The renowned sociologist W.G. Runciman, who died in late 2020, was the sort of figure who liked grand explanations. No one has been grander in our time, except perhaps Perry Anderson. Runciman wrote a massive ‘Treatise on Social Theory’ over many years. It was a sketch of the evolution of human societies in terms of how they operate in three fundamental areas: 1) economic or productive, 2) political or coercive and 3) persuasive or ideological.
One of the questions he asked himself was why the Greek polis (i.e., city state, e.g. Athens, Sparta, Corinth etc.) had died. His answer was that it had failed to tick the three boxes. It had failed to understand the importance of controlling resources and generating profits. It had failed to maintain its militia and failed to pay its mercenaries. And, above all, it failed to convince its people that they had any good reason to accept their subordination within the polis. There was, he said, “no ideology of subordination”.
His argument was that every civilisation needs an ideology of subordination. There will be an ideology of subordination, whether we like it or not. And so — and this is my argument rather than his — we have an interest in making sure that our ideology of subordination is a good one.
What is an ideology of subordination? It is a set of beliefs that persuade the masses to defer to what we now call the elites. In short, it is what we believe in order to accept our lot. In his book Confessions of a Reluctant Theorist — not that reluctant, obviously — Runciman commented that there was no set of values in Athens or Sparta to explain to the slaves or poor why they should defer to their rulers. Aristotle in the Politics testified overwhelmingly to the failure of the rulers to “persuade those whom they designated as kakoi” that their rule was justified. Plato in the Republic allowed a poor man to declare that “the rich are only rich because the poor aren’t brave enough to have a go at them”. This sounds a bit like modern Britain.
Cities could of course be successful if they ticked all three of the boxes Runciman identified. Runciman instances Rome and Venice: Rome, which extended citizenship to foreigners and slaves, which established something like a cash nexus, and which had a remarkable imperial-military cult based on the Temple of Jupiter; and Venice, which learnt how to extract wealth from its colonies, which used its naval power in service of control of commerce, and which magnified its own cult by building a shrine on the site of St. Mark’s bones and decorating it with Roman statuary.
What about our ideology of subordination? As everyone has come to know, Michel Houellebecq achieved notoriety for a novel, Submission, which sketched a vision of France operating under Islamic hegemony. This is one candidate for a modern ideology of subordination. The other major candidate is the corporate communist-capitalist one of China, the WEF, the WHO, the IPCC, the EU, London and Washington D.C. There are, perhaps, two other candidates. One is distinctively out of favour, though it is probably the only one which can save us. It is Christianity. And the fourth is a completely empty fantasy. It is built out of the decorative but insubstantial words of our civilisation: democracy, liberalism, freedom.
On May 1st Tulsi Gabbard spoke to Joe Rogan. She reflected on the rise of Islamism, and offered a simple analysis:
…their goal being to influence populations around the world towards this Islamist ideology. They want to govern the world under Islamic rule, under sharia law… And so this ideological war that’s being waged is being waged by one side, and there’s not a counter-narrative, there’s not a counter-war being waged on the other side to defeat it — with the superior ideology of freedom!
This seems to be the hopeful consensus of our time. That we, in the West — in the world created by the European empires in America, Australia, perhaps India and parts of Africa — can use the grand language of liberty to defeat our enemies. But there is an obvious problem with this.
The problem is, as usual, that we can understand this hypocritically or idealistically. Hypocrisy means we will use this language, and not believe it, and hope other people believe it. Idealism means that we will use this language and believe it.
The problem is that it fails both as hypocrisy and as idealism.
Hypocritically, an ideology of liberty is just a fig leaf for the communist-capitalist protocols of the institutions I have already listed. Liberty will avail us of nothing if its meaning is adjusted, twisted, reverse-engineered to mean something else. We will be forced to be free in a way even Rousseau could not have imagined. We will talk of freedom, but not be free.
Idealistically, an ideology of liberty is empty. It has no content. It offers us no reason to accept subordination. It ends in psychoanalysis and antidepressants. For a time, we believed in ‘meritocracy’. But as Michael Young, Ferdinand Mount, David Goodhart and many others have shown, it is extremely socially disruptive: it can only work within a grander ideology of subordination. Nigel Farage’s ‘British values’ are simply not going to hold anything together for more than a generation — a generation probably already gone.
All three of the great subjects the Daily Sceptic has made its own are elements of a modern secular ideology of subordination. The hope of our secular elites is that they can transcend the eclipse of Christianity by persuading us that we have good reason to value their domination. They do this by issuing grim warnings about what will happen to ‘the planet’ if we do not obey, by trying out new powers in crises such as COVID-19, and by allowing the old habit of liberty to be commandeered by useful administrators and protesters who demonstrate that the entire system is conspicuously and inquisitorially caring of the marginalised by proscribing anyone who does not accept the protocols of inclusion.
It should be obvious that we in the 20th Century made the mistake of taking our civilisation for granted. We believed that Christianity and Empire had delivered us into a relatively beneficent and prosperous modernity, and we supposed that we could dismantle Empire and dismantle Christianity without losing that beneficent and prosperous modernity. This, in retrospect, looks like a mistake. We are now aware that our political system is controlled by a new ideology of subordination, built out of desperate secular attempts to command our allegiance by claiming scientific and moral authority. This is the explanation of wokery, climate change, and even immigration — immigration being the means by which we recruit foreigners into our system not only for work but also in the hope that they, like the foreigners who became Roman, will feel loyalty to the Western state. This, obviously, is frequently not the case. And even if it were the case, in miniature, and for a time, it is happening within a system which is now not free but heavily ideologically coercive. And I, for one, cannot see why immigrants will see reason to respect a system which is now being designed to demoralise its own original people.
