November 20, 2023 - 11:50am
The Omnicause has claimed another single-issue group. The climate change campaigners Just Stop Oil organised a sit-in protest at Waterloo Station on Saturday — not in itself surprising, except that it wasn’t about oil at all, but instead a ceasefire in Gaza.
What does Palestine have to do with climate change? Nor is Just Stop Oil the only such case: a great many other apparently unrelated campaigns, such as the feminist domestic violence campaign Sisters Uncut, have recently abandoned whatever they were focusing on and erupted onto the streets in support of the Omnicause.
I say “Omnicause” rather than “Palestine” because while part of London’s recent street gaiety is clearly provided by those Islamists and their sympathisers, for whom the conflict in Gaza is a crucial Muslim political and religious cause, it takes more than Britain’s Islamists to provide the sheer number now clambering over war memorials and posing for selfies with the police. And it’s equally clear that much of the turnout that isn’t Islamists and their fellow travellers is drawn, by and large, from the same coalition that turned out for the BLM riots during Covid. (Indeed, one of the protesters interviewed recently by UnHerd said as much.)
The origin story of the Omnicause that impels their presence, as it did for BLM before, lies back in the middle decades of the 20th century, when the postwar Left abandoned the prospect of proletarian revolution in the increasingly affluent West for a new focus. In the 1960s Herbert Marcuse argued for “abolition” of the modern, wealthy “pseudo-democracy”: an order that, in his view, employed “repressive tolerance” to neuter potentially revolutionary subjects, then pacified them with soporific affluence and thus co-opted the working class as adherents of the regime.
The only way out of this system of capitalist control, Marcuse claimed, was a new revolutionary coalition drawn from the elite and the margins: a cadre of intellectuals, aided by “the substratum of outcasts and outsiders” such as racial and sexual minorities and the economic underclass. These new radicals would enact an extra-democratic revolution which, he thought, should be pursued through any means necessary: “I believe that there is a ‘natural right’ of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate”.
Subsequent generations of American progressive activists have developed Marcuse’s post-democratic playbook, as well as an elaborate body of theory on the coalition’s marginalised groups. Perhaps no buzzword captures the latter more completely than the doctrine of “intersectionality”, first set out in 1989 by the critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw but since popularised via a trillion Tumblrs, pop-feminist articles and infographics.
Crenshaw argued, in brief, that oppressed identities can overlap and serve as multipliers: the more axes on which you’re a minority, the more oppressed you are. In its pop form, this worldview cashes out as two central beliefs: firstly, that oppressed identities confer a kind of special status and knowledge, and arrange victims in a kind of hierarchy — those who speak for or about identities they don’t possess are thus enjoined to “stay in your lane”.
And secondly, that every form of oppression intersects with and hence must be tackled alongside every other form — meaning that believers must stay in their lanes but are also obliged to “stand with” the oppressed everywhere all the time. It is this contradictory but all-consuming outlook that turns seemingly disparate campaigns into an Omnicause.
It is never wholly clear why one instance of oppression should attain sacred status within the Omnicause, while others — the abduction and rape of women in war, for example — should be swept aside. For those with an instinct for seeking personal power amid the fog and chaos of conflict or revolution, this is no doubt a feature, rather than a bug. Regardless, whether their day-to-day focus is climate or domestic violence or something else, Omnicause revolutionaries are obliged to turn out for events designated by consensus as particularly deserving.
Palestinians have attained this status: as a group, they tick a great many intersectional victim boxes, while Omnicause adherents have long viewed Israel’s behaviour as a metonym for American oppression, both internally (racism, slavery) and externally (global imperial hegemony). As a cause, Gaza has come to represent the intersectional, omnipresent repressive order against which Marcuse encouraged his radical coalition to struggle by any means necessary.
Between the conflict’s totemic status for the Omnicause and its religious significance for Islamists, then, we should not be surprised by the scale of public disturbance. Or, indeed, the abrupt mobilisation of every seemingly disparate single-issue groupuscule under an unsettlingly univocal banner.
