Speaking of echo chambers… In today’s Observer, Jay Rayner ponders the whereabouts of dramatic radicalism in an age of state subsidy and asks what happens if, as Julian Fellowes suggests, “It’s just become impossible not to be a Socialist within the artistic community.” 

What strikes me most, during the discussions I have, is an almost total failure of imagination when it comes to working out what a play from the right might actually look like. We none of us have any problem naming overtly left-wing plays or their playwrights: names like David Edgar, Caryl Churchill, Trevor Griffiths and David Hare fall into conversation with ease. By contrast, even defining an overtly right-wing play, let alone identifying one, is apparently impossible.

One director, whose identity I will protect to save their blushes, baldly announces that they would “never put on a play that was racist or sexist.” I point out this is a pretty Neanderthal reading of neo-conservatism. We have one of the most right-wing presidents in US history in George W Bush, and yet he chose a black woman as his Secretary of State… Abigail Morris, a former artistic director of the Soho Theatre, describes how she used to receive plays in which a rape would take place “and the woman would start to enjoy it. I suppose you could call that right-wing.”

At various times, and in various conversations, I wonder out loud whether any of them could imagine a play that challenged, say, the values of multiculturalism. Mostly I am met with baffled silences. Sir Peter Hall sums it up for me when he says: “I’m sure there are people who would like to write that sort of play, but they would fear it wouldn’t be acceptable.”

Update, via the comments:

Rayner makes another interesting observation:

Time and again I am told that the job of theatre is to challenge the status quo and that this, necessarily, means it must come from the left. When I point out that the status quo now is the left, there are two clear responses. The first is to switch tack slightly and argue, as Michael Boyd of the RSC does, that “the job of the arts is to discomfort any orthodoxy”, whether it be from left or right. The second, which Lisa Goldman at the Soho Theatre most cleanly articulates, is simply to question the notion that there is even the slightest tinge of red to the current establishment. “I don’t think the status quo is left-wing at all,” she says. “Though there is, I suppose, a liberalism to it.”

An oppositional self-image is very important to some people, most often to people on the left, and particularly to artists. But in order to maintain the appearance of being anti-establishment or anti-bourgeois or whatever, the nature of mainstream bourgeois culture (and how it has changed) may have to be ignored or distorted, and the views of one’s political opponents may have to be caricatured. Hence the denial of theatre’s left-leaning tendency, and that of contemporary art more generally; and hence the claim that a fondness for racism and rape is a marker of “right wing” politics. 

More. Not entirely unrelated. And. 

The much–publicised launch of Sunny Hundal’s Liberal Conspiracy blog has already produced a fine moment of inadvertent comedy, and possibly a revealing one. In a post titled We Need Our Own Space, Guardian contributor Zohra Moosa bemoans the troublesome obligation to substantiate her politics with, you know, evidence and argument.

“I’m a little bit tired of spending so much of my time defending the most basic principles of what I stand for. It serves to distract. What I need is a safer space where I don’t lose so much energy justifying why social and environmental justice are worth spending a lot of society’s money on. What I want is a space where these ideas are a given and the debate is about how best to actualize them…”

A “safer space” is, presumably, a kind of echo chamber – one in which basic assumptions remain conveniently unquesti0ned, and in which such loaded terms as “society’s money” and “social and environmental justice” can be used freely and without clear definition. Principles are, of course, so much easier to have if one isn’t obliged to defend them or explain how they might work. Being clear about what one is arguing for – and keen to spend “a lot of society’s money on” – would, it seems, be a wearying distraction. Instead, Ms Moosa wishes to “actualize” her politics, which, I’m sure, is a comfort to us all. 

On a still more reassuring note, Ms Moosa also wishes to be “inspired by the good and the great to imagine what is possible – in that place where all life prospers,” and to have “conversations with people that are constructive, compassionate and rigorous… conversations that are both logical and passionate.” Though, given the previous paragraph, one might suspect that “passion” is of much greater importance to Ms Moosa than logic, or tiresome explanations.

Related. 

