The Politics of Dancing

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” ―  Hannah Arendt,  The Origins of Totalitarianism T witter is a place of anarchy, malicious vitriol, ill-will, racial hatred and partisan political venom. It is also an arena for the exercise of free speech and a forum for the exchange of views and, occasionally, enlightenment. Twitter is also a home, either from the left or right, for the opponents of free speech and unfettered discourse. Rarely does a day go by without a demand that someone should be silenced, ‘no-platformed’ or prosecuted. In some instances, the silencing involves less sophisticated methods, by subjecting ‘miscreants’ to a tsunami of vitriol and hate designed to drive them off twitter, women being disproportionately...

Pierre Bonnard at The Tate Modern  Stairs to The Garden 1942 Pierre Bonnard I looked forward to seeing the Bonnard  exhibition at the Tate Modern, however, whilst there is much to enjoy, I left with a strange feeling of claustrophobic melancholy. Something about the exhibition seemed sad and forlorn, more so owing, perhaps, to Bonnet’s reputation.    Pierre Bonnard, painter of domestic harmony, of glorious landscapes and gardens that assault the eye with bursting shells of colour, exploding yellows and reds, crimson and blue; the happy painter who through two world wars and the troubled inter-war years continued to paint pictures that depicted not only visions of intimate domesticity but the contentment of a settled life which had a love of beauty at its heart. The Belle Époque is perhaps the most burnished period in modern history.  This I suspect is a consequence as much of the cultural, scientific and artistic triumphs of the period as the mann...

At the height of the Arab Spring, I remember the dismay as the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt and immediately began an assault on that countries secular institutions and the modern secular tradition in that country.  At the time, I remember writing, possibly rather patronisingly, that the Brotherhood had mistaken majoritarianism for democracy.  That they were not the first to make this mistake and would not be the last. The idea that the winner takes all and ‘losers’ no longer count is just as poisonous to a democracy, pluralism and democratic institutions as any authoritarian demagogue.  The favourite tool of the majoritarian, as we have discovered recently, to our cost, is the plebiscite since this provides the either/or question that enables highly complex issues to be reduced to a simplistic good/bad formula. Moreover, a simple majority is all that is required to cast the ‘losers’ into the outer darkness of the bad. One vote will do. An attitude emerges, b...