“How, then, does a secular, modern, liberal society, composed of atomized individuals, come to embrace the idea that there is something greater than the state and its government? »
She just can't. This is the goal of atomization (which involves a set of manipulations, including that of language).
For example: the case of the French republican motto: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (without forgetting the: “or death”, which quickly disappeared from representations), or again: the great idea of “Human Rights” , are, in my view, semantic impostures. Abuses of language.
This is how we arrive at aberrations like talking about “feelings” about anything and everything. The weather is now paying the price for this concept; "It's hot, but you are wrong, the feeling of temperatures says that you must be cold..." A concept which opens the door to all (totalitarian) excesses.
This is how from now on (in France), everyone will be able to complain and say that they “perceived” this or that word as threatening; and therefore be punished, and may even be sent to prison. If you look closely, we are no longer very far from: “My little finger tells me that…”
Reading the article an image crept into my mind. The 'state' is now run by the Grand Vizier (the Blob, the Borg) rather than the Sheik or Emperor, or indeed elected governments. High officials now run the sheikdom/kingdom/empire.
The high officials generally believe that ordinary people are born as Blank Slates and are therefore perfectible - and it is their job to perfect them. Signs that the Gramscian ‘long march of the woke’ are ending are misleading because the marchers (those that would be Viziers) have now set their feet on the long march to Utopia.
Who could disagree with such a vision? Mostly those who see that the vision is an unrealisable abstraction, marked by heaps of corpses alongside the New Long March. If present governments cannot manage an economy well because of the lack of detail and knowledge at a local level then managing a Utopia will be even more difficult. And hence the drive to 'simplify' individuals into a standard and predictable 'unit of consumption' to make Utopia 'work'.
The relationship between the State and the individual is a dance, similar to the relationship between an "influencer" and their audience. The influencer influences the audience, but the nature of the audience response also feeds back and influences the influencer.
When we ask "Why did religion vanish - was it individuals, or the State", the answer is both. The State discourages religion, and the populace's obvious disdain for religion encourages the State to be even more hostile to religion. Covid restrictions - particularly masking - can be viewed in the same way.
When I read these persuasive essays I imagine my friend, who proudly identifies as a 'technocrat', reading too. And he then says 'yes, and?' because he intuits interceding as good precisely because 'harms' or 'inequalities' may be a natural consequence of our wiring. In other words, I don't know how to argue that modern secular technocratic liberalism sums as bad. Except for libertarians.
Truly, I wish you'd gone with the title 'Mandatory Underpants', David, but perhaps that is just me! 😂
As your only reader (so far as I know) coming from the ruins of the old left instead of coming out of the shadows of the old right, I find this account salient but historically incomplete in terms of the philosophical background. You tend to see a thread running from the Enlightenment to today that could only go down the channel taken... For me, this misses the conflicts among Enlightenment (and post-Enlightenment) thinkers who saw different visions of what was being attempted, and thus the gradual quashing of other possible futures in favour of ever more dependence upon state solutions.
In this regard, I have (largely coincidentally) written the Stranger Worlds pieces for May on the theme of 'Progress' in an attempt to tell one of the arcs of this philosophical history that tends to get missed out. (I have another angle on this that also needs covering, but it will have to wait...)
The last two pieces are of particular relevance to your project, David, and I hope you'll find time to read them - not to mention that the last May piece, 'We Are All Conservative Now', is entitled partly as a wink at an earlier exchange the two of us had that I found provocative. 😉
I don't think you can be alone here. I have never sought a political home, but it would most definitely have been with the left had I felt the necessity to sign up somewhere! Now I'm just seeing insanity all over the shop...
Thanks so much for this comment, Helen! The bulk of the comments here come from the traditional right-of-centre, so I do usually feel like I'm on my own in this Substack. But this feeling of 'political homelessness' seems widespread to me (I referenced it in the introductory description at my own Substack, Stranger Worlds, actually). I'm heartened to see someone else from the old left hanging out in David's comments. Much obliged for your mentioning it! 😊
On political homelessness..... I shuffled off my former post-graduate leftiness in the early 80s. But in a forty year career (first in teaching and subsequently in architecture) I never had one single colleague who was not somewhere on the left politically. Almost all my friends and family too for that matter. So I too know about the lonely political road.
