Just as the pandemic was getting started in 2020 I wrote a long essay about the contentious issue of whether biological sex was binary or existed as a spectrum. This was a response to a lot of noise around this subject that I’d been seeing on the fringes of what we now know as the gender, or trans wars. Part of that piece included an analysis of the meaning of spectrum as it appears in the rhetorical and sign strategies of LGBT activism. The rainbow - I argued - was the paradigmatic spectrum and the most readily identifiable symbol of LGBT discourse, whether as a flag carried by participants on a Pride march or used as a marker on products, literature or anything else. Describing biological sex as a spectrum was then a sort of territorial claim packaged with a cluster of associations which disrupted normative thinking around sexual dimorphism and the idea of the typical case, in a similar way that the expanding list of labels for sexuality and gender identity disrupt normative understanding of those categories.
I think an addendum to this analysis is in order on account of the way in which the use of the rainbow symbol has metastasised over the last three years. Very few people in the Anglophone world (as always it's worth noting that these phenomena reach their greatest intensity in those countries - at the vanguard of Decline) could fail to have noticed the massive expansion of the rainbow symbol beyond its common association with LGBT activism. We've come to a point where it's now hard to avoid encountering it in any number of incongruous locations. For example one might traverse a rainbow painted road crossing (displacing the traditional 'Zebra' black and white design) in Chiswick or Ealing. Are these places especially in need of ostentatious symbols of inclusivity? Do they have a known lack of diversity or history of discrimination against LGBT identifying people? The intention is opaque. If you visit a hospital or other NHS facility you're positively rainbow bombed by murals, information leaflets, signage and the now ubiquitous - and slightly threatening - rainbow adjacent imperative BE KIND. In addition to these publically funded examples you're also likely to come across private businesses making a strong show of their 'allyship' or status as a Stonewall accredited LGBT employer, replete with bright and shiny rainbow graphics. So, why all the rainbow flogging?
In my analysis in 2020 I drew attention to the use within LGBT activist discourse of the concept of "spectrum" and of the rainbow as the paradigmatic spectrum. On the one hand the rainbow with its multiple colours highlights diversity and inclusivity. All are welcome under its umbrella, and - as the concept of spectrum indicates - the symbol is able to accommodate an infinite multitude of non-conforming and emergent identities. In addition to diversity and inclusion the rainbow also symbolises equity, that all members within the spectrum are equal and there is no place for normative categories of any kind. No-one has the right to claim normative supremacy against which the others are but lesser variations. Everyone is a winner, everyone should be celebrated. Taken as a whole the rainbow stakes a claim for a form of totality - albeit of a rather circular kind. It is a circle of mutual celebration and normative dissolution where the members are considered equal but without singular consequence. It is a flag under which you can be whoever you want to be, but all you will ever amount to is an equal in an otherwise free-floating and boundless community. The burning of a thousand minor stars is blinding.
There are I think at least two main highways through which the rainbow has come to symbolise this new totality. The first should be familiar. During the pandemic the child-like painted rainbow became the symbol not only of collective support for health workers, but of collective conformity with government restrictions. During my many long walks in 2020 I would see this rainbow in windows beyond which lived people terrified to leave their homes. I saw it marked in chalk on pavements next to spray painted signs to KEEP YOUR DISTANCE installed by local councils. I saw it in the gaudy lights of giant advertising boards in Piccadilly circus, on the sides of busses and in stations. The rainbow came to mark a boundary and a sign of allegiance. You were either compliant and clapped the good people of the NHS and the government trying to protect the vulnerable, or you were with the MAGA conspiracists, the death cultists, the anti-vax 5G proto-fascists. Quite a dichotomy set up there, but it was one fuelled by politicians for over two years, and that particular piece of divide and rule has only continued into the latest round of crises. And herein lies the crux of the matter.
The NHS is collapsing. In some respects we no longer have accessible public healthcare in the UK. Certainly many people, myself included, no longer bother trying to access it unless it's a question of life and death. Over 10% of the UK population is currently waiting for NHS treatment and the average waiting time for an ambulance is such that if you were to suffer a stroke, heart attack, or be involved in serious car accident you are most likely to die on the street. As I have written before, comprehensive public health was abandoned during the pandemic in favour of a war economy aimed at one eminently survivable disease. The damage caused has been vast and will only worsen, since not only have many NHS services never returned to pre-pandemic levels, we now have a population wracked by physical and metal ill health, the direct consequence of being confined to their homes and having their social existence decimated by wrongheaded and entirely short-sighted authoritarian policies. We now also have rampant inflation, the combined result of disrupted supply chains (again due to the pandemic response) and the decision of European nations to shoot themselves in the foot by weaponising energy supplies in their now open conflict with Russia in Ukraine.
