Because We Say So.

Full of "beliefs", empty of anything else.

Last week, we looked at some of the more practical and structural reasons for the increasing loss of western influence around the world, in those many subtle interactions between states and their servants and influencers that have little to do with crude Realist concepts of the exercise of power. We noted that the model of Progress which the West held out in previous generations, and which had once been attractive, no longer was, and that the pragmatic lessons that had in the past been learned from western experience no longer seemed so interesting. Both the fundamental seriousness of the historical western approach to Africa and the Middle East, and the ideological base on which it was founded, have been replaced by a soulless, materialist, managerial Liberal attitude, of ticking boxes and supposedly measuring outcomes, which is driven primarily by the career interests of westerners and of a local neocolonial elite.

So whilst huge amounts of money are spent, and there are more NGOs and development officials now than there were missionaries and administrators at the time of colonialism, very little of lasting value is achieved. Yet nobody important really seems to mind, so long as budgets are respected and boxes are ticked. Today, I want to look in more detail at how and why this has happened, as a result of changes in the West, socially, politically and even philosophically. I’ll review a number of changes in ways of thinking that have come from all directions, but have collectively reduced the West’s capacity to act sensibly towards the rest of the world. Although my interest is thus primarily on what these changes have done to the reputation and influence of western states overseas, we need to begin by looking at what has happened in the West itself, and why. I’ll also briefly note that, nonetheless, the West continues to have considerable influence in some parts of the world, and that this is less about western strength than the current weakness of competitors. And as before I will try to restrict my specific examples to those I know something about. And again as before, I’m not getting into polemics about the rights and wrongs of colonialism here.

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A good place to start is the apocryphal remark, attributed to a number of African politicians, which runs something like: “when the Chinese come we get an airport; when the West comes we get a sermon.” At first sight this seems strange since, as we noted last week, missionaries built churches, schools and universities, among other things, while the colonial powers built lots of infrastructure. Almost all of Africa was connected by western built railway-lines at one time or another: a few of them are still in service. Further East, the French constructed the Damascus to Beirut railway, over difficult and complex terrain, in just four years. It was opened in 1895, but finally closed during the Civil War (You can still see the station in Beirut.) Now although these railways were built for mercenary reasons to do with trade and strategic positioning, the fact is that they were built, because capabilities existed then that we do not have now. (Chinese motives are unlikely to be any less mercenary, of course, but there it is.)

So all we have left is sermons. But let’s stay with that word for a minute. A “sermon”, from a Latin word meaning “discourse,” is an address on a religious theme, most often taking its subject from a verse of the Bible. (There is a similar process in Islam.) In the days when it was customary to go to Church, “sermon” simply meant an element of a Church service: with the decline in attendance, it has acquired a pejorative significance, and, as used by our apocryphal African, means moral lectures given by people who have no right to be giving them.

But sermons were once an important literary form, and in Shakespeare’s time collections of the sermons of Jean Calvin, for example, were best-sellers. Indeed the famous connection between Print and Protestantism is well exemplified in the case of sermons: those of John Donne were regarded as important literary works from the start, and have been reprinted in modern critical editions. They were also a form of popular entertainment, frequently preached in the open air before large crowds, who did not scruple to heckle the preacher on points of dogma or literary merit. They were often used to convey a political message either for against the established authorities, and preachers who were too controversial could find themselves in trouble with those authorities, or conversely shouted down, or even assaulted, by an angry crowd.

It’s immediately clear that you can only have this kind of discourse at all in a fundamentally homogeneous society. A crowd or congregation would be familiar with Biblical stories and themes (in the towns, by Shakespeare’s death, most of the urban middle class could read, and books on religious themes were the equivalent of political literature more recently.) References to everyday life, to recent historical events, even to popular religious controversies, would resonate with the vast majority of those listening. In turn, successful preachers, like John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism in the eighteenth century, carefully calculated how to present their reformist, populist teachings in such a way as to convert the largest number of people.

