The strange death of ‘liberalism’ in the past two years has received scant coverage or discussion in the media, for the simple reason that those media are staffed and controlled by people calling themselves ‘liberals.’ Since the spring of 2020, as the most fundamental rights of man were trampled underfoot by politicians, judges and police, the ‘liberal’ journaliars continued to pump out the fear propaganda that provided the covering fire for these assaults, without as much as a single newspaper article or broadcast discussion signposting the unprecedented nature of what was occurring. Moreover, constituencies of liberal society which had for much of the previous six decades acted as watchdogs for entities such as ‘liberal society,’ or ‘liberal values’ — artists, writers, rock ‘n’ rollers, feminists, socialists, ‘civil libertarians’ — remained similarly tight-lipped as everything they had claimed to stand for was destroyed.
Despite all this, the term ‘Liberal Democracy’ continues to survive in our cultures, literally and devoid of irony, conveying an apparently axiomatic aura of virtue, whereas it seems a minimal precaution to provide it with those hazard-warning quotation marks. This idea has become inextricably intermingled with notions of freedom emanating from the counterculture of the Sixties, which has acted as a kind of backstop on our sense of progress for the past seven decades.
What is called liberalism here is not liberalism at all, but the direct opposite, bearing no resemblance to any of the classical definitions of liberalism or even the most commonsensical definitions of same. It is liberalism only by name — termed such, in fact, purely to nod ambiguously towards its implicit appeal to freedom-seeking. By corrupting the meanings of terms like ‘equality,’ ‘tolerance’ and ‘rights,’ the ‘liberal’ ascendancy of the past three decades had, long before Covid, overburdened the very skeleton of our civilisation, mangling it, leaving it weakened and susceptible to collapse.
Back at the start of 2019, 30 ‘Pro-Europe Intellectuals,’ signed a Manifesto warning of the imminent death of liberal democracy. ‘Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall there is a new battle for civilisation,’ they lamented. The 30 EU intellectuals invited people to ‘join in a new surge’ in defence of ‘liberal values.’ ‘Our faith,’ the ‘Intellectuals’ elaborates, ‘is in the great idea that we inherited, which we believe to have been the one force powerful enough to lift Europe’s peoples above themselves and their warring past. We believe it remains the one force today virtuous enough to ward off the new signs of totalitarianism that drag in their wake the old miseries of the dark ages. What is at stake forbids us from giving up.’
But they did not name this ‘faith,’ nor acknowledge that the only ‘faith’ to sustain Europe was rooted in religious ideas, most recently deriving from the story of the life of Jesus. They namechecked Erasmus, Dante, Goethe and Comenius, but nowhere in the document does the word “Christian” or any of its variants appear.
I knew, of course, what they were getting at but in misdescribing what they had in mind they somehow anticipated its imminent demise, prophesying disaster but for laughably off-the-mark reasons. They mentioned the ‘new crisis of the European conscience that promises to tear down everything that made our societies great’ but did not elaborate much on the nature of that ‘everything.’ They had in mind the populist uprising evident across the Western world since the victories of Trump and Brexit, three years earlier. They did not mean that the very ideology they were seeking to preserve and protect would be the cause of Europe’s and the world’s undoing.
One of these 30 ‘intellectuals’ was once well known to me, but when last seen he was bragging to an interviewer about cruising the New York subway looking for people to abuse for not wearing face masks.
I would think of this guy — and others with whom I had consumed copious pints in O’Donoghues of Merrion Row or The International on Wicklow Street in the heady days of 1980s Dublin, when a kind of benign Cultural Revolution (the capitals are not undeserved) seemed to offer just about any kind of intoxicating possibility you might have been able to dream of.
One of the things I cannot stop wondering about is what’s happened to all the mouthy, lippy guys I cut my scribbling teeth with all those years ago in Hot Press, In Dublin, Magill and the Sunday Tribune. Where oh where have they gone, those dark moustachioed men who thought the world could go far if it listened to what they said? Where are they now — the ones who left me green with envy at their mordant and ironic turns of phrase? The ones who, just when you thought they were about to be found out, scribbled brief masterpieces of dripping satire on the adapted wrappers of sugar packets over breakfasts of beer and paracetamol. Not a peep out of them for 25 months now.
Having lost touch with almost all of them (something to do with telling the truth about the buggering of our country) I wonder about them sometimes: If we were sitting around talking now, like in the old days, what they would have to say about what has gone down? Does it ever occur to them that the culture they once took for granted as intrinsic to their freedoms is being dismantled before their eyes, and with their acquiescence? Do they ever think, as I do, that we have lurched as though backwards in time to a dispensation that actually never before existed except in distant, backward lands or fictional vistas forged from fevered imaginations?
