Sorry, I don't hate anyone (unfinished post)
Found this in "drafts". Posting as is, unfinished, with abrupt ending mid-bullet-point, since it´s unlikely I´ll ever have an incentive to finish writing a post that is likely to be read by nobody at all. The question of why I continue to post stuff that, unfinished or not, nobody reads, is one that undoubtedly deserves its own unfinished discussion further down the line.
Ahem.
"Sorry, I don´t hate anyone"
I've talked about hate elsewhere. For me, it's an exotic emotion, so rare than when it bubbles up momentarily (usually a few metres away from a Ford Explorer driver) I want to hang on to it, to calm it down and study it before it wriggles free and escapes. But it never lasts longer than a few minutes; and I can honestly and thoughtfully say I have never acted or spoken under its influence (other than perhaps accelerating a bit faster than a careful driver would). Consequently, I find it hard to take seriously any suggestion that it has a significant role to play in human affairs. If a particular societal problem can be plausibly attributed to anything other than that elusive emotion of hatred, I'll tend towards that alternative, more plausible explanation, whatever it is.
* * *
OK, that's the second time (in 58 years) I've been accused of racism, and I'll admit I'm pissed off. I'd understand if the accusation had come as a response to some kind of off-colour joke, or equivocal reference to a racial stereotype, or hurtful words directed at somebody or other, or some glib, indefensible generalization about a group of people, or at least some identifiable poor choice of language for which due apology and rectification might be in order. But no, it came in response to this:
(Context:)
(My response:)And let’s ask the question why would the Tories reject a definition of Islamophobia? Because they have 1000s of followers and potential voters who say ‘there is no such thing’ or ‘it can’t be racism ‘cos Islam isn’t a race’.— Michael Rosen (@MichaelRosenYes) May 15, 2019
Which happens to be true. Islam is a religion, not a race.— Cakesniffe (@Cakesniffe1) May 15, 2019
Incensed replies were not slow in appearing. Without exception, all agreed that on the strength of this one observation I must be, at the very least, a bigot - and that the truth of my observation (Islam is in fact a religion: this is uncontested, as is the fact that anyone, of any ethnicity, can belong to this religion) was irrelevant to this conclusion. What I propose to do here is to analyse the arguments that were, or might be, put forward in support of this claim, and let the reader decide if it has merit. Let's start with Michael Rosen's reply (quoting rather than embedding from now on, to save time):
Which happens to obscure the fact that most Muslims are people of colour and so hating Muslims becomes a disguised way for hating Muslim people of colour. Sorted. (There’s no such thing as ‘race’ anyway.)
Well, at least that's comparatively polite. I even find I have common ground with Mr Rosen: I, too, believe that the term "race" has no scientific basis, at least with regard to humans, and that we could easily do without the concept, and have said so many times over the years, including (years ago) here, and in the tweet with which I immediately replied to the above. Unfortunately, as I hinted in my reply, my (and Mr Rosen's) refusal to take the notion of "race" seriously does not prevent others, including the police in many countries, from believing it is a valid way of discriminating between people. And since the concept "race" does not correspond to any measurable reality, I find I can also agree with Mr Rosen that when people claim to make distinctions of "race", what they are really doing, as far as one can tell, is discriminating on the basis of appearance, including skin colour, or what the 1950 UNESCO report is pleased to term "ethnicity" (in my reply I used the term "visible markers"). All of this I can easily concede.
As to the argument, espoused by one or two other less polite participants in the thread, that only a racist would say that X is "not a race", this makes no logical sense at all, Suppose, for example, someone were to assert "Muslims worship Mohammed as a god": any of my angry Twitter adversaries, even the atheist ones, would surely reply: "no, that's wrong: Mohammed isn't a God. In Islam there is only one God, and Mohammed is his Prophet". It's perfectly possible to assert that Mohammed isn't a god without conceding that there is, somewhere, such a thing as a god (which an atheist obviously wouldn't concede). In the same way, saying that something "isn't a race" is functionally equivalent to saying "it is not something that a racist is likely to use as a pretext for discriminating against people".
