Arktos, London 2018
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ISBN
978-1-912079-28-5 (Paperback)
978-1-912079-27-8 (Ebook)
Editor
John Bruce Leonard
Cover
Tor Westman
Layout
John Bruce Leonard
Norman and Saxon (A.D. 1100)
Rudyard Kipling
‘My son,’ said the Norman Baron, ‘I am dying and you will be heir
To all the broad acres in England and that William gave me for share
When he conquered the Saxon at Hastings, and a nice little handful it is.
But before you go over to rule it I want you to understand this:-
‘The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow — with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing’, my son, leave the Saxon alone.
‘You can horsewhip your Gascony archers, or torture your Picardy spears;
But don’t try that game on the Saxon; you’ll have the whole brood round your ears.
From the richest old Thane in the county to the poorest chained serf in the field,
They’ll be at you and on you like hornets, and, if you are wise, you will yield.
‘But first you must master their language, their dialect, proverbs and songs.
Don’t trust any clerk to interpret when they come with the tale of their wrongs.
Let them know that you know what they’re saying; let them feel that you know what to say.
Yes, even when you want to go hunting, hear ’em out if it takes you all day.
They’ll drink every hour of the daylight and poach every hour of the dark.
It’s the sport not the rabbits they’re after (we’ve plenty of game in the park).
Don’t hang them or cut off their fingers. That’s wasteful as well as unkind,
For a hard-bitten, South-country poacher makes the best man-at arms you can find.
‘Appear with your wife and the children at their weddings and funerals and feasts.
Be polite but not friendly to Bishops; be good to all poor parish priests.
Say ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘ours’ when you’re talking, instead of ‘you fellows’ and ‘I’.
Don’t ride over seeds; keep your temper; and never you tell ‘em a lie!’
Acknowledgements
This book is a revised and updated edition of a previous book published with the title Travels in Cultural Nihilism: Some Essays. The changes and revisions to the text were made whilst serving as a Senior Research Fellow at St Chad’s College, one of the Colleges that make up the University of Durham. I am very grateful to the Principal and Fellows for offering me a Fellowship, and for allowing me to work in an atmosphere so convivial to scholarship for one year. I am also pleased to have had the opportunity to discuss the contents of the book with so many students and like-minded people at the College, in particular Bill Apedaile, James Page, Mark Roberts, Callum Bennett and Julius Berrien. In such viciously polarising times as these, fellow-travellers soon become close friends and I am pleased to say that this was very much my experience at Chad’s. There are few rebels who are prepared to challenge the prevailing discourse and orthodoxy of their own tribe. Those that do soon find themselves on a lonely path of sunken dissidents. If you meet a fellow-traveller on that pot-holed track, then you soon form a cast-iron bond with that person. Happily, that has been my experience in writing this book.
The original text was written during my time as a Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford. As always, I am grateful to the College, its Rector and Fellows for providing such a wonderful place to work. It was a great privilege. The idea to write such a book (which is admittedly quite far removed from my normal ethnographic pursuits, although I have a long-term interest in ideology) came to me after a summer spent in Sweden, but the real intellectual stimulation emerged after subsequent lively discussions with friends in Oxford. I should like to thank in particular Therese Feiler, Cosima Gillihammer, Peter Harris, Jason Carter, Hugh Wybrew and Charlotte Bannister-Parker — all at Oxford — for their unrelenting support, opinions and critical analysis.
During my time at Oxford, I was fortunate enough to host Sir Roger Scruton who gave an excellent paper at Blackfriars on a topic tangential to the thorny issues I tackle in this book. I am grateful for his advice and support these last years. I should also thank Professor Jonathan Haidt for his comments and for his inspiration for the subtitle of the book.
Finally, I should like to thank John Bruce Leonard at Arktos for proof-reading the book and for his efficiency in helping bring this book to its fruition. Some may wish to infer that by publishing with Arktos, I should be considered as a member of the alt-right, identitarian movement. That is not the case, but I do support the anti-globalist cause. I do not belong to any groups or political parties and do not approve of identity politics of any kind. To be frank, discussions without labels seem to be often richer too. I wish to do away with the fixation on group identities, and by doing so bridge the yawning ideological chasm that has become so destructive in Western societies. In the current climate, that seems to me to be the duty of any responsible intellectual. Sadly, I doubt that I have achieved that aim in this particular book.
SPL
Durham, May 2018
Preface
For if you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.
— G. K. Chesterton
These last years I have become puzzled by some of the developments that I have witnessed in academia, and now increasingly in society at large. In particular, I am disturbed by the blanket groupthink and the culture of fear and silence that has somehow become a feature of life in the West. I think any intellectual should be a passionate supporter of freedom of speech, but many seem all too happy to accept Stasi like infringements to the freedom of expression. At the same time, beyond academia I could see how the democracies we live in were becoming more and more polarised by the day, and how all these problems were being amplified by social media. With the #MeTooMovement, we seem to have slipped into an absurd and irrational cultural panic. In my opinion, the toxic, binary zero-sum identity politics that currently plagues western universities has gone too far. It has to end now, before the culture wars or whatever you want to call the current epistemic paralysis morphs into something more sinister.
