Why the left is in such a muddle over immigration



The liberal-left is in a terrible muddle over immigration at the moment largely because of a pervasive and highly-judgemental rationalism which completely fails to engage with people as they are.

This rather arrogant, dogmatic form of rationalism assumes that who we are, our opinions and our feelings, are all derived from thought, reflection, decisions and judgements.

Hence the discomfort someone might be feeling about lots of outsiders moving into their neighbourhood is viewed as being derived from a thought and ultimately a judgement that outsiders, or certain types of outsiders, are bad by definition.

In this way this sort of rationalism takes theoretical, universalistic thinking as primary to human existence, and assumes we are formed and come to be who we are primarily by thinking and judgements made from thinking. So, we would assume the person who is discomforted by lots of outsiders moving in to their area has done some thinking and concluded that outsiders are bad. On this basis we could reasonably assume that he or she is a racist or a xenophobe, and might also reasonably assume that those feelings of discomfort they have are a natural result of them being a racist or a xenophobe. We could reasonably say they are wrong both in factual and in moral terms and seek to attack and suppress them and their views.

This is quite a jump, from the person in question feeling discomforted by immigration to seeing them as a racist who is worth attacking.

This leap is made possible by an abstraction of the feeling, from the actual world of experience in which it arose to a universalistic ideological dimension – the dimension of high political theory. A personal resistance to a specific example of immigration is therefore taken by this sort of rationalism as a universal resistance to immigration and therefore also to immigrants – universalising the particular in a way customary to all ideologies.

I presented this as a hypothetical case, but anyone familiar with the ways of the liberal-left should be familiar with this train of thought. It is a startlingly judgemental way of looking at people, not least in this case because the person in question has not actually expressed any racist views. We know however that this will not stop them being accused directly or indirectly of being a racist, both from the left and by ex-New Labour types and Liberal Democrats.

This position is another example of the sort of ideological thinking I have been exploring a lot on this blog. It relies on a basic prejudice grounded in the assumption that just by feeling uncomfortable about incomings, this person’s world and place in the world can be understood fundamentally and can therefore be judged and pronounced upon freely and confidently.

In this way the immigrationist ideologue will say that the person feeling uncomfortable is ‘wrong’, perhaps because they ‘don’t understand the facts’, while at the same time not maintaining even a bare acquaintance with that person’s life experience – an irony they will either gloss over or be completely unaware of.

Unfortunately this rather authoritarian type of rationalism is widespread across the whole liberal-left in Britain, including Labour, the Liberal-Democrats and the Greens. I would go as far as to say it is the dominant way of thinking on the liberal-left today; it is something of a default position to fall back on and gather around in order to reassert our group bonds.

Thankfully, this tendency is being challenged by braver and more reflective types like Jon Cruddas, Rachel Reeves and John Denham, who know that people who are concerned about immigration are not all nasty racists who deserve to be suppressed and written off.  But they do not have the ready language and easy arguments to fall back on that the dominant rationalist view does: theirs are relatively new and unfamiliar arguments that do not tell people what they want to hear, and do not hold ready appeal to mainstream left-wing activists and true believers.

Even though Cruddas and Reeves are both important members of the Shadow Cabinet with access to the leader, in everyday liberal political-media discourse they are insurgents, barely chipping away at the consensus view. In their resolution not to dismiss the hypothetical person in this article, they are rather lonely on the left. The left’s dominant tribes do not like their message, and are not afraid to say so. Our old habits of denunciation remain very much intact for those who stray from the straight and rightful path.

With a General Election just a year away and the crucial issue of immigration not resolved in anything near a clear fashion by Labour, it makes for quite a muddle.


For more on this topic, see Immigration and the left page.

Comments

  1. Andy16 July 2014 at 14:19

    I think it's a lot more simpler than that Ben.

    The elite thought that pandering would get them votes.

    It did but, along with many other things, the areas won came at a price namely the alienation of some voters.