Fascinating - thanks for sharing this, Graham. For myself, while the vast majority of my friends have always been somewhere on the old left, I did have friends and family who were on the political right. Honestly, it never bothered me - I thought it very helpful to have the chance to talk to people with different views. I suppose I still do! 😁
Yes formative influences. I was at Essex University in the early 70s. At that time it was a magnet for student 'radicalism'.... the fashionable thing to be at that time was a Maoist. Very occasionally you could spot the odd student walking purposefully across the quadrangle in a shirt and tie and clutching a briefcase.....it was only years later that the thought dawned on me that those were the real 'radicals' on the campus.
There's a lot of great things about the left and a lot of crap comes from the right, lol! (And vice versa (sotto voce...). But I don't think what's happening on "the left" has much to do with what people thought they were representing a few years back - and I'm grateful for thinkers like David for analysing what's going on. I also find the knee-jerk reaction of "the right" to all things left really annoying. Oh here we go again - lots of lovely divide and rule and the cleverest people keep falling for it. I love Substack because I can read e.g. David and a moment later be reading e.g. Paul Cudenec and be nodding along to everything both are saying!
I've subscribed to you, Chris - I think you must be pretty interesting!
Thanks for the kind words, Helen! Stranger Worlds is an outlet for my desire to write philosophy, written in a form (3-minute reflections) that I hope can be more accessible than most philosophy.
But it is also a project about recovering our principles. It is this that puts David and I into accord, actually - a common element in our otherwise quite different Substacks. 🙂
Anyway, I hope you enjoy what you find there! It runs every Tuesday like clockwork.
Thanks Asa, I think this is such an important topic it needs to be wrangled from multiple angles. I greatly value David's take because his references and his starting assumptions are different from mine... plus, there is probably no way to tackle this particular problem exhaustively! 😉
Another interesting read. Not sure you're right about underwear though with the story yesterday about bras being a fundamental need for women's health and hence should be VAT free. I have no argument with that stance, but where does it stop - shoes to protect your feet ? Clothes to keep you warm ? Hats to protect against sunburn ?
Nobody seems to have asked the more funsamental question about why we charge VAT on clothes, or indeed why the state taxes our private transactions at all.
And the only answer - literally the only answer - to the questions you posed in the last paragraph, is that without God, we cannot do any of these things. Once society has scrapped God (or thinks it has), it needs the State to be put into the place of God. And of course, it sees the State as a kind of collective embodiment of human beings themselves. In other words, the State is just the people. Leftists always used to talk about the people owning nationalised industries, for example.
The whole thing is an embodiment of the age old temptation to put human beings in the place of God himself. The idea that man is sinful is the only counter to the argument that life is unfair. Who the hell are you to complain about life's unfairness if you are just a miserable sinner, in need of God's loving forgiveness?
If anyone wants to fight against the secular liberal State you describe, let him go to church, get down on his knees and pray for forgiveness.
It seems to me the principle of subsudiarity is key. Supposedly enshrined in the articles of the EU and the Catholic Church, and perhaps even the US constitution, but largely ignored. It needs to have teeth - that no agency or autonomy can be taken from any group, or individual, without their explicit consent. And to the extent that such agency has been taken away by some higher power, against the will of the individual or group (family, small community say less than 250 individuals) the full force of the law should be available to restore such agency.
It's not just a rejection of Judeao-Christian values for a secular value set of human origin. "Their justice and sovereignty derives from themselves." It is the rejection of the Logos that has precipitated a turning point for this civilisation. The rejection of the Logos has consequences. This is what we are witnessing in the form of atomisation, the sibling society and, ultimately, a grand delusion. Is this the mystery of lawlessness emerging from its restraint? That is a strong possibility which, if it is the case, would set expectations for where this is heading - and for what the message is to the dry bones.
People who know where their next meal is coming from, who have clean water, readly available food and good health can concern themselves with 'rights' issues and demands to the State for 'equality.' None of it affects the power hierarchy or the wealthy, and, actually, all the fuss diverts attention from an examination of how people with the real power, wealth and influence are actually dictating the 'adjudication' to suit their puproses.
Glimmerings of the Panopticon here (and a most certainly immanent state of affairs):
"The end result is that no human interaction is really carried out on a one-to-one basis, because even in their most intimate relations the individuals concerned are aware that the awesome power of the kritarch State is there, hovering over them, ready if necessary to step in."
Parallel with a statement in my latest article:
"When people socialised that way speak, they do not speak for themselves, but on behalf of their % group. And they therefore regurgitate canned and group-approved speech, never learning to formulate original thoughts and speak for themselves."
