Stop Making Sense.

There are no "why"s in our world.

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Now, then.

You may remember satire: it used to be a cultural art-form. Its purpose was to hold the failings of individuals and society up to ridicule, and has its origins in the plays of Aristophanes (apparently recommended by Plato as the best guide to understanding Athenian politics) and in the Roman poets Horace and Juvenal. It had a long and rich history in different forms, and the reasons why it now seems pointless to attempt satire have a great deal to do with the incoherence and apparent pointlessness of the modern world.

This is because satire presupposes a reasonably common frame of reference between the author and the reader or viewer, such that what is intended to be understood as excessive and ridiculous is recognised as such. The best satire is a matter of fine judgement: the depiction of individuals and circumstances which are sufficiently far removed from current reality to be striking and entertaining (thought not necessarily funny), but also close enough to current reality that the events and individuals retain a surface plausibility. In many cases, satire involves taking current cultural forms and political ideas, and giving them an extra twist or two so that they become ridiculous. Thus, Brave New World is a satire on Wellsian scientific utopianism, just as 1984 is partly a satire on the theories of the American managerialist James Burnham. Dr Strangelove  is a satire on the earnest apocalyptic literature and cinema of the 1950s, complete with mad Generals and technology getting out of control. As late as 1982, the British TV series Whoops, Apocalypse! could satirise the incipient boom in nuclear disaster stories towards the end of the Cold War.

As some of these examples demonstrate, satire does not have to be funny, although it may be. There are not many laughs in 1984, any more than in Zamyatin’s We, one of its principal sources. But what there are, is a series of ideas satirised by being taken to ridiculous extremes. Orwell knew that the shock value of 1984 would be greatly increased if it was set not in some imaginary country, but in the most unlikely environment he could think of, which was his own England; and if the non-ideology of the Party was disguised in the terminology of the form of very English democratic socialism Orwell himself had fought for. So Orwell took up and satirically exaggerated some of the popular fears of the time (black-uniformed paramilitary police in London, televisions that watched the watcher, attempted control of peoples’ thoughts, loyalty checks, sudden and violent changes of party line, endless wars, a single Party) recognising that, whilst the reader would know these things could not actually happen in England, nonetheless the shock of them appearing in the familiar environment of homely London, would be all the greater.

Thus, effective satire presupposes a degree of consensus about what is and isn’t real and what is and isn’t possible. Molière’s ambition to corriger les vices des hommes en les divertissant (“correct  the failings of men while entertaining them”) assumes a broad consensus about acceptable and unacceptable conduct, and the need to avoid taking ideas and beliefs (even religious beliefs) to extremes. This is why satire functions best in politically and socially structured environments, from the England of Swift’s Modest Proposal to the Vienna of Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, where satire is understood to be satire. Thus, it was possible in the 1970s for Monty Python to mock many aspects of the British establishment (of which they were part), including organised religion in The Life of Brian, because even those who were offended by the satire recognised and accepted the world that the Pythons satirised, and that it was satire. By contrast, Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus trilogy, initially written as a satire on the conspiracy literature of the 1960s, became absorbed seamlessly into that very culture, and is now often seen as an expression of it.

More and more in recent years people have started to say that “you can’t make it up,” and to suggest that there is no point in producing satire any more, because reality inevitably out-does it. It’s not a new idea of course. Although the satirist Tom Lehrer, author of some of the most viciously funny satirical songs in all history, later denied saying that he gave up writing after Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, it’s true that he would have been justified in doing so. (But then it’s also true that by that point he’d said just about everything there was to say: “the nice thing about a protest song is that it makes you feel good” remains the ultimate comment on performative political action sixty years after he said it.)

Nonetheless (and finally we get directly to the topic of this essay) most people now have a sense of living in a world in which satire is irrelevant and in many ways impossible, where every news report or morning RSS feed brings not just new horrors, but completely inexplicable and surreal turns of events, in a world in which nothing makes sense, and nothing seems to be logically connected. I actually sympathise with, and largely share, this view, because I think it is broadly true. We live in a world which we can no longer pretend makes sense, and we do not know how to deal with it.

