.
The moral maze is full of angry people right now, all as lost as each other.
It began with the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. This led to protests. A police station was torched which seemed fair as a raw expression of anger.
I watched the video of Floyd’s death and was very angry: the smirking insouciance of Chauvin encapsulated his institutionally racist and quasi-militarised police force.
About Chauvin I remarked that “he should be on death row”: odd for an opponent of capital punishment. Feelings are running high everywhere, but morality is about rationality – not feelings.
As a response to the murder of a black man, it didn’t make sense to burn and loot businesses owned by black people. Nevertheless, anti racism protests quickly spread and the UK was (admirably) in the vanguard.
But let us deal with the elephant in the room. While I passionately support their aims, it is morally illiterate to hold mass anti-racism protests during a pandemic.
The US & UK governments were criticised for slow Covid-19 lock downs: timely action is vital. Research suggests that locking down one week earlier could have saved 30,000 in the UK. We know also that people from ethnic minorities are disproportionately impacted by C-19.
Protests will spread C-19 just like the delayed lock down and large sporting events did. If ‘Black Lives Matter’ and the context of a racist police force matters, then the context of a deadly virus that disproportionately affects black people matters too.
On to statue wars. Sorry, excited activists who threw Edward Colston’s statue into the river – but this doesn’t advance a moral argument.
Moral discussions must collectively raise moral literacy. They must be dialectics in which rationality cannot be merely an optional extra.
Nobody can ‘win’ a moral argument: people must be convinced by the logic. Statue toppling, witch hunts and banning that (hilarious) Fawlty Towers episode about the Germans will not help.
Morality is not a numbers game: people will make up their own minds regardless of the size and fury of cultural tribes.
Statue toppling marks the end of material power struggles. Victors get to pull down statues. The left needs to make a coherent moral argument against racism, not gloat as though it has won a war. Cultural populism will only exacerbate division and strife.
Inevitably, right wing populists responded to the sight of graffiti on Winston Churchill’s statue. Counter protests will spread C-19 even more. Great job.
Moral illiteracy transcends political tribalism. Donald Trump said he was a “friend of peaceful protesters”, then unleashed the army on them and posed with a Bible. This hollow charade delighted the religious right.
In the UK, crowds gathered to ‘defend’ Churchill’s statue. Anti-racist protesters mostly decided to stay away. Bereft of ‘attackers’, the ‘defenders’ bottled the police who were also there …to defend the statue.
Then the ‘defenders’ gave Nazi salutes alongside the statue of the man who helped defeat Nazism. Later one of the ‘defenders’ urinated next to a memorial to Keith Palmer – a police officer killed in 2017 while stopping a knife wielding terrorist. Top ‘defending’ there lads!
Many left wing blogs are demanding that governments abolish the police. There is a very strong case for taking military toys away from grotesquely overpowered US police forces and for radical institutional reform. But abolish the police? Really?
Yesterday left wing blogs were moaning that the police hadn’t protected anti-racism protesters enough. How is that going to work if we have no police at all? Looking forward to the era of corporate private police forces? I’m not.
The media love this – lots of drama with no moral substance. The Daily Mail (the UK’s primary racial hate rag) asked sadly “what has become of the tolerant Britain we love?”. When the Daily Mail jumps on the bandwagon it’s time to jump off.
The Guardian is also having a field day, despite its shocking pro-Israel bias which is institutionally racist in and of itself.
The news cycle and the chattering classes will find new outrages shortly and few will have learnt anything. Faux journalistic blather about ‘Britain confronting its racist past’ will be forgotten.
It will be left to a few isolated outposts to make the case for a rational dialectic about the nature of goodness itself and how we might use reason to illuminate the folly of racism.
Some days I feel very lonely.
Since 2013 I have worked between 4-6 hours a day on this Ad-Free site: trying to give a voice to those without the power or agency to speak out for themselves and uncovering truths that well paid journalists in the corporate media dare not utter.
I am a home schooling parent on a low income – paying for the domain, web hosting and security entirely out of my own pocket.
If you found this article useful and could spare us a few shillings to help keep our lights on, it would be very much appreciated.
Thank you in solidarity with all our readers. John Lynch, Editor.
In the US the protesters are not talking about “abolishing” the police – they want them to lose blanket immunity and be brought under local community control. I would have thought too, that you especially would be aware that the police are the principal arm of the state, whose first duty is control of the masses, – burglary, murder, assault etc are just make-work in the meantime. UK police too could do with losing a lot of the immunity they have.