It's a multivectored situation, and Humpty Dumpty I'm afraid is in pieces.
And then this quotation too from your essay:
"a new phase is suggested in which the State positions itself as the adjudicator of disputes between the individual and the very world itself - promising to reconcile not merely each and every person with each and every other, but to reconcile the individual with all of creation..."
Exactly what I've been saying about our insurance ethic... the following also from my latest:
"The cultural practice of insurance payouts conveys an artificially ethical world in which suffering finds reward. It promises an environment of stability in a world full of accidents. But it also casts an illusion of actual stability where none exists."
Perhaps it's an enzyme in the Ardbeg that has on the same wavelength.
In response to your final question:
"Our best response (as far as I can see) is to prioritise languages other than the statistical-probabilistic one wherever possible."
To revitalise our society, we need to steer conversations toward the archetypal and mythological language of the psyche. For example: when folks start explaining a psychological phenomenon through ad hoc, invented evolutionary terms... like explaining one's distaste for small talk using a reference to 10s of millions of years of adaptation... we ought to pause and ask about the relevance of the exercise. Surely a reference to a story or myth about prolix folks getting into trouble or some such approach to conversation would be far more productive. The Darwinist approach is a conversation stopper. It provides "facts" (made up sure, but viewed as facts) and that's that. I am the way I am due to my ape ancestors. A story, however, we can interrogate. We can turn it around in our heads and entertain different perspectives. In the end, you might even undergo a transformation of consciousness and decide to alter your behaviour. It's a question of whether we live in a psychologically open or closed society. It's terribly depressing to have everything figured out and easy to explain. It enervates. I mean, what's there to live for?
I read it a while back when Paul Kingsnorth was recommending it. I think quite a few of our novelists were I touch with something more profound than we have till now realised.
“How, then, does a secular, modern, liberal society, composed of atomized individuals, come to embrace the idea that there is something greater than the state and its government? »
She just can't. This is the goal of atomization (which involves a set of manipulations, including that of language).
For example: the case of the French republican motto: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (without forgetting the: “or death”, which quickly disappeared from representations), or again: the great idea of “Human Rights” , are, in my view, semantic impostures. Abuses of language.
This is how we arrive at aberrations like talking about “feelings” about anything and everything. The weather is now paying the price for this concept; "It's hot, but you are wrong, the feeling of temperatures says that you must be cold..." A concept which opens the door to all (totalitarian) excesses.
This is how from now on (in France), everyone will be able to complain and say that they “perceived” this or that word as threatening; and therefore be punished, and may even be sent to prison. If you look closely, we are no longer very far from: “My little finger tells me that…”
Yes - when the self is all that matters, the feelings of the self are all that matters.
You have a way of articulating things I've noticed but not been able to put into words. Thanks Dave.
Thanks for the kind comment!
Reading the article an image crept into my mind. The 'state' is now run by the Grand Vizier (the Blob, the Borg) rather than the Sheik or Emperor, or indeed elected governments. High officials now run the sheikdom/kingdom/empire.
The high officials generally believe that ordinary people are born as Blank Slates and are therefore perfectible - and it is their job to perfect them. Signs that the Gramscian ‘long march of the woke’ are ending are misleading because the marchers (those that would be Viziers) have now set their feet on the long march to Utopia.
Who could disagree with such a vision? Mostly those who see that the vision is an unrealisable abstraction, marked by heaps of corpses alongside the New Long March. If present governments cannot manage an economy well because of the lack of detail and knowledge at a local level then managing a Utopia will be even more difficult. And hence the drive to 'simplify' individuals into a standard and predictable 'unit of consumption' to make Utopia 'work'.
In this regard McGilchrist’s description of the problem as being a confusion of roles between the Master and his Emissary is almost too on the nose!
The relationship between the State and the individual is a dance, similar to the relationship between an "influencer" and their audience. The influencer influences the audience, but the nature of the audience response also feeds back and influences the influencer.
When we ask "Why did religion vanish - was it individuals, or the State", the answer is both. The State discourages religion, and the populace's obvious disdain for religion encourages the State to be even more hostile to religion. Covid restrictions - particularly masking - can be viewed in the same way.
It's all a two-way street.
When I read these persuasive essays I imagine my friend, who proudly identifies as a 'technocrat', reading too. And he then says 'yes, and?' because he intuits interceding as good precisely because 'harms' or 'inequalities' may be a natural consequence of our wiring. In other words, I don't know how to argue that modern secular technocratic liberalism sums as bad. Except for libertarians.
