I wrote this back in 2020 but filed it away for another day and promptly forgot it. I intended to expand the ideas here in light of the argument of John Rutherford's article on 'the conservative origins of English socialism.' But I never found the time. I provide a link to Rutherford's article at the bottom. Suffice to say that I share those origins and espouse a socialism that is grounded in the communities, traditions, practices, and concerns of 'ordinary' folk, as against the deracinated, divisive delusions of the ideologues. And I also think that the liberal order is now drifting into something truly monstrous.
Slowly but surely during 2020 the penny dropped for me. I saw the 'Lockdown Left' – basically authoritarian liberals insisting that everyone in a plural society agree with them – hound one and all into compliance with the social isolation and austerity of Lockdown, only to celebrate the lawless rioting and vandalism and demos of those pushing their pet causes. Hypocrites with entirely arbitrary standards, one and all. They want what they want and don't care how they get it. The only consistency in their position is power. 2020 was the year I saw the contemporary 'Left' for what it was and what it is. No good.
Here is my rescued text from the middle of 2020
I have been reading Michel Houellebecq, and I have been reading his outraged critics. I read descriptions of him as 'controversial.' Such descriptions are neutral and anodyne. It's as if some people have a deep gut instinct that he may well be right, and not merely ironic, but lack the nerve to say so. I also read others who praise him for highlighting a long-standing anger on the part of many people at the decadence, complacency, and corruption of bourgeois society, and for his insight into the tragic fate of Western civilization. I examined the same themes in my work out of a concern to avert the tragedy that is unfolding all around us, in pursuit of the comedy of a happy ending.
People are expressing the hope that the pandemic will lead to a practical and meaningful re-evaluation of existing power structures. I express that hope myself, but am careful to back it with the practical ethical framework and infrastructure – communities of character and practice – that makes it active and effective. Without it, we will drift to a new normal under the relentlessly expanding sign of austerity, fear, and necessity. In these conditions, expressions of hope are no more than wishful thinking on the part of people who want a better world but have little idea – and power – to achieve. We will continue to drift for the reason that that is what we have been doing since Nietzsche and Weber warned of the dangers – and realities - of mechanised petrification, irresistible systemic force, and of the tendency of people to embrace surrogate gods and communities in their desperation in being shorn of the real thing.
Michel Houellebecq considers that the pandemic will more than likely exacerbate the same dehumanizing technological trends against which he and I, and Ellul and Mumford and Roszak and Kovel and many others have railed against for years. Such trends are corrosive of the social supports and communities that human beings as social beings require for healthy, happy, meaningful lives. “We will not wake up after the lockdown in a new world. It will be the same, just a bit worse,” Houellebecq wrote.
I see Houellebecq being criticised for being reactionary, illiberal, anti-feminist and other such terrible things. I don't know enough about him to know the extent to which any of this is true (we get his views second hand in English). I do know that Houellebecq is a critic of modern capitalism in the deepest sense – ethically and culturally and not merely economically. He enters into the difficult terrain, in other words, the terrain where socialists and conservatives meet, and liberals cleaving to individual liberty, choice, and preference steer well clear of. This is the area I go hard and deep into, offering a sustained critique of contemporary neoliberal society, free trade capitalism, and the permissiveness of radical individualism. I also underline the conformism and homogeneity of social and cultural libertarianism, exposing the self-image of bourgeois society to be in large part illusion. The 'convulsive self-importance' that Weber condemned in 1904 is expressed not in the difference and diversity that is routinely – and religiously – celebrated, but in blandness, mediocrity, banality, and predictability. This is the self-image of the age, and many who think themselves liberal and progressive comfort themselves with daily homage to the illusion. Such people are easily outraged by those with the nerve to look behind the image.
