Cultural Lag, Cultural Collapse, and Cultural Hope

Cultural Lag

Cultural lag is that phenomenon summed up by the old chestnut that “Politics is downstream from culture”. Indeed, it goes further: “Culture is downstream from culture”! “Culture” today was seeded 50 years ago and 80 years ago and 230 year ago and so forth. What is bred in the bone comes out in the flesh, yes – but a child still takes many years to grow to maturity!

This fact – that culture is a process of development, not an event, and that it involves strengthening and diminishing tendencies, not simple binaries of “then” and “now” – is very useful to understand. For instance:

How could Kirk be so prophetic, some 30 years ago, of our very moment when he predicted “that perfect freedom of expression, including street demonstrations by militant factions, would be not merely guaranteed, but encouraged” and the demands of such factions would include “ordinary police directed by citizens’ committees” and “that every demand for more abundant rights be more promptly satisfied”? Why have conservatives been complaining about the same doomsday since 1789, even though (we are told) it never comes? Well, it is in the first line of Dawson’s (awesomely) prophetic Judgement of the Nations: “A hundred years is a relatively short period.” Combine this with the title of Weaver’s most famous book – on cultural development! – “Ideas Have Consequences”. Ideas have consequences – over time.

The Jacobins, spearheaded intellectually by Paine, sought in 1792 to flatten out all question of economic distinction based on background. The idea – never executed, though first Brisotte and then Robespierre were – was to remove all inheritance of property and instead grant every citoyen a basic inheritance (call it a Universal Basic Inheritance) of land and cash upon their attaining majority. The surging idea of UBI is not new, even if it takes a different, more restrictive form (monthly cash payments, not property) and claims to address different problems (automation and the inequality of globalised wealth). It is much closer to success now than in 1792. In general, abstract rage against inequality of any kind now is the development of the tendency of the Revolution. Do consider how the Revolution worked out for its architects.

Marx, is, then, a development of that tendency; so is Mao. Gramsci, in many ways the brightest of the Marxians, was a descendant in the 1930s of Condorcet and Robespierre and Marx, and a junior contemporary of Mao (though I gather Gramsci was more decent than any of those bigots, fantasists, and megalomaniacs). Gramsci’s child, Hegemonic Marxism – the capture of the ridges and bulwarks of cultural production, that is, education and media – was in seed during 1968. Now, the soixant-huitards are in charge and their more radical children demand their revolution be completed. It is all a development of a tendency, which may sometimes burst violently into public consciousness like ivy breaching a window seal, but has been growing apace the whole time.

We are seeing the full fruit of ideas in motion over the course of centuries. We may see the result as triumph or disaster, but it is not sudden.

Cultural Collapse

Again, whether one sees present events as triumph or disaster, it is undeniably a collapse. It is not a sudden collapse, to reiterate the previous point; one can look to the recurrent metaphysical despair of the Adams dynasty (as Kirk does in The Conservative Mind) over 130 years for precedent. Slow-motion it may be, but it is a collapse, and the avalanche is quicker as it gains momentum further down the hill. (It is why the bottom of the slippery slope comes up so quickly.)

The facade of Western culture – long rotted out – is finally being torn down. It is being torn down literally – Rhodes must fall! – and metaphorically, as elites are exposed as fundamentally in agreement with the revolutionaries as to the objectives, disagreeing only on means and timing. There is nothing more pathetically amusing than to hear, say, a lawyer or University professor or actress denounce the “unjust elites” for their oppression of ethnic or social minorities. Those lawyers and professors and performers already are elites, and all the other elites agree with them! It is a deaf self-denunciation, with each monied atabeg and beylik shouting more loudly than the previous just how wicked they are – and that is why they ought to be listened to and trusted with revolutionary power.

That the whole matter has been long in the growing is clear from the worldwide spark – a horrid murder by a figure of authority, with racial overtones and details unique to the nation in which it happened. Of course it is manifestly absurd to cheaply translate the problem of race in America to the United Kingdom (where white working-class boys have the worst outcomes by many measures) or France and Belgium (where the racial issues are quite different on the whole). That does not mean there are no issues surrounding race in the UK or France or Belgium – there are! – but destructive riots and 8 minute 46 second religious rituals are not truly inspired by events in America. They are a cultural tendency – a cultural collapse – come to rotten fruition.