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SubscribeAll of the above is true as far as it goes.
Left wing identity politics has been full of such strange coalitions and contradictions for a few decades, but it is only recently that they have broken through into the mainstream.
25 years ago in my PhD/brief academic career days I would regularly hear student and academic “activists” denouncing western social norms as oppressive while simultaneously justifying non-western equivalents which to my untrained eye appeared to be worse.
If western women’s clothing is really the product of a system of patriarchal oppression, something Germaine Greer pointed out 50-odd years ago in the Female Eunuch, then I naively assumed that the sort of society which compels women to cover themselves in the name of modesty is worse. Oh how wrong I was! Turns out that in the intersectionalist Land of Oz which social justice warriors inhabit, the Burkha is actually a liberating symbol of women’s choice.
All that said, what the article above doesn’t talk about but should is the fertile ground onto which these crazy seeds are landing. And a lot of that has to do with the disenchantment of younger generations with a system which, rightly or wrongly, they feel no longer works for them.
On top of the demographic trend of an aging population and the slow decline in prosperity in the West, someone born in 1990 would have reached maturity in the middle of the credit crunch, then had most of the first 10 years of their professional career blighted by the turmoil of Brexit and Covid. Given this, it shouldn’t be so surprising when they start to listen to arguments that the system no longer works and its all the fault of a class of older, mostly white and male people who are jealously hanging on to all the privilege. The fact that what they are buying into instead makes no sense and is being propagated by some people who don’t have their best interests at heart probably doesn’t even occur to them. Its just different and offers a sense of purpose beyond grinding it out in the gig economy.
So you see huge tax breaks for the filthy rich, a runaway cost of living crisis combined with obscene profits by multinationals and a transfer of wealth from the 80% to the billionaire class at unprecented levels as what? “Normal, reasonable, fair and equitable” do you? ..or are you one of the tiny minority of ‘winners’ and so wilfully blind to the plight of your victims, the ‘losers’?
When the rich make the laws, impose the taxes and govern every aspect of life, and noblesse oblige is long dead what else is to be expected.. smug vs victim is surely the likely outcome, is it not?
You clearly don’t understand economics if you think the billions produced by the very rich came at the expense of the poor… This is to say nothing about the implications of relative financial disparities etc. just that if one does not get the basics that billions are made from expanding the pie not gobling up bigger portions of a limited pie, the remainder of their point is in question…
The billions of the rich do not necessarily come at the expense of the poor. But that does not mean they never do.
Also:
First, if large amounts of new wealth are being created, that will be evidenced by a rapidly growing economy.
Second, if productivity is increasing, but wages are not keeping pace, and if at the same time the wealth gap is opening up – then the rich can be said to be taking more than their fair share of the increase in the pie.
Who gets what from the pie, or it’s increase, will tend to depend on the balance of power between capital and labour.
Doesn’t Parliament make the laws? While there are undoubtedly “rich” people in Parliament, I don’t think it is right to consider that MPs are “the rich”.
The idea that “if you have it good, you must be screwing someone,” is puerile.
It really bothers me that so many people think it. I am not sure what I will do to fight it, but fight it I will.
Read “I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning” by René Girard. Mimetic envy, a deeply-embedded human vice, is as old as Cain and Abel. Envy is the principle underlying Marxist theories of oppression so easily adopted by every grievance group under the sun. You have described this phenomenon well: the success of one group must perforce be based on the oppression of some other group. This, of course, is sick thinking, but it motivates groups of people as disparate as American blacks to the Palestinians. Losers from Adolf Hitler to Al Sharpton to Yasser Arafat need a scapegoat to blame for their own failures.
You’re giving the term smug a bad name!
If you do “have it good” while others do not, you must ask yourself:
1. Did I attain my good fortune by fair means or foul?” – not just my own means but the means applied by the systems governing social life? and..
2. Did those people now much less fortunate than I am find themselves at an unfair disadvantage through their own fault or did the system act unfairly against them?
If you’re still in the clear then enjoy your good fortune. If not then make amends: correct the injustice where you can, if you are a decent, moral, Christian (or similar) person.
