"The Treaty Principles Bill ... provides a coherent and succinct statement capturing what liberal democracy is"

"Consider the two words 'liberal', 'democracy' and their connection. Both give us something that none of our ancestors living in kinship groups had. 'Democracy' gives us a system of parliamentary sovereignty, of law, of regulation. It recognises that our common humanity justifies equal rights. Those rights belong to the individual citizen, not to the group.
    "The word 'liberal' gives us the freedom to be different – as individuals and in voluntary associations based on a range of shared interests –culture, heritage, language, sport, music, religion, politics, and so on.
    "This is what makes liberal democracy remarkable. As citizens we have the same political and legal rights. As members of civil society we are free to be different. This is an enormously important point. It is the combination of rights, responsibilities and freedom within democracy's governance and laws that makes the modern world vibrant and prosperous.
    "That's why I support the Treaty Principles Bill – because it provides a coherent and succinct statement capturing what liberal democracy is – something we should all know, especially ... Members of Parliament ...
    "The Bill is the symbolic link to the hope found in both the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi and in the 1852 Constitution Act. Nineteenth century New Zealanders, especially those who had been slaves, decimated by war, of low genealogical birth status, or from impoverished backgrounds – they put their faith in a peaceful and prosperous future for their descendants. In the 21st century we can strengthen that faith for our descendants by agreeing to the principles in this Bill.
    "New Zealand's future may be that of a prosperous first-world liberal democratic nation or a third-world, retribalised state. A first world tribal nation is a contradiction in terms. It is not possible. There can be no prosperity without individual equality and freedom. There can be no social equality without prosperity. ...

    "[A]s early as the 1870s there's the commitment to a united people who belong to, and benefit from, the nation 'New Zealand.' Nearly 150 years later that commitment is under serious threat from those who would replace liberal democracy with tribal sovereignty and, by doing so, create a racialised society – apartheid." 

~ Elizabeth Rata from her Oral Presentation to the Parliamentary Justice Committee on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill

 

"Tribalism Divides Us — Only Individualism Can Unite Us"

 

"There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred — brute, blind, virulent hatred—than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character is determined at birth in some unknown, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way — then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred. Tribal or ethnic rule has existed, at some time, in every part of the world, and, in some country, in every period of mankind’s history. The record of hatred [and its result] is always the same."

~ Ayn Rand, from her 1977 lecture 'Global Balkanisation,' examining the meaning of “ethnicity” and the consequences of “modern tribalism” in politics -- quoted in Tom Bowden's post 'Tribalism Divides Us — Only Individualism Can Unite Us'

 

How altruism helped (re)create an aristocracy

The humanitarian impulse of the Aborigines' Protection Society helped embed privilege
across Britain's colonies, says the book's author, "whatever the colour of its skin"

"From 1836 to 1909 the Aborigines' Protection Society lobbied the British Colonial Office to defend the rights of aboriginal people. ... The background of the Aborigines' Protection Society's work was the growth of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. ... [Their generosity, though, fell short of respect, seeing native peoples as something like children, in need of protection rather than rights.]
    "The Aborigines' Protection Society was tied up in the New Zealand colony from the outset. ... Wakefield's early interesting in controlling emigration gave him common outlook with the Aborigines' Protection Society ... To get a clearer idea of what Wakefield was thinking, following his talks with [Aborigines' Protection Society head Thomas] Hodgkin, we can read his evidence to the [UK] parliamentary Select Committee around the same time (1840): 'if the inferior race of New Zealand can be preserved at all in contact with civilised men it can only be by creating ... a Native aristocracy, a Native gentry ...'
    "The Society's ... Reverend Montague Hawtrey ... persuaded the Colonial Undersecretary James Stephen that the Māori people ought to be 'looked after' in the new colony and 'saved from the impact of commerce.' ... Hawtrey, like Hodgkin, tried to get Wakefield to work the protection of the native Māori into his scheme of Systematic Colonisation. ...
    "Hawtrey thought New Zealanders ought to pay homage to the native chiefs. 'Even if there were no chiefs in New Zealand it would be,' he wrote, 'judicious to select certain personages from among them and place them in a position of honour.' The reason was that there had to to be 'a class of persons in the island who, by common consent and prescriptive right hold a position onf eminence above the others.' That was true of the Europeans too ... Hawtrey thought ...
    "In the end, Hawtrey's loyalty was to privilege, whatever the colour of its skin. ...
    "As David Cannadine explains, 'It was these people--the chiefs, landowners, sultans or sheikhs--on whom the British felt they could rely, and with whom ... they were most comfortable'. ...
    "The Aborigines' Protection Society helped make the case for the Treaty, and for the colonisation that it licensed."

~ James Heartfield, from his book The Aborigines' Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836-1909 [pp. vii, 67, 126-9]. As we've said before about the Treaty, it's the "chieftainship" that's the problem...

"Arguing against the views of Edward Said and others, Cannadine suggests that the
British were motivated not only by race, but also by class. The British wanted to
domesticate the exotic world of their colonies and to reorder the societies they

ruled according to an idealised image of their own class hierarchies."

Fisking the Treaty Principles debate

Cartoon by Nick Kim

Remember "fisking"?

