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Showing posts with label Kenan Malik. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kenan Malik. Show all posts
Kenan Malik ✒ writing in The Guardian. Recommended by Christopher Owens.


Forty years ago, a US historian claimed that social changes were severing communal bonds. He was right

‘The hope that political action will gradually humanise industrial society has given way to a determination to survive the general wreckage or, more modestly, to hold one’s own life together in the face of mounting pressures.” American historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch’s pessimistic prognosis of the shifting relationship of individuals to society and to each other in The Minimal Self was published 40 years ago. It might have been written yesterday.

From the late 1970s, Lasch published a series of books, most notably The Culture of Narcissism, The Minimal Self and The Revolt of the Elites, that prefigured many contemporary debates, about culture wars, the rise of a “liberal elite”, the corrosiveness of individualism, the encroachment of the market into social life, the creation of a celebrity culture, the rise of a “therapeutic” mindset.

Lasch’s early writings in the 1960s were deeply inflected by Marxism. Over time, his sulphurous critique of liberalism and of the impact of the market led him towards more familiar conservative themes, especially the defence of tradition, a critique of feminism and a wariness of progress. 

Continue reading @ The Guardian.

We Think Loneliness Is In Our Heads, But Its Source Lies In The Ruin Of Civil Society

From The Guardian ➤ This is a transformational moment. Let’s use it to challenge structural injustice, not to elicit or wallow in guilt.

By Kenan Malik

 The transformation has been bewilderingly swift. Six years ago, most Americans thought that police killings of black suspects were “isolated events”. Now, three out of four accept that there exists a systemic problem. Support for Black Lives Matter has risen more in the past two weeks than over the past two years. And far from feeding Donald Trump’s base, the flames consuming US cities have diminished the stature of the president while, so far, not exacerbating the polarisation of the nation.

The attitudes not just of the public but of major institutions, too, have metamorphosed. The NFL, which for the past four years has condemned players “taking the knee” to the national anthem in protest at racist killings, now acknowledges it was wrong. Nascar, that most Trumpian of US sports, has banned Confederate flags. Corporation after corporation has publicly affirmed support for Black Lives Matter.

In Britain, too, the ground has shifted. From nationwide mass protests to a new national conversation about statues and history, from footballers and politicians taking the knee, to Yorkshire Tea telling a critic of Black Lives Matter “Please don’t buy our tea again”, public life seems irrevocably changed. When demonstrators toppled the statue of slaver Edward Colston in Bristol, only a minority of Britons supported their actions. A majority, however, thought the statue should be taken down legally, something unimaginable even a few months ago.

Continue reading @ The Guardian.

'White Privilege' Is A Distraction, Leaving Racism And Power Untouched

From The Guardian a piece calling out political correctness.

By Kenan Malik
When a professor loses his job for mockery, and a film is attacked for political correctness, both sides should take notice.

‘In retaliation, Ayatollah Khomeini should tweet a list of 52 sites of beloved American cultural heritage that he would bomb.”

So wrote Asheen Phansey, an adjunct professor at Babson College in Massachusetts. He added that cultural sites to target might include the Mall of America and the “Kardashian residence”. Not the funniest of jokes (and not helped by the fact that Khomeini died more than 30 years ago) but definitely a joke and a response to Trump’s tweet that America would target 52 Iranian sites, including those of cultural significance, if Tehran did retaliate for the assassination of General Qassem Suleimani.

It led to an inevitable outpouring of outrage on Twitter from conservative snowflakes. By the end of the day, Phansey was no longer teaching at Babson … 

Much is made today of liberals demanding action against those using offensive language or making politically incorrect jokes. The Babson case shows conservatives are equally easily offended … 

The Babson case also shows the dangers of the left demanding censorship of offensive speech. It’s not just speech the left thinks is politically incorrect that will get censored.

Continue reading @ The Guardian.

Left And Right Should Learn To Take A Joke, Not Censor Them

Kenan Malik on the dangers inherent in Identity Politics.

The term was once used in the battle against oppression. Not after Christchurch
 
‘You turned the issue on its head,” someone said to me after I gave a talk on identity politics in Melbourne last week. “I’ve never thought of it that way round.” It always was on its head, I said to her. It’s just that we’ve never noticed.

I’ve been in Australia over the past week talking, among other things, about the politics of identity. The issue has, in the wake of the Christchurch mosque massacres, acquired new resonance …

… There is, though, in Australia as elsewhere, a strange disjuncture in such discussions. There is a heated debate about identity politics, which focuses primarily on the left, and on whether it makes sense to adopt such politics. There is an equally heated, but separate, debate about white identity and white nationalism …

… Where reactionaries adopted an identitarian outlook, radicals challenged inequality and oppression in the name of universal rights. From anti-colonial struggles to the movements for women’s suffrage to the battles for gay rights, the great progressive movements that have shaped the modern world were a challenge to the politics of identity, to the claim that an individual’s race or gender or sexuality should define their rights, or their place in a social hierarchy. 

Continue reading @ The Guardian.

If Identity Politics Is A Force For Good, How Does White Nationalism Fit In?

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