Roger Scruton debunked - 'deconstructed' (to use a term of his enemies) - the ideas of the left in a series of articles for The Salisbury Review. These were updated and published in his 2015 book "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands". Thomas Sowell began a similar programme of critique in 1980 - beginning with his now out of print "Knowledge and Decisions" - and a series of books have followed (focused mainly on economic ideas). Sowell locates 1964 as the year the ideas of the Fools and Frauds (Foucault et al) fully took root in the US.
These critiques and warnings came too late to stop the infestation in the UK that followed and was well established here by the seventies. Initially finding fertile ground in sociology and literature departments the invasion took longer to infect history departments but, we now see and as Frank highlights in his latest book, conquered them as well. The result, via education departments (once known as the intellectual slums of campuses) was the knotweed of left ideas filtered into wider society through generations of graduates that now run our institutions from the BBC to the Civil Service via museums, the judiciary, the police, schools, charities, and even the 'it's OK to cry' armed forces. [Hard to see how a box of tissues will be effective against Al-Qaeda] Thus it has come to be that we have to self-censor.
Try announcing yourself as a member of the Conservative Party (or worse Refom UK), for example, in the Home Office even though both are entirely lawful paries in the UK (for now). You would not be regarded as merely misguided or gullible but morally defective with all that would entail for your career.
The progress of bad ideas - my summary may not be accurate (I am a retired mathematician not a scholar of history or ideas) but probably followed something like the trajectory I outline - does not explain why they proved so potent. It is as if there is a need for people to believe they are morally good, the definition of which is decided by the zeitgeist, the grip of the knotweed now out of control in our garden, the sources of moral belief such as Christianity now atrophied and ineffective. In contrast, the left's bad ideas provide an easy route to a morally worthy purpose by simplifying with the shortcut of oppressor and oppressed. Everything is recast through this prism. But to sustain that history has to be rewritten. There is no celebration of Britain's role in ending the slave trade. Heaven used to rejoice over the sinner that repented, but no longer does. Redemption for sin is no longer a morally worthy route available to us.
But the road to hell is still paved with good intentions. The Equalties Act 2010 and its public sector duty requirement probably arose from good intentions - I do not credit the left with the ability or intelligence to forecast and plan long term effects over generations. There is no Bond villain sitting in a basment stroking a cat and planning everything that happens - but it has created a monster, the religion of DEI which clouds out and crowds out recognition of the damage that multiculturalism has done and is doing to society. It may even be too late to promote, support and celebrate a dominant culture for people to assimilate to. Thus the weekly horror show in London of anti-semitism and terrorist support that paralyses the establishment. And the cover up over the Southport terrorist was not a cover up by mastermind Starmer (at least not wholly so). It was enough for senior police and the Home Office to do the 'right thing' by the lights of their morally superior subservience to the religion of DEI that now sits atop the doctrine of muticulturalism. As Frank noted last April, we are undergoing a decivilising force. The left's elite vanguard, like all censors, beleive they are immune to, or can handle certain facts and ideas with impunity (and about as self-regarding as you can get), but intellectually and morally defective neanderthals like me cannot. They do this oblivious to the supreme irony that if anyone has been indoctrinated it is them.
Living in central London I can easily access librairies and bookshops and while browsing in Waterstones I came across an A level Politics text book. Curiosity aroused I sat down with it - Waterstones Piccadilly has armchairs for that purpose - and it was no surprise to find socialism got a good write up but conservatism less so. In particular there was no mention of Disraeli's definition. Change, Disraeli said, is an inevitable part of human existence, and the question is not whether change should be opposed, but “whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary general doctrines”. There were many injustices in the 19th century but deference to customs and traditions defined the English.
Or rather it used to. Today we are in the grip of "abstract principles, and arbitrary general doctrines" such as Labour's proposed amendement to the Equalities Act whereby larger companies will have to racially classify their workforce. (Given the increasing number of mixed race children good luck with that).
As to the arbitrary doctrine of multculturalism I had personal experience last Armistice Day. My wife and I were walking up the Edgware Road as thousands of wannabe Hamas jihadists were streaming to that Saturday's rally. We were wearing poppies as we were both well aware of 'how we got to here' having had fathers who fought in the second world war. As two masked men passed us one looked at our poppies and said 'f*ckers".
George Orwell highlighed the danger of "abstract principles, and arbitrary general doctrines” in his brilliant novel "Animal Farm" and came up with the memorable "Four legs good, two legs bad". We live under that abolute morality today and we two legged creatures, to do what Marx once believed of the working class, that a class in itself would become a class for itself, need to become a class for ourselves. We really do.
