The divisions of division

Ten years ago, Jacques Hamel, a humble Catholic priest in Normandy, was stabbed to death by a Muslim man who had pledged his allegiance to ISIS. Two days ago, in Berlin, a woman was killed at Berlin Pride by a van that the police allege was driven by a man who had attempted to join ISIS.

Over ten years, jihadi attack after jihadi attack has been aimed at institutions from the Catholic Church to pride parades, as well as events like Christmas markets, local community festivals and football games.

Every time, we hear words such as these from the organisers of Berlin Pride:

People are trying to divide our society and set some people against others … We will not allow this.

Let me steelman this. If, theoretically, someone claimed that these attacks pit Muslims as a whole against non-Muslims as a whole, I agree that it would be irrational and wrong. Most Muslim people very much do not support this kind of hideous violence.

But it remains true that in a very real sense we are divided. The fact that there is an aggressive minority of people who are prepared to use violence against targets of their religious disapproval — from priests to Pride marchers — makes this inarguable. Again, I’m not denying that one could use this fact to promote a form of politics which actively divides people. But it’s just a fact that people are already divided. 

This was the second time that I had thought about “division” this week. The first was when the actress Jameela Jamil had the unmitigated courage to say that “British people are truly the most evil people in history”. Damn. You’ve got to be brave to say something so critical about the British!

To be fair, I think that Ms Jamil was speaking with a certain comic cavalier bombast — if nothing else, I’m sure she thinks the Belgians are at least as evil — but she folded in sincere grievances like that British people, as a result of the British Empire, “owe £43tn to India”. Such bogus statistics have been debunked again and again.

My point is that being “divisive”, for too many commentators, is something only right-wingers do

Yet I don’t see someone like Jamil being described as “divisive”. Nor do I see mainstream commentators call it “divisive” when British institutions use concepts like the “global majority” — an attempt to marginalise white people in comparison with, well, everybody else that was created by an author of conspiracy theories about “the white elite”.

My point is that being “divisive”, for too many commentators, is something only right-wingers do. Farage? Divisive! The Daily Mail? Divisive! Minoritising the historic population? Just normal institutional practice. In essence, it being “divisive” does not always mean “dividing people”, as one would expect. It means “disagreeing with us”. What is sought is unity not for its own sake but in the sense of people unifying around their politics. 

There is no society, of course, in which people are not divided. Even if nativist, traditionalist fantasies of an ethnically, religiously homogeneous state happened to be realised — which they will not — people would end up disagreeing with each other. It is in our nature — and it can be healthy. But the extent to which people disagree with each other, and the form that their disagreement takes, is important.

Let’s agree that there are forms of “divisiveness” which contain a pathological urge towards conflict. Most of us, I’m sure, would want them to be minimised. If people want to minimise aggressive forms of division, I propose a few simple ideas. First, accept that some people on various ends of society are essentially and militantly committed to division, and that they have distinct reasons for being so. Some are neo-Nazis. Some are jihadists. But you can’t reduce them, as Chris Bryant MP attempts to do, to vague “hatred”.

Second, don’t radically increase the potential for division. Ongoing mass migration, and especially from more culturally divergent societies, compounds the problem of developing a shared form of cohesive identification. Third, don’t problematise the majority. This is an inherently “divisive” form of politics, masquerading as cosmopolitanism. 

I say this, it might be worth adding, as someone who has criticised right-wingers who salivate over the prospect of civil conflict. It’s not a thought that should excite anyone who hasn’t been driven mad by video games and their X timeline. But the sad fact is that dark forces of “division” cannot be dispelled by an imagined organic unity.