The barrister, novelist and essayist Helen Dale is not a lady to mince her words. She talks about the Jason Arday fiasco at Cambridge University:
“The idea that historically disadvantaged groups are entitled to extra civil rights – coupled with social preferment – over and above those held/enjoyed by people considered their oppressors is inimical to the rule of law, specifically the principle that people should not be punished for crimes they did not commit. We do not inherit criminality from our ancestors. This is in turn derived from the larger principle of treat like cases alike, which was first articulated in its modern form by the Roman jurist Ulpian.
I love the Ulpian reference. I wonder if the Cambridge dons who initially approved Arday’s PhD have heard of him.
“Jason Arday got his job in large part because a lot of people – and especially humanities and social science academics – think it’s reasonable to punish whites (and sometimes East Asians) who have never wronged blacks by making it harder for them to get into university or gain employment. This punishment of whites/East Asians who have done no wrong is undertaken to compensate blacks who have not been wronged for wrongs committed by other white people against other black people in the past. This logic is the basis of all affirmative action schemes and preferential hiring regimes (provision for which exists – albeit in limited form – in the UK’s Equality Act 2010). It is also the logic of inherited vengeance.
“It took humans centuries to work out that the law should punish individual wrongdoers rather than members of their family, their descendants, or their extended kin group for crimes or civil wrongs. One only need read some of the world’s great literature, both ancient and modern – from Njal’s Saga to The Godfather – to gain imaginative entry to a world where intergenerational and kin-based revenge are norms.
“May I suggest that the world of medieval Iceland or a New York dominated by the Five Families are the sorts of places you probably only want to visit in fiction? We stopped basing punishments on vendetta – a long, slow process of legal evolution starting in early Republican Rome – for good reasons. Societies based on vendetta are places of violent horror and boiling intergenerational resentment.”
There is a line in the film, For Your Eyes Only, starring Roger Moore as James Bond, where he tells Melina Havelock, daughter of the slain Havelocks, that she should remember the Chinese proverb that before entering on revenge, first dig two graves. I think that a lot of DEI and related ideological stuff is driven by revenge, by a desire to “settle scores”, even if the score-settling activity is self-destructive. Many graves end up being dug. This is why I think it is right, as several Samizdata and other commenters have said over the years, that there is a thick seam of moral nihilism that runs through all this. Drill into it, to maintain this geological metaphor, and all you will hit is darkness rather than a reef of gold.
It is worth pointing out that this happens in larger measure in subjects like social science and so forth. Areas where success is not objectively measured. One cannot tell if a professor in social science is a good professor except by the plaudits of other people in that field. One can definitely tell if an engineer is a good engineer or not based on whether his bridge falls down.
A bit OT but the description of blood guilt did remind me a lot of Christianity. The basic idea of Christianity is that we all inherit the sin of our forefather Adam, and that guilt, plus whatever we individually pile on top of that, is expiated by the death of an innocent person, namely Jesus. Blood guilt and punishment of the innocent for the crimes of their forefathers is the very core idea underlying Christian redemption, and I don’t see all that much difference between that and what is described here. Except perhaps as the late lamented Christopher Hitchens pointed out, at least in a human tyranny you can escape by dying, Christian doctrine promises punishment in hell for the sins of our father even after we die, for all eternity.
There were never, at any time, “Jim Crow” laws in the United Kingdom – so the argument presented in support of the 1964 American Civil Rights Act, that this government intervention counter balanced previous government interventions against black people, falls flat in Britain in relation to the government intervention that was the 1965 Race Relations Act – as there were no historic “Jim Crow” laws in Britain to counter balance.
But this whole discussion ignores the elephant in the room – Marxism.
If Jason Arday was a conservative – he would not have got the position he held, regardless of how black he is. And the same people who praised him – would have condemned him.
And “whiteness” (the thing the international establishment hate-and-despise) is not really about skin colour – it is about such things as belief in objective truth, hard work and (even) turning up on time. When Jason Arday did not turn up to teach his students – this was considered a good thing as his laziness was a rejection of “whiteness” (I also think it was a good thing – given what he would have taught them, if he had turned up). If he had been a hard working man who happened to be black – he would have been guilty of “whiteness”.
Everything is now “power relations”, “power structures”, with everyone being divided between “exploited and exploiters” “oppressed and oppressors” – with all evidence and logical argument rejected as “capitalist”.
Unless it is understood that we are dealing with Marxism, in its Critical Theory (Frankfurt School) form, then we have lost before the battle has even started.
And we have have to basic courage to call Marxism – Marxism, not hide from the word.
The world is infected by this disease – as we can see, for example, from the statements of so many Democrat candidates in the United States – including white candidates – it is not really about skin colour.
Whenever they speak or write it is obvious that they are Critical Theory (“Woke”) Marxists – yet there is some bizarre fear of pointing out that they are Marxists.
Frasor Orr – no, in fact doubly no.
First STEM can and is being infected with Critical Theory Marxism – they do not care if bridges collapse or aircraft fall from the sky. I agree with you that such things make them bad engineers – but they do not agree with such a test. Any more than leftist architects cared that their buildings were horribly ugly, dysfunctional, and often fell down – that is not how their stature as architects was measured – indeed the worse an architect was (in terms of the beauty of their buildings – or their strength) the more prizes and praise they got.
But also – of course history and the other humanities contain objective truth (indeed it is precisely the case of the-enemy they that they do not) – who is a good historian and who is a bad historian can be worked out, without any reference to “esteem from colleagues” or other such irrelevant things.
And a good economist, such as Ludwig Von Mises can be understood as different to a bad economist, such as J.M. Keynes, again NOT by the “esteem from colleagues” – but by the logical quality of their reasoning.