Government, Politics, and Ethics
This analysis of Yanis Varoufakis, explaining that we have already left not just neoliberalism but capitalism, is very pertinent. I hope a lot of people will watch it:
Varoufakis says we are on the way to something much worse than capitalism. He calls it a “techno-feudalism.” I call it a "techno-bureaucratic managerialism." I don't see it as independent of capital, either. I see assertions of independence of material interests (and claims of technical neutrality and the references "the science" as unarguable authority) as integral to the managerial ideology. I jotted down some observations a year or so ago, then wrote it up as best I could. (This raw and ragged, as written, I never got the time to polish - but there is something amiss in environmentalism as a "non-politics.")
I do precious little politics on social media these days. There is a cultish mentality afoot that is inimical to critical thinking. I can do without the abuse. You win few friends and attract a lot of enemies if you continue to ask pertinent questions. I'll keep asking those questions, but not to those locked in the cycle of assertion and counter-assertion on here. I see this video by Yanis Varoufakis being shared and gaining support. I supported it but with qualification - it may look as though we are transcending 'capitalism' with something awful and authoritarian (which is decidedly not socialism), but this is where that distinction I have always insisted on shows its worth - capital system vs capitalism. People remain on the level of 'capitalism' and focus on its most salient institutions. When these seem to change, people think we are moving to a new system and social order. Not necessarily so. We remain within the logic and relations of capital whilst moving to an authoritarian and austerian (morally, psychologically and fiscally) regime. I call it a "techno-bureaucratic managerialism." I don't see it as independent of capital, though, and see assertions on the part of managerialists of independence of material interests (and their associated claims of technical neutrality buttressed by "the science" as unarguable authority) as integral to the managerial ideology. I jotted down some observations a year or so ago, then wrote it up as best I could. (This is raw and ragged, as written, since I never got the time to polish it. But there is something rotten in environmentalism as a "non-politics." And I'm afraid too few have the intelligence to keep asking pertinent questions and fewer still among those the nerve to do so in public. My view is that there is a fundamentally anti-democratic movement underway, engineered from above through trauma and terror - all the psychologists which government employs in 'nudge' units - and sustained from below via permanent protest, crisis, and alarm. If you think revolution looks like this I'd suggest you pick up a history book. Millions, billions, of pounds worth of government expenditure is still dismissed as "not enough" by petted protestors - permanent activists who seem to have licence to wage a war of attrition on the public. Take a look at the scale of those climate programmes, how much Net Zero will cost and what it entails as an engineering feat, and ask: who has the power and the resources to push technology to that kind of scale? Not green hippies with startup companies. We are being slowly but surely manoeuvred into an austerian and authoritarian environmentalist straightjacket. "Going green" is about "going without." Note how many rich and pampered spokespersons for environmentalism are advocating rationing. "This is not about winning support" is a phrase that is constantly repeated. "There is no argument," "this is not up for debate." And these are phrases used by protestors and activists! Above them the global elite fly into Glasgow for Cop26 to lecture one and all about reducing their carbon footprint. The hypocrisy - and the authoritarian intent - is hidden in plain view in public. The end in view is authoritarian imposition of an austerian environmental regime under the auspices of a 'clean green' corporate capital. Varoufakis is getting there; I got there ages ago. And it's done nothing for my popularity among environmentalists (dare ask for a critique of political economy and see the abuse you get for not cheering the side and its vacuous "non-political" phrases on. People are embarrassing themselves now.)
It is somewhat reassuring to note that a good many ‘ordinary’ people are wise to the scam. ‘Only the poor will freeze & that’s the plan!! The Elites Wish to do away with the poor and cull this planet,’ one writes. My fear, as someone who argues for socialism and for a civic environmentalism that works within planetary boundaries, is that the activists are merely footsoldiers for the environmental technocrats, supporting a legislative and regulative approach to environmentalism as the external curb and constraint on human behaviour. This approach can go either one of two wretched ways:
a) an authoritarian imposition that brings the curtain down on democracy, installing a ‘benevolent’ environmental regime that works in tandem with already constituted money and power;
b) a libertarian and populist backlash that sets the environmental cause back for decades, maybe for good.
