To understand the zeitgeist in full we have to understand zeitgeistlichkeit. What I mean is that to understand the ‘spirit of the age’ we have to understand that the most significant thing about our age is our tendency to think of it as an age; to think that the age has a spirit; and to think that it is a spirit that moves. Or, as Bob Dylan put it in recent times so that everyone could understand it, the times they are a-changin’.
Dylan sang this in the 1960s, but the 1960s, though we celebrate it, was just the age in which the recognitions of the 1820s finally broke into the beat combo and vinyl record scene. Byron, Shelley, liberalism all flamed out like shook foil in the 1820s. It was in the 1820s that William Hazlitt wrote The Spirit of the Age. It was in 1829 that Thomas Carlyle wrote ‘Signs of the Times’. And it was in 1831 that John Stuart Mill wrote a commentary on ‘The Spirit of the Age’, in which he said that the spirit of the age was evident in there being such a phrase as ‘the spirit of the age’ – a phrase which had not existed 50 years before. These writers had a great sense that everything was changing. In Berlin, Hegel had suggested that all of philosophy had come to a full stop after 25 centuries of work: but this was then refuted in very simple manner by others such as Marx, not through argument, but simply by saying that time had passed since Hegel, and that the passage of time itself sufficed as a refutation. Yes, indeed, Hegel’s philosophy had ‘timed out’.
Everywhere there had been tumult. After 1789, all the radical and revolutionary theorists had wanted to build the world de novo or ex nihilo, anew or out of nothing. All the reactionary theorists lamented that the old traditional world could not be defended. Malthus – who fretted about over-population – attempted to refute the Enlightenment in a single argument. (See David Stove’s book On Enlightenment for an explanation.) And everyone was influenced by Malthus, whether for or against. Darwin appears to have thought of natural selection by reflecting on Malthus in the 1840s. And Darwin’s entire evolutionary scheme was a scheme about time. It was historical. Engels later in the century commented that formerly philosophers had always tried to make sense of the world in terms of things, but now they understood everything in terms of processes.
More than a century later, in the 1960s, a German historian called Reinhart Koselleck, when trying to make sense of all this, rather whimsically began to refer to a Sattelzeit, by which he alluded to a watershed moment in history. He located this at the end of the 18th Century and the beginning of the 19th Century. These dates coincide with John Stuart Mill’s observation that no one before that time had referred to the spirit of the age. This Sattelzeit marked a new consciousness: a sense of rupture, a sense of progress, an overwhelming sense of time, of this time being different from all other time.
In the early 20th Century Wyndham Lewis wrote a book entitled Time and Western Man which argued that our tendency to think in terms of time was damaging our ability to, well, write novels (he derided Joyce, Woolf and the others), but also make sense of anything. He wanted a return to Plato. In a sense modern thought has been a tussle between the survivals of an old Platonic belief in timelessness – or eternal truths – and a Machiavellian, Darwinian, Schopenhauerian, Rawlsian belief in time (time sometimes mere flux and therefore hopeless; or time sometimes twisted a bit, inflected with ‘social justice’ or ‘science’, and rendered hopeful).
Darwin’s Origin of Species was not really a book about origins, but a book about variation, hence change, hence time. It was a historical book. If on one side it depended on Malthus’s vision of animals competing over limited resources, on the other side it depended on Charles Lyell’s speculations in The Principles of Geology, published in 1830, about the fact that the history of the world was empirically observable in rock formations: and that this history was a gradual one which required many, many thousands of years to be completed. This staggering idea had been first proposed by another Scottish geologist, James Hutton, in the late 18th Century in a work entitled Theory of the Earth. Note, again, that this idea – this emphasis on the significance of time – emerged during Koselleck’s Sattelzeit: the strange time at the end of the 18th Century and the beginning of the 19th Century: when the French Revolution ruptured political continuity, when church and state were divided, when we discovered electricity, when heavy iron manufacture began.