Some of them, to be sure, having entirely lost their mojos, are cowering in their garrets for fear of dying of a head cold. Others, no doubt, having accepted the shilling of The Man, have decided to stay bought and keep schtum. A couple, like the ‘European intellectual’ referred to above, have upgraded and become novelists and the like, but the deafening dearth of outrage from their tom-toms tells me they decided to buy in also, perhaps (I think, charitably) in the hope that it would all blow over and they can go back to scratching one another’s backs like in the old days. Alas, it is already clear not only that things will never return to normal but that every word they have ever written is now irrelevant, having been superseded by virtue of the utterly far-fetched upgrading to quotidian circumstance of the kind of stuff George Orwell used to imagine he was making up.
Do these guys I got drunk with in Lisdoonvarna and Slane not ever look up from whatever nonsense they’re writing these days and ask: WTF? Do those blades of the biro who made a fairly good living for years making us laugh ourselves sick at the gobshitery of politicians not look at the clowns and creeps who swagger before us in jackboots and laugh out loud, despite the dark side of it all?
Or perhaps it’s the case that they were never really advocates of an actual positive programme of freedom, democracy and justice, but simply objected to the incumbent governments in times when these were invariably ‘conservative’ or even what was once (now, in the era of lockdown, utterly laughably) called ‘right wing’. It’s the vindication of that droll line of Dylan Thomas’s about the best politics for a ‘conscientious’ artist being ‘left wing under a right wing government.’ Perhaps these guys just enjoyed being ‘rebels’ when it was, as Myles na gCopaleen used to say, ‘popular and profitable’ to be such. They enjoyed the idea of sniping at moronic gombeen politicians and calling them fascists. Now that we have real fascists in the cheap suits of liberal-progressivism, they don’t know what to do. Tongue-tied and slightly mortified, the only option they see is to keep their mouths shut
In truth, their form of liberalism — if such it ever was — had always seemed somewhat remote from the classical kind of liberalism, defined by Wikipedia as ‘a political ideology and a branch of liberalism that advocates free market and laissez-faire economics; civil liberties under the rule of law with an emphasis on limited government, economic freedom, and political freedom.’ What we have thought of latterly as ‘liberalism’ is quite a different animal: a ragbag of nice-sounding sentiments that actually present up close as not especially wholesome, and on closer examination give no little cause for nervousness. This notion of ‘liberalism’ is much looser than the classical model — instinctive rather than schematic or principle-driven. It is, or was, about allowing people to do as they pleased, so long as they did not actively harm others, about living and letting live, about — above all — the entitlement to behave sexually in whatever way you pleased with other consenting adults. It also had an economic dimension, though tellingly this was not akin to economic liberalism conventionally understood, but rather a strange mix of market values and a soft leftism that favoured a kind of condescending noblesse oblige-style regime of patronage over the poor by the well-to-do. In a sense — and in an interesting harmonic of liberalism’s foundational conditions, this involved the incorporation into a broadly pseudo-leftist economics of a kind of post-Christian altruism, but in which the injunction to give alms to the poor became a kind of ideological afterthought rather than either a built-in element or a mere charitable impulse. This provided a certain gracing aspect to the otherwise unadulterated self-interestedness of the liberal programme.
Unlike the economic or classical forms of liberalism, this more recent form had always seemed to be of a slightly unstable disposition, exhibiting various forms of incoherence that its adherents were unable or unwilling to explain. For example, writing about feminism in the context of parental rights back in the 1990s, I began to explore the reasons why, if feminists were seeking to obtain for women equality with men in the workplace, they were in general simultaneously opposed to the idea of extending parental equality to fathers, who were at the time (and are still) in receipt of summary justice in matters relating to their relationships with their own children at the hands of secret and unaccountable family courts. In making this argument, I found myself under constant attack from self-styled feminists who in other contexts held up equality as the Holy Grail of political progressiveness, but here argued that mothers ought to be regarded as the presumptive primary parents of young children and that all fathers be judged by the failures of a derelict few. Rinsed down, it was hard to differentiate their argument from the idea that the feminist prescription for ‘gender equality’ was along the lines of ‘What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is my own.’
