The Golden Strawberry

Been a while since I did one of these. The article is "Reaping the harvest of our self-disgust" by Hanif Kureishi, from the Guardian on Saturday. It's my remarks in the quote boxes.

These days I don't often think about Margaret Thatcher,

Probably just as well. 

but I am aware that the world we inhabit now was partly brought about by what she and her party considered in the 80s to be freedom.

Strange that someone who was Prime Minister for eleven years would have such a profound effect on our country. 

By this I mean deregulation, the liberal market and consumerism,

Ah, you mean Thatcherism? Yes, Margaret Thatcher did seem a prominent supporter of that. 

notions much extended under Tony Blair and his government.

Thatcher's specific enemy was communism. Our avowed and necessary enemy - since the attacks on the World Trade Centre - is Islam in its radical version,

I agree

which is increasing in strength, particularly since the failed invasion of Iraq.

Although, of course, radical Islam was around way before the invasion of Iraq, and is not only down to Western foreign policy. Not that Mr Kureishi seems fit to mention that.

After 9/11 there has been much talk about a "clash of civilisations", as though Islam and liberalism are only ever opposed to one another, with one or other of them being defeated in the end, as communism was.

It's not that Islam and liberalism are opposed to one another. It's RADICAL Islam and liberalism. Most Muslims don't live under Sharia law and blow themselves up. Another distortion from the author. There are many liberal Muslims, but Mr Kureishi seems to want to talk in stereotypes.   

 The underlying idea here is that in the future we will all pursue the same ideals, and indeed become similar in character to one another: it could be called a globalisation of personality.

Or the "imperialism of human rights", as Eric Hobsbawm described it. God forbid everyone has liberal values - of tolerance, freedom of speech, thought and action, the right to vote, equal rights for women. Wouldn't the world be a much nastier place then. Remember "globalisation of personality" though, it comes back later.

But these seemingly opposed philosophies - one of certainty, fixity and moral absolutes based on the unshakeable authority of one book, while the other is one of postmodern scepticism, doubt and flux - are not alien to one another in the way we might think. There is mutual fascination, and far more mixing or "multiculturalism" than we would like to admit.

All over the Muslim world people are compelled not only by consumerism and materialism but by the idea of a free and fulfilling education for their children. Most Muslims want a higher standard of living, job opportunities, good healthcare, housing and pensions.

Isn't this what every civilisation aspires (or aspired) to do? Why bother writing this at all? Though it's pretty obvious by now this guy doesn't mind writing drivel.

But Muslims are far more aware than we are of our self-deceit, of the "spiritual" price we pay for our freedom. They can see that the beautiful ideas we are peddling - democracy, free speech, individualism - bring considerable negatives with them. If the west is trying to sell these excellent ideas they are also, like a sleazy salesman, failing to mention their obverse - what it is, as it were, that you see when you turn the pretty picture round.

Damn that pesky democracy and freedom of speech! Whoever liked those crappy little ideas? And individualism, what's that all about?

It's also telling that just a few paragraphs above Kureishi wrote about the "globalisation of personality", whereby everyone becomes the same, and is now saying that the West promotes individualism. Which one is it?

If the body of the suicide bomber has become the symbol of the Islamist's defiance, determination and an almost inexplicable commitment to religious ideals, the way we in the west characterise our bodies is equally telling.

Our media and our lives are full of stories of obesity and anorexia, of models, mingers and the dietary habits of children. We either consume too much or too little. We can never get it right; we feel out of control. There is self-harm and addiction everywhere.

Is this guy comparing people who blow themselves (and other people up) to people who eat too much McDonalds? This is ludicrous. Suicide bombing is hardly "self-harm", it's an act of cold-blooded murder. Something eating too much food will never be. 

Clearly most Muslims are not fundamentalists and most people in the west are not obese cokeheads.

Heaven forbid this guy talk in stereotypes. And some Muslims are obese and some westerners are religious fundamentalists. What a confusing world we live in!

Our notions of "east" and "west" are screens on to which we can project our fantasies. If we can say the east envies the west while wanting to distance itself from it - "they" refuse to integrate; why don't they want to be like us if they want to live here? - we can say that the self-disgust of the west conveys a profound confusion about the way we view ourselves now.

Where did "we" say that? Who is "we"?

From this point of view the Muslim is telling us what we already feel about ourselves but cannot yet own up to. The more alien this seems, the closer to home it is likely to be. Radical British Muslims wishing to attack and destroy something they belong to, crudely and violently represent something which comes from within rather than from without. If the east has too many values, which are over-constraining, the west, according to this view, has too few.

No, the west have values like "It's not right to blow yourselves up because you dislike government policy, killing dozens of people in the process". This is not a value which a few radical British Muslims shared on 7/7.

Our visual culture, Damian Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman; our playwrights, Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill; and our writers, including the excellent Michel Houllebecq,

I've only heard of one of these, (Damien Hirst), let alone actually see what they do, but never mind. Strange, as I thought modern art didn't really represent anything. 

present a picture of a nihilistic west disappearing into a whirlpool of narcissism, sentimentality and moral emptiness. They are saying we have sold our souls for the freedom to shop and screw as and when we wish.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the freedom to do what we like when we like it. I can't also see how (or when) we sold our souls to do this. Maybe Magna Carta should never have happened - it put us on that long, disgusting walk to freedom, where we can do what we like when we please. How we must wish to be back in the days of 1214... 

