When DEI Really Does mean DIE.
Part one of a two-part essay on the Cult of Political Correctness.
Recent high profile news stories have served to highlight the unconscious bias and impact of “woke” ideology on our public services in addition to wider society. The Henry Nowak case is a particularly egregious example of police compliance with so-called “woke” ideology under pain of dismissal. In these days of HR’s mafia style tentacles, it appears that we no longer have due process. We no longer give people the benefit of the doubt, you no longer pass “Go” and collect £100, now you go straight to jail.
You get the sack and lose your pension. This implicit threat is to keep employees apparently on side and frightened enough not to speak out if they feel something is wrong. Compliance is the name of game and is a quality prized far more highly over critical thinking or common sense. The whole world now can be viewed as a series of Venn diagrams and flow charts. We are a nation of literal jobsworths in that it is more than anyone’s job is worth to tell the truth as he sees it or makes a choice to act in concert with what he sees, and experiences. To dare to tell the truth is to risk losing everything.
Never, ever believe your lying eyes.
The police now work to a script. It is as if they perform in a spectacle, one that is assembled via bodycams, phones and CCTV. They know that they must never judge a scene as they find it. There can be no judgements. For they are now trained to find the scene that is pre-ordained for them to find, one that is written by the DEI priests of HR and policy wonks and not the real, messy world of human beings with their emotions and fleshy physicality. People are now rendered as cartoon characters, as abstracted avatars for the particular group they are said to re-present. These ‘re-presentations’ are ordered into a totemic hierarchy of oppression and therefore validity.
Professor Eric Kaufmann uses the image of a totem pole to illustrate the sacralisation of certain groups in a victim hierarchy. The order may shift and change, but for quite some time now, the bottom of the heap comprises of pale skinned, heterosexual males. Race is now the sacred cause par excellence (if at times selectively). Critical Race Theory of course is not a theory at all. A theory is supposed to be something that is proven through testing and empirical evidence and remains only valid until such time as another theory arrives to supersede it. This is the idea that still prevails in the world of science, although even there, truth is now made to order depending upon funding. We might call it truth by fiat. It is the story of our times, and our habit of grasping at gobbets of information rather than attending to detail is fuelling the tendency and making it worse.
Critical Race “theory” has never been evidenced – it is merely the fantasy construction of Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw, et al. Whilst pointing to society’s “social construction” of race, they have themselves have “constructed” a fantasy about how race functions, arguing that racism is a systemic societal phenomenon. If people “of colour” advance, it is only if it is the interests of “whites” they say. Never is it considered that advancing the interests of so called “people of colour” would be advantageous to whites because racism itself is considered to be harmful to society as a whole.
In this sense, so-called “white people” are in a no-win situation. Racism in itself is an agreed “bad,” so why are we rolling more of it out? One of the saddest aspects of this construction is the way that people are not judged by their character or behaviour – but on the colour of their skin. This superficiality results in people becoming like cartoon stereotypes, torn from their humanity in all of its fullness, and rendered as mere abstractions.
Iain McGilchrist warns us about this tendency to abstract. It is a characteristic of the left-hand side of the brain that wants to grasp the gist rather than see the nuances or detail. Arguably what happened in the Nowak case is a precise example of that. When the police arrived at the scene in question, they saw the various people as players in a drama, as re-presentations of particular ethnic groups. Therefore, the light skinned boy was a priori the “bad guy” and the darker skinned person being higher up on the totem pole of sacralisation, was therefore, a priori, the “good one.” The reason Vickrum Digwa was judged to be the victim was because in some essential sense, he had to be the victim within the framework of so-called Critical Race “theory,” now a component of British police training. Here, we can see that the word “theory” can more effectively be replaced with the word “fantasy.” What this means for us is a top-down nullification of imagination. As Roger Scruton has discussed, imagination is the faculty that allows us to empathise with the notional “other.” However, fantasy is what gets forced onto others.
And so, working to rigid formulae, the officers played it safe and did not so much “judge” as act out in accordance with the critical race fantasy scenario. It is as if now we are in a permanent public spectacle that is filmed, snapchatted, Tik-Tokked, Instagrammed, documented and scripted into “stories” and “shorts.” This particular fantasy-led politics resulted in the death of an actual innocent person. It is as if we are crunching reality through a potato masher in order to satisfy political fantasists.
And now, the police in this case must take their own place in the cartoon world of avataristic abstractions. Not for them the thinking, real characters we might have seen portrayed by actors in the television programme, The Bill. The kindly, wise decent Bob Cryer, the insufferable autistic Reg Hollis with his forensic attention to detail and the decent June Ackland dedicated and reliable. Our current crop of actors have been given worse scripts than the writers of The Bill could ever have concocted. The new scripts are written by DEI ideologues who demand truth by fiat and flow chart, whose demands for compliance render the acronym DEI more accurately as DIE.
This essay is simultaneously published on the New Culture Forum Locals Substack, where I am editor.
“If, as one people, with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then Nothing that they propose to do will be out of their reach.”
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This post captures a powerful idea: that people who perform public roles in state bureaucracies routinely follow scripts that incorporate purely abstract goals - and that ignore the flesh and blood human being on the receiving end.
The rigid hierarchy and politicisation of police forces pretty much guarantee that individual officers will stick to the 'standard script'. Keeping an open mind? Too risky mate! Remembering human decency and using your own judgement? Don't be daft! What's that got to do with applying the law?!
I may be stretching my imagination too far, but it could be that whoever decided to reorder society into a stratified hierarchy of races (putting so-called white people at the bottom) may have been trying to slip in a bit of religion. You know, to make the idea more palatable to the sheeple. Dei, in the genitive singular case, means “of God” (see Genesis 1:2) It also can be construed in the nominative plural case as “gods” (see Genesis 3:5).