The Omnicause and the Arts
Part I of II
What is the Omnicause?
“In the kaleidoscopic landscape of contemporary protest movements, we bear witness to a remarkable convergence — a fusion of causes that transcends traditional boundaries and coalesces into an ever-expanding “omnicause.” From the climate activism of Greta Thunberg to the Palestinian solidarity symbolized by her donning of the keffiyeh, from the seamless transition of Just Stop Oil’s protests to the Gaza conflict, we are confronted with a phenomenon that defies easy categorization.
This campaign creep, as some have termed it, is not limited to the realms of environmentalism and geopolitics; it extends far wider, encompassing a multitude of radical causes that seem to have been absorbed into a singular, all-encompassing movement.”
— The Omnicause: Unravelling the Essence of Modern Protest Movements, Robert Thompson (2024).
You don’t need to have seen Hamlet to be familiar with the much-recycled observation, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” The apparition of the ghost of his assassinated father tips Prince Hamlet into a dilemma that holds the rest of the play in tension. Hamlet must choose between avenging his father’s death—exposing corruption at the core of both his family and the state—and respecting the divine right of kings, maintaining order and entrusting justice and fate to ‘the heavens’.
Denmark is a small European nation with a population of under 6 million people. It’s a 40-minute train ride from Copenhagen to Malmo, Sweden, and a 5-hour drive to Hamburg. It’s important to remember these parameters when considering levels of professed rottenness. We should take comfort when Hamlet observes that something is rotten only in the state of Denmark.
In Hamlet, rottenness confined itself to a geographical area 180 times smaller than Australia. We live in a play where, “something is rotten, generally”, better describes the milieu.
Here and now, perceived rottenness and those urges to amend said rot no longer confine themselves to boundaries geographical or causal. In fact, the various campaigns against the various rots spread messily around the world may have fused into one amorphous rat-king of revolutionary zeal increasingly referred to as ‘the omnicause’.
While mankind has more access to information than ever before, we are seldom trained in how to discern between information, misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. Nor are most of us formally educated in ancient and modern history.
The task of understanding ourselves and each other is made even more difficult by years of cultural dislocation and upheaval for so many groups primarily as the result of colonialism and war; a dislocation that separated so many of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents from our people’s historical homelands and cultural practices.
When paired with a communications revolution introduced by the birth of radio in the 1920s and TV in the ‘40s, you have all of the ingredients necessary to slowly turn mankind from a culturally, politically, philosophically, and historically diverse species, into an ever-homogenising pool of mutual misunderstanding, discernible more by haircuts and skin-shades than various incarnations of peoplehood.
The streamlining of cultural inputs through mass media, most notably social media, significantly limits what we are able to think. Our understanding of basic events and previously indisputable facts are replaced with hot-takes made fashionable by algorithms that reinforce information that appeals to some kind of sensory delight or emotional need.
In a climate of deeply rooted colonial shame within the west, we feel compelled to reimagine all conflicts and their most recent incarnations as simple matters of ‘good and evil’. Binary thinking, in all areas of life, has always been considered a shortcoming. It has become fashionable in political discourse as the direct result of mass media’s influence on our capacity to think beyond a culture collected and vomited back at us by algorithms designed to make us keep scrolling. We feel increasingly emotionally attached to events we have no real understanding of; events bound together only by our emotionally driven desire to involve ourselves in the correction of all the world’s evils.
“Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system…”
“…Even the technical media are relentlessly forced into uniformity… its consequences will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out into the open, derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk – the fusion of all the arts in one work.”
— The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944).
The most disastrous by-product of all of this is our ever-limited capacity for conflict resolution. How could a society like ours—a society that holds the having of an emotionally charged opinion to be of greater moral decency than being able to account for where it came from—be trusted to adequately and impartially amend the wrongs of both past and present?
Conflict resolution, of course, requires mutual understanding, respect, and acknowledgement. If one group isn’t armed with the facts necessary to merely acknowledge that other group—be they a different gender, ethnicity, culture, or religion—is both real and deserving of safety and liberty, then what could have been resolution only manifests in further conflict. A prime example might be life under the Taliban as a woman in 2024, a government who this week put legal restrictions on women’s rights to speak in public or to show any skin.
I repeat, women under the Taliban are legally required to look out at the world from behind cloth—a gendered apartheid largely ignored by the west for reasons I can’t explain beyond orientalism.
It is under these conditions that a conflation of all rotten things we see on our screens may be neatly bundled into an omnicause and railed against with a degree of moral certainty and cognitive efficiency that is unmistakably representative of the age in which we live. Where to invoke a need for nuance, to call for restraint, or to separate issues with respect to their often paradoxical and confusing origins, has become not only the underinhabited domain of the historically literate, but a domain that might be less safe than packing all the world’s ills into the one pekeleh.
This is a short essay about nothing in particular, and everything at the same time—the omnicause. Just like omnicausal activists, I can paint in broad brushstrokes with zero regard for specificity, causality, or hypocrisy.
Part II focuses primarily on the omnicause’s prevalence in and effect upon the arts, arguing that it not only stifles creativity, but that it encourages the arts’ most narcissistic and conceited to use global tragedies as vehicles for personal gain.
In this play, devoting years of one’s heart and soul selectively to human rights causes—to choose with care what goes into one’s pekeleh on the basis of what one truly understands—is downright dangerous. In a world where activism has been commodified and transformed into something someone can wear like a scarf, the omnicause offers a one-size fits all solution to general rottenness.
Part II coming soon.
But here is a teaser:
“The omnicause shifts and changes but its power over us, especially those of us in the arts, only grows. It operates much like Medieval Catholic Indulgences. The omnicause offers atonement and self-promotion simultaneously; the omnicause enables its subscribers to buy a feeling of righteousness that, as a result of the culture that both creates and perpetuates the omnicause itself, cannot be questioned.
One’s success in the arts, or even one’s perceived talent, is deeply rooted in reputation. It is no coincidence that society’s explosive reckoning with endemic sexual assault, among much else, emerged from within the arts — a space where reputation could, and still can, be weaponised for restorative justice like no other. #Metoo platformed women like never before, and helped so many of us see in the mirror what for so long had eluded us.
Reputation among artists, of course, is merely a points system presided over by a horde of other artists and art-adjacents. All involved are competing for attention, for the attention of those who are already receiving attention, or to capitalise on those with attention by helping them to sell their reputation to purveyors of the arts, who again derive not only financial benefit, but reputational benefit by association.