Against the Year Zero Mindset and Reset
A culture is rooted and organic, forged through time and experience and maintained by warm, affective ties and loyalties. The treasures of a time and place are not the physical artefacts that we can see and touch – the art and architecture, the statues, the crowns and jewels – the physical things that may be quantified, commodified, and hoarded – but experiences honed into traditions, striking deep roots in the land and in the hearts of the people who live in time and place. This is our true inheritance, our birthright as a people, bound up with the lives of all who came before us, some remembered, many more long forgotten, their experiences absorbed into our identities and characters. To know who you are is to know the where and when of your emergence and existence and how our distinctive experiences are woven together as one through communities of practice, habit, and character over the passage of time. Enduring change is one that has roots; the deeper the roots, the sweeter the fruits – and the more secure the freedoms. Human beings are not discrete self-possessing, self-interested entities but attached beings. More than social beings, human beings are familial beings whose flourishing is based on the wealth of connection and loyalty to one another. The health and happiness of human beings requires extensive social and emotional support and stability running throughout the culture. With division comes disease as a dis-at-ease. A house divided cannot stand: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.” (Matthew 12: 25). Those who would seek to engineer or impose radical change know the truth of Jesus' words, and actively seek to divide, desocialise, demoralize, and dehistoricize human beings, uprooting them to render them pliable and manipulable. The engineers' view is one based on things and persons as mere inorganic, inert matter to be moulded whichever way to fit pre-determined ends, the world as a tabula rasa, a blank sheet upon which to write one's designs and desires.
'As long as family feeling is kept alive, the opponent of oppression is never alone.' (Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in Ferdinand Mount, The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage, New York, Free Press, 1992).
That 'family feeling' is something that is kept alive in a culture, history as spirit made flesh in the living, breathing organic matter of which we are all part, the embodiment of the Burkean partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn:
“Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts, for objects of mere occasional interest, may be dissolved at pleasure; but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco…. It is 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.”
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), pp. 136, 192-93.
“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle … of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love of our country and to mankind."
Burke
Change in these terms should be no cause for sadness and lamentation at loss for the reason that when considered properly as a continuum and connection over time, nothing is ever actually lost but is instead absorbed into a living and enabling tradition. What is raw and painful is a self-inflicted loss, a deliberate and engineered dispossession that discards our precious inheritance to leave us with what Erich Heller described as 'the disinherited mind.' It is wise to always be mindful of the Burkean partnership that unites past, present, and future generations and to thereby keep family feeling alive in our habits and in our hearts. Should we be able to do that we would lose the fear and dread of the future that condemns us to idle lamentation for a lost past and disappearing present.
Fear and dread of the future are understandable emotions on the part of people living in the whirlwind of modernity's permanent revolution. Marx and Engels described the condition perfectly in the Communist Manifesto:
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Allow me to make a provocative claim (in the interests of waking people from their dogmatic slumbers). The great enemy of conservatism is not the communism that conservatives obsess over – Marx himself was a critic of 'the abstraction of the political state' and argued for a social self-government over against a centrally organised top-down state control, which he demonstrated to be the necessary counterpart of the rise of capital. The great enemy of conservatism is the capital system and the globalisation of capitalist relations giving a 'a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.' Marx refers to the 'need of a constantly expanding market for its products' causing the capital system to extend its power 'over the entire surface of the globe,' nestling and establishing connexions 'everywhere,' drawing the national ground from under the feet of industry and all other place-bound human connection. The result is a global war of all against all, Hobbes writ large: 'all old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.' (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, chapter 1).
Contemporary conservatives who are inclined to see the machinations of 'globalism' everywhere are seeing everything on the surface and nothing in the depths. Behind this globalism is the constant revolutionising of production driven by capital's expansionary drive and dynamic, now under the corporate form. Those conservatives who are quick to identify their old enemy of socialism here are missing their target by a very wide mark, leaving it free to carry on uprooting all that stands in its way, unfettered in being unrecognized. Fighting the wrong enemy is a certain way of ensuring that the real enemy prevails, destroying all that you hold dear. Marx and Engels continue:
In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.
