Nobody Mention the Culture War
At the Guardian (where else?) Tony Blair weighs in on the England he helped to create. His headline and subhead is a case of “one of these things is not like the other:”
Blaming a moral decline for the riots makes good headlines but bad policy
Talk of a general malaise is misguided. The country’s problems stem from too many dysfunctional households
But what makes “too many dysfunctional households” — or at the very least, helps to make more of them than would have existed otherwise? Janet Daley of the London Telegraph knows. “The Left-liberal camp is in overdrive in its campaign to rewrite history (or, in its own vocabulary, to alter consciousness),” Daley writes, and you can include the equivocation by Tony Blair or the Guardian’s copy editor to the list, “you did not see thousands of jubilant thugs rampaging through the streets, destroying livelihoods and property for the sheer exultant joy of it.”
In contrast, Daley adds, “What real people know – and have known for quite a long time – is that the great tacit agreement which once held civic life together has been deliberately blown apart:”
There was a time within living memory when all reasonable grown-ups were considered to be on the same side. Parents, teachers, police, judges, politicians – decent citizens of every station and calling – formed an unspoken confederacy to uphold standards of behaviour within their own communities. But their shared values and expectations about human conduct were systematically undermined by a post-Sixties political ideology that preached wholesale disrespect for authority, and legitimised anti-social activity in the name of protest.
What real people saw on their television screens this fateful summer seemed to them to be the final vindication of their instinctive judgment: they may have been shocked but, on some level at least, they were not surprised that it had come to this. What else were these terrible events but the definitive disproof of a doctrine that had subverted adult authority in all its official and unofficial forms?
That doctrine goes back a long way. In fact, the politics of the Sixties were just a late incarnation of an 18th-century philosophy. We have Jean-Jacques Rousseau to thank for the basic principle that men are born good and will only behave badly if they are corrupted by authority and repressive institutions: that we need only liberate them from those false limitations and their natural moral instincts will come to the fore.
So hugely influential was this view in education and social policy that it almost succeeded in extinguishing the truths that arise from experience: people (especially young ones) will behave badly just because they can, because no one is stopping them, or has ever inculcated in them the conscientious discipline that would make them stop themselves.
The capacity for self-control, and the willingness to suppress one’s innate selfishness or cruelty, is something that adults must consciously instil in children and reinforce in other adults by their attitudes to them. The indispensable tools of social stigma and moral judgment that communities used to have at their disposal for this purpose have been stripped away, and the result – the fearless defiance of helpless authority – is what we saw in its terrifying logical conclusion on the streets. That is what real people know: that they were right all along.
When Mark Steyn’s new book came out, I described its literary stylings and doomsday forecast as a combination of Oswald Spengler*, the author of the influential Weimar-era tome, The Decline of the West mated to the riffing of the pioneering wordplay-obsessed comedian Mort Sahl. Tony Blair seems to want to get into the comedy game himself by adding John Cleese and a slight paraphrase of a classic episode of Fawlty Towers to the equation: nobody mention the culture war.
One interesting thing about progressives is that self-awareness is never a big part of their intellectual tool kit. They leave places like California and Massachusetts and demand the same policies that ruined their old homes be established in their new ones. They preach about “civility” in the same breath that they’re calling you an idiot and fantasizing about how the world would improve if you were dead. They lecture about pollution and carbon-spewing from their private jets while their limos sit idling at the airport. They rail about the need to raise taxes while docking their yachts in other states to avoid taxes. It is beyond simple hypocrisy, it’s so prevalent and entrenched it must be a hard-wired mental defect like psychopathy. Progressive politics and lack of self-awareness are likely two facets of the same illness.
It’s called Hegelian Dialectic…
or double-think…
depends on who is speaking.
They… demand the same policies that ruined their old homes be established in their new ones.
Yup, the great influx of immigrants from outside California – starting with the Dust Bowl-era migrants characterized by John Steinbeck and continuing for decades afterward – ruined the once-Golden State. Now their spawn are returning to the loser states from which their ancestors fled. The fault, dear Bucky, is not in California but in yourselves.
The disintegration of any advanced society always comes about as a result of that society developing a lack of confidence or sense that their society is worthwhile. For the purist progressive any moral failing of a society, no matter how far superior it may be to the primitive society, is reason to work actively to destroy that society.
Rousseau was an idiot and a libertine. But his ideas are very attractive to those without a sense of proportion, who only want change, even if it means destroying civilization and replacing it with barbarism.
To the progressive, the savage is far superior to Homo Modernus.
Psychopathy?
It’s worse than that: it’s demonic. Not red spandex and a forked tale, but a – no, THE “will to power.”
