Review of Eric Kaufmann: ‘Taboo: How making Race sacred produced a Cultural Revolution’. # 169. 23/07/2024

Out of Many, One People.

Welcome, to the third review in a row of very different books that I have really enjoyed reading. Next week’s blog will be a discussion of what ‘Taboo’ may say to the Church of England. I will probably then have a summer break until September 17th. Meanwhile may the eventual arrival of warmer weather bring you joy.

Review of Eric Kaufmann: ‘Taboo: How making Race sacred produced a Cultural Revolution’.

The week-end before last the Wireless Festival was held in Finsbury Park just down the road from my home. Amongst the items that attendees were prohibited from bringing were ‘Clothing, garments, items which promote cultural appropriation’. What’s going on? You mustn’t wear a sombrero! Music festivals used to be venues for hedonistic, let-it-all-hang-out expressive individualism; now they give more prissy instructions than a Sunday school outing.

When I started this blog almost four years ago I took a vow not to use the word w*k*, which I thought was a sloppy journalistic term to stir up hopelessly ill-defined culture wars. But incidents like the above convince me that ‘woke’ refers to a real phenomenon, and Eric Kaufmann’s book lays out why it is so important.

The Argument.

Kaufmann, Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the independent University of Buckingham, uses a less crass term, and makes ‘cultural socialism’ the centrepiece of his book. The parallel with the more usual term ‘economic’ is fairly direct. In both terms ‘socialism’ refers to a levelling, in Kaufmann’s estimate levelling down in both cases. Just as moving from economic liberalism to doctrinaire socialism has consistently led to poverty and immiseration, so too the drift from cultural liberalism to cultural socialism augurs ill for western, or notably in this book, Anglophone societies. Whilst Kaufmann’s response to this drift is fairly Draconian, his understanding is not marked by right/left polarising, but rather stresses the importance of holding to liberal centrality. Thus his book is marked by words such as moderate, balance, optimal; and his fears come from the lack of ‘guardrails’ that prevent a leftward drift. He frequently refers to cultural socialism as ‘turning the dial’ – as far as 11, when the common cultural good normally hovers around 5. He does not want to turn it back to 0. The changes of the last 60+ years – the focus of his time frame – have brought many good things, but the over-reach of cultural socialism has now brought us to the dire situation. If the upturn in cancelling speakers over the past decade is the most obvious symptom, more serious is the over-whelming dominance of left-minded academics, notably in the Social Sciences and Humanities, leading to a lack of diverse perspectives, and aided by the growing reach of self-censorship amongst their colleagues.

Kaufmann writes from experience here. He was Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, London, my alma mater where I was taught by the great Eric Hobsbawm, a brilliant historian but whose doctrinaire Marxism landed him decisively on the wrong side of history, and yet iconic status in the college nonetheless remains untarnished. Kaufmann doesn’t mention the college by name, but writes of the harassment and obstacles he faced in pursuing his research projects, and which led him to take up his post at the consciously ‘heterodox’ Buckingham University.

As to the marks of cultural socialism, Kaufmann highlights two in particular: ‘care/harm’ and equity. The former focuses on protectiveness towards vulnerable or minoritized groups, initially black people, then extending to women and sexual minorities. (Kaufmann also notes that the taboo extends no further, not reaching class or religious groups). The effect is that open debate is stymied since disagreeing with the growing reach of cultural socialism immediately raises the threat of being ‘racist’ (that is, ‘social death’, quoting John McWhorter), ‘sexist’ or ‘homo/transphobic’. The prevention of harm to such groups irresistibly justifies cancelling speakers, books or other expressions, including wearing sombreros at the Wireless Festival. Kaufmann points to ‘concept creep’ as aiding the process. The inflation of the term ‘harm’ from referring to fairly clear physical damage through to a wide range of amorphous subjective feelings means that it can be deployed extensively to shut down the views of others.

If ‘care/harm’ is cultural socialism playing defensively, then it is on the offensive with ‘equity’, policies which go beyond seeking equal opportunities for all people to instead taking the lead in proactively ironing out all differences of outcome between groups. He likes using the phrase ‘radioactive velvet glove’ – the softness of avoiding harm is joined with harsh punishment for those who disagree with the cultural socialism programme. For Kaufmann the point of origin is again race in the USA in the 1960s, where the culturally liberal Civil Rights Act outlawing racism and discrimination then quickly swung over in 1965 to President Johnson’s culturally socialist Affirmative Action, promoting measures of positive discrimination designed to over-rule principles of equal treatment with the intention of engineering equal outcome for black people across the society. The momentum has since gathered speed, both with the increasingly negative connotations of the word ‘white’, and with the widespread implementation of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, very often with a Di Angelo/Kendi assumption that white racism is always the problem. An illuminating table on pp 370/1 lists five pre- and post-1965 situations, where the leftward swing has by-passed the culturally liberal ‘Missing Optimum’ in the middle. As an example, the pre-1965 ‘White Centrality’ turns into post-1965 ‘White Sin’, with no place for the intermediating optimum of ‘White majority, with minority contributions’.

