can begin.

All this led me to the sad realization that, despite the progressive left’s alleged overlap with what are apparently the most open-minded and knowledge-seeking aspects of our economy, namely academia and the arts, the identitarian left is one of the most intellectually dead spaces there is. What’s the point in dialogue if you already know the answers? This, of course, explains why so much ‘progressive’ art is so heinously dull, increasingly closer to the medieval morality play than the wildness of 20th-century art. The bad behave as the bad do; the good impart their moral lessons; a specific form of justice is served.

Rather than an open dialogue of ideas, large parts of the liberal left pursued a particular selection of ideas to absurd extremes and long beyond those ideas have proved ruinously unpopular with the electorate at large. Such clichés were clearly not meant to be engaged with at any level of intellectual exactitude, to be analysed as actual arguments. And yes, most of them have now peaked, outside of the small enclaves of the knowledge economy I mentioned.

Nonetheless I’d like to present a selection of them today as a small contribution to showing why, over the last decade, ultraprogressive politics became a silly place. Let us show these mantras the respect of giving them some analysis.

---

1) The master’s tools will never demolish the master’s house

First of all, I get what this Audrey Lorde quote is supposed to mean. It means that the systems of structural oppression can never be defeated by the same systems which created then. I’ve heard it quoted by multiple progressives approvingly over the years, and it’s a classic of the genre, sounding righteous and wise. And also sounding the appeal to a generalised, helpfully non-specified ‘new way of doing things’ which will be better than what humans have come up with so far and also better unlike the previous ruinous occasions on which revolutionary change was implemented. New tools! Structural change! Unspecified utopias!

The thing is, it doesn’t make sense as a metaphor. Because tools are tools. The master built their house with their tools; therefore, it stands to reason that said house can be demolished via the same tools. Let’s try it with another object to see how daft it is. ‘The master’s toothbrush can never clean the servant’s teeth.’ Yes it can. You might need to boil it a bit first, but it’s a toothbrush, therefore it is perfectly capable of functioning for more than one user. Otherwise, the whole thing rather bizarrely invites a kind of ‘70s ditzy woman sitcom subtext; ‘We couldn’t be using the master’s tools! They’re so big and manly!’

Indeed, there’s a pretty good argument that seizing the master’s tools is exactly the way for the master’s subjects to gain power and has the added advantage of leaving the master toolless. Isn’t there some old quote about the workers seizing the means of production?

As it is, the metaphor shows a bizarre preference for the oppressed inventing new tools, which presumably work much the same as the old ones, just somehow more ethically, and then using them to do the same thing the old tools did. A better line might be ‘Get the master’s tools and demolish his house.’ That at least has revolutionary clarity.

2) Silence is violence

This is the idea that, in the face of a given injustice, refraining from speaking up represents a form of complicity of even condonement. If a massacre is going on and you don’t condemn it you are, by dint of not stating your opposition explicitly, on the side of the massacrers.

Unfortunately, this sets an absolutely impossible standard for everyone to be constantly speaking up against all of the injustices in the world. At any given moment, most of my progressive friends are very active in condemning some conflicts and never mention the others. Those who endlessly post about Gaza never mention Sudan, or the Congo. Does this mean they are actively condoning the latter atrocities?

Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say they’re just too lazy to follow multiple foreign conflicts. A common progressive defense here is that the West influences the Israel-Palestine conflict in a way that it doesn’t, say, China; a thought which presumably unravels like Xinjiang cotton in your jeans.

Meanwhile, most people are busy. It is simply unfeasible, not to mention undesirable, to expect them to spend their entire life condemning every incident of mass suffering and nor is that really the expectation. What it means rather is ‘condemn the atrocity which is currently fashionable to condemn in order to show group belonging’.

Indeed, spaces where this kind of vociferous condemnation - of, let's be honest, the US and Israel - is common are often quite poor on other conflicts, riven with Assadists and apologists of all stripes. The violence of apologism is, in my view, a much more direct kind than mere silence.

A better phrase might be ‘Speak out on injustice where you feel it’s appropriate, but don’t wear yourself out doing so; for people in those conflicts would not want you tearing yourself to bits on their behalf.’ The truth is we are all silent about most things.

3) Nobody is free until all of us are free

Again, this comes from rather a similar place; the erection in left spaces of an impossible standard, which no ordinary mortal could satisfy, and then using the failure to meet it to generate a powerful wellspring of performative unhappiness. There will never be a world in which all of us are free, not least because some people seem to generally choose to live under un-free conditions. Some people want to be unfree. Some people, including many of those in the most populous country in the world, think that a lack of liberty means better social organisation.

Only people determined to be unhappy could put such an unobtainable qualifier on their own freedom, defined as their ability to make their own life choices. Requiring universal freedom to enjoy your own only works as a kind of pure masochist fantasy, sacrificing your own stab at the difficult business of happiness by dint of perceived problems elsewhere. I note also that this attitude often co-exists in those who produce it alongside a hostility to capitalism, the single best driver of people’s personal freedom in history; whatever the merits of the original phrase, nothing creates freedom for anyone better than having some independent wealth.

4) Good comedy punches up

This is a perfectly decent working definition of comedy for somebody who has never actually seen or experienced the form. For those who have, the idea that each joke undergo a rigorous test as to the social positioning of its target to determine its merits appears wholly absurd, not least because nothing upsets social hierarchy like a joke, where the first can be last and the last first.

