moderate liberals and the new Cultural Revolution

I've been reading Richard Pipes' book on the Russian Revolution. He makes some interesting observations on 19th century liberalism. The most important point is that there was no essential difference between the aims of the liberals and the extreme left revolutionaries. Both wanted to reshape human nature entirely. Both were products of the Enlightenment. Both are ardent materialists. They differed only as to the means to be employed to bring about Utopia and to create the perfect Socialist Man (or the perfect Liberal Man).

The starting point of both ideologies can be found in Locke and in the utilitarianism of British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).

And an equally important point is that if forced to choose, liberals will support the far left extremists.

Pipes says that:

“...even under this reform-minded theory [of liberalism] lay the tacit premise that man could and ought to be remade. This premise links liberalism and radicalism and helps explain why, for all their rejection of the violent methods employed by revolutionaries, when forced to choose between them and their conservative opponents, liberals can be counted on  to throw their lot in with the revolutionaries.”

This has remained substantially true right up to the present day. Both liberals and the far left believe that people can be moulded to conform to their ideals. If people don’t want liberalism they will be made to want it. 

What this means in practice is that there is no such thing as a moderate liberal. All liberals believe that there is no limit to the extent to which human nature can be altered, and they intend to keep altering human nature until absolute conformity has been achieved. Eventually everyone will be a liberal. All it takes is sufficient indoctrination. The desired end point is totalitarianism. Liberals believe this will be a warm and soft and cuddly totalitarianism. Mao’s Cultural Revolution had the same aims. Modern western liberals think they can achieve the same results more efficiently and that the people will welcome this transformation. If they don’t welcome it that’s too bad - they’re going to get it whether they want it or not.

It is important to realise that these beliefs are not limited to leftists. They are shared to an overwhelming degree by all mainstream “conservative” parties in the West. These beliefs are also almost universally embraced by Big Business. This Cultural Revolution will bring about a world that will be extremely congenial to Big Business. It may well be a disaster for small business but to the leaders of Big Business that is a feature not a bug. A world of compliant conformist consumers is a world that appears to them to be very attractive indeed.

Not only will political dissent be eliminated. Religion will also be eliminated. Families will be ad hoc groupings of consumers. These changes are also seen as major pluses. To Big Business religion and the family are irritating disruptions to the growth of consumerism. To liberals religion and the family provide a dangerous potential focus of opposition to their program.

Our most dangerous enemies are the "moderates" - they are not moderate at all. They are extremists who intend to achieve their extremist ambitions in a slightly more gradual way.

saying no to the modern world

I seem to have succeeded admirably in my objective of isolating myself from the poison of modern popular culture. 

In 2015 I find I have read 68 novels. The earliest was written in 1835; the latest dates from 1990. Not one work of fiction from the past quarter-century.

I have watched 126 movies, dating from 1926 to 1980. Not one movie from the 90s or subsequent decades.

I have watched 383 episodes of television series, dating from 1954 to 1976. Nothing from the past forty-odd years. Not one contemporary television program.

I have also not listened to any contemporary music.

This did not start out as a deliberate choice. About ten years ago I noticed that my interest in modern popular culture was rapidly diminishing. Up until two or three years ago I still made sporadic efforts to appreciate the latest manifestations of popular culture. The results were dismal. Eventually I just stopped trying. I have no regrets.

In fact it is not at all difficult to insulate oneself from modern pop culture. If I want to read fiction I have centuries’ worth of books to choose from. Older books are not hard to find, even if many are out of print. One of the few completely positive things about the internet is that it makes it comparatively easy (and usually fairly inexpensive) to track down out of print books.

If I want to watch a movie there are literally thousands of older movies readily available on DVD or Blu-Ray. Some have gone out of print but they’re usually not too difficult find. Streaming is not really an option for me. It’s problematic at best if you happen to live in Australia and in any case it doesn’t appeal to me. DVDs can be expensive but if you shop about online they can often be pleasingly cheap. They’re certainly cheaper, generally speaking, than going to a cinema (which is something I haven’t done this century). And some at least can be rented. Older TV shows are likewise readily available on DVD and finding them presents few difficulties.

As I’ve confined myself more and more to the books, movies and television of the past I’ve found that my enjoyment has increased considerably. It is definitely not a hardship.

I’m not even sure that contemporary popular culture actually exists. It seems to me to be a kind of fake popular culture mostly produced and disseminated by the elites.

I don’t suggest that everyone should make the choice I’ve made, but it might be worth considering that it is at least an option and it makes life rather more pleasant. I don’t have to worry about the new Star Wars movie. I know they’ve made a new one but I’m not sure what it’s called. All I need to know is that I don’t need to concern myself with it. It makes life simpler.

my 2015 blogging in review

I’m just having a look at the stats for my blogging here in the past year. And for the four years in which I’ve been posting here.

The last two months have seen a significant increase in traffic, which is certainly pleasing. And December 2015 was the busiest month so far for this blog. 

My most popular post in the last month was my review of Stanley G. Payne’s history of The Spanish Civil War, although it’s still a long way behind my most popular post ever - cognitive dissonance and cultural sensitivity. My second most-viewed post has been thoughts on Huxley's Brave New World. My review of Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power and Leon J. Podles’ The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity also received plenty of traffic. Book reviews seem to get quite a bit of attention so expect to see more such posts in the coming year.

It’s no surprise that most page views originate from the United States. And it’s no great surprise that Australia is in second place. What is interesting though is that Russia has been consistently in third place - well ahead of Britain.

My original intention with this blog was to focus quite a bit on political correctness in relation to popular culture. Popular culture is after all to a great extent where the rubber meets the road. I’m hoping to do more posts on this topic in 2016, especially in relation to the insidious manner in which political correctness gradually came to dominate popular culture.