As an example, consider a proposal made to Hollywood in the 1970s for a film in which hundreds of thousands of lives, and the future of the Middle East itself, are hostage to the desperate attempts of two elderly, corrupt politicians in different countries to cling on to power and stay out of jail, and to the precise timing of an election in one country, and the financial and political weight of various voting constituencies. Imagine further that extreme religious members of the government of one country believe that they are close to the return of their Messiah, which will be prompted by a nuclear attack on the ancient enemy Persia, as set out in their Bible, and that other religious extremists in the second country think that the second coming of Christ will be prompted by the same events. Oh, and there’s this stuff about a sacred temple and a red heifer. You can imagine the reaction of a putative producer then, although these days we have come to just accept these kinds of events as givens. We’re a long way from the days when deep economic forces were believed to structure major events in the world.

Dystopia is the first cousin of satire, and often overlaps with it, and there is actually nothing more charming and entertaining than the dystopias of the past, because these stories are limited in their awfulness by what the writers can imagine about the future, based the norms of their own time. The urban violence of Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, for all that it seemed a shocking dystopian satire sixty years ago, and even a decade later when Stanley Kubrick made his film version, now seems quaint and very much of its more civilised times. Real urban violence today frightens us because it is outside any agreed and understood context: it’s doesn’t  even seem dystopian, it just seems incomprehensible.

As I write this, there are reports in the French media (not many, actually) of an altercation in Bordeaux between an Afghan refugee, asylum-seeker migrant and a couple of young Algerian immigrants who he found drinking beer. Berating them for drinking alcohol the end of Ramadan, he attacked them with a knife and killed one of them. There has been a spate of such violent incidents recently, mostly among teenagers and mostly in and  around schools. Some seem to be gang-related, others just the product of an imported culture where arguments of any kind frequently end in extreme and often fatal violence. Then there is the fifteen-year old girl of Algerian origin beaten almost to death recently by some of her classmates because she dressed in clothes that were “too western.”

It’s not simply that the French system has no idea what to do about these incidents: it has no idea even what to think. It has no frame of reference in which to try to place such (increasingly-frequent) acts.  The best that it has been able to do is to try to reduce the publicity they attract, because such publicity will “stigmatise vulnerable communities” (who are actually the victims) and “strengthen the extreme Right.” (The logical flaw in that argument would be obvious to any eleven-year old) Indeed, the French system has for years now gawped at the whole phenomenon of religious and immigration-related violence like goldfish: their mouths keep opening but nothing that makes any sense comes out. The irony is that the strongest IdiotPol critics of secularism as enshrined in the Constitution are not themselves religious believers, nor do they genuinely want to grant organised religion power over politics and society. In the abstract, they are as fiercely secular as those they criticise, if not more so. It is simply that, religion for them is not a matter of belief, but simply a cultural identity marker, worn by “disadvantaged” and “vulnerable” communities who are believed to be “subject to discrimination,” and must be “protected” against criticism.

It is impossible for such people, who dominate the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) of the western world, to understand that other people from other societies genuinely believe that the precepts of their religion are literally true, and the commands of their religion as interpreted by some of its leaders are operative, and that they are therefore justified in the mass killing of unmarried men and women socialising together, or the persecution, beating and rape of girls who fail to respect Islamic dress codes in the streets of European cities. Anything, literally anything, from “marginalisation” to “police violence” to "western military adventures” to the activities of western intelligence services, is preferable as a way of explaining Islamist violence at the wholesale and retail level, because those things are things we understand, or at least we are used to hearing about, in popular culture and on TV and in cinemas.

That last point is important, because research in psychology shows that what people believe is related far more to how many times they hear things repeated, than to the inherent coherence of what is being proposed. Sheer repetition creates familiarity, and familiarity provides us with an explanation and a framework that absolve us from the need for further thought. As a result, events that might appear strange, and as a consequence frightening, can be assimilated into a familiar discourse, and we feel less afraid as a result. When things happen that simply cannot be wrenched into an existing paradigm, but are too dramatic to ignore, they are simply reported hurriedly and without comment. The fact is that the PMC itself is completely unable to understand these acts of violence, because they are completely outside the bounds of their intellectually comfortable existence. It therefore limits itself to squeaks of virtue-signalling and irrelevance. (Le Monde had a long article about the Afghani killer this week, entirely devoted to the technical question  of whether the murder could be classified as an act of terrorism if it hadn’t been pre-meditated. As if anybody cared.)