Koselleck has an arresting phrase in his writings. He speaks of an ‘acceleration of time’. Time itself began to accelerate, he suggests, in the early 19th Century. Instead of living in a time contrasted with eternity – an eternity in which we could find significance for our earthly lives – instead of that, we came to see ourselves as living in a singular time, stripped of all eternity. We now lived in an immanent world, a world without transcendence. This was a kingdom of this world, lacking a kingdom not of this world. Its focus was on time: not past time, but of course the present moment as stretched into the future. The focus was especially on the future. The expectation was that we could hastily – using steam, electricity or petrol, as it were – move towards the future. If the future could be anticipated, could be known, could be cognised, could be modelled, then we could surely move towards it more quickly: accelerate through time. So haste became a thing in the world: a desire for futurity. Hence all the politics of progress. Hence science fiction (which did not exist before the 19th Century). Hence, inevitably, dystopia. Hence viral politics.
Two hundred years ago, then, we arrived at a novel way of thinking. (A way of thinking, incidentally, that went with novels.) This way of thinking involved a stronger sense of time: a sense that time was our world; a sense that time complicated truth; an awe-inspiring sense that natural time was long; but also an impatient sense that human time was very short: short in relation to our awareness of the length time for which the earth had existed, and short in relation to our urgent sense that if our lives were not to be worthless – given the death of God, the refusal of transcendence, and the oblivion of eternity – we had to achieve something, succeed in something, establish something now.
It was in the early 20th Century that Lyell and Darwin’s hundreds of thousands of years became millions, as Hubble and others noticed that the distances of remote galaxies could be estimated, and that the recessional velocities of these galaxies could be correlated to time, after which Lemaitre, Gamow and others came to postulate the origin of the universe in a single event, a singularity, or ‘big bang’. The scientific consensus for a while has been that the Universe is 13.8 billion years old, and our Earth 4.6 billion years old.
I think it is fair to say that we have a very interesting double focus in our minds about time. In the last two centuries we have come to see natural time as very long but our time as very short. This is surely a major cause of the cognitive disorder which is behind the panic about climate change. Climate change is a worry which comes from combining what we know about ‘life, the universe and everything’ on the most exalted and extended scale with what we know about human history on the shortest possible scale. We combine our Lyell-Darwin-Hubble scientific knowledge with various Malthusian and Marxist theories, and, in an excess of impatience and – let us say it – corruption caused by the framing of our scientific concerns in terms of political ones, we fret and worry, and then ignore our fret and worry in order to live in amusing manner, now, before guiltily turning again to fret and worry, and asking for something to be done. Greta? Bill? Keir?
It is all understandable under the heading of acceleration anxiety. For a few centuries or more, we have seen ourselves as hurtling through history, human history, and also seen ourselves hurtling through a greater history, a history we cannot control. Latterly, in the era of the IPCC, we now suppose that we are, in human time (comically dubbed ‘anthropocene’), willing ourselves into some sort of heat death of humanity through our capacity to control the very limited things we can control. Distinguishing whatever truth is in this from the mass psychosis caused by 200 years of education into acceleration anxiety – which has been in the last 30 or so years aggressively politicised and finally brought to an exquisite height in our own time – is very difficult.
Wyndham Lewis may have been right to suggest that thinking about time might be destroying the Western mind. It may well turn out that thinking about God, about eternity, about truth, is a far safer way of holding onto good order than accelerating into anxiety. If so, we should never have exchanged the certainties of the Bible, Bede and Bunyan for the ephemera of the Times, the BBC and so on. Yet the Father is gone, the Son is forgotten, and we only have the Spirit, not Holy but devilishly dynamic: a colour-changing, shape-shifting spirit (a rainbow-striped Pied Piper paid by our masters to save us). It may be that we have done all this to ourselves by reading newspapers, watching television and, latterly, by existing in the stream of consciousness found on Twitter and other feeds. Locked into a permanent fix or feed of ephemera, I’d say that it is no wonder that we all imagine ourselves to be hurtling through a demoralised, disenchanted torrent-flux of Burkean sublime to the end of an empty world. No wonder our politicians are so much the prey of humourless scientists with grand models and even more humourless moralists suffering from secular apocalyptic disorders of various sorts.
All of them suffer from long acceleration anxiety.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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George Galloway calls this out..
https://www.youtube.com/live/USRvury9NJo?si=u8x5WZnPSM7Ib_A-
Which uniform do I wear if I identify as a cat?
A tom or a queen?
The furry one!!
