The Obligatory End-of-Year Essay.

But do me a favour, and read it anyway.

This is the last essay of 2023, and not only do Substack’s terms of service require me to write an end-of-year piece, I think, but also two of the three last Tarot cards I’ve turned up for daily meditation have been No. XX, “Judgement,” which encourages reflection and stock-taking. OK guys, I can take a hint.

There’s not much to say on the practical level. I made the decision to turn on payments a few months ago, and I have been pleasantly surprised by peoples’ willingness to toss me a few coins, as well as buy me coffees. (I have no plans to offer a separate paid tier, ever, and so I will continue to make everything free.) I’ve actually been even more pleasantly surprised by the kind messages of support I have received, and it’s that, in the end, rather than any amount of money, that encourages me to keep going. If you’ve ever done any teaching (and I have, on and off for decades, and sometimes in very strange places indeed) then you know that the greatest compliment you can receive is for someone to tell you “I did not understand before, but I do now.” Hence, in part, the nameI have given to this site. And thanks to the many of you who have written such long, thoughtful comments as well.

That said, I plan to continue to write essentially about what I know, and to privilege analysis and interpretation over polemic. There’s too much polemic around anyway, and I find it tedious to read, and difficult and unrewarding to write. It also requires a faith in one’s personal moral superiority that I am not sure I am entitled to. Likewise, although I write quite a lot about security affairs, and have spent a lot of time with the military, I’m not qualified to analyse the latest battles in Ukraine, any more than a certain amount of time spent in the Middle East somehow automatically entitles me to be heard as an expert on Gaza. On the other hand, I’ve spent a lifetime in the engineering room of politics and security in various different countries, I’ve seen the sausage made and sometimes played a small role in making it. I’ve been in the cheap seats for some of the major events of the last forty years, and in certain cases in the slightly less cheap ones. My view is that of the bloke who actually does the work and makes things happen, even if I never had a large office and a large personal staff. I’ve been, as we used to say, within chip-flying distance of the coal face for a very long time now. Those things I think I’ve learnt, those things I think I understand, and those things where I believe I have something useful to say, I will continue to write about, as well as indulging myself from time to time with other subjects that interest me. I’ll have quite a bit to say about France, for example, where I’ve lived and worked for a long while, as well as about Europe and its institutional manifestations, during the coming year.

Right, then. (Stares at Tarot card.) There are writers who are highly organised, and have detailed plans of what they are going to write, and stick to them. I can’t do that: I prefer to think that whatever I’m writing, from a short article or a story to a book, exists already, fully-formed, and that if I start writing, it will come. Usually, it does: I was a quarter of the way through the first book I ever wrote, around thirty years ago, when I suddenly realised that the book wanted to be about something a bit different, and was signalling me to change course, which I did. So with these essays: I rarely have much idea of what I’m going to say before I start and, more importantly perhaps, of how the various themes will build on and interact with each other through the weeks. So without consciously realising it, I now see that I have been developing a consistent thesis, especially over the last year.

I think it can be summed up, surprise, surprise, in three points. You can consider it a kind of syllogism if you like, or a type of dialectical progression.

• The western world is faced with a series of practical, political, economic and existential challenges as grave as any it has faced in its history, requiring highly competent governments, states and private sectors to deal with them successfully.

• But the capacity of all the sectors mentioned above is already insufficient and getting worse, and there is no obvious way of correcting this.

• Therefore things are heading South.

If you accept the first two propositions (and I believe they are unarguable) then the third inevitably follows. We don’t want to believe that, of course, which is why people are full of If Only We Could, and Surely We Can, and This New Gizmo, and That Clever Idea. But as I argued last week, you simply can’t rebuild highly complex structures and capacities that took generations to create, and have been allowed to rot, or even been deliberately destroyed. So my writing next year will be directed at what the coming collapse is going to be like, and what can be done by individuals and groups to manage it and avoid the worst consequences. Much of the practical work of government in the past has consisted of sticking your finger in the dike, and hoping that you can solve the problem of the moment by the end of the week. (There’ll be another one on Monday of course.) As painful as it is to say, I think that we increasingly have to discount governments and international organisations as useful actors in the future: the decay has simply gone too far, and the dike is visibly crumbling.

Rather than pile on the doom and gloom at this point in the year, I thought it would be better to set out the above argument at slightly greater length, by referring people back to essays I’ve written in the past year or so. That way, the considerable number of people who have discovered this site recently, and in many cases subscribed, will have a direct link to essays setting out these ideas at greater length.

I’m not going to rehearse here the issues of climate change and infectious disease, on which I am not an expert, and on which plenty has been written already. But I have discussed, for example, the corrosive effects of forty years of neoliberalism on the very structures and foundations of our society, including the concept of the citizen, or on basic honesty, or on anachronistic ideas of “duty” and “service,” upon which the Society of Me is actually dependent, did they but realise it. I have argued that such a society will not survive very much longer unless it learns to adapt, but that seems very unlikely, without the kind of intermediate structures, such as mass political parties and trades union that used to work for political change. Indeed, such is the grip of the extractive model on our system, that the system may wind up eating itself, while our society falls victim to violence which has no discernible purpose or rationale. Likewise, it’s not obvious that “Europe” in any organised institutional sense, will survive.

Of course one of the major problems to be faced will be the longer-term consequences of the war in Ukraine. I have suggested that the West, and especially Europe, is now vulnerable militarily in unprecedented and unexpected ways. This is not surprising, since the nature of war changed, while nobody was looking, and the West made a series of bad decisions about how to spend its money.  The result is that the West’s military capability is a shadow of what it once was, and the chances of it re-arming to be on anything like equal terms with Russia are not great. Even keeping Ukraine going is effectively impossible.  This also means that the West will be increasingly unable to project power outside its own heartland. And in turn the lack of hard power means that attempts to use soft power will be much more difficult.

In theory, some of these problems are recoverable, if we only had decent people and institutions.  Yet western leaders and officials routinely believe stupid things. Our elites are not only incapable, they are essentially infantilised, living in a world of childish make-believe, and reacting with hysterical hatred to anyone, like that bad man Putin, who puts their half-digested Liberal, platitudes in question. (Although that hatred is itself, in part, an externalisation of the hatred our Professional and Managerial Caste feels for the rest of us, and each other.) And this includes both a complete ignorance of even the most basic facts about modern warfare, and a general habit of seeing the whole world as a projection of their fragile egos.

But I have also tried to provide a few rays of hope, if not necessarily of optimism. I think (and this will be a subject for next year) that the cascading failure of institutions that we see now is going to require us to find resources for ourselves, and these need to be as much psychological, and even spiritual, as practical. I argued a while ago that the wintry integrity of existentialism, with its severe ethic of responsibility for one’s actions, was perhaps useful now, as well as some types of Buddhism. I also suggested that moral relativism is just a fact, and that it’s really nothing to be afraid of. And finally, I suggested a few books that might help us understand the world better, as well as some that provided practical guidance on what we might do.

Well, that’s enough from me, I think. Thank you all and see you next year.