But if we think about it for a moment, it’s clear that classical “sermons” of this type are only one example of a type of in-group discourse. That is to say, they are intended to inform, persuade, and even entertain, a group of people who have broadly common ideas, or who, at a minimum, are open to persuasion based on what they know and believe already. A political orator, for example, might seek to reassure his or her her audience of the fundamentals of their beliefs, while also converting some of the audience to a more radical position than the one they currently hold. Even in that second case, though, there would have to be enough commonality of vocabulary and concepts to make persuasion possible. But just as often such discourses are about solidarity and consensus-building: consider a speaker at a Party Congress in Moscow in the 1980s, for example and, with some limitations, a speech given at the annual congress of a major political party today. Speaker and audience share a whole set of implicit and explicit assumptions, norms and values, which means they understand things that are said, and even not said, and even if those things are puzzling to outsiders.

So the idea of travelling to a far country and spending most of your life there, as a missionary or an administrator, did not come out of nowhere. It was not an appeal to adventure, nor an appeal to those who wanted to become rich overseas: there were plenty of other opportunities for that. It was an appeal to duty and service, in terms with which the target audience of young (mostly) men would have been familiar, because they had been hearing it all their lives. Moreover, the values that were supposed to guide their service did not have to be taught from zero: they were there already in the education systems of the countries concerned. And because they were also values widely accepted in the societies themselves, choices made by individuals were comprehensible to those wider societies. To tell your middle-class relatives that you wanted to become a missionary, or join the Colonial Service, might surprise them, but it would be as understandable as if you said that you intended to join the Army, or for that matter a merchant bank. It was part of an acknowledged range of choices that young people could make.

As I pointed out last week, there was a firm moral basis for most of the actions that these people took. The British case is perhaps more obvious, with its mixture of Protestant Christian and Liberal values, but in some ways the French case is more interesting because, in those days and indeed until relatively recently, there actually was a secular ideology called Republicanism: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the separation of Church and State and political power in the hands of the people. This ideology was no more universally respected than any other, but the important thing was that it provided a clear foundation for making decisions and implementing policies. And since the values of the French Revolution were universal, they applied by definition everywhere and at all times. So since slavery was an offence against equality, it had to be abolished everywhere that French power permitted. Both the British and the French, in their different ways, could thus call on a coherent corpus of thought and writing to support their policies.

Such a consensus-based moral certainty seems unimaginable today, and if our politicians seem unconvincing in their dealings with the rest of the world, it is because they have retained, and even strengthened, the vocabulary of morally superior instruction, without any of the consensus-based and coherent thinking that should underpin it. They continue to hector and lecture, both at home and abroad, but what they say makes little sense, because it is not based on any systematic set of beliefs. Moreover, the consensus a century ago was social as well as intellectual: no religious or political theory has ever been interpreted in the same way by everyone at all times, and indeed popular beliefs and norms tend in practice to be a rather complex mix of inherited and changing attitudes, mixed with changing interpretations of teachings and ideas. Most people, in fact, and whatever their level of education, hold strong opinions on many issues without being able to explain exactly why. This is normal, and in a relatively coherent society it is not necessarily a problem. It is a problem today because we no longer have a relatively coherent society. Let’s briefly look at examples of why.

I mentioned last week the attempts of western powers to put an end to such practices as child marriage in areas of the world they controlled. This in part had to do with changes in the concept of childhood in Europe in the nineteenth century, and progressive social legislation in many countries to prevent the sexual exploitation of children. That’s not a randomly-chosen example, because in a few months time we will be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of a famous petition, signed by almost every significant French intellectual of the epoch, calling for the legalisation of sex with children. The list included the usual names (Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre), some who now probably regret signing (Jack Lang, Bernard Kouchner) and a whole string of intellectuals including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida of the Deconstructionist Gang, to whom we will return. The petition was in the context of the so-called Versailles Affair , where three men were charged with sexual relations with boys and girls of 13 and 14 years of age. The basic argument was that the rights of children to make choices about their relationships were the only relevant issue. (No children appear to have been consulted in the drafting of the petition.) It was perhaps the first sighting of a modern, secular, normative social argument, entirely theoretically-based and uninterested in any practical consequences.

