'Muscular Liberalism' and other nonsense

Earlier this week David Cameron made a speech declaring that multiculturalism has failed in the UK and argued that the UK needs a stronger national identity. He criticised groups that promoted extremism and declared that the government would stop supporting groups that did little to combat such extremism, especially in the Muslim community. Most worryingly he called for more active, muscular liberalism. Not only does this display a frightening lack of understanding of the very concept of liberalism and all the trappings thereof, it is indicative of a distressingly illiberal attitude.

Mr Cameron’s comments assume that multiculturalism is some sort of policy that the state should either support or not. It is not. Indeed it is not something that can fail or not, nor is it in any way related to the concept of a national identity, which is, in itself, a worrying one. Multiculturalism is exactly what it says; it’s the mixing of different cultures. When multiple different cultures interact with each other, then we have multiculturalism. Multiculturalism cannot fail simply by virtue of the fact that there exist a multiplicity of different cultures in the world; a world in which it would be impossible for them not to communicate.

Of course one gets the feeling that the PM does not mean that. He does not mean that cultures are failing to communicate. To say so would be absurd; simply walk through any main street in England and you will see that it is not true. Even white people eating at Indian restaurants counts as multiculturalism. Mr Cameron is actually saying that he thinks the fact that Britain is a multicultural place is promoting extremism. Multiculturalism is not working to unite people and exclude the extremist; it is working to legitimise them.

Unfortunately Mr Cameron is, yet again, wrong. Mixing cultures is inevitably going to cause conflict. People disagree, and sometimes people fail to realise that there is nothing wrong with that. However this is not to say that we should not encourage different people to communicate and learn from each other. The more we encourage such communication, the more likely it is that people will realise that disagreement does not imply conflict.

Extremism arises from a sense of exclusion. People do not turn to violence because they feel their culture is being allowed too much freedom to interact with others. People become terrorists because they feel that their way of life is being ignored and oppressed by another’s. Mr Cameron’s call for a greater ‘national identity’ implies exactly that.

I said about seven months ago that I might write a blog about why nationalism is wrong some time; well this might serve as part of that. Mr Cameron’s call for a greater sense national identity is, in essence, a call for a greater sense of nationalism. It is the concept that people who live in Britain ought to feel that they most assuredly are British and should feel a certain pride at that fact. I’d question what exactly distinguishes someone as British. It seems simply to encompass where you live. A Brit is someone who lives in Britain, and what exactly is that? Britain is simply an area of land defined by a whole collection of events from history, encompassing wars, revolutions, and political evolution, reinforced by an awful lot of art. None of this is objective. This is simply the actions of humans, usually to no greater purpose that personal gain. A nation is nothing more than a collective history, confined by lines on a map. There is no difference between Brits, Germans, Indians or Chinese people except that they were born into different histories and in different places. They belong to different cultures, but they should not be defined by that culture. Nationalism seeks to define people not as individuals, but by where they live and which arbitrary, meaningless pieces of history their ancestors belonged to. The most insidious part about nationalism is that it divides people along those lines. We end up seeing Germans in the context of Germany, or Indians in the context of India. Nationalism stops us from looking at people as individuals and forces us to look at them through glasses tinted with their national stigma.

To promote nationalism in the UK would do exactly the opposite of what Mr Cameron desires. He wants to curb extremism by promoting a greater sense of national identity, but to create such a national identity would be to isolate and marginalise minorities, increasing the potential for extremism. A sense of national identity will not make people feel more involved and more welcome; you cannot force someone to love something, especially when it is so steeped in a history to which they do not belong. A sense of national identity will make Britain into an introspective, self-obsessed exclusion area where new people are not welcome and where not being British is a bad thing. That is exactly the kind of attitude that creates extremism; just look at America.

All of the above is caused by a misunderstanding of why Mr Cameron is there at all. His, and his government’s, role is not to promote multiculturalism or create a sense of national identity. Multiculturalism arises from the fact that there are many different cultures in the world and that borders are not walls. People move, people interact, cultures mix. It is a fact of life and that mixture is not something that can and should be controlled. Borders should never be walls and people should never be stopped from moving between them. The government is there to ensure that everybody’s rights are being protected, yet they persist in telling people what they can and cannot do.

Mr Cameron called for what he described as ‘muscular liberalism’. Again he shows a painful misunderstanding of what the concept of liberalism actually means. Liberalism is the idea that everyone should be free do say, do and think exactly what they like so long as those actions do not curb the freedom of another. Liberalism is the triumph of freedom over coercion, of choice over compulsion, of reason over force. To use the world ‘Liberalism’ in the same breath as ‘muscular’ implies that people ought to be forced to be free, compelled to choose and coerced to freedom. Such things are paradoxical and nonsensical. Muscular Liberalism is a meaningless phrase that implies something much more sinister that it sounds. It implies that we ought to force people to live our way; to substitute their values for ours and their way of life for ours. It implies that liberalism is the only right way to live and that we should force people to live it, despite the fact that a true liberal philosophy implies no such thing.