The second highway towards total-rainbow has been the mainstreaming of the gender wars at the same time gender activism has been making major inroads into State and third sector institutions. The main protagonists of the latter in the UK have been transgender organisations Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence, and the establishment LGBT+ organisation Stonewall, whose Diversity Champions Program and associated Workplace Equality Indices have come under scrutiny for among other things misrepresenting the UK Equality Act. There are however a whole host of advocacy/activist and associated gender-conventicles working across the economy, all using similar rhetoric and symbolism, including variations on the ubiquitous rainbow.
At a time of such self evident decline it's hardly surprising that the rainbow sticking plaster, with its infantile imperative BE KIND has conquered all before it. People have every reason to be angry; they are being taxed for services they cannot access and are freezing and starving to death in order to maintain American global hegemony. Western Governments have done little else over the past few years but sell out to big tech and big pharma, while at the same time annihilating the societal base upon which their populations may have been able to self organise and resist. We are angry, disenchanted and atomised. Our politicians have no answers to the grand problems facing post-industrial societies in climate collapse.
The rainbow provides a convenient image with built in semiotic slippage. Its ability both to totalise and to divide inside from outside make it invaluable - as it was during the pandemic - to rally people behind its nebulous cause, and stifle opposition. When after waiting weeks for a doctor's appointment you finally get to the overcrowded surgery only to find your appointment has been cancelled owing to staff shortages your understandable frustration is confronted by the sign fixed to the plastic screen (another retain from pandemic days) in front of the reception desk. It tells you 'We take a zero tolerance approach to any abuse of our staff". The words are ringed by a rainbow above which reads BE KIND. The reality being presented to you here is clear; you're either with the good guys, the cult of permanent celebration, that waits quietly masked up for treatment that'll never arrive, or you're the proto-fascist horde, the anti-vax thug, the deplorable superspreader event with bells on that deserves nothing from our entirely faultless and virtuous welfare system.
Pull back and apply the same logic to other situations where the rainbow appears like a warning. Whether you're an employee uncomfortable about being told to add your pronouns to your email signature, or a teacher unwilling to teach children about the existence of hundreds of gender identities, or just anyone going about your business only to be confronted by this new creed, this unspoken symbol of your compelled compliance, the rainbow makes clear you are either with us or against us. The rainbow has been radicalised and now represents a boundary permitting the distinction between insiders and outsiders. In a collapsing civilisation diversity, equity and inclusion becomes just another cudgel, another way to govern the ungovernable.
Interestingly, the emergence of the rainbow as a symbol of political kitsch coincides with its collapse as a symbol of unity in LGBT politics. The rise over the last two years of alternative activist frameworks which diverge from Stonewall's monopolistic approach is a sign that the reality of conflict between interests and the limits of facile liberal universalism are beginning to be felt. The Progress Pride flag is perhaps the strongest visual symbol of this conflict. It features the traditional horizontal bars of the rainbow flag but now it is bisected from the left by additional colours meant to represent marginalized people of colour, trans people, and those living with HIV/AIDS. The point of the triangle cleaves into the rainbow at a 45o angle as if it were trying to split it in two, the formal arrangement of which brings to mind El Lissitzky's Soviet era constructivist image 'Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge' 1919. In Lissitzky's picture, the Bolshevik red wedge is shown symbolically dividing the mass of the anti-revolutionary white army.
The progress pride flag, and all the many variations of it testify to a fundamental failure of the LGBT movement and of the liberal identarian dream more generally. If the rainbow flag, which by its own definition is the most inclusive flag imaginable, is not sufficient to hold the demands of your ever expanding list of constituents, then this might point to the insufficiency of personal identity and self-expression for founding a stable political community, or to escape conflicts over competing Rights claims.
The modern "prosumer" (producer/consumer) of digital capitalism will not settle for being integrated anonymously into a abstract concept like the all-inclusive rainbow spectrum. Visibility, a latecomer to the activist arsenal works like an agent-provocateur setting all against all in the battle to be seen. This should not come as a surprise, since in an attention economy like ours, governed by the extreme narcissism of contemporary liberal individualism, being seen, being noticed, might be the difference between sink or swim; at least according to the market based value system that contaminates all Western culture. It is clear that self-actualisation is rarely achieved without standing on the shoulders of others.
By the same token, the attempt to mollify and capture a declining civilisation under the same empty totality will fail. What is described as the woke capture of the institutions is actually this attempt, which aims to mitigate the negative externalities of our digitally dysphoric and ever more fragmented world by bureaucratic means. But DEI policies and disciplinary procedures are no substitute for values nurtured within real historical communities and real-world practices. Ultimately the rainbow stands for everything and thus stands for nothing. LGBT activism has been thoroughly co-opted by corporate interests and subsumed into the prevailing culture of marketing and rat-race self promotion. While at the same time its colourful imagery has been generalised into a society-wide palliative and encomium to quiet compliance with the ruling orthodoxy of managed decline. The rainbow symbol's only function now is as a brightly coloured boundary running through everything. Vaccinated,/unvaccinated, Brexiteer/Remainer, Fascist/anti-fascist, inside/outside, with us/against us. These absolutes are a selection from a far longer list which now serve to divide the modern West into opposing and utterly implacable camps.
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