Only Connect ....

We are lost in a haunted wood.

I’m pleased to say that we recently crept above the figure of 7500 subscribers: not much in the great scheme of things, but gratifyingly more than I ever expected. Many of the subscribers these days come from reader sharing, or readers flagging up my posts on other sites. Thank you to everyone who has made that possible. Overall readership continues to increase as well, averaging 11-12000 views per essay, plus translations. There’s an interesting long-tail effect going on, where essays published some time ago continue to attract lots of new readers.

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And thanks once more to those who continue to provide translations. Versions in Spanish are available here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting some Italian translations, and has set up a dedicated website for them here.  I am pleased to say that Hubert Mulkens has sent me the draft of another translation into French, which we’ll be looking at together and which I hope to publish in a week or so. 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. Now then:

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You can tell a lot about a society by the metaphors it employs about itself. Western society today uses the imagery of division, of fracture, of lack of communication, of warring parties separated by a chasm of incomprehension. Politicians try to mash together salami-sliced coalitions of interest groups, and to persuade them that their interests are irreconcilable with those of others, while these others are marshalled by their opponents into other coalitions of fractured parts.

So far, I suspect, so commonplace, and most people would agree that forty years of galloping neoliberalism have done a lot to create and then reinforce these divisions, pitting people against each other other at every level from the family to the nation. But I want to suggest something rather more ambitious here: that this is the end-result of a process of disintegration that begun centuries ago, and which was kept under some kind of control until fairly recently. Now it has escaped, like a predator from a zoo, and I’m not sure it can be put back.

These divisions originate from the fact that we see the world in a fundamentally different way from our ancestors even a century ago, and so fundamentally differently from our ancestors of, say, three hundred years ago that I’m not sure I can convey just how differently. Simply put, the world of the past was Connected—everything connected to everything else—in a way that ours is not, and I think there’s some evidence that human beings are unable to function properly in a disconnected society: certainly that’s how it feels now, when we seem to be

“Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night"“

as W H Auden wrote at another dark moment in history.

Here, as often, I approach terrain where I am not an expert, and so I will go quickly and defer to others. But if we are to look for the connectivity we have lost, we have to try to understand how our ancestors once saw the world as an infinite series of connections, and how in certain places, and in certain ways, we still long to do.

Let’s start with the universe, where the understanding of our ancestors was so different that even educated people today find themselves incapable of grasping just how different it was. If you study the literature, the thought or even the history of the West up to the seventeenth century (and these days it’s considered “too difficult” in many educational systems) you find yourself in a world as alien as any science fiction novel ever written. These differences were not “superstitions,” as the eighteenth century liked to argue, they were not charming blind-alleys to be explored in endless Ph D theses, they were the basic tenets of existence in those days, accepted by the highly educated as much as by the academically challenged. Above all, they depended on the idea that everything is connected to everything else. The planets in the heavens, and the Sun and Moon, are living creatures, and the stars influence, or reflect, life on Earth. Society is a single expression, an organic whole, where the health of the Ruler and the health of the country are intertwined, where bad rulers bring natural disasters on their countries. Human beings are at the literal centre of the universe, heaven is a short physical distance above, and not conceptually different from the stars and planets, and hell quite close beneath. Oracles foretell the future and are used as tools of statecraft. Humans and animals are not fully distinct from each other, the boundaries between this world and the next are fluid, and there is no hard and fast  distinction between magic and normal life. Everything is connected to everything else.

All this has been extensively studied. The classic works of Lewis and Tillyard, describe the kind of world our ancestors knew, and the magisterial tracing of the rise of secularism by Charles Taylor, shows how it was lost. One of Michel Foucalt’s earlier works, The Archeology of Knowledge (1969), was concerned with large-scale intellectual movements in western culture that changed the dominant discourse for one where everything was connected to one where everything was separate. Editors of literature and chronicles from Gilgamesh to Spenser try, and sometimes succeed, to convey just what a totally different, and infinitely more connected, world the readers and writers lived in. But that’s only part of it, and arguably the less important part.