Houellebecq has not received sufficient credit for anticipating an emergent anti-capitalist conservatism which rejects globalized free markets, the corporatisation of public life, the privatisation of urban landscapes, urban homogenization, displacement, the uprooting of the mores and habits of the heart. I have no truck with nationalism and 'national conservatism,' which involves as much a tendency to embrace surrogate communities and collective fictions and fantasies as the globalised liberalism it rejects. At present, we have corrupt elites and raging mobs concomitant with economic and cultural libertarianism, which is liberalism in its decadent phase. The solution is not a restatement of liberalism, as many claim, but a true integration and solidarity. Liberalism triumphed and is the dominant political and ethical tradition. It is liberalism that has brought us to this. By liberalism I refer to that body of thought that asserts the moral and ontological primacy of the individual, the discrete individual prior to society, who contracts in or out of society in accordance with self-interest. Such a view upholds a dualism of individuality and sociality that is a violation of human nature.
Patrick Deneen writes of an 'aristo-populism' as an alternative to this alliance of economic and cultural libertarian (the false political opposition between right and left as two wings of the same libertarianism). I suspect that Deneen, for all of his criticisms of neoliberalism and capitalism, would have little sympathy for the working class should they seek to organize and press their class interests. I suspect he has an ordered society in mind in which the working class know their place. In which case his view is a hopeless reaction that will be eaten alive by corporate capital.
I prefer to write of the 'true democracy' that Marx wrote of, developing it as a genuine republicanism, a genuine public community based on the unity of the freedom and happiness of each and all. But this quest for belonging, identity, community, and meaning is very much at the heart of my work. I share Houellebecq's concern with a society that has fractured into individuals, separated and alone with their discrete projects. This is the age of the 'free' individual separated from others and no longer investing in ties and loyalties with respect to tradition, community, and family. I do it my way rather than Houellebecq's, though. He writes provocatively and with irony, inviting the timid and the conformist into outrage and misunderstanding. I am more direct, but embody and articulate nuances all the same.
So what is it that Houellebecq longs for in this cold, heartless city, Martin Gelin asks in the Boston Review? Gelin replies: “A love that transcends the deep loneliness of urban life, sure, but also something bigger, much grander, a return to a pure France, a pure nation, with traditional values, respect for hierarchy, family values, national identity, faith, and meaning.” I don't know if that answer is correct, either in summing Houellebecq's views or in itself. I do know that I argue against the nostalgic frame and am scathing about yearnings to return to a lost past (that usually never was). Nostalgia traps us by denying us a future. The past was never as great as it may seem at a distance. The future lies in revaluing forms of common life and solidarities that lie within, but are repressed by, existing lines of development. At the same time, as my book The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality makes clear, I have been working hard and fearlessly in this area for a long while now.
It's not work that can be articulated in soundbites on social media. You will only reach me in the depths.
I can appreciate how my view is not easy to grasp and understand, and is very easily misunderstood and caricatured. There is something of a blend of socialism and conservatism in the air. I see both the attractions and evasions of 'one nation' conservatism, and criticized assertions of unity in a divided society at length in Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx (2018). The danger comes when we mistake the 'ought' of the harmony we desire to be an 'is' that prevails in the here and now, instead of being a critical and normative standard to uproot prevailing exploitative and diremptive relations.
To grasp the distinctions I am making here, this interesting article by Giles Fraser, laying claims to William Morris as a “Tory Socialist,” is worth examining.
I think that term “Tory Socialism” applies much more to John Ruskin than to William Morris. Morris was certainly profoundly influenced by Ruskin, and Thomas Carlyle, but notions of a romantic radicalism applies more to Ruskin, and Tolkien later, than it does to Morris, although that romanticism certainly enters into his make-up. But Morris was no less influenced by Marx, in fact even more so. A cursory examination of Morris' writings and socialist activities reveals the profound influence of Marx, clearly and explicitly. There is no question of this. Yet Fraser makes just one reference to Marx: 'He read Marx,' he says blandly. Morris did far more than just 'read Marx.'
I am much more vigorous than this in blending conservative and socialist themes around alienation and the sacred, community and democracy, mores and ties, loyalties and solidarities transcending the nexus of callous cash payment.
The pandemic has exposed the legacy of the old liberal order. The so-called just-in-time economy and the state being stripped back to minimal capacity have reduced our national resources and weakened our resilience.
How our writer was prompted to reflect on the ideology’s beginnings, after the experience of life in lockdown exposed the legacy of the old liberal order.
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