’Tis the Last Judgment’s fire must cure this place,
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.”
Come to think of it – for those of you of an evangelical mindset – it suddenly strikes me that these remarks by St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians:
“…be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled … that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped;”
…fit Rousseau beautifully, especially since his opinion of himself was certainly one of self-worship and a conviction of unique superiority; with the added disintegration of the Judeo-Christian infrastructure having so very many of his fingerprints all over it.
“In an important sense, the British Empire’s strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.”
Funny, that: I long ago stopped believing in liberals. And now strongly oppose ever lifting a finger to protect them from harm. Let them save themselves or die. They are not worth the life of one patriot.
We need to remember that Churchill as Interior Minister in WWI was indeed instrumental in imposing a police state on the UK. This was a response to the Irish unrest and to German sabotage.
Yes, he was very effective in that role.
Any reason to blame socialism and doing good for others less fortunate. Had this happened under Bush, Bachmann, Perry or Palin, would you blame, idiocy and capitalism. NOPE!
If Bush, Bachmann, Perry or Palin decided to simultaneously be prime minister of England, or the Mayor of London, I’d be pretty tough on them.
I know you’re a troll, but I’ll take the bait.
How have you or the policies you nominally endorse “don(e) good for the less fortunate?” You’ve wrecked their family structure, chased away the only kinds of unskilled work where they could’ve built a life through anti-industrial policy, destroyed the value of education, and now your unwillingness to hold people to a standard of conduct has left their communities in looted ruins. You’ve denied them every tool for advancement except taking; taking from the taxpayer and when possible, taking from each other.
At what point do you stop and ask about what you’ve accomplished, instead of what happens to assuage your conscience?
To ascribe blame for this kind of societal meltdown solely with the administration currently in power betrays a simple mind. To associate riots in London with GOP policies would be embarrassingly Amero-centric for any true Traveller (surely you could have made a Thatcher reference SOMEWHERE). To project that thinking on the authors of this article and related comments indicates an inability, or unwillingness, to follow the conversation.
It seems we have encountered an amateur and/or the young.
Regardless, the effect we are discussing isn’t the result of any single policy or administration, but the cumulative effect of society’s trajectory for the past decades. Surely you would acknowledge that our “progression” as a people has continued in a generally leftward direction throughout a series of administrations. I would be surprised were you to disagree with the idea that we conservatives are “backward thinking” and want to “roll back the clock” on all of your subversively empowering change. The resulting chickens of this cultural shift are, dare I say, coming home to roost.
Although we would cite idiocy, you are correct when you write that, were this to happen “under Bush, Bachmann, Perry or Palin” we wouldn’t blame capitalism. Of course we wouldn’t blame capitalism for capitalism is not the cause. Our reasoning and our message remain consistent despite immediate political convenience.
This isn’t “any reason” to blame socialism, it’s the same reason we who stand astride history have consistently cited throughout the debate. Your well-intentioned do-gooderism is somewhat akin to the oafish bumbling of a large dog: charming and laughable, but often smelly and ultimately destructive.
You don’t do good, you do bad. You place yourself in a morally superior position as arbiters of whom is more deserving of what material goods, despite your insistence that morality is artificial and money is meaningless (or vice versa). You pass sweeping judgments about entire swathes of society. (“Green jobs good, Oil jobs baaaaaaed!”) Anyone who disagrees with your labeling is branded an immoral capitalist and then justifiably mistreated.
Your ideas are bad, they result in cultural and societal decay. Your policies create a government-backed system of enablers for anti-social behavior. Eventually the bonds of society become so frayed that civilizations falls to barbarism, the type of situation wherein children burn down privately owned drugstores in order to “show the rich people” they can “do what they want”.
You justify the idea that, simply by existing, one person deserves the fruits of another person’s labor. You entrench envy as a moral high ground. The “unfortunate” are morally superior to the fat cats BECAUSE they are unfortunate (the rich people probably stole the money anyway). This becomes justification for taking revenge against the immoral class, so it’s not only okay to loot and pillage, it’s a moral imperative.
In case you couldn’t follow:
your policies => blame “evil” groups(rich people) & exalt anti-social behavior (do what you want) => justified barbarism (riots)
We’ve been saying this for a while. The fact you choose to ignore our consistent predictions and then blame us for being proven out is frustratingly repetitive. Ignorance may be bliss, but it makes for depressing history books.
Well, you just tipped me over into ordering Steyn’s book which I may have been able to avoid buying for another week or two. So I should say, “Thanks.”
If you ordered it though our Amazon link, thank you. As I said before, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll kiss western civilization goodbye.