"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 can save you a lot of space. Jobs program.
These budgets represent a PMC jobs program, a sinecure for college graduates, a place where you can actually make use of a degree in grievance studies or whatever.
Yup. "Defund the Police!" was similar as a practical matter. When yuppies said "Defund yhe Police!" what they meant was "take money from the undeserving (blue collar meathead unionized cops, famously unwoke) and give to the deserving (white collar social workers who can be relied on to uphold the latest and most censorious standards of political correctness)."
"Few Africans are going to learn Russian or Mandarin, and neither country has been particularly skilful in the export of its culture and influence."
Perhaps not.
I'm in a position where I can observe African and Central Asian students in China firsthand. This is a generalization, but scholarships to Belt and Road nations are creating a certain class of Chinese-educated technocrats who could become very influential in their home countries over the coming generation.
Another generalization is it seems the children of the elites go to Oxbridge, the Ivy League, and the Sorbonne to study law, literature, and whatever counts today as philosophy, while the children of middle-class strivers are in Chinese universities studying electrical engineering, applied computing, and industrial construction.
The showdown between those groups will be an interesting one to watch over the next twenty years.
An Islamic woman with a PhD in 18th-century French poetry is one thing; an Islamic woman with a PhD in unmanned aerial vehicles is something else entirely."
In our contemporary environment only two human identities are apparently recognised, those of employee, or of consumer. If you are not one of those, you are nothing at all. For example, in my country, the Department of Social "Security" describes me as a customer - not as a client and not at all as a citizen. In using this nomination, the department is absurdly describing itself as some sort of shop selling social services. If all our social relationships are reduced to this degree of alienation, then we have no society. If all that connects us is our commercial relationships what will happen when commerce fails?
"Customer" is a recent introduction from the top, and Social Security workers are horrified by it as well. "Claimant" or "beneficiary" are the proper words, they tell me.
I well remember my mother’s horror as a nurse in the ‘80s at some hospital administrators use of the term “clients” to describe what so evidently to her would always remain patients.
Relationships matter, and those who truck in their mischaracterization make much mischief.
Your analysis accurately captures the structural decline of Western influence. Historically, credibility was enforced by military power and then institutionalized culturally. Inevitably, the retreat follows the reverse order: institutional and cultural leverage erodes first, ultimately leading to the decay of military force projection, as recently evidenced in Iran.
The diagnosis here is largely correct and the precision is exceptional, particularly the observation that what has been lost is not the capacity to lecture but the coherent ideological framework that once gave the lecturing its legibility, to the lecturers, to their domestic audiences, and to the populations being lectured at. The Bloch exhibit is the essay's most powerful moment: a man who understood what the governance commons was worth and died defending it, whom the contemporary PMC can only process as a victim or a proto-European rather than as what he actually was.
One point requires direct challenge, however, because it is doing analytical work it cannot honestly support. The contrast drawn between Chinese infrastructure now and Western infrastructure then assumes a Western then that is a hundred and thirty to a hundred and fifty years old. The Damascus-Beirut railway opened in 1895. The African rail networks were built in the 1880s and 1890s. In living memory, in the memory of any African or Middle Eastern government that has dealt with Western development institutions in the past fifty years, the West has built essentially nothing material. The sermon did not replace the railway in some recent cultural deterioration produced by Foucault and the Anti-Oedipus. The sermon replaced the railway immediately after independence, when the colonial administration was replaced by the development apparatus without replacing the colonial infrastructure investment. The World Bank and the IMF built debt instruments and structural adjustment programmes. The most recent significant Western infrastructure project in Africa that can be named without difficulty is the Aswan Dam — which the Americans refused to fund in 1956, triggering the Suez Crisis, after which the Soviets built it. The infrastructure of the colonial period was the infrastructure of extraction: railways that ran from the interior to the coast to move commodities to European ports, not to connect African cities to each other. The contrast with the Chinese present is real. It is simply far more damaging to the Western case than the essay acknowledges.
The deeper gap in the analysis is the question the essay never asks: who benefits from the fragmentation it documents so carefully? The PMC is not the author of the condition described. It is a symptom of it. A population that has no shared historical memory cannot organise around shared historical grievances. A population whose identity is fragmented into competitive victim groups cannot build the transversal solidarity that effective political action requires. The destruction of the cultural, historical, and epistemic commons is not a byproduct of postmodern intellectual fashion. The fashion is the instrument. The destruction is the project. Temple Grandin's insight about cattle handling is the correct model here: the genius of the chute design is that the animal moves through it voluntarily, following its own instincts toward what appears to be open space, arriving at the point of slaughter in relative calm. Each individual curve looks like freedom. The people who benefit from the destruction of coherent shared values are specifically the people whose accumulation those shared values would otherwise constrain. The chute has an architect.
