Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution by Eric Kaufmann
“O tempora, O mores” – “O what times, O what habits” – Cicero exclaimed in 63 BC as he lamented that Catiline, though conspiring to overthrow the Roman Republic, was still taking part in debates in the Senate, where he could be seen marking out Cicero and others for assassination.
The founders of the United States strove by studying ancient authors to avoid, as they framed their Constitution, the flaws which facilitated the fall of the Roman Republic.
Eric Kaufmann adopts a narrower frame of reference. He seldom quotes any author who is not still alive.
One of the defects of his book is that it has no index to its 400 pages, so it is impossible quickly to check how many references he makes, say, to Thomas Hobbes or Max Weber (both of whom are mentioned in passing).
The omission of an index is presumably the publisher’s fault, for to compile and print one would cost money, but it is a severe drawback for any student, or indeed reviewer, who wishes to check what if anything the author has anything to say about, for example, de Tocqueville or Turgenev.
One merit of Taboo is that it sent me back to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, perhaps the most brilliant work ever written about the gulf of incomprehension which can separate the older and younger generations.
Kaufmann, born in 1970, is worried about the young and fears that as they get older they are not getting any wiser, but are instead wrecking the institutions which they come to control.
He points to the rise in the homicide rate in American cities after the death in 2020 of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis because the “woke” response to that crime was to defund the police.
But he begins his account in 2015, with Yale students shouting at one of their professors, Nicholas Christakis: “His crime? Being married to a woman who questioned whether Yale diversity administrators should be telling students what to wear on Halloween.”
According to Kaufmann, such “woke” excesses are not now, as some of us hope, on the wane, but are part of a “cultural socialism” which has become “the hegemonic ideology of Western elite culture”.
Between 2018 and 2022, he himself “weathered four investigations and numerous social media attacks” for showing insufficient respect for wokery.
He at length decided, as he explained in an article for The Critic, to move from the post of Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, London, to become Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham, where he had been commissioned to teach a course on the origins, dynamics, and implications of “woke”. He has also contributed to ConHome.
In the introduction to the book under review, he sketches his thesis:
“Taboo revolves around the left-liberal anti-racism taboo of the mid-1960s. Like the big bang, this was a cosmic event; its logic has been progressively expanding, defining our social universe. It has introduced a zone of unbounded Identitarian sacredness around race – a form of social kryptonite which irradiated anyone standing in its way. This powerful magic was borrowed by the feminist and later LGBT movements, weaponised by the revolutionary Left, and stretched to new frontiers of microscopic and confected emotional grievance. Along the way, it has eroded freedom, truth and excellence while vandalising cherished national identities and undermining social cohesion. Until the taboo is transformed into a proportionate norm like any other, cultural socialism will remain a dominant force in polite society.”
So Kaufmann concedes that the taboo may at some point be “transformed into a proportionate norm”: an admission which contradicts the alarmist note he more often strikes.
Just as a ship which almost capsizes in rough weather may by skilful handling and the blowing out of the storm return to an even keel, so a free society which has almost been wrecked by some violent gust of opinion may in time work out how to right itself and sail into calmer waters.
This did not happen in France in 1789, or Russia in 1917, but they had no settled tradition of freedom on which to draw. The United States has, admittedly, already had a Civil War, and four assassinated Presidents.
By suggesting, in the quotation above, that “cultural socialism will remain a dominant force in polite society”, Kaufmann implies the existence of an impolite society that refuses to be cowed.
He observes that “young people, especially young women” are much less tolerant of speech which is considered offensive to “historically disadvantaged race, gender, and sexual identity groups”.
He adds that these young people are moved much more by “guilt and compassion” than by “envy or the desire to overthrow the existing order”.
This last insight is surely correct, and in a novel by Turgenev, we would find ourselves able to feel a sympathetic understanding of those emotions of guilt and compassion, as exhibited by a young woman and her friends, who alarm and scandalise their parents by expressing a preposterous sympathy for various hitherto ignored and oppressed minorities.
One cannot blame Kaufmann for not being Turgenev. None of us is. But it is a pity he veers to the opposite extreme, and becomes a hectoring dogmatist with a “twelve-point plan” for “rolling back progressive extremism in our institutions”:
“The cultural socialist politicisation of institutions means we are entering a period in which power over certain policies must be centralised, away from autonomous institutions and toward elected government.”
Like many modern right-wing commentators, Kaufmann preaches to the converted, and does so in angry, clumsy language with an undertone of hysteria.
No thought is given to winning the hearts and minds of the misguided young men and women with their guilt and compassion who are marching through our institutions destroying everything in their path.
There is, it seems, no civilised way of dealing with these young, or nowadays not so young, people. They must be crushed by the use of state power backed by electoral majorities. Let universal suffrage become counter-revolution.
What a dismal, resentful, insecure version of conservatism. We are the underdogs, who can only succeed by mobilising millions of other underdogs. This is the politics of Donald Trump.
To succeed in Britain by such means would be to betray the inheritance of centuries, a live-and-let-live society that values games, jokes, the Common Law, churches, suburban gardens, a cup of tea, a pint, a walk with the dog, and laughs at anyone who takes an idea or a fashion to extremes.
As Philip Larkin once said, “I think it’s significant that a lot of Betjeman’s poems are funny – quite often there are things that you can only say as jokes.”
Kaufmann, on the other hand, informs us on page 81 that “Humour and logic…cut little ice with the next generation”, and on page 222 that “ridicule…is, at best, a delaying tactic”.
But does one want to live in a world without jokes, being preached at by prophets of doom who have a vested interest in convincing us that the end of the world is nigh?
Pessimism is a proper frame of mind for a conservative, and there are always grounds for it. The world is always going to hell in a handcart.
Was there ever a perfect age when the universities were in an admirable condition? Here is Edward Gibbon describing his experience in the 1750s:
“To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spend 14 months at Magdalen College; they proved the 14 months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life…
“The schools of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in a dark age of false and barbarous science; and they are still tainted with the vices of their origin…
“The legal incorporation of these societies by the charters of popes and kings had given them a monopoly of the public instruction; and the spirit of monopolists is narrow, lazy, and oppressive.”
After 600 years that monopoly was broken with the foundation in 1829 of University College London. Buckingham was founded in 1973, in a conscious attempt to break with the ethos which had developed in the by then very large number of universities, but in the words of David Willetts, has “not grown to be as big a player as was hoped”.
Yale, Harvard, and many other famous universities have in recent years damaged themselves by their obeisance to the wilder tenets of wokery. Either they will correct these idiocies, or they will find that gifted students go elsewhere. The self-righting capacities of liberal societies are not as exhausted as Kaufmann fears.
