Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Skinstorm

A while back I wrote about the scientist James Watson and the comments he made about lower intelligence among Africans, which apparently led to him being asked to resign. At first I was hesitant about saying that he was racist, then I said he probably was, then I felt uncomfortable with this and ammended my comment. After that my discomfort with any accusations of racism I had levelled grew, so that I wanted to write something else on the subject. I even felt sorry for Watson. He, like many people in recent years, has effectively been blacklisted for speaking in an unguarded manner. In being asked to resign, he has basically, it seems to me, been told to shut up. Although I think my own worldview is very different to Watson's and I even rather despise some of what he seems to stand for, I don't really want to live in a world where if certain people don't like what you have to say, you must shut up.

Well, before I could get round to writing anything new about Watson, something else caught my attention and has, for some reason, been preoccupying me. A while back on the Morrissey Solo site someone anonymously posted some news (or a rumour) that a "skin storm" had once again taken place between Morrissey and the music magazine NME. On the discussion thread of that entry, NME's editor, Conor McNicholas, denied that there had been any fall-out, describing such rumours as "unsubstantiated noise".

Soon afterwards there came a statement from Morrissey's manager, Merck Mercuriadis, with the text of a lawyer's letter addressed to the NME.

It seems to be a complicated sort of story, but apparently the text written by the original interviewer, Tim Jonze, was entirely re-written by the NME editorial staff, and Jonze subsequently disowned the feature. The issue of NME in question features a picture of Morrissey on the cover with the quote, "The gates of England are flooded. The country's been thrown away." Above and below this are the rather unsubtle headlines, "Bigmouth Strikes Again" and "Oh Dear, Not Again". On the NME site, a caption tells us that "Cover star Morrissey gives his most contentious interview in years."



The bone of this particular contention is that of immigration.

And it truly does seem to be a contentious issue. The discussion threads on the related news items on the Morrissey Solo site, here and here, make for interesting reading, not so much for the articulacy of what is said - since the comment are seldom very articulate - but because of the strength of the division between those who seem to believe that saying anything negative about immigration amounts to racism and those who think the negative aspects of immigration are simply facts that must be faced.

Here are a couple of articles giving the whole story in brief, with quotes from the interview in the former, from Sky News and Drowned in Sound.

I don't actually have a 'position' on immigration because, quite simply, I don't feel like I have enough information on the subject to come to any conclusions, but it's not something to which I have given no thought. In fact, I have given quite vigorous thought to immigration and race relations in general ever since living in Japan and experiencing what it was like to be part of a racial minority.

I'll attempt to jot down some of my thoughts on the subject now in no particular order:

I don't know how widespread this view is, but I've always felt that it is quite possible to become British, not only in a legal, but in a cultural and social sense. Trevor McDonald? British as tea and crumpets. Salman Rushdie? I would have said he was British, too, but I saw him once in an interview saying that he didn't feel British. Fair enough. His choice. Kylie Minogue? You get the picture. In Japan, such a thing is impossible. You are either born and bred Japanese, or you are not and never will be Japanese. I did not like this. I felt that the Japanese had cut themselves off from the rest of humanity. I began to feel a poisonous resentment at the invisible social wall that existed, and grew contemptuous of Japanese society. Did that make me racist, I wondered? Maybe I am racist, I thought - racist for thinking that the Japanese are racist. It seemed to me an immensely depressing dilemma, and I began to feel that the whole question of race will never be solved. There are differences between peoples (and people), on all kinds of levels, and differences seem inevitably to lead to conflicts. What can be done apart from making everyone the same, which would be another very depressing solution, even if it were possible. Perhaps, I thought sometimes, the Japanese were even right not to want foreigners becoming part of their society, since the whole society was, anyway, so etiolated and hidebound that it would probably fall apart if it tried to integrate one or two people who had not been indoctrinated into the unwritten rules since birth. "Make sure they come. Make sure they go." That, as someone who taught me Japanese, was the attitude towards foreign students and foreigners in general. Nice to have guests to admire your quaint little home. But you don't want them hanging around for long.

I came to a determination that individualism was the only viable way of interacting with the world, although I could see problems with this, too. In any case, I didn't want to interact with anyone as the representative of one group with the representative of another. Even to think in terms of groups seemed to me inevitably to lead to racism. On the other hand, I recognised that there are, indeed, such things as national traits. Is it racist to recognise and criticise such traits? I decided it was not, since criticism would be based on attitudes and social practices and not on any racial attributes. No culture or group of people can possibly be exempt from criticism.

I basically despise political correctness. I know there are many intelligent people who support it, but I simply do not believe that you can systematise tolerance. Such systems, on the contrary, breed intolerance and witch-hunts. They stop people thinking and they stop people talking openly. There can no longer be any honesty and no longer any celebration. I remember a conversation I overheard in a restaurant. The speaker appeared to be a headmaster. He was talking about how any Christmas celebration had been banned at his school (apparently against his wishes) since it would make non-Christians feel left out or alienated. After that ban, requests had been made for (I believe it was) Ramadan to be celebrated at the school. The headmaster, grimly and wearily, told of his satisfaction at having quashed that particular request. "If we can't have Christmas, they can't have Ramadan." No celebration, but instead a sullen resentment on both sides - that is the price of political correctness.

Britain once had an empire, through which we acquired considerable national wealth, though naturally this was never distributed in a particularly even way. Considering that our wealth has come from foreign lands, it seems only right that we should share that wealth with the rest of the world now by accepting immigrants. However, there does seem to be a certain measure - quite a strong measure, in fact - of self-hatred in the 'liberal' position that even to question immigration is racist (and the equivalent of wishing to set up death camps). I can understand that. I mean, I know all about self-hatred, and I often think that Britain has had a worse influence in world history than just about any other country on the planet. But I don't think it's at all constructive to base social policies on self-hatred. I think there should be an open, and, if possible, unbiased enquiry into the real impacts of immigration and that any policies should be decided according to the findings of such an enquiry. Having said that, I'm not especially optimistic about political solutions to any social problems.

The 'liberal' view that questioning immigration is tantamount to racism implies that there should be no limits on immigration whatsoever, since to apply a limit surely one has to question where that limit should be. If there is a reasoned principle behind this view (and perhaps there isn't) then logically it can only be the utopian idea that nations should not exist. Perhaps they shouldn't. Will there be wars as long as there are nations? It's hard to tell with certainty, but it could be the case that nationhood is inherently destructive. Perhaps it would be magnificent if the British were so welcoming and self-effacing that there were no controls on who crossed our borders and lived here. That would mean we were laying no claim to territory, that we had, effectively, dissolved the nation. I don't think that will happen unilaterally, however, if it happens at all. And round about here is where I get stuck, I think. Isn't it, in the most basic sense, identity that leads to conflict? I am me because I am different to you, because I am different I do things differently. I don't like it when you do this or that. These are my camels, not yours. Etcetera. And nationhood is group identity. And yet, however many times I ask myself whether it is imperative for nationhood to be dissolved, I cannot come to a conclusion. Let's imagine that nations were dissolved politically - there would still be language groups, religious groups, other kinds of groups. Would these be new, slightly more amorphous nations? And do we really want to wipe from the globe all the differences that cultural and other identity brings?

I actually think this - and pure survival in a ransacked environment - is the biggest issue facing the human race at the moment, and I must apologise if I can't solve it in a brief blog post. Anyway, whether you agree with Morrissey's (alleged?) comments or not, I think he has touched upon an issue that must be talked about, and not swept beneath the carpet by the arbiters of political correctness.