That's the socio-economic driver behind the 'globalism' which is currently striking terror in conservative minds. Marx sought to identify this dynamic in order to uproot it, supplanting the state and capital forms with truly social forms. Translated in the conservative idiom, Marx's communism emerges as an attempt to re-root a now globally interconnected humanity in places that are their own. Instead, the capital system has continued to sever individuals from their moorings and bearings, casting them adrift upon the indifferent sea of moral and social uncertainty.
Rooting individuals in time and place runs against the 'constant revolutionising' which characterizes the global capital system. Both conservatives and socialists stand on common ground here. Against them are the 'progressives,' with their eyes fixed forever on the future, always looked to cut the ground from under people in the present. 'Progressives' are in favour of 'change' and 'modernization,' in making everything 'relevant' in those terms. These terms are vacuous, self-referential and self-validating, utterly lacking in a set of values or standards that stand outside of the exigencies and imperatives of 'the times.' They are of a piece with the 'constant revolutionising' of the age of capitalist modernity, an age in which everything is to be 'modernized' and made 'relevant' in accordance with the imperatives of money and power within the prevailing corporate form. As Marx and Engels warned, nothing from the past has any place in the future and must be absorbed into the expansionary drive or simply extinguished. Words such as 'change,' 'modernization,' and 'progress' are invested with a normative weight that they don't possess. These terms are are devoid of substantive content and merely describe the endless revolutionizing of people, place, and production we see around us, without identifying its drivers let alone justifying them. They perfectly describe the rootless, meaningless, nihilistic character of the modern world in which change is justified for the sake of change or, more accurately, accumulation for the sake of accumulation. When conservatives can pluck up the political courage to acknowledge the force of Marx's socialist critique, and when, in turn, socialists can pluck up the political courage to acknowledge that their concern for justice, order, community, and connection can only be secured by recovering a sense of the transcendent, the proximal, and the familial, then we may have a chance of checking the forces of diremption, even reversing them. In his book Parliamentary Socialism, Ralph Miliband showed how justifications of 'change' and 'modernization' served as substitute socialism for the British Labour Party, politically-neutral terms that enabled the party to ditch its socialist commitment in favour of a 'progress' that would benefit all. In denying a past, such thinking denies us a future – the future becomes no more than the present enlarged, condemning us to live in the endless – nihilistic – present. Such terms deny our conscious moral and political agency and diminish our judgement by cultivating a sense of inevitability. Modernity, by definition, does nothing but 'modernize,' and 'change' is something that happens whether we want it or not. These terms demean us as human beings, as rational and social beings possessing creative moral agency and responsibility as individuals and communities. The demand for endless change and modernization are unsociable, unreasonable, and philistine, unleashing the tyranny and violence of abstraction upon organic culture, draining it of its vital saps, thinning and drying it out. 'Progressives' who identify themselves – or are identified by conservative critics – as leftists have nothing in common with socialism or the struggles of 'ordinary' people to retain control of their commons; the 'change' and 'modernization' they espouse is part of the 'constant revolutionising of production' which Marx and Engels revealed to be one of the most salient characteristics of the capital system on its way to constituting itself as the 'universal mode of production.' This is the term Marx and Engels used in The German Ideology (1846). What we now refer to as 'globalisation' and 'globalism' is at heart the globalisation of capitalist relations.
It is worth labouring this point in order to make it clear to conservatives that the 'globalism' they rail against is precisely the universal expansion of capitalist relations that Marx, Engels, and the original socialists railed against, in the attempt to constitute real community as against the abstract 'communities' of money and capital. Inadvertently or otherwise, Terry Eagleton makes a point with respect to the transgressive nature of the capital system that serves to bring conservatism and socialism closer together than conservatives and socialists may realize or be prepared to countenance:
No way of life in history has been more in love with transgression and transformation, more enamoured of the hybrid and pluralistic, than capitalism. In its ruthlessly instrumental logic, it has no time for the idea of nature - for that whose whole existence consists simply in fulfilling and unfolding itself, purely for its own sake and without any thought of a goal.