It's what you feel you have to do sometimes -- not so much to refute idiocies, as to reveal the bad thinking that causes them. Especially if that bad thinking is shared so widely.

Here below is some bad thinking that's shared widely, so I thought I'd do some fisking. Here's the context:

Last week Rawiri Waititi leaked a Ministry of Justice report said to prefigure the Coalition Government's proposed Treaty Principles Bill, which he, the report's author, and TV1 News all say "are at odds with what the Treaty of Waitangi" actually says."

Here's what the relevant bit of the leaked Treaty Principles Bill says:

And here then is a "lecturer in Te Tiriti o Waitangi" who agrees the principles in the leaked Bill have got it all wrong:

So let's follow his arguments and see if he's right.

But first, some history: why does so much law reference "Treaty Principles" rather than the Treaty/Te Tiriti? Simple answer: because from the time of the Fourth Labour Government, governments have been adding at the head of most important legislation words like "must have regard to the principles the Treaty of Waitangi." And because no government then or since have been buying a fight, and also because then Attorney-General Geoffrey Palmer thought that law needed to be vague so that it could be flexible, no bastard ever bothered to define in law what those principles are. So the courts tried to do the job instead, making a complete fustercluck of it, adding nonsense like "partnership," and "participation." (Long story here, if you're interested.) And so, ever since then, embedded at the head of most of the country's important legislation, are weasel words that remain essentially undefined. (Here it is for instance embedded as part of the Purposes and Principles of the RMA.)

Now, as any good lawyer should understand, embedding undefined weasel words into the head of legislation goes against the principle of good objective law. To remind you, good objective law is clear, precise, predictable, contextual, and rights-based. This is none of the above.

So the Coalition Government's proposed Treaty Bill -- alright, let's be honest, David Seymour's bill -- seeks to change all that, change it at least by adding precision to principles that, at the moment, have none. NOTE: the Bill does not seek to change The Treaty/Te Tiriti; it aims instead to change these undefined principles written into so much of New Zealand's law.

That's what Section 8, above, is referring to. It says that the aim of this Treaty Principles Bill is to give to existing legislation both certainty and clarity, so that the written law means what it is intended to mean, not what it could be taken to mean.

Got that? Alright then.

So let's see what our Tiriti lecturer has to say about this, and answer his claims one by one. (His claims in purple; my responses in italics.)

He says that the leaked document "confirms that the government's intention here is not to define the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi but to erase them."

If you've followed what I said above, you'll already see that's not the case. As long as those "principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi" remain embedded in so much law, they need to be properly and objectively defined. Which is Seymour's aim.

He says "the intention is to replace the existing principles with three new ones, which are supposedly based on the three articles of the Treaty."

See. Even he doesn't think they're going to be "erased." That was just him jacking up his argument for effect.

"The problem," he says, "is that the 'new' principles don't remotely resemble what Te Tiriti (or even the Treaty) actually says."

Two claims there: that neither English Treaty nor Māori Tiriti "remotely resemble" what the principles in the proposed Bill say. Do you get the sense already he's jacking up the argument again ... ?

See, the Treaty/Te Tiriti has three Articles. They've very short -- which doesn't make them clear -- and they're in two different languages -- but there is at least general agreement on the subject of each clause.

Subject of the First Article is governance, or sovereignty. Subject of the Second is land and resources. Subject of the Third is rights. (As with all good law, the earlier Articles take precedence.)

So let's see what his argument is for the Bill's principles not "remotely" resembling the Treaty's/Tiriti's ...

First off, he says, "the paper uses the term kāwanatanga to say that the govt have the right to govern all New Zealanders. This is a complete fabrication - as scholars like Margaret Mutu have repeatedly said the term kāwanatanga in Te Tiriti gave the Crown a limited power to govern its own people."

He agrees at least that kāwanatanga means governance. And so does Margaret Mutu. Mutu says however, "That kāwanatanga was for Pākehā," She says, "It was never intended for us." And she does say it repeatedly. But saying it does not argue for it.

The Treaty (English text) say that chiefs "give absolutely ... the complete government over their land." Tiriti says "tuku rawa atu" (literally: relinquish; very; away) "ake tonu atu" (from below upwards; permanent; away) "kāwanatanga katoa o o ratou wenua" (governorship; completely, without exception; they/them; land).

That's fairly clear. The only thing undefined there really is that word "kāwanatanga," a missionary neologism (governorship) which Māori would have understood from the power of Roman governors displayed in 'Te Kawenata Hou' ('The New Testament') and from having visited New South Wales and seeing the power there that governor exercised. That this was well understood is evidenced from the discussions at the Treaty signing, where rangatira showed they understood that agreement would mean the Kāwana having police power over them, for example -- "If thou stayest as Governor, then," said Te Kemara, then, "perhaps, [I] will be judged and condemned. Yes, indeed, and more than that--even hung by the neck." This would be puzzling if signatories understood things the way Mutu says they did. 

Because kāwanatanga exercised only over Pākeha would not give the kāwana this power. So Margaret Mutu and others will need to explain how governorship that clearly gives coercive power over everyone, including rangatira if necessary -- which is what signatories understood kāwanatanga to mean -- means instead that it gives limited power and only over Pākeha. She doesn't, and can't.