My next post will be about this.
Truly, I wish you'd gone with the title 'Mandatory Underpants', David, but perhaps that is just me! 😂
As your only reader (so far as I know) coming from the ruins of the old left instead of coming out of the shadows of the old right, I find this account salient but historically incomplete in terms of the philosophical background. You tend to see a thread running from the Enlightenment to today that could only go down the channel taken... For me, this misses the conflicts among Enlightenment (and post-Enlightenment) thinkers who saw different visions of what was being attempted, and thus the gradual quashing of other possible futures in favour of ever more dependence upon state solutions.
In this regard, I have (largely coincidentally) written the Stranger Worlds pieces for May on the theme of 'Progress' in an attempt to tell one of the arcs of this philosophical history that tends to get missed out. (I have another angle on this that also needs covering, but it will have to wait...)
The last two pieces are of particular relevance to your project, David, and I hope you'll find time to read them - not to mention that the last May piece, 'We Are All Conservative Now', is entitled partly as a wink at an earlier exchange the two of us had that I found provocative. 😉
Stay wonderful!
Chris.
I don't think you can be alone here. I have never sought a political home, but it would most definitely have been with the left had I felt the necessity to sign up somewhere! Now I'm just seeing insanity all over the shop...
Thanks so much for this comment, Helen! The bulk of the comments here come from the traditional right-of-centre, so I do usually feel like I'm on my own in this Substack. But this feeling of 'political homelessness' seems widespread to me (I referenced it in the introductory description at my own Substack, Stranger Worlds, actually). I'm heartened to see someone else from the old left hanging out in David's comments. Much obliged for your mentioning it! 😊
On political homelessness..... I shuffled off my former post-graduate leftiness in the early 80s. But in a forty year career (first in teaching and subsequently in architecture) I never had one single colleague who was not somewhere on the left politically. Almost all my friends and family too for that matter. So I too know about the lonely political road.
Fascinating - thanks for sharing this, Graham. For myself, while the vast majority of my friends have always been somewhere on the old left, I did have friends and family who were on the political right. Honestly, it never bothered me - I thought it very helpful to have the chance to talk to people with different views. I suppose I still do! 😁
Yes formative influences. I was at Essex University in the early 70s. At that time it was a magnet for student 'radicalism'.... the fashionable thing to be at that time was a Maoist. Very occasionally you could spot the odd student walking purposefully across the quadrangle in a shirt and tie and clutching a briefcase.....it was only years later that the thought dawned on me that those were the real 'radicals' on the campus.
CS Lewis was the most counter-cultural figure of the last 100 years. When you realise this, the scales fall from your eyes.
There's a lot of great things about the left and a lot of crap comes from the right, lol! (And vice versa (sotto voce...). But I don't think what's happening on "the left" has much to do with what people thought they were representing a few years back - and I'm grateful for thinkers like David for analysing what's going on. I also find the knee-jerk reaction of "the right" to all things left really annoying. Oh here we go again - lots of lovely divide and rule and the cleverest people keep falling for it. I love Substack because I can read e.g. David and a moment later be reading e.g. Paul Cudenec and be nodding along to everything both are saying!
I've subscribed to you, Chris - I think you must be pretty interesting!
Thanks for the kind words, Helen! Stranger Worlds is an outlet for my desire to write philosophy, written in a form (3-minute reflections) that I hope can be more accessible than most philosophy.
But it is also a project about recovering our principles. It is this that puts David and I into accord, actually - a common element in our otherwise quite different Substacks. 🙂
Anyway, I hope you enjoy what you find there! It runs every Tuesday like clockwork.
Clearly, the subject admits of many perspectives. Looking forward to your insights.
Thanks Asa, I think this is such an important topic it needs to be wrangled from multiple angles. I greatly value David's take because his references and his starting assumptions are different from mine... plus, there is probably no way to tackle this particular problem exhaustively! 😉
Another interesting read. Not sure you're right about underwear though with the story yesterday about bras being a fundamental need for women's health and hence should be VAT free. I have no argument with that stance, but where does it stop - shoes to protect your feet ? Clothes to keep you warm ? Hats to protect against sunburn ?
Nobody seems to have asked the more funsamental question about why we charge VAT on clothes, or indeed why the state taxes our private transactions at all.
