Giles a contributing editor at The New Yorker whose critique of globalisation will
Posted in General on 30. Sep, 2010
Giles, a contributing editor at The New Yorker, whose critique of globalisation will be published by Faber this autumn, stared dully at his racecard. Peter, a former academic just promoted to department head at the BBC, was sipping gloomily at his champagne. I think its value is that it is simply an imaginative object in space at large, that might invite people to reflect upon their own condition, in the same way I might reflect on mine.. The fact is that something like the Angel of the North came about simply by me having made an angel once, and somebody having seen it, and thinking that they might like to make one permanently.I’m not sure the Angel is really a monument, I’m not sure it upholds any definable moral values. The relationship between what happens in the studio and what happens beyond its walls is one I don’t want to fully understand It’s osmotic. What we do in recreating a world is the furthest from an illustration of the real world that you can get. To occupy that world fully is the only responsibility that we have.There’s been a strange osmosis since the election of this government, where artists are suddenly looked on as free social workers who can somehow massage the collective body, and I may well have been cast in that role.
The morality comes from a daily practice of that work.
I’m concerned about whose morality I am supposed to be upholding when we start worrying about an artists’s responsibility to anything wider than the very real responsibility of being an artist, which is – even more so since the great fights of the 20th century – a responsibility to be free of any ideological control.So, my response to the world is to try to make my own. The need is for integration and assimilation, rather than for perpetuating ghetto status.Lord Desai is a Labour peer and Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. I think that my responsibility is to be an artist – to do what I can about what the last work I made tells me to do My responsibility rests within my work The morality comes from a daily practice of that work. The way is to put forward a programme for equal opportunities for all, regardless of where they come from.Muslims need to be made to feel British, not labelled separately as Muslims. Human rights should adhere to one’s humanity regardless of special characteristics. In a truly equal society we will all be citizens protected under the law, regardless of our race, colour, gender.
To progress to that state we need to reduce, not increase, divisions. Muslims are said to be drifting away from the Labour Party, and have to be won back But the way to win them back is not to single them out. We need to put equality in the public sphere as a top priority rather than enshrine separatenesses into our law.No doubt there are other more urgent reasons for this move. The Anglican Church needs to be disestablished and its privileges such as the Blasphemy Law removed. The Buddhists did not enjoy religious status under the law on charities because they do not believe in a deity. How are we to define a religion, then? Are the Scientologists to enjoy protection, and what about druids, and Satanists? What about differences within religions? Will Muslims be protected against each other? Will Ahmadiyas, who are not regarded as Muslims by the Sunnis and Shias, be regarded as a religious group?A secular tolerant democracy needs to get away from privileging religion as a mark of citizenship rather than giving it a special status. Muslims are a much wider religion, multiracially universal, and do not recognisably constitute a distinct group.
There are white British Muslims and black American Muslims as much as Arab, Chinese, Bosnian and Chechen Muslims. What is meant even now by protecting Muslims is protecting those whom the popular demonising imagination thinks of as Muslims, ie the Middle Eastern and South Asian.But why single out Muslims? Once you step into the religious cauldron, the depth is bottomless There are Hindus and Buddhists, and so on. Both Judaism and Sikhism are exclusive religions not given to proselytising. Sikhs are not a race, but they – at least the Sikh men – are recognisable by their hair and dress. It is the weakness of the current law that few prosecutions succeed on racial hatred grounds.