Lordre: progressivism

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The dead tree theory of civilisation

Regardless of the passing novelties of culture, falling like leaves in the autumn, there are indispensable riches that transcend even a dead civilisation or social order, to persist. The essential heirlooms of a civilisation are protected and planted again, like acorns.

The origin of the term "radical" came from the Latin word for "root". Those who were radical would hack at the root, or get to the root of the problem. They would, to use an expression favoured by Jean-Paul Marat, bring the hatchet (or ax) to their root.

Inevitable moral decay?

Far from needing to be hacked down, trees eventually die by themselves. If nothing else brings illness to the tree, its death can occur when it becomes so large that it can no longer support its own weight. Then, however majestic it may seem, it will collapse. A tree may even rot while it stands, such that its great size and apparent triumph over other trees may mean nothing.

There have been successive civilisations that were at the centre of the economic life of the world. Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the more vaguely defined "Western civilisation" of the present day, with its multiple centres in London, Washington DC, Paris and elsewhere. There is no disputing that each of them collapsed, nor can we dispute that the collapse was necessary for the continued excellence of humanity, although the modern one cannot countenance its own ultimate fate as anything similar.

Many people of a conservative persuasion believe they see things rotten about our society, things that are continuously changing for the worse. They may point to increased sexual liberty and rights that were not typical of the higher and more accomplished stages of a civilisation. It has been argued that a higher civilisation adopts puritanical moral structures and a focus on scientific and artistic accomplishments in order to impress, and that denying excessive sexual liberty assists in this because it helps to keep humanity focused on human excellence rather than primitive joy. Those of a liberal persuasion, on the other hand, welcome any increase in personal liberty, and will only laugh at the above, but their response likely isn't any newer than the views of people during other declines.

It is difficult to form a rational case in relation to the idea of the moral corruption of society, because the outcome depends on one's pre-existing values. The very process of analysing flaws in the moral character of society requires first of all adopting values without rational justification, such as the view that excellence and intellect are better than laziness and pleasure.

How to detect decadence

Decadence, the steady loss of what gave a culture its value, may manifest in worsening cultural products and art forms that are not worth saving, in contrast to the creations of what would have been considered the works of a higher civilisation in its golden age. Everything is just a passing, worthless thing. This may result in a decreased ability to identify with any kind of culture and eventually, with other people in society. Even still, we may still have powerful governments, reminiscent of empires of old, dependent on the inertia of past accomplishments, up until the moment of their failure.

The idea of decadence implies that those who succumb to it either don't recognise it or don't recognise a problem with it, maybe instead being pleased with it. The concept suggests that a society can become sick without even realising it, because its own capacity to recognise goodness or judge itself is also being corrupted, succumbing to the same cultural and intellectual sickness it cannot see.

Decadence also signifies age. If it is a real sickness, it is inescapable and everyone is somewhat infected. Where the conservative is wrong might, then, not be in his dismay at the diminishing of moral or cultural value, but in his delusions that he can do anything to reverse it. A dead tree cannot be restored to a living one, and the clock cannot be turned back on society. Only a fresh acorn, planted elsewhere, has any potential after that.

To fell the tree

It is possible to appreciate both the progressive and the conservative, to see their roles in history.

The believers in progress perform a necessary role in the life of a civilisation, allowing the adoption of new ideas, new scientific models, and new technologies, but any kind of utopia may ultimately prove impossible or harmful, and so the reactionaries also have a valid role. If indeed a civilisation collapses, those who depended on its present state are not going to be the seeds of a new tree; only conservatives could create new civilisations or establish the next outposts of progress. Think what you like of them, but they bear with them a tried and tested formula for how to construct a society and civilisation, whereas the modern liberal only bears faith in the progress of the existing model and will refuse to go back to past traditions or simplicity.

The conclusion that necessarily follows from identifying what is considered decadent is that a thing is unworthy of respect or loyalty, once it is sufficiently debased that you no longer identify with it. It follows that a decadent culture or civilisation imperils those outside of it, like a rotten tree that threatens to fall when it might be inconvenient and should therefore be felled with all urgency. Its destruction, like that of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible, can eventually be justified.

