I like your characterisation of the British Tory Party as 'an absurdly broad spectrum' and I think this is why it cannot survive longterm. (And it pains me - as a long-time conservative voter - to say that I have come to the view that it should not survive.)
I also think that in the West more generally, party-political pluralism's death is approaching. For 50+ years the conservative political class has stood by whilst entire upcoming generations of high-end professionals, managerials and administratives have been university sheep-dipped in exactly the stuff you (rightly) berate the Labour Party for. Such that, Yes we still have a pluralist electoral democracy but now just as a kind of plaything....part of the media entertainment industry. Meanwhile the real government is a permanent and almost unchallengeable techno-bureaucracy constantly topped up by 'experts' emerging from its 'one-party' universities.
Institutionalised neediness, courtesy of Starmer and his acolytes; a public Stockholm Syndrome in which the masses identify with their captors.
The lockdowns were a turning point for me,as an instinctive outsider, one who has become increasingly disillusioned by the corruption, control creepery, wokus pokus and lack of conviction prevailing amongst our establishment: 'Stay safe', 'Stop the spread', 'Save granny', 'Can you look him in the eye?','2 metre distancing', 'Wear your face covering'. etc,etc.
Now we have safe spaces for fragile students, trigger warnings- even on films and the ghastly adverts which colonise our media; the Left/Lib's sneering condescension of all of us who challenge the steady decline of our country, our insistence on our right to informed dissent and informed consent.
The consensus which appears to prevail amongst our witless, self absorbed establishment, that Open Borders, Net Zero,the atomisation of communities, the destruction of small businesses and our farming and manufacturing sectors is All for the Best in the Best of all Possible Worlds.
Recently I read with mounting alarm, that youngsters are increasingly converting to Islam- the rapidly encroaching absolutist theological/ideological entity, which brooks no dissent, insists on absolute compliance and adherence, thus removing the need for self reliance, personal responsibility and the freedom to question and to go one's own way.
Yes, being an outsider is tiring and can lead to ostracism and worse, as we have witnessed here in Blighty, but there are still many of us, unfortunately typically British in our quiet ways, but can we win this slide into managerial safetyism and the embedding of radical Islamism? I'm not sure.
Finally, another gem from Groucho Marx:
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Groucho Marx
And one final plea to our excellent author: please, please dispense with the awful 'impact on ' and revert to good old affect.
I've often thought that there is no way out of a society made up of individuals manqué and proper - hence our see-sawing governments in a two party system. We need to have more subsidiarity and allow the freedom lovers (which we would consider ourselves, reading this) to have our own separate country! Of course, that was the American colonies three hundred years ago but that has now become bogged down with a very different demographic, who came looking for an easy life, not the frontier people who founded it.
The psychology of the people you describe: "who derive power and status (and the thrill of command) precisely from cultivating in others the propensity to approach life on the terms of the individual manque" is spot on. I used to know a woman like that - she had a very obvious behavioural pattern of taking lame ducks under her wing and smothering them with 'friendship' until they found their feet again, when she dropped them like a brick. Quite odd, but obviously said a lot about her mental state. I am also convinced through professional and personal experience that medicine attracts as many psychopaths as it does saints - the smell of vulnerability is irresistible to them.
Interesting. There is research to suggest that personality is driven by genetics and that this, in turn drives a persons politics. This suggests that there will always be those who crave safety and those who desire freedom and, in turn, in a universal suffrage democratic system there should be groupings who represent both points of view. Personally, I don’t think it’s that reductive and that feedback loops within societies will heavily influence where on the safety/freedom scale a person, and the wider society, may sit. However, we haven’t got that now. We have a liberal managerial mindset among both parties. The Tories largely have Cameron to thank for turbocharging that change through the preponderance of liberal MPs selected. They hoodwinked the electorate into thinking they had changed through the mendacity of Johnson but it’s now obvious that they are completely unable to do anything remotely Conservative.
The Tory electorate sat on their hands in the 2 by-elections and Labour candidates were elected on, in one instance, an increase in a few hundred Labour votes and in the other they lost votes. Unless they try the ‘ol Leader switcheroo again I think this will be replicated nationally and lead to a thumping Labour win. Mind you it will deeply undermine democracy and the Government’s legitimacy to win with such a small proportion of the electorate. Funny if the Gaza political crisis results in Labour voters sitting on their hands too. I truly hope the next election exposes the whole sorry system and undermines the legitimacy of it. I know quite a few who just want the Tories to be wiped out and for the whole thing to fall apart.
