Quarantined From Our Own Culture
Or, "Deconstructing Deconstructionism"
One of the many depressing things about life in Britain today is being fond of various British cultural artefacts but knowing they are in the care of people who are bound, by their socio-political convictions, to destroy them. And this seems to affect literally all British cultural artefacts. Whichever you happen to be fond of, it is doomed.
In a dystopian novel, the people doing this would hate the things they were destroying. In our age, it is more perverse: they have genuine affection and love for the things they are destroying. After doing their destruction, they are happy for their warped version of the thing to sit alongside the original. (Did surgeons, having performed lobotomies, enjoy looking at “before and after” photos of the patients?)
The reason this happens at all is, of course, that right-wingers have ceded cultural authority to left-wingers. In many cases, feeling out of place or unwelcome, they have literally vacated the organisations where culture is generated, maintained, interpreted, etc. Where they remain, they are utterly dominated by the leftist atmosphere they are immersed in. If they are tolerated, it is because they are barely right-wing at all any more, or have learned to keep their heads down and pretend to agree with what is happening. There has been total castration of that contingent of “cultural people” who are politically right-wing.
This effectively leaves the spaces of culture entirely peopled by left-wingers. Some of those people are more strident and politically pro-active than others, but none of them can think of a reason why a Dickens character should not be played by a Black actor. So, when that suggestion is made by the more strident, it faces no pushback whatsoever from the less strident, and is in fact eagerly taken up and energised by all present.
It is the same when some activist working at a rural museum suggests an exhibition about the town’s role in perpetuating slavery. Perhaps nobody else present had ever made such a preposterous connection, but now that it has been proposed, well, it would be unthinkable to reject the proposal. The right-wing among them know that to object would be to risk a disciplinary hearing and possible sacking.
Once it happens in the places where culture is generated and maintained, right-wingers are either reprogrammed or repelled by what then emanates from those places. As a result, you find such people less and less in places where culture is discussed. Online forums have dumbasses of both political wings, and thoughtful left-wingers, but no thoughtful right-wingers. Those people just seem to have vacated the business of culture, especially high culture.
I have seen the phenomenon in various places, by both creators and fans of culture.
To deal with the latter group first… I have seen online portals where fans of vintage television drama gather to discuss the old productions they love - the techniques, the actors, the writers, the tropes, and of course the locations, the cultural settings that have long since evaporated. They discuss depictions (whether factual or fictitious) of bygone Britain - London in the 1950s, Liverpool in the 1960s, a rural village in the 1940s, Birmingham in the 1920s…
It is clear they feel deep affection for these settings, and they will admit this, yet deny vehemently any desire to “go back”. They speak of it like a forbidden pleasure - and forbidden for very good reason! - something we can sample but should never have, and should never want to have. We can look back on it fondly, but should balk at the idea of recreating it, even at the desire to recreate it, for that desire is dangerous and immoral. The rural train station, the village school, the dreaming spires of a university, the working-class canteen with the little old ladies, the grand metropolitan museum… these places of old might seem cute and heart-warming, but they were rife with racism, bigotry, homophobia and classism. Worst of all, they had no diversity at all, so these people existed in a purgatory of whiteness, ignorant of other cultures and possessed of a latent racism that waited to emerge when the first poor Pakistani family moved in and began their long suffering at the hands of these bigoted English.
This is how you are supposed to view pre-diversity Britain. Fanatical leftists will obsessively attack it (see above), creating a social pressure which ensures that fans of depictions of it - films, TV shows, novels, even music albums - will fall over themselves to assure everyone that they do not want that age back. The very qualities which make it appealing, they must deride as ugly and unpleasant, or even “disturbing”. This is virtue-signalling, of course - what we might call “performative revulsion”.
I can give several good examples of this.
