Slouching towards Bethlehem?
As Charlie noted here yesterday, lots of people are having a grand old time fulminating about the Gwyn Prins / Robert Salisbury article in the new RUSI Journal on risk, threat and security in the UK. It’s not hard to see why their piece has aroused such passions:
The United Kingdom presents itself as a target, as a fragmenting, post-Christian society, increasingly divided about interpretations of its history, about its national aims, its values and in its political identity. That fragmentation is worsened by the firm self-image of those elements within it who refuse to integrate. This is a problem worsened by the lack of leadership from the majority which in mis-placed deference to ‘multiculturalism’ failed to lay down the line to immigrant communities, thus undercutting those within them trying to fight extremism. The country’s lack of self-confidence is in stark contrast to the implacability of its Islamist terrorist enemy, within and without.
Media comment on the Prins / Salisbury story – which was extensive – was cast along predictable lines. The Daily Mail covered the story as “Multiculturalism is making Britain ‘a soft touch for terrorists'”; the Telegraph splashed it on the front of the paper too. Equally predictably, a comment piece in the Guardian derided the RUSI article as “a glaring example of just how wrongheaded Britain’s political thinking has become” – and its authors as “ranting old colonels”.
It’s tempting, when watching one of these tedious set pieces, to mutter “a plague on both your houses” and retreat back to to blogging about more interesting subjects (like sputniks). But then again, isn’t that what Yeats seems to warn against in The Second Coming?
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Admittedly, Yeats’s own idea of “the centre” was not far from from that of Gwyn Prins and Robert Salisbury. (The “best”, for Yeats, refers to the values of Europe’s ruling class in 1919: God, King, and country. The “worst”, on the other hand, were Germans and Russians, plus French and Irish revolutionaries. Were Yeats alive today, he’d doubtless be with Prins & Co. on the subject of multiculturalists.)
But today, you can read Yeats’s poem differently: as a warning against culture wars where each side lurches progressively further towards extreme positions, motivated by outrage that the other side is doing the same thing.
Perhaps the most vivid example of this was the ‘positive feedback loop’ seen in debate over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 (now in the process of reigniting again): fundamentalists on both the religious and the secular side of the fence fanned the flames of the dispute, leading to polarisation of more centrist parts of the debate and an exponential amplification of the debate’s ‘shrillness quotient’.
So – can we break out of the cycle? Or are we doomed to ‘mere anarchy being loosed upon the world’?