Indeed, even for some years before I began to delve into these topics, I had, in writing on more general topics in the Irish Times, begun to insist on accompanying the word ‘liberal’ with a prefix such as ‘pseudo-‘ or ‘self-styled-‘ or ‘so-called-‘, or at the least placing the word ‘liberal’ in quotation marks, like so. I had been doing this from the early 1990s, pretty much from the time Mary Robinson was elected president, the event that spurred me to write my first book, Jiving at the Crossroads. I wrote that book within months of arriving in D’Olier Street, mainly as a result of observing the bared fangs of the self-styled liberals who worked there — the way, for example, so-called journalists togged out as literal campaigners for Robinson and then turned in the next day to bare-facedly present themselves as objective reporters of truth. A prefix such as ‘pseudo’ was, I felt, a necessary corrective on their self-descriptions. I never thought they were any kind of liberals — the very contrary — so I tended to approach all these terms and epithets with a certain irony — a mistake, of course, since even then we had entered an age that might just as accurately be described as ‘post irony’ or ‘post liberal’.
Those early inconsistencies I identified in the feminist project was in fact an advance warning of the incoherence of what is termed ‘Woke,’ which is really liberalism gone to seed, for reasons I will try to isolate. Feminism was the first clear manifestation of what subsequently became known as Cultural Marxism, the coalition of minority grievance-peddling that, when aggregated, gave us political correctness, microaggressions, spell words, #MeToo, Twitter mobs, and cancel culture.
The instability that would lead to this expanding incoherence is tracable back to the paradoxical origins of this pseudo-ideology in the foundational ideas of Western civilisation. The idea of ‘civil liberties,’ a close relation or descendent of the ‘rights of man,’ has its roots in Christian theology, and in particular in the Christian idea that each human person, being made in the image of God, has a unique dignity that attracts special protection in ways that are anterior and superior to all positive law.
This pseudo-liberalism is founded on a lie—several lies, in fact, but one in particular: the idea that freedom resides in getting whatever you demand, and doing whatever you desire—in the words of Aleister Crowley: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’. A moment’s thought reveals such ideas as potentially civilisation-threatening, for by definition what one person demands must be taken from someplace where it already benefits others, and doing exactly what you want will invariably be to the cost of someone else or, ultimately — because of the delicacy and complexity of the human instrument — yourself. There are libraries of philosophy and theology on these topics, but as far as the recent collective conversations of our societies are concerned, it is as though not a word of this has remained relevant or sensible.
My issue with my former friends is that they and others of the Sixties generation, which introduced these incoherencies intravenously into the bloodstream of modern societies, have not been honest about their own experience of these much-vaunted freedoms, which in truth have left a trail of devastation behind them, concealed beneath a blanket of bad sociology and worse psychology.
One symptom of this is that, other than dissenters, there is virtually no lucid witness to the errors of their so-called ‘liberalism,’ not just in the intimate areas of human relations, but in the vitally connected area of economics and the movements of people in the modern world. For half a century these converging strands of insipid and misleading thinking have dominated the cultures of western societies, steamrolling over everything and everyone with the help of corporate money and devious propaganda, their incoherencies protected from scrutiny by the influence and dollars of Big This and Big That, by corrupted media and the force-field of political correctness. Self-styled liberals had hi-jacked the idealism of the young to a project that had the outward appearance of virtue but deeper down was rotten to the core, convincing even our own children that globalism was an unequivocal good and that human safety, well-being and liberty into the future could be maintained without the assistance of the civilisational values that made all these qualities possible in the first place.
Thus, pseudo-liberalism seeks to turn upside down the value-system of the civilization that once was Christendom, attacking its core institutions and mocking and censoring its history. It justified genocide in the form of child-slaughter and was for a long time clearly intent — sometimes, it seemed, unconsciously — upon engineering the cultural and moral demolition of the West itself, by dint of godless relativism, induced migration, the elimination of distinct nations, and the destruction of the nuclear family.
‘Liberals’ have for decades spoken of what they called ‘the liberal order’ as though its virtues were self-evident. This, by their own logic, licensed them to adopt a tone of moral sanctimony that appeared justified by a rootedness of their beliefs in some kind of absolute sense of the good. Those who disagrees, therefore, must ipso facto suffer from some kind of pathological perverseness: they opposed the good out of fear, vexatiousness or worse. But the pseudo-liberal sense of the good was from the beginning selective and self-serving, and offered no good plans for those who dissented from it. We saw this, again and again — at the hands of social-justice warriors, LGBT activists, #MeTooers and the like — providing those with eyes to see with the evidence of what the liberal end of history would actually look like.