Of course we should not take Mr Cameron’s words to their logical extremes. Politicians rarely take anything to their logical ends and, while his speech sounded hard hitting, in reality very little will change. Rhetoric will alter slightly and some policies may change, but his words are mostly just that, words. They will not be followed up by actions. They never are, and that’s jut the nature of politics. I wish it weren’t, but that’s a whole different blog post.

The sporting life

So far in my 95 entries (wow 100 might requires something special) I’ve refrained from mentioning sport. You may have noticed this, or if you don’t know me you probably haven’t, because if you know me you’ll know that I quite enjoy playing and watching sport. With the Football World Cup around the corner I feel this is a good opportunity to explain why I don’t like to write about sport here and why a lot of sport pisses me the hell off, football (soccer to you Americans) especially.

I made a rule fairly early on in my blogging career (sorry, that is not the right word… ‘Adventure’ we’ll call it), that I would refrain from writing about sport because I find that sport tend to be very divisive and will only really interest a small number of people. Now this same accusation could be levelled at music, but the thing is with music is that one does not just like one particular band or genres to the exclusion of everything else, people tend to be fairly open minded and willing to listen to other styles and other bands of a style they like (on that note I recommend you all go listen to the New Pornographers and Modest Mouse). This is not the case with sport because people tend to support one (or maybe two or three) teams in each sport, and only really like two or three sports if that. So if I started blogging about my favourite Rugby or Cricket team, the likelihood of anyone actually giving a damn is pretty low, unless I advertised on a forum for that particular club, but in my experience people who go to sports team forums are unlikely to be interested in indie music. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I doubted any of you would care about sport enough to read. Even if most of you did care about sport (which you might), it’s unlikely that many of you would care about the right sports or the right teams for my ramblings to mean anything. I am even more reluctant to write about my own personal sporting achievements because, unless you know me personally, you would probably care even less.

Another very good reason for not writing about sport is that a large number of sports and even more sports fans fill me with such uncontrollable rage that this blog would eventually descend into so much bile and hate directed at sporting culture that you would all stop reading it because your eyes would start burning. This leads in very nicely to what I really want to talk about today – the disturbing attitude of many people towards sport and, in particular, football and the upcoming world cup.

You might be asking why I call it disturbing; it is a strong, foreboding word which implied some kind of danger involved. Well the reason is that the kind of enthusiasm and irrational dedication people have towards sports teams is exactly the same as the kind of enthusiasm and irrational dedication nationalists have towards their country. Sports fans (and I’m generalising here, I know many people support sports teams without adhering to this model, but if even if you don’t, you know someone who does, actually you know someone who does even if you don’t support a sports team) want their team to do well; no they want their team to be the best, so much so that it offends them when other people are better than them. In fact they are so convinced that their team is the best that, whenever anyone beats them, they find someone to blame; a player, a coach, a referee (usually the referee), but they never loose the faith that someday they will win. Now wanting your team to do well is fine, but when it gets to the point when you despise other teams for doing well and despise their fans for supporting a team that is doing well, things are getting a little far. The thing is that this allegiance, no matter how strong, is based solely on where you were born of maybe where your father was born, or where you live.

This is worrying enough because it is irrational, but let me do a little experiment. Here is a large chunk of the paragraph I just wrote, with all the references to sport replaced with references to nationalism.

Nationalists want their country to do well; no they want their country to be the best, so much so that it offends them when other nations are better than them. In fact they are so convinced that their country is the best that, whenever anyone beats them, they find someone to blame; a leader, a general, luck, but they never loose the faith that someday they will win. Now wanting your country to do well is fine, but when it gets to the point when you despise other countries for doing well and despise their people for being from a nation that is doing well, things are getting a little far. The thing is that this allegiance, no matter how strong, is based solely on where you were born of maybe where your father was born, or where you live.

I think you get the point; the same basic instinct which drives people to nationalism (and if you don’t get what is wrong with nationalism I suggest you study the history of the 19th and early 20th centuries, or maybe I’ll write a blog about it someday), also drives sports fandom. Of course when the two meet it is impossible to separate them (because they’re the same thing). Support for a national sports team involves lots of flag waving and racism. We start hating people from other countries because they’re from other countries.

This is why the World Cup annoys me. It is such a coveted prize, because if you win you are obviously the best in the world and you can revel in that knowledge for the next decade or so, that people go absolutely batshit loco about it. They get so into the even that they forget that it’s just 22 people kicking a ball about for 90 minutes. People from every country buy into this mad concept, despite the fact that most of them will end up being disappointed because there can only be one winner. People get very excited over something which, ultimately, means nothing. I don’t mind that so much as the fact that they actually turn to violent, nationalistic hatred for other countries for the sake of a cup which they themselves played no actual part in winning.

Maybe I don’t quite ‘get’ something that is going in here, but all the emotional investment people make into sport is a complete waste of time, effort and money because most of the time, most teams will loose in the end. The entire concept of supporting a sports team is highly irrational and is indicative of a dangerous attitude which I think we would all be better off without. I’m not saying we should not follow sport, or even support a team, but I think our support should be somewhat less fervent and much less like nationalism, because that kind of attitude it a dangerous one.