Much of this, of course, is ego-related. The idea that things happen in the world that we cannot understand without making a special effort; that there are events in which the West does not play a dominant role, for good or ill; that even in our own society things happen that we cannot shoehorn into our traditional frame of reference: all these threaten our precious ego’s ability to grasp, explain and therefore control the world; The more the world seems inexplicable, the more it seems frightening, and the stronger the desire to find some way, any way, of assimilating it to ideas we have already heard of. The alternative is silence.

For example, the monument commemorating the deaths and injuries to hundreds of people in the Islamic State attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris contain not one word about the identity or motivation of the attackers. It’s easy to get the impression of deaths from some kind of natural disaster. In reality, whilst France has a great deal of knowledge of the Islamic State, from fighting it in Syria and in Africa as well as at home, the mountains of studies, the endless accounts of former members, of experts in the regions and testimony at trials cannot be converted into a simple story that follows directly from what people “know” (or at least think they know) about Islam and the Middle East. So the result is silence before that which seems to be inexplicable.

It’s striking how this appears also in the coverage of Gaza. It’s routine now, in the pages of the surviving newspapers or in successive RSS feeds from the same site, to see horrifying pictures and terrifying reports from Gaza itself, accompanied by bleats from Washington asking Mr Netanyahu to be slightly kinder and more discriminating in the killing. There is no way in which a single news story can be written that encompasses both elements satisfactorily, so the overall impression given is of two stories which have no actual causal or even thematic connection, but by coincidence were reported at the same time. Once again, the silence is so loud it screams. For thirty years, up to and including Ukraine, the full ideological armoury of PMC militarism has been repeatedly wheeled out: military intervention, no-fly zones, airstrikes, military intervention on the ground, sanctions enforced by the military if necessary. And the bitterest of ironies, is that this is the one political crisis I can think of in the last thirty years where military intervention could put an end to the suffering in half an hour.

But the idea of military intervention clearly does not occur to western governments, because the use of violence against a western-aligned state is unthinkable, in the literal sense of that term. It is not within the frame of reference where thinking is taking place. That frame of reference is only capable of receiving and processing certain types of inputs: thus, flicking through some RSS feeds this morning I came across a story about how we might alleviate the suffering of the Palestinians, innocent parties as they were, in a war between Israel and Hamas. Such interpretations, for all that they may appear bizarre to the well-informed, represent the maximum extent to which the PMC and its associated political and media classes can actually process what they are seeing in a way that does not destabilise their vision of the world. After all, would any satirist or writer of dystopian SF thirty years ago have dared to write a story in which, in the same week, sanctions were imposed on China for selling goods to Russia, as Israel was flogged with a piece of wet spaghetti? It’s not even clear how you even begin to assimilate these two events to any coherent world view, which is why they could never have succeeded as a satirical narrative.

Examples could be multiplied, but I think the point has been made. Whilst the idea of living in a meaningless and chaotic world is hardly new, one of the many changes wrought by the Internet is to massively increase the quantity of raw data available about today’s crises, without necessarily increasing the level of understanding. Even thirty years ago at the dawn of satellite television, a few minutes live broadcast from a trouble-spot by a recognised journalist was the most you would get. A decade before that and it was film, developed in studios back home. Now, after an incident such as the Iranian missile attack on Israel, we are bombarded with smartphone videos that may or may not show real incidents that may or may not be related to the episode in question, and more commentary than anyone can sensibly absorb. It would be one thing if all these images and all this commentary tended in the same direction, but in practice much of it is disconnected and flatly contradictory.