Terry Eagleton, After Theory 2003: 118-119
This transgression is the story of self-made modern man and his undoing. The tendency to overreach your creative constraints is to undo yourself in an act of hubris. In seeking to be all, modern individuals choosing the good as they see fit risk becoming nothing at all; in seeking to create Heaven on Earth, they become masters of nowhere. For 'progressives' committed to 'change' and 'modernization,' there is no innate or essential nature constraining and orienting desire and possibility: the 'free' individual is free to invent and reinvent himself or herself or anyself at all at will, in a potentially endless process. Such boundless individuals live in infinity and eternity rather than place and history, but are entirely without roots. It is a nihilism, a nihilism on the personal level that mirrors the nihilism of accumulation for the sake of accumulation within the surrounding social system. Eagleton proceeds to draw a comparison between the conservative Aristotle and the socialist Marx, both of whom considered the idea of economic production for profit to be unnatural, since it involved a boundlessness which is alien to our nature. The lesson is plain: the economic needs to be embedded within the moral. 'Once this unnatural economic system known as capitalism was up and running, however, it was socialism which came in time to seem contrary to human nature.' (Eagleton 2003 ch 5). Which underscores the point that the connection, community, and sociability which conservatives seek to revalue were the very things which socialists sought to reclaim against the marketisation of society and instrumentalisation of human relations, only to be met with assertions that competition, egoism, and trading were natural to human beings.
Conservatives criticize – rightly – the Year Zero mentality of socialist revolutionaries and the way that socialist ideologues and activists seek to extinguish venerable and inherited values, habits, culture, and customs. Such revolutionaries seek to raze everything that is familiar, precious, and stable to the ground in order to build a new society – and a new man and woman - from scratch, in accordance with a blueprint drawn up by those who know best. (Note to conservatives, Marx positively eschewed blueprintism, referring contemptuously to 'writing recipes (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future.' (Marx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital I). Marx was not a blank sheet revolutionary seeking to erase all things to create answer. On the contrary, his socialism is a vision of the immanent society, existing as potentiality within the existing society. Marx's essentialist metaphysics is organised around such immanentist categories as form, substance, and necessary lines of development, hence the frequency of organic metaphors in his critical analysis. In emphasising Marx's essentialism and organicism in my work I was once accused of turning Marx into a conservative. The fact remains that Marx is decidedly not a blank sheet revolutionary committed to the destruction of the prevailing social order and its rebuilding according to a blueprint, but emphasises the extent to which capitalist society prepares the conditions for the socialist society of the future. In many respects that society beyong individualism and competition has in fact emerged, but not as the cooperative mode of production and associative democracy that Marx envisaged but as a corporate collectivism in which accumulation is organised and administered by bureaucratic control – and on a global scale. For conservatives to criticise this as socialism or communism is not only wrong, it misdiagnoses the problem so badly as to leave the forces for diremption and totalitarian control free to extend and consolidate their power.
In fine, whilst the conservative repudiation of the Year Zero mentality of revolutionaries revolutionism is sane and cogent, they badly err when applying it to socialism as such, effectively tarnishing the critics of capitalist modernity's 'constant revolutionising' of places, people, and production with support for the very thing being criticised. The real source of the malaise here is the capital system and its endless revolutionising of the economic base of society and, with it, politics and culture, and Lockean notions of the tabula rasa. As a result, the future is conceived to be no more than the present enlarged, a present that is abstracted from all that is stable, familiar, and grounded, a nowhere place, borderless and boundless, immune to the concrete particulars of the proximal world.
