Something is happening. We have several things we can do. The first thing is to observe it. The second is to criticise it. The third is characterise it. A fourth is to suggest causes.
By ‘it’, of course, I mean what has been clear since the emergence of COVID-19, and how this has altered our sense of the changes of the last 10 years (since the rise of political correctness 2.0), the last 50 years (since the cultural liberalisation of the 1960s), or even the last 200 years (since the religious and political liberalisation of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the British ‘National Apostasy’ associated with Catholic Emancipation, the Repeal of the Test Acts and the Reform Bill).
I see a lot of interesting suggestions, but no general statements, so offer this as an attempt to bring together as many lines of thought as possible.
- The decline of the church
Until the separation of church and state in the centuries after the Reformation every state was also a church. The decline of the church and the rise of the secular state had consequences:
• the loss of an anchor or aspiration or standard ‘not of this world’
• a shift from concerning ourselves with salvation to betterment in this world
• the emergence of a need to find a new anchoring belief system for the state
• a tendency to build such a belief system out of policies claiming to better the world.
Overall, we sought justification in terms of what could be achieved in this world.
- The rise of the cash nexus, trade and debt
In the 17th and 18th centuries the Dutch, English and French experimented with remarkable new institutions of banks, bonds, stock exchanges and national debt. This had consequences:
• for the first time in history ‘growth’ could be achieved without conquest
• we increasingly came to see everything in the world as marketable
• there was much more commercial activity and travel (and, ironically, conquest)
• markets enabled remarkable corporate monopolies to emerge (monopolies which attempted to tie up those markets)
• debt enabled us to postpone responsibility, since our current activities could be funded by mortgaging the future.
- The rise of bureaucracy
States increasingly concerned with this world and with a more complicated commercial world to preside over, and exploit, turned to bureaucracies to manage the situation. For the first time in the West a class of bureaucrats emerged, loyal not to a lord or a locality but the state. They were to be funded out of the public purse: taxes but also debt. Debt enabled not only great standing armies to be maintained, but also standing teachers and standing doctors. This had consequences:
• a shift from the old view that government should maintain law and order to a new view that government should manage and even educate the state
• an increasing use of statistics
• the emergence of a language of bureaucratic imperatives which for the last two centuries has existed alongside the similarly novel language of commercial imperatives.
Now these two, or three, languages exist alongside each other, and have drowned out the old languages of state law and order, and church. The new three languages, which exist alongside each other, and infect each other, are the language of bureaucracy (of the state or public monopoly) the language of corporations (of wealthy lobbying private monopolies), and the language of markets (of freely active private individuals). Together these three languages provide most of our current political language.
- The rise of meritocracy
Education had for centuries been dominated by the church and state. Commerce had almost no effect on education. But bureaucratic imperatives led, in the nineteenth century, to the formation of new universities, and the adjustment of historic universities, which abandoned religious tests and developed academic subjects designed (at first indirectly; later directly, if spuriously) to serve the interests of the state. This had consequences:
• the emergence of a class educated in bureaucratic and corporate languages, as well as academic languages
• the emergence of a divide, evident only clearly with the expansion of the universities in the late 20th Century, between this educated class and the uneducated classes
• the demoralisation of the poor, who, without the church, had only their relative failure in commercial and corporate activity to give them a negative identity and otherwise had to build a positive identity out of the modern bread and circuses supplied by doles and media.
Populism is the politics of those excluded in the modern class divide.
- The rise of specialisation
Until a certain point in history everyone was a generalist, from the farmer to the Renaissance gentleman. But commercial imperatives – Smith’s division of labour – as well as bureaucratic and corporate imperatives encouraged everyone in an increasingly complicated society to specialise. This had consequences:
• as the educated class became less generally educated and more specially educated there was an undermining of the old secular ‘republic of letters’ which constituted our culture between 1700 and 1950
• the rise of a difficulty about making general and wise assessments of the political worth of any policy under consideration
• the increased likelihood that a policy would only seem attractive if it was sanctioned by specialists: and only if the specialists could associate their policy with some sort of crisis
• the increased likelihood that the shared opinions or values of our society would be fatuous, since they were side effects of a media circus trying to generate excitement in the new boring languages.
