Ireland is the bloated sow that kills its young. The best little neoliberal country in Europe. From the blood of patriots, alas, a city of tents has bloomed around us.
Strange flowers bloom in our city, folding into doorways at night, spreading through the city and out to the suburbs.
Airy, I suppose, and if you want to look at the stars, you can sleep al fresco in a fashionable street corner on Grafton Street; snug under a sheet of newspaper
Such a fabulous city. The edge to it now. Feral gangs roaming the streets, the glitter of knives after dark, the wretched stench, the rivers of urine. And such sights to behold. A man defecating on the pavement, a girl in her underwear, crazed on drugs, running around O’Connel Street.
Enjoy your trip home from the city, if you have a home. You might not have it for long. A tent awaits you, like some fabulous moth flapping its wings in a cold wind, just for you.
Good thing we got rid of the scourge of England. Our own in charge now: posh, privately educated politicians, owners of multiple properties, unctuously wringing their hands about the crises of homelessness; so hard to maintain all those properties, so very hard.
A nasty little neoliberal country run as a business model. A human being is reduced to an economic unit to be preyed on, exploited, profited from.
Capitalist pathologies have morphed into neoliberalism. With checks, balances, and democratic norms, it’s cyclical nature could have been sustained, but at its best it exploits and appeals to the very worst in our human nature, creating a society of individuals motivated by little other than self-interest and self-advancement, jostling for status, position, power or wealth, enslaving humans by the ego, itself an absurd societal construct .
Everything has shifted to the right, including basic moral parameters. Democracies are failing, the right and the left are configuring.
Here sadism and cruelty have crept out from under the nun’s mantle and into public discourse. Homeless children, like cockroaches, eat their dinner off the pavement.
But the economy is thriving, and there’s full employment…
The slogan “Keep the recovery going” … was as out of touch with reality as any despot surrounded by yes men. It’s a good thing a disenchanted constituency here will be soaked up by Sinn Fein.
But profits blossom, as does the sale of luxury goods. Now we have the rich, the poor, and the working poor, who are little better than slaves.
Vulgar extensions protrude out of gentrified neighbourhoods, gangs in the shadows waiting to smash through them.
History teaches us again and again that the poor man will come to the rich man’s gate, and the barbarians are on the move. Civic virtues mean nothing, the good life or the practice of virtue is sneered at.
The idea of civic-minded citizens leading a virtuous life is not a religious concept, but about creating a society based on shared collective values. There are ways to organise a society for the greatest common good that don’t require a widespread understanding of rocket science, or a Communist regime. It simply involves valuing wider social responsibilities, and relationships over the narrow morality of self-interest and self-advancement.
Empires come and go, and simple spiritual lessons go unheeded. Monotheistic religions are a disaster, and the religious disposition may well be a pathology, but there are great riches in all spiritual traditions, blithely ignored.
Who, once he had truly seen a flower, not just looked at it, would want temporal power or to run an empire, or would trample on someone else? A fool perhaps. Only a fool who cannot see it.
Survival was never about the survival of the fittest. Darwin was referring to the survival of the fittest to adapt. Atomised humans have no sense of being part of a collective species, no shared sense of a future, or of the future of the planet that sustains them.
And when the nuclear cloud has settled, the earthworm will perhaps continue churning joyfully through the charred ruins of the Earth. Perhaps even a flower might poke it’s head above the rubble when the human grub has gone.
There’s a piece of public art that for a year or more languished on the edges of Union Square in Manhattan, before moving to a more innocuous location in Midtown.
It’s a piece of bronze and laser cut steel in the form of a thick-waisted businessman, peering up into the sky. The statue, by Jim Rennert, is called, “Think Big.” This rotund figure struck me as a bizarre but predictable contrast with Union Square itself, site of labor protests, political demonstrations, and various working class events over the past century and a half.
Then, on its cusp, a fattened, besuited, becalmed, moronic middle-manager stands, gazing into the clouds wonderingly. The figure itself looks like the Everyman of modern capital, depicted in the altruistic framing of business propaganda: a harmless, innocent, well-intentioned, exceedingly milquetoast middle-aged man of the people who does his earnest best to help his genteel corporation make a tidy profit, and drawing his modest share of the revenues to support his family. What could be wrong with that?
Aside from the stomach-churning inanity of it, the statue has elided every conceivable aspect of its form that might imply or evince the raging class war between workers and suit-wearing corporate servants, themselves alighted like parasites on the broad husk of the Big Capital. A class war that is blood-soaked and pitiless.
Yet our statue goes to great lengths to present the antithesis: the anodyne complacency of the humming mid-century office space, a hive of drones doing their daily duty. It is truly nondenominational, reflecting the most catholic of images, the most generic.
“Think Big is a sculpture that serves to inspire everyone who works hard every day to achieve their dreams and goals. The towering businessman gazes upward at the Manhattan skyline, contemplating the possibilities that lay within his vast surroundings and reminding us that if we “think big” any dream is attainable.” – jimrennert.com
Ersatz Replica
Philosopher and aphorist E.M. Cioran once wrote that, “Existing is plagiarism.” If to be is to simply be an ersatz replica of the palatable, then why exist, either as individual, artist, or work of ‘art’? Nobody has asked Rennert.
The statue, the name of which is like much modern advertising – quite clearly it is the first name that entered the brain of the artist (or advertiser, as the case may be). Thinking big, as it were, entails thinking big on behalf of the corporation for which you work; the ideas are not truly your own; the mission of the business is not your mission (unless you internalize it); and the life trajectory, even, is one set by the whim of the corporate market to which you sell your labor.
Rather differently, the labor strikes and protests that once occurred in this space, were fuelled by men and women fighting to have all of the things elided by the statue, shaved away by the sculptor’s judicious hand: your own mission; your own ideas; your own life and career trajectory. Thus, Herbert Marcuse wrote: ‘Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions. While they work, they do not fulfill their own needs and faculties, but work in alienation.’
How well the Think Big man resembles this perception: a drone, like others in appearance and wardrobe and function, alienated from his own desires, subordinated to those of a faceless overlord of industry. As a representation of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), it is equally apt, as that class sits as a bourgeois buffer between elitism and populism, between a secular aristocracy and the abject proletariat, both classes growing exponentially so that the metaphorical abyss widens in two senses: vertically and horizontally.
This bourgeois buffer provides an aesthetic disguise for the dirty business of capitalism. They are not the sweat-drenched coltan miners in the Congo, but the svelte marketers who ply the ether with iPhone ads. His hard edges have been sanded down; he is perfectly polished, nonthreatening, inoffensively bland.
In her book Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu historicizes this class. As the Socialist Left in America was progressively destroyed by the public relations efforts of big business, the haute bourgeoisie sided with capital. She writes:
When the tide turned against American workers, the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying the favor of capitalists it once despised. The culture war was always a proxy economic war, but the 1960s divided the country into the allegedly enlightened and the allegedly benighted, with the PMC able to separate itself from its economic inferiors in a way that seemed morally justifiable.
She describes them as ‘salaried mental workers,’ including doctors, lawyers, advertising managers, IT professionals, and bank managers who reproduce the status quo, having abandoned political radicalism in favor of cultural wars and careerism.
This is the buffer class, idealized in the sanitized vision of Think Big. Yet Think Big betrays the idea of simple reproduction, revealing the compulsion of neoliberalism to shave cost to stave a falling rate of profit. As Liu puts it:
In the United States, generations of allegedly neutral experts have hollowed out public goods, degraded the public sphere, facilitated the monetization of everything from health to aptitude, and indebted generations of Americans in a fantasy of meritocracy enhanced social mobility. Liberals have sat by while finance capital and corporate interests gutted the public treasury.
