The old Soviet Union was a world of bureaucratic tyranny, double-speak, and the banality of evil. It was a society of topsy-turvy norms where resentful child informers wielded incommensurate power, and commissars indoctrinated an ideology everyone knew to be bankrupt: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work” was a wry catchphrase. The great wonder was that it lasted as long as it did, a testament perhaps to the capacity of the mass to keep their mouths shut and heads down, and just get on with it.
It has felt refreshing, therefore, to leave behind a similar totalitarianism in the UK and move to China where my experience to date is of much greater liberty. Over an epochal two decades or so in my home country, the Rainbow Religion appears to have become just that: a dominant state ideology which brooks no rival.
Gulled and duped by emotive appeals to compassion, and enforced by an intolerant “liberating tolerance”, essential freedoms have withered.
Among the modern-day politburos are HR departments inculcating DEI initiatives (usually in hock to some protection-racket wheeze: diversity kitemarks or some such). My own background has been in education for all those 20 years, watching open-mouthed as we were progressively required to swallow patent absurdities by the Department for Education, giving credence in particular to fantasies about gender. On both sides of the Atlantic, the child informers are now those poor little souls who, at the mercy of relentless online algorithms and social contagion, are brainwashed into the cult. Parents are kept in the dark, emotionally blackmailed or legally coerced into playing along. One hoped it would all fall apart under the weight of its own contradictions, as did the USSR, but not soon enough for me. Like Orwell’s Winston Smith there came a point where being forced to accept that black was white became untenable; a government inspector told me to my face that a Christian headmaster expressing orthodox Christian beliefs in a Christian school was no longer permitted. Many dear colleagues face similar dilemmas, but I am no longer under any such restraint in my new school.
I am not naïve about geopolitics or anyone’s useful idiot, I hope. But as you can imagine, it has caused me to reflect deeply on the nature of freedom. The purpose of Western education from Aristotle onwards was to train the young to love the good and hate the bad, which presupposed a universal moral law. In the East Confucius taught something similar: education should lead to virtue. Rousseau and a long line of thinkers after him have turned this on its head. We are now offered a freedom from virtue, which is really no freedom at all, and descends inexorably into infantilism, idiocy, and insanity. St Anthony the Great forecast a coming time when “men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’” Centuries before him Isaiah prophesied the curse of a nation whose children ruled over them. Rousseau’s subjectivist doctrines and romanticising of childhood (despite abandoning his own children) have resulted in that nebulous misconception: “child-centred education”. They have also led inevitably to the triumph of the idea that we are defined by our feelings, rather than objective reality, and should follow our desires without limit or external constraint.
C.S. Lewis followed up a 1943 book on education with a fictional treatment of the same themes in his great dystopia, That Hideous Strength. In both, he delineates the dangers of the subjective drift in Western education; Edmund Burke had offered similar warnings at the time of the French Revolution: “They are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature.” Lewis contends that the denial of objective values cannot be held consistently, robs education of any true goodness or beauty, and is ultimately inhuman. It leads not to human flourishing and freedom, but to the Abolition of Man (male and female). So, while Lewis, following Aristotle, saw education as the inducting of the young into “just sentiments”, modern relationship and sex education (RSE) curricula are an invitation to depravity. The inconsistency of safeguarding training on female genital mutilation sitting alongside Costa’s glorification of mastectomy scars seems not to jar as it should, “…but what should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men?”
Chinese parents that I speak to are aghast at developments in California and elsewhere (places they have long aspired to send their children). This is a culture that values harmony over warring echo chambers in its public life, and that rests on a shared moral vision which recognises the centrality of family life to the nation. As Burke put it, “We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is the zealous citizen. We pass on to our neighbourhoods, and our habitual provincial connections. These are the inns and resting places.” China has an immense and rich history, and history, of course, is what must be erased or rewritten if your mindset is that of O’Brien in 1984. In Robert Service’s histories of the Bolshevik project, the most striking thing is how haphazard it all was. Like O’Brien, the leaders saw the point of power as power, with the details to be invented as events warranted. In other words, they made it up as they went along, much as the rainbow flag seems to have a new iteration with every vocal victim group included in the cause. School textbooks and lesson plans are hastily and shoddily assembled (they were quite often drivel even before all of this), history is reinvented, and our culture crumbles.
The final chapter of the Abolition of Man describes a future when the values of the majority are controlled by a small group, who in turn, are ruled only by whim. The result of Rousseau’s philosophy is an elite surrendered to their own motivations, who have done away with traditional morality only by the arbitrary selection of parts of it to undermine others which they do not like. They could no more invent a new moral value than a new primary colour; it all has a horribly familiar ring to it in my recent experience.
China has understandably resisted Western universalism, historically, and I can imagine that importing the Alphabet Cult looks as potent a threat as welcoming the opium which so devastated society here in the 19th Century; they will likewise want nothing to do with it. Can you blame them?
Nick Seward is Head of Schools at ICS Hong Kong.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I’m sure there are well meaning people working in “public health” – lots of them perhaps. But I don’t think anything will ever convince me to give my support to any initiative or organization that labelled itself “public health”.
