The take on mainstream economics is perfect. You should send it to Real-World Economics Review, pae_news@btinternet.com, it would be happy. After all, it's the official paper of the world's biggest association of economists, those who object to mainstream.
But I don't think ideologies are at fault, people can make anything under the cover of an ideology. Stalin was a "socialist", remember? And the term "liberalism" was invented as a self-designation for those who were against arbitrary government in Spain in the 1810s. And, by the way, "socialism" was invented as a self-designation of the charity bourgeoisie in France in the 1830s. Labels change.
What is true is Marx's idea that the ruling thoughts in a society are the thoughts of its ruling class. And in the North Atlantic world, the ruling class is the rentiers – people who don't want to build, don't want to work, just want to plunder the wreck and collect the proceeds.
And to continue. Maybe liberalism has always had the same meaning in England and France, I don't know (but wasn't Beveridge a liberal?).
In Sweden it has gone through violent mutations. In the mid 1800s it was the label of those who wanted "development", including state-led such, like in China today (but vastly less developed of course). Around 1900 it was the label of those who wanted universal suffrage. In the mid 1900s it was the label of those who accepted the welfare state but distrusted the state bureaucracy. And now, well, it's as Aurelien says the label of those who want to plunder the wreck.
Today we live in a number of parallel worlds. The triumph of China and the hell of Gaza. The point this commentary misses is - what motivates people? There is no single answer. The comments about Liberalism are all accurate. It really is yesterdays order and the eruption of critiques of it stands testimony to that. But in everyday life 'money' was never my prime motivation. I was never rich and on occasions had nothing. But I was still motivated - mainly to fight the bastards that wanted war and saw 'the poor' as the enemy. There was something unsatisfactory about this post - like a meal that left you feeling you hadn't eaten anything. When I re-read it, it dawned on me that this was really the point of it..'modern Liberalism.... has neither Growth nor Progress as its objective. What does it have then? Nothing, really, and that’s the terrifying thing'.
What your observation about slavery reminded me is that the defenders of slavery in US were doing so on Liberal principles: slaves were property, man's right to property must be defended as sacrosanct, and right to property should include the right to not have the property expropriated depending on location. That was exactly the conflict that caused the Civil War. Their strongest opponents were religious people, otoh, people who were willing to cast their lives aside for things that made no sense. The story would repeat itself periodically until 1920s: for all the ridicule he received, no well meaning person can dismiss where W J Bryan came from when he attacked scientific racism and eugenics (falsely called "evolution") at the Scopes Trial--if you read the historical background. But, somehow, during the century after Bryan's death, something weird happened to organized religion in the West, especially United States...
In UK, the slave owners were given reparations for loss of property, and when Haiti revolted and after a long struggle gained its independence, that was recognized only after agreeing to pay a huge indemnity, which took about 150 years to pay. The French are really some greedy bastards. Just look at their cousins, the Belgians - King Leopold II and the exploitaiton of Congo...
An other one is to consider that Southerners, as indeed true Liberals, wanted no tariff on whatever they imported from England and no retaliatory tariff on the coton and other raw agricultural products they exported there. Northerners wanted tariffs to protect their nascent industrial sector from importation of manufactured products and build the infrastructure they needed. But they could only have their way by repelling the Three-fifths Compromise that gave disproportionate political power to the South in Congress. There weren't so many moral or religious principles at stake here 😉
One crucial factor of fundamental underlying importance you're leaving out of the equation is the physical dimension of the human enterprise, namely energy. The world functions only thanks to energy that spins its wheels, and everything else is subordinate to this elementary fact.
For the past 300 years, the world has been powered by energy extracted from hydrocarbons a.k.a. fossil fuels. These fuels have provided cheap energy - in the sense of energy required to obtain fossil energy (not money, money is useless shit) - or huge energy surplus, which has, in turn, allowed the world flourish in an unprecedented, and most likely non-repeatable, fashion. That includes the development of all the wonderful technologies we have and the limited space exploration.
From societal, political, ideological, and philosophical viewpoints, that are of abundance - especially the Oil Age of the past century - has given rise to all sorts of issues, such as those examined in the text. They can be summarized by saying that humanity has fucked itself into a corner in 1000+1 ways. But while it matters somewhat, it's not the main predicament.
The main issue is that the people are getting less energy from hydrocarbons, the energy return on energy invested (EROIE) is diminishing, while the opposite is needed. Not only the human population is growing, but the human enterprise requires more and more energy to drive the whole fucking circus. Add to that production shifted in time through various debt instruments.
In other words, yeah, people are fucked up in the head as per the article, but that's much less important issue than the fact that we're running out of gas, with no replacement in sight, where gas is of paramount importance for sustaining not only the way we live, but the fact that we live at all.