None of this, however, justifies Mr Rosen's supposition that those people who (he insists) "hate Muslims" are in any way motivated by skin colour or any of those attributes that people associate with the unscientific term "race"; nor does it justify his sleight-of-hand in replacing the word under discussion, "Islamophobia", with "hating Muslim people of colour". This is precisely quod erat demonstrandum - that which was to be proven - the larger question being whether the UK Tory party should accept that a word which literally ought to mean "irrational fear of the religion of Islam" can reasonably be used to mean "a form of racism opportunistically directed at followers of Islam". The Tories, apparently, think it can't, and I agree with them.
There are two questions at issue here. One is the misuse of words, which as a linguist I have a particular interest in. The other, more important, issue is about understanding (in order to deal with and defuse) the narratives which give rise to anti-Muslim prejudice, in the UK and elsewhere.
As to the misuse of words, well, the fact that the ridiculous word "homophobia" (lit. "irrational fear of the same") has come to mean "prejudice against gay people" is unfortunate, not just because whoever coined it clearly had no idea what a "phobia" is or what "homo-" means as a combining form, but also because the word interferes with our understanding of the phenomenon it purports to describe (by insinuating that prejudice against gay people can only be due to some sort of "fear", rather than to other equally irrational but fundamentally different emotions). And if it is unfortunate, it is probably unwise to adopt such an abortion of a word as a template for other factitious "-phobias". The fundamental problem is that a phobia is an irrational fear, and while there may be people who fear gays, or trans folk, or Muslims, these faddish terms are usually intended to denote something other than fear. That something might be generically described as "negative prejudice", and the difference between this and a phobia should be evident in the fact that people who have a real phobia tend to be aware of the fact, acknowledge it as a weakness or a problem and, in extreme cases, seek help for it. The claustrophobe certainly does not go around telling everyone that enclosed spaces are inferior to open spaces, that they do not belong, or that they should not be trusted. He knows he's the problem, and not anyone (or anything) else.
Ironically, it appears that the adoption of the "-phobia" suffix may have originally been a clumsy attempt to "medicalise" the condition of being prejudiced against gay people, i.e. to insinuate that a person with this prejudice was not psychologically healthy, was not "normal", was in need of treatment. I say this is ironic because medicalisation is generally recognised as a form of what used to be called "othering", an obscure spectrum or slippery slope that ends in dehumanisation, which as I have discussed extensively elsewhere, is one of the three classic planks of hate speech. If you want to turn people against your hated enemy, you compare him to a rat or a toad or a bacillus. If you want to do the same, but in a more subtle way, you insinuate that he has some sort of loathsome sickness or secret deformity, perhaps a mental one, that sets him apart from the majority of good, healthy, wholesome folk. If you're a homophobe, or an Islamophobe, not only do you have something psychologically wrong with you, for which you should seek help, but your condition sets you outside the pale of polite society: you should be shunned, for everyone's sake. The only mysterious thing about these illnesses is that sometimes, if you are lucky. they can be miraculously cured by no other means than the issuance of a grovelling apology and a promise to "do better".
In reality, anyone not blinded with ideology will see that "homophobia", along with the rest of the factitious phobias, covers a multitude. If we cared about truth and honesty, and felt it was worth while to have a useful descriptive vocabulary, we would need a whole lexicon of terms to denote, e.g. the person who reacts with discomfort or violent repulsion to gay stimuli owing to his own unacknowledged homosexuality; the straight person who because of his cultural influences privately finds displays of gay sexuality aesthetically repellent, but mostly refrains from saying so because he is a liberal; the person who has the same responses as the preceding but does not hesitate to express them because he is a loudmouthed jerk; the authoritarian conservative who (having slept through Thatcher) still believes that "allowing" gay people to openly express their sexuality somehow threatens society, or the sanctity of heterosexual marriage, or some such thing; the neurotic would-be "progressive" who feels secretly disturbed and threatened by homosexuality but rather than acknowledge these feelings, projects them onto others, whose prejudice he detects and smugly denounces, revelling in his supposed superiority to those evil bigots; the blasé person who does not have any particularly strong feelings about gay people but reserves the right to continue using the allegedly offensive vocabulary he grew up hearing; and a range of other possibilities that I'm too tired to think of right now, All these people, of course, for the progressive, are just "homophobes", or would be if only their minds (in the case of the glib "woke" anti-homophobe) could only be read aright, Which brings me to Mt Rosen's own, not inconsiderable, mind-reading abilities.