To be fair I don’t know why school uniforms don’t just get scrapped altogether. No uniforms over here in the NL and I think the UK is in the minority regarding this. It’s an unnecessary extra cost to parents and I just think it quite antiquated really.
Uniforms are a Godsend when corruption of a child’s mind is the prize.
I’ve never been keen on it – too often it is the worst of both worlds – a pain for kids and parents but not properly enforced so they all look a mess – the girls with very short skirts and the boys look like thugs or tramps. Properly enforced you could argue they get the child’s mind set correctly for learning, but the usual outcome just seems like a waste of energy and source of friction. I think disruptive behaviour is much more important to clamp down on. That said, I think it slightly helps in London where they all kick off at bus stops and in town centres after school, one school vs another, as they can be more easily identified.
Always go after the children. This is evil, plain and simple. Those in positions to stop this need to take a long, hard look at themselves and start defaulting to decency and common sense.
Unfortunately, as a cohort, teachers are the single most stupid people on the planet so common sense is a bit like a virus to them.
(I know we have some teachers on here but I am sure they understand my point of view.)
In theory, this doesn’t really matter much. In a properly functioning state, individual schools wouldn’t be free to adopt political agendas of the US democrats and try to enact them via child indoctrination without primary legislation authorizing them do to that. Unfortunately, they key word is properly here. This would require undoing the New Labour (most likely suspect) arrangement to outsource as much policymaking to semi-private entities as possible to ensure that the people supposed to make political decisions on behalf of the population of the UK won’t be able to control it. After all, one day, these might have become people from the wrong party because of these ghastly elections where white van men and even their spouses are allowed to influence the government of the country! Can’t have that in a well-oiled democracy.
That’s technocracy for you!!
It’s privatized government. Or actually, not really privatized: It’s politicians using so-called private entities controlled by them as cover for putting their schemes into practice while bypassing the democratic mechanisms supposed to limit what they can and cannot do.
I was talking to my hairdresser a while back and he said they get loads of teachers in for haircuts. All of them hate the DIE ideology and the transgender movement, but are being held hostage by the people running the system and the managements of their schools. Many of them want to quit, because it’s become scary to be a teacher in a school. If you aren’t heard to be aggressively backing DIE, you’re assumed to be against it and face not just losing your job, but being blacklisted from your career. And if you’re blacklisted, it could hurt finding another career.
In my profession, I have to watch my mouth. Fortunately, as a freelancer, I work from home now and don’t have to say too much. I’ve not had to brush up much against DIE crap, but I dread the day I might have to refuse to do a job for moral reasons, because I’ll risk blacklisting too. Thing is, I could look towards religious broadcasters, but I find them to be too far the other way. They tend to be the ‘happy clappy’ branch of Protestant fundamentalism and I’m an orthodox-leaning Catholic – so I’m not comfortable with trying to get into niche religious broadcast networks either. Can’t win!!
It’s satanic. No beating around the bush on that. It’s a mixture of cult behaviour and a group of people who have developed an idée fixe.
More than anything groups who provide forms of accreditation have been created that businesses are kowtowing to. Only the state should sanction official accreditations: safety standard accreditation for glass, for example or symbols to confirm a cooker meets hear safety standards or that furniture is fireproof. All other accreditations should be banned, which would instantly remove people like Stonewall.
I’m with you on that Dom.
Remember that lovely video of a trans march when they where chanting “we’re here, we’re queer, and we’re coming for your children”
Well, it looks like they ment it!
How does referring to them as As and Bs make boys and girls feel welcome? This forcible depersonalisation seems extremely hostile to me. Imagine going from being mommy’s girl or boy to You must now chose to be an A or a B and if you dare to call yourself or anyone else a boy or a girl, you’ll be disciplined for this.
One can almost imagine the child-haters who came up with this demanding the children must cover their filthy faces in public all the time and be swabbed until their noses bleed to ensure their equally filthy bodies are not infected with nasty germs which could perhaps cause an entity illegitimately occupying the position of a teacher to get the sniffles or something horribly dangerous like that.
Oh wait … didn’t they do this already and wasn’t the so-called government of the UK was barely capable of forcing them to stop it?
How wonderful. How many steps to droid?