This crowd have been allowed far too much time. True, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that exposure has had them showing themselves for what they are. They use the opportunity to attempt to recruit people to their ‘resistance,’ listing the now tedious list of the doom and disaster that is sure to come. I would suggest that people read the literature coolly here and form their own conclusions – on no account is catastrophe on the horizon (unless these people get their way and slam the brakes on the economy). The consequences of continued global heating may well be unpleasant, but not catastrophic. What we have here is a movement that takes outliers in ‘the science’ and normalizes extreme case scenarios to pressure and panic governments and citizens by fear. Environmentalism has degenerated into a permanent protest, not a serious politics, but a recruitment tool designed to ratchet up pressure on government to ‘act’ (a slippery euphemism for increased taxes and expenditure). In their indolent fantasies, ‘the rich’ will pay, but without a genuine – and popular – politics the burden will fall on the much less rich. The secret is out – this is not about ‘going green’ but ‘going without.’ They know fine well that the public are never going to choose this reduction in their living standards (note the relish in their voices when they predict the loss of everything we have come to take for granted; note also the presumption that human beings (governments, businesses, citizens, are inert and passive agents and will do nothing in face of a crisis, a view which enables dire predictions of collapse to sound legitimate but which is historically illiterate). And note, too, the extent to which these spokespersons for the movement continue to claim ‘government is responsible.’ Actually, as any genuine leftist has long since said, ‘government’ is merely a second order mediation, charged with facilitating the process of capital accumulation (‘economic growth,’ if you like), within a fundamentally irresponsible market system. It isn’t ‘government’ that is in control but the systemic imperatives of an economy organised around the self-expansion of values. These characters either don’t know that, and hence charge ‘government’ with the responsibility to govern an inherently irresponsible system, or do know that and haven’t got the first idea how to supplant it. Their only tactic is constant destabilisation and demoralisation, in the hope of who knows what. The old phrase ‘the worse the better’ springs to mind. And it is that that is the truly disastrous doctrine.
Not so much going green as going without, having access to less of everything we have come to take for granted.
This is only possible by government imposition.
You will learn to have less and learn to accept it, if not like it.
Throughout all my writing I have attempted to define the constituents of good government in the hope of transcending the antithesis of ‘small’ and ‘big’ government and the way that this fractures into the extremes of libertarianism and authoritarianism, swinging between each of these contrary, but twin, poles by way of reaction.
The appeal of limited government lies in the way that it constrains collective madness, the way in which “tiny majorities” appropriate collective purposes and use institutional force of government and law to coerce compliance.
I have in time swung from a belief in the capacity of human beings to govern themselves by a self-legislating reason and now locate the rational capacity in God. This completely switches the register away from humans who aspire to the power and knowledge of God and instead recognizes our capacity for error as a result of our flawed nature. The fact that this understanding has been lost makes the tendencies of those seeking to engineer change from above incredibly dangerous. Those who aspire to be as gods brook no opposition to the truth they claim to possess. One of the best books I have ever written was on Tolkien. For Tolkien, the Ring controlling all would be dangerous in the hands of the evil, but most dangerous of all in the hands of the good (Gandalf), since they would wield power righteously, deaf and blind to the harm it inflicts on others.
The ‘social justice’ movement loves to redefine words and manipulate meanings. It is very much the political expression of the linguistic and discursive turn I contested in the universities in the 1990s and 2000s. In that engagement I learned how much such individuals love to control language and discourse, with the intent of controlling people in the name of liberating them. I encountered this in academia in the first instance. I warned that the consequences of this turn would be politically debilitating, most especially for radical causes. The turn away from socio-economic and class issues to culture and language was vehemently anti-socialist. And anti-realist. The foundations were cut from under radical politics. It is with bitter irony that I now see this postmodern and poststructuralist turn identified with socialism. This is wrong. To the extent that the leading spokespersons of this turn espouse leftist values, they lack the grounds to make good their claims, something which leaves them with no option but the recourse to force in various forms. I note also the tendency of such activism to engage in the language of crisis and catastrophe. These are tactics designed to scare, threaten, and bully rather than inform, inspire, and motivate.
There are some simple lessons that have either been forgotten here or, more likely, are being deliberately rejected by would-be universal tyrants of humanity:
”The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.” (Albert Camus).
“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” (William Pitt the Younger).