For your ancestors and mine, often illiterate, had no need to know the calculations behind the Ptolemaic system (or even who Ptolemy was) or be familiar with Neoplatonism. They lived, once more, in a world of infinite connections and overlap, as even a small acquaintance with traditional folklore and music will confirm. The agricultural calendar was linked to the signs in the sky, destiny could be foretold at birth, decisions could be made by watching the flight of birds, humans could change into animals and vice versa, the dead were very close to the living and could return under certain conditions, spells were used for mundane purposes, both good and bad, and the Otherworld, of benevolent and malign spirits needing to be encouraged or placated, was as real as this one. Children still understand this intuitively, and there’s a certain mordant irony in the fact that many of the great myths and legends of the West have been sanitised and turned into twee bedtime stories and Disney films.

When we become adults, we understand that we are henceforth required to live in a world dominated by the ideology of scientism, which is to say the mechanical (sic) application of nineteenth-century conceptions of scientific materialism as the explanation of everything. I have watched scientists rub their hands in glee as they drive home to their audiences how puny and insignificant we are, a race evolved by chance from the primeval slime on an unexceptional planet of an obscure star in one of millions of galaxies. We live in a meaningless, mechanistic world consisting only of hard stuff called matter, where consciousness itself may be an accident or an anomaly, in a universe which is itself winding down to an inevitable heat death. It’s true nobody knows where the Big Bang came from, or how it could have happened, but they’re working on that. We are a long way from Psalm 8 of the Old Testament, so familiar to our ancestors:

“What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.”

Those who react against this dogma (anyway outdated, stop and question the first passing quantum physicist you see) are patronisingly dismissed as naive and superstitious. Yet interest in religions and spirituality, the study of astrology, or of divination systems such as Tarot or the I Ching, in addition to being pragmatically useful, are attempts to recapture the sense of human beings as part of the universe, as linked to cosmic forces through eternity. Yes, there’s a lot of New Age nonsense out there, but it’s popular precisely because it revives in us a lost awareness of being connected to a greater whole, in a universe which is not just random noise, but actually makes a kind of connected sense. Likewise, conspiracy theories, or even the “softer” version, of the obligatory assumption of rational purposes behind historical events, no matter how difficult they are to find, can be seen as a reaction against a world where nothing seems to be connected to anything. After all, it has been persuasively argued that an omnipotent God was the original conspiracy theory, and in some parts of the world that is still true .

In the same way, our ancestors lived a life which was connected to changes in the planet. When I was a small boy, there were “seasons” when certain types of fruit and vegetables were available, and others when they were not. There were times of the year when you were cold (scraping the frost off the inside of your bedroom window on winter mornings) and times when you were hot. These days (and for some time past in fact) any fruit or vegetable you want is available at any time of the year from somewhere in the world if you go to a supermarket, and any season can be produced artificially anywhere. (Skiing in Dubai, anyone?) Seasons have become less pronounced, to the point where most of 2024 (where I am anyway) has been a series of variations on autumn. Agriculture has become an industry, vegetarianism and veganism are life-styles that make you feel good, and can be exploited for profit. Again, people are resisting to some extent: if they have the money they go to a shop and buy local produce, often labelled with the name of the farm and the farmer and the distance it has travelled. Likewise, Covid brought home to people for the first time just how disconnected we actually are from the sources of production of everyday things. It came as a genuine shock in France (at least for those who hadn’t been paying attention) that Paracetamol was not even manufactured in the country any more. This rather took the wind out of the sails of those who had mocked the burgeoning “Made in France” movement as outdated romantic nationalism with suspicious links to Fascism. These days, most companies that manufacture in France make a virtue of it. It’s not all bad news, then.

Our ancestors also lived in a connected social system: not one that appeals to us today with its rigid hierarchies of power and wealth and experience. The Liberal Ego, which is the foundation of our society, finds it very hard to acknowledge anyone as superior to itself. The concept of Service, to an idea, an institution or a person, on which much of human civilisation was based, seems incomprehensible these days. Liberalism promotes individualism, certainly, but also a definition of individual success which is very largely financial, with the status and power that generally comes with it. Since not everybody can succeed by this definition, and since the success of the few requires the failure of the many, a Liberal society brands those who do not become rich and powerful as failures. Logically enough, it also regards all identity-related grievances as stemming from an imbalance in the numbers of rich and powerful (and hence successful) individuals of different identities, and encourages competition between identity groups for the baubles of wealth and power.