Oakshott's notion of the "individual manqué" reminds me of Ted Hughes's observation regarding those with no imagination, that they are "slaves to the plan." A person with no imagination, Hughes explains, one “who simply cannot think what will happen if he does such and such a thing” must “work on principles, or orders, or by precedent, and he will always be marked by extreme rigidity, because he is after all moving in the dark.” And here's his further explanation (from "Myth and Education"):
"We all know such people, and we all recognize that they are dangerous, since if they have strong temperaments in other respects they end up by destroying their environment and everybody near them. The terrible thing is that they are the planners, and ruthless slaves to the plan — which substitutes for the faculty they do not possess. And they have the will of desperation: where others see alternative courses, they see only a gulf."
I can't emphasise enough the idea that what's missing in our society (what has been eroded through poor education priorities) is the development of interiority or of one's inner life. If anything is manqué, it is this faculty--the imagination and the inner world--without which there can be no individual. Without the inner being, one is merely a Dawkinsian robot, a hollow man. Seeing as politicians are about the shallowest and tinniest among us, perhaps we ought to look there to better understand the roots of this desire to have more and more rules.
It's not just political parties either. Barclays (1) wouldn't let me send my son £2000, to prevent me being scammed (2) when, after an unreasonably long interrogation, I lost patience and said if it didn't make the payment I, after decades with it, would close my account, it retaliated by shutting me out of my account and (3) later gave as its reason "Blocking accounts is one of the ways we have of protecting them"!
As your only reader who does not lean 'right', you may be interested to know that I agree with your criticism of the current state of the Labour party, although I think it worth saying there is an ideal of solidarity that used to be present in the party. and that is beautifully expressed in Ken Loach's 2009 film Looking for Eric. It is not a surprise that Darth Starmer had to eject Loach from the party.
But I do not like the Tory party either, and never have. However, I am bamboozled by the recurring attitude of many of my friends who cry "the Turkeys have voted for Christmas" every time a Tory government is elected. I suspect the problem is, they never once spoke to any 'working class' voters to understand the reasons for their voting. This, I think, is a very different problem to the one you highlight in this piece following Oakeshott.
Lastly, an objection to this claim: "using the word ‘discourse’ in its proper meaning as a body of knowledge that constructs its own subject"
How is this the proper meaning of this word? And how does any word have a 'proper' meaning...?
Apologies for relative silence recently; work has me rather besieged.
I'm getting a lot of personal value from these explorations. They help to make sense of my own shift - which began during extremely difficult personal circumstances - from a 'do goodness & fairness' political intuition (ie left/socialist) to a strong valuing of agency and responsibility. I see the naked will to power & authority of 'do goodness & fairness' everywhere now and find it repellant. This is largely because I feel more personally complete, having pushed through tough times and slain a few demons.
I like Oakeshott's distinction, it certainly seems rooted in observation, even if it has a whiff of naturalistic fallacy about it. (Or that's just a whiff of intellectual snobbery on my part). The reality may be more nuanced, perhaps this distinction is not set clearly for each of us but varies within our psyche depending on the battlefront of life and decisions to be made.
The likes of the Labour Party and its institutional henchmen then focus on amplifying the individual manque tendencies within us. In turn, other people and institutions we encounter in life encourage the other aspect - independent and freedom-loving one. As an aside, it seems the latter is fostered mostly by ideas and ideals, occasionally by individuals we encounter and only rarely by institutions.
No matter how agonising a decision may be and how much one may wish to be spared it, if anyone or anything tried to take it away, I would bristle and rebel against such encroachment on my autonomy. The hardest decisions, the most agonising are those involving other people, their lives and autonomy, those I'd have no regret about having taken away from me. But I do not think that is what Oakeshott is talking about.
Your mention of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor makes me think of Fyodorov, the founder of the distinctively Russian transhumanist movement of cosmism. I've read that Fyodorov influenced Dostoyevsky; but if he has Christ opposing the Grand Inquisitor by refusing to rule over everyone, that suggests that Dostoyevsky might have been NEGATIVELY influenced, since Fyodorov seems to have envisioned the entire human race united in obedience to the Christian autocracy of the tsar.
What should we stand for? National independence and smaller and less interventionist government.
What should we stand against? International governance (the World Health Organisation and the Legion of other agencies, treaties and agreements), and bigger and more interventionist government.