Furthermore, don't we claim to be enlightened, liberal and democratic while unleashing a whirlwind of disaster and death on the Muslim world, day after day?

I'd like to think that the occpying troops in Iraq now (I assume the writer means Iraq above all other cases) are not "unleashing a whirlwind of disaster and death", I'd like to think they are helping Iraq become a democracy, slowly but surely. Unlike the Muslim fundamentalists in the Iraqi resistance, who blow themselves up killing dozens of Iraqis daily. 

If we find the idea of sacrifice difficult - why would anyone want to blow themselves up for a cause?

Why indeed, what a ridiculous thing to say! It's hard to know if he's being serious or not. 

- our self-disgust points to an absence, perhaps to a need for authority. The idea of the father has declined, and the family has splintered; our religious leaders, our royal family, our politicians have little credibility. We no longer follow or believe in them.

On the other side, Muslim life is organised around the mosque, the family, the book, obedience, and the idea of being good. Further along, a committed Muslim might well kill himself not only for his beliefs but to improve the lives of others. Which of us will do this now?

What rot! Suicide bombers blowing themselves up to improve the lives of others? Nothing to do will Allah and 72 Virgins then?! If any Westerner is going to kill themselves to improve the lives of others, it'll probably be the troops in Iraq. Bearing in mind the results of a recent opinion poll, where it was said that 61% of Iraqis think bringing down Saddam Hussein is worth the hardship entailed.

I will repeat again that suicide bombing is an act of cold-blooded murder and there can be no excuses for it.

Freud considered religion to be infantile, which didn't mean he thought it was childish; rather, that it satisfied childhood wishes, mainly for certainty. Almost all societies, throughout all of human history, have been religious in some sense. Religion was a holding framework which organised people, often in authoritarian ways, controlling their sexuality.

Most societies have been religious - but there's little place for religion now that science has mainly disproved most things said in most religious books. Perhaps there could be a role for religion in helping people lead a good life - but that implies that you cannot make decent moral choices without being religious. This is a view I find very patronising.

Does Mr Kureishi believe that it was a good thing to organise people in authoritarian ways and control their sexuality? If he doesn't, this isn't made clear. You can use this sentence to show there ISN'T a place for religion now - I don't like the idea of a society being organised in "authoritarian ways".

Compared to religion, consumerism, which is based on, and indeed inspires, only dissatisfaction and greed, is far more likely to drive people mad, because who we are is always beyond our grasp. Once God overlooked us all, but now the only thing which watches us is the camera. We live in a country of more or less total surveillance, but it is an indifferent or hostile gaze which indicates that our extreme individualism has isolated us from one another. The Islamicist, far from being only crazy, is pointing to a weakness that we know - and refuse to accept - is really there.

I have to agree, I'm not exactly at one with the consumer society either. I'll leave insults to something more deserving.

In the past few years there has been much religion-lite, the New Age as well as versions of Buddhism or kabala. These are attempts to fill what Salman Rushdie calls a "God-sized hole". But these substitutes are the tofu of belief; they are not anything like the real thing. They do not terrify with their authority and they are not sufficiently irrational to inspire true faith. They do not punish enough. We are left to do that to ourselves.

So what we need is something terrifying and irrational?

Not long ago there was another idea, which involved neither God nor extreme competition, called socialism. It represented ideas of fraternity, social bonding and creativity which were fruitful and significant. But it was wiped out by Thatcherism in 1989 along with communism, which it in no way resembles.

Surely "proper" socialism was long dead by 1989? I wouldn't mind socialism being revived in the way he says, but we could manage with the values set out in the Euston Manifesto. I wonder if he'll sign it?

Our notions of tolerance, equality and interest in others - as well as legitimate guilt about colonialism - gave rise to multiculturalism, now considered a foolish if not discredited and even dangerous idea. How could we have thought that our ideas, developed since the Enlightenment, of rational debate, scholarship, criticism, were not far better than theirs? But now we are not so certain. If the west is a stew of corruption and idiocy this is not only a projection, but a version of our own self-disgust.

All of the west is a stew of corruption and idiocy? Rather generalised, isn't it? Like me saying the east is full of unthinking Islamic terrorists. Neither statement is true, just a massive crass overgeneralisation.

The repressed is returning: there is a new and virulent racism, in the form of religious discrimination. This is at the very moment when real religion has come back to the west - with a vengeance. This is not only because it is being imposed on us by "medievals" who we should never have tolerated, but because we are seduced by it. If the home-grown British bomber is our headache, he is also our symptom.

We are seduced by suicide bombers? Pfft....

If we have little idea of who we want to be or where are going, for some of us this is an agreeable state of entertaining disorientation. But this confusion fails to give us the conviction we require to assert ourselves, to really think about what it is the Thatcherite world failed to deliver, thus leaving a space which Islam can occupy.

And there the article ends. I don't see why Islam has to fill this gap in the world, and why it cannot be rational, secular values - freedom of speech, democracy, rationalism, secularism etc. Again, Mr Kureishi doesn't make his point very well.

Read the comments to his article as well - there are a few more decent points that I haven't included in this fisk.

I think that the article raises a couple (but only a couple) of serious points. But the way the writer argues them is crass and absurd. For the most part the article is overgeneralising, sterotypical claptrap. I hope I've put that across OK in this fisk.

Kudos for reading all this through to the end!

Cory