We have become so used to having steady supply of energy, together with infrastructure mostly built by previous generations, that we consider the underlying physical stuff axiomatic and worry about the sexier shit at higher levels, as evidence by kids that play fucking Minecraft instead of poking holes in the fucking ground and building fucking tree houses.
Thus, as far as thinking, we gotta inject some concrete into the abstract ...
Just so. Modern technological societies are unsustainable in the long run. How much that can be saved of present knowledge (and how much is worth saving), is the next problem. If there is anyone left to consider it.
The question is whether there is enough hydrocarbons left and enough determination for the development of technologies that would allow capturing solar power that Earth receives and whether it's technologically feasible in the first place, and whether there's enough time to do that.
The odds are probably higher for the current civilization to collapse and disappear because fucking people are so obsessed with the present, gluttonous consumption, and would be unwilling to give up the present-day luxury for the pursuit of a different form of existence, which would be simpler, less 'sexy', even if it allowed their children to survive and retain some of the perks of the hydrocarbon binge of the past century.
The whole world would have to be mobilized to engage in this effort and that's unlikely - look at what's happening. It's the beginning of the fight for whatever is left, for who'll reap the benefits of oil for longer (until the bitter end where the last fucking gas station dispenses the last drop of oil and the lardass billionaire's Lamborghini will only be good for shoving it up his asshole).
I don't know if the green movement is an attempt at the aforestated, but it's so imbecilic, halfhearted, and corrupt from the beginning, that it's a nonstarter, not to mention the fuckhead politicians promoting it. They're the antithesis of being inspiring, instead they make everybody wanna puke.
So, it doesn't look too good, but you never know.
How much of knowledge is worth saving is a good question, but I'd say that it's more about how much of the principles people adhere to is worth preserving. Certainly not the notion of progress, in the sense of technological development and nature conversion into a fucking Disneyland. Basically, a whole new ideology akin to something as huge as Christianity would have to be developed and imposed on people, for them to change their gluttonous, ultimately self-destructive behavior. That ain't happening without some cataclysmic event.
Anyway, I read this book Nonstop by Brian Aldiss when I was a kid. It's about a spaceship that goes on a faraway space exploration mission, but something happens on the way (I think an epidemic of a bad disease), which wipes out much of the crew and causes the survivors to forget what their original purpose was. Somehow the ship returns to Earth where it's kept in orbit, while people from down below provide maintenance and take care of the mutants the crew have become, because letting them back on Earth is deemed dangerous. The crew have become much smaller due to lack of proper nutrition, sunshine, and living in a confined space. They perceive the ship as their natural habitat, the universe. In the novel, some guy comes to understand all of this, and finally the ship people are allowed back to Earth. But that's not what the book is about - it's about forgetting the original purpose, how things get corrupted over time. So, if there's anybody left to consider shit some years or centuries after the oil collapse, they'll be clueless if they discover, say, an old rusty locomotive, because in the meantime, they will have had to worry about survival, real basic stuff.
Be all that as it may, what I find tragic today is that not only the powers that be never discuss any of these fundamental issues (hopefully in some concerted manner) to mobilize humanity in a way akin to putting man in space, but neither do most intellectuals, who mostly focus on societal, sociopolitical, and cultural issues, without taking the physical, the concrete into serious consideration.
For some years around the turn of the millennium, I worked as a financial journalist. My job it was to report on the day to day travails of the stock markets, on yearly profit reports of the Big Companies etc. The first thing I was taught was that "The Market is always right". Except, to my dismay, it rarely was. Stock prices were invariably governed by the first page of the press release, while of course the big caveats on always 'excellent profit marks' were to be found on page 3 of said press release, which in the heat of the moment, were never taken into consideration. I would write my piece, based on thorough investigation of the actual performance of any given company and would give my opinion on it, too. All very thorough work, but in the end, I never ended up earning much money on the stock market. Because, even though I may have been right, "The Market is always Right". (Just like I never invested in Bitcoin, because of course it is "tulip bulbs". I may be right about it, however, if I would have invested in it, I would have been quite rich by now).
Yes. You would have been richer in the short term but as you hint only at the cost of causing social hurt to others in the longterm.
Thanks for this piece. For some amorphous intellectual reason I found it to be very emotionally supportive. Your last sentence struck me serendipitously. I have, for many years now, hurled the phrase ‘the gangs will never reach this far North’ at any individual in the media who justifies political decisions by referring to market forces. It comes from Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York in which he presents the prevalent gang culture of lower Manhattan of 1842-1862. The British actor David Hemmings plays an autocratic wealthy New Yorker who says this phrase to his worried opulent dinner guests at his home just before they are violently beset by said gangs.
"You would have been richer in the short term but as you hint only at the cost of causing social hurt to others in the longterm."
The marginal value of a dollar is ever always only a dollar. It doesn't matter whether you got that dollar teaching inner city kids to read and write, or you got it by selling heroin to those same kids.