It is Christianity, in its truth, and Christian civilisation, in its conflict — see Hume, or Acton, or, indeed, any good historian — that generated the order into which we have been born. Christianity was always ambiguous as an ideology of subordination. It professes no simple submission. It asks for theology, in a way that Islam does not. When discovered in hypocrisy, it weakens itself more than any other system of belief. But it is for these very reasons that it is the most beautiful justification for subordination ever adopted by humans.
If the English fully lose the habit of organising their imagination and institutions around faith in Christ, then there is no alternative but to accept a stronger and inferior ideology of subordination. For the moment, the candidates appear to be the Islamic one, and the Chinese one. Perhaps there is hope in the vivid and various civilisations of Japan, India and even Europe, but it is hard to see how they can offer the requisite simplicity required by a modern system of subordination.
I intend this argument to be grim. Whether we like it or not, we must have an ideology of subordination. In the last five or so years we have been witnessing increasingly desperate secular attempts to supply us with one.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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It must be reacting to the increase in wind turbines and Teslas.
Don’t forget Lockdowns, my sceptical friend. We have Lockdowns to thank. A much needed climate reset. There’ll be another one when all our badness requires it.
You’re both wrong! It was the masks, stopping our deadly CO2 from escaping!
By Jove, jeepy, I do believe you’ve got it!
When I first read that I thought it said “baldness” and I was (not) about to complain to the editor about being persecuted.
I considered baddity
Me too
They want to steal our money and tell us how to live to “save the planet.”
People are so gullible they disserve what they get I suppose.
And while reading this, the BBC news has an item on measuring CO2 emissions from “nodding donkey oil facilities – minor in the extreme, but hey, it keeps them all scared.
Find me a weather forecaster who will put his house on it raining or not raining a week on Tuesday.
An article from 2013.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/09/12/remember-all-those-breathy-predictions-about-an-ice-free-arctic-by-2015-nevermind/?sh=7a1822f9aa19
Embedded in there: Catastrophical ice-free summer in the artic will have happened by 2016. Tipping point! Loads of frozen methane going to be released!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-collapse-sea-ice
Turns out we’re dead, Jim! Why haven’t we noticed?
Is it time to re-run the 1960s scare stories about us all freezing to death? It would be fun if someone more IT literate than me couyld research and put up a series of images and recordings of those times. Ho ho ho for Christmas!
Indeed. Search for “1963 winter freeze” in YouTube; no shortage of footage there. It was only my fourth winter, and can’r remember much about it – perhaps it did not seem unusual then!
It was unusual enough to allow a friend and I to ride our bikes across the frozen River Thames at Hampton Court!
Try Tony Heller’s realclimatescience.com
https://realclimatescience.com/1970s-global-cooling-scare/
I heard earlier on the radio news that we have to declare the Great Barrier Reef as an ecological red zone due to the desperate state of everything around the area.
But don’t I remember hearing about how the reef has bounced back from bleaching as part of its natural cycle? It’s all good, so how come we’re being told it’s a catastrophe?
Just like the Corona pandemic, climate change is a series of localized events freely jumping all around the globe in order to exploit whatever look as it could be exploited. As soon as a geographical area ceases to be useful for the narrative, it silently vanishes again.
The Pseudo Scientific Fraud, that demands compliance. But we do not live in a scientific dictatorship. Science is not decided by a show of hands form a bunch of government funded data adjusters that progressives like to call “climate scientists”. If something cannot be falsified, then it is NOT science. If a theory does not fit with observations then it is WRONG, and that is what we see. Rising levels of CO2 but not much in the way of warming. Fortunately for the pretend to save the planet people they can still pull the wool over most eyes because most people are busy with work and family life and have no time to investigate every issue. They depend on investigative journalists for that, but there are very few of those left and most News is simply activism ———But if there is one issue they should investigate it is this one, as it is about to steal all freedoms and prosperity for political purposes masquerading as science and “saving the planet”
Antarctica 80% or so of the world’s ice by volume – increasing, above the 20 year average (cue Attenfraud et al to drop charges in crevices, remote detonate them to get the ‘calving’ money shot for the sheeple on the BBC).
Arctic 1% world ice volume by weight, way above past yearly means, but was to disappear in 2014, 2016, 2020, now 2030….don’t forget that in 1972-4 US ‘scientists’ wrote furious letters to Dick Nixon to carpet bomb the Arctic with ash or nuke parts of it and save us from the coming ice age.
Greenland, roughly 15% of world’s ice volume by mass, also increasing, contrary to the doom reports issued during every single summer when there is indeed some melting ice faithfully reported by the Fake News. I guess melting ice in a summer season due to many factors including wave and current motion is deemed ‘the science’.
Fail, fail, fail. Climate bullshit and Pharma. The only $2 Trillion plus industries where you can lie, kill, deceive, and be applauded for saving the world and hang plaques and prizes on your wall.
“It’s a mystery. Why has Arctic sea ice cover roared back so quickly over the last few years?”. Isn’t one answer: as climate is essentially cyclic in nature, why wouldn’t it? The mystery would surely be if it didn’t.