'Beyond the Culture Wars: Identity, Immigration and the Contest for the Future’ – Thoughts on the Equiano Project Event. # 186. 21/01/2025
Out of Many, One People
Welcome , and a belated happy new year. And thank you to the Equiano Project for the event discussed below.
‘Beyond the Culture Wars: Identity, Immigration and the Contest for the Future’ – Thoughts on the Equiano Project Event.
On 16th January, surrounded by the National Portrait Gallery’s imposing collection of the great and the good from the past, the Equiano Project gathered together an impressive line-up of present-day public writers and intellectuals: Professor John Gray, Emma Dabiri, Ayisha Akanbi, and Matthew Syed, chaired by Sir Trevor Phillips.
With five speakers gathering to debate the four big issues of culture wars, immigration, identity and the future (plus a strong emphasis on class in the introductory blurb), then the Equiano Project’s event was likely to offer stimulating thinking but to lack clear focus or direction.
It can best be summarised by listing the disparate themes that surfaced through the evening.
Is integration natural?
Trevor Phillips, speaking from his long, close involvement with racial diversity in Britain, observed rather dolefully that the hoped for ‘organic process of assimilation’ was not moving in the right direction. John Gray also noted that ‘spontaneous convergence’ did not seem to be happening. As regards the salience of ‘race’, Phillips spoke of it as being more important than other distinctions, whilst in his concluding remarks Gray spoke of it being over-emphasised.
Emma Dabiri put forward the classical left-wing understanding of racial division as historically the ‘divide and rule’ creation of the ruling classes (going back to seventeenth century Barbados) which divided workers through conceptualising a notional hierarchy of races. There was audience discussion as to whether the more open-hearted welcome given to Ukrainian refugees over against Somali refugees indicated this. By contrast John Gray pointed to racial exclusivism having a long and deeply entrenched history, referring to pre-modern ancient Greece and China as well as the tightly cohesive working class community he experienced growing up in South Shields.
By contrast, Matthew Syed – again speaking from experience - wanted to celebrate the good story that racism had markedly declined and that evidence of the increased integration of British society was all around us. He commended the Sewell Report, widely excoriated from the left at its time of publication, as rightly emphasising the extent to which different ethnic groups were progressing.
‘Detached cultures’.
Syed’s emphasis on the progress made towards racial harmony, meant that he could also highlight the exception: ‘detached cultures’. In various ways the exceptionalism of sections of the Muslim population came to the fore. References were made to the school-teacher in Batley whose life was under threat because he had shown the Charlie Hebdo portrayals of Mohammad, or to the scandal of grooming gangs. Syed emphasised the importance of proposed legislation prohibiting cousin marriage which sustained tribal exclusivism and gave oppressive power to family heads. It is likely that the seminal argument of Joseph Henrich’s ‘The Weirdest People in the World’ (that the western church’s extensive legislation against marriage within blood relationships had led to positive and ultimately very productive confidence in ‘outsiders’) lay behind his affirmation of free and widespread cultural interaction.
But usually the question of whether traditionalist Muslims are the problem for a harmonious and integrated multi-ethnic society otherwise stayed under the surface of the debate.
Should there be cultural restrictions on immigration and citizenship?
Given the high level of current debate about immigration, the lack of direct discussion of the topic was noticeable, perhaps because as a society we are finding it impossible to locate a satisfactory balance between our economy’s intractable need for a high level of immigration set over against the massive infrastructure and social challenges that are created by a growing and increasingly diverse population. But the issue of how not to increase the problems arising from the ‘detached culture’ did surface in terms of whether there could be some regulation of incoming culture. (Sweden, for example, is intending to test on such issues as gender equality and the rule of law). But missing from the debate was the realisation that the most seriously alienated ethnic minority groups are found not amongst recent immigrants but amongst long-standing minorities, notably young black people or Islamists.
So, are we in the midst of a ‘culture war’?
This was the first question posed by Trevor Phillips. John Gray pointed to the ‘blowback’ of popular resentment to globalising and diversifying liberal policies, presumably both economic and social. The introductory blurb’s reference to Trump’s garnering of the working-class vote was never mentioned. For Emma Dabiri such conflict was the product of ruling class manipulation. To an extent the evening was framed by the growing loss of trust in politics. Possibly the outcome is fragmentation rather than war. Thus, the last election saw the rise of more specifically identitarian parties of various hues: Reform, Green, Islamist, with each appealing respectively to disenchanted white working class; progressive liberals (thus supporting the very ‘un-green’ issue of abortion); and Muslims enraged at disregard for the plight of their fellow believers in Gaza.
The big issue.
Matthew Syed located the growing distrust in the context of an economy predicated on a rising level of public debt, leading to asset price inflation and the sense of exclusion of those finding the property ladder unreachable. Behind this lay irresponsibly high level of government borrowing which was necessary to sustain the persistent deceit by the two main political parties that good public services could be provided without high levels of taxation. Perhaps the strongest statement of the evening was Syed’s assertion that the most serious form of discrimination in our society was trans-generational, with coming generations being oppressed by cope with a public debt now at the level of our GDP. Getting worked up about all the other forms of discrimination was merely displacement activity to avoid facing up to the harm we are loading on coming generations.
The search for a moral stance.
John Gray, it seemed to me, was offering a genuinely tragic view of society. The working-class community he grew up in provided a strong nurturing level of cohesion. But the dark side of cohesion was an exclusivism, leading to the fracturing that nurtured culture wars. He paid tribute to the emphasis on the radical unity of humankind stemming from Christian theology, which led to theologians such as Las Casas in the early sixteenth century defending the rights of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Both locally and internationally such convictions enable churches to be simultaneously diverse and united. A member of the audience noted the loss of a time when ‘a church on every street corner’ generated a sense of common identity. Perhaps most powerfully, Matthew Syed recognised how western power grew out of a culture of deferred gratification – in Christian terms ‘dying to self’ – which enabled capital to be built up and public works to be celebrated. By contrast, in a society where marshmallows are offered on easy credit widespread economic and cultural strength can never accumulate. We live now for future generations to pay later. That can only be countered by securely based moral convictions.
The future.
The event’s brochure raised rather unspecific possibilities that this event might be the launch of a developing programme. Having here raised a broad range of related issues, future events will need to have a sharper focus. How cohesion and diversity can be sustained together is one issue deserving further exploration. Of longer term significance is how to develop responsibility to future generations and the sort of culture required to prevent our perpetrating serious injustice on those not yet born.
Finally, there was a danger that this event could sound like Londoners talking about northerners. Thought should be given to varying locations, since culture war, identitarian and immigration controversies are more inflamed well north of London.
Next week’s blog: Review of Steven Vertovec - ‘Superdiversity: Migration and Social Complexity’ (2023).