E.M. Cioran says Western societies are beholden to – fatally obsessed with – technology, innovation, and the drive of capitalism for rapid obsoletion, and the process of ceaseless enhancement and replacement. He says they are in a state of ‘delirium,’ but adds (in Drawn and Quartered) that this kind of breathless preoccupation with novelty is itself relatively new in history:
Archaic societies have lasted so long because they know nothing of the desire to innovate, to grovel before ever-new simulacra. If you change images with each generation, you cannot anticipate historical longevity. Classical Greece and modern Europe typify civilizations stricken by a precocious death, following a greed for metamorphosis and an excessive consumption of gods, and of the surrogates for gods. Ancient China and Egypt wallowed for millennia in a magnificent sclerosis. As did African societies, before contact with the West.
Given that societies are anchored in historical circumstance, they are subject to the same iron law of all civilizations, that they will eventually ‘sag and settle’ as the initial dynamism dies. How much more likely in a society built on an idée fixe, a fetishistic mania.
And yet – small consolation for those whose lives are on a far faster downward trajectory than civilization itself.
Hence the siren call of rebellion will continue to outline itself precisely against this insipid, pulseless figure paradoxically anchored at the center of a monomaniacal society. A society the signature of which is the fixity of its preoccupation with profit – and the consumption that enables it.
U.S. President Donald Trump displays the signed Executive Order for the Establishment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity on May 11, 2017.
The American Dream and Authenticity
This cultural underbelly outlined above is eviscerated not just by the corporate art we are confronted with, but by the modern narrative of the American Dream™ ; this statue is just a recent embodiment of it.
Anyone, color and creed aside, through their efforts and ingenuity, can do or be anything they wish to be. No material circumstances obtain in their pursuit of happiness. Class is a byword of another era, trampled underfoot by the ascent of free-market capitalism, which brooks no discriminatory practice in its market-rendered even-playing field.
As any sentient being can observe, this is a historical fiction, a deceit reproduced daily through the channels of mass media and its advertising, entertainment, and news content, all of which is owned and operated by elite capital and managed by its flyblown class of sycophants.
Essayist and playwright John Steppling gets at much the same thing in his book Aesthetic ResistanceAnd Dis-Interest(2016). He writes, in the context of the dissolution of art as an anchor of culture, of the loss of art’s radical conscience in favor of corporate cliche.
Steppling would despise the ‘Think Big’ statue. Its banality is that of a Jeff Koons work, the more celebrated the less memorable. He argues that mass electronic screen culture has destroyed something critical in the collective consciousness, namely the space for authentic art.
He also notes that art is radical insofar as it refuses to adopt particular meanings, just as space is forever unyoked to purpose, yet radically ratifies none, and is the necessary background to all purpose.
He quotes Robert Kullot-Kentor, biographer of Theodor Adorno, ‘Art’s truth appears guaranteed more by its denial of any meaning in organized society…’ As Steppling later adds, ‘It’s purposelessness is its radical expression.’
And again: ‘Art is self destructive. It is guided by impulses that are anti-social, but only insofar as they question the status quo, because the status quo cannot survive history or memory.’
What artists like Rennet and Koons produce is effortlessly mainstream; it doesn’t challenge the status quo but rather reifies it. It is therefore not art. There is no question posed by the skygazing statue, no threat emerges. It is the reproduction of the placid mind of endless consumption, of ceaseless salesmanship, the mind of the individual cog in a system that it neither sees nor questions. Deification of the quotidian.
Steppling says the clue to the decay of society is the sense that culture is themed by ‘the inauthentic and counterfeit.’
That sensibility, that sinking feeling, for me, is most evident in the hypocrisy of modern advertising. Ads relentlessly tell us they are making commodities to make our lives better – that is their mission and purpose. Yet that is a half-truth at best, a full-blown deceit on a bad day.
Products are produced for profit, first and foremost. They are made to solve the sometimes real but largely artificial needs of consumers only insofar as they must. The initial aim of the product line is the MVP, or Minimally Viable Product.
This is the industry jargon for a commodity that meets the minimum threshold for sale-ability. Beyond that – innovations that improve the product – are seen as incurred costs, unnecessary but sometimes preferable if the cost-benefit analysis predicts higher profits with higher quality. This corrosive smile that fronts modern culture is the clue to the erosion of meaning but also somehow echoes the voice of the Cassandra exposing its desiccated spirit, having submitted itself to the hegemonic ideal, represented by the bland everyman that serves none but the needs of blind profit.
Alongside the denuded character of the Think Big skygazer – alongside the erasure of individuality, i.e., authenticity, in its homogeneity – is its infantile sensibility; yes, the only quality it truly has.
Its puffy childlike hands loose at its side; its rounded babyface; its gaze more wondrous than critical. Steppling says the infantile is a product of capitalist culture.
To paraphrase: the Oedipal narrative of the child overcoming his father as a path to self-actualization is denied by modern neoliberal society.
Neoliberalism denies meaningful work in a race to the bottom rungs of servitude. It denies meaningful leisure as labor is stripped evermore of its rightful surplus, no small measure of that margin being lost time. And it ultimately leaves in its infectious wake a featureless figure, bereft of purpose and means, a man unable to exceed or even succeed the father.
In such a state, the man opts for a permanent infantilism. Hence our recidivist culture that seems to drag us back, back, back toward childhood, finally into the warmth of the womb, the original safe space, protected by ignorance just as ignorance is unconscious bliss.
Benjamin Barber was an earlier prophet of our devolution. His seminal work Consumed detailed the ways in which commodity culture manufactures artificial needs beyond the realm of actual needs, an entirely predictable eventuality given the desperation of capital to continuously expand the marketplace of consumption.
Industry compels consumers to confuse needs with wants and then promises happiness through the instant gratification of that wanting. As one reviewer astutely noted, Barber, ‘…ably identified many of the contributing factors, not the least of which are our collective cultural boredom and our naive but doomed expectations of fulfillment via uncontrolled acquisition.’
The consequence of unlimited choice and acquisition is an infantile impatience with what one has as one is perpetually enthralled by novelty, the tradition-destroying feature Cioran lamented.
We see this trend everywhere. Often in Hollywood, which has found a stupendous revenue stream in the marketing of superhero comics to adults. Once, Superman was a movie for kids; now it is a movie for adults who have yet to put away childish things. Which is all of us.
As Steppling notes, the superhero story is the dream of childish omnipotence, a kind of puerile fantasy that adults once shed by the time they exited their teens. Now the happy myth persists well into adulthood. Its Manichean quality is a mirror of the imperial narratives of the state: one side is all good and the other all bad.
This reductive dichotomy is the cornerstone of modern consumer narratives, whether in entertainment or news, and has been instantiated in the programming strategies of major media entities.
Another feature of the infantile is what Stuart Jeffries alludes to in Grand Hotel Abyss (2016), his biography of the Frankfurt School. Namely, the infantile nature of modern man as his culture radicalizes identity politics by the insistence that its demands be instantaneously gratified, less an urgency than an hysteria. What more emblematic aspect of childhood than the baby that screams when denied what it wants?
But we see it in advertising, especially, and in general marketing. What does a professional basketball franchise ask its roster of players when interviewing them for promotion? [Giggling] What would your superpower be (if you could have a superpower)? As game show music plays in the background.
Likewise in broadcast advertising. A bank commercial shows a middle-aged father dancing around in a virtual reality headset while his more mature daughter plays on her mobile. Faces of consumers are increasingly banal in disposition, blank gazes, wide innocent eyes, awaiting information from the sales shill embedded in the commercial, the messiah of commerce. In the idealized playground of consumerism, modern man is a tabula rasa at 35, eyes awaiting the advent of the next shiny distraction.
If the endless spectacle of mathematically correct diversity casting is defended as reflecting the social ideal, and hence instructive, what is the repetition of the unsophisticated and simpleminded consumer in ads but an admonition?
Steppling interestingly notes that the infant mindset in adults feels incomplete, perhaps through its Oedipal failure to assert its worth and power. As such it must deny many facets of reality that might undermine its fragile psyche.
