The Cult Of Can't.

You'll just have to put up with it.

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I was originally going to start this essay with another example, but as it happens I was just trying to make my annual donation to Yves Smith’s irreplaceable Naked Capitalism site (if you don’t donate yourself, you should ask yourself why) and as always the Internet seemed determined to prevent me. I couldn’t pay by credit card, I couldn’t pay by bank transfer, and eventually, gritting my teeth, I used PayPal, which took two attempts and ended with the screen freezing after what seemed to be a successful transaction. I hope Yves gets the money. But on the other hand, earlier that day I did manage to buy a return rail ticket whilst only needing to go back to the beginning and start again once, so it’s not all bad news.

Now, I’m not going to inflict my trivial life-management frustrations on you any more: I just want to use them to introduce an argument about why it should be the case that Nothing Works today, which I find to be true, and what everybody I encounter says. There’s a well-established litany: sites that don’t work, phone calls not returned, payments not received, lost or taken twice, ridiculous gas and electricity readings that apparently can’t be corrected, simple parts for domestic appliances not available, correspondence lost in the entrails of organisations, companies and organisations that have retreated behind the walls of chatbots and FAQs, where you can’t even email anybody. And no doubt you can think of a dozen more examples. What’s much worse, nobody seems to actually care.

The consequence is a growing mistrust of organisations and private companies at every level, and an increasing realisation that you just can’t assume anything will work, so you need to double-check everything, make copies, send copies, make phone calls, make personal visits, just to try to ensure that what should happen automatically happens at all. The only thing organisations are any good at, I’ve found, is taking money off you, and often wrongly at that. There’s a reason why that is so, and we’ll come back to it.

Likewise, the idea that government and its services should function properly now seems quaint and old fashioned. I don’t need to insist again on the shambles of the response of western governments to Covid and the Ukraine crisis, or their apparent helplessness in the face of climate change. But it’s interesting nonetheless that the failure results not just from by declining state capacity, but also from a shrug-of-the-shoulders attitude that says, We Can’t Do It, It’s Not Possible, Don’t Ask, Whatever you Want, the Answer’s No. The pitiful spectacle that governments have presented over the last few years is fundamentally that of politicians who thought that politics was just about power, and largely Doing Nothing, but who were forced by the pressure of events into trying to Do Something, and making an utter shambles of it. No wonder, as with Covid, the temptation is to declare the problem solved as quickly as possible, so they can get back to Doing Nothing again, which at least they know how not to do.

But why should this be so? Simply put, western society (like others, yes, but I only have a limited amount of space) has gone through different phases of either belief in the possibility of a better future, or conviction that a better future was not possible, or even desirable, and that it was not even worth trying. And when you no longer believe a better future is possible, you lose all interest in safeguarding the present. For the last generation or more, we have been trapped in a case of the second phase, and I don’t immediately see how we are going to get out of it.

Now what you think of as a “better future” largely depends on when you were born. There’s always been an elitist “better future,” largely, but not exclusively, linked to scientific and technical progress, often for its own sake. From Plato onwards, elite thinkers have visualised ideal futures corresponding to their own needs and wishes, and in the last few hundred years, science and technology have given them tools for achieving their dreams, at least in theory. But little of this—and “Artificial Intelligence” is just the latest mad idea—was ever consciously designed to benefit ordinary people, nor were they consulted. By contrast, things that actually improved the lives of ordinary people were originated without fuss, without massive investment, and often by people of modest means and accomplishment, and were managed effectively once established. If we consider how far our civilisation has benefited from clean drinking water, indoor toilets and bathrooms, a reliable system of waste disposal, safety legislation at work, the clean air legislation of the 1960s and simple vaccinations against mass killers like smallpox and polio, and then consider how far that civilisation has benefited from, say, Bitcoin, then we can see how far and how fast we have declined.

What these examples have in common is that they improved the lives of ordinary people, at a point when incrementally improving the lives of ordinary people, and maintaining those improvements, was in fashion. Now it isn’t, and indeed is often asserted to be impossible anyway. Today, it is taken for granted that the lives of ordinary people will get worse, and if you don’t like it you can do the other thing. The return of deadly childhood diseases, rising infant mortality, hunger and homelessness are, apparently, just things we have to get used to, and anyway there is nothing we can do about them: it isn’t even worth trying, and any attempt will just make the problems worse.

