De-Civilization And The Way Back

Alastair Crooke’s latest article is one which could open the door to an increased understanding of the civilizational crisis of the West. The title is an allusion to a book by philosopher Karl Polanyi, which Crooke later makes explicit:

The beast of ideology lifts the lid on transformation

The context for Crooke’s reflections is the genocide in Gaza, but I’ll be largely ignoring that context. Crooke begins by noting—using the repression of criticism of Israel as emblematic—the prevalence of Ruling Class intolerance and repression of all criticism of their regime more generally. The over the top police repression of anti-genocide protests is one example, but we could add the widespread use and abuse of “hate speech” laws, social media censorship, the attack on reasoned inquiry into the entire Covid Hoax episode. These are all examples of an attack on freedom, while at the same time the Ruling Class loudly denounces all dissent—whether from Putin or domestically—as attacks on “our democracy.” The Ruling Class invokes “our” rules and “our” values to justify this repression, which is becoming more and more systematic. Our legal and constitutional orders have been subverted and politicized as weapons of repression while politics has been “hollowed out” and transformed into a Uniparty goverment—as we have seen in the lawfare assaults on Trump as well as the Uniparty “future proofing” of a purchased foreign policy in defiance of the desires of the populace.

The dangers of this trend are ever more apparent.

… the rest of the world now is cast as an enemy too, being perceived as recalcitrants who fail to embrace the western recitation of its ‘Rules Order’ catechism and for failing clearly to toe the line on support for Israel and the proxy war on Russia.

Our paramount “value” on the world stage is to grab those recalcitrants by the scruff of their necks and make them toe the line of our Rules Based Order. Just as at home, we see abroad the politicization of international relations, with international law hollowed out and replaced by arbitrary, context driven “values”:

As Professor John Gray writes:

“At bottom, the liberal assault on free speech [on Gaza and Ukraine] is a bid for unchecked power. By shifting the locus of decision from democratic deliberation to legal procedures, the élites aim to insulate [their neoliberal] cultish programmes from contestation and accountability. The politicisation of law – and the hollowing out of politics go hand in hand”.

Crooke traces the origins of this illiberalism to liberalism itself—the Classical Liberalism that arose out of the Enlightenment and is now more generally known as Libertarianism. It is the championing of the individual which has—some would say paradoxically—led to the crushing of freedom.

Many of today’s Woke liberals however, would reject the allegation of being anti-free speech, labouring under the misapprehension that their liberalism is not curtailing free speech, but rather is protecting it from ‘falsehoods’ emanating from the enemies of ‘our democracy’ (i.e. the ‘MAGA contingent’). In this way, they falsely perceive themselves as still adhering to the classical liberalism of, say, John Stuart Mill.

Whilst it is true that in On Liberty (1859) Mill argued that free speech must include the freedom to cause offence, in the same essay he also insisted that the value of freedom lay in its collective utility. He specified that “it must be utility in the largest sense – grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being”.

Free speech has little value if it facilitates the discourse of the ‘deplorables’ or the so-called Right.

In other words, “Like many other 19th-century liberals”, Professor Gray argues, “Mill feared the rise of democratic government because he believed it meant empowering an ignorant and tyrannical majority. Time and again, he vilified the torpid masses who were content with traditional ways of living”. One can hear here, the precursor to Mrs Clinton’s utter disdain for the ‘deplorables’ living in ‘fly-over’ U.S. states.

Rousseau too, is often taken as an icon of ‘liberty’ and ‘individualism’ and widely admired. Yet here too, we have language which conceals its’ fundamentally anti-political character.

Rousseau saw human associations rather, as groups to be acted upon, so that all thinking and daily behaviour could be folded into the like-minded units of a unitary state.

The individualism of Rousseau’s thought, therefore, is no libertarian assertion of absolute rights of free speech against the all-consuming state. No raising of the ‘tri-colour’ against oppression.

Quite the reverse! Rousseau’s passionate ‘defence of the individual’ arises out of his opposition to ‘the tyranny’ of social convention; the forms, rituals and ancient myths that bind society – religion, family, history, and social institutions. His ideal may be proclaimed as that of individual freedom, but it is ‘freedom’, however, not in a sense of immunity from control of the state, but in our withdrawal from the supposed oppressions and corruptions of collective society.

Family relationship is thus transmuted subtly into a political relationship; the molecule of the family is broken into the atoms of its individuals. With these atoms today groomed further to shed their biological gender, their cultural identity and ethnicity, they are coalesced afresh into the single unity of the state.

This is the deceit concealed in classical Liberalism’s language of freedom and individualism …

In other words, in Western liberal democracy, the freedom of the individual actually becomes an instrument of social control. The atomized individuals are less able to organize and resist the unitary state. The mania we now see to further groom individuals to “shed their biological gender, their cultural identity and ethnicity” is part of that process of control, which explains the Ruling Class repression of even speech norms. The individual, as such, is de-humanized.

The impetus for this malign trend, as I long argued in the earlier version of Meaning in History, arises from the breakdown of Western Christian philosophy into nominalism and Kantianism (themselves the end products of the radical skepticism inherent in Platonic thought, as transmitted to the West by Augustine). Nominalism maintained that no common natures or essences could be known—only unconnected individuals. Unlike the Christian valorization of the individual as the imago Dei, this new ideology of the autonomous individual gave no value to the individual as such. In his individuality each individual is merely a part of the Hobbesian Leviathan.