 Next, our Tiriti lecturer says, "The paper then uses 'tino rangatiratanga' to say that all NZers can exercise chieftainship of their land and property. This is just incoherent. That's not what the term means in tikanga or in state law. Tino rangatiratanga is a power of collective self-determination for Māori."

Two claims there: First, that "tino rangatiratanga" is only for Māori. And on that, in 1840, he's exactly right. (Should it stay that way? Read on.)

Second, that both "tikanga" and "state law" say that "tino rangatiratanga" means "collective self-determination." Well, not quite. "State law" and practice does sometimes suggest it as "a framework from which Māori have continued to challenge governments for recognition of our individual and collective self-determination," so it's certainly an aspirational meaning. And that's sometimes how the courts have decided to interpret this. But that doesn't mean that it did say that at the time, or that it has to say it now. (State law is nothing if not mutable.)

Translating it however even back in 1989, Hugh Kawharu rendered it simply as "unqualified chieftainship." Far from being incoherent, the Bill retains that idea.

But in what way should that chieftainship be directed? For a start, Article Two is about land and resources. (It comes in a natural order from Article One, explaining what sovereignty is for; in this case, to protect land and resources). This is most clear in Article Two (Part Two), which is about how land and resources will be sold, if owners want to. (This part was most important to the colonising government.) And Article Two (Part One) says that government will protect that land and those resources if they don't desire to sell.

Importantly, it also promises this not just to chiefs, but also to "families and individuals [original English text]/"the subtribes and all the people of New Zealand" [Kawharu translation]. This was pretty neat, at the time. (And, yes, at the time "all the people of New Zealand" only referenced tangata māori. And that's because that's who was being asked to sign.)

So that sets the context for what "chieftainship" means in Article Two. Because it can mean many things, based on the agency and power chiefs then had: power, ownership, independence, autonomy, liberty even. But in this Article, Article Two, the context is clearly land and resources. So in this context "unqualified chieftainship" means, as per the English text, that possession of lands and resources would continue "full exclusive and undisturbed," with all the independence and autonomy therefrom, just as long as owners (chiefs, families, individual NZers) didn't want to sell them to the government.

And that's what the Bill attempts to specify as the principle behind this Article Two: that it is about government promising to protect the property rights of all signatories. (And now, by extension, all New Zealanders.) And since no-one now would to enforce a law allowing land to only be sold to the government, it wisely ignores Article Two (Part Two). (As does our lecturer.) And it takes the liberty of extending this protection to all NZers (since, as a principle, it's a good one.)

Mind you, it doesn't specify it as an individual right, which is a pity. But neither does it specify it to be a collective right, since it can't be. Why? Well we're all aware by now (or should be) that both Treaty/Tiriti and contemporary activists confuse and fudge the difference between individual rights (which governments are properly set up to protect) and so-called "collective rights," which only make sense as individual rights voluntarily delegated. (Q: Why do they fudge? A: Because it grants tribal leaders semi-feudal privileges.)

But we do know that the Treaty's framers were unfortunately equally confused. Translator Henry Williams told signatories at Waitangi that Article Two (Part One) "confirms and guarantees to the chiefs and the tribes, and to each individual native, their full rights as chiefs, their rights of possession of their lands, and all their other property of very kind or degree." You can see the confusion right away. The actual drafting is just as confused. But that doesn't make it right.

Williams's explanation however is helpful, because it makes clear that despite the confusion, an individual property right is still being offered. And that's essentially what the leaked Bill is offering to make clear now.

Our Tiriti lecturer continues: "The 'new' article 3 then says all NZers are equal under the law with the same rights and duties. A nice idea (it'd be cool if my Māori whānau had the same life expectancy as my non-Māori whānau but heoi ano), but that's not what Te Tiriti says. Article 3 is a right of equity."

Several confusions here.  

First, this is not at all a "new" Article Three. As above, it's intended to clarify law in places in which "the principles of the Treaty/Tiriti" has been inserted.

Second, ensuring to all individuals "the same rights and duties" is not at all the same as ensuring to them all the same outcomes. Much could and has been written on the difference between equality before the law, and equality of outcome, and this isn't the place to replicate it.

But it is the place to make clear that what Article Three offers in the English text is equality before the law ("all the rights and privileges of British subjects"), in the Williams explanation it is also equality before the law ("all the rights and privileges of British subjects") and in the Kawharu translation it is still and remains equality before the law ("the same rights and duties of citizenship as the people of England").

It's true that Kawharu argues that the discussion at the Treaty signing about Hobson being a "father" to signatories suggests a focus on outcomes, or on "equity." But I argue that the repeated use of the “father” figure there is used less in the sense of someone to care over their every need, but more in the sense of either stern judge and a peacemaker, echoing the words of Tamati Waka Nene (harking back perhaps to the need for a mediator after recent wars) and also in the sense of being a teacher or wise adult from the outer world to allow them to learn and grow. Pumuka, for example, chief of the Roroa Tribe, has this sense when he says: "I wish to have two fathers - thou and Busby, and the missionaries." From the latter two he and his colleagues have already learned “Christianity and the Law,” he says (a major theme later at the Kohimarama conference) and they've seen and embraced the cultural change therefrom.