I don’t think that anyone these days talks about “social conscience,” except perhaps in connection with faraway countries of which we don’t know very much. (We have thus offshored our sense of guilt and responsibility for suffering as we have offshored everything else.) In nineteenth-century England, the detailed observations of Henry Mayhew on the lives of London’s poor, and the polemical work of Charles Booth, with its explicit argument that the poor of England were in a state as bad or worse as that of “darkest Africa,” were among a series of initiatives that did actually stir the conscience of the times and lead to pressure for change, and in due course to changes themselves.

But to demand change, and even more to implement it, you have to believe that change is in fact possible. This discourse has become so stained and besmirched now by decades of misuse, that it’s hard to imagine a time when incremental change for the better seemed not only possible but, with a bit of work, inevitable. (Colloquially, “change” today means “making things worse” and “change management” means forcing people to accept a worse life.) In turn, this requires a belief that societies are not static, that social and economic relations and hierarchies are not fixed, and change is not necessarily for the worse. This belief was reinforced by practical experience: when universal education was introduced, when the poor were given decent housing, when restrictions on the working day were introduced and when children no longer had to go out to work at eight years old, then, rather than society coming apart, countries become wealthier, happier and better places to live in. Oh, and even property crime went down.

Our self-appointed elites no longer affect to believe this. At the somewhat more intellectual end of the spectrum, societies and economies are supposed to be subject to iron economic laws of “competition,” which means that improving the lives of ordinary people, or even trying to preserve what still exists, makes the country “uncompetitive.” And there is a very important, and rather dangerous line of thinking, originating with the French historian François Furet and his work on the French Revolution, that sees all attempts at improving society leading inevitably to the Gulag and the guillotine. For the influential British philosopher John Gray, the Enlightenment itself led to “utopian” social projects which in turn led to the authoritarian terrors of the twentieth century. (One can grant a degree of validity to such arguments without accepting that, for example, widening the range of children able to attend university implies the concurrent opening of concentration camps.) At the somewhat less intellectual end of the system, meanwhile, it’s effectively all about the pro forma justification of greed, and the psychopathic desire for wealth and power.

Ideas like these have a long history, and appear in a number of different guises, necessarily overlapping in time and in scope. We can nonetheless distinguish a series of distinct arguments. The simplest is that the world is at is because it was created that way, and any attempt to improve the lot of ordinary people is blasphemy. This view is obviously associated with hard-line religious beliefs of different kinds, especially those of a determinist colour. Thus, western teachers in Muslim societies are driven to distraction by students who believe that they will pass their examinations inch’allah, and therefore revision and preparation are not really important. These are societies where predestination is assumed, and therefore human action is at best pointless and at worst blasphemous. In Lawrence Durrell’s Mountolive, the third book in the Alexandria Quartet, there is a scene where the eponymous hero, whose life and experiences are loosely based on Durrell’s own, sits in a restaurant under trees on whose leaves are believed to be written the name of everyone who will die that year.

We find the same in Christianity, of course, sometimes with far-reaching results. The Dutch Calvinists and French Huguenots who settled the Cape Colony accepted only one source of knowledge and guidance: the Bible. It told them that they were like the Jews of the Old Testament, fleeing persecution into a promised land that God had set aside for them. For several centuries, the Bible was the only book most families possessed, and any knowledge or belief not found in the Bible was clearly false. Although it’s not much emphasised now, the apartheid system was partly based on the asserted biblical revelation of the existence of different and unequal races, and the dominance that God had given to the Afrikaners over all others (including, though this wasn’t said out loud, the English.) Ideas of racial equality, or even moves in the direction of modern liberal societies were not just a Communist conspiracy, but actually blasphemy against God. (The Dutch Reformed Church finally changed its mind about apartheid in 1986, but you could still meet Afrikaners years afterwards who clung to the old beliefs.)

