Iceberg? What Iceberg?

Who could have predicted it?

I’m pleased to say that last week’s post again generated a lot of interest and brought another sizeable group of new followers and subscribers. Welcome to all of you. And a special word of acknowledgement to those who have posted comments and “liked” the essays on the Spanish and Italian translation sites.

These essays will always be free, but you can continue to support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and passing the links to other sites that you frequent. If you would like to take out a paid subscription I won’t stand in your way, (I’d be very honoured in fact) but I can’t promise you anything in return except a warm feeling of virtue. A special thank-you to those who have taken out paid subscriptions recently.

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And 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 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. And now:

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The first time I crossed a land border in Europe was as teenager, on a train from a place in Belgium whose name I have forgotten, on the way to Amsterdam. During the journey, a couple of Dutch frontier police came through the train, checking that everyone had a passport or an identity card. We were, after all, crossing a national border and going into another country.

Not that it was difficult in those days. Because I didn’t know how soon I would travel abroad again, I had been to the local Post Office with a photograph, and bought a British Visitor’s Passport valid for one year. It cost me ten shillings, and enabled me to travel basically anywhere in Western Europe. The whole process took about fifteen minutes as I recall. A few years later, friends of mine at University with more money spent the summer hitch-hiking to Greece and back and sleeping on the beach, which was quite possible even under the Colonels. Some went as far as Afghanistan, with little difficulty.

The attraction of such journeys in the days before the advent of mass hyper-tourism was that you were going somewhere different. It was necessary to learn a few words of the language, though, to understand a little about the country, and make allowances for very different ways of doing things. Above all, it was necessary to be prepared for the incredible depth and complexity of European societies and their history, and to realise that this was a fine-grained business where details and tiny differences mattered a lot. You quickly learned, for example, that there were actually two Belgiums, with parallel sets of political parties and institutions, and this makes complete sense when you consider the circumstances of the establishment of Belgium, which of course hardly anybody does. So I shouldn’t have been surprised that when I went into a shop in Brussels forty years ago and asked for something in French, the proprietor replied in English. Brussels is in Flanders of course: what did I expect?

For me, and for a lot of people, this is fascinating and different, and I’ve been very sad to see it progressively hidden (though happily not destroyed) under layers of plastic homogeneity. To take one example, there’s no doubt that the current currency situation in Europe is more economically “efficient” in banal bookkeeping terms. It’s true that I can draw Euros out of a machine close to where I live and spend them in Portugal or Italy. It’s also true that when I first travelled abroad, there were limitations on how much money you could take out of the country, and you had to order it in advance. But. There is always a But. In the old days, money was a tangible symbol of collective identity, and governments would put a lot of effort into designing spectacular-looking banknotes representing it. This is the background to one of the best recent French films, L’Affaire Bojarski, which recounts the story of how its eponymous hero fooled the French authorities for over a decade with beautiful hand-made copies of French banknotes, themselves works of art in the original. It was that which made me remember how physical and tactile money once was, and how specific to places and times. Inconvenient to carry different currencies in your wallet, certainly, but it did remind you that you were somewhere different.

By contrast, I have difficulty in remembering even what a ten-Euro banknote actually looks like, so I went to have a look. I can report that it’s a dirty brownish-pink and white, with an abstract design on one side and a kind of entrance on the other. I must have handled a massive number of them over the last twenty-five years, but they, and other Euro notes, have left literally no impression on me. This is deliberate of course. During the run-up to the Euro, there were various proposals for a more interesting name and for designs that at least nodded to the enormous depth and variety of European culture and history. All were rejected in favour of a bland, anonymous name, and designs that look as if they portray somewhere on Mars. The whole idea was precisely to design something without an identity, something out of Nowhere, as part of the creation of a bloodless, anonymous, economically efficient and post-national Europe. But why should anybody want to do that?

I’ve touched on the history before, and since the history isn’t my main concern here, I’ll pass over it lightly. But let’s just say that what we see today is the cumulative results of several centuries of glorification of the Individual, and the associated change from seeing the individual as a member of society, to seeing society itself as having no particular characteristics, just like the Euro notes, but only a collection of individuals happening to coincide temporarily in time and place. There is thus no collective identity or history for banknotes, for example, to express. We are now in what you could call the decadent phase of this process, and we are beginning to see more and more of the disadvantages and dangers of it. There will be more to come.

