I don’t always like Marina Hynde’s column in the Guardian – her heavy sarcasm can get a bit relentless – and, for that matter, I don’t always like the Guardian, but I thought this piece of hers, about the reaction to the movie Emilia Pérez and what it tells us, was right on the nose, so much so that I’m going to quote about half of it right here:
… A few months ago I was chatting to the pollster James Kanagasooriam about something, and he noted that “the left tends to issue-bundle”. Which feels a good way of putting it. Many people will have felt the increasingly illogical strictures of this all-or-nothing deal in recent years of supposed progressivism. It’s as though you can’t consider each subject or cause on what you, personally, judge to be its individual merits. Instead, you must buy the entire suite of opinions off the shelf, and you have to agree with all of them, or you are “on the wrong side of history” with the ones you don’t. This was odd, James pointed out, because outside the small minority of the hyper-politically-engaged, most people in the world are not actually like this. His example was to say that most people in the UK are extremely pro gay rights, but a substantial proportion of this group might also support the non-progressive cause of the death penalty.
Anyway: Emilia Pérez. A trans story! Latin actors! Big-swing cinema! It’s all good, right? Except: no. Apparently Mexicans hate it. Apparently trans people hate it. Now old-skewing liberal Academy voters – who loved it – have seen these controversies and know they have to do a 180 and hate it too… It was pitched as a progressive triumph – now it’s on “the wrong side of history”.
… I can’t stand that infantilising, hectoring phrase, which has spent the past decade being the laziest but most successful way to force someone to agree with you. Ditto the idea that if you share any opinion – at all – with people on the other side of a supposed divide, then you should just consider what that makes you, and fall back into line with your tribe. What bollocks.
In fact, the present political climate in the US seems to have been exacerbated by people performing their endless taxonomy of what is and isn’t on the wrong side of history. It’s enough to make you feel that the left, who bang on about polarisation the whole time, are actually more invested in it than the right…
I agree. I think that particular kind of judgy, conformist, witch-hunting ‘leftism’ must take some share of the blame for the rise of the authoritarian right. In other words, in its own terms, it’s ‘on the wrong side of history’, though, like Marina Hynde, I’ve always hated that phrase, with its smug implication that the speaker’s world view is the one that will ultimately prevail.
No one knows what the future holds. We can only guess and hope. (Speaking for myself, my guesses and my hopes no longer coincide). And both hopes and guesses are based on beliefs.
Our guesses are based on beliefs about how things work and, though some people are certainly much better informed about that than others, no one can really predict the future because human society is, in the technical sense, a chaotic system – one in which ‘the present determines the future but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future’ as Edward Lorenz put it (quoted by Wikipedia here), and even the wisest experts are necessarily working on the basis of very approximate understandings of the present.
Our hopes, our ideas about the way things should and could go, are based on beliefs that are necessarily even more tenuously evidenced than our guesses, because they’re not about the forces at work in our present society -something which we can at least observe for ourselves- but about how a hypothetical future society would work, when it doesn’t currently even exist, and about the steps necessary to get to that place, when history is littered with examples of paths being confidentally taken which didn’t go where they were supposed to.
I’ve used this example more than once, but it’s a good one. The leaders of the Russian Revolution were so convinced they understood the machinery of history, that they felt justified in setting up a dictatorship, in the belief that, if power could be consolidated in their enlightend hands, Russia would become a communist utopia. In fact, what it has led to is a police state, led by a former officer in the communist secret police, presiding over a brutal, gangsterish form of capitalism which no longer even nominally claims to be heading towards communism.
But anyone is showing the same kind of hubris (albeit not always to the same degree) if they believe for certain that if only we had a truly free market*, or a United States of Europe, or real socialism, or real democracy, or a strong leader, or no religion, or a global caliphate, or a world in which biological sex was completely irrelevant, everything would be better.
These are all beliefs, and it’s fine to have them. What’s not fine is to assume that anyone who disagrees with them is necessary stupid, or evil, or wrong. Some people argue in bad faith, some people are very ill-informed (including me in many ways), and some people’s politics are entirely based on a calculation of their own, or their tribe’s, short-term advantage, but all of those beliefs can be held in good faith.
* I recommend Ha-Joon Chang’s wonderfully readable book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, for his thoughts on the impracticality of a truly free market.