This new crowd – let’s call them the ‘woke left’so that we know who we are talking about – are everything I fought against in my research days in Academia. I was aware of swimming in the 1990s. I saw the damage that the linguistic and discursive turn and anti-realism would do, and sought to expose the manipulation (and lunacy) inherent in its dominant positions. I was conscious of swimming against the academic tide. It isn’t socialism, it is virulently anti-socialist. In origin, it is the work of academics appropriating leftist values and principles but with none of the social and democratic content. These people loathe ‘ordinary’ people for having the nerve to refuse being told the truth and to refuse being ordered about by self-appointed guardians of the moral and intellectual landscape. It was the anti-realism I focused on, the idea that there are no foundations and no grounds, no objective morality and reality, only that which is discursively and linguistically created – by them.
The critical social justice movement derives from a postmodern understanding of the world in which language constructs our perception of reality. I spent my entire time in academia trying to distinguish this postmodernism from socialism and a genuine left.
This is why it is such a common belief among ‘social justice warriors’ that they can achieve their utopia by coming to manipulate and regulate the way that people speak. This is why they advance censorship over dialogue and debate and why they keep redefining words. They reduce reality to discourse and language and assert their control over its terms, keeping everyone dependent upon them for meaning, silencing opposition by way of fear. The strategy works well as a cover for authoritarian imposition. These people are those most loathsome of creatures, bureaucrats of knowledge. The irony, of course, is that it is not knowledge at all that they have, but self-created ‘truths’ conforming to their own prejudices. The whole thing is philosophically incoherent, quite deliberately, I would suggest. In destroying rational standards it becomes impossible to hold any position to critical account. It really is errant nonsense and an absolute blight on the academic world. To go through the inconsistencies is as easy as falling off a log. I am an essentialist in philosophy, these people are virulent anti-essentialists, arguing that reality, such as it is, is malleable, plastic, and fluid. We live in an age when people are allowed to create their own identities, even and especially in contradistinction to biology. How interesting, then, that the same people become the most vehement essentialists when it comes to race, asserting the most strident form of racial essentialism in order to accuse each and everyone who fails to conform (and repent of their sins) of racism and cultural appropriation. If identity really is self-created and malleable, the issue shouldn’t arise. It is the crassest philosophical amateurism and ignorance, and yet these people can be found all across the humanities and social sciences. It hasn’t affected the natural sciences too much yet, but it will (these are the people who refer to such nonsensical things as the ‘gendered equation’ and are now hounding ground breaking scientists such as Newton on account of connections with slavery).
It is a blight. It is a blight on academia, on culture and society, and on reality. And it isn’t radical, isn’t progressive, and isn’t socialism – it is the corruption of the Left into something regressive and reactionary, seeking to uproot civilisation and dismantle capitalism (by which they mean the extirpation of economic life – I keep asking how they intend to replace the capital system, only to be met with ambitious and expensive programmes to be undertaken by this great abstraction called “government.” It is a recipe for economic disaster and political tyranny, bringing about the very catastrophe they claim to be ever on the horizon.
I have, from within, sought to make these points to activists and environmentalists, only to be on the receiving end of some vile abuse (‘pretentious little fraud’ was the most mild). I checked one character out who was most abusive. I noticed that on her page that she declared her love of “all humanity.” How interesting to note that the people who tend to be the most abusive on social media are also those who tend to proclaim ‘love’ and ‘kindness’ for ‘all humanity’ the most. But that’s the dead giveaway – they think words are reality, and that their own self-image and self-identity is truth. So long as you have the right words, your behaviour doesn’t matter.
And this is what is really galling to me. I have argued for virtue ethics, seeing the virtues as qualities for a flourishing existence. The virtues are also personal, thus restoring personal moral effort and responsibility to the centre of the collective projects being initiated in politics. This is key for me. Rather than opposing individualism and collectivism I see individuality and sociality as two sides of the same human coin, seeking to avoid each term going to extremes by way of abstraction. This is where the antithesis of ‘small’ and ‘big’ government arises and, with it, the opposition between libertarianism and authoritarianism. Each term breeds the other in my analysis. The key is good government based on genuine justice and virtue, establishing authority and autonomy as two integral aspects of the same freedom. The galling thing for me is to see ‘social justice warriors’ abuse justice in undertaking explicitly anti-social actions, with zero connection with the ‘ordinary’ people who constitute the demos. The impulse is inherently anti-democratic. Likewise with virtue. These people are denounced for their ‘virtue signalling.’ The great danger is that the great virtue tradition which I have worked so hard to restore will be identified with these political and philosophical cretins and dismissed. They are taking terms central to my work – central to the great Western tradition – and pressing them into the service of contrary ends. We see this clearly in the manipulative approach to changing human behaviours. The virtues in their original form pertain to the personal qualities of individual men and women, involving issues of character and responsibility; they are therefore internal, conceiving change as a matter of inner motives. By way of complete contrast, ‘virtue signalling’ is an entirely external process which involves the psychological manipulation of behaviours from the outside of individual motivation and choice, not a genuine ethics at all but the scientism of behaviourism. In place of God, these people have put Nature, and in place of ethics, they have put science. But it is neither a genuine Nature nor science but what – in academic language (I earned my spurs) – is known as an empty signifier, that is, ‘Nature’ as it emerges by way of a process of reification, the political appropriation and perversion of what natural science reveals about Nature. This ‘Nature’ is employed as an authoritative and unanswerable standard that all must conform to. The whole thing is not merely errant nonsense – gibberish concealed behind grandiloquent but meaningless terms – it is also riddled with inconsistencies – these people deny authoritative standards on the one hand (which is precisely what Nietzsche’s assertion of the ‘death of God’ entails), only to reinstate them (according to their own prejudices) on the other.
