Sphinx

This week I shall mostly be suffering from a filthy cold just when I wanted to be finishing my teaching prep for next week and getting various other things out of the way before term starts. Just after I’d returned from a refreshing break, too… But if I was going to have to come down with something, I suppose it’s better this week than next. And I’m taking the optimistic view that underlying the current floods of snot and phlegm I am actually in a better place, mentally speaking, than I have been for a while, because despite the thickness of my head I have actually come up with an Idea this morning, or if not an idea then a pithy phrase that encapsulates a particular kind of contemporary political discourse. Googling suggests that no one has previously proposed this characterisation, so I might at some point develop it further, but for the moment I just wanted to scribble it down for the record…

Parochialism is of course nothing new; indeed, there’s a plausible case to be constructed that it might be a human constant, from classical Greek ideas about the appropriate size for a sustainable political community to modern studies about the number of people one can on average sustain as a genuine friendship network. Of course we all have a tendency to fall back on familiarity, to take for granted and generalise from our own experience, to assume the truth of our inherited/acquired view of the world. This can overlap with or lead into narrow ideas of self-interest and favouring one’s own (e.g. the phenomenon of NIMBYism), but parochialism is primarily about perspective, that then motivates actions, rather than actions.

Politics, from regional to international level, always involves attempts at overcoming different sorts of parochialism, or reaching compromise positions, in the interests of a wider agenda and a greater good (“the greater good”). It does seem that this has been more of an issue in recent years, especially at the international level [note: nationalism and parochialism not identical, but nationalism can be thoroughly parochial in relation to the ‘imagined community’ of the nation; this needs further thought]. Brexit is the obvious example, with all its ridiculous talk of world-beating jams, now shading into culture-war stuff about the need for quotas of properly British tv programmes and the ludicrous defences of the British Empire as a cuddly, not-at-all racist paragon of progressive liberalism. But we can see similarly parochial thinking in different areas of a more fragmented Europe, and in the USA, and probably elsewhere.

Now, one might see this as a kind of rebalancing, as different versions of anti-parochial thought have lost credibility or effectiveness (most recently, globalisation and liberal interventionism). But what I want to suggest is that this is something more than an inchoate, instinctive parochialism reasserting its importance – and something more than conventional nationalism. We have in recent years seen a concerted movement to represent parochialism in normative terms, insisting on the moral superiority of the ‘people from somewhere’ and their worldview, in opposition to the (by definition, non- or anti-parochial) rootless cosmopolitans. Affinity ‘with one’s own kind’ is presented not just as an empirical finding but as a natural tendency that it is foolish and destructive to try to resist.

It’s the unmistakably racist element of this that made me think of it as ‘weaponised parochialism’; it takes a human tendency towards default parochialism and seeks to turn it into a political tool, to oppose movements towards racial justice and a more tolerant society, to demonise migrants and refugees, to undermine the sorts of international coordination necessary to respond to a problem like climate crisis. It summons up nostalgic images of community – even when it purports to be objective social science – in order to characterise them as being undermined and threatened by malevolent forces, not of globalised capitalism (where a case could be made) but of black people, foreigners, Muslims, trendy TV executives, woke academics, drugged-up students and the like.

None of these observations is new, and there’s little sign of these tools of populist politics losing their effectiveness any time soon. But perhaps, by naming the phenomenon as a whole rather than simply reacting to the ridiculousness of every individual pronouncement or website (which does serve their purposes; they only do it to annoy, because they want a culture war) we can better grasp the situation.