It must turn away from the wars raging, the coming barbarities narrated by arbiters of power, the afterthought that is endemic poverty and illness. We must turn to safer, more simplistic answers and the narratives that attempt to legitimate them; the ones espoused by the cult of decrepit professional liberalism, window-dresser of society’s distemper, pollyanna in purgatory, to whom we light a votive every day at dusk.
As an art theorist, Steppling notes a simple dichotomy in art that applies more broadly: good art, or art, shows an artificial reality and then shows the actuality beneath it; bad art, or non art, just show the artificial reality. In this sense, most broadcast advertising is bad art, or non art. It normalizes artificiality, the uncritical acceptance of every sales pitch, taking the pitch at face value.
This is reflected in bourgeoisie art criticism, which seems to again and again strip art of its system critique and either reinterpret it as a celebration of industry or a critique of individual foibles within a benign landscape of earnest employee/consumers.
Hence the narrative of history is penned not by the victors but by their dutiful scribes, the professional parasitic class who earn their livelihood through sycophancy and servitude. In service to the status quo.
Fold your hands behind your back and think big—on their behalf. Your passage through will be as frictionless as first class air travel. But say bon voyage to your dreams. This is inimical to the artist. Because art undermines. Art challenges. Art unsettles. There is no safe space in art. No diversity calculus. No appeasement of the herd.
We are thus left with a modern culture which no longer understands the term ‘sell-out’, which sees brand partnerships as a path to social uplift, not recognizing the inherent contradiction of allying with the perpetrator of inequity in order to rectify inequity. The irony is lost on us because there is no irony. The artificial is all. Irony would require a second perspective. In the marketplace of consensus, no second opinions exist.
Jason Hirthler is a writer, media critic, and veteran of the digital media industry. He has published in a variety of progressive publications including CounterPunch, Dissident Voice and The Hampton Institute.
To understand the origins of the Irish Housing Crisis we also need to look beyond our shores, and excavate the substrate of the modern global financial order. This will reveal a slow journey towards the neoliberal financialisation of property as an asset today – overwhelmingly bought and sold regardless of the needs of society at large. Today, individuals act as private companies, but invariably lose out to better organised and resourced institutions, while the periodic burstings of speculative bubbles widen inequalities, and create conditions for Populist uprisings.
In particular, it should be recognised that our capitalist system is not simply a market economy, of which there have been numerous variants through history, none of which, including our own, truly “free” in any meaningful sense. Capitalism in its current guise exhibits a dispassionate face, but ultimately relies on violent enforcement of interest-bearing loans by officers of the State. It arrived in the wake of widespread acceptance of what was previously considered the sin of usury – the practice of making unethical or immoral monetary loans that unfairly enrich the lender – by Protestant reformers during the Reformation.
Markets in goods and services have existed since civilisations first emerged in the Middle East, but these were invariably softened by community solidarity, wherein laws and norms ensured trade was not conducted – as we see increasingly today – as an impersonal, zero-sum game between competing parties. Of course, there were various categories of people – including women and slaves – that were excluded from such commonwealths, nonetheless a sense of mutual obligation and reciprocity was more pronounced in the trading arrangements of pre-modern polities.
It is only in recent history, as living standards have risen through technological advances, enhanced food supply and sanitation – along with the arrival of various forms of income redistribution associated with the welfare state – that property – in material terms shelter – has emerged as central to the achievement of a basic standard of living, and the good life we now expect. Its acquisition has become an all-consuming preoccupation in many countries, Ireland not least.
Subsistence Level
Even in Europe and North America, until the twentieth century the primary challenge for most families was to obtain sufficient food for survival. Due in part to a veneration of an economic philosophy of laissez faire, associated with Adam Smith, ample sufficiency was slow in arriving, despite increased supplies arising out of the Second Agricultural Revolution from the seventeenth century onwards; along with the arrival of subsistence crops from the Americas, including our beloved potato, and maize.
In Europe, initially at least, the ascent of the bourgeois from the seventeenth century worked to the detriment of peasants and a new working class. Thus, despite technological developments, such as the invention in Europe of the printing press, and a more stable food supply in the years between 1500-1650 prices rose by 500%, but wages rose much more slowly.
There were continuous interruptions to, and distortions of, food supply in a nascent capitalist market. The beginning of the seventeenth century witnessed grain surpluses in England as agricultural capacity exceeded the requirements of the population. Carryover inventories of food averaged between 33 and 42 percent of annual consumption. Therefore, in that period: ‘famines were man-made rather than natural disasters.’[i]
The typical English subsistence crisis after the ascendancy of Henry VIII did not take place because of insufficiency but because ‘the demand for inventories pushed prices so high that labourers lacked the cash to purchase grain.’ In essence, merchants were hording, and the poor were starving.
The Procession Picture, c. 1600, showing Elizabeth I borne along by her courtiers.
During the late Tudor period ‘paternalistic’ authorities recognised this and acquired surpluses, selling it on at prices affordable to the lower echelons of society, much to the annoyance of millers, brewers and bakers. That progressive market intervention unravelled during the Civil War of the 1640s, when Roundhead mercantile interests began to exert authority over government decision-making.
It was only in the 1750s, in the wake of food riots of ‘unprecedented scope’, that the State began to subsidise grain once again. As a result, by the early nineteenth century, famines had been conquered in England ‘not because the weather had shifted, or because of improvements in technology, but because government policy… had unalterably shifted.’[ii] Sadly that policy did not extend to Ireland.
Today, in order to achieve social harmony it seems likely that governments, including the Irish, will have to treat property as an essential commodity, similar to food, wresting control from a system that has enshrined the gambler.
Sealing of the Bank of England Charter (1694), by Lady Jane Lindsay, 1905
Bank of England
In the U.K. a financial system emerged associated with the creation of the Bank of England in 1693, when a consortium of bankers made a loan of £1,200,000 to the king. ‘In return’, according to David Graeber, ‘they received a royal monopoly on the issuance of banknotes … a right to advance IOUs for a portion of the money the king owed.’[iii]
A system of credit enforced by military might went global during the colonial era, leading to the enrichment of a class of financiers operating out of the city of London in particular. Fernand Braudel characterises this form of capitalism as first and foremost the art of using money to get more money.[iv] The capacities of this system appear to have reached a perfect pitch in our contemporary era.
But what system preceded this? And could there be an alternative? Prior to the arrival of paper money IOUs issued by the Bank of England, below the surface, older market systems based on mutual trust and solidarity operated. These were overwhelmed by the impersonal calculation that continues to characterise financial services, underpinned by the violent capacity of the State.
Thus David Graeber observes: ‘Under the newly emerging capitalist order, the logic of money was granted autonomy; political and military power were then gradually reorganized around it.’[v]
In his indispensable A History of Debt: The First 5000 Years, Graeber argues the ‘great untold story of our current age’ is of the destruction of an ancient credit system found in small towns and villages across England, and beyond. This was a complex market based not on coins, but on trust. In a typical English village: ‘the only people likely to pay cash were passing travellers, and those considered riff-raff.’ Reveallingly, he observes that ‘just about everyone was creditor and debtor’ and that ‘every six months there would be a public reckoning’ when the community would resolve their debts to one another based on a person’s ability to pay.[vi]
Such a system reflects a passage in the New Testament (Matthew 20:1-16) in which a landowner pays workers the same sum at the end of the day despite each one working different hours. When one of the workers complains the landowner responds:
‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
So the last will be first, and the first will be last.
In any community there are those less fortunate than others, and a pre-capitalist system of resolving debt, and rewarding work, acted as an impediment to excessive accumulation of resources in a few hands. Importantly it was not simply barter, as value was ascribed based on an ability to pay, and material needs, as much as on the labour or other input into the good or service. A cobbler might therefore produce shoes for an impoverished widow at a lower price than that set for a prosperous miller. No doubt it wasn’t idyllic, but it seems to have led to a fairer and more harmonious existence than what followed in its wake.
Graeber argues that ‘this upsets our assumptions [as] we are used to blaming the rise of capitalism on something vaguely called the market’, but these ‘English villages appear to have seen no contradiction between the two.’[vii]
John Constable – Parham Mill, Gillingham.
