Politics | Chris Beckett's Fiction

Palestine

A friend made herself watch footage taken by the Palestinian perpetrators of the massacre that took place on October 17th 2023. I don’t fully understand why she put herself through this, but the scenes she witnessed were absolutely hideous in their savagery.

But if the Israeli government had ever been serious about agreeing a two-state solution with the Palestinians, it would not have deliberately neutered, humiliated and discredited the Palestinian partner that was available to it to deal with – the Palestinian Authority, a partner which accepts Israel’s existence as a fact – by, among other things, allowing settlements to continue to mushroom all over the West Bank, and by protecting the settlers with soldiers, even when they roam about with guns and terrorise their Palestinian neighbours. Indeed, as Israeli politicians openly admit (see this article in the Times of Israel), Israel quite deliberately built up Hamas in order to further weaken the Palestinian Authority (thus also helpfully building up a Palestinian enemy too fanatical for people in the West to feel much sympathy for).

When Israel became independent, Palestinian Arabs were the majority in the area that is now Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinians still constitute about half the population of the area. If any of them claim that the whole area belongs to them ‘from the river to the sea’, there are howls of outrage – and yes, whatever the history, it’s not reasonable now to claim more than half of it. Yet many Israelis, including members of the current government, also claim everything from the river to the sea.

What’s worse is that, even when Israeli politicians did pay lip service to a two-state solution, they were in fact making that impossible by colonising the land all the way to the river. They must have known this. It’s been obvious for half a century.

And we’re all complicit because, though we could see perfectly well what was going on- it’s not difficult: you do not colonise territory you intend to give back – we allowed our leaders to pretend not to see it. We are like the man who makes friends with an affable neighbour and pretends, when he calls round to take him to the pub, that he doesn’t notice the bruises on the face of his affable new friend’s wife or the cowed look in her eyes.

(To continue the analogy, the neighbour has now taken a hammer, smashed all his wife’s things, and is chasing her screaming round the house – and we’re just beginning to mutter embarrassedly, ‘Oh mate! We know she’s annoying, but don’t you think you’ve gone a bit far?’)

Meritocracy and Its Discontents

In his excellent book, The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor of political philosophy, refers to another book, now out of print, published in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young. It was called The Rise of the Meritocracy, and took the form of a dystopia.

Writing as if he were a historian looking back from the year 2033, he [Young] described with uncanny clarity the moral logic of the meritocratic society that was beginning to unfold in the postwar Britain of his day. Without defending the class-bound order that was passing, Young suggested that its moral arbitrariness and manifest unfairness at least had this desirable effect: It tempered the self-regard of the upper class and prevented the working class from viewing its subordinate status as personal failure.

As Young’s imaginary historian writes:

Now that people are classified by ability, the gap between the classes has inevitably become wider. The upper classes are… no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism. Today the eminent know that success is just reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement. They deserve to belong to a superior class. They know too that not only are they of higher calibre to start with, but that a first-class education has been built upon their native gifts.

‘Not only did Young anticipate the meritocratic hubris of elites;’ writes Sandel, ‘he glimpsed their affinity for technocratic expertise, their tendency to look down on those who lack their lustrous credentials.’ He quotes Young again (still writing as if a historian in 2033) who suggests that ‘some members of the meritocracy… have become so impressed with their own importance as to lose sympathy with the people whom they govern’. Some of them, indeed, are ‘so tactless that even people of low calibre have been quite unnecessarily offended’. Here Sandel references Hillary Clinton’s famous —and extraordinarily politically inept— remark about half of Trump supporters being ‘a basket of deplorables’. I saw the same kind of contempt over and over again coming from remain voters in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. Indeed I felt so disgusted by it, as a remain voter myself, that I wished I’d voted leave.