You may enjoy the fruit, as perverse as that may be, and you may gladly anticipate what will grow next (or rather, has been growing). This may be a positive development. But we must recognize that the prevalent cultural lag in the West has led to a clear cultural collapse. There is no denying the collapse – no serious resistance can be found amongst those in power across several nations, merely anxious admonitory pleadings. Collapses are sanguinary and sad things, even if we are glad for them; the demolitioned tower block may have been hideous, but is there not poignancy in its fall?

The lesson we must learn from this – aside from not being too giddy at the destruction of a great building and institution, no matter how deeply we might have opposed its activities – is that though there may be a lag of centuries for ideas to have consequences, consequences they will have. A hundred years is a very short time, all told.           

Cultural Hope

Philosophical conservatives tend to pessimism. The Marquess of Salisbury is eminently quotable, and even more so when you add the apocryphal items, such as the following: “Change? Change? Aren’t things bad enough as they are?” Things are bad, have been getting worse, and can only get worse. To many conservatives, that is the mantra. The only duty of the conservative in public life is to squeeze the brakes as hard as possible, so that our descent from the Golden Age is slowed. It cannot be stopped.

This is, I think, a pagan pessimism, uncorrected by its proper companion, the Christian idea of ascent. Unrestrained progressivism has a secularised Christian optimism; unrestrained conservatism has a half-christianised Pagan nihilism. Chesterton sums it up well: “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”

The balanced conservative recalls other words of Chesterton’s, put into King Alfred the Great’s mouth, as that luminary warns the pagans of their doom:

"That though you hunt the Christian man

          Like a hare on the hill-side,

          The hare has still more heart to run

          Than you have heart to ride.”

Yes, the revolution is here, but its very arrival gives cause for hope. If revolutionary vanguards really can peacefully capture and transmute all high-status modes of cultural transmission, can that not happen again, but reversed? If the abolition of ordered liberty really can happen if it is willing to wait 230 years – like some slow canker, or the erosion of cliffs – can ordered liberty not plant seeds now to renew the orchard in many years’ time?

Once before Western civilization has gone down to near-ruin, with incalculable beauty and knowledge lost to the ravages of the fall of the Empire. As Lord Clark put it, “we got through by the skin of our teeth”. It is in this context of disaster and cultural survival, compared to our own, that MacIntyre prophesied the arrival of “another – doubtless very different – St Benedict”. Then, St Benedict and others gathered the breeding pairs of Classical culture on to a chronal ark to cross a tempestuous ocean. They believed in the concept of Stability so deeply that they swore to God to observe a perpetual vow of Stability, even as their world seemed to dissolve daily around them.

The monks of Lindisfarne and Iona illustrated manuscripts whilst harried by always-triumphant pagan raiders, burners of books and buildings; they carried the incorrupt corpse of St Cuthbert around for decades, waiting patiently for the day where he might be planted, both as seed for his own resurrection, but also the flowering of the Christian faith. His brethren had more heart to run than the pagan had to ride! His burying place – Durham Cathedral – shot up as a lithic sequoia amidst wooden huts in an isolated, savage corner of Europe. Temporarily inhabited by an apostate institution, the stone abides as a promise. It may take 300 or 500 years, but if you carry forward the flame, civilisation will come again.

Are conservatives supposed to be unmanned in the face of the baying mobs of iconoclasts, who even now in America drag down statues of men and women who fought (and died) for the cause of freedom the maniacs claim to own?  Are our bowels to turn to water because the universities ruthlessly pursue those of civilised conviction from their ranks? Do we leave the cultural field in the possession of the purveyors of pornography? These might sound like a hideous strength arrayed against us, unconquerable, but where the permanent-progressive can only ever live and value the solitary moment they inhabit, the conservative is aided by the shades of the past – “the communication // Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living” – and inspired by the vision of great-grandchildren, both his and his neighbour’s. If we do nothing now, they will have tares for a culture; if we plant now, they will have a patrimony, which they will tend in their turn, til eventually, the orchard blooms again.

What is the Community in Communitarianism?

Communitarianism is on the rise in chatterati circles. Think Blue Labour, or Red Toryism – think “a Britain that works for everyone” and the belief that we need better, stronger communities. Communitarianism neither exalts gross economic power or “social justice” over the basic priority of social stability and connectedness.