This is the basic truth and great flaw of capitalism.
It continues to annoy me that children are not taught the difference between economic or other forms of material exchange and capitalism in primary school. So simple to do yet beyond the ken or is it the intent, of our political ruling class.
Thank you again, for a thought provoking and very sobering analysis of the state of the boat in which we find ourselves.
The late dissident clinical psychologist, David Smail, made very similar arguments: diagnosing the breakdown ( or deliberate disassembly ) of the public sphere as the root cause of so many of our personal troubles, including those treated, with little success, by therapists like himself. The following quotation from ‘ Taking Care: an Alternative to Therapy’ (1987), gives a flavour of his thinking:
‘In order to change things for the better – in order, that is, to be able to act morally – the individual must have the moral space in which to do so. This is not something which people can create for themselves as private individuals, but something which is socially created and maintained through the proper use of concerted (political) power. A politics which perverts and abuses power in order to operate a network of vested interests collapses the space in which people can conduct themselves instrumentally to exercise a public function, and it does this mainly by focusing attention on purely private needs and treating ‘politically motivated’ conduct as somehow suspect or reprehensible. If, however, we are to come to see that we are inflicting incurable but avoidable damage on each other rather than merely suffering personally unavoidable but curable ‘breakdown’, if, that is, we are to move from an ideology of therapy to a culture of care, we shall have to force open around ourselves a moral space which gives us room for concerted action, and this can only be done through the re-insertion into that space of a ‘public dimension’. We shall have, to put it another way, to re-establish an ethical politics in the place of an apparatus of power for the manipulation of interest.’
"Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is."
Your critique may be valid as far as it goes, but the problem is that nobody believes in a religion, philosophy, tradition or anything else because they think such belief is beneficial to society. They believe because they think what they believe is objectively true. It is futile to advocate for a belief because belief (by others) has pragmatic value.
The search for meaning -- and coming up empty handed -- is causing quite a bit of despair with my 24 year old Senior in College. In our conversations I've needed to draw on the Buddhist tradition to remind him that belief in a transcendent meaning is something to meditate on from all angles. Don't be surprised, I tell him, if you reach a realization of the emptiness of existence, and that this realization can be quite liberating, as it can free yourself from the self-importance that comes with whatever you might contrive to be "meaning." I also believe, like Victor Frankl, that we'll still need some sense of meaning, and that need is greatest in the midst of a holocaust to endure. Even the Buddhists will say that our meaning should be in lessening the suffering of sentient beings. I tell my son that he can find meaning if he can find a nexus of his innate gifts and the world's greatest needs. For me, my curiosity about existence is such that I am content to find meaning in each day to see how this crazy world is turning out. As Mencken said about all of us in the USA -- "we all have a front row seat to the greatest show on earth." It gives me meaning to observe today's episode of reality (and what the James Webb telescope is showing us about the universe) and add more puzzle pieces to the big picture. We all have to decide what makes us want to get out of bed in the morning on the individual level.
Perhaps the void that Aurelien is articulating is an absence of a shared sense of transcendent meaning or purpose. I think every era had a sense of this. I think that since the Industrial Revolution there has been a shared sense that the "human adventure" is a joint mission of progress, particularly in understanding nature with reason and science, and advancing the human condition with that understanding. I believe that we are now in that great state of confusion between eras. We can see how the former era has dissolved in all sorts of corruptions and contradictions and is no longer credible. During this interregnum, the best we can do is make money, write essays, do podcasts, start a business, become a celebrity, have lots of good sex, raise kids, etc. It reminds me of the conclusion of Wagner's Ring Cycle, the Twilight of the Gods, when the once-great but fallen hero Siegfried has died and Grunhilde returns the Ring to the Rhinemaidens to repose until another hero (or worse) retrieves it, thus starting a whole new cycle of transformation -- building (electric powered bullet trains!), exploration, incest, tragedy, etc.
I will now tell you what the next cycle is -- one which will give humans a great sense of collective meaning and hope -- namely to transform our way of thinking and living to be sustainable with other life on planet earth. This great joint task of the species awaits. Because of climate change, this task is increasingly urgent. Because it requires collaboration rather than competition, it will be a post-capitalist undertaking. We will need every human to work toward saving ourselves and the planet while there is still time. The start of this cycle may take a catalyst in the form of a revelation and disruption too cataclysmic to ignore -- like the breaking off of a huge piece of an Antarctic Ice Shelf -- to launch humanity on that path.
Will anyone complain about a lack of meaning then -- at the start of this new cycle?
"...Liberal managerialism, as I have suggested, really has no objectives at all, other than the vague teleological search for a state of pure competition and infinite personal freedom, both by definition unattainable in this world, and both requiring unrelenting destruction of all organisation and society that might obstruct them."
The point is more benefits for the PMC.