Money was Trust
In this world trust was everything: ‘Money literally was trust.’ Neighbours appeared he says ‘quite comfortable with the idea of buying and selling, or even with market fluctuations, provided they didn’t get to the point of threatening poorest families’ livelihoods.’ Thus Graeber describes the origin of capitalism as ‘the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest.’
The new legal order of strictly enforceable loans had serious consequences for debtors, a position which was connected to sinfulness, and led to imprisonment. Graeber goes so far as to argue that this amounted to ‘the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasised that in a small community, everyone normally was both lender and borrower.’
He also argued that this transition provided ample space for swindlers and cheats:
What seems to have happened is that, once credit became unlatched from real relations of trust between individuals … it became apparent that money could, in effect, be produced simply by saying it was there, but when this was done in … a competitive market place, it would almost inevitably lead to scams … causing the guardians of the system to periodically panic and seek new ways to latch the value of the various forms of paper onto gold and silver.
Moreover:
Only the wealthy were insulated, since they were able to take advantage of the new credit money, trading back and forth portions of the king’s debt in the form of banknotes.[viii]
Eventually the price of bank notes stabilized once notes became redeemable in precious metal. This is referred to as the Gold Standard, which emerged following the South Sea Bubble Crash of 1720. But this crash was far from the last in what appears an inherently unstable system. As Graeber puts it: ‘it does seem strange that capitalism feels the constant need to imagine, or to actually manufacture, the means of its own imminent extinction.’[ix]
Hogarthian image of the 1720 “South Sea Bubble” from the mid-19th century, by Edward Matthew Ward.
Separate Legal Personality
Companies were established in canon law by Pope Innocent IV in 1250, and applied to monasteries, churches, guilds and other institutions, but were in no sense profit-seeking enterprises in the modern sense. However, according to David Graeber ‘once companies’, such as the East Indian Company, ‘began to engage in armed ventures overseas … a new era in history might be said to have begun.’[x]
The inherent danger of profit-seeking corporations was once widely recognised. Thus, between 1720 and 1825 it was a criminal offence to start a company in England, during a period of rapid economic expansion.
In the United States until the nineteenth century there were two competing ideas regarding the purpose of companies: the first involved those with charters restricted to the pursuit of objectives in the public interest, such as canal building; the other regime issued charters of a general character, allowing companies to engage in whatever business proved profitable.[xi]
The latter category emerged triumphant, divorced from responsibility to fellow citizens; an unaccountable abstraction with separate legal personality established in the landmark 1897 case of Salomon v. Salomon. Thus capitalism discovered the perfect vehicle for wealth accumulation, and as wealth begets wealth, increasingly multinational companies overwhelmed smaller family-owned businesses as a wander down any high street today confirms.
Moreover, as corporations have swelled in size, a chasm has opened up between the pay levels of senior officers and rank and file workers. Thus, whereas in the 1950s the CEO of General Motors, then the model of a successful US business, was paid 135 times more than assembly-line workers, fifty years later the CEO of Walmart earned as much as 1,500 times as much as an ordinary employee.
Moreover, according to Theodore Zeldin: ‘In the twentieth century, the British colonial empire was replaced with a less visible but even more powerful financial empire compose of an archipelago of some sixty offshore tax havens presided over by the City of London.’[xii]
As companies grow in size and internationalize, the pursuit of profit becomes an overriding purpose, and the connection between management and workers diminishes to a point where companies are no longer embedded in communities. This is particularly evident in financial services, where making money out of money has become a conjuror’s act, increasingly incomprehensible to the uninitated. It was surely only a matter of time before property would be adopted as a speculative asset to an all-consuming leviathan.
Property Today
For obvious reasons, throughout history land has been a paramount concern for peasant societies, primarily as a source of food, grown for subsistence and as a commodity. Agricultural land, however, must be worked, so speculation in rural land produces scant reward unless there is skilled labour and capital attached. A surviving aristocracy has continued to draw incomes from rural rents, but this has been severely dented by agrarian movements that emerged in Ireland and elsewhere to produce a class of petit bourgeois peasant proprietors.
Similarly, at least until the end of World War II, in urban areas property brought significant trouble and relatively scant reward for any landlord, with tenancy considered a transitory existence associated with student years; while public housing schemes assisted the urban poor to leave tenement dwellings that had bedevilled many cities, including Dublin, which had the worst housing conditions of any city in the United Kingdom at the turn of the last century.
However, since the post-War period workers, including those engaged in monotonous ‘unskilled’ work, joined forces to win a series of improvements to their conditions. These included a five-day week and eight-hour working day, along with aspirations to a living wage. It allowed scope for many, if not most, of those pointedly referred to as ‘the working class’ to enjoy a reasonable, and improving, standard of living across the Western world. Importantly, a steady job permitted home ownership.
Moreover, in the wake of the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture after World War II – which led to a radical reduction in the cost of food – steadily rising living standards in the U.S and Europe brought a profusion of recreational activities including sports, and unprecedented access to the arts, especially film – the defining cultural form of the twentieth century – along with access to higher education, even for the children of the poor. In these circumstances property became an increasingly prized asset – pent-up demand ripe for exploitation if circumstances permitted.
Crucially, from the 1970s, an ascendent neoliberalism led to governments around the world withdrawing from the housing market, leading to dramatic decreases in the stock of social housing. In 2015 in Ireland, for example, by which time economic growth for the year was at 7.8%, a mere 334 social and affordable units were built.[xiii]
In the meantime, regular stock market crashes underline to financiers the reliabiity of bricks and mortar as an investment. Pension funds especially relish the assured income that property generates. Thus, even when there is a crash in property prices, as in Ireland, rents continue to be paid, and with assistance from the State – socialism for the rich – property prices rise once again.
Throughout most of history the quest for a crust of bread has been the dominant struggle for the bulk of humanity. Today, in the Western world at least, somewhere to rest one’s head in a place of one’s own has become the overriding concern. At the heart of the housing crisis in Ireland, and elsewhere, lies a yearning for the good life that most us see as a right, but which is being exploited by a buccaneering class of financiers, many of whom survived the Crash of 2008, and continue to exert control over the institutions of the Irish state.
It appears that just as governments had to regulate food supplies in order to avert famines and accelerate development in the early modern period, similarly today it has become necessary for states, especially the Irish State, to regulate a property market which is working to the detriment of a growing proportion of the population. More generally, whether we can do away with the rigidity of a capitalist system of debt enforcement, and return to a market based on greater social solidarity and reiprocity remains to be seen. But at least we should radically reform an inherently unstable and unfair housing market, which is failing to deliver the good life we have a right to expect.
[i] Roderick Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris, Sok Chul Hong, The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, p.116
[iii] David Greaber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House, London, 2011, p.49
[iv] Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Braudel on Capitalism, or Everything Upside Down’ The Journal of Modern History Vol. 63, No. 2, A Special Issue on Modern France (Jun., 1991), pp. 354-361 (8 pages) Published By: The University of Chicago Press.
[xi] Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Everyday Life. A new Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future, Maclehorse Press, Quercus, London 2015 pp.232-233
[xiii] Dan MacGuill, ‘FactCheck: How many social housing units were actually built last year?’, 9th of February, 2016, www.thejournal.ie, https://www.thejournal.ie/ge16-fact-check-election-2016-ireland-social-housing-2587923-Feb2016/
Say it to me if you have something to confess
I was born on the wrong side of the tracks like Ginsberg and Kerouac Bob Dylan, Key West (2020)
Notwithstanding my loathing for fundamentalisms of all strands, I have always preached from a gospel of love, or at least a form of reason that leads to moderation in the Public Intellectual Series.
Ideas about religion and the existence of God based on reason, such as that articulated by Thomas Aquinas, must yield to the facts as these emerge. The ideas contained in natural philosophy – with its harmony of the spheres – available to a medieval monk has been superseded by the discoveries of the Enlightenment that brought the hitherto unknown field of science. Yet, this yielded quantum physics that permits a layer of uncertainty, wherein the nature of an object may shift depending on one’s perspective.