This matters not as a refinement of the diagnosis but because it changes the question. The essay ends, correctly, with the observation that the process has gone too far to stop and that the undermining effect is slow and unstoppable. If the PMC is the author, that conclusion follows. If the PMC is a symptom, the question is whether the institutional conditions that produced the symptom can be changed, and the historical record suggests they can, because every previous enclosure of the commons has eventually produced a recovery movement, from the Levellers through the labour movement through the New Deal, each time deploying the specific institutional innovations that the enclosure had destroyed.
The vocabulary of recovery does not require the theological consensus the West has lost. The Roman commons doctrine, the res communes omnium, the things that belong to all by their nature, was a legal rather than a theological provision, derivable from reason, received across Islamic jurisprudence and secular modernity alike. The jubilee's periodic reset of accumulated advantage is sound political economy whether its warrant is divine or constitutional. The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace's requirement to evaluate every significant decision for its consequences seven generations hence functioned for centuries without Christianity. These are not nostalgic appeals to a lost coherence. They are institutional designs grounded in the observable consequences of the accumulation dynamic's unconstrained operation, accessible to reason, valid for communities that share no cosmological framework.
Bloch's testament, I will die, as I have lived, a good Frenchman, is the constitutional expression of this in its most personal form: the rational attachment to the particular commons that one's life has been lived in and that the next generation will inherit. The PMC's inability to process it except as victimhood is the measure of how completely the managed consensus has destroyed the vocabulary in which the governance commons can be named. Enough diagnosis. The vocabulary of recovery is what the moment requires.
“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.”
I for one take this to be a good thing. 500 years of Western imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism are ending — it is long past time that our nations turn their energies inward to heal themselves and give over lecturing others how they ought to arrange their affairs. Let them make their own mistakes, and let’s get on with the much more important business of sorting our own domestic problems …🤨
Since this essay touches on the theme of 'belief systems' I would encourage those who haven't yet read Alfred Korzybski's 1933 'Science and Sanity' to take a look. AK created the discipline of 'General Semantics' based on his theory of belief systems and is credited with the now familiar aphorism 'the map is not the territory.'
If you find that heavy sledding, a good introduction would be Stuart Chase's 1936 'The Tyranny of Words' which sought to clarify AK's work, very successfully I would argue.
This is so wildly exaggerated as to be completely untrue: "I ... 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."
There have not been "various different studies." There was an internet article about one professor's informal experiment (https://www.thecollegefix.com/college-students-think-america-invented-slavery-professor-finds/)). He found: "Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America. They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America."
The sentence from the College Fix article, "Students' overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon," is not what the professor found. It is the journalist's sensationalized interpretation.
As for Aurelien's statement that "this belief was strongest among the better-educated," I was not able to find any source for this.
That;'s precisely why Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity - he wanted a set of rules. And why the early 'Rus' in Kiev asked various religions to 'bid' to be accepted in early Russia.
Thanks, Aurelien. When you say "what looked like advances in the rights of the individuals could be seen rather as just a subtler form of domination" you have identified a profound defect in the notion of rights as the basis for a society. Rights alone are purely abstract without a power to enforce them. Indeed the centrality of rights carries the implication of a tribunal which accepts pleadings of violations of rights, thus creating a stratification and ensuring submission and dominance between complainant and authority. In assertion of rights we submit to authority. For this reason I much prefer to place the basis of society on duty. A society that accepts duties towards all its members (with suitable wrangling over what those duties are and how to provide them) seems to me better than one that pretends to elevate rights with consequent submission to authority.
Rights and duties are as two sides of the same coin — neither exists without the other, and any pretence to the contrary won’t long survive contact with reality.
The essay is weaker than usual this time. Especially irrelevant are several rambling paragraphs in the beginning.
Aurelien takes an internet meme introduced by hakmao, "as a Kenyan official put it, every time China visits we get a hospital; every time Britain visits we get a lecture" (https://x.com/hakmao/status/1507139958087299072), but paraphrases it using the word "sermon" instead of "lecture": "when the Chinese come we get an airport; when the West comes we get a sermon." Note that nobody has ever used "sermon" in that pseudo-quotation; that is fully on Aurelien.