In short, this is the mess that human beings get into when they think they can dispense with God, the ground of all being, and go it alone by their own standards. Without God, there are as many standards as there are human beings, with no objective criteria available by which to resolve disagreements – power decides, force decides, hence the recourse to law, to censorship, to repression.
This is everything I sought to steer the Left away from, in the optimistic belief that the lessons of the moral and political wasteland of Communism – fresh in the memory – would have been learned the hard way. How disappointing to see how little people have learned. But not surprising. Without God, they cannot learn the lesson, merely keep repeating the error – self-made men forever in process of their undoing. This is not merely a crisis for ‘the Left’ but of Enlightenment rationalism, for all those who have thought that, through science, reason, and technology, that human beings can live in accordance with their own self-created standards. The effort fractures every time, inevitably, since there is no unitarian force – God – holding the diverse perspectives and perceptions and prejudices together. Instead of a genuine unity, there is a uniformity, imposed by one social form or another; instead of a genuine diversity, there is division.
These people have zero connection with ‘ordinary’ people and quite explicitly repudiated class and socio-economic positions in favour of identity. They were probably wise to – working class people are at least as conservative as they are socialist, certainly on issues of family, community, immigration, and faith, all the loyalties that the woke left seek to uproot and destroy in order to make individuals clay in their manipulative hands. I’m in print arguing all this back in the 1990s, in an attempt to steer a resurgent Left away from all the old totalitarian and authoritarian snares. Unfortunately, the nonsense I contested back then has broken out of the universities and entered society, causing all manner of division. I’m glad to say that ‘ordinary’ folk can see through. I’m not glad that many social institutions, including corporations, have proven cowardly in face of the onslaught, giving in in search of the peaceful life. It won’t work, for the reason that anti-realism simply eats itself up in its ratcheting up of impossible claims and demands. It is a cancellation of reality, and utterly unliveable. In the first instance, it is important not to concede an inch and not apologize in search of peace.
As for the anti-capitalist rhetoric, I don’t believe a word of it; it is hollow, shallow, and superficial, not a word of it rings true – it lacks content. The people who seem to be the most vocal anti-capitalists also seem to be the most comfortably off. It is telling that in their actions they come into direct confrontation with the actual working class, that is, people who have to work for a living to pay their bills, feed their families, and put a roof over their heads. Actual working class people going to work every day in the capitalist economy are treated with contempt, considered as part of the system to be destroyed. Posh anti-capitalism, of course, has a long history, going all the way back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. One thing that posh anti-capitalists hate most of all about capitalism is that it not only gave birth to the working class, it also enriched, empowered, and emboldened the ‘masses.’ Elitist snobs to the core, they loathe that ‘ordinary’ people can help themselves to the good things in life. Their animus against capitalism is not that it failed but that it succeeded, succeeded in generating material quantities that could be shared out among the despised, benighted masses. Where once socialism argued that capitalism expanded the productive forces successfully but failed to distribute its largesse equitably, the socialist economic system claiming to do better, modern day anti-capitalists want to slam the breaks on production in order to drastically curtail consumption. The vision of myriad hells to be visited on the planet at some future date arises from the fact that, deep down these activists know that the present is actually not all that bad, indeed quite good; in fact, present day society is materially better than life has ever been. People are healthier, wealthier, better educated, longer lived than at any other time in history, and in much greater numbers. It is very hard to sell your nightmare prospectus of ‘hell on Earth’ at the ballot box in those conditions. And so, of course, democracy is discarded. In truth, these supposed radicals and progressives are not radicals and progressives at all, they are reactionary and regressive, a seething, guilt-stricken, impotent bourgeois mob incapable of seeing a future and so lamenting a past that is beyond recall. It is a cul-de-sac and more fool any leftists that hitch a ride on their doomwagon.
