Though Cowards Flinch

There’s a fantastic article in the National Review by a chap called Thomas Sowell railing against intelligence in politics (via an incredulous AlterNet). FDR was brainy, created the New Deal, prolonged the Depression. Hitler was brainy, created the Third Reich and killed a few dozen million people. Anyone see where this is going? Yeah, Obama and his administration are brainy… . Subtle stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Yet presumably if writers feel they can get away making jibes about someone’s intelligence, then there is a market for what they’re saying. Right enough, Bush’s apparent stupidity didn’t seem to bother everyone until the war and the economy started to go bad. Similarly, Gore and Kerry – who was a war veteran – were derided as being egg heads. One wonders, since when has that been a bad thing?

Then there’s the usual crusades for inveterate anti-intellectuals (in America at least, it has never seemed so much of a problem over here): creationism, fundamentalist Christianity and so forth. These arguments are often portrayed by more liberal figures as being dumb hicks or corporate shills versus the shining white knights of science, galloping in to save eternal scientific truths from corruption by the mob (e.g.). Conservatives see it as smug and superior liberals attempting to force their views on everyone else (e.g.).

I think these view are superficial and counterproductive, especially from the point of view of ‘our’ side – i.e. the Left. For this reason I am less than impressed by programmes such as this from Richard Dawkins, videos such as this on YouTube or the new book, edited by Ariane Sherine, billed as a perfect 2009 Christmas present for atheists.

I am an atheist, and like most atheists I’ll snicker at the jokes made at the expense of the religious and, indeed, the stupid. I’ll gawp at the irreconcilable irrationality of certain religious viewpoints – something amply demonstrated by the interviews in Dawkins’ “Root of all Evil” documentary. Individually I tend to treat religion with disdain and to find the deeply religious plainly irritating.

Which makes me just as bad as Dawkins etc, because actually there’s a class analysis to be derived here. The fatuous pronouncements of the Bishops or self-made evangelicals like Ted Haggard need to be dealt with, for the sake of a secular society, but they’ll not be dealt with on the liberal basis which a straightforward “smart vs. stupid” or “religious vs. atheist” narrative provides. In fact, that may well make things worse.

The fact of the matter is that most of the people who consider themselves religious, like many of the people on the 12th September march on DC, are also working class. From their point of view, the ‘liberal’ media is not to be trusted – as indeed it isn’t. Televisual media in the US like MSNBC are themselves often corporate shills and, the rhetoric of an Olbermann or a Maddow notwithstanding, offers no solution to America’s problems.

Certainly not the problems faced by the American working class. I think there is a tendency to forget this, since such pundits can seem positively revolutionary when compared to FOX’s Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly.

A disorganised working class can be seduced by people like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. The fear of the people on the Teabaggers’ march was palpable, with one group interviewed saying that they’d met Russians on the march who feared that America would actually become like the Soviet Union – i.e. grossly repressive to the rights of the individual. This fear is born from a lack of socialist organisation. People who have the power to change things don’t need to fear.

What becomes clear in this situation, where we’ve only seen sporadic resistance to the depredations of capitalism in crisis, is that neither side is really listening to the arguments of the other. ‘Smug’ liberals and ’stupid’ conservatives simply don’t really care what the opposition is saying except insofar as they can, in exasperated fashion, mount their particular soapbox. As Ben Goldacre and others outline, day after day, the empirical truth can go hang for all people seem to care – whether it’s the anti-vaxxers, the anti-flouridators or whatever.

How do we fix the situation?

In certain circumstances, I’m sure, polemic will work – but polemic is all we will ever get from a liberal intelligentsia. Organisations set up to support secularism, such as the National Secular Society or the British Humanist Association, even including certain aspects of certain political parties, are really just a way to better organise the polemic, whether on the side of buses or in the Guardian or in universities. Indeed occasionally the rhetoric of “the enlightened” obfuscates an agenda which is harmful to the interests of the working class.

As regards today’s vote on the Lisbon Treaty in the Republic of Ireland, the liberal intelligentsia have gone all-out with this contrast between the “enlightened” ‘Yes’ camp and the supposed backwards-looking fear they claim is inspired by the ‘No’ camp – as indeed did that of France and the Netherlands when the people of those countries each returned a “No” vote on the Nice Treaty. Needless to say both were ridden over roughshod much like the second referendum in Ireland rides over the point of having a referendum at all.

Clearly, therefore, mere polemic is not enough. Whether what we’re interested in combatting are the openly quirky movements such as the anti-vaxxers, fundamentalist religion or whatever movement contradicts the rationalism socialists accept as fundamental to our worldview, we cannot reduce ourselves to pretty patronising arguments over this or that finer point of the empirical evidence.

I made a point about the efficacy of rational argument when addressing the concerns of the BNP – and I stand by those arguments. In a future article I hope to revise and extend them by deconstructing the ideological nature of “logic” and how both logic and illogicality are constructs of the capitalist hegemonic totality (which ties in to my current reading of Engels’ Anti-Duhring and the nature of dialectics).

For the meantime, I think it is simpler to say that we can better deal whatever anti-corporation sentiment which creates enemies of rational public health decisions here in the UK, or whatever anti-state sentiment that makes people believe that socialized medicine is intrinsically harmful to a free society, not by belittling or attacking the knowledge of the opposition but by a flanking manoeuvre geared towards socialistic organisation of the working class. Much in the same way as we can beat fascism.

This is not to say that we socialists patronizingly recognize what arguments are “really” about. When someone complains of immigration, the argument is really about immigration – there’s no deeper displacement from ‘real’ class struggle at work in the psyche. Much in the same way that the English Revolution really was about religion, in the sense that this was the idiom in which people understood what they were fighting for. Yet once explicitly engaged in class struggle and correctly orientated, stances on things like religion and immigration alter accordingly.

If we take the historical example of the English Revolution for a moment, the argumentative idiom of radical sects such as the Ranters and Fifth Monarchists was religious. They were not Marxists who believed in class struggle, but neither was their social radicalism incidental. It was intrinsic to their religious millenarian views (see Flecknoe’s Aenigmatical Characters or the description of Mary Cary’s New Jerusalem helpfully recorded in Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, p275). This turned them away from the sterile religious narrative of their contemporary ruling class and towards popular engagement and attempted mass organisation.

In the same way, socialists want to turn workers away from sterile narratives on the ‘harm’ caused by immigration (or secularism or anything).

For a modern example, there are plenty of workers who read reactionary bilge from the Sun or the Daily Star or the News of the World or the Mail. I’m almost certain that if workers at the oil refineries and power stations which went on strike over the last year were surveyed, at least one of these papers would qualify as being widest read. Yet, ignoring the racist, anti-immigration filth in the media, when the workers got involved in a tussle it was directed against bosses – not other workers – and involved ejecting a racist BNP interloper from the dispute. This shows that we can appeal directly to the closest interests of the working class, and incidentally act to get rid of prejudice en route.

That is how we challenge religious prejudice, racial prejudice, irrational fears of science and so on. It bears pointing out that anti-statism is embryonic class struggle to begin with: the state is the tool of capitalism. People who want a small state and correlate a big state with oppression can be right – we can provide the corresponding critique of ‘the market’ too. How?

Organize on a class basis. The one answer which the smiling, suited technocrats can’t provide. Organize, organize, organize.

And don’t be an intellectual snob in the process.