Among the signatories, unsurprisingly if you know the era, were Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, authors of the Anti-Oedipus published in 1972, which effectively distilled the incoherent demands of the leaders of the 1968 generational rebellion. Now, as often, it’s not so much that Great Books change history, as that they concretise the thought of a period, offer a point of reference, and provide a vocabulary and a set of ideas to make what was previously incoherent more structured and easier to understand. It’s therefore unsurprising that the influence of many Great Books is strongest on those who have never read them, but have absorbed popular interpretations of their main ideas. So I’m not going to flog through the text of the book, which features the wilful obscurity and newly-minted vocabulary obligatory in modern French philosophical writings, but just mention a couple of points associated with the book’s popularity.

The book formed part of the “anti-psychiatry” movement, but extended the condemnation to psychotherapy, also, which was dismissed as ”reactionary,” and as a kind of “police force.” Inspired by Nietzsche’s Will to Power, and by Foucault who wrote the preface, the authors portray the element of Desire as existing above everything else, and in effect producing reality by itself. Human beings are “desiring machines” interacting with each other. But Desire, they argued, is also capable of being perverted by capitalism into the desire for subordination or even to be repressed. Therefore, Desire must be liberated from the family and all the other repressive structures used by capitalism to control it. The schizophrenic is celebrated or at least cited, as the only truly liberated individual, unlike the paranoid and the psychotic, who remain prisoners of the desire-negating system. (No schizophrenics seem have been consulted in the production of the book.) Schizophrenia is not a mental illness, but a higher state of being, therefore.

If that sounds clumsy and needlessly obscure, well that’s certainly how many would characterise the book. After all, as was pointed out from the start, Desire is not necessarily a good thing: mass murderers, sadists, the Waffen SS and others are certainly acting out their desire, even while they transgress social norms that their families and societies tried to inculcate. But criticism is rather beside the point: the book was a sensation when it was first published, and even more so when an English translation appeared. For many who did not get beyond reading the back cover, it represented the sacralising of the do-what-you-want mood of the times, a kind of ”Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” but with a much larger list of references than anything Crowley could manage. It appeared—like some Leftist version of Ayn Rand—to provide intellectual support for our natural urges to selfishness and indifference to the welfare of others, which a repressive society tried to control, and to represent them instead as natural responses to a world consisting only of “desire machines.” Quite what such a world would have looked like, must remain a mystery, since the book was exclusively concerned with the need for rebellion, and not the consequences.

No wonder it was much talked about, if not necessarily read. Now the idea of an appeal to Rights preempting any other type of argument (from duty, from consequences etc) was not of course new. You can find it already in the foundational Human Rights document, the Declaration of 1789. The Preamble, which tends to be neglected these days, says in part, in the official English translation, that because “ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt of the rights of man” are “the only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of Governments” the National Assembly has “resolved to set forth, in a solemn Declaration, the natural, unalienable and sacred rights of man.” There are a few interesting points here. Rights are everything. Neglect of duties, except by the State is nowhere mentioned. And if they were respected, all of the misfortunes and corruptions of Governments would be cured. Moreover, the text asserts that these Rights are “natural, unalienable and sacred,” so that they are pre-existing in some Platonic sense: they have not been defined or argued over, but exist independently of human debate, though they are capable of being recognised by human Reason. (In fact the list was the product of furious debate.) Moreover, the list of Rights is exclusive: it’s “the Rights” not “some rights:” les droits in French. The list is therefore exclusive, exhaustive and presumptively correct. It is not subject to debate or qualification, and simply needs to be implemented.