“Public Health” is actually a good thing. In wealthy countries it enabled the eradication of preventable diseases like Malaria. What it is we need to be worried about is the hijacking of bodies and institutions in the pursuit of political agenda’s. In the case of climate that is “Sustainable Development” and “Net Zero”.
It should be good but I have zero confidence that the hijacking you mention can be prevented.
Yes but it is the hijacking that is the problem not the idea of public health. As regards climate all institutions have been hijacked —science, education, all government departments, art, media, and virtually everything else you can think of. So eg we would not say that the arts or education are bad things. Only the hijacking of them is bad.
I think publicly funded bodies that set out to “do good” will get hijacked so the less we have of them, the better.
So you want “less” public schools? “Less” public fire brigades and police? “Less” public hospitals. ———-I am a small government person myself but I think you are rather taking things to extremes.
Bodies are only being hijacked by the progressive left, and it is they we should be attacking, not the actual bodies.
The bare essentials only that the market is not able to provide sensibly/affordably. The NHS is a disaster, but in any case it’s concerned with treating sick people, which isn’t quite the same as “public health”.
“Public Health” gave you vaccinations for everything from Small Pox to TB. ———-But I think we are wasting our time here. We are playing with words. —–Notice I say “we” not you. —–Perhaps we should focus our attack on this parasite new government, because if we both want smaller government that doesn’t interfere in our lives then we now have the very opposite.
Never a waste of time debating with a fellow sceptic. I think we agree on who the enemy are and where we should focus our efforts. If there is ever a winding back from the gigantic state and all of its tentacles, it almost certainly won’t go as far as either of us would like! I guess my point is that the political branch struggles to implement what it purports to want even regarding the most basic and fundamental or services it directly controls never mind all the other do-gooding institutions that it funds. As for vaccines, I don’t know enough to comment. Sanitation and food hygiene I would be ok with but when the state starts wanting to nudge my private health choices I have to say no. Have a good day!
“The Director-General of the World Health Organisation is adamant that this must be his organisation’s priority”…….Bet he isn’t adamant in private, and I bet he also has a private Jet.
Great article, and I have been saying all of those things since about 2007. Climate Change dogma is based on faith and emotion rather than fact and reason. It is a political agenda that requires it’s own facts and makes statements of certainty about things where there are none. It will all the time make claims that are a tiny smidgeon of the truth and will turn that into a planetary emergency. The Malaria scaremongering is typical of this idea that people must be filled with fear in order that they accept the politics masquerading as science. Malaria used to exist in the UK, Holland, USA etc and what wiped it out was good public health enabled by prosperity. It is not a disease of climate yet that is what we are repeatedly told and it all seems plausible because it is told to us as if it is common knowledge with this air of authority because “all scientists agree”. This is FALSE and matters of science are not decided by a show of hands from government funded data adjusters and climate modellers.
A friend said to me one time “Why would governments tell us there is a climate emergency if it isn’t true”? ———This is the crucial question that everyone needs to ask. I asked it in 2007 and what I have found is that Climate Change and its solutions are the biggest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated. ——-My friend asked me that question because he is getting his information from mainstream news who are presenting a particular narrative, and he, like most people think that these news channels (like BBC, SKY News) are doing investigative journalism on this issue and so can be trusted. But once you read books like “Hubris” Michael Hart, —-“Watermelons” James Delingpole, —-“Energy and Climate Wars” Economides and Glover, ——“Taken by Storm” McKitrick and Essex, —–“Climate Uncertainty and Risk” Judith Curry etc etc you realise very quickly there is a completely different story altogether. You may disagree with that other story, but like my friend, how can you disagree with it if you NEVER HEAR IT?
Very true. And the reason why the politically driven “Climate change” is clearly nonsense, is simply its basis on CO2.
The personalities driving this global policy originally needed a scientific term to justify and promote their novel idea and they chose CO2, a gas everyone had heard of but few know very much about.
They forgot, and presumably did not know at the time, that human beings are simple animals which require oxygen to breathe, whereby we convert some of that oxygen into CO2 as part of the biological process of life.
In fact, we all exhale 100 times as much CO2 as we inhale: simply put, we are all CO2 generators – with every breath we breathe.
So, using CO2 as the basis for all evil is idiotic and requires the extinction of all animal life, not just human life.
And then one can discuss the logarithmic relationship between CO2 and its greenhouse effect, or the research showing CO2 at high atmospheric levels has a cooling effect, or the far greater effect of water vapour on the climate (the public would never have accepted water being the source of all evil), and so on and so forth.
Leave the climate alone! We are far too stupid to fully understand its workings and we are frighteningly arrogant if we believe we can control it.
Finally, to your list of authors, I suggest you add Patrick Moore (ex Greenpeace), Ian Plimer and Gregory Wrightstone.
Yes but we can argue about science all day. We can talk about feedback loops, logarithmic rather than linear effects, climate sensitivity to CO2, models full of speculations regarding a myriad of parameters etc etc but we are mostly wasting our time because this issue isn’t and never was about science in the first place. The science is just the excuse for the policies.
I am just trying to find ways to open people’s eyes to the obvious. We are animals, therefore we exhale CO2, therefore CO2 cannot be harmful.
Having said/written that, I have not been able to convince people with science PhDs! Very frustrating!