Separatism [entry in the taphonomy of worlding]
As inspired by Raymond Williams' Keywords
I’ll start with today’s opening sentence of the wikipedia entry on separatism:
Separatism is the advocacy of cultural, ethnic, tribal, religious, racial, regional, governmental, or gender separation from the larger group.
As such it is a political term and specifically relates to the boundaries and membership of a polity, such that it informs secession “movements” with regards to territory, often in relation to the fact that empires do not know what boundaries are, when their expansion incorporates, unavoidably, the diversity of human life despite the drive for one oneness or another.
While those human elements of identity rely on what is recognised as more contingent elements, of, say, locality, religiosity, supra-familial background or cohort/group upbringing (and so require more insistent reinforcement), there are some more essential ontologies that inform examples like gender separatism, which are of more use to example, herein, a more basal emotional illustration of separatism as bad worlding, if not an emotional illness.
Generally gender separatisms are not born in sexual orientation but in some other aspect of the worlding we do (ideology, gender roles and expectations, power relations and entitlements) and because of real exploitation or a perceived affront to one’s rights and privileges, the solution found is an emotional retreat from the world as composed of those negotiations. It forgets that those negotiations create those very ontologies, from which it seeks to champion or defend one class or type, (this is another type of “one oneness” or other, less imperial in ambition but worlding none-the-less). It is the same movement as the more imperial need to control diversity, expressed in a different context.
If you criticise any of this as imperial you are missing the point that both/all these expressions are worlding efforts. I’ll also add you are less likely to pick up the pieces if you criticise it as, for example, imperialistic or ideological or, perhaps even, blinkered.
Criticism can sap agency. Separatism is an over-reaction to agency-sapping critiques.
Quietism?
This separatism also often shares in its style of movement a quietist potential: the nunnery, a desert hillside of cave-living hermits, the monasteries of meditation, prayer and routine. There is also a co-commitment in which there is an conscious withdrawal from the society’s mundane or worldly activities, but even if this is put in terms of removing oneself from ‘the world’, the world is not actively rejected in quietism, and an accommodation is reached, or an extension science or outreach programme is developed.
As such there is often the replacement of family responsibilities & duties with that of the religious order, which substitutes for the family or indeed a more profane personal career. Indeed this is why it is possible in some societies to off-load a surplus of children, without killing them off, as potential rivals to the throne in the name of stability, regardless of the individual’s preferences for a life of retreat and contemplation.
Separatism, emotionally speaking, not only withdraws from those responsibilities, it rejects the world and all its negotiations. Secession is not the aim, destruction of the world is the aim. In the name of… some element of the world.
This is unhealthy, because the world cannot be destroyed. If only because the negotiation of the world, even in rejecting it, is an act of negotiating the world. Separatism rejects the world in bad faith, separatism worlds by worlding as if it is not worlding. This is irresponsible.
This is not possible. And just because we world without having a word for worlding, does not mean that that is not what is going on.
Of course revolutionaries are a temporal separatism, which rejects this world for the next more perfected world, and radical traditionalists are the same, but can do it with the benefit of hindsight, this is equally indulgent.
What of the ‘emotional illness’ ?
The rise of conspiracy theorying is the worst kind of separatism, it removes agency from ones’ own life, and like covert narcissism blames all of one’s or class’ troubles on the machination of others, it indulges the emotional separatism that there is nothing you can do, while at the same time giving all one’s power to the true enemy, apathy and the nihilism of tearing that down which is all we have.