In response to those who produce evidence that we have now passed ‘peak woke’, Kaufmann argues that we face not a simple ‘up and then down’ profile, but instead a process more like a tide where there is a recess after each wave comes in, but then the next wave comes in further up the beach. This long-term drift is enabled by the inability of cultural liberalism to resist the logic of cultural socialisms two main thrusts. The latter’s strength is particularly amongst the young, more especially young women apparently, who have the weaponry and threats of social shame to pressure older cultural liberals into acceding to their demands (as with the junior staff of publishers or newspapers or university departments successfully pressuring their seniors into refusing ‘taboo’ expressions). The evidence is that it is unlikely that young cultural socialists will soften their views with age, therefore the institutions where their views have gained ground (initially universities, then journalism and the media, education, and now large organisations with considerable DEI budgets) will increasingly be dominated by them as they move into positions of seniority.

Many critics of woke mentality have interpreted it mainly as a development in the history of ideas – with Critical Social/Race Theory’s cynicism over the abuse of power by established institutions stemming either from a Marxist perspective, or from post-modernity’s deconstruction of the illusion of their legitimacy. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s ‘Critical Theories’ take this stance, as does Carl Truman’s excellent theological diagnosis in ‘The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self’. Disappointingly for those who delight in knowing their Gramsci from their Foucault, Kaufmann disagrees: ‘Those seeking to explain our cultural predicament need to focus more on our banal public morality than on the intellectual lineage of today's woke fundamentalists’; rather ‘they key into the common humanitarian-egalitarian morality of our time’ (p 41). Whilst, strangely, he makes no reference to Tom Holland’s ‘Dominion’, like him he similarly sees a linkage with Christianity: ‘Cultural socialism springs from the same Christian and Enlightenment sources as other Western ideas. It evolved as variants of liberalism, egalitarianism and humanism were taken to their logical conclusion’ (p 31). He notes it would come under Nietzsche’s derision of ‘slave morality’ (p 46). The key development is that these initially liberal emphases took on institutional and prescriptive force, and with the absence of appropriate ‘guardrails’ fell into absolutist implementation. Given that woke-ism has this once pious origin, it may be no coincidence that the most virulent anti-woke critics such as John McWhorter and James Lindsay are also strongly anti-religious. Kaufmann notes the firm resistance to cultural socialism in secular Quebec (p 292) and France.

Meanwhile it seems that Nietzsche’s worst fears are being materialised, with the ‘rise of victimhood as a cultural trope’ (p 255). Correlating with the avoidance of harm has been the rise of fragility and decline in resilience, and rising mental health problems. Vulnerability has been valorised. (On Channel 4 news this evening there was a report of a disastrous mud-slide in Ethiopia that killed over 200 people – including ‘women and children’ we were told. Are there mudslides that kill only men? Or, if so, would they be less serious?)

The consequences.

If the negative results of hard economic socialism took time to appear, then with the more elusive cultural socialism the harm in ‘impoverishing national culture and the societal good’ (p 61) is less immediate or obvious. At many points Kaufmann points out the harm: cancellation of opposing viewpoints, free speech hindered by the partly unconscious implementation of taboos, the teaching of speculative hypotheses of critical race theory or ballooning gender diversity as firm and given facts.

In addition there are what he terms ‘sins of omission’ (p 308). Cultural socialism doesn’t achieve its ends of promoting justice or eliminating harm, but rather shows ‘a steadfast refusal to take an evidence-based approach to problem solving, recognising past mistakes (p  311). In reality its progressivism appeals more to white people than to blacks, whilst it is striking ‘that the results of rigorous attempts to quantify the impact of diversity training showed no positive effects for minorities’ (p 189).In contrast look at ‘the millions of victim-centred stories, memes, and videos circulating online and you have a recipe for collective disempowerment’ (p 313).