This is, as far as I know, the first attempt to produce such an ambitious and far-reaching document without a religious justification, or for that matter reference to traditional Classical authorities. (Quite what the Deist-style phrase “in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being” is doing at the end of the Preamble has never really been clear, but it’s probably an attempt to make the text more palatable —including to the King— without explicitly invoking divine authority.) This style of writing has continued to the present day. There are many lists of Human Rights now, and in general they are presented in the same way, as being non-negotiable and pre-emptive. They do not have to be argued for or justified; they may just be assumed. More recently, however, identity groups have started to claim special additional rights for themselves, although they are seldom specified in any detail. Rather, some initiative or other will be criticised as an “attack on (insert group) rights.” The inevitable conflicts and violent arguments have developed, since it’s effectively impossible to increase the special rights of one group except at the expense of others.

However, the rights listed here, and in subsequent declarations, are what Marxists call “bourgeois” rights: freedom of speech and association, equality before the law, innocence until proven guilty, and of course the right to own property. From the beginning, it was widely recognised that actively exercising such rights was not the same as having them in theory. Governments of the Left did try, honourably, to make access to these rights easier, and to introduce economic rights, such as the right to state pension, as well. But there was another analysis also, which was to suggest that all such assertions about rights were fundamentally meaningless. Every apparent victory just concealed a more subtle defeat, and what looked like advances in the rights of the individuals could be seen rather as just a subtler form of domination.

Here, we enter the world of the Deconstructionists, about which, as I’ve explained before, I have very mixed feelings. In one way, much Deconstructionist theory is unexceptionable and even common sense. Everyone accepts that ideas and ways of expressing them have changed greatly over time, that organisations and institutions tend to have fixed ways of expressing themselves internally and to the outside world, and that what is and is not said depends partly at least on power relations. Likewise, society only exists at all because people agree to follow rules and procedures established by others whereas in theory they could refuse to do so. As a set of broad, pragmatic sociological observations, this is unexceptionable, and would be accepted by pretty much anyone who has worked in an organisation or lived in a society. The problem is that making a stellar academic career out of such mundane sociological truths is not easy. Thus the temptation to go further, and to argue that all knowledge and truth is a production of power, and that all relations of any kind are just expressions of domination and submission.

Whether Foucault himself believed this has been long debated, but some of his imitators, and imitators of imitators, certainly did. As a philosophical principle, of course, the idea of truth as a merely production of power is self-refuting, since that statement itself can only be a production of power. Nonetheless, taking the argument to its logical conclusion, we must live in a world where all relations, even the most intimate, are about domination and submission, and where all truth and all knowledge is relative, as decided by power at any point. As I say, I’m not sure whether Foucault actually shared this nightmare vision, but that’s not the point: generations of people have now absorbed these ideas at second and third hand, and do not scruple to use them in struggles of all kinds. Of course such ideas cannot be applied universally, because of their self-refuting nature. If someone says “the mainstream media is telling lies about Gaza” you can reply that such a comment presupposes an absolute standard of truth that by definition cannot exist, and anyway their own sources of “truth” are themselves just products of power. If a feminist says “you would say that, you are a man,” you can reply that she is just a voice expressing “truths” a feminist power structure has imposed upon her. It’s a very tedious game that leads nowhere, but in its shambling around it has destroyed a lot of things along the way.

In particular, this way of thinking privileges the absolutist, peremptory assertion against which there is no appeal. In 1789, and for quite a while thereafter, there was a body of belief and custom which softened the practical impact of such assertions considerably. Now, there is not. The result is that in politics today it is possible to make virtually any statement about a controversial issue without feeling the need to cite any evidence in favour of it. Indeed, the more heterodox the better, because the more extreme the statement, the more you show yourself to be liberated from the structures of power that determine what truth is. So one of Mr Mélenchon’s lieutenants recently informed us that it was a “myth” that France had ever been a majority white, Christian nation. It’s all truth determined by power, you see. And of course once you fall into the Abyss, there is no stopping.