I like your characterisation of the British Tory Party as 'an absurdly broad spectrum' and I think this is why it cannot survive longterm. (And it pains me - as a long-time conservative voter - to say that I have come to the view that it should not survive.)
I also think that in the West more generally, party-political pluralism's death is approaching. For 50+ years the conservative political class has stood by whilst entire upcoming generations of high-end professionals, managerials and administratives have been university sheep-dipped in exactly the stuff you (rightly) berate the Labour Party for. Such that, Yes we still have a pluralist electoral democracy but now just as a kind of plaything....part of the media entertainment industry. Meanwhile the real government is a permanent and almost unchallengeable techno-bureaucracy constantly topped up by 'experts' emerging from its 'one-party' universities.
Institutionalised neediness, courtesy of Starmer and his acolytes; a public Stockholm Syndrome in which the masses identify with their captors.
The lockdowns were a turning point for me,as an instinctive outsider, one who has become increasingly disillusioned by the corruption, control creepery, wokus pokus and lack of conviction prevailing amongst our establishment: 'Stay safe', 'Stop the spread', 'Save granny', 'Can you look him in the eye?','2 metre distancing', 'Wear your face covering'. etc,etc.
Now we have safe spaces for fragile students, trigger warnings- even on films and the ghastly adverts which colonise our media; the Left/Lib's sneering condescension of all of us who challenge the steady decline of our country, our insistence on our right to informed dissent and informed consent.
The consensus which appears to prevail amongst our witless, self absorbed establishment, that Open Borders, Net Zero,the atomisation of communities, the destruction of small businesses and our farming and manufacturing sectors is All for the Best in the Best of all Possible Worlds.
Recently I read with mounting alarm, that youngsters are increasingly converting to Islam- the rapidly encroaching absolutist theological/ideological entity, which brooks no dissent, insists on absolute compliance and adherence, thus removing the need for self reliance, personal responsibility and the freedom to question and to go one's own way.
Yes, being an outsider is tiring and can lead to ostracism and worse, as we have witnessed here in Blighty, but there are still many of us, unfortunately typically British in our quiet ways, but can we win this slide into managerial safetyism and the embedding of radical Islamism? I'm not sure.
Finally, another gem from Groucho Marx:
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Groucho Marx
And one final plea to our excellent author: please, please dispense with the awful 'impact on ' and revert to good old affect.
So very, very true.
I've often thought that there is no way out of a society made up of individuals manqué and proper - hence our see-sawing governments in a two party system. We need to have more subsidiarity and allow the freedom lovers (which we would consider ourselves, reading this) to have our own separate country! Of course, that was the American colonies three hundred years ago but that has now become bogged down with a very different demographic, who came looking for an easy life, not the frontier people who founded it.
The psychology of the people you describe: "who derive power and status (and the thrill of command) precisely from cultivating in others the propensity to approach life on the terms of the individual manque" is spot on. I used to know a woman like that - she had a very obvious behavioural pattern of taking lame ducks under her wing and smothering them with 'friendship' until they found their feet again, when she dropped them like a brick. Quite odd, but obviously said a lot about her mental state. I am also convinced through professional and personal experience that medicine attracts as many psychopaths as it does saints - the smell of vulnerability is irresistible to them.
Interesting. There is research to suggest that personality is driven by genetics and that this, in turn drives a persons politics. This suggests that there will always be those who crave safety and those who desire freedom and, in turn, in a universal suffrage democratic system there should be groupings who represent both points of view. Personally, I don’t think it’s that reductive and that feedback loops within societies will heavily influence where on the safety/freedom scale a person, and the wider society, may sit. However, we haven’t got that now. We have a liberal managerial mindset among both parties. The Tories largely have Cameron to thank for turbocharging that change through the preponderance of liberal MPs selected. They hoodwinked the electorate into thinking they had changed through the mendacity of Johnson but it’s now obvious that they are completely unable to do anything remotely Conservative.
The Tory electorate sat on their hands in the 2 by-elections and Labour candidates were elected on, in one instance, an increase in a few hundred Labour votes and in the other they lost votes. Unless they try the ‘ol Leader switcheroo again I think this will be replicated nationally and lead to a thumping Labour win. Mind you it will deeply undermine democracy and the Government’s legitimacy to win with such a small proportion of the electorate. Funny if the Gaza political crisis results in Labour voters sitting on their hands too. I truly hope the next election exposes the whole sorry system and undermines the legitimacy of it. I know quite a few who just want the Tories to be wiped out and for the whole thing to fall apart.
