Face to Face

Richard King, author of Here Be Monsters, has a new piece in the magazine Arena titled Standing Ground in a Turning World. He argues that "identity politics" has been detrimental to Left organizing because it lacks a sympathetic understanding of how people's lives have been turned upside down by the pace of techno-scientific change. He recommends tolerance for small c conservatism and the traditional values that help anchor people people tossed about by modernity. He sees signs of this "moral maturity" in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations which have avoided the purity tests seen in other recent protest movements. I've tried to make this case for some time, insisting that technology tends to run out ahead of culture's ability to absorb and assimilate it resulting in the kind of incoherent "politics" we are seeing globally. This incoherence shows up on the Left in the form of pronoun policing and snow-flake hysteria over cultural appropriation. On the Right it manifests as looney conspiracy theories and "passionate intensity" ranging from populism to fascism. The question for me is how you find the sweet spot between a provincialism that can be reactionary, racist, xenophobic etc and a cosmopolitanism that is alienating. You want to tolerate religious belief but also challenge chauvinistic sex-gender prejudice. We can appreciate "face to face" interactions but still value the internet. It is the question of how much time these adjustments take. Capitalism moves at the speed of light and "all that is solid melts into air", regardless of the cultural dislocation Freemantle Shipping News