Cultural socialism also carries heavy political costs both at home and abroad. At home it has widened the gap between academia and the public, whilst using the term ‘racist’ to describe white people becomes counter-productive. Prior to the 2016 presidential election it was found that calling Trump a ‘racist’ significantly increased his support. ‘All told, politically correct speech restrictions narrowed debate over immigration and crime, opening the way for populists who, in turn, inflame progressives, whose excesses, in turn, stoke conservative backlash. This creates a polarising cycle of mutual recrimination and mobilisation’ (p 331). Internationally, cultural socialist alarms and exaggerations provide fuel for totalitarian attacks on western democracies. China used the BLM protests to argue that America was hypocritical in criticising their crackdown in Hong Kong, whilst the unfounded Canadian media and political scare over alleged mistreatment of indigenous people deflected criticism of their mass internment and abuse of Uyghurs.

In summary, Kaufmann argues:‘The aim is not to jettison cultural egalitarianism, but rather to turn the dial back to an optimal point at which costs to competing values such as reason, liberty, cohesion, and excellence are reduced. Valuable rules, such as free speech, equal treatment, due process, and an objective truth-based legal and scientific order must be reaffirmed and only abridged in extremis’ (p 335).

As well as all his research, in chapter 11 Kaufmann goes on to speak of ‘What to Do’. Since he sees the hold of cultural socialism at its most destructive in mediating institutions – starting from the universities, then (contrary to traditional defences of freedom) it needs to be the responsibility of democratically elected governments to act on behalf of the people to control institutions that cultural socialism now holds captive. Most controversially he seeks to learn from such questionable organisations as the National Rifle Association or the Christian Right to produce a Twelve Point Plan to undercut the Japanese knotweed invasion of powerful institutions. Speculative, flakey and possibly even tongue-in-cheek, his proposals can be seen as both creative and alarming, or even dangerous if Trump wins in November. But behind his seemingly eccentric prescriptions is a shrewd, original and discerning take on the reality that the rather lightweight word ‘woke’ conceals a far more deep-seated and harmful derangement of what was once a valuable liberal culture.

In conclusion, Kaufmann’s book is a remarkable achievement. Time and again the extraordinary range and detail of his researches (such as in the Appendix below) provide firm evidence in place of popular and unquestioned speculation. He is not afraid to question culturally socialist dogmas, or over-ride taboos surrounding discussions, especially of race, sex and gender, where in many cases the most likely explanations have become the unsayable.

Between the iron blocks of solid research at times there are less secure ‘clay’ sections of hypothesis, but overall I think his thesis on the woke nature of our culture is compelling. Though the shape of his argument would be clearer if the one word titles of his middle chapters had been extended to give a clearer picture of where the book was going.

(He does also include two very minor inaccuracies:

*Tom Wolfe’s very useful phrase ‘radical chic’ comes not in a novel but in his journalistic account of a Black Panther’s fund-raising soiree in Leonard Bernstein’s elegant New York apartment (p 51) - just a trickle before the recent flood of super-rich support for BLM or Ibram X Kendi’s Centre for the Study of Racism. *Gordon Brown did not call Gillian Duffy a ‘bigoted woman’ in a tv debate, but rather in a televised ‘meet and greet’ session where she peppered him with questions about immigration without any pause for an answer. It was when being filmed in his car after the tirade that Brown (correctly, surely) described her as a ‘bigoted woman’).

Overall his account of how a worthy cultural liberalism has been swept aside by a damaging cultural socialism is illuminating and needs the close attention of those who are still cultural liberals. So, next week’s blog will be on ‘Reading Eric Kaufmann’s ‘Taboo’ in the Church of England’.

Appendix: Survey results in the USA on how race has been perceived (pp 201-205).

* The proportion of white progressives perceiving racism to be a major problem soared from 35% in 2011, to 60% in 2015 and over 80% by 2020. ‘This despite the fact that police killings of black suspects were at a historic low, while interracial marriage and tolerant attitudes were at a historic high. . . This was nothing more than media generated delusion’.

* In 2019 databases showed that between 13 and 27 unarmed black men were killed by the police. But when asked how many they thought were killed in the past year 54% of ‘very liberal’ respondents thought the number was over 1000, as opposed to just 16% getting the closest answer of ‘about 10’, compared to nearly half of conservative respondents doing so.

* Eight in ten black respondents thought a young black man was more likely to die at the hands of the police than in a car accident, when the reality is that cars are about ten times more dangerous. 95% of black people who thought Republicans were racist got this answer wrong compared to 70% of white people who thought the same; and compared to 53% of black Trump voters getting it wrong, and only 15% of white Trump voters doing so.