Liberal-progressivism— to give it its most informative name — was, we now intuit, actually an advanced form of colonialism, imposing itself not just on territories but also claiming dominion over all future time, brooking no dissent and remorselessly punishing recalcitrant doubters. In this sense it was deeply totalitarian, essentially removing from humanity the prerogative of adapting to each moment in accordance with human responses and instead insisting on this ‘one best way’ that ought not be questioned. This ‘liberalism’ promised untrammelled economic growth, itself an example of its incoherence: for not alone does increasing growth never deliver increasing happiness but the promise itself, in ignoring the inevitability of boom-bust, is an example of a dishonest pseudo-liberal promise. There could be no final glorious destination. This is now obvious in ways that are manifestly terrifying and little short of tragic.
When we say that such a concoction as this recent breed of ‘liberalism’ derives from Christianity, we are not, of course, talking about a legitimate offspringing. The conception happened, somehow or another, but is rarely alluded to by either party. A slight resemblance is noticeable, but only occasionally, fleetingly, in a certain light.
In some respects, it is possible to argue that what occurred was an attempt to supplant Christianity with a secular version of its conception of the ‘dignity of the individual.’ And, indeed, there are those who say that the more modern formulations of this idea — the obsession with civil liberties, personal freedoms, fundamental rights and freedom of conscience; the social contract centred on individual freedoms; the idea of natural law; the sovereignty of the people, and so forth — arose precisely from the decline of religious belief, reaching their apotheosis with the abolition of God. Moreover, acceptance of the idea that ‘liberal values’ might be rooted in Christianity came about only after Christianity was no longer representing a threat to the emerging alternative ‘reality. Pierre Manent, in An Intellectual History of Liberalism, suggests that such understandings were in fact forged in the battle to overcome the behemoth of Christianity, and that these ‘rights of man’ had emerged in their full power only after Christianity had been stripped of all its secular power. Liberalism, by this telling then, sprang out of a rejection of Christianity, as a form of ‘disincarnation’ of human reality, or as C.S. Lewis describes things, an ‘unChristening.’ In a sense, this ought not come as a disappointment to Christians, since the origin of Christianity is not an idea but a person, Who also happens to be God.
The opening words of the Preamble, the introductory section of the text of Bunreacht na hÉireann — The Irish Constitution — is as follows:
‘In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred, we, the people of Éire, humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial, gratefully remembering their heroic and unremitting struggle to regain the rightful independence of our Nation, and seeking to promote the common good, with due observance of Prudence, Justice and Charity, so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured, true social order attained, the unity of our country restored, and concord established with other nations, do hereby adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution.’
Among the purposes of this, as I repeatedly point out — indeed perhaps its core function — is to provide a ‘mechanism’ to achieve something that cannot be effected otherwise: it places the fundamental rights of human beings out of the reach of their own kind, laying them at the feet of the deity in which the vast majority of the population at that moment believed and placed trust. The ‘rights of man’ do not emanate from the State or Government or Court; nor do they exist by permission of the people or any section thereof. They are independent of and superior to all positive law.
Nothing like this ‘mechanism’ exists otherwise, or can be provided for itself by a society without a profound belief in some kind of god. In such a society, therefore, there is no way of underwriting the rights and freedoms of citizens other than with the threat of state force, itself representing a nullification of freedom, since freedom that depends on coercion cannot be called freedom.
There is a somewhat profane but not not entirely fanciful analogy to be drawn between the way in which the Irish Constitution is underwritten by the connection with the Holy Trinity and the way a currency may be underwritten by a commodity or commodities — Gold, silver, petrol, wheat – a topic very much set to be uppermost in the minds of the world’s human population in the coming months and years. The existence at the base of a money system means there is something at the back of the claims and promises that are made when the currency is used to conduct transactions between citizens, and even for those who understand that there is not enough money in the system to meet the demands of citizens should they all seek to reclaim their own at the same time, the degree of trust placed in the stability of the foundational commodity acts as a reassurance that maintains the system in stability. This is because a mystic quality of money derives from the confidence arising from established patterns which in turn generate trust that the system is capable of functioning even though it does not back each money token with an equivalent quantum of commodities.
Similarly, in the old dispensation of rights, even those who did not share the general belief in the deity in whom the rights of the community and its individual members were vested, could nevertheless be reassured by the belief, veneration and god-fearing of their believing fellows. The Bible used in courtrooms was a highly visible symbol of this trust, which acted as a kind of glue to hold the collective understanding in place. By ending the ‘God Standard’ that underpinned freedom, man created the conditions by which the strong and powerful men, working from within, could usurp the rights and freedoms of the rest.