These are strange times. To discuss political ideologies these days is to dive into a polarised, neurotic and bawdy scrum. It is nigh impossible to be heard and the voices are unforgiving. This is a book about the suppression of alternative voices in the context of a clash between politics and culture. As I will go on to demonstrate, these voices have been suppressed through both groupthink and what as a linguistic anthropologist I perceive to be linguistic corruption.
This book is arguably a polemic, but it should not be. I might be prorogued somehow, but somebody has to speak the truth about developments in the West, and Sweden in particular for so seldom do we actually get to hear what is going on in that country. The very future of Sweden, and the West generally is at stake here. I am taking the long-term view of things and as
king readers to reassess their teleological priorities although the people that actually read this book will probably have their priorities absolutely right. We tend to read things which we think might appeal to us, anything that might be tinder to those inflammatory thoughts locked away in the empty cabinets and dusty drawers of our mind.
It is surely the duty of a scholar to attend to the big questions, and not just the micro-niches of his own field. It is a matter of extreme responsibility. As an ethnographer, I wish to question not just the ideological values outside of the Western domain, but also very much those within it. When I do so, I do not speak with a vatic energy; but there is a falsehood that must be unmasked and brought to light. I wish to posit the absolute, not relativism, and expose the hidden cultural and linguistic codes which I believe are the sources of oppression. That is all I have done here, but because the truth is often glossed as ‘racist, xenophobic bigotry’ by the dullards who have succumbed to this arsenal of commoditised language, — the rhetoric of anti-communication —, it might feel like a revelation for some. I believe we are living in an atmosphere of stifled public dissent, the kind of atmosphere that lingered before the establishment of the notorious totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.
Politicians cannot bring themselves to state the obvious: that multiculturalism, as the ideology dictates we call it, has been a disaster everywhere. The metro-liberal Left’s despisal of any sense of tradition and shared social bonds is an attempt to render us rootless, leaving our societies looking like little more than a Hamletian ‘sterile promontory’. It is extraordinary to think that Marx himself rejected the ‘values’ (by which I perhaps mean the psycho-social facts that a group fall back on in times of conflict; the very word ‘values’ implies a culture of moral whim) of the French Revolution (especially equality and liberty) as too abstract. The contemporary Left takes the idea of emancipation to such extremes that it absolutises Janusian terms such as ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’. It is a betrayal of the non-State socialism that was at the heart of the Left until the late nineteenth century, and is the core of the problem that the essays in this book attempt to address. The constant mischaracterisation of those that stand for tradition and cultural continuity will come undone, and perhaps in a rather spectacular fashion. I believe we are rapidly reaching this point.
Words can suddenly become weapons in times of crisis, in the blizzard of fundamental uncertainty; the communicative ground shifts under one’s feet and conversations on this topic, if they took place at all, became during the migration crisis, the most recent US Presidential election and the Brexit debate dichotomised and polarised. Following geo-political events of such magnitude, our world has become deeply politicised. Friendships (and relationships) are now formed and their fate might be determined on the basis of where one stands on these issues. The struggle and ‘information war’ we are implicated in goes beyond our own lives, and speaks to the future of our entire society and social norms. Communities are now created along lines of political discourse. There is an onus on linguistic and moral consistency. Terms such as ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’, ‘minority’, ‘race’, ‘gender’ are the new shibboleths for probing and identifying the opposition. These terms are indicators of political compliance, be it for individuals, groups, institutions and even communities. As we will see, more or less every public institution in the West goes out of its way to incorporate these terms in all forms of communication, public or private. Communities and institutions around the world scramble unthinkingly to incorporate these words into their discourse. There is a curious belief that they can only be credible if they use this kind of language. The response is robotic and near-universal. People are forming political communities on the basis of the use of these words, dividing up the moral territory. They then moralise these communities along binary terms. Communities are thus no longer fixed entities, but are open-ended amorphous groupings based on a finite set of politicised buzz words that refer somehow to certain ‘rights’. These intellectual communities are playing an important role in the epistemic shaping of our world leading to a kind of social polarisation not known since the 1930s. As a society, we have now subsided into an awkward culture of anxiety, one that I believe is not so radically different from that which prevailed in the East German Stasi era.
