Such an idea!

Fight racism by not being racist.

So, crazy it just might work.

//The politics of identity is a very poisonous way of looking at things, and it really isn’t very new or progressive at all. In fact, it is very close to the racism, homophobia and sexism that its proponents claim to oppose. The reductive collectivism of identity politics rests on the same principles as the colonialist idea of the ‘white man’s burden’ – namely, that white people are fundamentally different, biologically and morally, to black people. And, likewise, it’s disgustingly similar to the ideology that fuelled the racism of the American South well into the twentieth century. We all need to move forward together, not as men and women, not as white and non-white, not as gay and straight, but as individuals, dropping those labels that only serve to hold us back. Nobody is the same, no matter what boxes they tick. I may be a white male, but I refuse to take any responsibility for the crimes of other white males, or claim credit for the success of people who looked vaguely like me.

There’s no doubt that certain demographic categories of people were abused and oppressed throughout history, but the best way to deal with those injustices now is to put an end to the malicious practice of seeing people superficially, in terms of their sex or skin colour. Rather, we need to treat people as individuals with unique talents, fears, beliefs and values. I don’t want my children to grow up in a world where they will be wrongly seen as symbols of oppression or victimhood. I want them to grow up in a world where my son can look up to Aung San Suu Kyi, and my daughter can look up to Frederick Douglass, and both can become inspirational individuals, freed of the chains of identity.//

The liberal, humanist case against assisted suicide...

...I agree.

Interesting how a libertarian source like Spiked can run so often against the conventional mores.

Gay marriage, the importance of elites and social conformity.

Brendan O'Neill at Spiked writes:

With gay marriage turned into ‘a kind of common sense’, opposing it became more difficult, potentially even threatening one’s social and moral standing. The ‘common sense’ of gay marriage has been turned into something like a dogma of gay marriage, in a very subtle way. So the very act of debating gay marriage has been implicitly demonised, since in the words of one observer, ‘The fact that there is a debate over whether to deny a group of people their civil rights is unacceptable’. Here, through further linking gay marriage to the old civil-rights movement, even discussion itself can be branded ‘unacceptable’.

Others say there should be no ‘acknowledgment of subtleties and cultural differences’ on gay marriage, since ‘there is a right answer’ on this issue. Those who insist on possessing ‘cultural differences’ on gay marriage – or even worse, opposing it – feel the fury of campaigners. A chicken restaurant in America was boycotted after its owner criticised gay marriage, while voters in American referendums who have said no to gay marriage have been called every name under the Sun by the respectable political and media classes: ‘ill-informed’, ‘deceived’, ‘plain ignorant’, ‘knuckle draggers’. This has the effect of beating down critical questioning. Gay marriage supporters actually boast of using moral pressure over political debate to win people’s acquiescence. Scientific American magazine recently discussed the apparently brilliant way that social media is being used to influence people’s ‘attitudes and behaviour’ on gay marriage. Everyone is ‘susceptible to the powers of peer pressure’, it said, so constantly saying favourable things about gay marriage on social-media websites can be a way of ‘send[ing] out a message about what’s acceptable, appropriate and… well, normal’. That is – never mind convincing someone with reason; just heavy-handedly let them know it’s normal to support gay marriage, and thus presumably abnormal to oppose it.

This is how conformism is forged and enforced today: elites devise an idea or campaign, far away from what one gay-marriage proponent calls ‘the tyranny of the majority’; that idea or campaign gets disingenuously depicted as something that protesters and campaigners demanded and actually put pressure on the elites to come up with; and through a process of debate-demonisation and pathologisation of dissent, through the treatment of acceptance as normal and criticism as abnormal, the idea or campaign is spread more widely through society. Eventually, in the words of Caldwell, even those who are unsure about gay marriage ‘quell their natural misgivings’. Indeed, when I interviewed the British pop star Dappy recently, and asked him if he supported gay marriage, he said: ‘I want to say no… but I get so much stick already. So say “yes”. Definitely say “yes”.’ How many other people are saying ‘yes’ not because they believe in gay marriage, but because they don’t want, in Caldwell’s words, to be thought of as ‘losers’ who have failed to ‘emulate their betters’?

The conformism around gay marriage cannot be put entirely down to handfuls of campaigners, of course, and certainly not to any conscious attempt on their part to enforce political and moral obedience. The fragility of society’s attachment to traditional marriage itself, to the virtue of commitment, has also been key to the formulation of the gay-marriage consensus. Indeed, it is the rubble upon which the gay-marriage edifice is built. That is, if lawyers, politicians and our other assorted ‘betters’ have successfully kicked down the door of traditional marriage, it’s because the door was already hanging off its hinges, following years of cultural neglect. It is society’s reluctance to defend traditional views of commitment, and its relativistic refusal more broadly to discriminate between different lifestyle choices, that has fuelled the peculiar non-judgmental tyranny of the gay-marriage campaign, which judges harshly those who dare to judge how people live. Through a combination of the weakness of belief in traditional marriage and the insidiousness of the campaign for gay marriage, we have ended up with something that reflects brilliantly John Stuart Mill’s description of how critical thinking can cave into the despotism of conformism, so that ‘peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes, until by dint of not following their own nature, these [followers of conformism] have no nature to follow’.