This produces a situation which is, I think, unprecedented in human history. Consider: until century ago, news from the outside world was difficult and expensive to find and came in small packets from specialist correspondents. People were aware of the confusions and contradictions of life, the terrible things that could happen, the inexplicable crises that developed, but mostly in a local and domestic context that they very largely understood. Only recently have news feeds been full of inexplicable, unexpected and terrible events perpetrated in places we have never heard of, by people whose names we cannot even pronounce.

This has coincided with a levelling effect brought about by the Internet, which assimilates everything to a single discourse. Paradoxically, the Internet has massively narrowed and simplified our view of the world. When I was young, other parts of the world, even of Europe, were accepted to be Different. The narratives of African explorers I grew up on, the boys’ stories of derring-do in the Middle East, the BBC documentaries of David Attenborough, all resonated with a sense of just how different other cultures were. The end of European Empires meant among other things the end of daily interaction with completely different civilisations, as Ministries of Colonies were folded up and became minor appendages to Foreign Ministries, and expertise in genuinely foreign cultures became much less valued. (Come to that, much of the early success of the James Bond novels was from their placement in exotic and different places like Jamaica or Japan, which only a handful of readers could ever expect to visit.) These days, as people post videos of themselves outside McDonald’s in Ho Chi Minh City or half way up Mount Everest, we are fooled into thinking that the world has finally become just a projection of our own egos, and that we now have a conceptual framework that can broadly assimilate and interpret anything, even if we argue furiously about detail. Hence the fear when the ego is confronted with something it genuinely cannot force into the context it thinks it understands.

Of course, the idea that we live in a confusing, irrational and frightening world is not new. For our ancestors, it was probably worse, at least in their daily lives. But there have been two intellectual traditions that functioned as palliatives, and at least partial explanations. One, of course, was religion. In pantheistic societies such as that depicted in the Iliad, the question did not really arise: the gods did what they felt like doing to mortals, and that was it. There was no overarching system of ethics, or even need for rationality. Monotheism has always been able to propose a solution to this problem: the designs of an all-powerful creator God are bound to be such that human beings cannot understand them. Indeed, there is an entire school of mystical writing found in both Christianity and Islam, known as “apophatic” theology, which argues that we can have no knowledge of God and it is pointless to try. (Kant thought the same thing by the way.)

The problem with this argument is that it requires a certain degree of humility, which is not a virtue much in fashion today, and which tends to undermine our ego-driven view of the world, where everything must be comprehensible to us, and capable of being judged by us. (The argument does not depend on the existence or otherwise of God for its force, it’s an argument about the limits of what humans can realistically expect to know.) The idea of the existence of forces that we cannot understand is more than our ego can accept, so, since the eighteenth century, we have redefined God as a “reasonable” being we can comprehend, and much atheist sentiment comes from the ego-driven inability to accept the very concept of a divine figure whose characteristics we intrinsically cannot grasp. At one extreme, it’s argued that belief in a single God is unreasonable, at the other it’s argued that the idea of a God who condemns souls to everlasting perdition is unacceptable and cannot be true. But it’s obvious that a supernatural being has no obligation to accept the rational and moral standards of westerners in the third decade of the twenty-first century. It’s also obvious that throughout history the vast majority of Christians, at least, have had no difficulty in accepting the idea of everlasting perdition, just as hundreds of millions of Muslims do today. Nonetheless, the ego-driven rejection of anything beyond our powers of discernment (like goldfish deciding that no-one was actually feeding them, but that food just arrived in the water naturally) has left us with no alternative except purely reductive human ones to explain the paradoxes, cruelties, injustices and general incoherence of the world.

