I spent most of April working on a somewhat blog-related project that didn’t turn out quite as well as I had hoped. Then I didn’t feel like writing for a little while. But recently I was inspired by a few blog posts touching on some of my favorite themes.
Aurelien discussed “neo-tribalism” last week. Here’s a short excerpt, but of course there is much more.
Liberalism, we recall, is an ideology of radical individualism: it might be fairer to call it an ideology of self-interest, or even simply of selfishness. The individual is the measure of all things, and there is no higher value than individual freedom, especially in the economic sphere. But of course ultimately, your freedom can imply my lack of freedom, and the exercise of my rights often imposes obligations on you. Liberalism is essentially a zero-sum game, a competition to exert our freedom and impose obligations on others, with victory going to those with the most power and money. This was less of a problem so long as Liberalism remained the elite ideology it originally was, but any attempt to generalise it to society as a whole was bound to create problems. Hence the apparent paradox that Liberal societies allegedly devoted to personal freedom often have highly repressive laws.
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So as the cold realisation of what Liberalism has done creeps up the spine of the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC), the only solution is to formalise the developments I’ve just been discussing through the creation of virtual, ascriptive communities. These I refer to as tribes, or more properly neo-tribes, since they are artificial and not natural.
Aurelian uses the term “ascriptive communities,” which is derived from a social-science concept that relates closely to identity and social status. I’ll probably follow up on that in a week or so, but I’m reluctant to make any more exact predictions given my recent blogging history.
Ian Welsh republished a guide to some of his past posts on character and ideology. An excerpt from a 2013 post:
An ideology which leads to us killing a billion or more people with climate change, allow me to posit, is a bad ideology. At the end of its run, neoliberalism will kill more people than Marxist-Leninism did, and our grandchildren will consider it monstrous. Most of them will be no more able to understand how or why we submitted to it (or even believed in it) than we can understand how Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Mao came to power. Hyperbole? Not in the least, because the body count is going to be phenomenal.
When faced, then, with a monstrous ideology, our duty is to come up with a better one, an opposing one. Because ideology determines what we do. It is both the lens through which we see the world, and the motor that pushes us forward.
Welsh is using the term ideology to mean more-or-less organized systems of ideas about right and wrong that are necessary for large groups of people to act in concert. This is different from, but related to, the concept of personal ideology in Erikson. Strong group ideologies can bolster or even substitute for strong personal ideologies when things are going well for the group. Welsh tends to simplify and reify ideology at a high level of abstraction, but I think he is basically right—things aren’t going to change much until somebody comes up with a suitable system of ideas that inspires people to reject the neoliberal rut we are in. A catchy name for the new system would help.
John Michael Greer (formerly The Archdruid) writes about how occult methods and goals were redirected from predictions of the future to “personality-obsessed navel gazing” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mr. Greer suggests that the tendency to avoid predictions was tied to the modern myth of progress:
What made the myth of progress so distinctive was the way that it decked out the Christian belief of the Second Coming in secular drag, and proclaimed the imminent arrival of the Millennium without any supernatural justification. Much of the intellectual history of the Western world from 1890 to 1990, say, was shaped by the transformation of this secondhand mythology from a belief of fringe groups to a commonplace of the cultural mainstream, taken for granted by supposedly serious thinkers and accepted as simple fact by the masses. Much of the intellectual history of the Western world since 1990, in turn, has been shaped by the gradual unraveling of the failed progressivist faith.
What gives all this a bitter irony is that the world of the late 19th century was not on the doorstep of Utopia. Rather, it stood poised on the brink of a future of utter horror. . . [T]wo horrific world wars, waves of genocide sweeping across much of Eurasia from Armenia in 1915-1920 to Cambodia in 1976-1978, the total collapse of European empires in a chaos of insurgencies and failed wars, the rise and fall of the Communist and Fascist movements, and much, much more of the same kind, with poison gas, aerial bombardment, and a couple of mushroom clouds in there just to add a little additional piquance.
My posts in January and February about identity and Erik Erikson focused mainly on personal identity as the core self from which we derive our strength and ability to act in the world. Much of the Eriksonian identity project (not just what Erikson thought he was up to, but what people attempted to make of his work into the 70s and 80s) was to equip people with strong enough identities to perform as isolated, semi-rational actors in an atomistic, neoliberal world.
Historically, only mythic heroes or counter-heroes needed such a strong identity. Erikson himself recognized that analyzing a hero level of identity development was important, writing about Martin Luther and many others, but the therapeutic insights and methods Erikson pioneered were intended to allow everyone to be the heroes of their own stories. That is the ideology of the late 20th century, more so than any economic theory such as socialism or capitalism—trying to force everyone to be individualists, preferably of the homo rationalis type, whether they wanted to or not. It does not work because people evolved to be embedded in culture.
It is impossible to overstate how profoundly the neoliberal ideology of mandatory individualism is failing. It’s probably the biggest component of the populist backlash currently consuming politics in the West. Much bigger than unhappiness with “the economy, stupid.” By some measures the economy is doing fine right now, but people rightfully hate how it works, and are starting to recognize the unfolding disasters foretold by Mr. Welsh and Mr. Greer.
No promises on blog scheduling until I get a little closer to actual retirement and have more free time, but watch this space.
I feel your pain about writing routinely. For years when I was still working full time and raising children, I managed to eke out the subjects and effort to write almost every day. Now that the "golden years" have come around, I struggle to get a solid post in once a week. Pathetic.
We seem to be reading the same folks out there. They aren't chicken littles, but they are rays of sunshine and hope either. But they seem to have a handle on the what is going down. I am jealous of their abilities to lay down several thousand cogent and well-written words in a piece every week.
Keep trying. Odd as this may seem, I think that I will use our shared pain and POV to try and do a restart of something serious.
John