And they are baubles, not least because they are seldom pragmatically connected to any particular skills or attributes (let alone virtues) of those who become wealthy and powerful. This isn’t a new phenomenon by any means, but in most societies for most of history, the ruthless pursuit of wealth and power has been viewed with at least a little circumspection. Not so today, where wealth and power are regarded as signs of moral and intellectual excellence. We all know this is wrong of course; and that luck, ambition and greed are the fundamental qualifications required for what our culture chooses to call “success.”

As a result, and curiously at that, we actually live in an intensely hierarchical system, probably more hierarchical than was the case a hundred years ago. The difference is that this system is incoherent, and not connected to any objective criteria other than the ability to use wealth and power to acquire status. A century ago, and even more a century before that, hierarchies were explicit, based around birth with the occasional admission of wealthy interlopers into the system. As a result, those disputing the power of traditional hierarchies (for example the rising middle classes in western Europe) had a defined and connected target at which to aim. By contrast, current hierarchies of wealth and power are often shadowy and confused, and so tackling them, or even understanding them, is much more difficult: they are no longer connected to anything tangible.

Modern thought has always had a problem with hierarchies, and has sought to tear them down, and establish “access” and “opportunity,” with the perverse results I have just noted. But the egoistic turn in thinking about society has also put everyday hierarchies and questions of status into question. Experience and acquired judgement no longer matter very much: what matters instead is innovation and fresh ideas. Which is fine as long as you know what you are doing. It takes a certain amount of humility to put your ego away for a moment and apprentice yourself to someone who knows more than you do about something, and then to work your way up the hierarchy as a craftsman, an artist, a technician or even a doctor, through a structured and connected system that leads to a recognised status. The turning away of the Left from the values of education over the last couple of generations, the decline in apprenticeships and practical training, and the explosion in romantic fantasies of the lone entrepreneur, are all facets of the Liberal refusal to submit the ego to the discipline of learning from others.

We want instant solutions that validate our own ideas about ourselves, and even our fantasies of what we might become, and we react badly to being told that there are things we have still to learn. We take comfort in  the extensive literature that now tells us that we can have and be anything we want as long as we wish hard enough. Success, however we define it, is thereby completely disconnected from time, effort and study. We do put up with studying something like a law degree, but not for the content and the intellectual training, just for the certificate that opens the way to what we hope will be a lucrative career. Likewise, we reflect, why spend all those years qualifying as a psychoanalyst, when you can earn as much money setting up as a life coach, with no experience or knowledge at all? One result of this is a pervasive and continuing disconnect between influence and status on the one hand, and actual knowledge and experience of the world on the other. Another is a reduction in the actual level of experience and knowledge available to society as a whole because of the increasing disconnect between professions with status and importance, and professions where you actually have to know something. (About one in five university degrees in the US are in business and finance, around four times more than in engineering.)

Speaking of which, there is now an almost complete disconnect between our societies as a whole and their economies. As Karl Polanyi showed a long time ago, it had been normal in Europe for economic activity to serve social ends, and to be governed by them. (And one might add that this was pretty typical of all societies everywhere.) What changed from the eighteenth century onwards was the emancipation of the economy from social and political controls. When Polanyi wrote, there were still some social and political limits, at least, on what economic actors were able to do. Now there are very few, except for legal restrictions that might or might not be enforced. The economy, as managed by the rich, has been completely emancipated from society, and the social consequences of economic change and the unbridled pursuit of wealth through social destruction are just regarded as natural phenomena, like hurricanes, that society has to live with.

At a more personal level, there has also been a growing disconnect between the traditional idea of studying hard, working hard, gaining experience and “doing well,” and the actuality of modern employment. At one extreme, as I have pointed out many times, the new generation of politicians like Macron and Sunak often have no practical knowledge of anything: not even politics. The traditional connection between high office and experience, and between the highest office and previous more modest ones, has entirely been lost. Politicians like Starmer are, quite correctly, seen as amateurs, whose current status is unconnected to any particular experience or aptitude, other than for political in-fighting. More generally, you can criticise traditional hierarchies where status and power were connected to experience and knowledge, but only up to a certain point. That type of management did at least give you a coherent set of assumptions to work with, and a recognised heuristic for understanding and working with the organisation of which you were part. The organisation established criteria for advancement based on ability and experience and, at least in theory, the most able and experienced would rise to the top. But the proliferation of useless “management” in most organisations today often puts real power in the hands of people who understand nothing of what their organisations actually does, and for that matter know little about anything else either.