David, you lost me with the assertion that modern man is free. It's not what I'm seeing.
Oakshott's notion of the "individual manqué" reminds me of Ted Hughes's observation regarding those with no imagination, that they are "slaves to the plan." A person with no imagination, Hughes explains, one “who simply cannot think what will happen if he does such and such a thing” must “work on principles, or orders, or by precedent, and he will always be marked by extreme rigidity, because he is after all moving in the dark.” And here's his further explanation (from "Myth and Education"):
"We all know such people, and we all recognize that they are dangerous, since if they have strong temperaments in other respects they end up by destroying their environment and everybody near them. The terrible thing is that they are the planners, and ruthless slaves to the plan — which substitutes for the faculty they do not possess. And they have the will of desperation: where others see alternative courses, they see only a gulf."
I can't emphasise enough the idea that what's missing in our society (what has been eroded through poor education priorities) is the development of interiority or of one's inner life. If anything is manqué, it is this faculty--the imagination and the inner world--without which there can be no individual. Without the inner being, one is merely a Dawkinsian robot, a hollow man. Seeing as politicians are about the shallowest and tinniest among us, perhaps we ought to look there to better understand the roots of this desire to have more and more rules.
It's not just political parties either. Barclays (1) wouldn't let me send my son £2000, to prevent me being scammed (2) when, after an unreasonably long interrogation, I lost patience and said if it didn't make the payment I, after decades with it, would close my account, it retaliated by shutting me out of my account and (3) later gave as its reason "Blocking accounts is one of the ways we have of protecting them"!
Hi David,
As your only reader who does not lean 'right', you may be interested to know that I agree with your criticism of the current state of the Labour party, although I think it worth saying there is an ideal of solidarity that used to be present in the party. and that is beautifully expressed in Ken Loach's 2009 film Looking for Eric. It is not a surprise that Darth Starmer had to eject Loach from the party.
But I do not like the Tory party either, and never have. However, I am bamboozled by the recurring attitude of many of my friends who cry "the Turkeys have voted for Christmas" every time a Tory government is elected. I suspect the problem is, they never once spoke to any 'working class' voters to understand the reasons for their voting. This, I think, is a very different problem to the one you highlight in this piece following Oakeshott.
Lastly, an objection to this claim: "using the word ‘discourse’ in its proper meaning as a body of knowledge that constructs its own subject"
How is this the proper meaning of this word? And how does any word have a 'proper' meaning...?
Apologies for relative silence recently; work has me rather besieged.
Chris.
I'm getting a lot of personal value from these explorations. They help to make sense of my own shift - which began during extremely difficult personal circumstances - from a 'do goodness & fairness' political intuition (ie left/socialist) to a strong valuing of agency and responsibility. I see the naked will to power & authority of 'do goodness & fairness' everywhere now and find it repellant. This is largely because I feel more personally complete, having pushed through tough times and slain a few demons.
I like Oakeshott's distinction, it certainly seems rooted in observation, even if it has a whiff of naturalistic fallacy about it. (Or that's just a whiff of intellectual snobbery on my part). The reality may be more nuanced, perhaps this distinction is not set clearly for each of us but varies within our psyche depending on the battlefront of life and decisions to be made.
The likes of the Labour Party and its institutional henchmen then focus on amplifying the individual manque tendencies within us. In turn, other people and institutions we encounter in life encourage the other aspect - independent and freedom-loving one. As an aside, it seems the latter is fostered mostly by ideas and ideals, occasionally by individuals we encounter and only rarely by institutions.
No matter how agonising a decision may be and how much one may wish to be spared it, if anyone or anything tried to take it away, I would bristle and rebel against such encroachment on my autonomy. The hardest decisions, the most agonising are those involving other people, their lives and autonomy, those I'd have no regret about having taken away from me. But I do not think that is what Oakeshott is talking about.
Your mention of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor makes me think of Fyodorov, the founder of the distinctively Russian transhumanist movement of cosmism. I've read that Fyodorov influenced Dostoyevsky; but if he has Christ opposing the Grand Inquisitor by refusing to rule over everyone, that suggests that Dostoyevsky might have been NEGATIVELY influenced, since Fyodorov seems to have envisioned the entire human race united in obedience to the Christian autocracy of the tsar.
What should we stand for? National independence and smaller and less interventionist government.
What should we stand against? International governance (the World Health Organisation and the Legion of other agencies, treaties and agreements), and bigger and more interventionist government.