I suspect, by some measure, 80% of people in Britain are “communitarians”. But the question is “which measure?”. What does communitarianism mean, in practice? Classical liberal critic Kristian Niemitz of the IEA sees it as an empty, reactive fad that is only right when it is self-evident: “Communitarianism is the pretence that trivial clichés are profound wisdoms, and that an unwillingness to engage with economic arguments makes you an especially highbrow thinker.” (https://iea.org.uk/communitarianism-the-art-of-passing-off-trivial-cliches-as-profound-wisdoms/) (I note here with wry amusement that Kristian’s main personal target, when he sounds off about this on Twitter, is an obscure mental health nurse going by “Post-Liberal Pete”.)

So what sort of material policies do “communitarians” want? Well, it’s easier to find bad (or at least unpopular) policies than it is to articulate them positively. Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s top advisor as PM, is a communitarian – and is best known by most of us for the “dementia tax”. That sought to put a duty of financial care for the elderly on families rather than the taxpayer; it also probably lost the Tories several seats in 2017.

Again, the modern Social Democratic Party (SDP) is communitarian. It has bright and sensitive minds in the mix. One of its banner policies on community AND the environment is opposition, whether by legal sanction or otherwise, to non-stun slaughter. You know – halal and kosher slaughter. Though there is a gloss about animal rights on that (poorly evidenced and largely debunked by, amongst others, my friend James Mendehlson – see e.g. https://largebluefootballs.wordpress.com/2019/11/20/how-the-sdp-still-discriminates-against-jews-and-muslims/), it is chiefly aimed at the spread of unlabelled halal meats. This is plainly considered an infiltration by an alien culture or community. Of course, were kosher and halal to be banned here, every faithful kosher Jew would either have to import kosher meat (if allowed) or...leave Britain. Bloodless pogroms via Stena Line. Excellent neighbourliness there.

Well, if directly levying the families of those in care homes aids in building community, let’s do it. If banning kosher does, sure, sounds good. But we’ve gotten to the sticking place here: which community? Whose? And who gets to define it?

Communitarianism requires a community whose values and health it desires to uphold. How on earth is this possible in a pluralistic society? And – bearing in mind the law of unintended consequences – how do communitarians cultivate their community’s health by law without accidentally chopping healthy parts off?

I suppose in one sense I think the task is an impossible one. Communitarians identify society as atomised and drifting apart – and that is what may be fatal to their project. Kristian Niemitiz, and many others who do care about community, ultimately value personal choice over community stability. If you want to be part of a stable community, feel free to make the economically disadvantageous choices necessary – but don’t make anyone else stay. But long-term stability requires social pressure – which such a liberal emphasis disbars.

In parallel, but on the other flank, the “social justice” crowd will point out that the community implied by the communitarians – even if stripped of strange policies like the ones about banning or labelling kosher – is exclusive, and claim that its historical forerunners did awful things in the name of community cohesion. (A pertinent example – look at all those statues of community heroes who now seem to us have to believed or done evil things!) Whether fair or not, this is salient. Community implies “in” and “out”, by one metric or another. Who gets to decide which metric? (Incidentally, the post-Marxian bunch also have their metric of “in” and “out”; cancel culture is precisely about that.)

There are, I think, communitarianisms – plural. There are different visions within this part of the “post-liberal” movement. One emphasizes “white Anglo-Saxon” norms; another emphasizes linguistic or religious uniformity; another pushes something else. The many communitarianisms are not fully compatible: one that sees food traditions (an exceptionally important locus of community, historically) as paramount will tend to exclude Jews and Muslims – but a vision that emphasizes religious observance as a base for community cohesion, or that looks to the British tradition of respecting privacy, will find that a frankly appalling prospect. Without explicit reliance on religious or some other objective morality, none of these can be said to be “the best” community for us to support.

This tension is why, I think, “civic nationalism” appeals to many of those attracted to communitarianism. The emphasis becomes that which is shared in the present and historically by all Britons – legal and constitutional norms and values, an implicit social conservatism with explicit guarantees of personal freedom. The trouble here, though, is that precisely because it moves away from defining “community”, civic nationalism ends up being a blank slate of a different kind. Kristian Niemitz can still question on what basis he is required to surrender economic mobility; the post-Marxians can still dismiss the whole project as imperialist. The civic nationalist ends up with little in the way of set policy, because one has dodged the core question – which sort of civis? Which nation? This is the undoubted advantage of the “halal slaughter is weird and so are their beards” lot – there is, at least, a clear definition in play, and a clear argument why it must be enforced.

For those of us with philosophically conservative leanings, or with strong religious conviction, this may be disheartening (though I remind my religious readers that “My God is in the Heavens; He does whatever He pleases”). The horse of Cultural Uniformity has bolted, released by those clandestine lovers, Laissez-Faire and the Cultural Left. The high price of putting the horse back in the stable is one that communitarians – a pretty soft-hearted bunch on the whole – will not be willing to pay.

