SOCIAL DISSONANCE

 Brexit and The Corrosion of Civil Society

Democracy is dead without conflict, without the dialectic of competing ideas. If you want peace, harmony and unanimity go visit a graveyard. Compromise, the prerequisite of democracy is a form of creative tension, - never fully settled, always threatening fracture and division.

This is the framework in which debate and political discourse take place. However, there are limits to the degree of division compatible with a healthy democracy.  When the division becomes too wide civility, the agreed rules and formula begin to break down, compromise becomes impossible and conflict threatens to become violent; civil war begins to emerge as a possibility. Examples abound, Spain from 1933 to 1936, Ireland after the creation of the free state. France in late 1930s and Weimar Germany. As can be seen from the above examples, not all such discord ends in civil war, merely that it is threatened and civil unrest becomes more likely.
I want to suggest that the UK is currently experiencing just such a breakdown, though I think civil war is not a remotely conceivable possibility. Instead, another possibility is slowly emerging, a development which, though well short of civil war, is extremely damaging and corrosive of democracy just the same. This might be termed Social Dissonance.

All the exhortations about learning from history are predicated on the assumption that people do not look back to the past to inform their actions. This is simply untrue. If anything, people look back far too much and, as AJP Taylor observed, draw all the wrong conclusions from the exercise. Generals prepare to fight the last war and politicians arm themselves to deal with the last financial crisis. The appeasement of the 1930’s threatens any attempt to make concessions to an adversary, whilst McCarthyism hinders any attempt to deal with entryism or real fifth columnists. Thus, if we look back to other times when societies were crippled by the civil discord of a similar kind they might not contain answers to our current situation. Though one stark conclusion is that such situations rarely end well.[1]
Of course, the Brexiteers think that everything will be resolved on leaving the EU. Whilst my comrades in the Remain camp believe that everything will return to normal if the whole Brexit enterprise is junked. Both I believe to be deluded. Though the former much more so since leaving will not be an end but the beginning of a whole new period of upheaval and discord. Whatever happens, an evil-smelling can of worms was opened after the 2015 General Election and the chaos and rabid disunity that it has released into society are unlikely to dissipate anytime soon.
We are entering a period of prolonged social dissonance and it is not going to be pleasant.



[1] War seems to be the best way of reuniting divided societies. 

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