The astute reader will also notice there is a difference between "duties" (per Kawharu) and "privileges" (per Williams and the English text), and it's the former that the Bill plumps for. Which is a shame, since "duties" suggests that government can make us behave in ways of its own choosing. It's a particular shame the word used wasn't "responsibilities," which would make clear who's responsible for outcomes over one's own life. In the formulation of one Ian Fraser several years ago,

"individuals are the rightful owners of their own lives and therefore have inherent rights and responsibilities; and ... the proper purpose of government is to protect such rights and not to assume such responsibilities."

That would make things plainer, perhaps. But that's not what Te Tiriti says. More's the pity.

Our Tiriti lecturer continues: "As this [TV One] article says, the govt's own officials have said the Bill is in breach of both the spirit and the text of the Treaty. That's a fairly direct statement but it's completely warranted. In my opinion this is the most direct attack on Māori by the govt in a generation." 

Government officials say all sorts of things. And these government officials are leaking, so clearly they don't agree with it. But, frankly, we're all entitled to form our own personal view of whether or not the Bill is in breach of either or both the spirit and text or, if indeed, it affirms them. After all, we all have agency, right?

Is it an attack on Māori? I can see that some individuals in Māoridom would see it that way -- especially those who have been granted legal privileges under the court's present principles. (To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, those granted extra-legal privileges are apt to howl when they're taken away.)

But if it is an attack, I would characterise it instead as an attack on bad law-making, and an attempt to correct it before extra-legal privileges become cemented in -- if they haven't already.

Continuing... "The great shame is that rangatiratanga can be good for everyone. The exercise of rangatiranga in the lockdowns kept people safe. Kaupapa Māori orgs led the vaccination effort. Our rivers and lakes are always healthier when Māori share decisions. There are so many examples."

I agree, rangatiratanga can be good for everyone, if and only if the meaning of  rangatiratanga can be agreed upon. Rangatiranga as liberty is very agreeable, and good for all. Rangatiranga as rights of ownership is also good for all. Folk exercising agency individually and voluntarily did help reduce the spread of COVID. Organisations everywhere, from iwi agencies to pharmacies, vaccinated thousands -- and were paid to do so -- and good on them. Our rivers and lakes are healthier when property rights are protected -- as this proposed clarification of the principles of Article Two might help to do. And more affordable homes can be built when rights to one's own land are recognised in law ... As he says, there are so many examples.

He concludes by saying "Te Tiriti" can be good for us all. 

That is possible. But it might first take some clarification.

Here's the Swell Maps:

NB: I've taken both the English text of The Treaty and Williams's explanation of Te Tiriti from Ned Fletcher's book The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi (reviewed here). Hugh Kawharu's semi-official translation of Te Tiriti appears at the Waitangi Tribunal site.

"The Treaty/Tiriti was the starting point not the end point for New Zealand’s constitutional development."

"The Treaty/Tiriti established Crown governance and the rule of law, protected property rights, and conferred equal rights on all New Zealanders. As an international agreement Te Tiriti had no force until it was reflected in domestic legislation. This required the enactment of the NZ Constitution Act 1852 and the establishment of a Parliament....
    "The Treaty/Tiriti was the starting point not the end point for New Zealand’s constitutional development. The1986 NZ Constitution Act confirmed the democratically elected Parliament’s authority and made clear that the Crown has only a symbolic and procedural role....
    "Confusion in today’s Te Tiriti discourse largely arises from activists ignoring the 1840 document and substituting their own interpretations and wishes....
    "Te Tiriti is not a constitutional partnership between Pakeha and Māori or the Crown and Māori.... There are no principles stated in Te Tiriti. There is no “Aotearoa”; Māori are citizens of Nu Tirani (New Zealand). They are not referred to as indigenous nor as tangata whenua....
    "History shows that race-based societies fail. No tribally based society has ever succeeded in the modern world. And yet New Zealand is rapidly racialising and tribalising its system of central and local government and other institutions."

~ Peter Winsley, from his post 'The Human Rights Commission needs to do its job and stay out of politics'

IDENTITY POLITICS, Conclusion: It's Not a Right/Left Issue

 

Remember when you just took people as you found them? You didn't need to first check their tribe, their pronouns, their penis, or their "privilege." Alright, true, that wasn't all entirely universal -- but for a time there, it was at least the aim, wasn't it? 

That was, until today's identity politics took over.  Watching the increasing re-tribalisation of political life, it was hard to miss its arrival; any folk who did could hardly have missed its explosion in the latest TERF v Trans wars. It's real, and it's odious, and it's here. And it will only go away if you understand it, and fight back.

In today's conclusion of this brief series on the what and why and where and how of the identity politics movement and its origins and spread (first published back in 2019, remember), I remind you that the focus of the attack was (and still is) on our right to speak freely ... and it comes from both sides of the alleged political spectrum...

CONCLUSION: It's Not a Right/Left Issue

"Speaking is not only essential to the transmission of ideas; it is also essential

to the formation and validation of ideas. Speaking is essential to thinking."

