Against the cultural stasis, an invitation to remake the world
Read an edited version of Jacob Reynolds' introduction to the Ideas Matter summer school, The Academy.
Last weekend, the charity Ideas Matter held its annual summer school, The Academy. The theme of the event was ‘What happened to the future?’. The event featured lectures on a wide range of topics, and these lectures will be available soon on the Ideas Matters podcast, which is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and most podcast apps.
Here we reproduce the introductory comments by the convenor of The Academy, Jacob Reynolds, which eloquently set out the sense of stasis we experience today.
The Academy 2023 is an attempt to get to grips with a straightforward, but complex, question: why does life seem so ‘stuck’? From politics to culture, economics to technology, we seem to be at an impasse.
Our political inertia might be particularly bad in the UK, but speak to many people across Europe and America and the sense of stasis is palpable. Barbie or Oppenheimer might have caused a stir in the cultural world, but they hardly break new ground. Advanced economies are gripped by the same stasis: the best the capitalist class can do is double-down on previously discredited ideas. As for technology – we are continually promised that our world will be transformed by the latest in AI, yet no one has any idea what to do with it except as a marginally easier way to write an email.
But what feels particularly novel about the current impasse is the discrediting of the idea of progress itself. What we lack is not merely an alternative but, increasingly, a direction of travel. The end of alternatives was already well-known to us as the ‘end of history’ – the period which seemed to establish a conjunction of liberal democracy and free markets as the only game in town. But even a world without serious alternatives still, perhaps, contained some residual progressive energy: living standards rose, new technologies emerged, cultural media could enjoy ‘golden ages’, and debates between liberals and communitarians, even if rather tame by comparison to previous ideological battles, gave intellectual life some kind of dynamic.
Today, we seem to be experiencing the full force of the pyrrhic victory of liberalism. Predictions that, without the contest between capitalism and communism, the former would lose any intellectual vitality, seem to have come true. The dynamic today seems much close to one of corrosion than of any era since the turn of the last century.
But the sense of an impasse is fuelled by more than simply the internal corrosion of liberal capitalist values. Liberal democracy appears to have raised something of a cuckoo in the nest of post-Cold War prosperity. Although the precise origins of each may be different, a mix of environmentalism, critical race theory and gender ideology takes to task some of the fundamental building blocks of Western civilisation.
Against the idea that we might take charge of nature and inaugurate widespread prosperity, environmentalism insists in the inviolability of natural limits.
Against the promise that liberal values could grant meaning and status to all, critical race theory insists we are limited by our partial, racial differences.
And against the idea that our sexual lives and relationships can be free of artifice, naturally embraced, gender ideology insists we are slaves both to our different gender roles and to an innate sense of disjunction between mind and body.
It is not just that our elites are lacklustre, not just that progress has stalled of its own accord, but we have also fostered a series of ideologies that aim to directly contradict the tenets of Western life.
In each case, what seems to have been called into question is the idea that there exists, in history or culture, custom or experience, any resources with which we might be able to think through our contemporary problems. Estranged from our past, both in the sense of forgetting and of forsaking, the future has become a dark and dangerous place.
But weirdly the future, in the contemporary imagination, has become more like the past – or at least like one version of it.
Environmentalists promise us a return to medieval modes of subsidence farming.
Critical race theorists wish for a return to segregation (albeit in a new guise).
Trans ideologues seek ever-more rigid, more backward versions of masculinity and femininity.
As is suggested by these examples, everywhere the idea of limits is in vogue.
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The depth of the cultural turn towards limits is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that even erstwhile critics of the three ideologies already discussed agree on this basic idea of the need to return to limits.
A group of intellectuals collected under the name ‘post-liberalism’ is one example. The post-liberals argue that the spread of the liberal ethic of freedom has gone too far – we have created a new, unencumbered subject, an individual shorn of his organic ties, a class of person unable to comprehend, much less accept, obligations. Arm in arm with the market, liberalism has destroyed everything that makes individual people unique. Ironically, the cult of the individual has resulted in a curious shapelessness to all individuals. Our only hope is in a return to unchosen limits – national service, families and a revitalised church, even if it is an anachronised one.