I’ll sign off here, I’ve wasted far too much time on this lunacy. The fact is that this is a lunacy that feeds on the controversies it incites. There really is nothing of substance to the politics and philosophy of ‘wokery.’ I really don’t like using the term. I don’t think it grasps the depth of the problem. And our best hope seems to be the revulsion and reaction of ‘ordinary’ people who don’t use the term, don’t understand the term, and don’t waste time trying to come to terms with it. It is dreck to be dismissed contemptuously and immediately. Let it loose and it spreads like wildfire. Because you are basically arguing with a vacuum. You can’t debate a vacuum, you can’t reform or transform a vacuum, you can’t do anything with a vacuum other than become drawn into it, never to be seen again. You can’t wake the woke. People who inflate emptiness to the nth degree are beyond being reasoned with; such people simply feed on the responses they incite in a process of endless negation. Once they have silenced and suppressed all external opposition, the void merely turns in on itself. The filters of race and blanket oppression are infinite in their application, revealing the destructive and self-destructive tendencies at their core. Only something which has limits can be fulfilled. But since there is no reality only the one that is self-created, we are drawn into an essentially limitless environment. This environment is virulently anti-essentialist. There are no substantive essences and no necessary relations other than the ones that are discursively created (that is, 'made up’ according to whim and prejudice, egoistic self-interest, sense of entitlement etc). In my philosophical work in the 1990s and 2000s I argued forcefully for an essentialist metaphysics, for ideas of substance, form, necessary relations, lines of development, potentials and their realisation. This was the era when a linguistic and discursive turn swept through the humanities and social sciences in university departments. I warned then about where this anti-realism would lead. It is one small step from seeing the world as malleable and manipulable to seeing human beings themselves as malleable and manipulable – this anti-philosophy is tailor made for that most loathsome of creatures, the bureaucrats of knowledge, power, and control. And here they are, having spilled out of academia and into culture and society. They are a blight. I first argued against them as a socialist who identified them, rightly and accurately, as anti-socialist. To the extent that they continue to proclaim leftist values and principles, their commitment is entirely arbitrary – they have no grounds and no foundations for such a commitment. That makes their supposed socialism an arbitrary, existential political commitment, one based on a groundless faith. It has no relation to the old grounds for socialism in material relations and life-processes and least of all in the working class. Human beings are mere abstractions in this groundless faith, abstract categories, people who are objectively exploited and oppressed even if they don’t know it and don’t feel it. It is for the self-appointed vanguards, then, to lead the fight against exploitation and oppressed, even if that means going against actual flesh and blood members of the exploited and oppressed classes. The old substitutionism in socialist politics is thus revived as easily as that. And without grounds and foundations in reality and social life processes – without ever bothering with popular democratic support and consent – the entire process threatens to encompass one and all in its void.
You see the anomalies everywhere. You see greens practising a ‘woke environmentalism,’ asserting a substance called ‘Nature’ on the one hand, this great material entity whose boundaries should never be transgressed, and the rights of individuals to choose their identities as they see fit on the other; you see constant damnations of essentialism as oppressive of identity on the one hand, and then denunciations of cultural appropriation and assertions of racial essentialism on the other. On the one side an assertion of boundaries, on the other a justification of the transgression of boundaries. The whole thing is philosophically and politically incoherent. And there is only one thing that can paper cracks as wide as this – tyranny, authoritarianism, and censorship. These people are in denial of reality and must work endlessly to suppress all those who raise objections at the damage being done to reality and real people. The nature of nonsense is that it is limitless in its application, for the reason that it has no reality check. Its errors are self-validating, and feeding on the divisions it opens up. It can be used in any context and it masquerades as radical politics and scholarship. In truth, it is a philosophical charlatanry supporting a regressive, divisive politics.