Now, we appear to believe that these rights and freedoms grow on trees, or resemble the air that we breathe without giving it a thought. We don’t know how freedom is done, but just presume it’s easy because it always seemed to be.
The French writer, socialist and nationalist, Charles Péguy, whose life and work straddled the late 19th- and early 20th centuries was a devout Christian from his early thirties on. In one of his youthful writing, he sets out what might be a kind of fundamental manifesto of modern ‘pseudo-liberalism’: ‘We do not admit that there should be human beings treated inhumanly; that there should be citizens treated uncivically or men thrust out from the gate of any city. Here is the deep movement by which we are animated, the great movement of universality which animates the Kantian ethic and which animates us in our claims. We do not admit that there should be a single exception, that any door should be shut in any one’s face. Heaven or earth, we do not admit that there should be fragments of the city not living within the city.’
Taken on its face, this might be the ramblings of a Woke ‘snowflake’ protesting the sanctity of all rights and freedoms, until hardy come to hardy and we speak of the unborn child or the Christian who believes that this child’s right to life trumps the mother’s ‘reproductive rights.’ But, taken as a bond entered into with the person of Jesus, and in the light of His injunction to us to ‘love one another as I have loved you,’ it becomes a sacred trust among believers and those who honour such belief.
And herein resides the clue that reveals the intrinsic instability of what we have called ‘liberalism’ [which I have called ‘pseudo-liberalism): Christianity is not a hypothesis that can be measured by some more fundamental tool. It is the fundament, the basis of everything. This ‘liberalism,’ therefore remained true and stable for a long time after it had lost contact with its origins, even notwithstanding that it may have been forged in opposition to Christianity. Indeed, it might well have endured for a much longer time, for as long as it adhered, if only for the sake of appearances, to the world as presented in Christian thought. The more it attacked this thought system, the more it undermined its own foundations. In other words, of its very essence as a secular-atheist philosophy, it was sawing away the branch it was perched upon. ‘Woke,’ therefore, is not a ‘development’ of or outcrop from a prior form of this ‘liberalism’ — it is the plummeting of the entire thing towards the ground, the final nosedive of human civilisation. This ‘liberalism’ is a ‘value system’ without foundational values, that has now vacated its foundations because it always contained the seeds of its own destruction.
D.C. Schindler, in The Politics of the Real says that liberalism ‘represents a transformation of human nature from the ground up’; it is an extraction of human nature, root and branch, from the actual tradition in which it is embedded, ‘so as to imagine a truly radical reinterpretation of every dimension of human existence.’ The essence of liberalism, he says, is specifically a rejection of Catholicism, in the sense that the Church is the actually continuing presence of Christianity in history, coming to bear on human existence as a set of understandings that are historical, ontological and eschatological. It will be obvious from this insight why Ireland has suffered such a disintegration of the trust that hitherto underwrote our fundamental freedoms.
In The Idea of a Christian Society, T.S. Eliot described liberalism as ‘a movement defined not so much by its ends as its starting point; away from rather than towards, something definite.’ Liberalism was always moving in the direction it’s clearly going in now: towards its own dismantling and disintegration. It was the means to an end, but what end?
This was all perhaps inevitable given the way Christianity erupted into history — in one sense timelessly, but in another fixed in an earthly temporal schema. We can see through history since the Reformation/Enlightenment that, having ‘borrowed’ its essences from Christianity, liberalism would feel obliged to eliminate the Church, perhaps so that it could pursue whatever might have been its imagined destination-point. The rediscovery of Aristotle in the 13th century, providing the basis of a guiding star that preceded the Christian era, thereby . According to Manent, the next important staging post was Machiavelli, who introduced the idea of evil as a plausible basis for power, thus undermining the Christian claim to proffer a sole or definitive blueprint for political order.
In our world, including Ireland — indeed especially in Ireland in the past three decades — Christianity has been reduced to a matter of opinion. Christianity is either true or not, and if it is true it is the very pivot of history. If it loses this pivotal position, it loses also its status as font of truth. Having become unmoored from its Christian origins, liberalism — i.e. the prioritising and valourising of freedom above all other values — has gone the way of all unbounded human endeavour: a few men have taken it on themselves to supplant the God they have abolished. And they amount, for sure, to a tyrannical god. Driven, as becomes clearer, by a mindset of suspicion, contempt and hostility towards their fellow man, they seek at first to control, and then to dominate the ‘less enlightened’ members of their species —in, of course, their own interest, at least in the beginning. This is the rinsed-down meaning of the events of the past two years.