Wonderful post, even by your own high standards!
And the only answer - literally the only answer - to the questions you posed in the last paragraph, is that without God, we cannot do any of these things. Once society has scrapped God (or thinks it has), it needs the State to be put into the place of God. And of course, it sees the State as a kind of collective embodiment of human beings themselves. In other words, the State is just the people. Leftists always used to talk about the people owning nationalised industries, for example.
The whole thing is an embodiment of the age old temptation to put human beings in the place of God himself. The idea that man is sinful is the only counter to the argument that life is unfair. Who the hell are you to complain about life's unfairness if you are just a miserable sinner, in need of God's loving forgiveness?
If anyone wants to fight against the secular liberal State you describe, let him go to church, get down on his knees and pray for forgiveness.
It seems to me the principle of subsudiarity is key. Supposedly enshrined in the articles of the EU and the Catholic Church, and perhaps even the US constitution, but largely ignored. It needs to have teeth - that no agency or autonomy can be taken from any group, or individual, without their explicit consent. And to the extent that such agency has been taken away by some higher power, against the will of the individual or group (family, small community say less than 250 individuals) the full force of the law should be available to restore such agency.
Q: "Can these bones live?"
A: "O Lord God, only you know!"
It's not just a rejection of Judeao-Christian values for a secular value set of human origin. "Their justice and sovereignty derives from themselves." It is the rejection of the Logos that has precipitated a turning point for this civilisation. The rejection of the Logos has consequences. This is what we are witnessing in the form of atomisation, the sibling society and, ultimately, a grand delusion. Is this the mystery of lawlessness emerging from its restraint? That is a strong possibility which, if it is the case, would set expectations for where this is heading - and for what the message is to the dry bones.
People who know where their next meal is coming from, who have clean water, readly available food and good health can concern themselves with 'rights' issues and demands to the State for 'equality.' None of it affects the power hierarchy or the wealthy, and, actually, all the fuss diverts attention from an examination of how people with the real power, wealth and influence are actually dictating the 'adjudication' to suit their puproses.
Another wonderful piece, David. Thanks for this.
Glimmerings of the Panopticon here (and a most certainly immanent state of affairs):
"The end result is that no human interaction is really carried out on a one-to-one basis, because even in their most intimate relations the individuals concerned are aware that the awesome power of the kritarch State is there, hovering over them, ready if necessary to step in."
Parallel with a statement in my latest article:
"When people socialised that way speak, they do not speak for themselves, but on behalf of their % group. And they therefore regurgitate canned and group-approved speech, never learning to formulate original thoughts and speak for themselves."
It's a multivectored situation, and Humpty Dumpty I'm afraid is in pieces.
And then this quotation too from your essay:
"a new phase is suggested in which the State positions itself as the adjudicator of disputes between the individual and the very world itself - promising to reconcile not merely each and every person with each and every other, but to reconcile the individual with all of creation..."
Exactly what I've been saying about our insurance ethic... the following also from my latest:
"The cultural practice of insurance payouts conveys an artificially ethical world in which suffering finds reward. It promises an environment of stability in a world full of accidents. But it also casts an illusion of actual stability where none exists."
Perhaps it's an enzyme in the Ardbeg that has on the same wavelength.
In response to your final question:
"Our best response (as far as I can see) is to prioritise languages other than the statistical-probabilistic one wherever possible."
To revitalise our society, we need to steer conversations toward the archetypal and mythological language of the psyche. For example: when folks start explaining a psychological phenomenon through ad hoc, invented evolutionary terms... like explaining one's distaste for small talk using a reference to 10s of millions of years of adaptation... we ought to pause and ask about the relevance of the exercise. Surely a reference to a story or myth about prolix folks getting into trouble or some such approach to conversation would be far more productive. The Darwinist approach is a conversation stopper. It provides "facts" (made up sure, but viewed as facts) and that's that. I am the way I am due to my ape ancestors. A story, however, we can interrogate. We can turn it around in our heads and entertain different perspectives. In the end, you might even undergo a transformation of consciousness and decide to alter your behaviour. It's a question of whether we live in a psychologically open or closed society. It's terribly depressing to have everything figured out and easy to explain. It enervates. I mean, what's there to live for?
You’re not the first person to recommend that E M Forster piece to me recently. This must be telling me something!
I read it a while back when Paul Kingsnorth was recommending it. I think quite a few of our novelists were I touch with something more profound than we have till now realised.