Given recent posts on the University of Delaware’s bizarre indoctrination programme and my comments on corrupting students’ probity, it may be worth revisiting an extract from an interview with Theodore Dalrymple, presented here in longer form. The second paragraph below was brought to mind by Dr Shakti Butler’s claim that “all white people” are racists. I was trying to imagine how a student might react to this assertion and, given the context, how disinclined they might be to respond realistically – and what that unrealism might entail.

My father was a communist though he was also a businessman. Our house was full of communist literature from the 1930s and 40s… It was always clear that my father’s concern for humanity was not always matched by his concern for men, to put it mildly, for whom (as individuals) he often expressed contempt. He found it difficult to enter an equal relationship with anyone, and preferred to play Stalin to their Molotov… I think the great disjunction between my father’s expressed ideas (and ideals) and his everyday conduct affected me, and made me suspicious of people with grand schemes of universal improvement…

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect, and is intended to.

Examples of how the obvious can be ignored with great determination can be found here, here, here and here.

A victory for FIRE: 

“The University of Delaware has dropped an ideological re-education program that was referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The program’s stated goal was for the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on politics, race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy and environmentalism… Universities often cannot defend in public what they try to do in private, and the situation at Delaware was no exception… While we are pleased that this program is over, it is stunning that it ever existed at a public university in the United States.”

Meanwhile, at the University of Maine, at Tufts, at Duke, and in Seattle’s public schools…

Via the comments to this, The Thin Man directs readers’ attention to an extraordinary story regarding the University of Delaware and its efforts to correct improper thought:

Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”

The University’s “Life Diversity Facilitation Training” document also includes the following definitions:

REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behaviour by people of colour toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give “preferential treatment” to people of colour over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’ [Page 3]

And,

A NON-RACIST: A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of colour (called “blaming the victim”). Responsibility for perpetuating and legitimizing a racist system rests both on those who actively maintain it, and on those who refuse to challenge it. Silence is consent. [Page 3]

The training document is “presented” by Dr Shakti Butler, who is described here as “a creative and visionary bridge builder” and an “inspirational facilitator”, whose “consulting, writing, and lecturing style supports her use of mind, body, and Spirit or Consciousness as an approach to challenge deeply embedded beliefs and generate new questions.” Presumably, Professor Stanley Fish has no objection to “bridges” being built in this way, or to the term ‘racist’ being applied to “all white people… living in the United States.” And presumably he still believes that students “don’t have to worry” about the spread of campus speech codes and other neurotic sensitivities. Again, I beg to differ. One of the surest ways to erode a person’s probity is to make them repeat in public, among their peers, things they know to be untrue. The more ridiculous the lies, and the greater the mismatch with reality, the greater the effect. That is what is happening here.

Update, via the comments:

Like many other “activists”, Butler obviously isn’t opposed to racism per se. She isn’t arguing for a reciprocal moral principle – i.e. that people shouldn’t be prejudged on the basis of their skin colour or country of origin. She’s simply encouraging paranoia, victimhood and disaffection among students, while apparently indulging her own bizarre racial revenge fantasies. Fantasies which others may begin to share after prolonged and coercive exposure to this lurid nonsense. Having redefined racism as “prejudice + power”, is Dr Butler concerned by her own abuse of influence, or the power wielded by academic institutions like Delaware, or Duke, or by other likeminded educators, administrators and activists? Is she troubled by her own unsupported, overtly racist, efforts to indoctrinate? It seems not. Perpetuating this anxious, non-reciprocal outlook may be politically useful to some leftist ideologues and opportunist pressure groups, or those with serious mental health problems; but it isn’t clear how believing “all white people” are racist helps anyone see further than the colour of a person’s skin. 

Update 2:

Delaware’s Vice President for Student Life, Michael Gilbert, responds to FIRE’s criticisms – evasively and inaccurately. In turn, FIRE responds to Gilbert, rather well, I think. Significantly, Gilbert makes no mention whatsoever of Dr Shakti Butler’s overtly racist and paranoid training document, despite its key role in Delaware’s “diversity facilitation.”

Update 3:

One down in Delaware.

Update 4:

On emasculated liars. 

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