2. "It is this quasi-religious aspect, I think, that helps to explain many of the most puzzling features of actually-existing Liberalism. After all, turning your back on Growth and Progress may provide short-term financial benefits for those who have too much money anyway, but it is already starting to negatively impact the lives of the Liberal priesthood itself. Decaying infrastructures, failing education systems and rotting public services will ultimately impact everyone, up to the evilest moustache-twirling villain."
The PMC are confident that they can insulate themselves from all that, or at least their upper ranks can do so. For the peons, oh well, it can't be helped.
3. "I cited last week a comment by Guy Debord that Liberal societies prefer to be known by their enemies than by their results. When you have no results, you need an awful lot of enemies. This is one of the main reasons for the unreasoning hatred of Russia at the moment."
A Scary Enemy is always a necessity.
1. To justify why we can't have nice things. Healthcare? Infrastructure? Education? We don't have time for that now, don't you know we gotta fight Saddam/Milosevic/Bin Laden/Saddam again/Ghadaffi/Assad/ISIS/Putin/Hamas/Houthis/ad nauseam.
2. To give the rubes a cause to rally around, rather than ask awkward questions, like why they have to tolerate crumbling infrastructure and dangerous schools.
3. To unify political factions around a common enemy, justify the division of spoils and explain why we can't have nirvana right at the moment, we'd really like to but the Scary Enemy is stopping us and don't you know we gotta focus on this fight, right now!
4. To justify crackdowns on civil liberties. You and your namby-pamby Bill of Rights, you hate our freedom! What, are you on the side of the fascists/communists/Islamicists/Russians/ ad nauseam?
Nihilism and lack of shared morality was baked into the Enlightenment which took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. As MacIntyre put it in his most famous book, After Virtue, “Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology, or hierarchical authority.”
While reading I was forcibly struck by the importance of the id3a of “context” when thinking about different philosophical/political ideas.
When Liberalism was being invented the “pursuit of rational self interest” must have seemed like a very sensible idea when opposed to the illogical unfreedoms associated with the existing post feudal order.
The problem with criticising Liberalism then was that the opposition represented something that was obviously a lot worse. Inherited wealth and position as the only route to importance.
Of course there was another option: Socialism was already being discussed (The Levellers etc) but that was and always has been hated and feared by the feudal elite as well as the Liberals. And that commonality of purpose gives us the clue about the faults with Liberalism. An obsession with property first before people. But that is a sidetrack.
The importance of context as I said is interesting here. As the Sufis always emphasise, it is always important to ask “who, where, when”?
I am not sure liberalism alone is to blame for our woes - though, as you so eloquently point out, its nihilism is inherently self destructive.
When it comes to progress - times of rapid scientific, social and/or economic progress are the exception in human history. Most of human history is made up of long eras with no or very little progress.
By some measurements we are today still profiting from the latest burst of innovation which may have peaked as far back as 1870. Which would mean we are now running on fumes and that should frighten anyone who beliefs in infinite growth through innovation.
That last innovation explosion was by and large an energy revolution which made it possible for machines to do human work. AI is merely the logical conclusion of that innovative outburst.
This also explains the diminishing return on investments in the nations that spearheaded the industrial and technological revolutions. Today's late adapters like China and Africa are only doing so much better because they were so far behind.
Again - all of this has happened before in human history. And sadly it rarely ended well.
Civilizations have the tendency to use up all of their available resources until they become so bloated that they can no longer sustain themselves the moment a minor crisis hits.
“Historians” will not argue “how much purges were the result of paranoid personality” because historians don’t argue silly bs. If you see someone arguing that this is not a historian.
This essay is the mirror of my thoughts for some time and with increasing urgency. I can only wish I had expressed myself as clearly as do you. In recent weeks I have read C.S.Lewis's "space trilogy." The third volume, That Hideous Strength, is your essay in the guise of a novel. It occurs to me, as to others among those commenting, that looked at from the perspective of liberalism the actions of Israel in Gaza are quite correct. Israel wants the land. The occupants are in the way. Obviously, they need to be removed. So slavery in the US and prison industries whose operators lobby against sentencing reform. So personnel departments relabeled "human resources." So the word eugenics has crept back into the lexicon. Whatever is to be done with all the redundant people, which calls to mind the film Soylent Green and Cyril Kornbluth's short story The Marching Morons. As to why pursue the next billion when you have one or more already, there is a word for it, pleonexia. It is defined as the desire to have more.
The take on mainstream economics is perfect. You should send it to Real-World Economics Review, pae_news@btinternet.com, it would be happy. After all, it's the official paper of the world's biggest association of economists, those who object to mainstream.
But I don't think ideologies are at fault, people can make anything under the cover of an ideology. Stalin was a "socialist", remember? And the term "liberalism" was invented as a self-designation for those who were against arbitrary government in Spain in the 1810s. And, by the way, "socialism" was invented as a self-designation of the charity bourgeoisie in France in the 1830s. Labels change.