Of course if you’re a smug, self-satisfied, cheat then such thoughts of fairness and Christian values will not affect you in the slightest, will they?
Hi Liam,
I think the two questions you pose are very important ones. And, I think both smuggle in a idea that goes something like: “a person’s wealth—good fortune, or whatever—is always attained through a system that favors that person and harms others.”
OK, let’s grant you that point.
But then, Liam, I think you are standing on very shaky ground because, at best, your propositions are not falsifiable, but that hardly makes them true. And, worse yet, it seems to me, they take you down a path of relativism that can only end up eventually biting you in the butt.
Why, you might ask? Because when, as will inevitably be the case, you come out ahead of the game at some point in your life, your perspective demands that you return your (ill-gotten) gains in order to avoid being one of the nasty people whose success is screwing others.
And honestly, would you give it all back? And if not, how will you ever justify the portion you keep? Your two premises do not really allow for keeping any. And if you do keep some, then you are behaving immorally. Which, if I understand you, you wish to avoid doing. A bad place to end up, I think.
And, worse yet, invoking the “being a good Christian who shares what they have” mantra starts to sound awfully hollow and self serving as well. Also not a place worth being.
Excellent post.
It is classic “zero sum game” thinking which seems so prevalent in left/progressive thought.
Note also the binary nature of the choice he offers, deliberately excluding the possibility that you might consider yourself to have succeeded through a combination of merit, fortune and perhaps unfair advantage. In which case you might desire to return some (though not all) of your gains.
But can this realistically and fairly be measured ? And in particular by you as the beneficiary ? Your perceptions may be biased, distorted or evolve over time – indeed it may take a long time for your success to emerge – what if in the shorter term you suffered losses on the way to success (normal in business investment) ? Can those be reclaimed ?
I don’t consider such a system remotely practical or capable of being implemented in a manner recognised as being “fair” by all participants.
This is a weird outlook. Everyone is born to circumstance. All of us born in the west, with freedom and prosperity, are amongst the most blessed people in the history of the world. Yet some are born in the ghetto and some are born in Malibu. Meanwhile, more than 1 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Are we supposed to make amends for our good fortune? And should we be grateful and do good works?
Pure Communism dressed up in the thinest veil of Christian garb. Well, Communism owed a lot to the teachings of Christ – that much we know. You’re not fooling anyone, I’m afraid.
What is this thing called “the system” of which you speak ? Critics of the status quo always criticise something they label “the system”.
Usually, there is no such “system” in the normal sense of that word – there is merely an environment which develops and evolves over time. The idea that there is some defined system in operation here feels wrong. A complex interaction of cultures, groups and individuals isn’t really anything coherent we might label as a system.
You take a very white and western view of why a person is in the position they are in.
There are other ways of knowing.
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.135.nymo.html
The proposition “if you have it good, you must be screwing someone,” would seem to be a special instance of the more general proposition: “benefit implies cause.” Does it? If it did, then the police would have such an easy job: just arrest the beneficiary of any murder victim’s insurance policy. This is doubly perverse in that if and when previously disadvantaged groups undo their disadvantages, the former oppressed are damned for having joined the oppressor ilk.
I’ll copy paste something I posted on an article about Greta Thurrnberg.
Greta Thurnberg respresent bourgois cosmoplitans who hate the rooted western “somewhere” middle class, its values, its way of life and the fact that the western citizens enjoy reasonnably high living standards.
That’s what she stands against. And that is what I stand for.
The people whofight climate change hate the West, and support anything that hates it.
Who is funding and directing these groups?
Which countries wish the West’s decline? There’s your answer.
Countries don’t ‘wish’. Only people wish! You’ll find to your surprise, that views differ within countries and indeed also differ with specific issues related to decline..
If for instance, USUK’s rampant warmongering were to decline most people within the US and UK would welcome such a decline.
Conversely, the decline in morality especially among the governing classes to be greatly bemoaned by many people.
These things are complex not at all black and white like you want them to be.