Crooke argues that this atomization of all human relations—in the name of “freedom and individualism”—has led to de-civilization and un-freedom. Because no man can be free as an island. Only in a culture under God can true freedom be found:

Yet perversely, behind the language of freedom lay de-civilisation.

The ideological legacy from the French Revolution, however, was radical de-civilisation. The old sense of permanence – of belonging somewhere in space and time – was conjured away, to give place to its very opposite: Transience, temporariness and ephemerality.

Frank Furedi has written,

“Discontinuity of culture coexists with the loss of the sense of the past … The loss of this sensibility has had an unsettling effect on culture itself and has deprived it of moral depth. Today, the anticultural exercises a powerful role in western society. Culture is frequently framed in instrumental and pragmatic terms and rarely perceived as a system of norms that endow human life with meaning. Culture has become a shallow construct to be disposed of – or changed.

“The western cultural elite is distinctively uncomfortable with the narrative of civilisation and has lost its enthusiasm for celebrating it. The contemporary cultural landscape is saturated with a corpus of literature that calls into question the moral authority of civilisation and associates it more with negative qualities.

“De-civilization means that even the most foundational identities – such as that between man and woman – is called into question. At a time when the answer to the question of ‘what it means to be human’ becomes complicated – and where the assumptions of western civilisation lose their salience – the sentiments associated with wokeism can flourish”.

It is at this point that Crooke turns to the thought of Karl Polanyi, a trenchant critic of the neoliberal, or “Austrian”, school of economics, represented among others by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Polanyi was born in 1886, so he lived through the descent of Europe into two world wars and the total cultural and political transformation of Europe (The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time was published in 1944). Here I’ll quote from an article linked by Crooke, rather than Crooke itself. I’ll do so at some length because I believe readers will find it cogent and well organized (Karl Polanyi’s failed revolution The liberal world order is collapsing once again):

Polanyi set out to explain the massive economic and social transformations that he had witnessed during his lifetime: the end of the century of “relative peace” in Europe, from 1815 to 1914, and the subsequent descent into economic turmoil, fascism and war, which was still ongoing at the time of the book’s publication. He traced these upheavals back to a single, overarching cause: the rise of market liberalism in the early 19th century — the belief that society can and should be organised through self-regulating markets. For him, this represented nothing less than an ontological break with much of human history. Prior to the 19th century, he insisted, the human economy had always been “embedded” in society: it was subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations. Land and labour, in particular, were not treated as commodities but as parts of an articulate whole — of life itself.

I have argued that the roots for this “great transformation” lie earlier—but certainly not later than the 14th century breakdown of of philosophy into nominalism. This isn’t to dispute Polanyi’s thesis—it simply takes time for an ideology to transform what had been a cohesive culture. In our own time of social and cultural disintegration, that process can happen far more quickly.

By postulating the allegedly “self-regulating” nature of markets, economic liberalism turned this logic on its head. Not only did it artificially separate “society” and “the economy” into two separate spheres, it demanded the subordination of society, of life itself, to the logic of the self-regulating market. For Polanyi, this “means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system”.

Polanyi’s first objection to this was moral, and was inextricably tied to his Christian beliefs: it is simply wrong to treat the organic elements of life — human beings, land, nature — as commodities, goods produced for sale. Such a concept violates the “sacred” order that has governed societies for much of human history. “To include [labour and land] in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market,” Polanyi argued. And in this sense, he was what we may call a “conservative socialist”: he opposed market liberalism not just on distributional grounds but also because it “attacked the fabric of society”, breaking down social and communitarian bonds, and breeding atomised and alienated individuals.

This relates to the second level of Polanyi’s argument, which was more practical: market liberals might have wanted to dis-embed the economy from society and create a fully self-regulating market, and went to great lengths to achieve this, but their project was always bound to fail. It simply cannot exist. As he writes in the opening of the book: “Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark Utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.”

Human beings, Polanyi argued, will always react against the devastating social consequences of unrestrained markets — and struggle to re-subordinate the economy, to some degree, to their material, social and even “spiritual” wants. This is the source of his argument about the “double movement”: because attempts to disembed the economy from society inevitably invite resistance, market societies are constantly shaped by two opposing movements. There’s the movement to constantly expand the scope of the market, and the countermovement resisting this expansion, especially insofar as “fictitious” commodities are concerned, primarily labour and land.

The author goes on to argue that we are now in the grips of yet another collapse of the neoliberal order, leading to “a dramatic intensification of international tensions.” Crooke, for his part, concludes:

The answer – clearly – was to make society again a distinctly human relationship of community, given meaning through a living culture. In this sense, Polanyi also emphasised the territorial character of sovereignty – the nation-state as the pre-condition to the exercise of democratic politics.

Interestingly—and I wish I had saved the citation—I read recently that the nub of the Neocon case against China is that China competes unfairly, i.e., in non-market ways. The Chinese view is that their economy exists for the good of the Chinese people, rather than the other way around. That means that the functioning of the economy should not resemble a casino, a la Wall St., but should be part of a harmonious whole. That sounds, not coincidentally, like the Confucian ideal that Xi has sought to propagate—with some significant success. It also resembles Putin’s efforts to resurrect the Russian spiritual heritage. It was also the ideal of Catholic social thought. The road back will not be easy.