What is true is Marx's idea that the ruling thoughts in a society are the thoughts of its ruling class. And in the North Atlantic world, the ruling class is the rentiers – people who don't want to build, don't want to work, just want to plunder the wreck and collect the proceeds.
And to continue. Maybe liberalism has always had the same meaning in England and France, I don't know (but wasn't Beveridge a liberal?).
In Sweden it has gone through violent mutations. In the mid 1800s it was the label of those who wanted "development", including state-led such, like in China today (but vastly less developed of course). Around 1900 it was the label of those who wanted universal suffrage. In the mid 1900s it was the label of those who accepted the welfare state but distrusted the state bureaucracy. And now, well, it's as Aurelien says the label of those who want to plunder the wreck.
Today we live in a number of parallel worlds. The triumph of China and the hell of Gaza. The point this commentary misses is - what motivates people? There is no single answer. The comments about Liberalism are all accurate. It really is yesterdays order and the eruption of critiques of it stands testimony to that. But in everyday life 'money' was never my prime motivation. I was never rich and on occasions had nothing. But I was still motivated - mainly to fight the bastards that wanted war and saw 'the poor' as the enemy. There was something unsatisfactory about this post - like a meal that left you feeling you hadn't eaten anything. When I re-read it, it dawned on me that this was really the point of it..'modern Liberalism.... has neither Growth nor Progress as its objective. What does it have then? Nothing, really, and that’s the terrifying thing'.
As far as the West is concerned, as long as it can smash up whatever China has achieved, that is the next best thing.
Fortunately, that is looking less and less likely, although I imagine you will differ, as is customary.
What your observation about slavery reminded me is that the defenders of slavery in US were doing so on Liberal principles: slaves were property, man's right to property must be defended as sacrosanct, and right to property should include the right to not have the property expropriated depending on location. That was exactly the conflict that caused the Civil War. Their strongest opponents were religious people, otoh, people who were willing to cast their lives aside for things that made no sense. The story would repeat itself periodically until 1920s: for all the ridicule he received, no well meaning person can dismiss where W J Bryan came from when he attacked scientific racism and eugenics (falsely called "evolution") at the Scopes Trial--if you read the historical background. But, somehow, during the century after Bryan's death, something weird happened to organized religion in the West, especially United States...
In UK, the slave owners were given reparations for loss of property, and when Haiti revolted and after a long struggle gained its independence, that was recognized only after agreeing to pay a huge indemnity, which took about 150 years to pay. The French are really some greedy bastards. Just look at their cousins, the Belgians - King Leopold II and the exploitaiton of Congo...
I guess this one way to see it…
An other one is to consider that Southerners, as indeed true Liberals, wanted no tariff on whatever they imported from England and no retaliatory tariff on the coton and other raw agricultural products they exported there. Northerners wanted tariffs to protect their nascent industrial sector from importation of manufactured products and build the infrastructure they needed. But they could only have their way by repelling the Three-fifths Compromise that gave disproportionate political power to the South in Congress. There weren't so many moral or religious principles at stake here 😉
One crucial factor of fundamental underlying importance you're leaving out of the equation is the physical dimension of the human enterprise, namely energy. The world functions only thanks to energy that spins its wheels, and everything else is subordinate to this elementary fact.
For the past 300 years, the world has been powered by energy extracted from hydrocarbons a.k.a. fossil fuels. These fuels have provided cheap energy - in the sense of energy required to obtain fossil energy (not money, money is useless shit) - or huge energy surplus, which has, in turn, allowed the world flourish in an unprecedented, and most likely non-repeatable, fashion. That includes the development of all the wonderful technologies we have and the limited space exploration.
From societal, political, ideological, and philosophical viewpoints, that are of abundance - especially the Oil Age of the past century - has given rise to all sorts of issues, such as those examined in the text. They can be summarized by saying that humanity has fucked itself into a corner in 1000+1 ways. But while it matters somewhat, it's not the main predicament.
The main issue is that the people are getting less energy from hydrocarbons, the energy return on energy invested (EROIE) is diminishing, while the opposite is needed. Not only the human population is growing, but the human enterprise requires more and more energy to drive the whole fucking circus. Add to that production shifted in time through various debt instruments.
In other words, yeah, people are fucked up in the head as per the article, but that's much less important issue than the fact that we're running out of gas, with no replacement in sight, where gas is of paramount importance for sustaining not only the way we live, but the fact that we live at all.
We have become so used to having steady supply of energy, together with infrastructure mostly built by previous generations, that we consider the underlying physical stuff axiomatic and worry about the sexier shit at higher levels, as evidence by kids that play fucking Minecraft instead of poking holes in the fucking ground and building fucking tree houses.