Organisations themselves are increasingly disconnected, not only from their core functions, but from their workforce. (It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that most organisations today hate their employees: certainly they behave as if they do.) A hundred years ago, life in a car factory, say,  could be unpleasant and over-regimented, but it was at least clear that the activity on the shop floor was connected to the objectives of the company: to make and sell vehicles. These days, it seems as though the activities of the workforce, and indeed its very existence, are just nuisances in the way of ensuring an ever-higher share price. And whereas until recently skilled workers could feel some connection to the finished product, these days much “manufacturing” in the West is really just assembly, taking components from all over the place and sticking them together, to send sub-assemblies elsewhere to be further assembled. It’s hard to feel any connection to a finished product that you might never actually see, which is perhaps why senior management, for whom the activity of the factory is just lines on a spreadsheet anyway, no longer feel connected to anything very much apart from their wallets.

I suppose if there is a classic example of an institution disconnected from its real function, it must be the modern university. What, I wonder, would a Martian political scientist or sociologist, unused to the concept, imagine that a University today was actually for? Certainly not the transmission of knowledge and preparation for careers. Certainly not the increase of knowledge itself through research and publication. Even in countries where education remains more or less free, students have been re-designated as demanding customers, and a vast management bureaucracy has been erected to deal with them. This can and does mean that teachers are a second priority (there are always plenty of applicants for jobs, so who cares?) and their interests are subordinated to those of the students. Now any teacher has the interests of their students at heart, or should have, but that doesn’t mean that every whim of students has to be indulged. Too often, the result is the dumbing down of curricula, the relaxation of marking standards and the tacit recognition that what really matters is getting the maximum number of students out of the door with the right piece of paper.

Universities have thus become disconnected from their historic social role. The engineers, scientists, doctors, teachers, even lawyers that society needs to function are no longer being produced to the standard required in many countries: the anecdotal evidence of inadequate training of professionals today is overwhelming. This is not because either the teachers or the students are stupid, it’s because the university itself has become disconnected from one of its traditional social functions. Sometimes the results can be quantified: in France, where lots of quantified educational results have been published, schools are finding it more and more difficult to recruit teachers with an adequate knowledge of their subject, and even the ability to express themselves clearly: a basic skill for any teacher. In some parts of the country teachers are being recruited with a final evaluation of 8 or 9/20 in their subject after a three-year degree and two years’ professional training. But again, it’s not entirely their fault.

The next type of disconnection, and probably the most serious, is disconnection from society itself. When Mrs Thatcher famously abolished society early in her reign, she was doing nothing more, really, than expressing a trivial Liberal commonplace. Liberal “society” consists essentially of autonomous individuals trading with each other and seeking to maximise their financial and personal advantage. That’s it. For several centuries, various religious and political constraints kept this unappealing ideology under some semblance of control, but it has now escaped. And a Liberal “society” cannot tolerate any relationships other than economic ones, because such relationships would undermine the purity of the Market, and so produce less overall utility. Or something.

Moreover, the Liberal economic policies of the last forty years have actively promoted the disconnection of ordinary people from any larger identity. Families can no longer live near to each other, communities have been broken up, trades unions and other working-class institutions are largely defunct, mass political parties are no more, even football clubs are multinational corporations whose principal activity is now selling merchandise. Most people no longer live “in” somewhere, or are “from” somewhere. And indeed the example is furnished by the international Party, whose cadres may have several passports, flit from country to country, inter-marry and lunch with each other in restaurants in Brussels where everybody speaks the same strangled and gutless form of English. The trafficking of workforces from one country to another in the name of “flexibility” undermines communities and produces new ad hoc communities of bewildered transplants.