If you think about it, it must surely be true that the “Individual” only became possible, once societies had reached a certain stage of complexity. If you were a yak-herder, or farmer’s wife or hunter on the steppes, then your life would be pretty similar to the lives of generations before you, and of generations to come. You might be A, son of B, son of C, from the village of D, and that was it. The individual, insofar as he or she existed, was disaggregated from the whole. (We can see the heritage of this even today, in societies fewer generations removed from the land, and where people still identify with a larger group. A Japanese businessman would introduce themselves (in Japanese, anyway) with the formula such as Company name/Department/ Rank/ Family Name, which is helpful to the other person, who then understands the status and points of reference of the person introducing themselves.) In theory, royalty, priestly castes or even merchants and traders could have more of a personal identity in those days, but at least in early societies there’s a lot of evidence that their lives were largely governed just as much, if not more, by ritual and tradition. Even when towns developed, the apprenticeship system and family traditions meant that you would pursue very much the life of your father, if you were a man, and even more your mother for women. “Individuals” were generally marginally figures: think François Villon.

Only when urban life became sufficiently complex was there any point in most people even trying to live individual lives. With a world of more “choices” than just farming, religious orders or a tradesman of some kind, we see the beginning of the growth of an urban middle class with its own individualistic outlook on life and its own theories. The key text, of course is Hobbes’s Leviathan, whose famous frontispiece shows, critically, not a stable society organised in some hierarchy, but an anarchic collection of Individuals, needing their containing body —the Leviathan—to control them by force, to prevent the disintegration of society.

We can consider, certainly, that greater emphasis on the Individual over the last few centuries was both inevitable and right. The liberties that were being sought such as freedom of belief and speech were not negligible, even if they were essentially for elites. But the final result, as I’ve discussed on a number of occasions, was the alienation of the freshly-minted Individual from their society, their community, their history and their identity, and their eviction from a world that made sense where everything was connected, to a world where official doctrine said that nothing was connected, and the Individual was just a microscopic speck, lost somewhere in a meaningless universe. Yet we are told that we are free as never before. After all, we can change sex just by a declaration! And they wonder why so many people are unhappy today.

So in this decadent stage of the dogma of Individualism, people are being re-imagined as theoretically sovereign individuals, but who lack the power to actually determine anything important in their lives. The corollary of this, of course, is that if anything goes wrong, it’s the fault of the Individual. We create our own reality, it appears. If we can be anything we want to be, just by wishing, then it’s obvious that the poverty and unemployment we suffer are our own creations. Consequently, the days when the State was actually expected to make the lives of its citizens easier and better, and look after them, have long gone. These days, your teacher is an electronic tablet, if you can afford one, and your doctor is an AI Chatbot.

For individuals, in the traditional sense, there used to be a process called “growing up,” but it’s many years since I heard the term used of children in the West. The idea was that you gained maturity through testing yourself against the limits imposed by your family and your society, and you learned to distinguish between what you could change or influence and what you couldn’t. You would emerge, at least in theory, as a more rounded person, having become an Individual in something like the Jungian sense: a member of society but still yourself. In turn, the creation of your own identity would involve selective allegiance to, or identification with, larger groups, ranging from the Church and the Scouts to political parties, hobbyist circles and even football clubs.

Officially, at least, the world has changed completely. The Child, for example, is at the centre of a non-hierarchical education system, and everything must be done to benignly promote and defend their independence and individuality. Children are encouraged to “be themselves” and “express themselves,” in defiance of the recognised truth that children of school-age don’t have selves to express, and that we actually continue to develop our personalities until the mid-twenties. Indeed, growing up is, or used to be, a process of trying on ideas and personalities for size, until you found your way, with a bit of luck, to some kind of individual self. Yet paradoxically, children these days have less freedom, and so less chance to develop their individuality, than their parents, and much less than their grandparents. The corollary of hyper-individualism is distrust and suspicion of others, so children must be protected, monitored, only exposed to the right influences and taught from an early age to respect a series of incoherent Liberal norms about society. Except of course, that they also have access to the Internet, which, respecting the gospel of Individualism and the freedom of creative choice as well as the freedom to make lots of money, has turned into an intellectual and moral sewer from which literally anything can be dug up.