The answer is as brutal as it is simple. The *government* funds these people. Any government. All governments. Even though the people in the government know they are, willynilly, funding their enemies. Which makes me think, they are not considered enemies in the governance circle of life – just part of the ecosystem, and each plays their role.
You need a course in reality studies! And put away those comic books!
Open Society Foundation is usually top of the list, and they get UK taxpayer funding.
Two guys: Con Spiracy and Theo Rist. Those are the ringleaders!
But according to you its the billionaires…
Ultimately, the AntiChrist.
In two words “mental illness”
Virtue signaling, performative politics, or self-righteous displays.
Bandwagon displaying.
Like I said, mental illness
These changes in our culture go way beyond “performative displays of mental illness” They bring to mind the mystery of the horror that was the Cultural Revolution. Even if we put aside the brutality and violence there’s still the un-answered question: how could people have done such a thing? This wasn’t the work of a small cadre of radicals, it was a mass movement.
Todays mass movement, thankfully non-violent (so far), contains frightening parrallels; a convoluted philosophy that’s not really understood by its adherents, a common bullet-point style list of cliches and shibboleths, a sort of teen-culture desire to get out and do something with all your friends. (We used to go dancing and shouting a little, now they march and shout a lot.), a mindless disregard of the concepts of mercy and common decency…
The New AntiSemitism is the most frightening part. We all know that down that road lies madness.
Ms. Harrington did a great job of expanding our understanding.
I’m a little pessimistic. I think a bloodbath is coming.
Bored, dimwitted wannabe victims looking for an omnicause.
What’s next? Part-time Mothercare workers for Palestine?
Anglicans for Palestine.
The Left have always been against capitalism and the USA has been their example of capitalism to be against.
I suspect that because the USA supports Israel the more extreme Left automatically supports the other side, i.e. HAMAS. No more thought is required for a visceral reaction against The Man (how Sixties) – partly because the reaction is a luxury belief which can safely be dabbled with as it is happening far, far, away.
Wonder how these fools would feel if it was their daughter who was gang rapped and paraded around… These fools really are simply scum…
Excellent article. It comes, for me, only a day after a surprisingly friendly exchange on social media with a typically-credulous climate change devotee who included an increase in volcanic activity as one of the possible consequences of human CO2 emissions.
She was at least pretty gracious about admitting that perhaps she’d made that bit up, after I pointed out that nowhere in even the most extreme climate alarmist narratives is there any serious support for such a view. But it did nonetheless emphasise once again how baseless a lot of the popular support for these ideas can be. The “omnicause” described above captures this perfectly: the people who support the various ideas in question don’t do so out of any belief in or understanding of the facts; they do so because those ideas come as a package, no part of which is up for debate.
The propaganda has been overwhelming as well. These people likely have no clue that climate related deaths have declined 98% since the early 1900s, and continuously too. The hysterics surrounding this issue is next level. Nothing like it in modern history really.
Mob behaviour
Collective solipsism
Moral narcissism
Group identity-formation
Transferred nationalism
Fanaticism,
etc, etc.
Ideology starts off as a cult, as it gathers momentum it becomes corrupted, the next stage is totalitarianism, then finally high mortality/mass murder and social collapse.
A nice succinct explanation of the absurdity we have been labelling “woke” for years. If you want a more succinct example of everything that is totally absurd about this mentality “Queers for Palestine” should do.
I wonder if Hamas are aware of the solidarity they are getting from this misguided section of the LGBTQ+ community? Maybe Hamas will be inclined to treat them more kindly in the future and throw them off buildings that are not quite so tall?
Thought the problem was that Israel had stopped oil to Gaza.
Something for JSO to celebrate, I would have thought….
Indeed. The wider the net cast by intersectional activism, the more the focus is blurred and those in the struggle lose purpose.
Often the same people are protesting for Occupy Wall Street and then BLM and then the Israeli war on Gaza , etc. For them the cause doesn’t matter. What matters is the opportunity to protest. Not a means to an end, but as an end in itself. To be a protester and activist is their identity.