It shocks me that Christian schools are going along with this. At my Catholic Primary school in the 1980s, uniforms were highly regulated. Even wrong socks could get you into trouble (at the time, there was the classic TV series where Adrian Mole went to school in red socks and got sent home!) Without discipline, we’re setting up a generation to fail. Just think: if all our power failed for a few weeks, they wouldn’t have the first idea how to feed themselves. They couldn’t go into the woods and hunt a deer or know what plants are and aren’t edible.
That should be church schools and not Christian schools. The CoE is about as Christian as the average Pride-marcher.
Yeah, as I said yesterday, Christianity is going back into its old pre-Church era. We’ll soon be back to wandering priests arriving in a town and holding a mass before moving on before the authorities can arrest him for holding that mass! The reason I said ‘Christian schools’ is that many religious schools of different denominations are now under the control of the same trusts.
Really, it was a mistake for the Catholic Church to give its schools to the state after the war. And in the free school era, churches ought to have reestablished religious schools outside of state control.
A major reason things are so out of control right now is that a few Islamic schools were claimed to be teaching ‘bad things’ to their pupils, so The Blob took the opportunity to crack down on all schools to teach the new state religion of DIE.
“Really, it was a mistake for the Catholic Church to give its schools to the state after the war.”
And this was a consistent erosion. My parents supported my senior school with cash while me and my brother attended and it was money they could ill afford with four children. Many parents did similar. The Catholic Church gave our school to the state but with who’s permission?
I am still very much a Catholic in outlook but I no longer respect my Church.
I think school uniforms are the least of parents’ concerns if their kids aren’t going to be actually attending school. Is this for real? 7,000 schools now??
”Up to 7,000 at-risk schools have yet to be checked for crumbling concrete according to reports this morning. The Mirror said an army of structural engineers are set to be dispatched on Monday to inspect hundreds of schools which may have used reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) in their construction.
Fears have been raised that the problem could extend to buildings across the country including housing, prisons and hospitals. The Mirror said sources had confirmed experts are being sent out tomorrow to assess whether further action needs to be taken across the country.
It comes after 104 schools and colleges were told by the Department for Education (DfE) to partially or fully shut buildings just as pupils prepare to return after the summer holidays – with many more expected to follow. But the Department for Education had still last night failed to publish the list of schools that had closed, or give a figure for those at risk.”
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/at-risk-7000-schools-not-27642849
Oh no, we’re all going to die in the RAAC Scamdemic.
The reality of course is to create more panic and confusion amongst the masses. Selective school closures will be next further increasing misery for parents as time off work is required for child minding. Jobs will be lost for poor attendance and sickness and mental health issues will follow. Oh yes, it’s all coming along nicely.
They’ve supposedly known about this for a long time, yet they only send in the engineers on the first day of term after the long summer holidays?!
https://earthactiongloballeague.com/2023/08/21/al-gore-vs-oil-rich-dubai-host-of-cop28/
Oh look, it’s old Gorey talking BS at COP28.
Strangely enough, Co2 emissions have increased every year since the first COP. Not being particularly science minded would I be wrong in drawing an obvious conclusion from this fact or would that just be conspiracy theorising?
Why not just give all newborns a serial number and be done with it?
In order to protect trans youth one could also consider to assign preliminary genders randomly to babies after birth regardless of their sex. I bet someone could make up a nicely worded justification why that’s something which ought to be done.
Please don’t suggest this to anyone in a position to implement it. I can see some people rather linking this idea.
How long before it’s just Child X?
I just walked in on my wife watching a Netflix documentary ostensibly about female pleasure. Except that all of its experts were gender lunatics so it was unable to actually refer to women. At one point, a blue haired so-called doctor was describing the way that genitalia develop in embryos, she couldn’t bring herself to say ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ so she referred to them as “it’s a boy” in mocking air quotes and “it’s a girl” in mocking air quotes, mocking the old days when if a baby was born with a penis, we’d call it a boy.
I have to say I’m very glad I’ve left the west. I’m afraid it’s a sinking ship.
This makes no sense. Won’t it be obvious that Uniform A is for boys and B for girls? Surely if they want to remove differences then they should just have a unisex uniform? But then should they not be celebrating difference? Hard to keep track of it all. Then again if they remove the terms “boy” and “girl” from the uniform designations, are they saying that boys are not allowed to wear girls uniform? Isn’t that anti-trans or whatever these loonies call it?