Aurelien is then displeased with the word he himself inserted. He goes on and on how using "sermon" pejoratively show the fallen mores of our contemporaries. LOL, despite what Aurelien thinks, using "sermon" in a negative sense is not a recent invention of our godless times. People have been griping about this since at least the seventeenth century: "And doe not our Prelates thus, when [...] they disgrace and traduce Preaching, calling it in scorne, Sermonizing?" (Henry Burton, For God, and the King, 1636).
Masterpiece along these lines: Hayden White's "Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe" (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Stunning at every turn of the page...
The thing is, Aurelien, that people believe what they want to believe - and what they need to believe. I've come to the conclusion that anybody can debate ideas and what they should 'educate' themselves in is practical skills. Do Maths I told my son. You can read Milton at the same time. He did. We debate Milton while he gets on building the world.
Like Lilongwe where the Chinese built them a new Parliament building. And over the road a 5 star hotel for said parliamentarians to stay in. How to buy the politicians big time. Where the construction projects are primarily staffed by Chinese managers and workers with minimal skills transfers to local people. With unquestionable vested in interests in country's resources - though less so in Malawi which has few. Whilst loading those countries with debts - see Sri Lanka. And yes Ive been there and seen it.
No - the Chinese are just a new generation of colonialists without even the guilt and debate that the West has. The Russians even more so given that the entire country is a colonial and imperialist construct after brutally invading every one of its neighbours. With an openly stated ambition to re-establish its empire.
It is a feature of those most critical of the West with its colonial past and the legacy that has to be dealt with, that they are mostly silent about present day colonialists of Russia and China, or the historic slaughter carried out by Russia. It is of course wholly NATO's fault that some of those countries have joined NATO to defend themselves from being raped yet again.
For what it's worth, quite a few Africans (and others) are studying in China and Russia.
"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 can save you a lot of space. Jobs program.
These budgets represent a PMC jobs program, a sinecure for college graduates, a place where you can actually make use of a degree in grievance studies or whatever.
That is all.
Yes, but a Jobs program is also a patronage network. "I sing the song of whose bread I eat" and all that.
Yup. "Defund the Police!" was similar as a practical matter. When yuppies said "Defund yhe Police!" what they meant was "take money from the undeserving (blue collar meathead unionized cops, famously unwoke) and give to the deserving (white collar social workers who can be relied on to uphold the latest and most censorious standards of political correctness)."
"Few Africans are going to learn Russian or Mandarin, and neither country has been particularly skilful in the export of its culture and influence."
Perhaps not.
I'm in a position where I can observe African and Central Asian students in China firsthand. This is a generalization, but scholarships to Belt and Road nations are creating a certain class of Chinese-educated technocrats who could become very influential in their home countries over the coming generation.
Another generalization is it seems the children of the elites go to Oxbridge, the Ivy League, and the Sorbonne to study law, literature, and whatever counts today as philosophy, while the children of middle-class strivers are in Chinese universities studying electrical engineering, applied computing, and industrial construction.
The showdown between those groups will be an interesting one to watch over the next twenty years.
An Islamic woman with a PhD in 18th-century French poetry is one thing; an Islamic woman with a PhD in unmanned aerial vehicles is something else entirely."
In our contemporary environment only two human identities are apparently recognised, those of employee, or of consumer. If you are not one of those, you are nothing at all. For example, in my country, the Department of Social "Security" describes me as a customer - not as a client and not at all as a citizen. In using this nomination, the department is absurdly describing itself as some sort of shop selling social services. If all our social relationships are reduced to this degree of alienation, then we have no society. If all that connects us is our commercial relationships what will happen when commerce fails?
It's even worse when those in prison are described as 'clients'.
"Customer" is a recent introduction from the top, and Social Security workers are horrified by it as well. "Claimant" or "beneficiary" are the proper words, they tell me.
I well remember my mother’s horror as a nurse in the ‘80s at some hospital administrators use of the term “clients” to describe what so evidently to her would always remain patients.
Relationships matter, and those who truck in their mischaracterization make much mischief.
Your analysis accurately captures the structural decline of Western influence. Historically, credibility was enforced by military power and then institutionalized culturally. Inevitably, the retreat follows the reverse order: institutional and cultural leverage erodes first, ultimately leading to the decay of military force projection, as recently evidenced in Iran.
