A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #13–Michael Dummett.

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*Originally published in the 3:16am blog.

** “EJ Spode” is a pseudonym of Peter Ludlow.

A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #13

13. Michael Dummett

Michael Dummett was a lot more politically active than most people realize. From the late 1960s onward, Dummett was deeply involved in campaigns against racist immigration policies in the UK. He and his wife, Ann, did casework with immigrants and refugees and saw—up close—how the UK’s rules were being applied in a discriminatory way. He helped found or worked closely with groups like Justice, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), and later the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Race and Community. He wrote a whole book about it: On Immigration and Refugees (Dummett, 2001), which is basically the fruit of decades of his activism.

I want to stress that a lot of his work involved “feet on the pavement.” A friend of his told me that Dummett and his wife, Ann, went almost every day to assist immigrants with legal issues. (She was an immigration lawyer.) Whether that was an exaggeration, I cannot say, but it is clear that Dummett was very committed to this cause—a cause that seems particularly topical today.

Dummett spoke publicly against the National Front and other racist movements in the 1970s–80s. Dummett was also obsessed with fair voting systems. He argued that “first-past-the-post” voting misrepresents voters’ preferences. He wrote a book called Voting Procedures (Dummett, 1985) and another called Principles of Electoral Reform (Dummett, 1997), where he analyzes different systems and defends more proportional/expressive ones.

Schuringa, of course, wants us to believe that all this was just a whole lot of nothing. He describes Dummett’s political work in two sentences, and then dismisses it based on a quote, lifted from Dummett’s book On Immigration and Refugees, in which Dummett says that an “indigenous culture” was not to be “submerged.” Schuringa tells us that Dummett is just channeling Margaret Thatcher’s quote about not swamping English culture with immigrants. What a wildly dishonest representation of what Dummett said.

What Dummett is clearly talking about is not England being submerged by immigrants (a thesis which he calls “utterly ridiculous”), but the right of minority groups to not have their culture submerged. To illustrate what he means by culture-submerging, Dummett uses the example of how the American holiday of Halloween, and the custom of trick-or-treating, are submerging the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico. I can testify that that is definitely an issue in Mexico.

As to the question of whether the immigrants coming into England could “submerge” it, Dummett, to avoid any misrepresentation like the one Schuringa is putting forth, takes the readers by the hand and very slowly walks them through the reasons why that is absolutely NOT what he is saying:

There is a right which opponents of immigration will rejoice to see enunciated. They should not rejoice too exuberantly, for it is of extremely limited application. It is nevertheless worth stating at the outset, lest it be overlooked among more general considerations. The right is one possessed by groups united by race, religion, language or culture: such groups have a right not to be submerged. Formulation of this principle requires the greatest precision, since the standard complaint of racists and xenophobes who object to any level of immigration that is taking place, however low it may be, is that the country is being swamped; for this reason I have deliberately chosen the word ‘submerge’ in place of the more emotive ‘swamp’. Mrs Thatcher made the utterly ridiculous assertion that the English people and English culture – or perhaps the British people and British culture (she was not specific) – would feel themselves swamped by the proportionately tiny number of people of Caribbean or Indian origin who had entered the country. No minorities of so small a size could possibly have swamped Britain or its cultures.(Dummett, 1985, my emphases)

Dummett then goes on to point out that because of its long history of submerging minority cultures, “Britain would indeed be in no position to complain of being swamped, even if any real danger of its being so existed.”

How can Schuringa, or anyone, pack so much dishonesty into a single book? I don’t know, but the effect is somewhat similar to the strategy deployed by American right wing advocate Steve Bannon: He calls it “flooding the zone with shit,” or what we used to call a “firehose of falsehood.” The idea is to flood the discourse with so much falsehood and disinformation that no one has the time or energy to correct it all. If someone does take the energy to correct it, then the tactic is to say the person making the corrections has been triggered, or their need to constantly correct the record must be evidence of some bias on their part. Or that there must be something true in the flood. Then too, there is the implicit threat that anyone who objects will have the firehose of shit turned upon them. We have seen this strategy play out in the US political theater. It is sad to see a philosopher wielding a similar tactic.

But again, just to be clear, this deliberate misrepresentation of Dummett’s point about submerging a culture is Schuringa’s entire case against Dummett’s lifetime of political work. And it comes at a time when you would think that work in support of immigrants would be celebrated and not ridiculed.

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