The story of how we got here has been told many times by me and others, but I think that the most important point is one that is seldom mentioned. A gospel of Individualism doesn’t have to lead to the collapse of a society, and doesn’t necessarily do so, except for the presence of two other factors. The first is the lack of external controls and countervailing forces. In modern times, we have seen not only the decline of organised religion, in favour of Me-based individualistic, vaguely spiritual practices, but the parallel decline of political ideologies of all kinds, generally based either on the belief that society must be defended as it is, or that it can and should be made better. This has gone hand-in-hand with the decline of voluntary and collective organisations of all sorts, and even of causes that people can practically identify with. Buying something from a company that asks you to add an optional one per cent to aid a charity, or signing an online petition against global warming leave the average person unsatisfied. And the type of collective organisation that does attract members, unfortunately, seems to be disproportionately interested in pitting groups within society against each other. (More on that later.) As Yeats foresaw, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. To which we can add the destruction of traditional legal and political controls, especially the ghastly “deregulation” disease, such that locks were removed from doors, and the foxes were provided with an official illustrated guide telling them how to get into the hen-house.

The second factor was an incredible naivety, and lack of any real awareness, or even interest, about the likely consequences of the obsession with the Individual and their Choices. Whatever the objection made, the answer was always that It Wouldn’t Matter. Hands were waved and jawbreaking terms invented, to disguise the fact that the proponents of hard-line economic individualism, for example, hadn’t thought about the consequences, and anyway didn’t care. Now, of course, it’s too late. Because the first and most obvious criticism is the one made a century ago by the great British Socialist RH Tawney: freedom for the pike, he said is death to the minnow. More generally, the fewer the rules, the greater the advantage to the rich and powerful. But that’s OK, said the economists at the time. Our models show that it will be All Right. Of course, we have to make the simplifying assumption that all products are identical and all consumers have equal spending power, but those are details.

Take free trade, for example. Surely its better if trade flows freely across frontiers, then everything will even out, and the societies which can produce this or that best will specialise in those things, and everybody will wind up producing what they are best at, and we’ll all be happy. Because commodities and bargaining power are both identical in all cases, everything will be All Right. (If you think you recognise the ghost of Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, well you do.) In real life of course, this breaks down immediately. So in my local supermarket I can buy a bag of organic oranges from France for €4, or a similar one from Spain for €3. The oranges seem to be identical, so the ghost of Ricardo tugs me by the sleeve and says “buy the cheaper one!” Hang on a minute, though, why should oranges transported from farther away be significantly cheaper? Well, it turns out, surprisingly, that people cheat. Orange-growers in Spain often use illegal temporary immigrant labour. Whereas in France the organisation that inspects companies to check on such things is very effective, in Spain the equivalent is much weaker. The result is that permanent jobs are lost in France, but permanent jobs are lost in Spain as well, and illegal immigrants are trafficked across the Mediterranean to work for a pittance, often in appalling conditions. And of course there is then pressure on French producers to themselves use illegal workers, simply to compete. (There were prosecutions last year, after a Champagne producer was found using illegal workers, several of whom died of heatstroke in the fields.) Ah, it wasn’t supposed to be like that, was it?

But surely with cheaper imports, the prices go down, so people have more money to spend on other things? Surely, the individual benefits; and society, after all is just a set of individuals? Well, no. For example, I used to buy tee-shirts, socks and such from a French company called DIM, which makes such things for both men and women. Then I noticed that, whilst the quality went right down, the prices remained the same. They had of course externalised the manufacture, to the Indian sub-continent I believe, and pocketed the difference. So the unemployed workers lose, the customer loses and the company and the shareholders gain. And that puts pressure on competitors to do the same, and so on. Oh dear, it wasn’t supposed to be like that.