This is supported and justified by a Liberal ideology in full flower. The religion of human rights, whilst theoretically universal, acts in practice to divide groups and pit members against each other. All traditional forms of identity are considered dangerous and need to be suppressed. Identification with community, culture and tradition, previously taken for granted throughout history everywhere in the world, is now coded as being of the “extreme Right.” A new generation has therefore grown up without shared reference points from the past. (It’s often forgotten that such reference points don’t have to be seen in the same way by everyone: indeed they often serve to structure debate and disagreement. Now we don’t even have that.) Norms from nowhere have increasingly replaced traditions from somewhere, with the added problem that, whereas in the past it was acceptable to rebel against traditions, it is not acceptable to rebel against norms, precisely because they are norms.

I mentioned the decline of “traditional” forms of identity and connection, and that leads to two great paradoxes. The first is that, at least in theory, the world has never been more “connected.” But it doesn’t feel like that, does it? This is because the connections are not necessarily the ones we seek. Everybody wants your email so that they can send you special offers. People you don’t want to speak to can call you anywhere in the world. What we have lost, rather, is the right to disconnect when we want to, because the effort involved in contacting a million people by email is essentially trivial if you have access to enough mailing lists. For most of my career, I was able to disconnect from work, at least partially, in the evenings and at weekends. Setting off on a business trip of a week or two felt like a kind of liberation. I would occasionally get a fax or telephone message from the office, but that was about it. Now, people are expected to stay in contact from the cabin of an aeroplane by wifi. And at least I had the relative freedom that accompanied a little responsibility and seniority: pity the harassed junior technician today, followed from job to job by the eagle eye of management.

The second paradox is well enough known: “identity” has never been more powerful as an idea. So how can we be disconnected from it? The answer is easy enough: modern “identities” are not freely chosen, they are ascriptive identities imposed on us by outside political forces for their own purposes, whether we want them or not. Indeed, in being made to assume ascriptive identities, we actually become disconnected from the real ones. This produces endless uncomfortable and alienating paradoxes. You can find yourself easily shuffled into some meaningless identity group for management or political purposes, which is bad enough, but then obliged to treat people you actually do identify with as enemies or at least competitors. If you and a colleague of a different gender or ethnicity, and whom you actually get on with very well, are both being considered for the same promotion, the result is interpreted as a victory for one identity group and a defeat for another. It’s rather as though members of a community were randomly sorted into opposing sports teams and told to compete against each other.

Even at their best, such ascriptive identities make very little sense, and in most cases reveal themselves as transparent political manoeuvres. To imagine that “African” or “Asian” is an identity is simply ludicrous. After all, Africa, as I can’t remember how many Africans have told me, is probably the most diverse continent on Earth, and contains more separate and conflicting identities than probably anywhere else. Many of these are related to the history of slaving in Africa: among exiled Sudanese, for example, those from the North consider themselves superior to those from the South, because they used to raid there and sell their victims as slaves to traders from the Gulf. And entire books could be written full of such examples from other areas (bad feeling against ethnic Chinese economic dominance of some parts of South-East Asia …. do I need to go on?)

But if skin colour and the shape of your eyes is a stupid way of trying to impose connections, what about traditional biological differences? Well, the problem is that, whilst there are broad distinctions between male and female roles which hold true in most places at most times, the detail varies a lot, and is affected by the objective circumstances of life. Family structures and male and female roles were very different on an eighteenth century farm, in a nineteenth century industrial slum neighbourhood, a twentieth century middle-class family and a twenty-first century community of episodic couples. Women traditionally acquired status by not having to work: now they acquire status by competing with men for wealth and power.

But politics being what it is, there have been attempts to politicise relations between the sexes and apply ascriptive ideological identity frameworks to them. At least at the beginning, I don’t think these frameworks were intended to be taken literally: they were political slogans designed to promote careers, launch movements and sell books. Nobody who has actually lived on this earth for, example, could ever believe that men are dominant in all personal relationships: it’s enough to pass in review some of the couples you have known, starting with your parents. (Come to that few feminists in my hearing have ever claimed to be dominated by their male partners.)  But as with anything endlessly repeated, there are inevitably practical consequences. Has nobody ever considered, I wonder, what the effects might be of at least a generation now of telling adolescent boys that they are inherently aggressive and violent, and adolescent girls that they are fated to be victims of male violence? Could children at an impressionable age treat such ideologies seriously and behave accordingly? There’s a thought.