If one subscribes to the notion of social progress, the sheer amount of protest and alarm emanating from the idea's own adherents today is absurd. Surely, things should have improved by now? Surely, the ills of society are at least milder than in the past?

Instead, we seem to have entered an era of exaggerated grievances. We look for stupid things to complain about, rally in protest against irrelevant half-injustices that aren't comparable with the horrendous atrocities of the past, and declare war on other people and their point of view rather than actual policies of the state.

In Westernised society, where being overweight is literally more of a problem than hunger, anything that goes even slightly awry or encumbers people's personal wishes will increasingly be subject to comparisons with major civil rights breaches and even mass murder in the past. It is why the US vice president compared the kerfuffle of January 6 2020 with past wars and mass-casualty attacks on the United States, specifically the 9/11 attacks and Pearl Harbor. It is why vaccine mandates and mask mandates are compared with the Holocaust by radical conservatives. The complete lack of resemblance between the events being compared is so staggering that it seems like a joke.

Oppression in Western societies today

For the most part, there is no real oppression in Western societies anymore, and the belief in it is just whipped up through exaggeration for one political cause or another. Nobody is being mistreated or abused on any scale of note, and the complaints are downright pathetic compared to the plight of previous generations.

We see this behaviour on both the right and the left, showing that it is common to the whole society. People on the right assert that Christians and whites are persecuted in the US, overreacting to attempts to merely maintain a secular constitution and allow equal representation. People on the left see racist utterances and behaviour as tantamount to fascism and regard themselves as resistance fighters.

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature makes the case that things have universally improved compared to the past, in terms of decreasing violence. People live longer, there is less hunger, and there is less to care about. When I read George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, it dawned on me how lucky I am. Had I been born a century ago, literal hunger and cold would have been a regular worry in my life, rather than complaining that I should be paid more in my job or that bosses should work harder not to hurt the feelings of their employees. Go back a century further, and I could be wearing rags and living somewhere in a swamp, like some miserable character in The Lord of the Rings. Comparisons with the severe realities of the past make any complaint I might have about my life and the way someone treated me seem like frivolous nonsense.

In Western societies, we have come a long way from a past marked by hunger, war, genocide, and civil rights struggles aiming for human beings not to be treated like animals. Now, the grievances have turned elsewhere, and the concerns we have are often inane.

Currently, we have a major effort in society to root out just about anything that makes people feel uncomfortable in any way. Many refer to this as "wokeness" but it is really just social liberal militancy being continued in the absence of major injustices to work against. Journalists contribute to it, because their business is always to create moral panic and sell papers.

While some of the goals of social liberal protest are valid, like ending police executions of African Americans and the coercion against women by powerful men, other issues I will not get into border on the absurd. The cause as a whole is unfocused, too, making it just as concerned with nonsense like disapproving of the way someone talks as it is with preventing murder. Surely, there are priorities? Surely, some things are unworthy of concern and do not require any response or even comment?

Rights are at risk of being confused with privileges such as respect, approval and other people being nice to us. The desire to get rid of something as insignificant as "microaggressions", as has become a cause célèbre of some commentators and activists, is unrealistic. It confuses being treated with respect, with human rights. It borders on trying to iron out the wrinkles from other people's facial expressions.

It is not a human right that other people must express no negative assumptions about us. Other people must be permitted to be resentful and hurt our feelings, with no rational justification whatsoever, as they have always done. They must look at and speak to us however they please, and we must do nothing, because that is life. Other people are agents of their own will, and they have every right to be horrible people. Not everyone is your friend, nor should they be.

What people have done is allow rampant speculation and theorisation about their fellow citizens, including a drift towards conspiratorial and paranoid thinking on all sides and at all levels to adjust for the lack of actual material failings or true oppression to talk about. It seems we needed the real oppression. Now that it is gone, we don't know what to do and are gnawing at each other.

Rather than accept the milder sources of discomfort, namely the faults in other human beings, we risk demanding that all prejudice and stigma, no matter how minor, is ironed out like some intolerable wrinkle. But this presupposes that society can even be perfect and achieve equality of outcome at all times, or that human life can even exist in such an unprecedentedly kind society. For all we know, the implicit goal of a kind and perfect society is like wanting to breathe pure oxygen.