The principal alternative, of course, was Marxism, or to be more precise institutionalised Marxist-Leninism, as represented and directed for three quarters of a century by the Soviet Communist Party. The idea that humanity was moving, if irregularly, in a certain direction under the tutelage of the CPSU provided at once an analytical framework for viewing the world, and a way of accepting and rationalising terrible events. Even alleged errors —forced collectivisation, for example—could be explained as individual cases where the Party had deviated from correct behaviour, but had got itself back on track. It was the destination not the journey that mattered, even if that journey passed through Stalin’s purges and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

Both of these systems of thinking have lost a great deal of their political and ethical power, but the habits of thought they inculcated remain influential nonetheless. The decline of formal religion has produced—well, I was going to say conspiracy theories, but that’s perhaps overstating it, because a theory is an intellectual construct that generates testable propositions, and few if any “conspiracy theories” do that. Rather, it has produced a conspiratorial world-view where nothing is as it seems, and everything is the result of the machinations of individuals and organisations that we invest with what are, frankly, superhuman powers. (An invisible demon came down and killed Jeffrey Epstein for example.) Exponents of this world-view, like the Gnostics of old, believe they have instinctive knowledge of the truth of any situation, without the need for evidence.

At the other end of the spectrum, then if formal Marxism has lost a lot of its former influence, vulgar Marxism, with its myopic emphasis on purely material and economic explanations for everything, remains extremely powerful as an all-purpose method of analysis in any context, relegating such factors as history, geography, politics and culture to a subordinate role. And in many cases, the two degenerate forms of thinking actually manage to coexist, sometimes in the same set of assertions. Of course, once you have a model in your head of how the world works, it can be applied without modification anywhere. Remember the Malaysian Airlines flight that disappeared after takeoff a few years ago and was never seen again? Well it turn out the Americans shot it down. Well, probably. Possibly.

In theory, Liberalism could act as a substitute global theory to explain the miseries and inconsistencies of the world, but it is too incoherent in its practice and even in its theory (how many devout Rawlsians do you actually know?) to play such a role. A political and social theory based on generalised egoism and selfishness has to just accept the ills and contradictions of the world of winners and losers as inevitable, perhaps to be ameliorated by stricter adherence to Liberal orthodoxy. Even if it can identify ills, by definition it cannot act itself to assuage them, because it is a transactional theory of the world. For all their faults, religious believers and Communists went out to fight and die for things they believed in: Liberals just want to pay someone else to die for things Liberals believe in. It’s the difference between “I must do something,” and “something must be done.”

But I digress. Well, a bit. The point is that the modern Liberal destruction of both religion and political ideas aiming at a better future has created a huge void in our ability to rationalise the world, which Liberalism itself cannot fill. And Liberalism is busy destroying all those other yardsticks by which we used to judge and interpret actions: national interest, collective good, defence of families and communities, and so forth. And finally Liberalism has itself shattered into factions busy biting and gouging each other over largely imagined ego-driven differences.

It’s this, I think, that accounts for the hysterical tone of much of what passes for political discourse, let alone debate, today. Our opinions and our evaluations of the world are ultimately just extensions of our own egos, without agreed external reference points, and we choose our opinions  and our ideologies like we choose a football team or a pop star to follow: essentially by pure emotion. A challenge to our opinions is therefore a challenge to the solidity of our egos, and a feeling of uncertainty about how to interpret some event therefore frightens us. We choose opinions and points of view which we find emotionally satisfying and ego-strengthening and, because they are internally generated, rather than being drawn from commonly accepted frameworks, a different point of view from ours is perceived as an attack on the strength of our ego.

This was noticeable in the kerfuffle following two recent incidents: the attack on the Crocus concert hall in Russia, and the destruction of the bridge at the port of Baltimore in the United States. What struck me—and I’m not going to enter into substantive speculation, since little hard evidence is yet available in either case—was that within minutes of the first media announcements pundits had taken to the Internet with elaborate conspiratorial explanations of the events, though not, as I have suggested, conspiracy theories as such. This was at a point where even basic facts were unclear. The point, of course, was to immediately entrap and domesticate these events in a conceptual framework which was unchallenging to the ego, because it was already familiar, and made us feel that we understood the world. Whilst few of us are marine engineers, specialists in the design of harbour bridges, experts on the complex and violent history of the Islamic State, specialists in the interaction of terrorist networks or qualified to talk about sabotaging large cargo vessels, we are all familiar with popular culture tropes of “false flag” operations, mysterious special operations forces, the dark doings of intelligence services, clever technical means of sabotage, and many other things. We fall back on things “like” that Netflix series we never finished watching about the Russians (or was it the Chinese) sabotaging a bridge (or was it a tunnel) because it provides us with something to hang on to. Because we select the explanations that please us according to essentially emotional and aesthetic criteria, then we are incapable of discussing the underlying issues calmly with someone whose criteria are different. We end up trying to scratch each others’ eyes out.