In many respects, then, what has been called ‘liberalism’ is really just a combination of ideological appropriation and a kind of showing-off of alleged atheistic virtue in societies experiencing an overhang of Christian affiliation or tokenism — and this is sometimes weaponised as an instrument of moral blackmail against holdout Christians who might be inclined to dispute the basis or direction of such ‘virtue.’ Thus, faithful Christians are challenged in their claims to Christian ‘compassion’ should they refuse to yield to every demand of the LGBT or ‘multicultural’ agendas, including the most dangerous and damaging elements. ‘Call yourself a Christian!,’ sneer the unbelieving ‘liberals’ who believe in nothing: ‘Whatever happened to “Love thy neighbour”?’
This device was used to great effect during the Covid exercise, when Christians were immobilised by a spurious interpretation of the ‘common good,’ which implied it to be a kind of communitarian solidarity as opposed to something like the generalised protection of the individual rights of each implicated human person. This, of course, is closer to a communistic, indeed a totalitarian interpretation, but Christians — certainly their leaders — appeared incapable of advancing such an argument, perhaps out of a fear of being depicted as unChristian.
At the heart of both the capitalist system and the liberalism which nowadays underlies most conventional notions of social progress lies a misunderstanding of human freedom. With the capitalist, the misunderstanding is self-interestedly deliberate; with the 1960s revolutionary it is hypocritical. Far from counter-cultural, the listed objectives of the 1960s ‘idealists’ are the dark matter of the modern consumer society, fuelling notions of ‘rights’ and ‘equality’ which in turn propel the economic system onward to wherever it thinks it’s going. Gay marriage, surrogacy, the shuffling of the mores of family life, fractured identities, the binning of true diversity through mass migration, which is elevated as the ultimate promotion of diversity — all these syndromes generate activities which stand to be monetised, while also rendering those affected more amenable to distraction and anaesthetisation.
The 1960s placed at the centre of Western culture the idea that the shortest path to satisfaction was along a straight line between instinctual desire and its intuited target. Freedom was the enjoyment of what came naturally, and the handbook suggested that this also came without consequences once you shook off the guilt imposed by the greybearded naysayers from whose grasp society and its instruments had been snatched.
The hippies and bohemians overthrew the bourgeois conformism of the greybeards they delighted in despising, having come to see their values as existing largely as abstractions, devoid of a context other than social control. They missed that these apparently imposed rules and strictures were the encoded wisdoms of human trial and error through the ages. The ‘rules’ emanated from within the human person, defining both the limits of human searching for satisfaction and proposing safeguards against potential encroachment on or from others. They were not so much rules as laws laid down by the facts, characteristics and limits of human capacity. In this schema, every desire has a set of potential consequences, which must be considered before the cost of ‘freedom’ can accurately be assessed. For the sake of shorthand, these consequences were enshrined in a series of strictures, which unfortunately read as simple prohibitions, but in essence they amounted to succinct reminders of the true nature of the human edifice: If an action of mine is likely to hurt myself or another, then it is ‘wrong’ according to a calculus of ultimate consequences, which is really what morality amounts to.
The post-1960s generations have not been honest about their experience of freedom. Privately — individually — many have found that their pursuit of freedom did not deliver the satisfactions they craved, but they had invested too much of themselves in the project to admit this.
A more fundamental element in the sleight-of-hand which led to us continuing to believe in a misconstrued idea of freedom is narcotics. This is an element of the revolution that, although not overlooked, is rarely if ever given its correct place or context. We have fallen — or been — into a cultural reflex of talking about certain forms of drug use as ‘recreational,’ essentially a Sixties meme. In fact there is no such thing as purely recreational drug use. All drugs are used because they are useful: they allow the user to achieve some level of exalted serenity by chemical means, and therefore to avoid some of the pain and chaos of life.
The hippie communes of the 1960s, where human freedom was narrowly defined as the pursuit of self-gratification for everyone, were in effect an attempt to debunk and discredit the alleged authoritarianism and prohibitionism associated with tradition and authority (especially of the father) and, more importantly, to demonstrate that the frowned-upon forms of ‘freedom’ were perfectly functional and harmless. This in turn would ‘prove’ that the authoritarianism of the elders had been arbitrary and oppressive.