I am not trying to defend evil and imperfection, but to just acknowledge it will always be there, in the way Christian theologians acknowledge our world as fallen.

The search for evil

Among conservatives, the conspiratorial thinking about the pandemic and masks is precisely parallel to the nonsensical Critical Race Theory (CRT) in how it exploits paranoia and engages in exaggeration, gnawing at non-issues or even valid health policies because they can't find any true fault with the system. The fact is that radicals are no longer interested in the root of anything (the origin of the word itself) but they are interested in constructing imaginary injustices and writing a wealth of worthless drivel about them.

To believe that other people and the government advising you to get a vaccine or encouraging masks is tantamount to civil rights breaches is absurd. It might be different in Austria, where the government has actually taken coercive measures, but Germany and Austria have always been more authoritarian than Britain and America and that is their business.

Other conservatives believe even more deranged conspiracy theories, explicitly labelling all the scientific community and all the world's governments as being out to get them and even kill them. The theories are insane, but prolific on the internet, alleging global depopulation agendas, et cetera. This is the most extreme example of imagining ugliness in the world to match the grotesquery of our own primitive psyche.

There is no evidence of the evil claimed by conspiracy theorists, but their conspiracy theories are ample evidence of evil within the human mind and the bizarre human need to invent some form of Satanic force to resist.

In the perfect society, humans become blemishes

Humans are tougher than they look. We are built for adversity. Taking all adversity away may be like removing the ground we were walking on, and could have psychological or even physical results on us that we weren't aware of. If the source of unkindness is our own nature, which is possible, then trying to achieve societies of absolute kindness and inclusion may be impossible and even dangerous.

Even removing material shortages and injustices may have been a dangerous move, since it has caused us to obsess about human behaviour rather than systemic problems. Americans gnaw at one another rather than at actual repairable problems, and increasingly list other people as the problems in their lives. It is less pronounced in Britain, but has the potential to get just as bad due to the constant export of American behaviour and concerns to us through the cultural umbilical cord between the countries.

There are valid reasons, whether you subscribe to either the scientific model of evolution or to a religious theology, to believe that unkindness emanates from humans and cannot be ironed out. It may simply arise from us with no reason other than our neurology and behaviour, commanding us to find or even invent problems and continuously exert the same levels of energy to correct them.

In one of the Matrix movies, the creator of the false reality in which humanity is trapped explains that earlier iterations were perfect, but that the human mind refused to accept it. A more believable version of reality, with injustices and disappointments, was introduced instead, so that the sinful minds of humanity could accept it as real.

For those more traditional, consider the Garden of Eden. According to Genesis, humanity was given a perfect world, but became aware of good and evil. That mere awareness itself planted the seeds of wickedness, and we were cast out. As such, by attempting to create a utopia on Earth, we may not be navigating a path back to the Garden, but a path to self-inflicted evil and suffering. Even if given perfection and material abundance, or able to create it, renewed hostility under new guises will only cause us to fall again.

The fixation on minor ills in the pursuit of social justice, the rooting out of microaggressions, comparison of even the subtlest forms of prejudice or disfavour with past murder and genocide by affixing the same labels to it, is the result of a kind of utopia forming. Comfort is so high and expectations are such that true hunger and injustice are unheard of, and new problems are imagined instead. In the end, the only bad thing in our lives becomes other people. All hatred and desire to fix things becomes targeted at other people, and there is no end to it. When everything is perfect and expectations are of a perfect life devoid of all disappointment, human forms and behaviours begin to look like blemishes.

It may be that the ultimate form of society is impossible, because the primitive and violent minds of men will still search desperately for anything wrong with it and react with disproportionate hatred. The knowledge of evil begets evil because it begets fear, which is enough to motivate hatred.

Are better forms of governance really inevitable, and is progress itself inevitable? Thousands of years from now, will people still look at the ideas most people consider progressive now, and agree that they are so?

In a previous post, I talked about the British constitutional monarchy and how some feel now is the time to put an end to it. Yet some interpretations hold that there is nothing inevitable or even necessarily good about political and social change, and that in fact there is no clock pacing our civilization forward to a better time.