- The rise of political correctness
The decline of the church meant that the state, especially now with its phalanx of bureaucrats, required a belief system. Commercial, corporate and bureaucratic imperatives supplied the language: but could not supply anything more powerful. State ideologies appeared in dictatorships, but also in liberal societies. This had consequences:
• the state had to find a surrogate for religious belief
• this belief had to be confected out of educated opinion and the new public languages
• the belief had to be something sufficiently contorted that it would appeal to the educated class but appear to be beneficial to the uneducated class
• the result was ‘political correctness’, or a set of received values which could be used to distinguish those willing to swear allegiance to what were, in real terms, contradictory and self-defeating policies from those who wouldn’t or couldn’t.
The world of political correctness is a world in which the elite avow a ‘public’ belief which ostentatiously contradicts their ‘private’ interests: but enables them to flourish commercially, corporately or bureaucratically nonetheless. It offers nothing to the demoralised poor and uneducated.
- The rise of a corporate-commercial-bureaucratic monopoly in politics
Politicians are trained in corporations, can expect to work for them after retiring, and are lobbied by them when in office. This has consequences:
• it is very hard to use any sort of available political language against the ruling elites or, what is the same thing, the educated class
• we have a ruling culture which is extremely fragile and fickle, since solidarity and unanimity can only be achieved by following fashions of unreal and hypocritical avowals of extreme sentimental allegiance to certain policies, usually supported by specialists and justified by crisis or spurious emotional identification
• the ‘public’ culture which exists now has almost no reality: it is a confection out of whatever successes private interests have had in using the available political language to create a pseudo-ideology of rationalist solutions and policy deliverance.
- The emergence of a world of fractured crisis
Political correctness is partly a moral matter, where it is dominated by a concept of equality which has existed since the French Revolution; but it has also, in the last 50 years, become a matter of technology. Whereas before technology was positive, serving progress, now (in the prevailing ideology) it is associated with crisis, for better and worse. This has consequences:
• we are told that capitalist technological society has damaged the world by draining it of its resources leading to ‘climate crisis’ and ‘overpopulation’
• this justifies policies which damage the world, including the human world, far more than the problems they are designed to solve
• Covid-19 was a vivid instance of a crisis which was magnified by corporate and bureaucratic imperatives and the media circus until it dominated every other possible political concern and became the unlikely contender for the cause of the greatest solidarity ever seen by man.
- The demoralisation of the educated
The demoralisation of the educated classes by climate politics, pandemic protocols and political correctness has so far been justified by the solidarity it has achieved in the service of the interests of bureaucrats and corporations: but it has alienated the uneducated classes and is in the course of alienating the educated classes to the point where they will have no ability to make adequate sense of any problem of genuine political concern. This has consequences:
• the instincts of the educated classes will be to generate solidarity negatively by undermining the continuity of their own civilisation and the capacity of their own state to deal with genuine problems in a realistic manner
• a culture is emerging in which unity is only affirmed by admitting to historical transgressions and signalling virtue by admitting guilt
• we are coming to believe that there is nothing of the value in the past, there is only bread and circuses in the present, and there is only repayment of debt in the future
• education is increasingly becoming an education in limited specialisations, in which incentives serve specialisation and in which unity is only found in what is encouraged by bureaucratic-corporate state propaganda (since everything else is to be discouraged as misinformation, disinformation—or atavism—and censored)
• the educated classes will continue to turn to specialists for answers, to indulge in hypocritical or fatuous politics of display, and to do so in such a way that they destroy their societies while claiming to save them.
One consequence of this is that the bureaucracy, which has one task, to serve the state and hence society, cannot see what the state as a whole requires, and out of specialisation and hypocritical moralisation and frank opportunism comes to serve corporate interests.
- The end of identity
In an era in which nothing can be affirmed except whatever is required by the fashions of crisis, a premium is put on identity. The problem is that indeterminacy in our politics also threatens confidence in identity. Identities become political, some more admirable than others, and as much cultural appropriation and cultural disburdening takes place, so identity becomes malleable. This has consequences:
• no positivity is found in old identities associated with church and state (religious, imperial or national)
• everything must be globalised, abstracted and emptied out: especially our own civilisation
• women have been ‘emancipated’, and this has led to the overturning of the old sexual division of labour, causing much confusion of sexual activity and sexual identity (for both men and women): with the new political correctness positively valorising sexual confusion
• the freedom to do anything has developed into the freedom to be anything as long as there is the consent of others and the consent of the self
• we have become separated from nature, cushioned by technology and increasingly alienated even from our immediate selves
• we remain unformed and immature, confections of neurosis and narcissism.