As Sandel notes, in Young’s dystopia, ‘resentment against elites was compounded by the self-doubt that a meritocracy inflicts on those who fail to rise’, for, as Young’s historian wrote, ‘Today all persons, however humble, know they have had every chance.’ Sandel goes on:

Young predicted that this toxic brew of hubris and resentment would fuel a political backlash. He concluded his dystopian tale by predicting that, in 2034, the less-educated classes would rise up in a populist revolt against the meritocratic elites. In 2016, as Britain voted for Brexit and America for Trump, that revolt arrived eighteen years ahead of schedule.
Continue reading “Meritocracy and Its Discontents”

Trump etc

I have read a lot of pieces lately that thundered about the many infamies of Donald Trump. It’s certainly not hard to compile such a list, or to get upset about it, but I’m reminded of the aftermath of Brexit, when stunned/outraged remainers liked to enumerate, over and over, the many reasons why Brexit was wrong, why leavers had lied etc etc. In both cases (or all three cases, given that Trump is in his second term) what I think these pieces fail to engage with is the fact that people voted for Brexit and voted for Trump – a majority in the case of Brexit and Trump Mk. 2 – and did so in spite of all these many arguments against.

It should be obvious by now that what we are calling ‘populism’ is not just a glitch or temporary aberration from which we will one day return to the comfort of the old familiar world. That world is history now. It’s gone. If you are going to accuse Brexiters and Trumpers of harking back to a mythical golden age, then don’t do the same thing yourself. We’re here now, and wishing you didn’t have to start from here is as futile in politics as it is in personal life. You have to ask yourself why those things did happen.

Why did people vote for things you hate and not for the things you wanted? Why did they ignore all the wise counsel, all the expert advice? The answers often given are either that people were duped by bad actors and foreign dictators, or that they were in some way morally bad themselves (racists, bigots, misogynists perhaps – or wilfully ignorant – or only interested in their own financial gain…) I have seen both remainers and Democrat voters speaking of those who voted the other way almost in the way that religious folk talk about sinners. I have seen both remainers and Democrats say they are not prepared to ‘forgive’ those who voted the other way, even if they subsequently change their minds. (I mean, come on! You’re talking about people here whose votes you’re going to need!)

I have also heard many remainers say that people should not have been allowed a vote on EU membership (something, incidentally, that in relatively recent times has been a manifesto commitment of Greens and Liberal Democrats as well as of the Tories) or that the outcome of the vote should have been ignored. Casting your opponents as the dupes of saboteurs and foreign agents, demonizing them as evil, denying them the vote, or overruling votes that they win are surprisingly Stalinist moves to come from the supposedly liberal side of the argument. They also fail to engage with the new reality.

The people who voted for Trump 2.0 or for Brexit are not some small minority cult. They were more than half of those who turned out to vote. Of course they are deluded, but to varying degrees we all are. We all have our own dreams and fantasies, designed to comfort and reassure us that we are the good guys, that we are entitled to what we have, and that the ‘precious ordinary’* that makes us feel secure can somehow be preserved. And even the clearest-eyed among us project these fantasies into the political sphere where there are in fact no certainties, and no experts who can tell us for sure what the consequences might be of any particular action.

Politicians of all stripes seek to win our votes by pursuading us that they will nurture the things we cherish, and typically fail to live up to their own rhetoric. (Quick thought experiment: imagine that by some electoral freak, the Green Party, who I sometimes vote for myself, had won the last UK election. Would the gap between aspirational rhetoric and practical reality by this point have been any less wide than the gap between Leaver rhetoric and Brexit in practice?) We all know you can’t take politicians’ rhetoric literally, but we try anyway to choose the options we find the most reassuring, and in Britain in 2016 and America in 2024 that was, for a small majority, respectively Brexit and Trump. Unless the opponents of these things are willing to engage with that fact and address the fears and insecurities that Brexit and Trump apparently do address, then they’ll continue to lose, no matter how loudly they thunder their outrage.

The liberal elite/experts. Voting for Brexit involved voting against the recommendations of all the major political parties in mainland Britain, most of the intelligentsia, most business leaders, and most economists and bankers. Instead of asking, ‘how could people be so stupid as not to listen to all those wise, successful, and knowledgeable people?’, a more productive question might be, ‘why are all those voters so distrustful of the whole educated class?’ (I’m going to write another post about this soon, but previous thoughts here and here.)

Disruption. Also, instead of asking the question, ‘how could people be so reckless as to do such damage to so many precious things?’ it might be more useful, even just from a self-interested, strategic point of view, to ask ‘why are people willing to risk so much?’, or ‘what is it about major disruption that appeals to so many people?’, or ‘why does what seems precious to me, not seem equally precious to all these compatriots of mine?’