But it is an iron law of life that the pursuit of selfish desires leads ultimately to chaos, grief and pain, firstly for other people who come to be used in your pursuit of satisfaction in this way, and ultimately by yourself. And since this was true also for the hippies in the commune, some method was required to mitigate the negative consequences — or at least the negative feelings they were likely to provoke. Because the ‘peace and love’ lifestyle was a recipe for total chaos in the personal lives of those who pursued it, drugs became an essential element of living this freedom, and also of the mechanism of proving the greybeards wrong. With the aid of drugs, the hippies were able to postpone not gratification, as their fathers had advocated, but the consequences of refusing to postpone it, or at least the negative feelings associated with such negative consequences. By medicating themselves with what we insist upon calling ‘recreational’ drugs,’ the Flower Power generation was able to push out of sight, indefinitely into the future, all the alleged downsides of their definition of freedom. Of course these consequences were bound to come home to roost sooner or later, but when this happened the hippies would have moved on, leaving behind those afflicted by their freedom-searching, who would just have to get on with things. Alternatively, if the law of consequences struck early — in the form of a calamity brought on by the misuse or overuse of drugs — this could be attributed to other factors besides the intrinsic incoherence of the freedom model: the victim was a casualty of personal weakness or over-enthusiasm rather than any flaw in the philosophy.
Now we have imported this logic wholesale into the heart of our cultures: we medicate — either through alcohol or prescription drugs — so as to avoid and postpone the chaos and grief which properly accompanies the senselessness of our governing ideologies. Our civilisation is becoming a single great hippy commune, in which the incoherence of our guiding ideologies is offset by the routine use of chemicals and opiates to maintain an artificial balance in lives that would otherwise succumb to disorder and despair.
Debt, the very definition of modern money/materialism, is both a reflection of liberal dispositions and a metaphor for the revolution’s avoidance of consequences. Just as the so-called ‘liberal agenda’ postpones all costs to be dealt with by posterity, the modern economy pushes its liabilities into the distant future, to be accounted for on a theoretical basis only. But the crux of the matter is not greed, selfishness, or decadence. This is an odd meme of modern ideological society, which adapts certain prohibitions born of religious thinking to fill gaps as they become visible in its moral or philosophical edifice.
The common denominator to both social liberalism and capitalism gone out of control is a cultural phenomenon of desire misunderstood — a failure to understand that human longing cannot be met by any of the obvious things it fixes upon. To speak moralistically about these matters invites a short-circuit of understanding. The issue cannot be addressed by more rules or the renewal of morals, but only by a reopening of the question: what does mankind actually want? And the deeper problem is that the understandings about this condition, encoded in rules and proscriptions, were vested in the great religions, which became the most frequent target of post-1960s revolutionary ardour. The abolition of God became, finally, not just a matter of philosophical assertion, but of social reorganisation to drive the logic of religious sensitivities out of the public square and underground. First of all, in the new bubble of controlled conversation hosted by the media, the idea of man’s subjugation or inferiority to some external power became an acute sense of embarrassment to those who imagined themselves citizens of a ‘modern’ age, whatever they meant by that. But, interestingly, the period since the 1960s has been characterised by unparalleled attempts to establish alternative, earthly seats of power, to which human beings might hand over control of our lives: the EU, the Internet, the free market, The United States, the motivating power of self-interest. In spite of the spread of rationalism, all our great beliefs continue to be in powers outside of ourselves. The age of unmoored individual freedom has yielded a generation which is more passive, less enterprising and possessed of less faith in itself, or in the power of people or peoples, than perhaps any previous generation in the history of mankind.
Western civilization has already become so contaminated by PC values that any initiative to name it or define it immediately sounds excessively pernickety and hyperbolic. Thus, in effect the neo-constitution of Cultural Marxism, PC has supplanted the concept of rooting the rules and protections of society in a religious understanding of reality.
Here, however, coercion is the key instrument. As a result of the manipulation of language and logic already achieved by the Cultural Marxists, any attempt at a critique short-circuits on the host of new definitions and compulsions we breathe in every day. Thus, a new form of thinking has been comprehensively ring-fenced at the levels of society where important decisions are made about future direction and policy. What appeared to begin as a form of courtesy towards vulnerable or marginal elements has become the default thinking of the power centres of society, impossible to challenge without risk of social denunciation and even outright cancellation. At the same time, these edicts and prohibitions have now become so diffused and engrained in culture as to require neither formal leadership nor subversive strategy to enforce them. The real subversion takes place between the ears of people who are unaware that the very words they use to describe reality have been interfered with to make them more useful for certain purposes and utterly incapable of reaching the meanings they once unambiguously conveyed.
