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.
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