Globalisation. Both Trump’s programme and Brexit place a strong emphasis on restricting migration from other countries, and putting up barriers to international trade. While it’s possible to respond to this with a lot of thundering about racism, xenophobia, inward-looking nationalism, and how you ‘don’t recognise your own country anymore’ and are going to move somewhere else, it would also be reasonable to ask why so many people are hostile to economic globalisation.

It doesn’t require rocket-science levels of expertise to guess at answers to that one. Why would anyone be a fan of having their job outsourced to another country, or of having to compete for work with people from poor countries who are willing to work for much less, and put up with much worse conditions, than you’ve learned to think of as your due? There are no easy answers here -even people who are threatened by globalisation as producers, are beneficiaries of it as consumers – but these are reasonable concerns and, however simplistically, the populists address them while the old mainstream politics really didn’t.

Even concerns about losing a community of likeminded folk and being surrounded by people with an entirely different culture are actually reasonable ones -as any impeccably liberal person knows who prefers to live in a nice bougie part of town with likeminded neighbours. Populists are prone to address such concerns with dangerous rhetoric that encourages racist hostility, but mainstream parties have historically dismissed the concerns themselves as racist.

I saw someone saying the other day that it was time we understood that migration was part of human life and always has been. This is perfectly true. Every human being on Earth is descended from someone who came from somewhere else. But it would be equally true to say that frontiers, and restrictions on movements across frontiers, are part of life and always have been. If we want grownup politics that deals with reality, let’s try not to cherrypick the bits of reality that suit us and pretend the others don’t exist.

*The phrase ‘the precious ordinary’, a favourite of my wife’s, comes from Benediction by Kent Haruf, a novelist of small lives in small forgotten places.

Might is Right

‘The Americans want our resources, our water, our land and our country,’ says the new prime minister of Canada in his acceptance speech. Canada! Even a couple of months ago, a Canadian prime minister talking about the threat of annexation by its neighbour and long-term ally really would have seemed the stuff of speculative fiction, not something that could happen now.

Whether or not Donald Trump is a ‘fascist’ depends on how broad or narrow a definition of the word ‘fascist’ you use -Is Putin a fascist? Kim Jong Un? Narendra Modi? Erdogan? – but he represents an extraordinarily sudden reversion to a style of leadership that prevailed for much of history: the naked and unapologetic wielding of power, not to make the world better in some way, but simply in order to dominate and prevail.

The use of force by powerful countries has of course never gone away and America, Britain and other nations have been actively involved in very recent times in overthrowing governments they didn’t like, but America’s new posture of openly flaunting its power to dominate and spread fear, even among its supposed friends and allies, really is reminiscent of a medieval king, like King Scyld in Beowulf (that ‘wrecker of mead-benches’ who forced neighbouring clans to pay him tribute, and of whom the poet says ‘That was a good king’), or of the Roman generals who won adulation by conquering new territories, and bringing their defeated leaders back to Rome to be paraded through the streets in chains.

Since the Italian Fascists and German Nazis admired this kind of might, and claimed to be emulating this kind of leadership, it really isn’t an exaggeration to say that Trumpism is a cousin of Fascism and Nazism, an ideology, like them, based on the glorification of might. But Fascism and Nazism were very specific ideologies that emerged in Europe in the second quarter of the twentieth century, alongside Stalinism (which, barring the genuflection to socialism, was something rather similar) and to call Trump a capital-letters Fascist is perhaps to ignore how commonplace the rule of more-or-less naked might has been throughout history, and how commonplace it is around the world.

England

My sister told me the following. Her sons play online games in which players identify themselves with a name and a flag to indicate their their country of origin. Scottish players use the saltire, Welsh players the dragon, but my nephews don’t use the St George’s flag because it has become associated with far-right politics, and they avoid players who do use it. Instead they choose the union jack.

I can’t criticise my dear nephews’ pragmatic choice – they are there to play a game, not to get involved in unpleasant conversations, and of course they don’t want to be ostracised by other players – and yet a part of me wants to yell, It’s our fucking flag! Are we really just going to lie down and let those people steal it? England is already the only part of Britain that doesn’t have its own parliament, meaning that its government is also the government of the UK (one consequence of which is that England can have a government that wasn’t elected by a majority of English MPs – something that never seemed to be mentioned when English remainers were wailing that Brexit wasn’t democratic because Scotland didn’t vote for it!) Are we also to be confined to using the UK flag?