For Michael Oakeshott this is the problem of rationalism in politics. That view is a challenging one for me, given that I organize my work around the concept of 'rational freedom.' For Oakeshott, the rationalist has a deep distrust of time and an impatient hunger for eternity. The criticism, I would argue, applies to that particular kind of Enlightenment rationalism that inspired a quasi-scientific utopianism and blueprintism, a mentality that is with us today. But there is a need to make some sharp distinctions here. Such rationalism is a deracinated conception based on an abstraction from the social, cultural, and natural environment, from the organic potentialities of time and place. It is a rationalism that is of a piece with the abstracting tendencies of the capital system and its 'constant revolutionizing' of the conditions of social existence. My work on 'rational freedom' sought to reclaim and revalue reason from the clutches of capitalist modernity's rationalization, distinguishing socialism as a social-ism from those statist and bureaucratic incarnations of the abstract rationalist spirit. There is a tendency to conflate utopian, technocratic, and socialist modes of thought, action, and organisation given the commitment to transform existing society and create a new social order, but socialism properly defined and understood is quite distinct. Indeed, socialism, with its inherently democratic, associative, and self-governing character, and technocracy, with power in the hands of a knowledge elite, are inveterate opponents. The antithesis was made clear in Thorstein Veblen's open demand that Marx's 'dictatorship of the proletariat' be replaced by the 'dictatorship of the engineers.' Once socialist revolutionaries came to the realization that Marx's proletariat were not the revolutionary agents theory taught them to be, with pronounced conservative tendencies alongside the socialistic ones, the switch from democratic self-organisation to vanguardism was effected, locating power and initiative in the hands of the knowledge elite – 'engineers' of all kinds, the people Marx derided as 'would-be universal reformers.' Such vanguardism inverted and, in practice, perverted Marx's socialism. It will do the same to environmentalism.
In Seeing Like a State, political scientist James C. Scott examines the failed attempts to build Heaven on Earth and roots them in a “high-modernist ideology,” over-confident in its belief in the powers of rationality as a vehicle of social and economic progress, over-weening in mobilizing vast resources for the express purpose of radically transforming societies in accordance with detailed blueprints. To such universal reformers, reason constituted its own legitimacy, with no need to refer to those subject to change, still less secure their consent. “Not surprisingly,” Scott argues, “its most fertile social soil was to be found among planners, engineers, architects, scientists, and technicians whose skills and status it celebrated as the designers of the new order.” (James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, p.4). Whilst many of the designers confined themselves to implementing technocratic schemes for the improvement of society, ordering and organising society by way of remote control, others went much further to become engineers of the soul, committing themselves to the creation of the new man and new woman. Year Zero was also to witness the birth of a new humanity. In the process, they endorsed authoritarian and totalitarian interventions and manipulations which inflicted substantial damage to human beings. Scott attributed these tragedies to the pernicious doctrine of the tabula rasa, which holds that human beings and their societies are no more than blank sheets of paper for visionary leaders to write their dreams and blueprints on. To illustrate his point, Scott quotes the utopian Robert Owen and his vision for New Lanark: “Each generation, indeed each administration, shall see unrolled before it the blank sheet of infinite possibility, and if by chance this tabula rasa had been defaced by the irrational scribbling of tradition-ridden ancestors, then the first task of the rationalist must be to scrub it clean.” (quoted in Scott, Seeing Like a State 1998, p. 341).
At risk of labouring the point, Marx was an essentialist who emphasised the extent to which people and things were essentially something and something essentially. Marx's rationalism, if we are to put it that way, has more in common with Aristotle and the ancients, even the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, than the Enlightenment. Marx wrote neither blueprints nor theories but instead engaged in extensive critiques which were designed to expose existing and immanent processes of emergence and development, seeking to liberate potentiality from within the relations within which they were currently confined.
In his essay Rationalism in Politics (1947), English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott draws an important distinction between “technical knowledge,” formulated into universal rules which are consciously learned and applied, and “practical” knowledge, that exists only in its use and cannot be formulated in apodictic rules (which is to say, rules that are clearly established and beyond dispute).(Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, ed. Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991, 12). The problem is not merely that ambitious large-scale social engineering projects display a tendency to conflate technical and practical knowledge but, much worse, assertion the primacy of the former over the latter on the assumption that practical knowledge “is not knowledge at all.” (Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics 1991, p.15). It takes no leap in the political imagination to turn one's eyes to the extensive and expensive policies and programmes being proposed or already enacted in the modern age and conclude that further misguided experiments of rationalism in politics are being attempted, inviting further tragedies doing untold damage to human beings and their communities and livelihoods. The clever people are rarely as clever as they think they are, and least of all when they are idolators of knowledge and technique.
The rationalist mind, Oakeshott charges, has no atmosphere. Ideology, he argues, “can be taught best to those whose minds are empty: and if it is taught to one who already believes something, the first step of the teacher must be to administer a purge, to make certain that all prejudices and preconceptions are renewed, to lay his foundation upon the unshakable rock of absolute ignorance.”
