Harry Potter and the forced order of the Great Bohemians

Courtesy of The Australian

Here is a piece of mine that was published in The Australian newspaper last week:

THE AUSTRALIAN

Harry Potter and the forced order of the Great Bohemians DARYL MCCANN

By DARYL MCCANN12:00AM JUNE 23, 2020 • H 245 COMMENTS The present-day frenzy to “cancel” everyone from James Cook to JK Rowling is a revolution. But not the kind of revolution Karl Marx predicted. Perhaps our destiny is not to end up with a dictatorship of the proletariat but a dictatorship of bohemia instead. Our revolution is not about the working class taking over business. Capitalists can keep their companies, even their non-union labour, so long as they submit to the latest politically correct diktat. This is not a class war but a war of belief. Those in possession of the new moral compass do not come to take responsibility for the day-to-day running of the economy but to shame their betters into their idea of moral purity. According to Roger Sandall’s The Culture Cult, all this began with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rejected by French society, Rousseau embarked on a lifetime of deriding the great artists and intellects of his era. Ressentiment towards Western civilisation has been the guiding principle of bohemian, or hippie, thinking ever since. Its anti-bourgeois spirit is a rejection of tradition, with the exotic being preferenced over the familiar, spontaneity over respectability, promiscuity over fidelity, eccentricity over conventionality, and so on. An argument can be made for ranking Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) as a particularly high point in the history of bohemian art and literature; and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) as, well, not so high. Both works are at war with bourgeois conventionality. Bohemianism, almost by definition, was the scruffy outsider looking in.

Not any more. The bohemia pandemic has been infecting institutions of higher learning since Franz Boas opened up Colombia University’s anthropology department to the “would-be- writers” Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Their “heavily didactic semi-fiction”, masquerading as leading-edge anthropology, helped start the transformation of our academies into the purveyors of anti-bourgeois ressentiment. Nowadays the idea of studying the triumphs of Western civilisation is an anathema.

Bohemian values are supposed to be about freedom. Boomers may feel that their inner bohemian (or inner hippie) has never been entirely extinguished. Perhaps this sentiment expressed itself through the years as a form of libertarianism, a useful counterpoint to the conservatism acquired with experience. Live your life according to your own lights may be our crypto-hippie mantra, but allow others to do their thing. This kind of flexibility or moral relativism is vanishing fast amid the moral absolutism of today’s bohemian quest for Year Zero: burn everything down so we can reset society with their correct values.

This has some of the disturbing hallmarks of Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. For example, silence is complicity with the shaming of any public figure who refuses to submit to the latest PC orthodoxy. Such a threat has nothing to do with broad- mindedness and everything to do with despotism.

Rowling is the latest case in point. A revolution has a tendency to devour its own. Rowling, a stalwart of the British Labour Party, retrospectively coloured her children’s Harry Potter series with a PC tint when she announced that Professor Albus Dumbledore had been gay all along. Who knew? Who cares? In any case, it offered Rowling no protection when the Rainbow Guards came calling. Her offence? Asserting that while trans women are invariably wonderful people, they are not — technically speaking — women.

This heresy constituted an unforgivable crime against humanity. Paradoxically, perhaps, Rowling’s wrongdoing was built on an earlier PC dictum that people born female have a separate identity from males and, therefore, are justified to fear “the other” misappropriating their history (or herstory). Just ask Germaine Greer.

But that was then and this is now. The actors in the Harry Potter franchise who play Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) each posted a similar- sounding communique: “Transgender women are women.” They all denounced Rowling as a transphobic offender. It must have exasperated Rowling to be mansplained by Radcliffe and Grint on what it means to be a woman.

Bohemians in the hippie era at least agreed that all players had a right to voice their personal opinion. Identity politics makes that difficult because the personal is now so political. An earlier humanist perspective might have warned us against trying to find our humanity through our identity rather than the other way around. Shakespeare, for instance, is a triumph for all of humanity and not just males, white, heterosexual, trans or otherwise. In a healthy Western democracy such contentious issues are debated and not dictated.

Which is why the three screen heroes were in no way heroic for publicly denouncing Rowling, and not because she literally created their fame and fortune. It could have cost Radcliffe, Watson and Grint a lot more to remain silent because silence is complicity in the Great Bohemian Cultural Revolution. Had they not criticised Rowling publicly, their agents and social media warriors would have harried them (pun intended) until they did.
The trio surely knew they were helping to condemn Rowling to the status of what Vladimir Lenin and Mao chillingly termed a “former person”. Rowling may keep her castle and estimated $3bn bank account, but she will be demonised for as long as our cultural revolution persists.

The young editors at Hachette, Rowling’s publisher, are refusing to work on her latest children’s book. This is an example of the ostracism Rowling faces for stating her personal view. The personal, according to Mao’s marauding Red Guards, is always political. So it is with our own Rainbow Guards.
Daryl McCann is a political columnist and blogger.