Any form of politics based on ascriptive rather than genuinely felt identities actively promotes division and disconnection. I was recently passing through a university where I sometimes teach, and was looking at the posters plastering most vertical surfaces. The majority were about sexual violence, notably warning female students about the risks and telling them where to turn for help. Others were aimed at male students, telling them that even to question the existence of widespread sexual violence was to be complicit in it, since it was by definition everywhere. (In practice, students at the university did not consider it a problem.) But there were also posters condemning anti-semitism, islamophobia, homophobia, racism and a slew of other ideological evils. The result of all this of course, was to disconnect almost every part of the student body from every other part, and to prevent the sense of community and connection which would be natural in a group of intelligent young people of the same age.

What’s most worrying, perhaps, is that these disconnections have now become commonplaces, infiltrating their way into the media and into everyday conversation. I really doubt, for example, whether there is any real reflection behind the knee-jerk dismissal of virtually every attempt to preserve genuine connections between people as of the “extreme Right:” it’s just become an automatic reflex and a default way of thinking and talking about a whole range of issues. It doesn’t have to correspond to reality because it makes a pre-emptive claim to be reality. An unconnected example from a few days ago. I went to an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay devoted to Gustave Caillebotte, a minor but interesting Impressionist, who often painted human figures indoors and outdoors in Paris. As usual there was a commentary on the artist and individual paintings, in this case largely devoted to gender issues. We learnt that the external world at the time was a male domain and women were largely confined to the home. Immediately next to this announcement was one of Caillebotte’s most famous paintings, of couples strolling in the rain under umbrellas, with in the foreground a middle-class couple looking happy and prosperous. And a few minutes research with Wikipedia would have revealed that since the opening of the Bon Marché in 1838, middle-class women had frequented the new department stores and built much of their social life around the tea-rooms and cafés there. (Zola wrote a whole book about it.) If this had been deliberate use of ideology, it would be less of a problem, but, as in so many other areas of life, divisive rhetoric becomes unquestionably accepted as fact.

Finally, of course, we are increasingly disconnected from ourselves. It’s not just that the destruction of any connected life is a cause of mental illness, which is well known and bad enough, it’s also that, as I’ve described above, we increasingly hear, and may even be required to think, things about our society, our economy and even our personal relations, which we know are disconnected from reality, and which we strongly resist on principle. And it’s young people who suffer the most. The result is perhaps the first deliberately induced epidemic of mental illness in western history.

EM Forster is scarcely remembered today, but he was an important novelist and social critic of his time, concerned about the disconnecting effects of the (then) modern world, and sceptical about the effects of scientific progress. In Howards End (1910), probably his masterpiece, Forster adopts as his epigraph “Only Connect!” This injunction applies at all levels: connect the inner and outer life, connect rationality and imagination, most of all reach out and connect to others. It’s a startlingly modern approach, and the consequences of disconnection were memorably depicted in his famous story The Machine Stops published the year before. Here, human beings live underground, completely separated from each other, dependent entirely on the Machine for life. Until it stops. (If that’s not pessimistic enough for you, Michel Houellebecq treated much the same theme with his usual cheeriness in La Possibilité d’une Île (2005.))

Connecting is what human beings want to do, and try to do, in the face of all obstacles. It’s hard to see how we can live our lives otherwise. Yet the pressures upon us—economic, social, political, ideological—are intended to break the connections we value, and force upon us connections that are trivial and often meaningless. This model is one that the West has tried to force on the rest of the world, and the result has been the creation of an international would-be ruling class—the Party—which has a superficial veneer of disconnected internationalism and a half-understood and poorly digested ideology of Liberal clichés. But it hasn’t taken root everywhere (not in China for example) and has been pretty much chased out of Russia. Even in Europe there is resistance, even if it is flippantly and ignorantly dismissed as “Fascism.” But ultimately a society that is so disconnected cannot endure for very long, and if we cannot manage to connect together, I fear we shall perish separately.