The ‘uncertainty principle’ seems to have been anticipated by the Ancient Greeks, as Albert Camus explains in his essay ‘Helen’s Exile’ (1948):
Greek thought always took refuge behind the conception of limits. It never carried anything to extremes, neither the sacred, nor reason, because it negated nothing, neither the sacred nor reason. It took everything into consideration, balancing shadow with light.
This he contrasted with ‘Our Europe’ which:
off in the pursuit of totality, is the child of disproportion. She negates beauty, as she negates whatever she does not glorify. And through all her diverse ways, she glorifies but one thing, which is the future rule of reason.
We may find, therefore, an excess of reason breeding dogmatism that gives rise to unreason, or even scientism. Thus, the subtlety of the Greek mind, now reflected in the thinking of Jurgen Habermas, permits a space for religion in the public sphere, but certainly not the rule of religion, or a single moral vision.
An awareness of the limitation of reason, or really any one individual’s capacity to reason in a divinely inspired way is not, however, to dismiss the true nature of objective facts in a given situation. As Karl Popper (‘On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance’ (1962)) points out:
belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of justice, and of freedom, can hardly survive the acceptance of an epistemology which teaches that there are no objective facts; not merely in this particular case, but in any other case; and that the judge cannot have made a factual mistake because he can no more be wrong about the facts than he can be right.
Therefore, dogmatism of all kinds – especially couched in religious terms – should be excluded, but we must also accept facts insofar as we are capable of ascertaining these, using the intellectual tools inherent in science and history that have served public intellectuals through the ages.
Extremism of Our Times
Where divine revelation is treated by true believers as factual is truly dangerous. Thus moral philosopher Professor John Finnis assumes the existence of one God ‘the Almighty’ to be self-evident, leading to a fixed moral view that does not allow for diversity, or even mild eccentricity, within our private lives.
In recent writings, Finnis illustrates a dominant extremism of our time. Marriage is for him exclusively between a man and a woman. Therefore, gay marriage is not a good. Furthermore, marriage involves sexual congress, which has as its aim the production of children. Not sex for the sake of having sex, but only for conception. Thus, Finnis considers homosexual congress and sex outside marriage as intrinsically shameful, immoral and harmful.
Some argue that he derives such normative conclusions about homosexual relationships from factual premises of heterosexual physical contact. Moreover, in the civilised world, many of the practices Finnis sanctions are considered by homosexual and heterosexual couples both within and outside of marriage as part of normal sexual congress and behaviour.
The issue highlights how sexuality has warped contemporary Christianity, negating more important issues around the real suffering of human beings in this world, a concern that Pope Francis is at least beginning to address. In his latest encyclical Fratelli Tutti (‘All Brothers, 2020) Francis condemns, ‘a concept of popular and national unity influenced by various ideologies … creating new forms of selfishness and a loss of the social sense under the guise of defending national interests.’
Shaming Culture
The advent of shaming culture as opposed to a justice culture, involves the demonisation of others and is a reversion to social primitivism, akin to burning witches at the stake, or René Girard’s idea of the reconciliatory victim or scapegoat. It is allied to a rise in Populist hysteria and religious mania.
The leading contemporary Jewish philosopher in the U.K., Jonathan Sacks, in a balanced way seeks to exonerate religious belief from its critics. In God’s Name (2016) is a defence of religion in terms of the values it produces. Sacks rails against extremism, a theme he revisits in Morality (2020), where he outlines positive religious values, including a focus on dignity, associative levels of responsibility, community and a sense of public service and the common good.
Jonathan Sacks
Christian jihadism encompasses such forays as the invasion of South America by Spanish Conquistadors and the Crusades, leading to mass slaughter and the destruction of indigenous civilizations. In modern times the Blairite justification, couched in Christian terms, for the war on Iraq was also used to mask narrow self-interest in oil.
Sacks equates altruistic evil with the thinking within the neoconservative group, wherein we are considered good and those outside our group are evil. This leads to the arrogant assumption that we are doing it for ‘their’ own good, killing multitudes will pave the way for democracy.
Crusades, whether modern or ancient, are invariably cloaked in the garment of religious ideology, but are really about resources and the ruthless pursuit of self-interest. They also still permit mass murder. The connection between religion and unbridled capitalism has long been evident, and is, alas, woven into the fabric of institutionalised religion.
All of these examples are truisms historically about the search of the Church and its believers or fellow travellers for gold and money – the Kingdom of Mammon, as opposed to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Both Christopher Hitchens, and indeed Richard Dawkins, have written extensively about the new forms of religious extremes we are witnessing, with the finger of blame primarily being pointed at Islam. That religion of course provides graphic examples of brutal beheadings, mass executions, stoning to death for adultery, planes hitting the Twin Towers, as well as the murder of journalists. All of this is unconscionable, but much of the rage can be traced to neo-imperialism in the Middle East, culminating in the invasion of Iraq. Christopher Hitchens’s greatest intellectual error was to support the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq.
Power Vacuum
So what is the root cause of Islamic extremism and Evangelical and Catholic extremism?
Blame is rightly attached to the misguided and illegal wars in Iraq, and going all the way back to the 1920s, the creation of client regimes in the Middle East. The unintended consequences of the occupation of Iraq led to a power vacuum in Syria, which gave an opportunity to well organized religiously inspired militants.
This, however, was the culmination of long-term trends within Islam, wherein successive generations had been radicalized by preachers who exploited a loss of identity in the face of Western consumerism, segregation and enduring poverty.
In Marxist terms, religious fundamentalism can be traced to growing disparities of wealth and structural inequality, as well as a lack of opportunities to gain a rounded education, with all too great an emphasis on technical or scientific education for economic advancement, as opposed to a broad liberal education that inculcates critical thinking.
Primarily, however, this extremism speaks of a need to belong to a cause, leading to belief in something ethereal, no matter how ludicrous. Belief in an afterlife defines people’s existences and justifies, as far as they are concerned, even self-immolation.
But the secularist response in France especially – under the aggressive application of laïcité – to ban or regulate the wearing of the burka or nijab, upheld in the European Court of Human Rights in the SAS case, only appears to inflame the issue. This is really little more than a sideshow to a wider collapse in values.
A Group of Women Wearing Burkas. Afghanistan women wait outside a USAID-supported health care clinic, Afghanistan, 2003.
As the wheels come off the economic system as we know it, and where people are searching for words and expressions to convey their understanding of the withering of societal bonds, extremist Christianity has stepped into the void to provide solace.
In the United States, at least, we are seeing an unholy synergy developing between Evangelical Christians and right-wing Catholicism. Far-right demagogues, led by Trump, have articulated a view that ‘our’ country is being overrun by immigrants and that the dominant ethnic group must ‘take back control’ from a phantom intellectual Marxism, liberal elites, or straight socialism – all emanating from the decadence of the mixed race cosmopolis.
This a descent into the racist abyss, where those we disagree with are scapegoated and targeted. It is a product of a dangerous dualistic mode of thinking, which Sacks identifies with a need to define God in relation to the Satan residing in others. This is the demonisation of those we disagree with, which is also evident in social media vilification.
Real Suffering
The suffering expressed through religion is the genuine sigh of oppressed creatures. In Marxist terms, the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
In a world of poverty, of diminishing resources and human degradation the appeal of an afterlife is obvious. What the Christian far-right in the United States and elsewhere offer is the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, which involves a veneer of protection against the unbelievers. This leads to isolation of the righteous few in gated communities, segregating the chosen people from the disaster they have inflicted on others.
The pandemic has led to the recrudescence of a millenarian ethos and sense of doom that is creating a society not dissimilar to that found in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, enforced against men and women alike.
The philandering Donald Trump is merely a front man for larger interests, who control the puppet on the chain. He dances to the beat of the dark money of the Republican Party, appointing the Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court was his parting gift.