Thus, as far as thinking, we gotta inject some concrete into the abstract ...
Just so. Modern technological societies are unsustainable in the long run. How much that can be saved of present knowledge (and how much is worth saving), is the next problem. If there is anyone left to consider it.
The question is whether there is enough hydrocarbons left and enough determination for the development of technologies that would allow capturing solar power that Earth receives and whether it's technologically feasible in the first place, and whether there's enough time to do that.
The odds are probably higher for the current civilization to collapse and disappear because fucking people are so obsessed with the present, gluttonous consumption, and would be unwilling to give up the present-day luxury for the pursuit of a different form of existence, which would be simpler, less 'sexy', even if it allowed their children to survive and retain some of the perks of the hydrocarbon binge of the past century.
The whole world would have to be mobilized to engage in this effort and that's unlikely - look at what's happening. It's the beginning of the fight for whatever is left, for who'll reap the benefits of oil for longer (until the bitter end where the last fucking gas station dispenses the last drop of oil and the lardass billionaire's Lamborghini will only be good for shoving it up his asshole).
I don't know if the green movement is an attempt at the aforestated, but it's so imbecilic, halfhearted, and corrupt from the beginning, that it's a nonstarter, not to mention the fuckhead politicians promoting it. They're the antithesis of being inspiring, instead they make everybody wanna puke.
So, it doesn't look too good, but you never know.
How much of knowledge is worth saving is a good question, but I'd say that it's more about how much of the principles people adhere to is worth preserving. Certainly not the notion of progress, in the sense of technological development and nature conversion into a fucking Disneyland. Basically, a whole new ideology akin to something as huge as Christianity would have to be developed and imposed on people, for them to change their gluttonous, ultimately self-destructive behavior. That ain't happening without some cataclysmic event.
Anyway, I read this book Nonstop by Brian Aldiss when I was a kid. It's about a spaceship that goes on a faraway space exploration mission, but something happens on the way (I think an epidemic of a bad disease), which wipes out much of the crew and causes the survivors to forget what their original purpose was. Somehow the ship returns to Earth where it's kept in orbit, while people from down below provide maintenance and take care of the mutants the crew have become, because letting them back on Earth is deemed dangerous. The crew have become much smaller due to lack of proper nutrition, sunshine, and living in a confined space. They perceive the ship as their natural habitat, the universe. In the novel, some guy comes to understand all of this, and finally the ship people are allowed back to Earth. But that's not what the book is about - it's about forgetting the original purpose, how things get corrupted over time. So, if there's anybody left to consider shit some years or centuries after the oil collapse, they'll be clueless if they discover, say, an old rusty locomotive, because in the meantime, they will have had to worry about survival, real basic stuff.
Be all that as it may, what I find tragic today is that not only the powers that be never discuss any of these fundamental issues (hopefully in some concerted manner) to mobilize humanity in a way akin to putting man in space, but neither do most intellectuals, who mostly focus on societal, sociopolitical, and cultural issues, without taking the physical, the concrete into serious consideration.
A depressingly accurate discussion of liberalism.
For some years around the turn of the millennium, I worked as a financial journalist. My job it was to report on the day to day travails of the stock markets, on yearly profit reports of the Big Companies etc. The first thing I was taught was that "The Market is always right". Except, to my dismay, it rarely was. Stock prices were invariably governed by the first page of the press release, while of course the big caveats on always 'excellent profit marks' were to be found on page 3 of said press release, which in the heat of the moment, were never taken into consideration. I would write my piece, based on thorough investigation of the actual performance of any given company and would give my opinion on it, too. All very thorough work, but in the end, I never ended up earning much money on the stock market. Because, even though I may have been right, "The Market is always Right". (Just like I never invested in Bitcoin, because of course it is "tulip bulbs". I may be right about it, however, if I would have invested in it, I would have been quite rich by now).
Yes. You would have been richer in the short term but as you hint only at the cost of causing social hurt to others in the longterm.
Thanks for this piece. For some amorphous intellectual reason I found it to be very emotionally supportive. Your last sentence struck me serendipitously. I have, for many years now, hurled the phrase ‘the gangs will never reach this far North’ at any individual in the media who justifies political decisions by referring to market forces. It comes from Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York in which he presents the prevalent gang culture of lower Manhattan of 1842-1862. The British actor David Hemmings plays an autocratic wealthy New Yorker who says this phrase to his worried opulent dinner guests at his home just before they are violently beset by said gangs.
"You would have been richer in the short term but as you hint only at the cost of causing social hurt to others in the longterm."
The marginal value of a dollar is ever always only a dollar. It doesn't matter whether you got that dollar teaching inner city kids to read and write, or you got it by selling heroin to those same kids.
This is the basic truth and great flaw of capitalism.
It continues to annoy me that children are not taught the difference between economic or other forms of material exchange and capitalism in primary school. So simple to do yet beyond the ken or is it the intent, of our political ruling class.