But it is like that. What may be good for me on a personal level (cheap oranges) and good for individual producers (bigger profits) has all sorts of unexpected and usually negative consequences when real life takes over, and real people with real motives start making real decisions. Human beings are not, in the end, fungible. Many towns and cities were built around factories and the production of raw materials, and their populations cannot simply turn to other trades or just go elsewhere. There are public housing estates not far from where I’m writing this, built by left-wing municipalities to house factory workers, where there is literally no work apart from mini-supermarkets, tattoo shops, food delivery and crime. That could not have been foreseen, of course, when the factories were closed. And it just occurred to me, walking past a dry-cleaners that had closed down, that against all expectation, the fetish for franchising has meant that economic units have become smaller and smaller and therefore more and more vulnerable.

And of course the same argument applies at the macro level. People are people, workers are workers, bring them in from anywhere, it’s all the same. After all, it’s a basic human right to live anywhere in the world, isn’t it? And who can blame migrants for rationally pursuing their economic interests, and going to places where social payments are most generous? What this has produced in France (and it seems to be broadly typical) is a new underclass of economic migrants dumped in poor areas where the education and health services are already overstretched, often not speaking French, without skills or much education, and with more health problems than average. Classes where a third of the children don’t speak French properly and where a substantial number come from conflict zones and have psychological problems are to be found everywhere. And it turns out that the younger immigrants brought over to compensate for a declining population actually grow older, and in turn become part of the problem. Because most of these societies forbid women to work, there is now a shortage in some areas of care assistants, domestic help and even traditional entry-level jobs for female workers such as cleaners. This could not have been anticipated of course.

I’m harping on these points because it’s essential to understand that the process has now gone beyond anyone’s control, or even understanding. It was designed, insofar as it ever was, by idiots who could not see beyond the end of their noses. If it were actually designed by evil geniuses, it would be less of a problem. Oh, there’s no shortage of evil people, or of people who fancied themselves as geniuses once upon a time, but nobody is really in control, as you can see from the dazed and incoherent responses of national leaders and so-called titans of industry. As a result, we just have to trust to luck. The system that has arisen (no-one can really say it was “built”), has done so through an interaction between radical individualism, and a tightly-coupled economic and social system that cannot cope with the unexpected. As a result, when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, the system cannot cope, and nobody has any idea what to do.

The idea that humans should be fungible, that they could be treated as abstract interchangeable units capable of being moved anywhere and doing anything, was dangerous even when it was defended as a mere simplifying assumption, because there was always the possibility that someone would mistake it for reality. But in fact the whole tendency of neoliberal economics has been precisely to try to create that reality, not only in the economy but also in society. De-skilling has reduced the variety within the workforce, and the different trades and types of expertise that once made societies interesting. The move from a qualified to a credentialed society, from actual expertise to a certificate of finishing, has created a featureless and broadly interchangeable workforce dealing mostly with abstract data on a screen. If somebody with a degree in Cultural Studies leaves a job as a call-centre answerer on Friday, they can be replaced by someone with a degree in International Relations on Monday. A degree is just a broad guarantee that you can read and write. Likewise, every effort has been made to obscure the differences—in clothing, for example—between, children and adults and men and women, and to fill jobs with men or women interchangeably, all in the name of economic efficiency.

It is important that we ourselves should be brought to regard employees and citizens, including ourselves, as interchangeable. We must be prepared to go where we are sent, work with whoever we are told to, and, as managers, treat everyone as interchangeable, except for the many cases when we are told not to. We must be “CEOs of our lives,” and we are responsible for our own welfare and well-being. If we lose our job, it’s somehow our fault. Because we live as Individuals, alienated from each other, we must regard everyone else as a competitor and a rival. Our relations with each other thus become more and more mercenary and transactional.

Much the same is true internationally. I mentioned banknotes, but in fact many other symbols of Belonging are being suppressed at the same time. The language of the European elite, for example, is a type of strangled, lifeless English with French influences, sometimes called Globisch. (Paradoxically, the working language of Brussels is thus derived from a language that almost nobody speaks natively.) Great efforts continue to be made to create a flat, featureless, monotonous European space in which everywhere and everything is the same, and nothing different or interesting happens. This is a political system that disavows its own history and its incomprehensibly rich cultural heritage, and whose highest cultural expression is the Eurovision Song Contest. The citizens of Europe (and here I include the UK) are themselves fungible, transferable, and interchangeable. They move (or are moved) from country to country, and indeed “country” in this sense just means the legal and geographical space in which you happen to be living. You are no more attached to the country in which you live than a shareholder is attached to the company in which they have shares. A nation is just a temporary collection of people who don’t live anywhere else.

