The Denial of Shit: International Knife-Fight Edition

To understand the way Britain is governed in 2026, it helps to have in your head an image of Hobbiton bedecked in Pride flags. The idea is that if we are all terribly nice and tolerant to each other, and if our foreign policy aligns with our domestic policy in this regard, the rest of the world will be nice to us too. We will follow international law, particularly international human rights law, and implement its watery effete universalism within our own borders, and all will be hunky dory. We can sit about and enjoy our Gail’s second-breakfasts and smoke-free pipeweed alternatives in peace. This is what is referred to by the Sackville-Bagginses who rule us as ‘progressive realism’, but is referred to by people who actually possess military power as the strategy of “losers“.

Now that it is, as we say on Merseyside, ‘all kicking off’ in the Middle East, progressive realism has met reality: when the chips are down, nobody cares about international law; nobody cares about tolerance and diversity; nobody cares about human rights; nobody cares about doing the right thing. They care about winning. When you’re in a knife fight, you stab the other guy. Repeatedly. Until he stops moving. You’ve then won, and he has lost. You can then worry about the rights and wrongs of the matter at your leisure.

Israel is the world champion of international knife-fights, because its political leaders understand their logic. Setting aside the substantive rights and wrongs of the broader Israel-Palestine issue, about which reasonable people can debate, Israel’s conduct since October 7th 2023 has impeccably stuck to this basic principle: when you’re in a knife-fight, you win it, because if you don’t win, you’ll lose. Iran, through its proxies, started a knife-fight on that date, and Israel knew instantly what it had to do. First, win. Defeat your enemies. Two and a half years later, we find ourselves in the final act of that particular drama.

Britain is at the other end of the spectrum, where former Great Powers are unable to even get a single warship in theatre, unable to protect their own airbases from attack and unable to rescue nationals stranded abroad, because its leaders are in the grip of a terrible kitsch. And it is worth here revisiting the thoughts of Milan Kundera on this matter, as they explain so much about what is wrong with how we are governed.

In a crucially important passage in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera sets out a definition of kitsch as “the denial of shit“. Kitsch, he says, is art which aims to salve our metaphysical anxiety by pretending, metaphorically, that ‘shit’ does not exist – by, indeed, presenting to us a world that is purposively and studiedly perfect. The existence of shit is the great slap in the face to anybody who thinks that the world can be perfected, because as long as there are human beings that have to shit, the perfection of temporal existence will never be achievable. Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal in which this is not so – and kitschy art is that “in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist”. It is art which expunges anything that is undesirable, discordant, awkward or imperfect, in the interests of displaying a kind of idealised niceness.

Kitsch is of course undesirable from an artistic perspective. But Kundera warns us of the dangers of the descent of politics into a similar, kitschified aesthetic. “Kitsch,” he says, “is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.” This is because, like everybody’s favourite fin de siècle French constitutional theorist Maurice Hauriou, he knew that political movements are not rational. They are rather formed by “fantasies, images, words and archetypes” (what Hauriou called “directing ideas”) that are passed between people at moments of communion and which propel them forward. As I put it in my earlier post on Hauriou:

Human social movements are driven forward. They are directed by ideas. Those ideas have an independent existence, and individual human beings imbibe them at communal meetings and make them concrete in their own minds through action in between. Human associations, therefore, almost literally have lives of their own; with apologies to Jung, individual people do not drive their associations, but rather associations drive people.

For Kundera, the problem is that people are easily lulled into political kitsches by shared, communal ideals. They have a vision in their mind of a particular type of society, which they know they share with others. And this causes them not just to fixate on what is ‘good’, but to convince themselves that since lots of other ‘good’ people think the same way, it must be the only route to perfection. This in turn leads them to expunge doubts, questions and even independent thought: they convince themselves that anybody who is not fully engaged in the pursuit of perfection – who raises the possibility of shit – is wicked, villainous, evil.

This problem, Kundera goes on, is solvable in a free society, where different political movements compete, and thereby, if you like, remind each other of the existence of shit. This allows individuals to maintain their individuality and artists to produce genuine art. But in a society in the grip of a single, unified political kitsch the kitsch itself becomes totalitarian and there is no escape. No questions in such a society are permitted, because to ask a question is to identify oneself as one who shits, and thereby to remind everybody else that there is no perfection in human affairs.

To say that the woke Hobbiton that is contemporary Britain is beholden to a totalitarian kitsch would be to go slightly too far, but only slightly. It is just about possible in some forums to obliquely question certain aspects of the aesthetic vision which our ruling class holds dear. (Here I am writing this Substack, after all.) But nonetheless there is a dominant, hypertrophied bourgeois progressive liberal kitsch with which we are all familiar. As I previously put it:

The modern progressive liberal is defined above all else by being enamoured with an aesthetic ideal of perfection: a world in which all can, eventually, be made exactly equal; in which borders can be made not to exist; in which everybody can be ultimately liberated from the bonds of nation, religion, family, sex and so on; and in which – this is I think more significant than any other factor – everybody can be made nice in the sense that they will be the type of tolerant, well-behaved, kind, thoughtful, empathetic and almost childishly good-natured stereotype which progressive liberals unfailingly imagine themselves to represent.

This is not totalising yet, and if we are lucky – we may be lucky the sheer amount of shit that it is out there in the world may be about to swamp us and cause us to have a rethink (and perhaps call a plumber). But we are perilously close, and the current dire status of our conception of the ‘national interest’ is a perfect illustration.

For Sir Keir Starmer and his cronies – Lord Hermer and the strange coterie of what I previously called “popinjays, goodie two-shoes and narcissists” who form the international human rights law set from which Starmer himself sprang – the national interest is simply defined by identification with precisely the kitsch I earlier described. The world can be perfected and it can be perfected by, essentially, idealised niceness, conceived along the lines of what a bourgeois person in north London imagines niceness to mean. How nice, they all say to one another, it would be if everybody was nice like us. And they nod along and reassure each other that, in desiring niceness, they too are nice. And thus the kitsch is formed and reinforced: nice people want nice things, and questioning niceness becomes essentially the same thing as defecating in public. If you suggest that there may be any downside at all whatsoever to niceness, then you are not being nice and that is that.

A ruling class in the grip of this type of kitsch, plainly put, is a ruling class which allows itself to spend almost twice as much money servicing the national debt as it does on defence, and five times as much on welfare. And, more broadly, it is a ruling class which fools itself into imagining that life struggles against death, when really life struggles against life. It is a ruling class which looks out across the globe in 1997 and reassures itself that, yes, it is absolutely the case that shit has been abolished for good, and spends the next 30 years behaving accordingly. It is a ruling class that does not think about the future, does not plan for the long-term and does not orient itself towards security or endurance. It is a ruling class that does not have a concept of winning or losing, and so loses. It is a ruling class that will very soon be drowning in the shit that it denies.

As I said earlier, this may in the fullness of time enforce a rethink. Being swamped in faecal matter has a way of doing that. In the meantime we must rightly confront the label of “loser”, and consider whether it might be better if, as a nation, we started thinking about winning.

Dr David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.