Thank you again, for a thought provoking and very sobering analysis of the state of the boat in which we find ourselves.
The late dissident clinical psychologist, David Smail, made very similar arguments: diagnosing the breakdown ( or deliberate disassembly ) of the public sphere as the root cause of so many of our personal troubles, including those treated, with little success, by therapists like himself. The following quotation from ‘ Taking Care: an Alternative to Therapy’ (1987), gives a flavour of his thinking:
‘In order to change things for the better – in order, that is, to be able to act morally – the individual must have the moral space in which to do so. This is not something which people can create for themselves as private individuals, but something which is socially created and maintained through the proper use of concerted (political) power. A politics which perverts and abuses power in order to operate a network of vested interests collapses the space in which people can conduct themselves instrumentally to exercise a public function, and it does this mainly by focusing attention on purely private needs and treating ‘politically motivated’ conduct as somehow suspect or reprehensible. If, however, we are to come to see that we are inflicting incurable but avoidable damage on each other rather than merely suffering personally unavoidable but curable ‘breakdown’, if, that is, we are to move from an ideology of therapy to a culture of care, we shall have to force open around ourselves a moral space which gives us room for concerted action, and this can only be done through the re-insertion into that space of a ‘public dimension’. We shall have, to put it another way, to re-establish an ethical politics in the place of an apparatus of power for the manipulation of interest.’
President Eisenhower famously said,
"Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is."
Your critique may be valid as far as it goes, but the problem is that nobody believes in a religion, philosophy, tradition or anything else because they think such belief is beneficial to society. They believe because they think what they believe is objectively true. It is futile to advocate for a belief because belief (by others) has pragmatic value.
The search for meaning -- and coming up empty handed -- is causing quite a bit of despair with my 24 year old Senior in College. In our conversations I've needed to draw on the Buddhist tradition to remind him that belief in a transcendent meaning is something to meditate on from all angles. Don't be surprised, I tell him, if you reach a realization of the emptiness of existence, and that this realization can be quite liberating, as it can free yourself from the self-importance that comes with whatever you might contrive to be "meaning." I also believe, like Victor Frankl, that we'll still need some sense of meaning, and that need is greatest in the midst of a holocaust to endure. Even the Buddhists will say that our meaning should be in lessening the suffering of sentient beings. I tell my son that he can find meaning if he can find a nexus of his innate gifts and the world's greatest needs. For me, my curiosity about existence is such that I am content to find meaning in each day to see how this crazy world is turning out. As Mencken said about all of us in the USA -- "we all have a front row seat to the greatest show on earth." It gives me meaning to observe today's episode of reality (and what the James Webb telescope is showing us about the universe) and add more puzzle pieces to the big picture. We all have to decide what makes us want to get out of bed in the morning on the individual level.
Perhaps the void that Aurelien is articulating is an absence of a shared sense of transcendent meaning or purpose. I think every era had a sense of this. I think that since the Industrial Revolution there has been a shared sense that the "human adventure" is a joint mission of progress, particularly in understanding nature with reason and science, and advancing the human condition with that understanding. I believe that we are now in that great state of confusion between eras. We can see how the former era has dissolved in all sorts of corruptions and contradictions and is no longer credible. During this interregnum, the best we can do is make money, write essays, do podcasts, start a business, become a celebrity, have lots of good sex, raise kids, etc. It reminds me of the conclusion of Wagner's Ring Cycle, the Twilight of the Gods, when the once-great but fallen hero Siegfried has died and Grunhilde returns the Ring to the Rhinemaidens to repose until another hero (or worse) retrieves it, thus starting a whole new cycle of transformation -- building (electric powered bullet trains!), exploration, incest, tragedy, etc.
I will now tell you what the next cycle is -- one which will give humans a great sense of collective meaning and hope -- namely to transform our way of thinking and living to be sustainable with other life on planet earth. This great joint task of the species awaits. Because of climate change, this task is increasingly urgent. Because it requires collaboration rather than competition, it will be a post-capitalist undertaking. We will need every human to work toward saving ourselves and the planet while there is still time. The start of this cycle may take a catalyst in the form of a revelation and disruption too cataclysmic to ignore -- like the breaking off of a huge piece of an Antarctic Ice Shelf -- to launch humanity on that path.
Will anyone complain about a lack of meaning then -- at the start of this new cycle?
" the best we can do is make money, write essays, do podcasts, start a business, become a celebrity, have lots of good sex, raise kids, etc."
Looks like you didn't get very far into Buddhism.
Talking about taking things out of context... Did you even read the rest of the comment, or just seize on that as a "gotcha!" the moment you saw it?
It's important in the context of the whole of the post. Read it all again, and consider.