The diagnosis here is largely correct and the precision is exceptional, particularly the observation that what has been lost is not the capacity to lecture but the coherent ideological framework that once gave the lecturing its legibility, to the lecturers, to their domestic audiences, and to the populations being lectured at. The Bloch exhibit is the essay's most powerful moment: a man who understood what the governance commons was worth and died defending it, whom the contemporary PMC can only process as a victim or a proto-European rather than as what he actually was.
One point requires direct challenge, however, because it is doing analytical work it cannot honestly support. The contrast drawn between Chinese infrastructure now and Western infrastructure then assumes a Western then that is a hundred and thirty to a hundred and fifty years old. The Damascus-Beirut railway opened in 1895. The African rail networks were built in the 1880s and 1890s. In living memory, in the memory of any African or Middle Eastern government that has dealt with Western development institutions in the past fifty years, the West has built essentially nothing material. The sermon did not replace the railway in some recent cultural deterioration produced by Foucault and the Anti-Oedipus. The sermon replaced the railway immediately after independence, when the colonial administration was replaced by the development apparatus without replacing the colonial infrastructure investment. The World Bank and the IMF built debt instruments and structural adjustment programmes. The most recent significant Western infrastructure project in Africa that can be named without difficulty is the Aswan Dam — which the Americans refused to fund in 1956, triggering the Suez Crisis, after which the Soviets built it. The infrastructure of the colonial period was the infrastructure of extraction: railways that ran from the interior to the coast to move commodities to European ports, not to connect African cities to each other. The contrast with the Chinese present is real. It is simply far more damaging to the Western case than the essay acknowledges.
The deeper gap in the analysis is the question the essay never asks: who benefits from the fragmentation it documents so carefully? The PMC is not the author of the condition described. It is a symptom of it. A population that has no shared historical memory cannot organise around shared historical grievances. A population whose identity is fragmented into competitive victim groups cannot build the transversal solidarity that effective political action requires. The destruction of the cultural, historical, and epistemic commons is not a byproduct of postmodern intellectual fashion. The fashion is the instrument. The destruction is the project. Temple Grandin's insight about cattle handling is the correct model here: the genius of the chute design is that the animal moves through it voluntarily, following its own instincts toward what appears to be open space, arriving at the point of slaughter in relative calm. Each individual curve looks like freedom. The people who benefit from the destruction of coherent shared values are specifically the people whose accumulation those shared values would otherwise constrain. The chute has an architect.
This matters not as a refinement of the diagnosis but because it changes the question. The essay ends, correctly, with the observation that the process has gone too far to stop and that the undermining effect is slow and unstoppable. If the PMC is the author, that conclusion follows. If the PMC is a symptom, the question is whether the institutional conditions that produced the symptom can be changed, and the historical record suggests they can, because every previous enclosure of the commons has eventually produced a recovery movement, from the Levellers through the labour movement through the New Deal, each time deploying the specific institutional innovations that the enclosure had destroyed.
The vocabulary of recovery does not require the theological consensus the West has lost. The Roman commons doctrine, the res communes omnium, the things that belong to all by their nature, was a legal rather than a theological provision, derivable from reason, received across Islamic jurisprudence and secular modernity alike. The jubilee's periodic reset of accumulated advantage is sound political economy whether its warrant is divine or constitutional. The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace's requirement to evaluate every significant decision for its consequences seven generations hence functioned for centuries without Christianity. These are not nostalgic appeals to a lost coherence. They are institutional designs grounded in the observable consequences of the accumulation dynamic's unconstrained operation, accessible to reason, valid for communities that share no cosmological framework.
Bloch's testament, I will die, as I have lived, a good Frenchman, is the constitutional expression of this in its most personal form: the rational attachment to the particular commons that one's life has been lived in and that the next generation will inherit. The PMC's inability to process it except as victimhood is the measure of how completely the managed consensus has destroyed the vocabulary in which the governance commons can be named. Enough diagnosis. The vocabulary of recovery is what the moment requires.
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/the-chute-has-no-author
This is, unsurprisingly, excellent.
“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.”
