Art vs Social Progress

by Sean Bw Parker (October 2024)

The Grievance Industry is in cultural control across the Anglosphere, and no doubt elsewhere. Campaigning scriptwriters are in constant demand from mainstream broadcasters, against the better taste of the public: Dr Who, James Bond, Hollyoaks, to name but three are notorious in their ‘social progress’ messaging, with the Dr changing from man to woman to black to no doubt neurodiverse soon. James Bond is constantly straining under triggering headlines that pull the suave spy away from his uber-masculine roots, and Cheshire soap Hollyoaks crams in doctored news stories on a near-weekly basis.

It is gradually becoming clear to the critical world that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes are a back door to neo-communism, based on identity boxes rather than economics. The professions are being riven with this form of equality of outcome, including the UK legal profession, which has just announced new requirements in this area, and people with actual or suspected Asperger’s (high-functioning autism) seem to be making black and white, moralistic decisions at the top of pretty much every organisation.

As with all the isms, this began with feminism—Affirmative Action led to sex balance at work, media hit-pieces ensured that was never enough, while unhappy couples were torn apart by anti-male bias in the family courts. Does male fragility exist? Yes it does, when it comes to their general attitude towards women, it’s the one area where they should be questioning, caring etc. With the majority in the west that is supportive, collaborative, seeking harmony, but social movements such as the heavily incentivised #MeToo movement across society have rendered relations in a dire state.

Distrust is now the default setting for ‘thinking,’ sophisticated people, while everyday relations are their normal push-pull amongst less politicised types. As men walk around modern Britain alone as solitary males, they can’t help but feel like perverts, painted that way by a media culture that looks for the conflict in every dynamic, and beams that to every available screen in the race for attention, clicks and advertising revenue.

The male gaze/approach is more dynamic, dictated by evolution, and men feel scuzzy and weird when they gossip, while women seem to feel virtuous and empowered when they do. This is why #MeToo turned out to have been close to the worst thing for culture since the Nazis banned Degenerate Art: intimacy coordinators on set, trigger warnings before films and instructors cowed into delivering sub-standard work due to fear of being labelled a ‘bully’.

#MeToo and Stanislavsky’s Method make strange bedfellows, as this acting technique involves ‘living’ the role for weeks or months before performance, in order to deeply feel or inhabit a role. This is from whence Marlon Brando or Al Pacino’s best work came, the commitment to art: this immersion cannot afford, by its nature, to be mindful of the feelings of others. If a violent schizophrenic needs to be acted, s/he needs to be acted properly, not pandered to.

While equality feminism has made great gains in true equality over the past century, when power-feminists have sons, their entire perspective seems to change, as they realise it’s not their upbringing that dictates the majority of their behaviours, it’s their immutable characteristics. These characteristics are seen as socially destructive by a certain brand of radical feminism that is bent on power, and has migrated from dungarees and Doctor Martens to power suits to lingerie. This brand prefers to ape those stereotypical make characteristics than develop their own, in an anti-patriarchy power-grab.

There’s more to art than ‘inclusivity,’ but you wouldn’t know it looking at most exhibition line-ups or mainstream broadcasting listings, as the disciplines of existentialism, decluttering and amorality are packaged up into a box called ‘mindfulness’ —which can easily go to not taking responsibility for your own actions in a race-to-the-bottom iteration of self-entitlement. While the new criteria of art criticism is increasingly Could it have been done by AI?, a visiting alien could be forgiven for thinking that art’s only purpose is in helping others.

Well art is in itself amoral, exists as a simultaneous expression and reflection of artist and society, and has simply been quietly co-opted by the progressive bourgeoisie over the past thirty years. It’s time the creative arts were freed from their enforced servitude.

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