End of Days
Another hallmark of the present distorted religious influence of the neoliberal world order is the denial of climate change, and the employment of post-truth reasoning – the denial of objective facts underpinning the rule of law as Karl Popper saw it – to justify this.
The Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, in his simple and illuminating Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, closes his account, with a reflection on how centuries of discoveries affect an understanding of ourselves. While generally positive, one stark passage stands out for its relevance to the challenge of addressing climate change.
I believe our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think that we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilisation.
Carlo Rovelli
This exemplifies the difference between a man of science and objective facts, and those of a fundamentalist bent that place mankind atop the pyramid of Creation.
More terrifying than where Ravelli places us in the grand scheme is the end of days preacher who cannot countenance that we may indeed be just an irrelevant blip on this Earth, but instead sees the Earth as something created for us to plunder and exploit.
Cognisant of this threat, Noam Chomsky recently claimed that the Republican Party is the ‘most dangerous organization in world history’ He has deliberately corrected many interviewers who mistakenly stated that in fact he said it was the most dangerous organization in the world today.
Chomsky also mentioned in a BBC Newsnight interview that there has to be connection between the denial of science, and active attempts to undermine it, with the belief of nearly 40% of the American public that the Second Coming will occur by 2050.
Why would a deluded mind bother saving life and civilization, when it is prophesised that it will all be over soon? Christian End of Day’s logic, or lack thereof, is not so prevalent in agnostic Europe at present, but the breakdown of the social order through the austerity shock doctrine, and now the coup de grâce of the pandemic, leaves the continent exposed to those same forces, which may be articulated in an equally millenarian scientism that sees human beings as vectors of disease.
Loss of Meaning
In a 2004 essay Václav Havel foresaw much of what we now find in a piece called ‘What Communism Still Teaches Us,’ describing ‘supposed laws of the market and other invisible hands that direct our lives.’ There remains an abject lack of humanism in neoliberal politics and society, comparable in certain ways to Communist totalitarianism, not least in the brainwashing of the young through solipsistic social media.
With the loss of religious forms, however, many living in modern technocratic societies experience a loss of meaning, and even a moral void. The social structure of religions fostered close relationships and inculcated a sense of community, as well as charity, the protection of human dignity and a commitment to public service. The Bible injuncts kindness towards strangers, and to do unto others as you would wish them to do to you, which also derives from Aristotelian philosophy.
To rectify contemporary problem such as poverty and environmentaldegradation, undoubtedly we need to shift from a conception of ‘I’ to ‘we’ as Sacks argues.
In The Godless Gospel, Julian Baggini also calls for a form of religion shorn of hatred for our age, where we develop personal and social goods through deeds not pious words. Through this we may realise our best intentions and develop empathy and compassion, a commitment to personal humility and an obligation and commitment to the truth. Above all we should try and do as little harm as possible he asserts.
All of these are good values that Christianity may teach to those of a secular persuasion lacking in moral clarity.
Thus from a secular perspective, Jürgen Habermas understood how religion engenders social integration, and is the basis for communicative action. As far back as 1978 he argued, from an agnostic perspective, for the necessity of religious ideas to humanise society. Those of faith must learn to communicate reasonably, which means the renunciation of violence and extremism. We must learn to talk and communicate our differences, agreeing on facts to ground the rule of law.
Pope Francis
Pope Francis’s experiences in the barrios of Buenos Aires appears to have shaped an empathy towards those afflicted with extreme poverty and subjected to degradation. He preaches tolerance, engagement and social and economic justice. This has largely been stripped of the condemnation of sexuality and sexual expression evident in his predecessor John Paul II.
Let us hope the liberation theology that is intrinsic in Francis’s message is not tainted by the dark money of the Vatican, and he does not go the way of John Paul I, or ‘God’s Banker’ Roberto Calvi, found hanging from Blackfriars bridge in 1982, just outside the site of my Chambers.
Christian socialism is a potentially vital force if it reflects the values of what Philip Pullman calls that great man Jesus, but not the values, as he equally presents, of that scoundrel Jesus Christ. This latter is a distortion of New Testament values, dedicated to the accumulation of capital, a lack of compassion and political manipulation.
If inequality grows any further – amid ever-greater accumulations of wealth – then neoliberalism may well give way to neo-feudalism. Viewed in this regard it is easier to understand the potential for an alliance between church and capital in subjugating the masses. The Book of Genesis sanctions man’s dominion over the earth which has led to a scorched earth approach towards environmental regulations that will ultimately impoverish us all. For too long Christianity has married the exchange of goods with the exchange of gods.
Scopes Trial
In parts of American Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is accorded equal weight and validity as Creationism in schools. Children are taught that the world was created by God the Almighty in the space of seven days.
It’s been a long time coming. In the Scopes Trial of 1925 – where a High School teacher was put on trial for teaching Darwinism – the legendary American attorney Darrow anticipated what happens when a society abandons reason altogether.
Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? In addition, tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. Soon you may ban books and newspapers. Then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we’ll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!
In a period of declining belief in a broad liberal education, and where the art-repeneur has taken over from true artists, there is a desperation for something to cling on to, whether Creationism, neoliberalism or even scientism. We are living in an age of pervasive ignorance, which can be traced to our putative higher educational institutions, where students are taught to believe and comply. Or as Foucault would have it, punishment is becoming internalized through control vectors.
Lost in all of this is the message of Christian socialists such as Pope Francis, Sacks, and even their ideological fellow-traveller Habermas. This is a form of Christian decency that reflects the needs of human beings battling for survival in an increasingly hostile environment, where adequate nutrition, shelter, health care, education, housing and even dignity are denied.
Thus organised religions appear to be experiencing an existential battle between the neoliberals and Christian socialists. Exclusionary family values that are a hallmark of religious neoliberalism conceal a corporate existence and controlled sexuality. Its tenets are designed to diminish any radicalisation among the young.
But let us hope a new-found empathy with the Wretched of the Earth can emerge, in Catholicism at least under Pope Francis, and perhaps other Protestant more tolerant faiths. This would reflect the moderation and human decency of public intellectuals in this series such as Jürgen Habermas, Albert Camus, George Orwell and Edmund Burke, all of whom in their own ways rejected the moral absolutes that lead to human degradation.
No Time to be Making Enemies
On his deathbeds the great Enlightenment intellectual Voltaire (1694-1778) was asked by a priest in attendance to renounce the devil. Voltaire considered this advice, but approaching the pearly gates he decided against doing so: ‘This is no time,’ he said, ‘to be making new enemies.’
At this stage in our history it is important to be open to all belief systems, including Christianity in spite of its diabolical history. Christianity, and other religions, must confront a dark past, but can provide moral guidance in the face of a culturally dominant neoliberal cost-benefit analysis of life. Dogmatic secularist should concede that there are lessons to be drawn from religions. These may help generate a genuine brotherhood and sisterhood among human beings to confront the real evil in this world.
Since the 1970s, the consistent presence of neoliberalism in politics alongside short, sharp bursts of neoconservatism have shaped our planet to a greater extent than any other ideologies. This has been to the detriment of all but a shrinking cast of billionaires that profit in periods of crisis, even during the pandemic. The prognosis is not good, even if the pandemic provides a porthole for the possibility of a realignment.
Distinct Ideologies
At one level, neoliberalism is extreme libertarianism, purged of its earlier socialist or anarchist underpinnings that were ultimately communitarian. Neoliberalism has had a tremendous influence on conservative thinking in recent times. Yet it is not conservatism in a traditional Burkean sense of conserving and preserving that which is good. Neoliberals do not advocate moderation, restraint, anti-extremism, perspective, nuance or that ill-defined word ‘balance,’ save in terms of conventional political rights such as liberty, privacy and freedom of movement.
Contemporary neoliberals are not supporters of little people, and in effect operate against the interests of the ordinary working person in the name of economies of scale or other workplace rationalisations. It is unbridled free market extremism, engendering a tragedy of the commons.