Let's just remind ourselves again: for Mr Rosen, "hating Muslims" (assuming for the moment that's what "Islamophobia" means) is always or generally "a disguised way for hating Muslim people of colour". Here, Mr Rosen decidely has the advantage over me: he can read minds, but I only have what people say and do to go by. And based on that, I see no evidence whatsoever for this assertion - and only limited evidence for the underlying assumption that "hatred of Muslims" is a phenomenon serious enough to deserve its own medicalised diagnosis. (Admittedly, in the country where I live there are very few Muslims, so his mileage may differ). What I do see a lot of, on social media at any rate, is vocal opposition to the religion of Islam - the kind of opposition which might be colloquially expressed as "I hate...", albeit referencing an entirely different emotion than would be presumed if the object of the hatred was a person, or collective of people.
It is actually possible to hate a religion - at least I think so. I wouldn't say I hated any myself, but I certainly dislike them all to differing degrees, and I would probably have to admit that Islam is the religion I dislike most, at least in a present day context. Looking back over history, by contrast, the religion I consider most worthy of repudiation is Christianity. Islam has been and is immensely destructive of human wealth and progress and happiness, but Christianity, historically, even more so. I'm probably as close to "hating" Christianity as anyone you're likely to meet - all the more in that I was brought up in this religion, and remember all too well the misery it injected into my childhood. Yet, somehow, I am married to a Christian. So it is, apparently, possible to "hate" a religion, yet bear no ill-will whatsoever towards its adherents. To my mind, this is so obvious it scarcely needs saying.
From here, the obvious question is "well, if Islamophobia isn't grounded on 'race' - i.e. appearance - then what do you suppose it is grounded on?" Well, first of all, let's acknowledge that there's a bit of question-begging here, in that the question assumes there has to be a "reason" for this (or any) species of hatred. One of my Twitter respondents was quick to point out that racism is irrational - "you don't need a reason for it". To which my answer would be: yes and no. I've engaged in lengthy discussions elsewhere on what underlies the phenomenon of hate speech and how to recognise it, but for present purposes, suffice to say that yes, hatred is irrational insofar as it's an emotion that, under certain circumstances, people cultivate within themselves apparently for its own sake, but nevertheless, I believe that at least the most socially significant, damaging and harmful manifestations of hatred tend to attach themselves to pretexts, or what some call "narratives", which serve as a kind of mental recharger: you "remind" yourself that the target person or group of people have wronged you in X way, or are contemptible for Y reason, or deserve to be punished because of Z, and instantly the sought-after emotion comes flooding back into your mental circuitry. It is, I would argue, these cognitive aide-memoires that the politicians need to be aware of in order to effectively challenge the hamful narratives in play.
As a simple illustration, let's suppose in 30s Germany a well-meaning politician wanted to give a speech denouncing Hitler and Nazi antisemitism. It would not be useful, I think, for him to just tell his audience "antisemitism is irrational". Nor would it be particularly helpful to insist that antisemitism is "a form of racism", or to hint that its proponents might be using Jews as scapegoats to justify a more general hatred of people who do not look like themselves. It would be far more useful to engage with what the antisemites actually say about Jews, and show that (a) the truthful element of their discourse (e.g. "some Jews happen to be rich") does not justify hatred, and (b) that whatever is being invoked to justify hatred (e.g. "Jews are plotting to undermine our society") is, in fact, a web of disingenuous falsehoods. Beyond that, what is needed is a way to subvert the mental demarcation of in-group and out-group that this sort of hatred and prejudice depends on; and as I have discussed in other posts, given certain realities of human psychology one of the best ways to achieve this is to define a "common enemy" (preferably of the non-human sort) in opposition to which in-group and out-group may suddenly find themselves united as one.
(post left unfinished, dragged out of draft as an attic clearing exercise)
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