It is not surprising therefore that the issues I deal with in this book can be extremely divisive, and the discussions agonising. Some of the topics are almost by definition dissensual. The ‘refugee crisis’ in particular raises many ontological conundrums, but I hope to have shown here that the ‘refugee crisis’ has meant that Europeans must now ponder their moral universalism and reconsider their Christian values even if they live in ostensibly secular States. The West — Germany and Sweden especially — have brought home the problems of war-torn countries that were best left alone. The migration crisis of 2015/16, and its subsequent ongoing permutations, could (and I suspect will) entirely threaten the establishment of order in Western Europe, and that may even be the intention of some of the globalists who might be plotting a conspiratorial, destabilising agenda. Either the globalists’ liberalism will have to redefine itself when for the first time in twenty-five years it is confronted with a non-liberal ideology, or a new ideology will develop. Whatever it might be, I just wish that we were not living in these times. How I wish my mind could rest on some more pleasurable, less sinister ideé fixe!
These issues are admittedly subjective; there is perhaps little point trying to grasp for some kind of objective truth, at least when it comes to dissecting such crises. These polarising topics (the migration crisis, Brexit and the election of Trump in particular) have exposed deep divisions between members of society which have previously lain fallow. Some of these divisions which have now come to light in America are so deep, there is even talk of civil war.
These last years, I have spent much time in Sweden. I have watched political events unfold with a sedulous eye. I have witnessed at first hand how successive Governments have forced so-called ‘multiculturalism’ on a kind people that are liberal-managed with the aid of a mendacious, Government-subsidised media. As an outsider, but as a good flâneur of the North, I have seen, objectively, how the multiculturalist project has failed in the most spectacular fashion and how its failures have been covered up time and again. If Leftist politicians are able to continue on this clandestine, deceitful path, I believe a model society described previously by the UN as ‘the best place to live in the world’ and presumably therefore redolent of all things that are superlative, could be transformed into a troubled State within a generation or two. That is why this book has to be written now, by somebody who has observed, but not been tainted by the statist air and the totalitarian mindset induced by the Swedish media and politicians for whom conformity of thought is the first imperative. But, also Sweden is a microcosm for the world, always one step ahead in terms of ‘progressive’ thinking. It is the future; it marks the direction the West is going in.
I want to do whatever it takes to remove the ideological blindfold from the Swedes, and make them see sense, because unlike some of them, I think this country is worth saving from the kind of laissez-faire multiculturalism that some countries publicly ditched years ago. Liberalism (when I speak of liberalism in this book, I am primarily talking about socio-cultural liberalism that ‘promotes individual rights and equality of opportunity’ [Milbank and Pabst, 2016: 13] and not economic-political liberalism) subscribes to the idea that the past is always worse than the present, but I love the Sweden that was, the Sweden that can still be found amongst the battalions of birch and the moon-lit antique farmhouses. I feel a Faustian restlessness, a desire to speak up for the Swedes, to show them that theirs is a country worth fighting for. Sweden has no Solzhenitsyn, nobody who is prepared to say, as he did about the Soviet Union ‘in our country the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the State’.1 And yet, once again, we are living in Solzhenitsynesque times.
Forgive me if this sounds like a cri de coeur, but I am talking here about cultural pathology and the regression of humanity, for we in the West at least are living ‘in an age of unsettled beliefs and enfeebled tradition’ (Eliot, 1933: 62). It is the crisis of secular modernity, an anti-traditional globalist liberalism steeped in moral disorder and its imminent clash with absolutist Islam. This is a book that tries to tackle the Socratic question in the light of a fundamental binary between globalism and localism, between tradition and continuity on the one hand and State-sponsored rootlessness on the other. But I hope it is something more than just a farrago of -isms that an uncouth Slovenian philosopher might cough up in a tubercular spasm.
The essay ‘The Globalists in Brussels’ considers the question of whether we are going to empower local communities by giving them the freedom to choose their own composition, or whether we are going to give this power to far away technocrat elites who like to think that only they can address global issues. Future political battles may well be fought along these lines. Brexit and Trump have at least shown us that there are alternatives to the prevailing discourse and ideology, and that we must not inevitably succumb to the oligarchs in Brussels.
The Swedish Government did its best to meddle in the response to the Brexit result, telling us that it disapproved of the apparently xenophobic tone of the Brexit campaign and broadcasting absurdly partisan radio documentaries on how Boris Johnson apparently had managed to dupe a national electorate. Irrespective of one’s political views, the fact of the matter is that the key political figures in the Swedish Government who voiced these complaints are amateurs whose opinions are not worthy of the headlines they receive in the newspapers that they sponsor. The current Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, is a former welder who became a trade unionist and then a politician. Basically, Arthur Scargill with a heart of gold. He had not held a single Government post before becoming Prime Minister. And so when hundreds of thousands of migrants headed towards Sweden in the summer of 2015, his Government just simply did not know what to do. Many of them had wanted this for many years, but never dreamt that the change could happen so quickly. Their ideologised liberal conscience told them that they should unquestioningly let them all in on an indiscriminate basis, but they were overwhelmed.
The Ideology of Failure Page 1