If English people say ‘England’ when we mean Britain, or ‘Britain’ when we mean England, we get ticked off. But you can see why we get confused!

I’m not trying to suggest that England is hard done by. It’s the richest, and by far the largest, part of the UK – several times more populous than the other three countries combined – but I do think we should be allowed our own identity.

Perhaps more importantly, I think that this kind of move – eschewing our own national flag, expressing distaste for our own country – is exactly the kind of thing that alienates the general population from left-leaning middle class folk like myself, thus contributing to the disastrous rift that’s opened up in the century-long class alliance that used to sustain progressive politics. We liberal types are very hot on respecting other people’s cultures. We should apply the same principle to the culture of our own compatriots. Not least because, if we don’t, they’ll turn to people who do. But also because disparaging your own just isn’t a very appealing habit.

And anyway, look at it, what a beautiful flag it is! The flag of England!

The wrong side of history

I don’t always like Marina Hynde’s column in the Guardian – her heavy sarcasm can get a bit relentless – and, for that matter, I don’t always like the Guardian, but I thought this piece of hers, about the reaction to the movie Emilia Pérez and what it tells us, was right on the nose, so much so that I’m going to quote about half of it right here:

… A few months ago I was chatting to the pollster James Kanagasooriam about something, and he noted that “the left tends to issue-bundle”. Which feels a good way of putting it. Many people will have felt the increasingly illogical strictures of this all-or-nothing deal in recent years of supposed progressivism. It’s as though you can’t consider each subject or cause on what you, personally, judge to be its individual merits. Instead, you must buy the entire suite of opinions off the shelf, and you have to agree with all of them, or you are “on the wrong side of history” with the ones you don’t. This was odd, James pointed out, because outside the small minority of the hyper-politically-engaged, most people in the world are not actually like this. His example was to say that most people in the UK are extremely pro gay rights, but a substantial proportion of this group might also support the non-progressive cause of the death penalty.

Anyway: Emilia Pérez. A trans story! Latin actors! Big-swing cinema! It’s all good, right? Except: no. Apparently Mexicans hate it. Apparently trans people hate it. Now old-skewing liberal Academy voters – who loved it – have seen these controversies and know they have to do a 180 and hate it too… It was pitched as a progressive triumph – now it’s on “the wrong side of history”.

… I can’t stand that infantilising, hectoring phrase, which has spent the past decade being the laziest but most successful way to force someone to agree with you. Ditto the idea that if you share any opinion – at all – with people on the other side of a supposed divide, then you should just consider what that makes you, and fall back into line with your tribe. What bollocks.

In fact, the present political climate in the US seems to have been exacerbated by people performing their endless taxonomy of what is and isn’t on the wrong side of history. It’s enough to make you feel that the left, who bang on about polarisation the whole time, are actually more invested in it than the right…

I agree. I think that particular kind of judgy, conformist, witch-hunting ‘leftism’ must take some share of the blame for the rise of the authoritarian right. In other words, in its own terms, it’s ‘on the wrong side of history’, though, like Marina Hynde, I’ve always hated that phrase, with its smug implication that the speaker’s world view is the one that will ultimately prevail.

Sola fide and the ‘internet Left’

In an earlier post, I talked about the disadvantages of ‘belief’ but also its necessity in a world where so much can’t be known for certain. However I didn’t even mention the utility of ‘belief’ as a marker of belonging, as when a religious person explains their faith by saying ‘we believe X’, where it is the belief that makes possible that ‘we’ – and therefore also an excluded ‘them’. In many religions, notably in Protestant Christianity, belief in the correct dogma is, or at least has been, seen as far more important than moral behaviour. Only faith – sola fide – can save you from the fires of hell. And of course many religions, including Islam and most branches of Christianity, have not even waited for the afterlife, but have had people tortured and killed in this one for not subscribing to the correct dogma.

There are all kinds of advantages to sola fide. It’s easier to conform to a set of beliefs than it is to change your way of life. It’s also helpful for the wealthy and powerful who might otherwise have to take seriously moral teachings such as, in Christianity, Matthew 5.5 (‘blessed are the meek’), or Matthew 19:24 (‘ it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God’). At my primary school – a famous fee-paying school, and therefore only accessible to well-off people- the ‘eye of the needle’ was explained away by the chaplain as the name of a gate in the walls of Jerusalem through which a camel could actually pass, though it might be a bit of a squeeze, which makes the whole saying rather lame, and is quite funny when you consider all the other sayings which religions have insisted should be taken completely literally. Many people have been burned alive, for instance, for denying that communion bread and wine are literally the blood and flesh of Christ.