More basically, famously nobody has ever made a single funny example of a joke about an ostensibly disadvantaged minority, never made a good joke about a blind person or someone with a learning disability, and this isn’t funny at all; in addition, a member of said minority has also never made a joke about themselves and prefer in comedy environments to have their identity treated with solemn reverence.

In reality, there is only one real test of whether a joke is ‘good comedy’ or not: Does it hit its target well? It’s pretty irrelevant where the ‘punch is heading’, only that it connects cleanly and with skill. Whether tasteful or tasteless, if a joke is good it’s normally followed by a wave of laughter, and what’s more the hierarchy thereafter is not the same after a gag has landed, with the joke teller either up or down; the real power dynamic is the comedian trying anything they can to assert power before and over the audience, and in trying to get there, any comedian is just punching any target they can hit.

Comedy isn’t the search for the most judicious or appropriate targets; it’s a desperate battle for the next laugh, and no comedian could ever be fussy enough to only seek to ‘punch up’, a concept itself widely different from moment to moment. Ironically this is why so much good comedy skewers hyper-liberal people, even tho they are often not the biggest threat to society; they’re just so recognisably punchable, and they go to comedy shows.

5) Socialism or barbarism

Well Sherlock, which one do you think the electorate is going to pick?

‘So I’m going to pay 80% property tax. Could you tell me more about this barbarism business again?’

This is evidence of so much of the issue of the left in coalition building, in that it presents endorsement of its own political view as the only choice, and opposition as always due to ignorance or bad character; there are people so instinctively repulsed by this kind of self-righteousness and intolerance of other views that they will vote for literally anything in response to it, who prefer an honest barbarian over a lecturing socialist. Particularly if low taxes are on offer from said barbarian. Also the electorate is generally just fine with a little barbarism, as long as it is happening to others. Meanwhile the left also wins from this ultimatum; it gets to consider itself a moral martyr, far from the vicissitudes of power. Purity and governance are antonyms.

Via Salon.com

6) The right side of history

This is really the motherlode of all these ideas, the wellspring of where the left has gone wrong in seeing politics itself a teleological moral crusade. It’s nothing new of course - false consciousness, as an idea, is predicated on the idea that there is one true account of politics which you either see or do not and which opposition to can only be explained by manipulation.

There is no such thing as a ‘right side’ of history; history is much more like a prism. From the Iraq-Iran war to the Cavaliers vs. the Roundheads, history presents countless examples of conflicts without a clear ‘right side’, where the only right sides were those doing their best to stay out of the way.

Even in cases as clear cut as defeating Nazism in Europe, there are still grave violations by the obvious ‘good guys’; Hitler had to defeated, but did Dresden have to be fire-bombed? War is a powerful motor for generating situations of moral impossibility, which is why pacifism, by reducing everything to the simple principle of non-violence is such a convenient position, albeit not one which reduces the presence of belligerent agressors.

Furthermore, this idea of a ‘correct’ side to every debate which progressives unerringly pick, usually year ahead of others, leads the left considerably intellectually astray. Even as a moderate Zionist, I can’t defend the actions of the Israeli army in Gaza or offer justifications for it, but only a dedicated Right Sider could think that this meant there was any possible defence of Hamas or use it to whitewash barbarous terrorists into freedom fighters. But the binary logic can’t entertain that in some cases both sides of a conflict are bad.

In fact a better response to such knotty crises would be just educating yourself about the basics of the issue. Better ten experts than a thousand ill-informed ‘activists’. And I do believe that expertise in a topic almost inevitably leads to moderation; as Robert Conquest had it, as part of his Three Laws of Politics, ‘Everyone is a conservative about what he knows best.’

Fundamentally, there isn’t some inelectable arrow of history heading to progressive nirvana. Even if we one day achieved that it would begin its decline within weeks, at least if humans remain involved. This sense of the just-out-of-reach-any-day-now perfect world, the world where we are all free or the one where constantly condemn injustice, the perfect world being just around the corner, leads to perennial unhappiness as we privilege dreams of perfection over the ragged glory of life.

It is happier to try and live in the world as it is, accepting that there are periods of uptick and subsequent decline, a pattern we see in our own lives. My own life was better two years ago than now; two years on it will be better than today. Accepting that places and people can live in grey areas, tho I sometimes wonder if our current age isn’t determined to create people as simple as our ideas. That nuance is just another 20th-century concept in retreat.

Ironically, this simplistic, unidirectional view of history is itself a sign that we are, after the prosperous postwar period, entering a period of decline; even Fukuyama was more bearish on the exact conditions of what it would be like to live at ‘the End of History’, a time he saw as potentially full of boredom and strange anti-democratic spasms.

We must give the strangeness of the past its due, which means in large part allowing that the ideas which motivated people back then may be different than now; history is not just tides of open-hearted liberals against crotchety conservatives. That means abandoning the idea of the past as trending in one direction, each time branching off to give the correct or incorrect answer, when even if the undesired binary wins the better one will be back soon; there are only setbacks, never reversals on the way to history’s perfected end state. That is a recent modern progressive narrative of the past which only really suits a stupid person. And who wants to be that?

It is the middle ground, in the finding out about things, that there is room for debate and discussion and learning. Political extremes are the opposite to this as there the answer is always known in advance, like the way the World Socialist Web Site used to review every film on how it impeded or advanced the cause of socialism. As you can imagine, few films passed that test.

It’s stupid to want the world to conform to a particular ideological faction; some things age poorly, some things are forgotten, and this is the common feature of all this; political extremes, from wherever, reject the complexity of experience and the undramatic but fulfilling possibility of being wrong and revising your view. Ideologues can be cunning but they are rarely bright.