~ Craig Biddle

As we’ve seen, this is not a right/left issue – it's bigger than that. Both “sides” of that notional spectrum collectivise people this way. And both sides should be damned for it. 

The right for example argue that race determines IQ and earning power; the left that class and gender determine one’s “privilege.” The right use this issue to oppose immigration because “white culture” is allegedly under threat; the left, to oppose “white privilege” in order to protect privilege’s alleged victims.

They disagree about what your particular collective might be, and what precisely this determines about your group, but they join hands in this deterministic embrace of collectivism. That your race determines your culture.

And both sides of the alleged political spectrum are united in opposing free speech: The left publicly celebrates “diversity,” except for diversity of opinion; while the right just as ostentatiously celebrates “western civilisation” by upholding values that civilisation has rightly damned. 

And the left trumpets “tolerance,” all the while being intolerant of those against tolerance; and at the same time the right celebrates their own intolerance, while seeking to ban those who are intolerant of them. 

And while the left wants to shut down and deplatform speakers on public streets and in public universities [and, most recently, in Albert Park], the right wants to regulate and control speech on Facebook, Twitter and on other private social media.[ii] 

The allegedly opposed political tribes are neither opposed nor rational, but on this point they agree fundamentally: the group above all. All they're really arguing about is: "Which group?"

Let me remind you of the three things missing here in all this: your own choices, your own values, your individuality, and your free speech. The values, in short that did build this civilisation, the values these barbarians have dropped. Defending civilisation should begin with embracing those values, and rejecting their tribalism. Because, remember this: "if the west resorts to tribalism to defend civilisation, then civilisation is already irredeemably lost."[iii]

If there is a "side," then it's this one: those on the side of reason, individualism and civilisation, and those against.

Because it's not about left versus right. Or our gang against your gang. That's a pathetic phone war. It's about individualism against collectivism -- especially, in these times, about individualism against this barnyard form of collectivism that has been building and incubating  on either side of the political spectrum, and is now very dangerously busting out again -- and in our own backyard.

The threat to civilisation is not "invaders" from elsewhere. It's our own awful ideas.

Arguing that race trumps reason -- that's wrong. And it leads to much worse.

Identifying collectives by means of race -- seeing conflict as inevitable and racially driven -- identifying ourselves or others by collectives, especially racial or religious or gender-based collectives -- is as deluded as it is deadly.

And it's dangerous whichever side of the alleged political spectrum from which it emerges.

The right's adoption of "identitarian" race-based politics in answer to the left's introduction of identity politics is wrong. Dangerously wrong. Irredeemably wrong. "Crushing the left" by adopting their tactics, strategies, and identity politics is not any kind of "winning" -- it's being captured whole. Killing people in the name of your racial identity is a throwback to a kind of barbarism that should have been, but still hasn't, been buried.

The politics of race is as vile when imposed by the left as it when spat out by the right; it has no place in civilisation.

Bad ideas can only be fought by better ideas. And that, right there, is the value to every one of us of free speech: in an environment of free and open exchange of ideas, we get to hear and think about this free exchange of ideas for ourselves; and the freer the contest, the more likely it is the better ideas that generally win. And then we all do.

It really needn't be a zero-sum conflict.

ENDS 

THIS IS THE FINAL PART of what has become a 7-part series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'
• Part 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'
• Part 6: The right adopts the left’s love child 

 

NOTES 

[ii] See for instance Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s ‘[Trump] White House Seeks Social Media Sob Stories From Conservative Snowflakes,’ Reason, 16 May, 2019.

[iii] Yaron Brook Show podcast, 'NZ Massacre & "White Genocide",' March 19 2019

 

IDENTITY POLITICS, Part 6: The right adopts the left’s love child

 

As we've learned in earlier posts in this series, the left began and embraced the anti-reason collectivism of identity politics, using it as a lever by which to grasp power.  But as this post points out, the grotesqueries of tribalism work both ways.

Written soon after the Christchurch mosque murders, the post argues that the tribalism of identity politics has been picked up by what passes for the right of the political spectrum -- picked up, and turned into something savage and wholly odious ...

The right adopts the left’s love child

"The [Christchurch murderer] is ideologically on the same side as the 

Jihadists: he's moved by the idea that people are essentially parts of 

tribes, defined by ancestry & tradition, that are vying to 'replace' or 

repress one another. This idea must be opposed in all its forms." 

~ Greg Salmieri

IDENTITY POLITICS IS TRIBAL.  We are tribalised by others by gender, by race, by sexuality, or by “privilege.” (Or by all of the above!) Our “tribe” is how the progressive left now defines each of us and, if necessary silences us as well.

While this modern tribalism emerged on the left, it has now been fully embraced by the right – in another, but equally destructive form.

The left’s impugning of the white, the middle-class, the so-called privileged was bound to lead to a reaction from those being so labelled. But rather than argue against this flagrantly irrational collectivism on the basis of reason and of rational ethical standards, the reaction of some on the right has instead been to embrace it -- to embrace it on behalf of “whiteness” and “privilege.”

