On centrist dads and hijab wives

Late anthropologist Ernest Gellner wrote: “the tribe has fallen apart, the shrine is abandoned.” In fractures from those broken bonds, dangerous ideologies grow.

Over a decade ago I did a Masters at the King’s College London War Studies Department. One of the few books on the course list that truly enlightened me was Reason, Postmodernism and Religion by anthropologist Ernest Gellner. It is a slim, mostly forgotten defence of reason and objective truth against what we now call woke.

Gellner was a Czech-British academic who was best known for his work on nationalism. But to me, his analysis of “‘three fundamental and irreducible positions’ on faith” is both prescient and explanatory regarding two of the most destructive forces of our times: Islamic extremism and post-modernism infused woke ideology. These two have been at the forefront of our culture for years now, and many ask why they seem to work in tandem?

Gellner’s book is a good place to start.

And if you really want a jarring reminder of just how debased our current intellectual climate is compared to past eras, just read this glowing review of Gellner’s book, published in the Independent in 1992. The reviewer, Ziauddin Sardar, wrote:

“Gellner’s concern is to rescue ‘serious knowledge’ from the post-modernist and fundamentalist strait-jacket of absolute subjectivity. His ‘mild’ common-sense rationalism combines reason with virtue and presents a sagacious intellectual position that most sensible Muslims would be happy to endorse."

Three decades later, the UK is, according to many brave critics, implementing de facto blasphemy laws. What a shocking and tragic degradation of our western patrimony.

But I digress.

According to Gellner, whose geographical focus in this book was the Levant, the most important feature of Islam is that it was divided not just along schismatic lines, but also the “between the High Islam of the scholars and the Low Islam of the people. The boundary between the two was not sharp, but each had its place in the social structure.”

High Islam for the urban scholars and trading bourgeoisie, Low Islam for the tribal or semi-tribal rural dwellers, and the urban poor. High Islam attracted adherents in the modern era who were driven in part from the “trauma” of contact with far more technologically and economically advanced western cultures. It produced the urge to reform in the direction of doctrinal purity and away from the saints and the superstitions of the old.

Gellner’s great revelation, for me, is that the jihadi ideology that has driven so much murder on European and American soil, is not ‘traditional’ in a way that I think it is commonly viewed today.

“Contrary to what outsiders generally suppose,” Gellner writes in what surely is one of the most profound passages written about our modern world: “the typical Muslim woman in a Muslim city doesn’t wear the veil because her grandmother did so, but because her grandmother did not: her grandmother in her village was far too busy in the fields…The granddaughter is celebrating the fact that she has joined her grandmother’s betters.”

Perhaps scholars of Islam can pick at Gellner’s take, but this essay is not intended as a treatise on that religion. The point of this essay is to ask: Can something similar be said for the broad acceptance, among swaths of once non-political society, of woke?

Thinking about Gellner’s formulation of Islam in our modern world — which I do on an almost weekly basis because I am a huge nerd — sparked the thought: could this be what is driving middle class men from the post-Christian west? Men who inherited conventional morality and stability from their grandparents, and now accept the most insane policies that today’s left-wing radicalism can dream up?

Can this explain why so many utterly normal, liberal types align themselves with batshit crazy, extreme beliefs?

I’m thinking specifically of the centrist dad. The type of guy who is very well described in this Tweet: “middle aged, comfortable, utterly convinced of his own brilliance. The type of man who reads The Irish Times every morning, listens to [Irish broadcaster] RTE without question."

One of the most disconcerting things about my trajectory from student leftie to centrist liberal to whatever the hell I am today, has been that as I moved right, conservative people I have known for years, have moved left.

I’m talking about former military men, burghers, landed gentry. Men you would expect to become more conservative as time went on, not less. Not lads from trade union families or rough housing estates, carrying the legacy of worker’s rights and international solidarity.

These men find my stance on sex changes for children ‘extreme.’ These men supported vaccine mandates, hate Brexit, equate populism with fascism, and are fine with waves of unvetted migrants arriving in the UK — at least until they wash up in their pretty villages and neighbourhoods.

But when I was 20 and arguing that it was all the fault of capitalism, or something, these same men would have — and in some cases, did — laugh at my misplaced youthful fervour. How on earth have we essentially switched places?

It’s because for millions of normies, holding those woke and woke-adjacent beliefs has become a status marker, while at the same time an objective media vanished into thin air.

As Gellner wrote of Muslims moving away from a more folkloric religion to austere and global Wahhabism: “the tribe has fallen apart, the shrine is abandoned.”

The same can be said of the communal fabric of Christendom, which has frayed to an almost fatal point. In fractures from those broken bonds, dangerous ideologies grow.