And, to return to my main point, it is caught entirely between the false antithesis of individualism and collectivism; this is the classic liberal figure of the abstract individual inviting and inciting the equally abstract collectivity as a reaction. The two go together as they have done throughout the entirety of liberal modernity. An excessive individualism – call it egoism, narcissism, entitlement etc – breeds an excessive collectivism in response, a surrogacy, a substitute community that attempts to satisfy the social dimension of human nature. Both figures in this antithesis are abstract and unreal. There is a rottenness in the heart of contemporary culture that is making society weak. This is a case of modernity against modernity, its very successes turning rotten and turning into failures, characterised by failing laws and authorities, failing respect, failing ethics, failing culture, failing character – problems with crime and addictions, gaps between rich and poor, arrogance above and resentment below, the weakening of the family unit, the winnowing away of face-to-face personal relations and the dissolution of community, the weakening of the religious sensibility and so on. This is a loss of social connection, freeing the individual even more to pursue purely personal projects, and it is accompanied by a growing nihilism – and despair – individuals who are no longer properly socialised but grow up extremely individualist and egocentric, and ignorant, when not openly disdainful of, traditional western values. This is a crisis that goes right to the heart of liberal modernity, a hollowing out of the core that proceeds hand-in-hand with immense successes in expanding material quantity. Materially, capitalism triumphed, it triumphed to such an extent that individuals are encouraged to believe that they have been freed from all constraint. Marx held that what capitalism created most of all was its own gravediggers. He identified these gravediggers with the proletariat, who would revolt against iniquity and exploitation and utilise the productive forces for the good of all. This is not remotely the situation that confronts us now. The working class show every sign of being more or less comfortable within the capitalist system. They have had ample opportunity to revolt: they can barely bring themselves to vote for left of centre political parties. This has left leftists without a social and democratic content to their leftist principles and policies – rather than abandon their values they have abandoned reason and reality. Such is the criticism of the ‘postmodern left’ launched by the likes of Stephen Hicks. That’s not quite my view, not least since the anti-realism and anti-foundationalism of postmodernism leaves any political commitments on its part as entirely arbitrary. I repeat, in my work in the 1990s and 2000s I demonstrated at length that postmodernism is virulently anti-socialist. In this, I made great use of the work of Marxist thinkers like David Harvey, Terry Eagleton, and Frederic Jameson, who identified postmodernism as ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’ (to take the title of Jameson’s book of 1991). How utterly galling for me to see all that work I did just casually ignored by the heirs of those postmodernists, now identifying themselves as socialist and being identified as socialists. I had sought to recover socialism from its failures and inadequacies as Communism and Social Democracy. Capitalism’s ‘gravediggers’ here are the spoiled, entitled individuals it has reared in its midst. Instead of a genuine socialisation, individuals have been brought up believing that they are free to get their own way and serve their own interests – entitled to choose the good as they see fit. It’s an intoxicating idea with one major flaw – human beings are social beings and must live in relation with one another. Where each is entitled to choose the good as he or she sees fit, there are no grounds for compromise with others and their own personal choices. We thus live in a world of self-created goods, each person his or her own god – or, to others, devil, since the world has discarded the objective criteria that enables evaluation – and compromise. It is a world of warring gods, with politics deteriorating into religious war. Society will fall apart, rent at its seams. With personal character and relations dissolving into self-chosen identities, the only way to hold things together will be by an abstract collectivity; instead of an internal union which comes by way of personal moral effort and good character there will be enforced external imposition.
People baulk at my emphasis on character and virtue; such things are jarring in a culture that has been raised on personal choice and subjective preference. The West’s obsession with self and identity, individuals looking first and foremost at themselves and how they identify by gender, or sexual inclination, or race, has not come out of nowhere – it is in liberal modernity’s existential DNA. The radical moment has been missed. Instead we have an excessive individualism based on the figure of the abstract individual which breeds an excessive collectivism based on the figure of the abstract community (law, ‘government,’ various political movements, and such like).
For my part, I am intrigued by the anomalous spectacle of governments committing themselves to ambitious, extensive, and expensive environmental programmes whilst activists constantly pressuring the political process from the outside cry that it’s still ‘not enough.’ The interventions and investments on the part of governments dwarf past socialist regimes, and yet they are damned as inadequate. This is madness. This is the incoherence at the heart of anti-realism and anti-foundationalism in philosophy and politics. The vision of the future as hell can never be satisfied by constructive action. All the expenditures and investments in the world cannot satisfy the hell-bent. These people are emotionally invested in and committed to the worst, the hellish – they damn the world and demonize the people in it. Their science is not science at all, it is a demonology. They take the outliers in the science, the most extreme possible scenarios, presume that human beings will do nothing (as they have never done in history), and normalize them to predict ‘Hell on Earth.’ And that process then justifies their ‘all or nothing’ approach, one that pitches the ‘all’ at levels of impossibility. Failure is built into the approach, all the better to carry on with the doom and damnation. This anti-politics is an attempt to mug a taxpayer supported environmental gravy-train out of government. It is grifting on a huge scale.