But this takes us back to importance of belief as a marker of belonging, the means by which a virtuous ‘us’ is separated from a ‘them’ which at best is ignorant and in need of enlightenment, and at worst does not deserve to be treated as part of the moral community at all. This is very handy. It makes priesthood important, for one thing (because priests are the ones who let you know what you have to believe in). It gives even the lowliest of believers the comfort of feeling superior to somebody (which is useful for elites who want to keep them in their place). And it provides a rationale for treating unbelievers badly, which is great if you want to conquer their country, or make them into slaves, or even just dismiss them as of no account.

The thing about this kind of belief, though, is that it’s no good just asking people to believe something obvious. You can’t build an ‘us’ and a them’ on the back of, say, ‘the sun rises every day’ or ‘on the whole, it’s good to treat people nicely’. It has to be something that isn’t obvious and that wouldn’t normally occur to you. In fact, more than that, it needs to be something which everyday experience would suggest there is no evidence for. Even ‘there is a god’ isn’t really sufficient, because that’s a pretty widespread idea which isn’t associated with any particular belief system, but ‘God consists of three persons – not two, mind you, or four, but three – who are all distinct, but are still somehow only one god’ – now, that’s more like it, no way is anyone going to come up with that empirically! And ‘bread and wine are literally blood and flesh’ is perfect.

Sorry to pick on Christianity by the way -I know many good people who are Christians, and who don’t use their religion in this kind of way- but it just happens to be the religious tradition I was brought up in, and therefore the one I feel best qualified to criticise. The point I am actually coming to is that sola fide is not confined to religions. In particular, I am struck by the way that politics has degenerated into competing belief systems of this kind. Hence the so-called culture wars, the internet-fuelled tendency to separate into competing tribes, each with its own priesthood and its own rigid and often arbitrary beliefs which you have to subscribe to in order to belong, even when your head is secretly saying to you ‘it’s really not as simple as that.’

Since my own politics, cloudy as they are, are on the left (which is to say, it seems to me that the people at the bottom of society get a lousy deal, and the people higher up are obscenely privileged) my particular concern is this tendency on the left. If being on the left is reduced to expressing the latest ‘correct’ views on social media in the latest approved language, with the aim of demonstrating your loyalty to your faction, and your distance from that other lot, it has ceased to really be politics in the sense of a practical attempt to make things different, and has just become a way of feeling superior.

And this at a time when oligarchy is on the rise and oligarchs are managing to persuade a lot of people who would normally be your natural allies, that you belong to a haughty self-righteous elite who don’t even like them, and that they should throw in their lot with them, the oligarchs.

The New Barons

I’m not really a joiner at heart, but back in the late seventies I was a member of the Labour Party, and I helped as a canvasser and teller in the 1979 election, (which famously Labour lost).

One thing stayed with me from that experience. As a teller outside the polling station, checking off people’s names as they turned up to vote, I was sitting with the tellers of the other parties, Tory and Liberal, and we chatted to each other, and even occasionally helped one another out if one of us had somehow missed a voter’s name. It occurred to me that this was pretty remarkable. We didn’t agree with each other but we accepted each other’s humanity and right to be there, when for most of history, and in most countries in the world, factions resorted to violence to get their way, and, if they succeeded in taking power, used torture, murder, imprisonment and censorship to suppress their rivals. This struck me as something precious, and much more important than the actual outcome of the election, important though that also was: a system of government that relied on consent.

I should not delude myself. What now, looking back, can seem like a golden age, really wasn’t. In the middle of the twentieth century, industrialised nations like Britain were still taking advantage of a massive head start in the world economy resulting in large part from the imperial system, in which most of Asia and Africa was run by European powers, or America, in a way that was rigged for their own benefit.