You fall further and faster if you don’t know, or haven’t been taught, anything about the world, even mediated through some tedious power structure. For reasons we’ll come to in a second, the teaching of history is discouraged these days, not least because of the harmful potential effects of introducing students to ideas from earlier epochs. I was rather startled to read recently that according to various different studies, a significant minority of Americans believe that slavery was invented in America and was never practised anywhere else. Given that this belief was strongest among the better-educated, we may begin to have doubts about the pragmatic benefits of education. But more generally, not only has Presentism invaded the academy, with its single-minded, unchallengeable insistence on the inferiority of all previous societies, but there is an increasing move to adjust syllabuses to avoid students having to encounter unpleasant, um, truths or indeed anything that might challenge their beliefs. This means not simply that students are emerging from university without a proper critical training, which is bad enough. In the context of this discussion, it means that overseas students paying a fortune to study at a prestigious western university are increasingly wasting their money. And that can’t be concealed forever.

All of this would be more manageable if we didn’t have a political class and an acolyte Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) that hated their own countries. I’ve discussed this point often enough that I won’t beat it to death here, but the fact is that, with a few exceptions, we are ruled by globalist internationalists, who feel contempt for their citizens and their history and culture, and are only happy when they are together in some post-national plastic construction of their own devising. For some, this is a twisted version of the argument (itself twisted) that national differences produce wars, for some it is the creation of a teleological transnational utopia, for some it’s just about money and power, but for all of them it means belittling, sneering at or just ignoring, their own history and culture, and dismissing it with absolutist, pre-emptive ideological statements. (Thus Mr Macron’s assertion that “there is no French culture.”)

There are entire schools of revisionist “history” flourishing on the Internet that claim to dispute “received ideas” produced by “power structures.” Sometimes people even manage to get books published expounding them. For a while, in print and occasionally in person, I used to challenge such people, asking if they had read this or that book, or were aware of this or that document. I gave up, eventually, because it was useless. People have their ideas about the past, which they find comforting, and which no amount of power-produced mere “knowledge” is ever going to shift. Perhaps I’m the only one who is concerned about such things, I don’t know.

But of course for a country where the dominant political forces feel contempt for their own history and culture, there’s no reason why other countries should take them or their country seriously. Back when I used to do a lot of this, and I was asked whether I would recommend some aspect of the British system, I would say “we certainly don’t have all the answers, but we have hundreds of years of making mistakes. We have tried to learn from them and perhaps you can too.” I wonder what British (or French or US) advisors would say these days: “I come from the evilest country in recorded history, and I really should get back on the plane” perhaps? I caricature, but only because the reality of the situation lends itself so exquisitely to caricature. Why should foreign governments take political systems and their leaderships that spend all their time hating themselves and apologising for their history, seriously?

Pragmatically, an ignorance of national history is helpful to our ruling class and the PMC, because much of history is about solidarity, collective struggles and the forging of a national identity. We don’t want that today, because every one of the intellectual trends I’m discussing today, including uncontrolled Liberalism, is about the individual and not the group, about the pursuit of individual wealth and power, rather than the common good. National identity and patriotism are threats to today’s political class and PMC. So instead of myths that federate, we have myths that divide. Instead of respecting heroes, who may unite us, we value victims, and victims set us against each other. Sometimes this is explicit (“I am your victim,”) but it can also be implicit (“I’m a bigger victim than you are.”)

If I may be permitted a final example from France, then about a fortnight ago Marc Bloch was received into the Pantheon, which is the large and rather grim building at the top of the rue Soufflot when you stand with your back to the Luxembourg Gardens. For centuries, great figures of French history have been symbolically interred there. Bloch was a genuine hero. A very distinguished historian (co-founder of the Annales school) he fought in the First World War, he volunteered for the Second, although he did not need to, joined the Resistance after the fall of France, was arrested, tortured by the infamous Klaus Barbie, and shot just a couple of weeks after the Normandy landings. He also wrote The Strange Defeat, a historian’s attempt to explain the defeat of 1940, which was published only after his death. He was also a quintessentially French hero: he came from a family of secular and assimilated Jews who lived in Alsace until their region was occupied by the Germans in 1870. Like many others the family then went to live in Paris. Bloch had no strong political convictions: he appears to have been a moderate centrist Republican, and he joined the Resistance out of simple patriotism. In his testament, composed in 1941, he wrote that “I will die, as I have lived, a good Frenchman.” And in The Strange Defeat he pitilessly analysed the hatred of their country by the French elites, and their readiness to countenance defeat if they could achieve political advantage by it, and get rid of the detested Republic. If Bloch is not a genuine hero, I don’t know who would count as one.