    While hoping I am wrong I am cynical enough to doubt the 'bravery' of Jon Cruddas, Rachel Reeves, John Denham and others and put it more down to them being clever enough to read the rise of UKIP and doing / saying what they feel is needed to appease those voters who were still around but decided to switch.

    I hope it isn't to late but a bit like Dave's pandering to the feminista's in the reshuffle, in the belief it will swing the female vote to them, suspect it will have little bearing.

    Labour, despite being seen like most parties for what they are (especially the elite end of it) will still win but it will be down to them being the best of the worse best option.

    A real shame but at the moment it is nothing more than what they deserve.

    ReplyDelete
  2. New River Dining1 July 2016 at 03:31

    This is deeply flawed Ben. People don't like immigration. We fear seeing new people arrive in big numbers. This is mainly because of a primeval fear of not-like-me. It's tribalism. Countries are just tribes+. New people might kill us, eat our food, use our resources. They might speak differently so we can't read their intent.

    The problem with dignifying this fear is it validates it the notion of important difference. People are people (so sang Depeche Mode). We are of equal value. If the UK was suffering and (say) Chad held some promised land, we would move. You can't penalise people for seeking prosperity. Britain is a rich country precisely because we did that, at some considerable cost to various peoples of the world.

    The difference between people is slight. Even what appears to be major cultural differences disappear when you break bread together.

    But this is only so much hippy dippy stuff from a (new) member of the liberal elite. The working class fear immigrants because they can be seen. They are demonstrably new people chasing their resources. Workers don't care if they are from the next village, town, city or country. The same cry will go up: I should come first.

    But why?

    But this is the wrong question. Instead of arguing about the rules of the game we must examine the game. And that is what the left has not done. The left is part of the centuries old dialectic in service of the system that encourages the fetishisation of resources holding.

    Once, hoarding resources meant having two elk instead of one, probably as a reward for being faster, stronger, nicer or more sneaky than your neighbour. Now it means one family having more wealth than millions of individuals. We have enough. The debate shouldn't be who we share it with, it should be HOW we share it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

All comments, however critical, will be accepted as long as they are not personal and/or abusive.

Popular posts from this blog

Schopenhauer on Hegel: "A flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan."

There's nothing like a good insult or two, and if you're looking for insults in philosophy, you need look no further than Arthur Schopenhauer's comments on his German contemporary, the much more popular and successful Friedrich Hegel.  Schopenhauer suggested as a motto of Hegel’s philosophy some words of Shakespeare: ‘s uch stuff as madmen tongue and brain not’. He added : " Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to ac
Read more

Why Islamists and feminists avoid confronting each other

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of our system of diversity is the way feminists and Islamists avoid directly confronting each other. Their ideologies are utterly opposed to each other, but within the system they are allies, so maintain distance and attack others. We can see this in how feminists resolutely avoid picking up on specifically Islamic-related instances of actual misogyny and discrimination in action. They nearly always stick to generalities and abstractions about the world or society as a whole, as Fawcett Society chief executive Sam Smethers does in telling Owen Jones that , “We have a very misogynistic culture in the UK.” In this version of reality, there is a single culture – or at least all the cultures we have come from the same root - and it is ‘very misogynistic’. This is the ‘patriarchy’ theory that is remarkably popular in the upper echelons of the liberal-left, just as it is among young feminists coming out of their Gender Studies courses at universit
Read more

Immigration: our public debate misses the main point

Our public debate on immigration in Britain almost always focuses entirely on money and thereby misses the main point, a point that our political-media class finds difficult to deal with and that many regard as almost illegitimate. This is how people feel . It is emblematic of the state of democracy in Britain that any sort of negative opinions about immigration routinely get shouted down and lambasted as ‘wrong’ by the siren voices of people and institutions, most of which are on the supposedly ‘liberal-left’ side of politics. It is particularly disturbing the way that anyone who talks about negative effects of immigration is routinely attacked (often by hordes of lefty people on Twitter) as ‘racist’. These voices have a huge and in my view poisonous impact on the debate, forcing anyone who wants to make some nuanced points about immigration and identity into defending themselves against charges of racism, which is well established as one of the the worst offences one
Read more