A lesson that the state—the modern, enlightened, left-liberal, Anglo-Saxon state—finds hard to learn is where the limits of its power lie. It fancies it can do all sorts of things that can’t be done. It does seem to have learned that it can’t do what it likes abroad but only because ‘abroad’ has shown itself to have a will of its own. At home, where it has a monopoly, it increasingly deludes itself that it can do the impossible. The White Queen merely believed impossible things. The modern Anglo-Saxon state goes one better. It believes it does them.
“Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?” asks the Apostle. “Me!” answers the Prime Minister with a Majority in a Quinquennial Parliament. “I put a motion before the house. I whip it, I vote it, I win it. (“See i’, say i‘, sor’id,” as the train companies say.) It is the law.
And thus he creates new universities, by proclamation, by renaming, by handing out licences and by money-lending on a gigantic scale; and the universities he creates are ones to which half the population may go. Lucky half to have degrees. Lucky other half to live in a land where half have degrees. (But why only half? If half, why not all? Are we not a land of equals?)
With the same magic wand, he makes art new too. He waves into existence the Arts Council and gives it a lot of money to give to non-artists to make non-art with. And as, if you don’t co-operate in the fraud, you don’t get the money, lots and lots of non-artists—and, no doubt, some real ones—do co-operate. And, upon pain of being out-of-work, so do museum and art-gallery curators and administrators. Then, all together—Prime Minister, Minister for Non-art (at the moment said to be ‘for Culture, Media and Sport’), Chair-In-Perpetuity of the Arts Council (Sir Nicholas Serota), Museum Directors, Curators, Administrators, non-Artists, TV Presenters and other Hangers-on in the Media—declare all this expensively produced non-Art to be … Art. And into public Art Galleries, so-called, it goes, and also into the private collections of people with more money than taste and a taste for more money. And who is there to denounce this vast money-sowing-and-reaping fraud? Hardly anyone but David Lee at the Jackdaw—a daw of dull and scruffy plumage but with a peck and a caw for all that.
And, by the same means, the wizard creates new marriages, handing out licences, giving things new names, taking thought and uttering it in air and on paper. And lo, man and man may be husband and wife, and, yea, woman and woman too. (Though quite what, for these new couples, will count as adultery neither he nor they nor anyone knows.)
And, by the same power of vote-winning and proclaiming, he undoes sex, re-names it ‘gender’, and male and female he them uncreates. And finding his power good, he makes it available to all; all may now be what they say; henceforth, if they say so, woman may have a penis, man menstruate. A great and terrible wizard indeed.
And if you are only as male or female as you say, it follows that you are only as black or white too. So the Meghan Markle-that-was, whom—to look at—no one would guess was black, doesn’t—now that the time for passing for white has passed—feel white at all. She’s Blake’s Little Black Boy turned inside out, crying, “And I am white, but O! my soul is black.” (Though, it must be said—I think for her—that neither she nor anyone else—and, I’m sure, certainly not Harry—could think that, in her, ‘woman’ was mere grammar and not biology.)
And if the state has the power to turn sex and race into mere identities which we can take on (and put off) at will, it’s certainly got the power to do the same with culture and personal history. Thus the woman christened Marlene Headley, who grew up in Kilburn and was born in Harlesden to parents from Barbados, renames herself an African no African would name her, Ngonzi Fulani, an unlikely combination of mainly Christian Igbo and mainly Muslim, and rival, Fulani. But her real name? It is Ngozi Fulani because, as the Race Correspondent of the Independent (nothing to do with horses or dogs) says, “she has claimed it as such”.
Where and when this wizardry began, I am not sure. It had certainly arrived by 1999 when the Macpherson Report found that a “racist incident” (or any other “hate incident”) is nowhere but in the eye of the beholder: it is “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.” There is no other test, i.e., there is no test. An “incident” isn’t necessarily a crime but the state does record it as a “non-crime” black mark against you, which can show up on advanced police checks and, if it is (is perceived as?) part of a pattern of such ‘incidents’, can become a crime. It is a sort of non-crime crime whose doubtful character is signalled by its doubtful grammar. An “incident” has occurred and been recorded by the police without any crime having been committed but, nevertheless, one party has done something to make another party a victim, and has been booked for it.
So how are we to speak of it? Surely we can’t say that the first party has committed an incident, can we? It is scarcely English. Mustn’t we say something like “he caused the incident”? But then that overlooks the crucial (alleged) fact that there is a victim somewhere. So I think the clearest sense we can make here is that Macpherson has extended not just the law but the language: an incident is now something you may be said to commit. (It is a non-crime crime.)
And the Irish too—as Anglophone as ourselves, for all their membership of the EU—are about to make it a crime to say anything, in person or online, which anybody from a protected category finds “hateful or offensive”. Lucky (or maybe unlucky) categories, to find themselves protected by Leprechauns and Banshees.
The roots of these magical beliefs and practices go deep and spread widely. They are in such folk sayings as ‘everyone has a right to his own opinion’, ‘all forms (of art, music, literature and everything else) are equally valid’, ‘truth is relative’, ‘ it is my own truth, my lived experience’ and in the replacing of, for instance, ’interpretations of’ (which may be wrong) by ‘takes on’ (which may not) and of ‘censorious’ (which has nothing against judgement) with ‘judgemental’ (which has). O brave new world that hath such incantations breathed upon it.
Duke Maskell writes on Substack, which can be found here.
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