At the other end of the world and the religious spectrum, the Catholic Church in Spain held several records in the eighteenth century for vicious obscurantism, sometimes in unusual areas. Arturo Perez Reverte’s 2015 novel Hombres Buenos (“Good Men”) recounts the true story of a dangerous trip to Paris by a group of Spaniards seeking to buy a copy of Diderot’s Encyclopaedia, and opposed at every stage by the Church, which distrusted anything not found in the Bible and the writings officially accepted by the Church. That Church forbad Spanish mariners of the time from using modern inventions like the compass and the sextant, asserting that they should trust in God to get them to the right place. This meant, among other things, that the Spaniards fell behind in the exploration stakes, so let nobody suggest that dogmatic anti-modernism never has quantifiable effects.

Back on dry land, a milder version of this way of thinking held that, predestination or not, the world had been designed by God in every detail. So not just rich and poor, lords and peasants, but hunger wars and and famine, infant mortality and terrible diseases were all part of the Divine Plan, and we could no more understand that Plan than a beetle on Einstein’s desk could understand the Theory of Relativity. Thus, attempts to improve the lot of ordinary people, still less to grant them a share of political power, were blasphemies against the divine order of things. And such ideas were widely accepted: the peasants of the Vendée who rose against the Revolution believed that it upset the God-given order of things, and they fought under the motto For God and the King. And even more thoughtful and moderate churchmen would try to persuade others that, well, God had created the world like this, and really we should be very careful before we started messing around with it. If God had not intended rich and poor, if He had not intended a large proportion of children to die before the age of ten, then presumably the world would have been ordered differently. But it wasn’t, and we should respect that.

The secular version is of course the kind of civilised scepticism found in Burke’s treatment of the French Revolution (which he only ever read about.) Whether Burke genuinely believed that the ramshackle, corrupt English political system he defended was “the result of a lot of careful thought”—and it seems unlikely—he was at the origin of a type of reactionary theorising that presented itself in public as simple pragmatism, a sensible and moderate approach to change, taking account of human nature and the dangers of going too fast too soon. After all, mused many conservatives of the time, once you started meddling with society where might you and up? A concession here and a concession there, and quite soon you would have revolutions and guillotines. So in the end, you do nothing at all, because there’s always a sensible, prudent argument against doing any particular thing. As was frequently argued in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was all very well teaching people to read, but what if they read the wrong things? Conservatives believed that they understood human nature: starvation wages ensured that workers would not idly fritter away excess money. A healthy level of unemployment forced the lazy to look for work. Indeed, looking back, the extent of the ruling class’s distrust and contempt for our ancestors seems almost without limit. I was born in one of the first generation of public housing in England to finally have bathrooms and indoor toilets. After all, the poor didn’t wash anyway, so what was the point of a bathroom? And these vulgar prejudices were in turn reinforced by vulgarisation of the works of Darwin and Malthus. Shrug of the shoulders: it would be nice for ordinary people to have these things, I suppose, but in the end it would be just a waste of money.

Nonetheless, there were counter-arguments, and increasingly the were voices claiming that progress was possible, and that the lives of ordinary people could, in fact, be improved. But the indispensable condition for this kind of thinking was that change was in fact possible, and not just some kind of utopian dream, like the land of Cockaigne in the Middle Ages. The French Revolution was fundamental here, less because of its ideology, important as that was, but more because for the first time, political power moved unmistakably away from the landed aristocracy and towards the urban middle classes, showing that traditional relations of power were not, in fact, immutable. It was this that so frightened Burke and his contemporaries: maybe ordinary people would soon be demanding a share of power as well. And indeed, that is just what happened.

Once you accept that change and improvement is in fact possible, much follows. In particular we see the beginnings of speculation about what a better world could actually be like, often harnessing the forces of technology, which symbolically represent the increasing power of the educated middle classes who do the design, and the skilled working classes who do the work. The most famous novels of Jules Verne are contemporary with the last days of Napoleon III and the installation of the Third Republic, just as the major works of HG Wells are contemporary with the foundation of mass parties of the Left and the organisation of modern trades unions. The change in patterns of power (technology implied mechanical transport which could be disrupted by strikes) began to produce improvements in the lives of ordinary people.