It did not begin this way. In its first iteration, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek warned against the excesses of socialism in The Road to Serfdom (1944). This was witnessed in Britain of the 1970’s with the three day working week, refuse on the streets, and the stranglehold of government by the unions. Many of Hayek’s points were valid, and I suspect he would be horrified at the political trajectory his ideas have taken. Similarly, Karly Marx was not responsible for and would have been horrified by Stalin.
The initial idea behind libertarianism was for a combination of unregulated laissez faire economics, and the legitimation of a hedonistic lifestyle through laws and social policies. I see nothing wrong with hedonism per se – or for tolerance of human frailties more generally – and indeed have spent much of my professional career as a barrister upholding the rights of an accused to due process.
Neoconservatism, on the other hand, is hardly even capitalist in outlook. It is really an offshoot of a more authoritarian leftism combined with a fundamentalist, morally self-righteous neocolonialism informed by ‘Christian’ values. It is associated in particular with the administrations of George W. Bush, with Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle its most prominent ideologues.
Left to right: Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush.
Many neoconservatives made an ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist left to the camp of American conservatism during the 1960s and 1970s, with its intellectual roots in the magazine Commentary, edited by Norman Podhoretz. But anti-Stalinist does not imply a respect for human rights or the rule of law; its followers’ ambitions were simply global rather than limited to a particular country, as was the case with Stalin’s approach.
Neoconservatism adopts the unregulated free market, but not libertarian permissiveness or due process or a respect for international law: the ends would justify any means. That is what makes it distinctly evil. It attracted money from Christian fundamentalist and the rapture movement and cohabited with authoritarian academics.
Thus, there is a world of difference between former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption, a defender of human rights and free markets, and Tony Blair, the UK’s foremost neoconservatives. Blair is a fundamentalist Christian, a self-deluding mediocrity, who exported a destabilising jihadist war based on an absurd world view and sold it as a humanitarian intervention. He cannot really be described as a socialist – although state bureaucracies expanded massively under his New Labour – but nor is he a genuine conservative. He is simply a telegenic opportunist who became drunk on power.
His neocon influencers were Bush and Irish-American pseudo intellectuals like Daniel Moynihan, who fused Christian jihadism with racist fundamentalism and veneration of a deregulated market. The worst of all possible worlds.
Neoliberal Permissiveness
While neoliberals cock a snoop at Christian fundamentalism, some perhaps even going so far as to oppose the war in Iraq, an inbuilt resistance to state intervention means neoliberals such as even Barack Obama, did nothing to heal the wounds, or address the causes of discontent in the developing world.
I suspect the neoliberal endorsement of liberties and indulgence has in one sense been counterproductive. It may have not started with bad intentions. All were in favour of lifestyle ‘choices’: gay and transgender rights, sexual freedoms and shifting the agenda of equality towards formal equality rather than substantive equality. This involved superficial gestures such as including sufficient mixed race women in boardrooms but keeping the cleaners in the poverty trap.
The gender equity and transgender lobby now often act in a sinister way, and represent a branch of neoconservative in all its puritanical absurdity. ‘No platforming’ esteemed academics like Germaine Greer steers young people into sexual confusion and away from political engagement. It is a disaster emanating from a preening devotion to political correctness.
The sponsorship of the gender equity agenda by corporate America negates the real human rights agenda. These companies do not tend to fund advocates of social and economic justice, including rights to housing, healthcare and a clean, safe and aesthetically pleasing environment.
The privatisation of healthcare and even the Bismarckean welfare state began largely under Nixon in the U.S., where neoliberalism first evolved. It was replaced by an insistence that people exercise personal and professional responsibility, which masked a dismantling of social supports.
‘Even Richard Nixon’s Got Soul’ (but not William F. Buckley)
Nixon, a more sympathetic figure in hindsight – at least by comparison with latter day Republicans – was forced into healthcare privatisation by lobby groups from the medical profession, bringing into being the anti-health care system of America, where in 2018 over 17% of the country’s resources devoted to healthcare, yet it has one of the lowest life expectancies in the OECD. Moreover, industry sponsors regularly renege on private health care entitlements, through the machinations of unscrupulous lawyers. The fact of having a health care plan in the U.S. is no guarantee it will pay out.
Nixon had his doubts and did not buy into the ideology wholesale, but by the time of Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 the neoliberals were firmly in the ascendancy, with disastrous consequences for Americans, as Reagan’s advisor David Stockman describes in The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed(1986).
A crucial neoliberal mastermind was William F. Buckley, the satanic ideologue of modern U.S. conservatism, who ostensibly venerated Edmund Burke, but subverted Burkean conservatism. Buckley helped establish the new philosophy of neoliberalism through texts such as God and Man in Yale (1953), and through his editorial of the Republican Party intellectual rag The National Review.
Buckley moved conservatism away from the spirit of Burke’s community of souls, towards naked self-interest. This has led to the undermining, and now the actual buying of the state apparatus by the corporatocracy. Thus, under Buckley’s stewardship conservatism mutated into a form of individualism tat undermined states.
Buckley’s brilliant rhetoric was only matched by his repulsive qualities as a human being. This is all-too-evident in the 2015 documentary Best of Enemies made about his media punditry alongside the almost equally contemptible Gore Vidal during the 1968 American election. Buckley had an enormous, understated, influence in moving the Republican Party, via Reagan, towards libertarianism, and the disaster capitalism now in vogue. Buckley in fact co-opted Russell Kirk, the Burkean conservative author of The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953) onto The National Review, seemingly in order to get him ‘on message.’
Yet the Republican Party and indeed much of the present Conservative party in the UK are not conservatives in the Burkean sense as aforementioned. They have become neoliberal fanatics, which is far from the origins of the paternalistic conservatism that emerged in Britain the late eighteenth century.
Why Edmund Burke Provides a Counterweight
Edmund Burke was a moderate conservative in the Benjamin Disraeli mould, who sought to preserve traditions he believed worth maintaining. His career was an idiosyncratic mixture of radicalism and abiding by conventions, and he believed in the desirability of change but not change for its own sake. Change should come about incrementally he believed, and with due regard to tradition; his antennae were attuned to unintended consequences.
Edmund Burke.
Contemporary neoliberalism has engendered a form of corporate fascism that mandates extreme conformity in working days that stretch into long evening. I doubt Burke would endorse its excesses. He believed in a form of market capitalism favouring small enterprise, as do I too. Burke was also anti-monopolist and would see dominant multinational firms, and perhaps the European Union, as anathema to the capitalism he favoured.
Neoliberalism should not therefore be equated with traditional conservatism. Indeed if Edmund Burke was around today he might pen a text entitled: Reflections on Imminent Social and Economic Breakdown!
Burke of course, unlike adherents of neoliberalism believed in the concept of a community, involving associative obligations and reciprocal interactions. A moral and networked community in other words. The neoliberal mentality, on the other hand, leads towards social atomisation and fragmentation, or as Margaret Thatcher famously put it: “There is no such thing as society only individuals.”
Thatcherism is contrary to the Burkean ethos. I suspect that in modern times Burke would be regarded as a Keynesian capitalist, which is precisely what Buckley was attacking in God and Man in Yale. Burke ideas also align with environmentalists as he had a sense of community as inter-generational:
Society becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
He held a defined sense of the public good that was not just where the dice landed in the casino capitalism of the market. Further, though a passionate advocate of rights and liberties he was also a passionate advocate of restraint and moderation. He believed that the extension of rights should not extend to untrammelled liberties and licentious anarchy.
Although a conservative in terms of his invocation of habit, tradition and social order, and also with his belief in institutional contribution and preservation – as well as measures of fiscal rectitude – he was, conversely, also its opponent of in other respects.
One drawback to Burke as an intellectual, in my view, was his devotion to religion. Born in Ireland to a Protestant father and Catholic mother, noxious Irish Catholicism shaped him, diminishing his contribution; although one cannot say that he had the religious zealotry of a neoconservative.