"Proud to be white!" say their T-shirts and bumper-stickers, unaware they're allowing their alleged adversaries to define them.

If the left, as a policy, had adopted so called “reverse racism,” then this new movement, calling themselves the Alt-Right, was willing to openly adopt its adverse: real and original racism. "If they're going to call us 'racists'," goes the (non) thinking, "then let's go balls deep."

That in a nutshell is what the Alt-Right represents: the politics of race, reversed. And with it we’re back to the very racism that the right originally opposed. Because the Republican Party, as representative of the Old Right, was formed before the US Civil War to explicitly oppose black slavery.  

“There can be no denial of rights on account of colour” declared Radical Republican leader Charles Sumner when eulogising Lincoln at his burial. This is how the "right" spoke then. Not now. Not any more. In recent times they've been slamming immigrants, spewing anti-semitism, talking about so-called "race realism," and scaremongering about so-called "white genocide." 

With this discussion of the Alt-Right, you might notice that we’re also right back to the gunman with whom we began this seven-part series. The “race realism” his tract upholds is a demand that the only realistic racial policy that governments should enforce is separatism. This is the so-called “replacement theory” for which he killed 51 people, the misbegotten notion that white people are being "replaced" by an “invasion” of more fertile coloured immigrants. After this and similarly-motivated massacres in El Paso and in Pittsburgh, Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill described these animals as “the armed wing of identity politics.”

They are armed. And they are barbarians. But this is identity politics taken to its logical conclusion.

And this -- all of this -- is very far from the reason, individualism and individual rights on which western civilisation was born and grew up (values which the right were once said to embrace). It is simply the violent flip side of the left’s own version of tribalism – a flipping of the intersectionalist’s diagram with the “strong” tribe on top, and very well armed.

If you can smell Nietzsche hovering around at this point, you would not be mistaken.

THE WORLD WOKE UP to this odious movement after an explicitly Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, just five years back. But it had been incubating for some time, and was emboldened by the populist revolt of Donald Trump’s election, and his pandering to the movement that had helped put him there. ("Very fine people on both sides," he famously said when asked.) 

But they had been around much, much longer than that. 

The two “sides” exposed themselves four or five years ago in an online “call to arms” over four women of colour in the US House of Representatives, including Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which was known as “The Squad.” Trump set off another small eruption heard around the world by tweeting that these women should “go home.” His supporters then began unthinkingly chanting “Send them home!” (oblivious to the fact that three of the four women were born in America). In response to this, many supporters of The Squad began reflexively chanting “Racist,” “Racist,” “Racist.” And on Twitter, almost immediately, two hashtags began trending: #IStandWithIlhan and #IStandWithPresTrump – the call going out for both sides to “pick a team.”

Such is the level to which public debate has descended in the United States of America.

OF COURSE, AS SOMEONE who thinks for themselves, one should choose neither “side.” As an independent thinker, one would recognise the implicit tribalism for what it is. As an individualist, you would reject the implicit demand from the drones that you pick a tribe and stick with it, no matter what.

The right's adoption of this tribalist "identitarian" race-based politics however, in answer to the left's introduction of identity politics is wrong. Dangerously wrong. Irredeemably wrong. "Crushing the left" by adopting their tactics, strategies, and identity politics is not any kind of "winning" -- it's being captured whole. Most particularly, killing people in the name of your racial identity is a throwback to a kind of barbarism that should have been, but still hasn't, been buried.

The politics of race is as vile when imposed by the left as it when spat out by the right; it has no place in civilisation.

For folk sympathetic to the Alt-Right, the Christchurch mosque murders should have been a wake-up call. For many of them, subscribing to Alt-Right identity politics however is simply their way of "owning the Libtards." Trolling them. They apparently don't realise that it's them being "owned" by the very irrational collectivism they (sometimes) claim to oppose, while releasing this barbarism from the crypt where it was deservedly buried.

They apparently don't realise that the opposite of Leftist identity politics is not the Alt-Right and its own politics of white supremacy. That these are both forms of the same thing: both forms of collectivism, both of which must be shunned. That the opposite of identity politics is not the creation of an identity politics of your own: the opposite of identity politics is individualism.

In the slogan of Quilliam's Maajid Nawaz (fig. 5, above), the controlling left and the Alt-Right must both be damned to hell[3] -- their shared identity politics condemned altogether as being the politics of the group, of the tribe, of the race. Racism, as Ayn Rand identified, being "the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism," a "barnyard" form of collectivism appropriate only to a mentality "that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men."[4]

Because, like every form of determinism, it removes the thing that makes us truly human: our ability to think and to choose.

AND POST-CHRISTCHURCH? The political reaction worldwide to the Christchurch shooting was as swift as it was self-destructive, ramping up threats to free speech with an across-the-board call for massive online censorship—social media platforms and governments "voluntarily" teaming up to ban "violent extremist content." As Reason’s Nick Gillespie wondered out loud: “What could possibly go wrong?”

What the New Zealand government did in the wake of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mass shooting, should disturb anyone who believes in free speech. The government went so far as to ban the manifesto of the shooter and video of the shooting… “possession of either the video or the manifesto by unauthorised individuals is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and NZ$50,000, while distribution can get you 14 years behind bars.” 

