Colombians tell me that I look at their multi-ethnicity through rose lenses and that prejudice is rife; that if you lined up the richest to the poorest, the richest are the whitest and the poorest the blackest. Turning to the UK, I’ve aways been heartened by the fact that if you’re in a shop and surrounded by Brits of all colours and ethnicities, shut your eyes and you’ll not know which or who is speaking. That is rarely the case in the USA – and I don’t even know if that’s important.
But beware those rose lenses when it comes to the UK. Every Black friend or contact you have will tell stories of horrible prejudice and discrimination (much as a majority of women will have stories of insult, abuse and worse).
Repeating myself, the fear and hatred that politicians have encouraged in their voters in pursuit of power; the general pusillanimity of mainstream media (now very much a minority taste); and the disgusting social mores of the ultra-rich who have their social media boots on our necks – these three phenomena threaten to extinct empathy, humaneness and rational debate. AI and AGI will not come to our rescue, witness the widely experienced racism, sexism and homophobia embedded in the underlying databases. ‘Scraping’ is an appropriate description of AI’s information-gathering process. The scrapings not only of human inspiration and the Enlightenment but of the vilest of the vile bottom of the barrel hatreds – and an inability to moderate the difference.
A step toward rationality might be to throw political correctness to the four winds and recognize that we are all tribal creatures with a deeply ingrained fear of ‘other’ tribes. Let satire and political humour run riot because we are, or ought to be, sufficiently evolved to be able to rise above the childish feelings of being offended. Surely by now we should be able to overcome the tribal fear of other. Ricky Gervais, who I often find unbearably smug, is right on the money when he talks about human evolution: we have risen above terrible dangers, we have evolves and advances – only to have become afraid of words.
Humour is a path toward humanity and rationality, to questioning the absurdities of prejudice and discrimination, and it’s interesting that very, very few truly racist, classist or sexist comedians have careers. I mean truly racist, classist or sexist in their hearts. Yes, one may be outraged by a particular riff or joke but that outrage so very rarely accurately defines the comedian or commentator as racist, classist or sexist. The joke is the joke and if that offends us perhaps we need to toughen up. If the teller is an irredeemable racist, misogynist or homophobe, well that’s something else and fortunately, while many of them might thrive in their sordid secret social media caves or, indeed, in branches of government and law enforcement, they rarely do in humour or satirical comment. Which, of course, those racist, misogynist and homophobes would love to shut down.
An aside. Some liberals and progressive exert their cancel muscle (though how liberal or progressive that makes them I’m not sure). Some conservatives and retrogressives demand that institutions, (including the BBC, incidentally) balance this tsunami of allegedly left-leaning content with right leaning content. Good luck with that. Name me one comedian who can get big laughs out of the conservative and retrogressive policies that are turning us against each other and bundling us to the cliff’s edge like a herd of buffalo driven toward a buffalo jump.
Yes, of course, the solutions to racial and class conflict require more than incisive humour. They need the kind of investment in political, economic, social and educational recalibration of which we seem to be incapable; increasingly incapable, in fact, in an age when ‘fuck you’ has prevailed over common cause and ‘empathy’ is an incomprehensible three syllables. I fully expect it to be excised from online dictionaries within my lifetime.
Part three posts shortly