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.
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