A subset of the post-liberals are the so-called reactionary feminists. They agree with the sense that human beings have sought too hard to transgress natural limits. The limit of biology, the rhythm of the life-cycle, the age-old conjunction of sex and childbearing, sex and intimacy. It is again technology that they call into question. Perhaps not the technologies of nuclear or fracking, which environmentalists abhor, nor the budget airplane or social media, which the post-liberals accuse of having reduced all nations to variations on a theme, but the technologies of contraception and childbearing. The same story plays out: human beings, especially women, estranging themselves from themselves, shirking the duties that come with the unchosen limits of their biology.
It is worth noting how close these ideologies appear to environmentalism. Their proponents might not have much time for Just Stop Oil, but similar ideas underpin their reaction against the modern world. For environmentalists, the individual, shorn of his organic relation to the soil, presumed to cut all ties with mother earth and reject all the obligations that the natural world would foist on him. Their attack is again against the rampant individual, trampling not norms and customs but resources and animals. A return to limits is well overdue – all we can do is cut back.
There is in each of these stories something perhaps sympathetic. The post-liberals often grasp that the building blocks of public life are under threat, the environmentalists appeal to a not-unwelcome idea of unspoilt beauty and the sheer oppressiveness of mass society, and the feminists attack a sort of sexual free-for-all where only the most boorish traits of each sex seem to have survived liberation. Most fundamentally, perhaps, they all capture, in their own ways, the widespread sense that duties, obligations and responsibilities enjoy little cultural validation today.
The problem with these ideas is not that they fail to grasp real, enduring challenges to capitalist society. Rather, the problem is that they are what we might call ‘philosophies of dispossession’.
Post-liberals, having been dispossessed of the res publica, turn inward toward the realms of family and community. Environmentalism enjoys intuitive appeal because modern man is increasingly dispossessed of both his prosperity and his mastery of nature. The new feminists, in turn, react to the fact that both men and women have become dispossessed of any particular role in a society that seems to have little need either for childbirth or heroism.
Their essential conservatism – their reactionary character in the literal meaning of the term – limits their theoretical frame to a desperate rearguard action against what has recently been lost. Their obsession with what they have been robbed of blinds them to more fundamental issues. It gives even their most articulate and historically informed proponents an inescapable ‘back in my day’ quality. Even Matthew Crawford, a rare public intellectual with an unusually wide frame of reference, has started saying that the post-liberal programme would be happy to just turn the clock back 40 years.
If the problem with reaction in this case is therefore a sort of ex-boyfriend syndrome – obsessed over that which is lost, but unable to grasp why they lost her – we need to turn our gaze to more fundamental issues. The most useful clue we can receive here is that all our reactionary philosophies share an instinctive aversion to the concept of freedom. In fact, they all agree that most of our problems stem from having too much of it: Too much freedom bespoils the planet, too much freedom estranges us from community life, and too much freedom estranges us from biology.
In contrast, it is our job to recover the tradition that understands the link between freedom and responsibility.
A final word. We’re going to talk a lot about progress this weekend and progress is a tricky concept.
When Lasch, in one of our readings, rails against the fatalism of progressive thought – its tendency to close down discussion of political and economic change, banish all critics to the position of old fogeys unable to move with the times – he is not trying to renounce human improvement. Quite the opposite: he believes true improvement in the condition of man is possible only if we reject the shallow ideology of progressivism, the automatism of its ideology.
In this sense, he is offering a book-length treatment of a sentence by Hannah Arendt: ‘Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; both are articles of superstition, not of faith.’ It is possible to hope for a better future, but only the progress superstition insists it happens automatically, which at the same time disengages us from the responsibility to make it happen. In an odd way, Extinction Rebellion or Black Lives Matter are the strange heirs to the tradition of progressivism – they might have given up on the idea of human life getting inexorably better, but they both share the idea that time itself dictates a course of action. ‘I just can’t’, they say, ‘we shouldn’t have to deal with this in the twenty-first century’.
Well, like it or not, we do have to deal with this in the twenty-first century. Until we stop seeing the problems and challenges as our time as an un-shoulderable burden and start seeing them as an invitation to remake the world, we’ll never overcome the superstition of progress. Responding to the invitation to remake the world is our job - so let’s get started.
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