I’m also hoping to do more posts on historical topics.

I’m also hoping 2016 will be a better year for all of us, so Happy New Year to all my readers.

four years on

It’s now just over four years since I started this blog. It’s been an interesting experience. Putting one’s ideas down on paper (or the digital equivalent thereof) does help to clarify those ideas.

I am going to try to be a little bit more regular in my postings in 2016 - whether I’ll achieve that aim remains to be seen.

Doing this blog has helped to reawaken my enthusiasm for history so that’s been a plus.

The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers 1804-1999

Misha Glenny’s The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers 1804-1999 aims to provide a unified history of that troubled part of the world and the book does indeed offer a reasonable introduction to a fearsomely complex subject.

Glenny rejects the idea that the violence and instability that has plagued the region can be blamed on ancestral hatreds going back to the Middle Ages. He believes the trouble started much later - at the beginning of the 19th century. The slow but inexorable decline of the Ottoman Empire created a serious power vacuum which was exploited by the Great Powers in a manner that was selfish, cynical and short-sighted. Worse, the Great Powers entirely ignored the ethnic, linguistic and religious complexity of the region. Drawing borders in a way that suited the interests of the Great Powers more often than not created nations that were inherently unstable.

At the same time the newly developed ideologies of nationalism found their way to the Balkans. Nationalism (in the 19th and 20th century sense of the term) was something that simply did not exist in this part of the world before the 19th century.

Under the Ottoman Empire the various ethnic and religious groups had managed to co-exist quite successfully. Christians and Jews might not have enjoyed the same rights as Muslims but they had security and stability. In fact Christians often had a good deal more security than they had under Christian rulers. 

The major problem with Balkan nationalism was that, even without the interference of the Great Powers, creating coherent ethno-nationalist states was an impossibility. The various religious and ethnic groups were hopelessly mixed together. There were Serb minorities in Croatia and Croatian minorities in Serbia. There were huge Turkish minorities in Greece and equally huge Greek minorities in Turkey. There were Greek minorities everywhere. There were Albanians in Serbia and Serbs in Albania. Religious and ethnic differences were not clear-cut. There were Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Muslims who spoke the same language and were ethnically identical. There were Orthodox Christians who belonged to different ethnic groups. There were Croats who regarded Muslims as fellow Croats and Croats who regarded the same Muslims as non-Croats. In some places there was no majority group at all. There were cities like Salonika that were coveted by several different nations but were almost entirely Jewish. In some regions the city-dwellers were predominantly Muslim while the rural populations were Serb or Bulgarian or Greek or Croatian. 

The nationalist aspirations of the newly emerged nations such as Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania were entirely incompatible - no line drawn on a map could possibly satisfy everyone.

The end result was that a comparatively peaceful corner of Europe became a powder keg. And the Great Powers displayed an uncanny ability to make a bad situation worse. Austria’s annexation of Bosnia in 1908 was the first step on the road to the catastrophe of the First World War.

By the 1990s the Great Powers were no longer intervening in the Balkans for the traditional reasons of territorial greed. They were now doing so for humanitarian reasons. The results were equally disastrous.

Glenny weaves together the stories of the various Balkan peoples with considerable skill. The narrative is perhaps to complex for a single volume but it’s a brave attempt.

He also endeavours to be as even-handed as possible. Just about everyone in the region has at one time or another been both oppressor and oppressed, both perpetrators and victims of atrocities. Every Great Power (even China!) has at some stage tried to interfere in the region, with lamentable consequences. Trying to divide the various actors in good guys and bad guys is a pointless exercise and in general Glenny avoids that pitfall. He does display a touching child-like faith in democracy as a cure-all but overall he tries not to  over-simplify inherently complex problems that simply do not have straightforward solutions.

I have no doubt that there are better and more scholarly works on this subject but as a general introduction this is a stimulating and fascinating book. 

Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas everyone!

making sense of modern politics

I’ve spoken often of my belief that conventional attempts to describe politics in terms of left/right and conservative/liberal or conservative/socialist just don’t work any more.

So we need to replace these outmoded terms, but what do we replace them with? Some years ago it became briefly fashionable to use a two-axis system, with one axis describing a person’s position on economic issues (ranging from untrammeled free-market capitalism to communism) and the other being the authoritarian/libertarian axis. The big problem is that today in order to describe the political views of a person or party we need to place them on the correct points on multiple axes.

The first axis would have to deal with beliefs on social issues, ranging from social conservatism to social libertarianism. I personally would prefer to describe the latter position as social radicalism since libertarianism has other connotations which tend to cloud the issue.

The second axis would deal with opinions on domestic economic issues, ranging from laissez-faire capitalism to complete state control of the economy.

The third axis would deal with views on international economic issues, ranging from complete free trade to rigid protectionism.

The fourth axis would describe views on international relations in broader terms, ranging from extreme interventionism (the best way to solve problems in foreign countries is by invading them and imposing “regime change”) to extreme isolationism (the best way to solve problems in foreign countries is to let those foreign countries sort out their own problems).

We would also need a fifth axis, ranging from a belief in open borders to a belief in strong immigration restrictionism.

To make things even more complicated yet another axis would be required, this one ranging from a belief that environmental threats are so severe that drastic action is required to combat them to a belief that environmental threats are wildly overstated and that no serious action is required.

To describe a person’s political views we would need to know if they are social conservatives or social radicals, if they are economic interventionists or non-interventionists, if they are globalists or economic nationalists, if they are imperialists or isolationists, if they are open borders supporters or immigration restrictionists and lastly if they are environmentalist catastrophists or environmentalist sceptics.

This scheme might sound fiendishly complex but it has the virtue that at least it tells us what a politician or political party actually stands for. There may be a simpler way ofd doing this - if you can think of one let me know!