This is, of course, fantastically removed from the kind of life that ordinary people actually want to lead. Maybe a tiny proportion of the population, speaking three languages, married to somebody speaking three more, moving in a whirl of interchangeable international hotels and business-class air travel, eating in indistinguishable restaurants in easily-confused countries, just occasionally waking in the morning and wondering Where am I? actually enjoy this kind of thing, or regard it as natural. I can’t imagine why.

But the most damaging aspect of our current situation is that the same radical individualistic impulse that has destroyed societies and communities has also led to the creation and strengthening of other questionable group identities. The replacement of universalist societies by those of unfettered individualism has paradoxically led to more conformity and less freedom than was the case in the past. Fifty years ago, the main divisions among western populations were economic and social. There were manual workers and white-collar workers, graduates and non-graduates, employers and the employed, those who owned property and those who rented it, those who lived on dividends and those who borrowed money, and professionals on one hand and artisans on the other, both qualified by years of study and apprenticeship. Political parties would try to represent, and also seek support among, some of these groups. Parties of the Left would build public housing, while parties of the Right would encourage home ownership. All that seems from another planet now.

The assumption in those days therefore, was that people were naturally organised in objective socioeconomic groups (you objectively owned a house or you didn’t) and could be appealed to on that basis. But the draining of any real substance and ideology out of politics from the 1980s onwards, and the replacement of traditional mass parties by boutique elitist constructs which you could move freely between, like a professional footballer, created obvious problems when it came to tedious things like gaining support and winning elections. Fortunately, Liberalism was doing a good job of breaking down these traditional groupings anyway, and undermining their traditional correlations (both professionals and graduates generally owned their own houses, for example.) These groups have been progressively decomposed into Individuals: unemployed graduates, speculators owning many houses, “self-employed “gig workers, former employees made “independent contractors” overnight, academics on six-month contracts without benefits, Youtube influencers … the list is endless. And there are no structures any more, especially not those that reward talent, study and application. Is it even possible to suggest to a teenager today that they do this or that in the hope of one day finding a “good job?” This has all sorts of practical consequences which or course were unforeseeable: extended families broken up, couples unable to afford a house or a family, longer and longer journeys to work, isolation and depression, the end of most societies and social organisations.

Yet in theory this should not be a problem. We are, after all, Individuals. We pursue our own personal interests, financially and personally. We seek nothing more than economic advantage and the greatest possible extension of our Rights. We owe nobody else anything, and cooperate with each other only for mutual advantage, according to carefully worked-out preconditions. We all demand special treatment or priority for any number of reasons, and complain when we do not get it. Yet we are unhappy and becoming unhappier.

Because it turns out in the end that most of us do not want to be alienated individuals, fighting others for scraps. Most of us never see the benefits of this “Individualism” which is incessantly marketed to us. Those benefits, ironically, go disproportionately to those with family or professional networks or money on which they can rely, not to alienated individuals. Why do you think people go on LinkedIn, if not to create artificial support groups and networks to replace the real ones that have been lost?

It’s accepted, I think, that the rise of the Comfortable Class in the 1960s—university educated, largely debt-free, with new openings in the universities, in politics and the media, as well as access to the traditional professions—created a new social dynamic in politics. Rather than promote the interests of the class they had left behind, the Comfortable turned to internecine warfare among themselves for power and wealth, making use among other things of half-understood fashionable philosophical ideas making the rounds of university bars. With enough ingenuity, any group could claim to be oppressed, disadvantaged, marginalised etc. and organise to try to take wealth, power, positions and jobs away from the others. The members of such groups did not need to agree on everything—they might violently detest each other—but they could cooperate in the wider objective of increasing their power. As with all aspirant ruling classes, they constructed self-serving and self-justifying ideologies to support their ambitions, and over the decades these solidified into what we now call Identity Politics, or IdiotPol for short.

