Racism's Overton Window

 

As many readers will know, there’s a concept called the Overton Window (developed by Joseph P. Overton) which suggests that in every generation there is a “window” of acceptable views, ideas, beliefs and political policies that are categorised as standard and expected, and that everything outside of that window is unacceptable and beyond the pale. The window gets shifted over time because when ideas outside of the window are considered at the extreme, the less extreme but still radical ideas start to become more widely accepted and move within the purlieus of the window.

Views go from so far outside the mainstream that few people accept them into the mainstream >> to radical >> to peripheral >> to mainstream >> to incontrovertible (whereby you’re now considered far outside the mainstream if you ‘don’t' subscribe to them, and could even find yourself in jail if you speak out against them). Here are some examples; In a few decades we’ve gone from climate change alarmism being a belief only subscribed to by a few off-the-wall crackpots, to a situation where if you don’t subscribe to it you’re seen as a filthy capitalist rogue who doesn’t give a damn about anything other than money. In a few decades we’ve gone from homosexuality being illegal, to the slightest intolerance of it being seen as a hate crime. In those same few decades, we've gone from thinking of 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 as dystopian fiction, to them being actual political realities imposed on us by the establishment.

Being the hot topic of the day, I want to talk about racism in terms of the Overton Window. Racism is best categorised as unfair segregation or hostile aggression on the basis of race. It is telling people they are not allowed on a bus; it's lynching; it's beating up, it's murdering people because of their skin colour or ethnicity - that is what racism is, and we can all agree that these things are bad. The trouble is, once something is rightly identified as bad, it becomes tempting for people to stretch its meaning and apply it a bit more widely to encapsulate their own cause. Then the Overton Window begins to shift, and it gets applied a little more widely still, then even further, until it means nothing more than 'disliking or disagreeing with someone who happens to be of a different ethnicity or skin colour', and then even further to become 'holding a different view to a view that's popular within a particular group'.

Once terms like racism, sexism, hate crime, misogyny and Islamophobia become more mainstream, people become readily tempted to use them even more widely for their convenience. Before you know it, it's possible to cry 'racism' if someone with different skin colour demolishes your argument; it's possible to cry 'sexism' if someone doesn't support all-women shortlists; and it's possible to declare that you've been the victim of a hate crime just because someone insulted your religion on Twitter (and worse still, perhaps, it's easy to find swathes of people getting offended on your behalf).

And once society is at that stage, it's scarily easy to descend into absolute ridiculousness, where things like the denial of the biological distinction between the sexes, the eroding away of a the concept of competence-based achievements, the refusal to believe that IQ makes any significant difference to success, the denial about the fact that many of the reasons for our struggles are due to our own bad decision-making, the differences between men and women are socio-culturally determined, etc are mainstream views, and to be outside of them is to be beyond the pale.

Social grifters
As I indicated in a recent blog post, it seems clear that most tribal groups that peddle extremist propaganda (whether that's extreme left or right wing movements, environmentalists, woke social justice warriors or feminists) are doing so because they want to seek attention, find some meaning and purpose in their life, assuage their own insecurities and moderate their own self-dislike. And in order to this, they have to artificially construct injustices that aren't really there, or inflate the ones that are already there into something much more severe and unrepresentative of reality. An analysis of radical extremism that fails to consider what the participants personally get out of it is an anaemic analysis - and it is absurd that people go about their business as though this consideration doesn't matter. It really does matter; because if you find what's lurking beneath their virtue signalling and agenda-driven search for purpose, you'll find something dark and horrible (I'm sure it's in most of us).

One way to look at today’s society is to say that we must still be in the throes of racism if mobs of people feel the need to the streets and pull statues down, and demand the removal of others. Another way to look at today’s society – a way that at least has some truth attached to it – is that we must have done an awful lot right to bring about the decimation of most racism if people have the luxury of having to focus on statues of people who died before they were born. As always, I expect the truth lies somewhere in between.

But there is something significant, to do with balance, that we are probably getting wrong about the racism matter. I think it’s partly in the misdiagnosis, and partly in the misallocation of attention. The misdiagnosis is that I think virtually all acts that appear to be racist are, in fact, only proximally identified. I think the distal, and far more prominent causes of apparent racism are built on more fundamental kinds of pain, weakness, fear, resentment and insecurity (often flavoured by national and cultural heritage too). In other words, when someone appears to show racial hostility, it is often only superficially to do with the victim’s skin colour or ethnicity – it is largely driven by the inner hostility and self-contempt of the perpetrator. If we looked for the hurt in the racist, we’d see damaged people who have not been given the sufficient education, diversity of life experience, love, guidance and opportunities to enable them to be better, more tolerant, less hostile people. Attacking someone by their label is the outward manifestation of an inner self-disgust – I don’t think it’s much to do with a genuine prejudice against skin colour or ethnicity. As Graham Greene observed in The Power and The Glory:

“Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

And that leads me to the misallocation of attention. Having regularly misdiagnosed racism, society then places almost all the emphasis on the victim, and almost none on the perpetrator. Don’t get me wrong, it is certainly important to create a society in which the victims of any prejudice are loved, respected, supported, valued and encouraged to thrive. But unless we begin to identify racism and prejudice for what they are, we won’t help the victims or the perpetrators to move forward, and we’ll remain mired in a false stratification that neglects to focus more accurately on the poison and on the medicine.