As Milan Kundera emphasised, totalitarian regimes find it imperative to destroy the memory of a people in order to make it controllable and manipulable:
'The first step in liquidating a people .. is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will forget what it is and what it was. The world around us will forget even faster.'
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Michael Oakeshott describes the process of deracination which serves to siphon off the vital sources and springs watering and preserving our greatest ideals and values, rendering them dry, ossified, and brittle:
'The predicament of our time is that the Rationalists have been at work so long on their project of drawing off the liquid in which our moral ideals were suspended (and pouring it away as worthless) that we are left only with the dry and gritty residue which chokes us as we try to take it down. First, we do our best to destroy parental authority (because of its alleged abuse), then we sentimentally deplore the scarcity of 'good homes', and we end by creating substitutes which complete the work of destruction. And it is for this reason that, among much else that is corrupt and unhealthy, we have the spectacle of a set of sanctimonious, rationalist politicians, preaching an ideology of unselfishness and social service to a population in which they and their predecessors have done their best to destroy the only living root of moral behaviour; and opposed by another set of politicians dabbling with the project of converting us from Rationalism under the inspiration of a fresh rationalization of our political tradition.'
Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays
Such a society is one that can never be at peace, for the reason that it can never be reconciled to its past, a past it has been taught to despise. In despising the past and all those who have made us what we are, we despise ourselves. In fine, the hatred of the past, its people and its deeds, is at bottom a self-hatred projected outwards. And such people can never be at peace with the society of which they are members, for the simple reason they are not at peace with themselves. Such a society is populated by individuals who are incapable of appreciating the concrete particulars of their total inheritance – they are people who know only projections and abstractions.
It is not things as such that are valuable, but their relationship. Relationships are primary. Things only become what they truly are by virtue of the relationships they stand in. The same is true with respect to human beings, history, and society. It is in recognition of this fundamental truth that Genesis begins with human relationships, and proceeds to demonstrate that the 'good' world created by God is constitute in and by relationship. These relationships give a culture and a society their distinctive textures and treasures. Functioning in abstraction, however, the Year Zero mentality is unable to compute relationships, it speaks an entirely different language, endeavouring to measure the immeasurable, or simply discarding it as irrelevant. Such a mindset is antithetical to the organic and rooted understanding of culture, society, and history.
If human beings are rational beings, then they are also social beings that exist in conditions of mutual interdependency. We are dependent rational creatures, bounded, related, limited, fallible, and attached. And that means we are needy creatures:
“We are needy creatures, and our greatest need is for home—the place where we are, where we find protection and love. We achieve this home through representations of our own belonging, not alone but in conjunction with others. All our attempts to make our surroundings look right—through decorating, arranging, creating—are attempts to extend a welcome to ourselves and to those whom we love.”
Roger Scruton
Who we are and where we are are bound together. Home is the place where we find security and are loved; home is the place to be. Ranged against this is the tyranny and violence of abstraction which characterises the 'constant revolutionising' of capitalist modernity. The tabula rasa Year Zero mentality is acidic, dissolving traditions, practices, experiences, and relationships as obstructions standing in the way of the creation of the new society and the new man and woman. The relationships that obligate us also inspire, move, and motivate us; they make us something rather than nothing. And they are dissolved by the process of constant revoutionising. That endless change and modernization is a treadmill and a prison that locks us into a zero-sum game. A world of constant revolutionizing of people, places, and things is a world of dispossession and disinheritance, breaking the pact between past, present, and future. We are custodians of the inheritance, not possessors; we are charged with passing the inheritance on, not selling it out. The inheritance belongs to past and future generations as well as to those living in the present. In coming to see 'progressive' demands of 'change' and 'modernization' for the pathetic frauds they are, empty and meaningless, we will come also to dissipate the sense of inevitability that 'progressives' of all kinds seek to cultivate in furtherance of their abstract plans and blueprints. We need to eschew fear and dread of the future and see it instead as lying on a continuum with who and where we are in the present, with deep roots in the past; we mustn't allow those who adhere to the blank sheet Year Zero mindset and reset to dispossess and disinherit us.