You have in a few words hit it just right… They are protesters looking for a protest vs people compelled to protest, against their nature, due to the importance of the cause…
Exactly! Their only regret is that there isn’t a Winter Palace to storm!
The Omnicause is the destruction of the ‘capitalist West’, the ultimate ‘oppressor’, and anything which dilutes the ‘victimhood’ of the designated ‘oppressed’, such as Muslim atrocities, must be glossed over. The Jews, of course, in addition to being Islam’s ultimate foe, which must be destroyed on the Day of Judgement, are also the ultimate capitalists.
An excellent article. However, I would question the author’s use of the word “contradictory” when describing the central tenets of intersectionality. I believe those who are upbraided for not “staying in their lane” are only those who dare to deviate, even slightly, from the party line. This is why the idea of allyship is such a sham. Intersectional activists don’t want allies (for that would imply some degree of political parity or autonomy), rather they want toadies, lackeys, and unthinking stooges. They want someone who will listen to their proclamations with a glassy-eyed awe and drooling deference. Even if you don’t belong to a marginalized group you are absolutely expected to raise your voice in their defense. Just don’t espouse any original ideas, especially if they might be seen to contradict the orthodoxy. You’re simply meant to amplify their voice by parroting the pre-approved talking points.
It has exactly as much to do with climate change as CO2 does.
This idiocy will lead, ineluctably, to one “intersectional” group accusing another “intersectional” group of oppressing it. The revolution will eat its own.
Read “I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning” by René Girard. Mimetic envy, a deeply-embedded human vice, is as old as Cain and Abel. Envy is the principle underlying Marxist theories of oppression so easily adopted by every grievance group under the sun. You have described this phenomenon well: the success of one group must perforce be based on the oppression of some other group. This, of course, is sick thinking, but it motivates groups of people as disparate as American blacks to the Palestinians. Losers from Adolf Hitler to Al Sharpton to Yasser Arafat need a scapegoat to blame for their own failures.
In the end, I think the Omnicuase is primarily an Omni-Demand for attention and an expression of old-fashioned hatred of one’s parents (i.e. the prior generation)…
What, protesting against weaponized rape and mayhem doesn’t get me any negative attention. OK, I will protest pro-Hamas, how do you like me now old man…
What Marcuse didn’t get, and tried to rationalise, was that what he was seeing was the emergence of a new elite morality.
What we should take from the marxist tradition is that if the elite adopt a particular ideology, it is either because it serves their own interests, or it distinguishes them from those they see as social inferiors and legitimises their social position.
We, the best, are the good and the caring – and we care for the weakest and most oppressed above all. Thus we deserve our exalted social position. Morality has replaced taste as a mode of social distinction.
It’s also why the traditionally oppressed, the (white) working class, have fallen off the radar. They are the moral and social inferiors against whom the elite (and those who seek status through emulation) define themselves.
Brilliant!
Wish only you commented earlier so more readers would have seen it…
I don’t suppose it’s going to happen, but I really wish these clowns would f**k off.
Idiot leftist omnicause fanatics have driven people who think for themselves out of public life. A woman who opposes rape as a legitimate weapon of war is ordered to support Hamas rapist actions and is drummed out of her cause. Soon there are only omni fools left in any cause. A cause with only omni fools no longer has rational support and fails!
What is the difference in IQ between the average Jew and the average Irish person. Anyone know?
Mary’s thesaurus has had a busy morning.
Maybe… but i loved her simple but effective use of the term “gaiety” to describe the Islamist-led street theatre
I’m really not at all impressed by this piece with its entirely imvalid, almost throwaway terms like Islamist (instead of Islamic) and the notion that genuinely concerned, moral, decent people are simply jumping on a bandwagon!
Has it not occurred to Ms Harrington that such decent, moral, Christian people are genuinely concerned about a great many issues while smug, self-satisfied elites just don’t give a damn about anyone except themselves?
And there IS a common denominator even if she denies it or tries to hide it, namely: the whole rotten system is in the hands of such uncaring, self-satisfied, greedy and sometimes even wicked ‘elites’ who care nothing for the will of ordinary people, that yes.. any chance we get to say to these degenerates: “mend your ways” we will take it!