Reactionary science fiction

In Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune, adapted to a movie in 1984 by David Lynch and again in 2021 by Denis Villeneuve, we are presented with a world apparently tens of thousands of years in the future. It is some fine escapism because so little resembles our world today. Nothing important, divisive or aggravating in today's society exists in that world. Even the Earth itself is a distant memory, never mentioned in any dialogue or being a passing thought of any character.

The characters in Dune are motivated by values that would be alien to most Western audiences, and affected by conflicts between ancient forces that will not exist for us for many thousands of years. They follow traditions that, to us, don't even exist yet or mean anything to us.

Despite how strange it may seem, the political system in the distant future worlds of Dune is very clearly based on our own past. Rather than advancing forward to increased liberty, inclusiveness and kindness, darker aspects of humanity have won out. Feudalism has made a return, with no mention of democracy. Capital punishment seems to be commonplace, as are torture, duels and assassination.

But is this regression really possible? Can values that protect the flourishing of a sovereign people indeed be forgotten and replaced simply with the base desire to rule as a monarch? What historical precedent exists?

It isn’t unusual for things to get worse

The best example might be the Greek and Roman civilizations. Each of them established a democratic order for a time. Both Athens and Rome, in their heydays, were determined to maintain a constitution that prevented the abuse of power. The Romans loathed the idea of a monarch, and yet the ultimate evolution of their system turned out to be an empire of absolute rule. This later developed into a system of absolute spiritual rule in addition to temporal rule, under the Emperor Constantine, once Rome turned Christian. Can that kind of social change, driven by such fervour, really be considered progress?

When the meaning of change, changes

The defining difference between the left and right in politics - the progressive and conservative - is their attitude towards whatever set of reforms and changes are the order of the day. It has nothing to do with a particular set of ideas, ideologies or values but simply one's response to whatever social changes are held to be new and pertinent at the time, by a majority of people. In revolutionary France, the advocates of harsh nationalism were also the ones advocating increased rights for common people. Nationalists were considered the political left, attempting to redefine the people as sovereign rather than the monarch. Opposing them. the political right were the defenders of the old order of the monarchy and the church.

As the classical liberal reforms and changes that were once considered revolutionary came to pass, they came to be accepted and written into constitutions such as the American constitution. They aged and became associated with a stable order. In becoming old, these once-revolutionary ideas that had been loathed and fought against by conservatives became the new order the conservatives would defend.

Many views of politics are stuck in the Twentieth Century, because of the dramas of the Second World War and the Cold War. They imagine the political left to be a static set of ideas, essentially socialism or Marxism as applied in the Soviet Union, and imagine the political right to consist of permanent defenders of classical liberalism’s old maxim of life, liberty and property. This becomes confused, however, when modern issues like those surrounding LGBT rights come into the picture, because those would fit into the right-wing ideology based on the above definition, yet are staunchly opposed by the American right because they are contrary to tradition. Tradition is really the main defining feature of the right, rather than a prioritisation of individual liberty. A person on the right merely advocates classical liberalism as tradition.

What constitutes tradition changes, depending on who won out in the previous struggle. In countries that adopted Marxist systems of government, youthful rebellion and subversion came to be associated with Western influence and capitalism. On the other side, in countries that maintained Western capitalism, change has been associated for a long time with socialist movements and the youth were drawn to them, even rallying behind Jeremy Corbyn in the UK before his downfall.

We all want to be a character in some special story

Whether or not something is held to be a form of progress is entirely dependent on what thing challenges the established order. If democratic governments were in power for long enough, revolutionary movements would quickly see something new and promising in the idea of monarchy and wish to reimplement it. Social change is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to make sense or be consistent with past change, and it is normal for it to be awful.

Left vs right, liberty vs order, is simply defined by generational difference and possibly even boredom with what came before. You could have a society with no faults, and the energetic next generation would still find ample things to complain about and try to alter that society into something possibly worse or less stable just so they can feel special in the attempt.

Nobody wants to live in the end of history, or to do nothing about their world. They all want their lives to feel like a story where the world was set right at last, even if this means they must advocate regression or simply nonsense to get that sensation.

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