As I’ve suggested, far more data (let’s not say “information”) is available about major events in the world now than we can possibly process, and yet our culture’s ability to make sense of what it sees is declining all the time, even at the level of decision-makers and influencers. This explains, perhaps, the latter’s dislocation from reality over Ukraine. The assertion “Russia must not be allowed to win,” has to be glossed with the rider “or the Western Strategic Ego will suffer irreparable damage, and that is unacceptable.” The thought of a western defeat and a Russian victory is so ego-destroying that it cannot be contemplated, much less allowed to be discussed. Satire, if it felt like it, could really make fun of this dislocation from reality: on second thoughts, perhaps it did a long time ago, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

This is going to become a real problem in the years to come, as the narrative that holds the Western Security Complex together starts to disintegrate, and it becomes clear not only that western influence on many of the problems of the world is limited now, but that it always was much more limited than the Western Strategic Ego was ever prepared to contemplate. One thing  that united the most fervent supporters of the overthrow of Gaddafi and the attempted overthrow of Assad with their bitterest critics was their belief in the fundamental importance of western actions. It’s douche of cold water time, I'm afraid, and the water will be even colder in the future.

Declining power structures still clinging to inflated ideas of their own importance have always been good material for satirists, but I expect that here we have something a bit more fundamental than the end of the Hapsburg Empire to contend with, and live through. But then again, the disintegration of that Empire and the wider chaos that followed World War 1 isn’t exactly a good augury for our future (note to self: write an essay on that.)

So how do we live, in this post-satirical, schizophrenic culture, where truth is whatever makes us feel good, and enables us into pretend that we actually understand the world? I think we have two choices, which between them amount to a decision about whether we think the world is inherently simple, or inherently complicated, and whether we can actually cope with the consequences if we decide in favour of the latter.

Thankfully, some have been here before us? There is an entire literary and philosophical tradition of the Absurd, mostly in French (Céline, Sartre, Camus, Ionesco), which essentially looked at the paradox of the search for meaning in a world which evidently had none and interestingly often adopted a distinctly satiric tone in depicting that world. It’s best-known exponent, Albert Camus, famously asked whether, in such a world, it wasn’t best just to kill ourselves. The Absurdist (and especially Existentialist) answer was, No, keep going, without hope but without despair. Although Camus presented his argument in terms of the human condition as a whole, it’s not hard to see Absurdism as a product of the First World War and of the events of the thirties and forties, which could indeed be read as suggesting that humanity had lost its collective marbles. The First World War, in particular, destroyed far more of the foundations of society (including religion) than is commonly realised. Perhaps it’s not an accident that Absurdism, like Existentialism, was in decline in the prosperous and peaceful sixties and into the seventies. The gleeful smashing of the last structures of meaning and relevance by Liberalism over the last forty years has, unsurprisingly, brought us back to the same despairing sense that nothing is connected and nothing makes sense. It also prompts, I think, the same possible responses: either the neurotic search for some grand unifying theory of occult forces that will explain all the events of the world, or a calmer recognition that the world is indeed fundamentally meaningless, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still useful and important things to do.

Primo Levi, the Italian scientist and writer, was arrested in 1943 for his resistance activities and eventually wound up in Auschwitz, where he saw not only that who lived and who died was largely a matter of chance, but also that the behaviour of the SS authorities running the camp was completely unpredictable and inexplicable. Using the German he had learned (one of the things that helped him survive) he asked a camp guard one day why the had gratuitously snatched away   an icicle he had taken to quench his thirst. Hier ist kein warum was the reply. “There are no whys here.” Although few of us will ever find ourselves in such extreme circumstances, we all, in the end, live in a world in which there are no whys, and it would be best if we got used to it.