India had only been independent for 31 years at the time of that election, many African countries for considerably less, and in some cases only after brutal wars. (Algeria, for instance, had only won its independence 15 years previously after an ugly war with France that may have killed up to a million people.) In fact Britain had only been a democracy at all for less than twenty years unless you chose to discount all the subject peoples, outnumbering its own population, that Britain ruled over whether they wanted it or not, imprisoning those who challenged its rule. (‘The overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat,’ George Orwell had pointed out in 1939, ‘resides not in Britain but in Africa and Asia’).

And even in 1979, when Britain had shed most of its empire, its democracy was still bolstered by the prosperity that the empire had brought. Democracy is much easier when there’s prosperity -it’s hard to win people’s consent when most of them are living in poverty- and our prosperity been built on top of a tower of tyranny, from which we were still benefitting, and still do benefit now, though progressively less and less.

So that peaceful tolerant scene outside the ballot box wasn’t quite what it seemed. But still, what a lovely dream it was! A world that didn’t work by violence.

These days, polls show increasing numbers of people saying that liberal democracy doesn’t work and they’d prefer a strong leader who doesn’t need to answer to an electorate. America has effectively said so through the ballot box and many other countries are heading the same way. Across the world, large numbers of countries have never had democracy, or have had it and lost it already.

Democracy is disappointing if things aren’t going well. When we were children, my sisters and I used to discuss elaborate games of let’s pretend – we were a family of explorers in the Amazon, I was the dad, one of my sisters was the mum, another was the dog, another was a deaf-blind child etc etc – but once we’d set up the game, it was kind of done, and we never actually played it. Democracy can end up being a bit like that. One party lays out a set of policies and ideas which it says are going to solve our problems, but they never really happen (think of David Cameron’s Big Society) -or if they do happen, they don’t work in the way they were supposed to, or don’t happen quickly enough to fit into the electoral cycle – and then we chuck that party out, and the other party discards whatever’s left of its set of ideas and introduces its own, which also do not happen, or don’t work, or don’t work quickly enough.

And meanwhile things keep chuntering on in much the same way regardless, except that these days they seem for most people to be steadily getting just a bit more shitty all the time. You just lose interest after a while. You get cynical. You start wondering about alternatives. And there’s no denying that there are some advantages in a system where a single regime can carry out its programme over a long period of time without always having to think about short-term popularity.

The thing is though, that there has to be some way to determine who gets to be in charge, and if it’s not a ballot, what is it? If you look at dictatorships around the world, the mechanism is always some combination of violence and bribery. You eliminate rivals, you buy the acquiesence of as many people as you can, either with money and material assets or with non-material benefits such as enemies they can hate- and you repress the others. The most ruthless player wins.

We are heading back to the brutal world of rule by competing barons, by powerful thugs, jockeying with each other for position. Many countries never left it. But this time it’s barons with the internet, AI, satellites, drones and nuclear weapons.

Woke

Exhibit A: In the early seventies there was a programme on ITV called The Comedians, in which a number of stand-up comedians stood in a row and took it in turns to tell jokes. I can only remember one joke. The comedian – it may have been Bernard Manning – said that he’d met a Pakistani in the street, walking a pet duck on a lead. ‘I didn’t know you had a monkey,’ the comedian said. ‘It’s not a monkey, it’s a duck,’ replied the Pakistani, to which the comedian responded -and this was the punchline- ‘I was talking to the duck.’

The reason this has stuck in my mind is that, even at 14 or so, and even in those times when racist jokes were commonplace even among liberal middle-class kids like me, I could see this was vile, a joke that doesn’t even work unless you think it’s funny to describe a stranger, to his face, as non-human, because he has brown skin and a different culture. It seemed vile to me then, and it seems, if anything, even more vile now when two of my own grandchildren – two of the people I love best in the world – have brown skin. The thought of those two cheerful little girls being exposed to stuff like that and realising they’re the target of it, quite literally keeps me awake at night.

In the culture wars, the accusation of being woke – it used to be called politically correct – is constantly being thrown at those who object to inappropriate language being directed at people because of their skin colour, ethnicity, gender etc. ‘So what exactly is wrong with objecting to offensive language?’ the defenders of wokeness reply. ‘What you call wokeness is just common courtesy and basic human decency.’ And of course in many cases this is true, as it would be if someone raised objections to the ‘joke’ above. (Presumably the reason filth like that is no longer heard on on national TV is because of the many objections to it people have raised over the past 50 years – and good for them.)