This is why I insist on a genuine virtue ethics and on character construction alongside social reconstruction. The real problem with identity politics vis personal moral effort and character is that those pushing identity politics the hardest don't have good characters at all, as revealed in their tendencies to abuse and bully. The best are ignorant, deluded fools, the worst are grifters who debase academia, politics, and culture. And the worst part is that it may even work. Not only have governments been giving in to the pressure, they may do so willingly. After all, who loses, who pays the price? I suspect ‘ordinary’ people as usual. For all of the condemnations of politics-as-usual and business-as-usual, this is the old top-down reformism on steroids, working hand in hand with ‘clean, green’ corporate capital. It’s a scam that will change nothing at the level of social relations, merely confine individuals within an authoritarian and austerian environmental regime. Whatever else that is, it isn’t socialism.
Once again, I saw all of this coming. I never quite believed it could reach this scale of stupidity. I really thought that people had learned the lessons of history. Maybe they have. Maybe I follow social media too much and so think the world full of activists. ‘Ordinary’ people in the ‘real world’ seem to be able to smell a great herd of rats and are expressing their opposition. Optimistically, I hold that people should be able to identify the pernicious doctrine of the end justifies the means when they hear it. The same with respect to all those claims that one thing is of such overriding significance as to trump all other things; the same with respect to the doctrine that the health and well-being of a future, as yet non-existent ‘humanity’ outweighs the interests of real flesh and blood individuals in there here and now. The most remarkable thing of all is to witness supposed environmentalists ignoring the basic principles of ecology (social and natural) to break things up and assert the superiority of some aspects, abstracted from the whole, over others. The commitment to interconnection seems shallow indeed. The activists are ignoring the first principle of ecology - the law of "integrated systems" – which affirms an interactive cooperation which is the very antithesis of an abstract individualism and an abstract collectivism. We need to raise a generation of citizen-lawyers who know principles and values and how to practise them internally, NOT activist-lawyers who take principles and values and apply and impose them externally. We need virtue ethics, NOT the behaviourism of government and environmentalist psychologists ‘nudging’ human beings in what they perceive to be the right direction. We need to foster the inner motives, NOT the external manipulation of the emotional intelligence and the motivational economy. Environmentalism is doing politics and ethics all wrong, is manipulative to the core, and breeds authoritarianism above and below. Arguing with environmentalists of this persuasion is akin to pleading before the Spanish Inquisition. The only thing they want to hear from you is a full confession before they burn you at the stake, using carbon-free fuel.
So rather than contesting their ‘faith,’ it is better not to give them the publicity they have sought by law-breaking. They do not argue and engage, merely proselytise. They claim that they have never been allowed to get their message out and that people don’t understand. They are deluded and fanatical. If anything, climate change has received far too much coverage. Climate change is not the problem, it is symptomatic of a much deeper problem at the heart of social relations. But the ‘anti-politics’ of these environmentalists casts those problems to one side. This is one reason why their demands, if enacted, will lead to an authoritarian environmental regime that does nothing to address the real problem, merely confines individuals within an austerian straightjacket. The danger of employing the figure ‘necessity’ in politics is that it comes with the dangers of overspill and appropriation. We may speculate as to whether the strategists of this war of attrition against the public know this, and are leading the environmental herd of activists along as useful idiots, traumatising and terrorising society into compliance with extensive environmental interventions by government. I continue to ask this question of environmentalist activists who consider themselves to be radicals: take a look at the environmental programmes and investments being demanded, the legislation and regulation these entail, the finances they require, the technology and the engineering it involves and ask: who has the power, the resources, and the capacity to realize such demands?
[Apologies for the somewhat random nature of these comments and observations. I have major issues to be dealing with in my life and have wasted far too much time writing over the years. If this looks like a word salad, then there are reasons. I am facing life-changing and even life-impairing and threatening issues, which are my priority. I am effectively in retirement, having written more than enough on these questions over the years. It is time for those who are most concerned to change the world to do some work themselves and read.]