The Beginning of the End of History
The Bushman-Blairite wars were an exercise in duplicity in shocking breach of international law. There were no smoking guns or development of nuclear weaponry in Iraq. It was Christian jihadism led by a latter-day Crusaders, including telegenic Tony that most lightweight of British gentlemen.
Neoconservatism is a nefarious dysfunctional ideology that suits the interests of the powerful, which tragically became the consensus. A Dictionary of Received Ideas. There would be no comeuppance for Tony or George Dubya, who now blithely paints portraits of migrants, with all irony seemingly lost on him.
In Britain, Brexit may lead to the gradual dismantling of the Blairite welfare state, even after the Johnson health care crisis, with the chronic under-resourcing and deregulation of the NHS now laid bare by the pandemic. This applies to all other countries, Italy most obviously, which diverted resources from essential services under neoliberal austerity measures. Meanwhile we see America on the brink of anarchy and civil insurrection due to the triumph of these ideas with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, who is the symptom of a very deep malaise.
The combination of neoconservatism and neoliberalism is a far more deadly virus than Covid-19, which has simply exposed the soft underbelly of societies afflicted by its ravages. From a neoliberal point of view healthcare or a clean environment are not rights but entitlements and part of a libertarian agenda.
The lack of regulation of spiraling accommodation and rental costs in the US and elsewhere brings a situation where, for the vast majority, outright ownership of property is a myth. Ostensibly, high salaries are hoovered up in hyper-inflated rents and mortgages subject to repossessions by vulture funds.
The cost of living is prohibitive, and cramped accommodation makes the possibility of a decent family life almost impossible for most, engendering a dysfunctional humanity. Inequalities, short term contracts, and punishingly long working hours destroy mental health, decrease productivity and render family life – save for a privileged few – a thing of the past. The long-term effects on children are potentially catastrophic.
This leads to short-termism and prevents even a modicum of forward planning for most people, who must live from one pay cheque to the next.
Lacking objectivity and perspective, as we struggle for survival in subhuman working conditions that undermine the quality of life, decline arrives in increments. This leads to petty corruption and greed, in a dog-eat-dog universe where the elderly are replaced once they have outlived their usefulness. Their fate is increasingly to be place in decidedly uncaring privatized nursing homes, or spend their last moments on a trolley in an underfunded hospital.
Nozick the Great Ideologue of Neo-Liberalism
Anarchy, State, Utopia (1974) by Robert Nozick was a subversive reaction to John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice who had promoted a theory of economic justice. It became a neoliberal bible. Nozick suggested that government intervention, meaning taxation, beyond the enforcement of contracts and the control of crime is akin to slavery or theft. I own my body, he argues, so I therefore own everything my body produces, and if the state takes that which I produce away from me it enslaves me or – more elegantly – ‘socialism forbids consenting acts between capitalist adults.’
The egregious fault with his argument is that it does not follow that because you own your body you own everything you produce. Inequalities are inbuilt into capitalism as David Ricardo’s Labour Theory of Value demonstrated. It also does not allow for any understanding of the human condition, other than one informed by radically disaggregated and individualistic behaviour, devoid of co-operation and community.
At the time many thought that him daft, and that his ideas could not be implemented as they would lead to a socially dislocated society. It was even suggested that Anarchy, State; Utopia was an elebatorate joke, or part of an intellectual game. Indeed, Nozick was fond of scholarly conceits and subsequently wrote a book with a radically different thesis. So perhaps he did not take what he said seriously. Others did unfortunately.
The consequences have been economic collapse and surging inequality, the gradual destruction of the middle class, and the privatisation and diminution in healthcare as a right, as well as homelessness and mass evictions
The University of Chicago with its two highly placed judges in Easterbrook (dangling for a Supreme Court judgeship) and the truly nefarious ‘most cited’ legal scholar in the world Richard Posner, have also been responsible for much of the damage.
Here we have the perfect reductio ad absurdum: all of human activity is reduced to the wealth maximisation thesis. Thus rape arises out of scarcity of resources: it is expensive for men to purchase sex so we should have a de-regulated prostitution market according to Posner; or adoption should be de-regulated to deal with a competitive baby market where the product can be purchased by the consumer. Such nonsense is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729) in which he satirizes an earlier version of neoliberalism, with the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that it would serve the polity to kill excess babies for economic gain.
The Middle Way
Keynes fell out of fashion because of the stranglehold of unionism and the imposition of socialist dogma in the 1970s. This created ‘a market’ for the work of the Chicago School and trickledown economics characterised by fetishist privatisation, deregulation and the elimination of state subsidies. In the late 1970s a retreat by the state made some sense, but the correction turned into an ongoing campaign. The market may have seemed like a score counter that could be tamed for human purposes. No longer. It is the recipe for inequality
Naomi Klein in her bestseller The Shock Doctrine (2007) analyses the growth and development of neoliberalism across the world. She dubs the economic paradigm ‘disaster capitalism’, homing in on how these crises and others are used to justify further disaster prescriptions. She quotes Hayek’s disciple Milton Friedman:
Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.
Naomi Klein.
That is precisely where neoconservatism and neoliberalism coincide. Proto-neoconservatives remove the democratically elected Allende regime and replace him with Pinochet, before neo-liberal reforms open up the country for exploitation, washing their hands of any blood.
Yet all the best evidence indicates that stable growth occurs in Nordic and Middle European social democratic countries. There is a tangible link between Keynesian economics and sustainable redistributed growth. Neoliberalism does not generate sustainable growth, as opposed to wealth for the few, and does not provide for redistribution. In effect it is a recipe for diminished human welfare, less good for the greatest number.
Where Are We Now
The Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stieglitz famously described our present state of affairs as ‘Socialism for the rich capitalism for the poor’. And the new era of state and corporate feudal control and terror we have entered into will accentuate these trends. Thus during this pandemic some of the wealthiest individuals in the world have actually increased their wealth.
A return to the methodology of neoconservatism can be seen in the emergency legislation that has passed through the parliaments of U.K. and Ireland. In theory these are designed to confront an immediate emergency, but will become embedded, and spiral out of control just as we have with counter terrorism legislation. Enforcing self-isolation and ‘track and trace’ become new norms inflicted by neoconservatives and consented to by neoliberals, many of whom with notable exceptions such as Lord Sumption, forget their libertarian origins as long as the dosh keeps rolling in. Notably Tony Blair is awake to new opportunities.
Tony Blair: If you're not able to test significantly when trying to get large numbers of people back into a normal routine, you're going to be enormously inhibited in how you handle the disease.
— Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (@InstituteGC) August 17, 2020
The very phrase ‘social isolation’ is problematic and euphemistic – like ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘military intelligence,’ a contradiction in terms. In fact self-isolation suits a silo bubble of social atomisation and dealing with people or problems one by one by state authorities. We risk a descent into a new barbarism not least due to the pernicious effects of decades of privatization.
The Indian activist Arundhati Roy demonstrates how neoliberalism and environmental damage have gone hand-in-glove in her book Capitalism: a Ghost Story (Verso 2014). There are the mass evictions in India of ‘surplus population’ (a truly evil capitalism coining). The street vendors, rickshaw riders, the small shops and business people, and not least the suicide of 250,000 farmers.
This forced displacement, often from rural areas to cities, augments the channelling of wealth towards the one percent plutocracy controlling India.
It has been suggested by John Gray and Roy herself that the pandemic may lead to a rethink. I fear not. In fact, rather than becoming, as Roy puts it, a porthole to a sustainable and fair existence for all, I fear increased atomization, semi-permanent social distancing, diminishing social supports and the insidious undermining of civil liberties, supported by a scared and soma-induced population.
We are now entering an age of corporate feudalism and of mercantile state control with sub Malthusian ideas gaining traction. It is an age of extremism nourished by religious fundamentalism. It is a time for the convergence of Burkean conservatism with Habermasean moderate socialism to implement ideas informed by traditions of decency and the green agenda. It is a time for sustainable personal and societal living to be realised.