"...Liberal managerialism, as I have suggested, really has no objectives at all, other than the vague teleological search for a state of pure competition and infinite personal freedom, both by definition unattainable in this world, and both requiring unrelenting destruction of all organisation and society that might obstruct them."
The point is more benefits for the PMC.
2. "It is this quasi-religious aspect, I think, that helps to explain many of the most puzzling features of actually-existing Liberalism. After all, turning your back on Growth and Progress may provide short-term financial benefits for those who have too much money anyway, but it is already starting to negatively impact the lives of the Liberal priesthood itself. Decaying infrastructures, failing education systems and rotting public services will ultimately impact everyone, up to the evilest moustache-twirling villain."
The PMC are confident that they can insulate themselves from all that, or at least their upper ranks can do so. For the peons, oh well, it can't be helped.
3. "I cited last week a comment by Guy Debord that Liberal societies prefer to be known by their enemies than by their results. When you have no results, you need an awful lot of enemies. This is one of the main reasons for the unreasoning hatred of Russia at the moment."
A Scary Enemy is always a necessity.
1. To justify why we can't have nice things. Healthcare? Infrastructure? Education? We don't have time for that now, don't you know we gotta fight Saddam/Milosevic/Bin Laden/Saddam again/Ghadaffi/Assad/ISIS/Putin/Hamas/Houthis/ad nauseam.
2. To give the rubes a cause to rally around, rather than ask awkward questions, like why they have to tolerate crumbling infrastructure and dangerous schools.
3. To unify political factions around a common enemy, justify the division of spoils and explain why we can't have nirvana right at the moment, we'd really like to but the Scary Enemy is stopping us and don't you know we gotta focus on this fight, right now!
4. To justify crackdowns on civil liberties. You and your namby-pamby Bill of Rights, you hate our freedom! What, are you on the side of the fascists/communists/Islamicists/Russians/ ad nauseam?
Well, finally an article I can unequivocally endorse - for whatever that's worth, these days.
Nihilism and lack of shared morality was baked into the Enlightenment which took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. As MacIntyre put it in his most famous book, After Virtue, “Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology, or hierarchical authority.”
That is a very fine essay.
While reading I was forcibly struck by the importance of the id3a of “context” when thinking about different philosophical/political ideas.
When Liberalism was being invented the “pursuit of rational self interest” must have seemed like a very sensible idea when opposed to the illogical unfreedoms associated with the existing post feudal order.
The problem with criticising Liberalism then was that the opposition represented something that was obviously a lot worse. Inherited wealth and position as the only route to importance.
Of course there was another option: Socialism was already being discussed (The Levellers etc) but that was and always has been hated and feared by the feudal elite as well as the Liberals. And that commonality of purpose gives us the clue about the faults with Liberalism. An obsession with property first before people. But that is a sidetrack.
The importance of context as I said is interesting here. As the Sufis always emphasise, it is always important to ask “who, where, when”?
And 'how' and most importantly, 'why'.
Great thoughtful essay - as usual. Thanks!
I am not sure liberalism alone is to blame for our woes - though, as you so eloquently point out, its nihilism is inherently self destructive.
When it comes to progress - times of rapid scientific, social and/or economic progress are the exception in human history. Most of human history is made up of long eras with no or very little progress.
By some measurements we are today still profiting from the latest burst of innovation which may have peaked as far back as 1870. Which would mean we are now running on fumes and that should frighten anyone who beliefs in infinite growth through innovation.
That last innovation explosion was by and large an energy revolution which made it possible for machines to do human work. AI is merely the logical conclusion of that innovative outburst.
This also explains the diminishing return on investments in the nations that spearheaded the industrial and technological revolutions. Today's late adapters like China and Africa are only doing so much better because they were so far behind.
Again - all of this has happened before in human history. And sadly it rarely ended well.
Civilizations have the tendency to use up all of their available resources until they become so bloated that they can no longer sustain themselves the moment a minor crisis hits.
“Historians” will not argue “how much purges were the result of paranoid personality” because historians don’t argue silly bs. If you see someone arguing that this is not a historian.
This essay is the mirror of my thoughts for some time and with increasing urgency. I can only wish I had expressed myself as clearly as do you. In recent weeks I have read C.S.Lewis's "space trilogy." The third volume, That Hideous Strength, is your essay in the guise of a novel. It occurs to me, as to others among those commenting, that looked at from the perspective of liberalism the actions of Israel in Gaza are quite correct. Israel wants the land. The occupants are in the way. Obviously, they need to be removed. So slavery in the US and prison industries whose operators lobby against sentencing reform. So personnel departments relabeled "human resources." So the word eugenics has crept back into the lexicon. Whatever is to be done with all the redundant people, which calls to mind the film Soylent Green and Cyril Kornbluth's short story The Marching Morons. As to why pursue the next billion when you have one or more already, there is a word for it, pleonexia. It is defined as the desire to have more.