There were intellectual changes as well. The discoveries of Charles Lyell in geology and Charles Darwin in the theory of Evolution showed that the traditional view of a recently-created and essentially unchanging world could not be sustained. Karl Marx for the first time proposed an evolutionary view of economic development, and predicted, quite correctly, that unrestrained capitalism would finally eat itself. Sigmund Freud opened up an entire unsuspected world, that of the unconscious, and dealt the death-blow to purely mechanistic interpretations of human thought and behaviour. Subsequently, quantum physics revealed that the world was even stranger than the strangest theories of Christian mystics, and John Maynard Keynes produced a manual of how to run an economy sensibly without driving the car off the road.

Discovery, indeed, was one of the themes of the time: (It’s interesting that the discoveries and writings of Freud come from the same period as the travels and publications of the first serious European explorers in Africa, the last “undiscovered continent” for Europeans.) For the first time, the names of scientists were known to the general public. The wildlife documentaries of David Attenborough, and the undersea adventures of Jacques Cousteau revealed unsuspected wonders to anyone with a TV set. As late as the 1960s, the apparent confirmation of the “Big Bang” theory made front page headlines around the world. The future also appeared to be exciting: new opportunities opened up for ordinary people, in a world where they could start to take clean water, enough to eat, indoor sanitation and freedom from poverty and childhood diseases for granted. Such opportunities were not necessarily related to getting rich either. A generation before, I would have left school at fourteen and gone to work in an office: I was fortunate enough to live during the brief period of time when children of undistinguished origins could hope to go to university for some years, and even be paid for studying.

Obviously this period was not a Utopia (though it would have seemed so to a working-class Londoner of the previous century.) But it was a time when incremental positive change was assumed to be the norm, particularly in the lives of ordinary people. What was called in Europe “municipal socialism,” the provision of unglamorous but key services to the local community, such as power, water and street lighting, were examples of this approach. And since these services were run by elected Councils, they had to be responsive to popular demands. At the time, none of this was controversial.

I really don’t think that in, say, the late 1960s, the kind of world we have today would have been imaginable, outside the pages of dystopian science fiction. And it’s interesting that science fiction itself became predominantly dystopian from the early 1980s, in the works of William Gibson and others, depicting a world where every social and economic advance since the nineteenth century was effectively overturned. At the time, it seemed, well, fictional. Science fiction was not always of the Left by any means, but its authors had historically celebrated the potential for humans to improve themselves and their condition. Beyond the superficial mythology of flying cars and spaceships was an excitement about the possibilities of the future and the belief that it could be better than the past.

And indeed it seemed incomprehensible that the world would ever go backwards. After all, which party could hope to gain political power by promising more poverty, worse healthcare and higher unemployment? Some of the reasons why this changed were social: the rise of a new white-collar working class and lower middle class that had grown up in prosperity, and began to identify with the the wealthier part of the population, and to look down on the social class into which they had been born. But a lot of it was accidental. As I’ve pointed out before, in Britain where the rot started, Mrs Thatcher was not intended to become the leader of the Conservative party, under slightly different circumstances she would never have won in 1979, and if the Labour Party had not decided to commit suicide, she would have been thrown out in 1983. The British public were not convinced, and indeed public opinion in Britain moved to the Left in the 1980s, and remains to the Left of the government even today. A party of the genuine Left would have ridden to victory in the early 1990s at the latest. Parties of the Notional Left were indeed elected then, but they were entirely lacking the reformist zeal of their predecessors, and rapidly joined the consensus that actually maintaining a decent life for ordinary people was too difficult, sorry. You’ll just have to put up with it. Why was this? Why did the previously unstoppable forces for improving the lives of ordinary people suddenly disintegrate like snowmen in the rain?

There are many reasons, but I’ll just pick out two. One was that the parties of the Left had changed sociologically, especially at high level. Famously, Friedrich Ebert, the Socialist first President of Germany after 1919, was apprenticed as a saddle-maker as a child, and later owned a pub. Gerhard Schroeder was a lawyer for fashionable left-wing causes. Their leaders were increasingly distant from those they claimed to represent, and local party officials were now increasingly drawn from the educated middle classes. If you were a university teacher and your spouse was a lawyer and you lived in a nice house, then with the best will in the world it was hard to identify with your working-class voters who didn’t talk proper and had left school at fifteen. You had been on “demos” against the Vietnam War, you cared deeply about Bosnia and the Somalia famine and you prayed for the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic. You paid your gardener and your housekeeper in cash, and grumbled about the rate of income tax.