That's simply terrifying and positively dystopian. Do people really think that possessing a book or a text or a video means the owner is enslaved by it or even agrees with its messages? …

This sort of response makes me think of Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and revealed just how banal and childish many of their rituals, titles, and activities were in his 1954 blockbuster ‘I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan.’ The level of ridicule he brought to bear on the Klan helped destroy its credibility and power. Something similar happened to Scientology when its secret documents were made public via the internet in the early 1990s ... On a pragmatic level, the idea that hiding details and suppressing information about extremists will reduce their power seems wrong.

More fundamentally, though, it should be deeply worrying to anyone who believes in free expression that governments and corporations are openly working together to decide what is and is not acceptable speech…

Between threatened crackdowns by Republicans and Democrats and European Union bureaucrats and cave-ins by tech giants trying to preserve market positions, it's right to fear that the era of the open internet is almost certainly over.

Practitioners of politics exploit every opportunity, however grotesque. Post-Christchurch, their motive wasn't primarily empathy, it was "never let a good crisis go to waste." And the focus of their attack was (and still is) on our right to speak freely ... 

CONCLUDED IN PART 7: 'It's Not a Right/Left Issue'

PART 6 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'
• Part 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

IDENTITY POLITICS: PART 3 - Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics." Earlier, I explained that identity politics is "a species of collectivism that groups people together, not on the basis of their thinking, their chosen beliefs," but by irrelevant unchosen physical attributes. It then proceeds to divide and rule -- reducing politics to a straight-out game of pressure-group warfare – with the pressure group into which you belong not even chosen by you, but assigned to you by the "group" or tribe into which you are allegedly born.

This is pressure-group warfare, and of a peculiarly tribal type. And you know what that means...

Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict 

"We are not a capitalist system any longer: we are a mixed economy

i.e., a mixture of capitalism and statism, of freedom and controls. A 

mixed economy is a country in the process of disintegration, a civil 

war of pressure-groups looting and devouring one another."

~ Ayn Rand

Modern democracy has been described as “the counting of heads regardless of content.” In a tribal age like ours is becoming, when headcounts matter more than heads’ content, when group action will always have more political reach than individuals’ ideas and values, then each particular “group” is desperate to gain not just the ear of government, but its power. 

We are living in a reign of fear not only with respect to the government itself [explains George Reisman] but also with respect to any private group that can create enough of a social commotion as to threaten possible government action against one, irrespective of the matter.

This is not hyperbole.

Democracy encourages the rise of pressure groups. In its unrestricted form, after all, it's just a form of mob rule. Grafted onto the contemporary mixed economy -- that mongrelised mixture of freedom and controls with no principles, rules, or theories to define either -- in which governments are free to dispense largesse and power to groups ever-eager to beg for both -- these pressure groups are encouraged to war with each other for scraps from the political table. And pressure groups spawn power-lusters to "speak for them," to pull down some part of the power they so lust after.

The modern mixed economy raises the push for power to an artform -- each group set against every other group, "each group fighting for legislation to extort its own advantages by force from all other groups," each would-be leader elbowing their way to the top, with the main winners being politicians, egging on the warring parties like bookies at a bare-knuckle brawl. Only, in today's politically-driven mixed economy, they're not harvesting losing betting slips, they're shilling for political power. Which means votes.

Every election around the world sees pundits discussing “the black vote,” or arguing about “how Maori might vote” – as if your vote is determined by something as trivial as skin pigmentation. This is said to matter. Brexit was said to be swung by white northern voters, Trump’s election by dispossessed, angry white voters -- voters’ “groupness” being considered more important than whatever ideas or values they may individually hold.

We see government action being called on to enforce gender quotas on private boards, and Maori quotas in local elections. Or insisted upon to shut down criticism of Islam, or suppress debate about the high number of Maori in jail, or to silence those like J.K. Rowling who might question transgenderism. 

The "group" must be protected! 

This groupness extends to the nation. Team USA as a group are said to be "losing" a trade war to Team China. Team Britain were said to be losing out to Team Europe. And (depending on your location) the values, culture and way of life of "your team" are said to be under threat by immigrants from Team Mexico, Team Poland, Team Middle East or (if by boat into the northern shores of Team Australia) from Team Other. 

Every group is said to be at war with every other -- either metaphorically or literally. In this zero-sum game of tribal politics – when every group is said to be a threat to every other group – then one’s own group must demand the power of government just to survive.

In such a war of group upon group, any action however odious seems justified – and the benefits of tolerance, peaceful coexistence, and the economic harmonies of a division-of-labour society praised and explained by the likes of Adam Smith and Frederic Bastiat seem very far away indeed.

Tribal politics is a zero-sum conflict. Nobody wins but those who've grabbed --or are grabbing -- political power.

CONTINUED IN PART 4: Some causes for all this, especially politics and polylogism, Marx and Marcuse...

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'

IDENTITY POLITICS: PART 2 - Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way

 

PART 2 in a series explaining "identity politics." (Part 1 is here, answering the question 'What is Identity Politics?'.) 

Now all-pervasive, identity politics judges you not by your ideas or thoughts or choices, but instead pre-judges you by the group or tribe in which you allegedly belong. You speak not as yourself, but "as a" member of this group. 