All this is the consequence of living in a state which claims, fatuously and hypocritically, to do everything for us. Fatuous and hypocritical, because it is not true. But it is harder to say that it is not true: because our language has been corrupted by bureaucratic and corporate imperatives, creating noise and chaos like the final orchestral rising glissandos of Sgt. Pepper, above which we can increasingly only hear the dissonant siren falsettos of globalism, slave-morality and crisis.
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How about a fifth – do something about it.
And that won’t involve voting.
Spot on. At the end of the day, money talks, and what we support that way can be useful, or the financial collapse of some of them by withholding support in some way or other. Look at the number of banks that have gone bust in America recently, e.g.
Good list – why are we imploding, adding to the above:
1-the end of doing things manually
2-the end of living in the world of the 5 senses where reality is now very much optional
3-corporate fascism ie govt + huge corporations eg. pharma, evthg is money and power
4-govt/corp controlled fake news and propaganda – endless
5-uniparty political corruption that is off the scale with the real power behind the thrones being transational agents
6-end of local democracy (you voted today but have no idea for who or why, you voted for a corrupt party and none of these clowns have talked to you, knocked on your door or explained in person or even online who they are)
7-UN/WHO/EU + the other 721 int’l orgs, treaties and nonsense
8-end of science – climate, rona, darwinism, trannyism – all sorts of philosophies parade around as science when they are driven by money and funded for reasons of power or to eradicate families or the church etc.
9-end of critical thinking and disobedience and the rise of conformity and group think
10-the concommitant decline of indivduality
11-the end of faith and the replacement of awe and divine grandeur with midgets, morons and half wits who call themselves leaders, the science, or the experts
12--debt slavery – who can rebel when you are up to your eyes in debt?
13-end of weapons – hard to be belligerent when your only weapon is a fork, in the middle ages every man knew how to wield a sword, dig up ground, labour and had to survive – today we know and do mostly nothing and moan for more
14-end of free speech
15-cultural marxism and sexual perversion that is off the charts
16-Endless wars and managed events – endless warring will destroy you, see Byzantium for more info
Can you imagine a Brunel, a Peel, a Wilberforce, an Elgar, a Dickens, a Nelson, or a reduced/very light Thatcher in today’s world? I can’t.
Strange that you don’t mention population replacement: the West has to become less Western because the population is rapidly increasingly non-Western.
You might also add the moronisation of popular “culture”.
the West destroyed by useful idiots
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The west would perhaps more aptly named as the european parts of the American empire.
The European mistake of the latter half of the 20th century was the attempt to redefine ourselves based on something which was a mere mirror image of us. Thus robbed of both its foundations and the mortar which held its bricks together, it immediately started to crumble into a not overly decorative pile of rubble.
The West is getting eaten alive from within. Read “The War on the West” by Douglass Murray.
Yes, but better yet, try James Lindsay’s 30min lecture exposing what the poison is and where it came from. It is certainly causing a stir
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc0684V2ej8&t=438s
Thanks. I will have a wee look at that. ——–I know people can sleepwalk, but I never knew a whole country could, and infact the entire western world is sleepwalking to disaster.
I prefer James Lindsay’s analysis. He gave a 30min lecture to the Identity and democracy Foundation at the European Parliament recently.
IMO it is the clearest exposition of what the malaise is and where it came from etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc0684V2ej8&t=438s
How about 11. The replacement of facts with feelings.
Maybe people that know too much can’t be controlled. In promoting the idea that what you believe is more important than demonstrable scientific fact it seems that some are trying to move us to back to the pre-scientific age of superstition when only a chosen few had access to truth and knowledge, which would give them the power to impose whatever crackpot ideas they may have on the masses, as well as a way to acquire vast wealth. Net zero being a prime example.
A bit late for a comment – but anyway. I would highly recommend, to those interested in the thrust of this article, Carl Jungs late book / eassy published in English under the title ‘The undiscovered self’. Written towards the end of hs life, and like so much fom the recent past – incredibly prescient for our times.