The other was that parties of the Left, always masochistically ready to believe the worst and to assume the fight was lost before it had begun, swallowed uncritically the End of History nonsense, and believed that US dominance, globalisation and deindustrialisation were here to stay and just had to be lived with. Now that all of these have been put in question, these parties have nowhere to go (vide Mr Starmer.) The only electoral slogan they could contrive was “if you think we’re bad, the others are even worse,” which didn’t play very well. In the process they completely abandoned any real initiatives, or even promises, to make the lives of ordinary people better. Progress was replaced by Regress. Increasingly people didn’t bother to vote, because what was the point?

So right-minded, good-thinking party leaders, disinclined to do anything practical, looked around for an outlet for their political energies, and of course found and nurtured Identity Politics in its various stages and guises. This had many advantages, especially because it didn’t require any actual action or commitment, just the right opinions and the right speech. It allowed you to feel superior to others and sit in judgement on them because of your opinions, rather than your behaviour. It enabled you to “fight” not against individuals, who might fight back, but against abstractions such as “racism” and “sexism” which have no objective existence, and because they can never be properly identified can never be defeated, thus providing you with a job, or a cause, for life. It enabled you to destroy your enemies ideologically without risk or even inconvenience to yourself. Above all, it provided you with a repertoire of codes and signals to display your own virtue, seek out the like-minded and avoid the riffraff.

It has always astonished me that anyone could seriously assume that these ideas, and the writings of the theorists that are held to underpin them (Foucault, Derrida, Deluze…) are in any sense of the word of the “Left.” In fact they are deeply conservative in their formulation and even more so in their practical effects. They provide a new set of rationales for why nothing can change, why progress is no longer possible, and why indeed attempts to change and improve things are pointless and even counter-productive. It’s no accident that these ideas have been happily taken up by the Right in business and government, and employed as a form of ideological discipline.

Whilst it’s true that Foucault, for example, was associated with some causes coded “progressive” (one was prison reform) he and his peers were quite uninterested in traditional causes of the Left. They supported, not the massive strikes of May 1968, the largest in French history, but the middle-class students in Paris who were demanding more freedom from Mummy and Daddy. The bastardisation of the views of Foucault and others in the US under the weird title of “French Theory”, as though it were homogeneous, now lies like a smothering blanket upon anyone and any institution that seeks to make life better. Everything is power and domination, every apparent victory is just a concealed defeat, all progress is illusory since power simply retreats into positions which are better hidden. (This is of course one of the progenitors of modern conspiracy theories: the fact that there is no evidence that such conspiracies exist just shows how well they have been concealed.)

Thus, you may see Mrs von der Leyen’s aggressive role in the Ukraine conflict as a triumph for women everywhere (or you may not) but in fact it’s just an example of the misogynistic power structure finding subtler means of control. You may think that giving money to a homeless person is an act of charity but in fact it’s just a symbol of the humiliating domination of the wealthy over the poor, just like sending them to work in Poor Houses two centuries ago. You may believe that you are entering into a long-term relationship with someone for whom you feel love, whereas in practice you are just involving yourself in an unending sado-masochistic struggle for power and domination. (Given what we know of Foucault’s private life, that was probably true in his case.) You may believe that you are doing good by sending money for disaster relief in the Third World, but in practice you are just acting out traditional patterns of neocolonial and racist domination. In any case, nothing is worth doing: all finer feelings, all altruistic sentiments, can be deconstructed into the pursuit and exercise of power, and finally everything is deconstructed, even the teaching of deconstruction itself, which of course implies a power relationship between teacher and students.