But the trouble with the whole yah-boo culture wars phenomenon is that it obliterates nuance. There is another side to wokeness, I don’t find it hard to see why it raises people’s hackles, and I find it a little disingenuous when the defenders of wokeness claim not to see it.

Exhibit B: Some years ago, in the late nineties, when I was still involved in social work, another incident occurred which also stuck in my mind. A colleague (white) expressed horror at the fact that some foster-parents had used the term ‘coloured people’, which was seen at that time as derogatory. (Indeed, another white colleague, I now remember, had actually posted a sign in the office with a quotation from somewhere which objected to the word ‘coloured’ in terms something like this: ‘How dare white people call us coloured, when they are the ones that come in all sorts of different colours, and change colour when they’re angry or cold or embarassed.’)

This is different from Exhibit A, because there was no reason to believe the foster parents were intentionally using the term in a derogatory way. In fact, they very probably thought that ‘coloured people’, as opposed to, say, ‘black people’ or ‘Asian people’, was the polite and respectful expression to use, as it had indeed once been – hence the name of the American civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And of course nowadays, the term ‘people of colour’ (POC) is widely used by the wokest folk, and no one, as far as I know, suggests it is derogatory, or objects to the association of the word ‘colour’ with people who are not white.

Terms not intended to be offensive do acquite offensive connotations over time -I get that: look at the word ‘spastic’ for example- but not keeping up with the currently acceptable language is not even vaguely in the same category as telling a Pakistani man he is a monkey. And it seems to me that to affect outrage when someone uses outmoded language is something more akin to the cool kids at school mocking some poor schmuck who still listens to music that’s now uncool, or wears clothes that are no longer in fashion. In other words, it’s about proving your own superiority.

It’s often not clear who decides when words become unacceptable, or who chooses their replacements. Sometimes, as in the case of ‘spastic’, I guess it just becomes obvious to everyone in the field that what was once a neutral term has now become a term of abuse. (Was this ever the case with ‘coloured people’?) But I do think there are self-appointed mindguards out there – assertive, educated, social-media-savvy people- who actually enjoy catching other people out and feeling superior to them, and having a following of herd animals who join in.

The people most likely to be caught out -apart from those who actively pride themselves on being ‘anti-woke’, or who simply don’t agree with what the mindguards have decreed to be correct- are those who are less educated (like those foster-parents) and less social-media-savvy, and therefore less up to date. In this way ‘wokeness’, which is supposed to be (and often is) about challenging exclusion, can itself become a tool for excluding people, a form of classism, hiding in the guise of being anti-isms – and of course the people so excluded notice this and resent it. More generally, it just makes it harder to express an opinion that is genuinely your own.

(Meanwhile, on the other side, the ‘anti-woke’ have their own mindguards, and their own herd animals, and their own stubborn refusal to see the game they are playing.)

“Trump refuses to rule out using military to take Panama Canal and Greenland”

He is also suggesting that Canada become a US state. We are very much back in the world where big powers feel they have the right to annexe small countries if it serves their purposes, simply because they can. It never completely went away, but there was a time in the second half of the twentieth century when it looked (at least from the blinkered perspective of middle class folk in my very prosperous part of the world) as if it was becoming less acceptable. Perhaps it has just become more naked again.

In the case of Greenland, Donald Trump is threatening military action against a small country (Denmark) which, like Canada, is supposed to be a US ally. No wonder he’s never been particularly concerned about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Greenland is unusual in North America (along with Nunavut territory in Canada) in being a large self-governing entity in which indigenous people are still the majority and indigenous politicians are in charge, at least in some spheres. Until recently one might have assumed it would stay that way and that, one day, in spite of its tiny population, it would become a fully independent Inuit state – the first new indigenous majority state in the continent. It now looks increasingly as if this has just been a respite, and that Greenland will go the way of the rest of the Americas. It just hasn’t been worth bothering with up to now.

This is all very much the territory of my novel America City (though things are happening much more quickly than I anticipated) and, I won’t lie, there’s an idiot part of me that wants to crow over my powers of prediction. But another part finds all this absolutely terrifying, because I have ideas about the things that are going to happen next, not in fiction, but in the world that my lovely, lively, optimistic grandchildren are going to have to grow up in. I honestly feel afraid to even name those things, though I don’t think you have to be much of a prophet now to see what they might be.