If this stinks, it's because it's an outgrowth of a dead idea called "determinism" ...

Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way

"'Identity politics' . . . sorts individuals into groups based on gender, race or sexual orientation, as if such characteristics actually decide one’s political interests...    
    "Public intellectuals push for ever-expanding and cross-cutting segmentation of society into group identities. Rarely mentioned, let alone taken seriously, is the notion that ideas and principles can, and should, unite individuals of all physical types and cultural backgrounds, for the sake of the individual’s life and happiness. The [idea of the] 'melting pot' is now an object of mockery."
          ~ Tom Bowden

Determinism as a school of thought says that human being beings lack free will and the ability to make choices. Hard determinists say we're "wired" to do and think things, about which we have no choice -- as if, in the words of novelist Anthony Burgess, we're all just some kind of "clockwork orange." Realising the idiocy therein, “soft determinists” advanced the view that the faculty of free will is merely "under severe influence from outside factors such as one’s background and environment.” The theorists of identity politics turn this into an iron law, arguing that your background and environment -- your race, class, ethnicity and gender -- fully determine everything about you, from your emotions, to our perceptions, to your politics. According to this recrudescence of tribalism, you are your 

group.

According to tribalism [explains philosopher Tara Smith], the source of reality, of truth of value is the group. Truth resides not in the logic of the group's beliefs – in the validity of their ideas -- but in their groupness. Treat our claims as worthy because we’re us. What makes us –our  group -- a group worthy of respect? Well, we were born with this skin pigmentation. Or of this hereditary lineage or with these physical organs.  In this geographic area, Serbia, Bosnia, south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Now, notice you do not control these things. They're accidental… But tribalism maintains that's what's important about you. These accidental characteristics that you happen to inherit.

    Which implies that  individual reasoning, that free will, that action, that these things are not significant. Tribalism elevates the accidental over the chosen; happenstance over decision; the collective over the individual; feeling over reason; “we want it” as opposed to “we can prove it that it's the right way to go.”

    Tribalism represents the attitude “our group, right or wrong,” rather than “our group's view should be adopted because evidence and reason demonstrate its logic.” And because tribalism rejects reason … , you get ahead not by creating things based on reason and trading with others to mutual benefit, but by beating others, wresting the quarry from their hands. So it's an us-versus-them mentality based on a zero-sum picture that requires combat you get by grabbing.

Note how this idea reduces politics to a straight-out game of pressure-group warfare – with the pressure group into which you belong not even chosen by you, but assigned to you by the "group" or tribe into which you are allegedly born. [Assigned by whom, you ask? Ah -- that's where the political power comes from. More on that shortly.]

“What it reduces us to is members of a larger group,” explains US lawyer Steve Simpson in a panel discussion with Dave Rubin and Flemming Rose – a group that essentially functions just as a tribe does. This is the consequence, he observes “of many decades, even centuries, of very bad philosophy.”

Part of it is collectivism, and I think that the best way to describe it in today’s world  is tribalism: that you are a member of a tribe, and you should say only what that tribe says. 

And if you look at the way tribes function, they always rigidly enforce tribal adherence—because the whole idea is that there is no such thing as the individual. There’s only a member of a group. And your role as an individual is just to give yourself over and to sacrifice your life for the good of the group. . . .

Note the elements Smith and Simpson both identify:

•     You have no reality as an individual: your only identity is your group;
•     You do not choose your group;
•     Adherence to group norms is rigidly enforced by the group;
•     The role of every individual is submission, to the group. 

Consider the musty stale odour that this all starts to emit, the sort of smell generally associated with tribalism, and we can see why Simpson and others refer to it this way. It’s not meant as a metaphor: in many ways the philosophies that led us here are as primitive as the tribal idea itself. Any individual worthy of the name would run a mile from such restrictions – it smacks of what is sometimes called the “crab-bucket mentality” – “a way of thinking best described by the phrase ‘if I can't have it, neither can you.’"

The [crab-bucket] metaphor is derived from a pattern of behaviour noted in crabs when they are trapped in a bucket. While any one crab could easily escape, its efforts will be undermined by others, ensuring the group's collective demise.

Tennis ace Chris Lewis, who now trains youngsters to climb the sport’s mountains he once conquered, observes that “there will always be those who give up on their quest to climb life's mountains, and instead choose to remain at the bottom of life's bucket — which would be fine, as long as they didn't then devote their destructive efforts, like the crabs, to pulling the climbers back down.”

This is the mentality of the followers of identity politics, concludes Tara Smith, a lowest-common denominator form of collectivism.

A species of collectivism that groups people together, not on the basis of their thinking, their chosen beliefs … but on the basis of given physical characteristics. Tribalism is collectivism whose basis rests in blood, body chemistry, genes, geography, unchosen physical characteristics. So it's pre-intellectual. It's the love child of collectivism and anti-intellectualism. Tribalism is non-cognitive collectivism.

CONTINUED IN PART 3: 'Tribal Politics is a Zero-Sum Conflict'

PART 2 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

Part 1 is here: 'What is Identity Politics?'