Nothing can ever change, therefore, nothing can ever improve, even if it seems to do so superficially. Society is as static in this formulation as it was in eighteenth century Spain. I’ve argued before that our society is effectively eating itself, and that our political system is both the cause of exhaustion and is itself exhausted, and I won’t repeat all that here. Between the globalists and market fanatics on one hand, and those dazzled by deconstruction on the other, we have no myth of Progress to sustain us, only a myth of Regress. The best that we can do is to grab what we can while we can in a society in decline, to battle others viciously for decent access to healthcare and education, to save and borrow frantically to have a house instead of being homeless, to desperately seek personal financial advantage wherever and however we can find it. Here, both the modern “Right” and the modern “Left” have a common vision of a society of all against all, where the winners are those who manage to hang onto as many of the traditional components of a decent life as possible.

It goes without saying that collective action is thus pointless. It cannot accomplish anything, since theories of structures of power and iron laws of economics tell us that only the individual counts, and that all relationships are necessarily conflictual, dominant-submissive, and part of a zero-sum game. Even the past is rewritten, to reinterpret what was historically seen as altruism as selfishness, and collective efforts as examples of the insidious operations of deeply-hidden power structures, in case the past should become a source of inspiration for the present and the future. So it makes no difference who you vote for, or whether you are a member of a charitable organisation, a church or a trades union. You might as well give up before you start. Providing a better service to customers, improving education or healthcare, even undertaking infrastructure improvements, is pointless and even counter-productive. It’s fascinating to see the way in which the sense of security and prosperity of the 1960s has been carefully obscured, 1984-style, just in case people start to think that full employment and functioning public services were actually, you know, possible. (Oh, the sexism in those days! How terrible! Were you alive then? No, but I read about it in this book that came out last year.)

No society built on the Cult of Can’t can actually endure very long. Ultimately, it’s impossible to hide the fact that in the past, and for that matter in many other countries today, systems actually worked reasonably well, and people could and did look forward to a better life in the future. There are signs that in many western countries people are finally starting to rebel against the immobilism and pessimism that dominate the political landscape. The problem is the obvious one: none of the established political parties have any convincing story to tell about how society can start to get better, or at a minimum stop getting worse. Oh, there’s waffle about how AI is going to make us all wealthy, or how even more offshoring and social security cuts are going to turn the economy around. But in the end, the message is effectively that of the Church in eighteenth century Spain: you’ll just have to put up with it. And it’s no longer worth appealing to the traditional parties of the common good—the old Left or the civilised Right—because their brains have been eaten by parasites. When services don’t work, the important thing is to claim as many good jobs for your identity group as possible. When universities no longer educate, then what matters is that the ideology they propagate is yours. When everything is too difficult, let’s concentrate on dividing up the spoils: at least we know how to do that.

This is terribly dangerous of course. “Sod the electorate” is only a workable policy for as long as the electorate accept to be sodded. And what happens when they don’t? Let us have an example from history, you ask. Very well. I’ve been reading a new book by the French historian Johann Chapoutot, which covers in great detail the last three years of the Weimar Republic, and which I hope will appear in English soon. It depicts a liberal-authoritarian government obsessed with cutting spending in the middle of an economic depression, and steadily losing power and elections, a Socialist Party supporting the regime of austerity for fear of something worse, fringe parties of Left and Right picking up votes, and a government trying to govern without a mandate or a majority. Enter Kurt von Schleicher, evil manipulative genius who decided it would be a cool idea to make use of the Nazi Party, losing support rapidly and effectively bankrupt. Why not split the Party, he mused, by inviting Gregor Strasser into government and sidelining the Bavarian idiot Hitler? . Except that the ailing Hindenburg wanted Hitler instead. Well, fair enough, either way the Nazis would split before long and be gone in a few years.

It’s a virtue of Chapoutot’s book that he completely avoids hindsight, and the result is a kind of glacial tragic farce, as incompetence and stupidity compete with the pursuit of short-term political and financial advantage to ruin a country quite unnecessarily. Of course history doesn’t repeat itself but as I always say, politics is like engineering, and the same pressures and stresses tend to produce similar results. When a problem cannot be resolved by ordinary means, people will turn to extraordinary ones. When conventional political parties refuse to address real grievances, people will turn to unconventional ones. The Cult of Can’t can work when whole societies accept a religious or ideological justification of the status quo and the refusal of progress. But it can’t work when the only argument is, Because we say so, and You’ll just have to put up with it.