One of the inevitable characteristics of this culture, as we have seen, is incoherence. It is important to understand that this can appear as both a collateral element and also as a deliberately induced condition. For example, the Cultural Marxist ideology insists on a gender balance in all areas of employment and public life. The only place it does not insist on such a balance is in parenting, where it is no longer even desirable that the parents of a child be a man and a woman, i.e. the actual father and mother of the child or children. Modern society is told that it must ‘get over its obsession with biological parenthood.’ Similarly in politics, where parties must now nominate a minimum number of female candidates — and yet, the same ideology, in a parallel reality, insists that there is no such thing as a fixed gender. A man can become a woman, or a woman a man, and this is a matter of personal choice.
To call this a tyranny risks ridicule, yet only such a word is capable of adequately capturing its scope and nature. It is unlike the classical tyrannies in that its use of force is covert and contingent. For the most part it protects itself by enabling the distraction or anaesthetisation of its subjects. In the minority of cases where this fails, it is capable of summoning up a mob to denounce, shame and ostracise. After this, for the determined dissenter, lies banishment and, where necessary, the threat of criminalisation and all this entails.
In effect, technology is the new way in which humanity postpones consequences — the dope of the third millennium. We live in a virtual world, hiding from the real one. This feels free, but only because we have increasingly unreliable models with which to compare it. Reality begins to fade from our memories, and gradually we are enslaved to the will of those who wish to exploit us more effectively.
This is not a fresh thought after two years of such ‘soft’ tyranny, but it bears repeating: In many ways, the most accurate prophecy of the totalitarianism which now envelops us is to be found not in George Orwell, identified with the brutalising dystopianism of 1984, but in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, written in 1931. Whereas Orwell anticipated a world dominated by fear and torture, Huxley foresaw a world in which mankind would be imprisoned by things that seduced human beings, including technology, amusement, sedation and diversion. Set in London in 2540 AD, the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that can be used to impose the will of the few upon the many. In the Brave New World, there is no such thing as marriage or sexual fidelity. The society is run by a benevolent dictatorship, and the subjects are maintained in a state of pseudo-contentment by conditioning and narcotics — a drug called ‘soma.’ Huxley outlines the ultimate oxymoron, a benign dystopia, a society in which children are mass-produced by in vitro fertilisation techniques and, allocated to different castes which correspond to the various future production needs of industrial society, conditioned for their future roles.
The Woke agenda — this plummeting to earth from our high eyrie near the sky — is, in real life, the final destination of the Sixties revolution. In effect that project involved dismantling everything that lies at the core of human society, and replacing it with something that is merely alleged to be more — and compulsorily — ‘progressive.’ This claim to ‘progressiveness’ is an arbitrary insinuation based on the self-interested claims of a tiny element in society, and without any objective evidence to support it. As we have seen, it is ineluctable within the ideological model we have pursued that such interferences in the human edifice as are currently being pursued will, being untested, emerge as fraught with unprecedented risk, by virtue of being prima facie rooted in no concept of natural or evolutionary reality. But this is merely to scratch the surface, for what is being foisted upon our societies is a new anthropology, directed at transferring the custodianship of human reality from God to men — and not so much to men as to certain men. In effect we are talking about a form of culturally pursued suicide of the species, a dismantling of everything on which the survival of humanity depends. An entirely bogus insistence on ‘human rights’ and ‘civil rights’ is being used as a battering ram to demolish the existing model, condemned as dysfunctional and corrupt, and to replace it with something which has no basis other than in the spurious claims of its advocates. And, parallel to this, the deletion of actual freedom, which more and more comes to be depicted as the preoccupation only of the reactionary.
It is a characteristic of post-modern society to reject any limits for what concerns its operative principles of autonomy and freedom, meaning that man is himself, both in morals and in metaphysics, autonomous. This presupposes necessarily that there is no order in nature and that it is the man himself who defines all the criteria. But this raises a range of vital questions, like: of which man, or men, do we speak in this connection? What are their intentions, their plans for the power they seek to draw to themselves? How do they regard their species as a whole, and its individual members, which is to say ‘us’?
But the most vital question for the rest of us — the ones who are not among the chosen ones: How likely is it that these men will be as benign as, or more benign than, the God we have abolished so that they may become our flesh-and-blood deities?
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Author John Waters
