Secularism and Prole Drift

In marketing there's an expression called Prole Drift. It's what happens when products considered identity markers by the urban middle class and above are devaluated and become toxic as they are embraced by the lower orders. Burberry is one example: originally marketed toward professionals, it became a staple of British chav culture and is now considered low-brow. Automobile aficionados can attest to how the same thing happened with the BMW 3 series, or more infamously, the whole Porsche brand after the Boxter was released. High-quality coffee products likewise lost their aura of exclusivity as soon as the rabble could afford and appreciate them. It's even happening to cocaine.

Arguably a similar process is going on in the marketplace of ideas. When secular liberalism was first marketed, the militant hardline version as well as the softer Can't-We-All-Get-Along package, it was for the educated populace from respectable homes, who could appreciate and afford art, who had the time and energy to go to the opera and discuss topics of interest in the pretty salons. We all know what happened: the Western European working class eventually stopped clutching their crosses and demanded that the clergy and their power-structures step out of their lives. As laïcité, women's lib, family planning and other such marvels of modernity became everyman's property, enter Houellebecq and his ilk telling us how half-empty our cup of freedom is and what self-serving swine we've all become.

Recently, the Guardian commentator Giles Fraser has provided us with a prime example of this curious dynamic in action. As the wrong kind of white people have finally embraced the notion that religious ideas have no place in determining public discourse, to maintain the precious distinction there is no choice but for the middle class to latch onto another group, no matter how reactionary, while pointing all the time vaguely toward colonialism, but like the unfortunate Richard Seymour of Jacobin (instructing us to read Edward Said and then come back to the discussion), never properly explaining what upper-class plundering of poor countries has to do with drawing Muhammad, funny or otherwise.

During South African apartheid, one of the main arguments against full integration was that it would ruin the beautiful and mysterious indigenous African cultures, the integrity of whose communities better protected by fences and death squads. Today the well-meaning profesionals most likely cannot give a future to the “disaffected banlieues”, but it can give them a cardinal's hat with which to prance around. We don't know what the Muslim population thinks of being turned into a Muslim community (though Kenan Malik has written extensively about the political process involved) or being reduced to a hipster affectation, but right now it does answer a desperate need on part of the middle class to distinguish itself from the vulgar swine that keep running away with their ideas.