Of course, when at such a fulcrum moment as we are – where anything might happen, any project or ideology rise to supremacy from nowhere – it may be that a faction triumphs which grounds itself upon a particular religion or community. I doubt this faction will talk or act much like the present notable communitarians – mostly diffident and wonkish, middle-class and softly spoken. The critics of communitarianism may end up wishing it had successfully defined a singular “community” for us all to share.

Why Private Property Is A Social Good

One key component of Western society is very widely questioned in theory (though scarcely ever abandoned in fact by its doubters): private property. What are the defences of it? There are really two main forms, stemming from ultimately incompatible philosophies.

The first is that, essentially, everyone must go their own way, and has the innate natural right to make what wealth they can. Everyone is entirely responsible for ill conditions in their life. States exist and protect private property out of a compact between those who have earned their way – who give up some rights of aggression against each other and the weak to protect their property. This is fundamentally a Hobbesian view of the *purpose* of the state, though in other respects this view may prefer a very limited state.

I do not intend to defend this view, based as it is upon force, greed, and a self-serving view of human agency.

The conservative defence of disseminated private property – “several property”, as Burke put it – has different versions too, depending upon how property is expected to be spread. Chesterton, for instance, wanted “not fewer, but more capitalists” – with property much more widely distributed. The Agrarians aimed more at concentrations of private property in the hands of gentry, in which the wider community participated by right. I will not distinguish between these forms, or others, below. They are different means to the same ends.

The essence of the conservative defence is (at least) fourfold:

1.      Several property bonds landowner and dependents to the land – they have a necessary investment in it, and an incentive to care for it. “Land” here means not simply woods or field – though there is a strong strand of eco-conservatism which elevates care for the land – but also the aesthetics of property, good neighbourliness, and so forth. This bond to land, property, and community is the greatest of temporal adhesives for social order. A property-owning people are a settled people.

2.      Several property offers a dignified field where people may pursue proper human ends. I do not mean “pursue wealth and pleasure” – I mean ownership allows greater creative, taming efforts than renting. The renter calls the landlord to fix the cooker and paint the living room – the owner takes responsibility themselves, and in so doing tames disorder both within and without themselves.

3.      Several property locates ownership with the (potentially extended) family/household, rather than inorganic institutions such as the state. This is proper – the primary duties of care for creation and for neighbour fall first upon the individual and then their family, prior to the state’s involvement.

4.      Several property provides a degree of independence to its owners, and therefore provides a stable brake against the arbitrary power of the state. The most effective brake on state tyranny has never been the raw power of the people – indeed, the worst state abuses have been accomplished by that very power. The most effective brake on tyranny is disseminated private property, allowing many individuals and households to make decisions and hold opinions without reference to the state’s beneficence. A family which owns a business and a house is much more independent of the state, and so more prone to oppose its excesses, than a family which owns neither and is dependent on state support.

Several property lays responsibility on owners, provides a sphere for the pursuit of our proper ends, emphasizes the primacy of the family over other social units, and it serves as a brake on the tyranny of the state. It is an undeniable social good, and the basis of every functioning state in history that valued private liberty. The destruction of private property works the opposite effect – it engenders irresponsibility, stymies the pursuit of human flourishing, undermines the family, and strengthens the state. Any who trivialise the destruction of private property out of supposed concern for the oppressed demonstrate a misanthropy that undermines all claims they make to humanitarianism.

As a postscript, it is worth noting that where private property seems to break down social cohesion and peace – when rentier classes are created, when large numbers of workers are alienated from both property and labour, and so forth – conservative political philosophy does not see these as trivial costs of a wider ideological project. Rather, the philosophical conservative opposes these innovations of liberalism and seeks to ameliorate them in favour of those so alienated.

Three Sentences on why all Politics are Integralist

Catholic Integralism is the thesis that the proper end of politics is the securing of mankind’s proper, spiritual, eternal ends – and that therefore the temporal authority (government) must be subordinated to the spiritual authority (church).

All political beliefs (silently or explicitly) agree, whether the proper end is Millian individual-actualisation or Marxist utopia or anything else - with their theorists the alternative Bishops.

Every political view, therefore, is Integralist – the only decision to make is which religion (Liberalism, Socialism, Calvinism, Catholicism, etc) integrates the temporal and spiritual spheres.