Although IdiotPol damaged many institutions, some irretrievably, as groups fought each other violently and tried to establish competing police states, the real problem arose when the structure of national politics itself started to be infected also. Political groupings aiming to construct or take over political parties have to be built around some kind of common interest, and in the absence of economic interests, identitarian ones were all that were available. The result, skipping ahead to the present day, is a political culture in which all mobilisation is negative. The world is not going to become a better place, nor is there any chance of reverting to the situation in the past, so the historical dynamic of modern politics is basically absent. In its place are resentment, demands for priority treatment and attempts to secure the largest slice of a cake that is getting smaller. The vocabulary of collective interest and effort has been suppressed, and utterly disparate groups of people, with nothing in common, find themselves yoked together in some ascriptive category and instructed to vote for this or that party that will allegedly represent them. Because these groups are only ascriptive, and not organic as political groupings traditionally were, they are riven with disputes and feuds, and with vicious combats to achieve preferred victim status.

As before, the consequences of these ideas are now outside anyone’s control. Virtually the whole of traditional politics, with its concerns, its objectives, its means of organisation, has now been banished to the dungeons of the “extreme Right.” This is necessary, because if politicians actually tried to respond to the needs and demands of the people, the political system we have today would collapse. It is thus necessary to retain the iron grip of ascriptive politics, in case people from different ascriptive groups start to realise they have interests in common, and to act accordingly. This reaches absurd levels, as when the head of the Socialist Party in France claims that the idea that different parts of the country have different problems and need to be treated differently is an argument of the “extreme Right.” Everybody knows that the whole country basically resembles the 6th arrondissement of Paris. Moreover, you can’t try to impose ascriptive, divisive politics on a society without the risk of losing control of the process, as has indeed happened in various countries. After all, Men and White People, not to mention religious fundamentalists and even “minor-attracted persons” are ascriptive groups as well. Any number can play at that game, as is clear from a startling opinion survey carried out in France recently, that showed that around half of French people thought they had been victims of racialism. Pundits and the media are still struggling to find an acceptable way of interpreting that figure.

The weirdest thing here is that the mainstream Right, far from opposing this rubbish, has embraced it as well, if not always so enthusiastically. Partly this is because modern political parties have no real principles anyway, and so grab onto whatever is fashionable that week, but mainly because it is an extremely useful stick with which to beat their enemies all over the political spectrum. After all, who is going to argue that society, or some institution, should be less diverse or should deliberately exclude people? And what better defence against such accusations coming from your opponents than to promote unwhite or unmale or unheterosexual politicians to positions of power? This enables traditional criteria of competence to be neatly sidestepped, because of course we don’t really need competence, do we?

The trouble is, of course, that, like just-in-time logistics and sub-sub-contracting and uncontrolled economic migration and the rest of this miserable assemblage of half-thought-out ideas, the replacement of real community by ascriptive group, and the suppression of genuine identities in favour of artificial ones, depends for its survival on nothing going wrong. Suppose, just as a thought-experiment, that over the next few months, something does go wrong. Perhaps ships with oil will not arrive. Perhaps there will not be enough food to go round. Perhaps medicines will be in short supply, perhaps there will be power cuts and shortages of petrol.

Now an organic society, however imperfect, does actually both have a discourse and an organisation for facing up to such problems. It has a discourse of national community, shared history and culture, and the idea that people live together because they want to. We may recall Ernest Renan’s famous formulation that a nation is not a question of race or of language, but something positive: a “never-ending referendum” showing that people actively want to live together. Such a discourse would not be understood by our leaders today: you might just as well ask residents of a European country to act out of solidarity with each other as you might ask shareholders not to sell their shares When you have annihilated common points of reference, when you have brought into your country people who are there for financial reasons, have no wish to integrate, and may indeed identify more with the interests of another country, then even if you could disinter the old discourse of community solidarity, nobody would understand what you were talking about.

And the mechanisms for invoking and using that solidarity no longer exist anyway. Governments today cannot actually organise very much, as Covid showed. They have given up the capabilities they used to have, and even where they have theoretical powers they don’t have the ability to implement them. Moreover, our entire political system, from national level downwards, is about identifying, stoking and exploiting differences, like passengers on the Titanic arguing about who had the right to the best seats. Oh, and the Titanic didn’t carry lifeboats for everybody because no-one thought it was necessary.

Is that an iceberg I see before me?