I for one take this to be a good thing. 500 years of Western imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism are ending — it is long past time that our nations turn their energies inward to heal themselves and give over lecturing others how they ought to arrange their affairs. Let them make their own mistakes, and let’s get on with the much more important business of sorting our own domestic problems …🤨
Since this essay touches on the theme of 'belief systems' I would encourage those who haven't yet read Alfred Korzybski's 1933 'Science and Sanity' to take a look. AK created the discipline of 'General Semantics' based on his theory of belief systems and is credited with the now familiar aphorism 'the map is not the territory.'
https://oceanofpdf.com/?s=Alfred+Korzybski
If you find that heavy sledding, a good introduction would be Stuart Chase's 1936 'The Tyranny of Words' which sought to clarify AK's work, very successfully I would argue.
https://oceanofpdf.com/?s=Stuart+Chase
This is so wildly exaggerated as to be completely untrue: "I ... 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."
There have not been "various different studies." There was an internet article about one professor's informal experiment (https://www.thecollegefix.com/college-students-think-america-invented-slavery-professor-finds/)). He found: "Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America. They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America."
The sentence from the College Fix article, "Students' overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon," is not what the professor found. It is the journalist's sensationalized interpretation.
As for Aurelien's statement that "this belief was strongest among the better-educated," I was not able to find any source for this.
‘Gibran asks us to pity “the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion,” which pretty much describes the West today.’
Indeed, nothing to bind together. Which is essentially what the Latin word religio conveys.
There are other prophetic lines from the same poem,
"Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press."
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again.
That;'s precisely why Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity - he wanted a set of rules. And why the early 'Rus' in Kiev asked various religions to 'bid' to be accepted in early Russia.
Thanks, Aurelien. When you say "what looked like advances in the rights of the individuals could be seen rather as just a subtler form of domination" you have identified a profound defect in the notion of rights as the basis for a society. Rights alone are purely abstract without a power to enforce them. Indeed the centrality of rights carries the implication of a tribunal which accepts pleadings of violations of rights, thus creating a stratification and ensuring submission and dominance between complainant and authority. In assertion of rights we submit to authority. For this reason I much prefer to place the basis of society on duty. A society that accepts duties towards all its members (with suitable wrangling over what those duties are and how to provide them) seems to me better than one that pretends to elevate rights with consequent submission to authority.
Rights and duties are as two sides of the same coin — neither exists without the other, and any pretence to the contrary won’t long survive contact with reality.
The essay is weaker than usual this time. Especially irrelevant are several rambling paragraphs in the beginning.
Aurelien takes an internet meme introduced by hakmao, "as a Kenyan official put it, every time China visits we get a hospital; every time Britain visits we get a lecture" (https://x.com/hakmao/status/1507139958087299072), but paraphrases it using the word "sermon" instead of "lecture": "when the Chinese come we get an airport; when the West comes we get a sermon." Note that nobody has ever used "sermon" in that pseudo-quotation; that is fully on Aurelien.
Aurelien is then displeased with the word he himself inserted. He goes on and on how using "sermon" pejoratively show the fallen mores of our contemporaries. LOL, despite what Aurelien thinks, using "sermon" in a negative sense is not a recent invention of our godless times. People have been griping about this since at least the seventeenth century: "And doe not our Prelates thus, when [...] they disgrace and traduce Preaching, calling it in scorne, Sermonizing?" (Henry Burton, For God, and the King, 1636).
It is a comedy of errors.
Masterpiece along these lines: Hayden White's "Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe" (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Stunning at every turn of the page...
The thing is, Aurelien, that people believe what they want to believe - and what they need to believe. I've come to the conclusion that anybody can debate ideas and what they should 'educate' themselves in is practical skills. Do Maths I told my son. You can read Milton at the same time. He did. We debate Milton while he gets on building the world.
Like Lilongwe where the Chinese built them a new Parliament building. And over the road a 5 star hotel for said parliamentarians to stay in. How to buy the politicians big time. Where the construction projects are primarily staffed by Chinese managers and workers with minimal skills transfers to local people. With unquestionable vested in interests in country's resources - though less so in Malawi which has few. Whilst loading those countries with debts - see Sri Lanka. And yes Ive been there and seen it.
No - the Chinese are just a new generation of colonialists without even the guilt and debate that the West has. The Russians even more so given that the entire country is a colonial and imperialist construct after brutally invading every one of its neighbours. With an openly stated ambition to re-establish its empire.
It is a feature of those most critical of the West with its colonial past and the legacy that has to be dealt with, that they are mostly silent about present day colonialists of Russia and China, or the historic slaughter carried out by Russia. It is of course wholly NATO's fault that some of those countries have joined NATO to defend themselves from being raped yet again.
Eye of newt and toe of frog?
How about you invest in a better grimoire and up your incantations game?