This was all horribly embarrassing for the PMC, which idolises victims, preaches division and discourages assimilation because it’s “racist.” Some pundits wondered aloud if Pantheonising Bloch, an unrepentant patriot, would “encourage the extreme Right,” others argued that he was best understood as a Victim (he had been sacked from his university job by the Vichy regime under its anti-semitic legislation) or that anyway he wasn’t really a patriot at all, but a convinced European, almost like von der Leyen. The ceremony itself tried to plant little hints on all of these themes here and there, and Macron was clearly uncomfortable throughout. It struck me watching it, that if there’s one thing worse than the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gilbran’s injunction to “pity the nation that acclaims the bully as a hero,” it must be to pity the nation that has no heroes at all, and seeks to destroy the ones it used to have.

If it’s obvious that all this division is deeply harmful to society, it’s equally obvious how unattractive it must be to foreigners. Both the British and the French, in my personal experience, had a long tradition of spreading influence through personal contacts, places at university, cultural exchanges, language training and many other things. I’ve heard American diplomats reminisce nostalgically about the year they spent at the Sorbonne or Oxford: the elites of many African and Arab nations were trained in the West as well. But you can only do this if you think you have something to offer, and if you put time, effort and money into it. These days, we just want the money. For the British, foreign students have been a matter of financial survival for decades now, and the British have so led the way in rubbishing their own culture and history that I’m increasingly unsure why anyone would want to come there. In France, you can now do a semester or two at a French university without speaking a word of French. Your teaching is in English, normally by French lecturers who spent some time in the US, your teaching materials are in English and reflect Anglo-Saxon values, and your academic and social group will be made up very largely of English speakers. Given the costs involved, Why Bother? is a reasonable question.

In the same poem I cited earlier, Gibran asks us to pity “the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion,” which pretty much describes the West today. A hundred years ago, those who believed in western moral superiority could point to sets of organised beliefs, often based on religion, and to practical experiences that they felt justified this attitude. Today, we have nothing : only the impulse to lecture and hector remains. The answer is no longer, We do it better, come and see. The answer is Because we say so, and don’t argue. This is what you would expect from a fragmented culture, where debate as such has stopped, and has been replaced by competitive sets of pre-emptive norms, wielded as weapons, and against which there is no appeal. Certain types of beliefs still exist, but in isolation and often in conflict each other, essentially random in nature and unsupported by anything except the power to require others to accept them as true. This means there is effectively no organised thought at all, because the minimum requirements for it do not exist. Politicians and pundits contradict themselves not from hypocrisy or ignorance but because they express different conditioned reflexes depending on the situation. The politician who in the morning praises their country for its openness and tolerance of immigrants, and in the evening treats the same country as a suburb of Hell, mired in structural and institutional racism, probably isn’t aware of the contradiction. It’s just that different normative discourses apply in different situations.

All of this is having a slow, unstoppable, undermining effect the ability of the West to continue to influence political systems and cultures abroad, in subtle ways that are ultimately much more effective than any number of weapons. The process has gone too far to stop now, and anyway it’s actually a consequence of the disintegration of identity, nation and culture in western society, about which nothing can now be done.

It will be a slow process, partly because of nostalgia and habit, partly because other obvious competitors (Russia? China?) have their own problems, and are not necessarily attractive models for everyone. Few Africans are going to learn Russian or Mandarin, and neither country has been particularly skilful in the export of its culture and influence. But it’s impossible to mistake the contrast between the firmness of purpose and sense of collective identity shown by these states, and the empty blathering and hectoring of the West, which in the end has only an intellectual and spiritual vacuum behind it. It won’t be long, I suspect, before some nation tells us exactly where we can stick our moral superiority. I wonder what we will do then.

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.