To that section of feminism which is disgracing itself over this war, why would some of you cede all authority to the nosiest voices among the Jewish half of one per cent of the population, but not to the noisiest voices among that half of one per cent which professed a gender identity different from its biological sex? By doing the former, why are you lining up with the far more powerful people who did the latter? Why do you never mention that, unlike Hamas, two parties in Israel’s ruling coalition do not allow women to be candidates for public office, and both of those parties were already in government on 7th October? Why do you make such a fuss of Tel Aviv Pride, which is Asia’s largest example of the specifically LGBT+ events against which you demonstrate in your own country, and at which your gender-critical views would be thoroughly unwelcome, to put it politely?
Led by the working class, the struggle for economic equality is the struggle against a capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade. That trade financed enclosure, meaning that there has always been One Struggle, and it has always been against something that was fundamentally racist.
Today, as the likes of “Tommy Robinson” recognise and celebrate, the world’s preeminent example of the specific phenomenon of white violence against people of colour is the oppression of the Palestinians, making it central to the class struggle. You are siding with those who rioted at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day, injuring nine Police Officers, as had always been the intention from the decision to go equipped with bladed articles but not with firearms. Your boys had not gone to shoot Hamas. They had gone to stab the Police. You have chosen that side. We are the 76 per cent for a reason.
The Israelis themselves now admit they have no evidence of any rapes, just as there were only 1200 rather than 1400 dead (expect that figure to fall further), only one of whom was a baby, neither beheaded nor baked. That is before we even start about Hamas bases under hospitals, and what not. What next, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? The people who say this are the people who said that. We have already had at least one attempt at a feminist war. How did Afghanistan work out for you? Then again, it did you no harm at all. Upper-middle-class white women did not have to fight it.
The origins of capitalism long pre-date the Atlantic slave trade. And you should consider yourself fortunate that you obviously haven’t seen the Hamas video of toddlers at a kibbutz nursery being tied together and burnt alive.
Nor have you. We are expected to trust the word of carefully selected courtiers. Since when was that journalism?
The Israelis themselves are no longer peddling this. Try and keep up.
We are the 76 per cent for a reason. As on Iraq, one day you will pretend that you had always been of our number.
Where does the Holocaust fit in with all this dimwitted tripe.
”white violence against people of colour.”
It was a different phenomenon.
get your head checked
“A capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade.”
You can’t seriously believe that? Modern industrial capitalism is built on energy. The invention of the steam engine and abundant coal are its foundations. Slavery has been an element of every economy in recorded history but is not the foundation of capitalism. Indeed it’s probably no coincidence that the only global hegemony to ban it did so as machines started to replace muscle power.
Interesting that you use One Stuggle. Have a look at Mary’s Omnicause article.
We are used to her sort of sneering. She is hardly the target audience, anyway. Hey, ho. Her sort has cut itself off from both streams of the material realism on which it depends, the ancestrally Marxist, and the Thomist (my lot) as the cause dearest to the hearts of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition partners, the eradication of Christianity from the Holy Land, proceeds apace even in the Old City of Jerusalem itself. From our garrets to our monasteries, we are going to hold the line against gender self-identification. The Harringtons of the world have sold out as surely as the pseudo-Leftists and the pseudo-traditional Catholics who supported the Iraq War. Where are they now? Very rich, of course. But what shall it profit a man?
“The Israelis themselves now admit they have no evidence of any rapes….”. I’d love to see your source. You contradict everything else I’ve read. Just blurting such things out makes you seem un-serious: it’s the difference between a polemic and a rant.
Incoherent ramblings of a useful idiot. The Achilles heel of democracy is giving people like you the freedom to spout nonsense, a freedom that is granted in Israel but not Palestine.
This stands out as the most stupid comment I have ever read on Unherd.
“a capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade. ”
Stopped reading right there. Very few people got rich off of slavery. The capitalist system was founded on the urban poor.