Excellent points and a very necessary article! When I entered American academia in 1993 as an immigrant from a former Communist country, I remember feeling so suffocated by the atmosphere of intellectual conformity that I thought: "If, God forbid, this country ever took an undemocratic course, this would be worse than communist Romania because the intellectuals here are conformist by nature, while in Romania they were conformist by necessity." I think one can explain conformism in many ways, but if we chose a psychological and sociological explanation, I would say that puritanism as a mindset plays a big role here. A "puritan" is a person whose biggest desire is to be valued morally by her (it is usually a she) peers (hence moral righteousness and "virtue signaling") and who watches and denounces anyone who seems even remotely a heretic. The other big role is the feminization of the institutions (a phenomenon explained by many psychologists, in particular Jordan Paterson). Women are socialized to be "nice" and to avoid conflict, he says. I would add to that: this is the case for middle-upper-middle class women in Anglophone societies. Niceness, "kindness" and social conformity (ie the fear to disagree) are traits of the bourgeois (ie, middle class) women in the Anglosphere (this is very different from Eastern Europe where the middle class is much more rarefied; traditionally, these are societies of peasants, and peasants are not " nice".) And so, the more women in institutions, especially in position of power, the more conformity.
And then, there is another possible explanation related specifically to American academia and the way people are being evaluated there. It is a system masquerading as democratic in that everybody evaluates everybody else, including the students their professors (something non-existent in Europe), and this creates conformity because it encourages professors to play to the gallery and submit to the students' demands. And last but not least, the idea that the student is a customer also creates a context in which the "seller" (the professor) submits to the demands of the "customer" (the student).
The force of the pressure to self-censor is unbelievable. I have met it from those on the right as well as the left. The promotion of the “climate crisis” by the right was as ferociously policed as any campaign on the left. To speak up against it is to risk attack from all sides. But thankfully there are still some strong voices who question the assumptions of this culture. Very powerful piece.
Roger Scruton debunked - 'deconstructed' (to use a term of his enemies) - the ideas of the left in a series of articles for The Salisbury Review. These were updated and published in his 2015 book "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands". Thomas Sowell began a similar programme of critique in 1980 - beginning with his now out of print "Knowledge and Decisions" - and a series of books have followed (focused mainly on economic ideas). Sowell locates 1964 as the year the ideas of the Fools and Frauds (Foucault et al) fully took root in the US.
These critiques and warnings came too late to stop the infestation in the UK that followed and was well established here by the seventies. Initially finding fertile ground in sociology and literature departments the invasion took longer to infect history departments but, we now see and as Frank highlights in his latest book, conquered them as well. The result, via education departments (once known as the intellectual slums of campuses) was the knotweed of left ideas filtered into wider society through generations of graduates that now run our institutions from the BBC to the Civil Service via museums, the judiciary, the police, schools, charities, and even the 'it's OK to cry' armed forces. [Hard to see how a box of tissues will be effective against Al-Qaeda] Thus it has come to be that we have to self-censor.
Try announcing yourself as a member of the Conservative Party (or worse Refom UK), for example, in the Home Office even though both are entirely lawful paries in the UK (for now). You would not be regarded as merely misguided or gullible but morally defective with all that would entail for your career.
The progress of bad ideas - my summary may not be accurate (I am a retired mathematician not a scholar of history or ideas) but probably followed something like the trajectory I outline - does not explain why they proved so potent. It is as if there is a need for people to believe they are morally good, the definition of which is decided by the zeitgeist, the grip of the knotweed now out of control in our garden, the sources of moral belief such as Christianity now atrophied and ineffective. In contrast, the left's bad ideas provide an easy route to a morally worthy purpose by simplifying with the shortcut of oppressor and oppressed. Everything is recast through this prism. But to sustain that history has to be rewritten. There is no celebration of Britain's role in ending the slave trade. Heaven used to rejoice over the sinner that repented, but no longer does. Redemption for sin is no longer a morally worthy route available to us.
But the road to hell is still paved with good intentions. The Equalties Act 2010 and its public sector duty requirement probably arose from good intentions - I do not credit the left with the ability or intelligence to forecast and plan long term effects over generations. There is no Bond villain sitting in a basment stroking a cat and planning everything that happens - but it has created a monster, the religion of DEI which clouds out and crowds out recognition of the damage that multiculturalism has done and is doing to society. It may even be too late to promote, support and celebrate a dominant culture for people to assimilate to. Thus the weekly horror show in London of anti-semitism and terrorist support that paralyses the establishment. And the cover up over the Southport terrorist was not a cover up by mastermind Starmer (at least not wholly so). It was enough for senior police and the Home Office to do the 'right thing' by the lights of their morally superior subservience to the religion of DEI that now sits atop the doctrine of muticulturalism. As Frank noted last April, we are undergoing a decivilising force. The left's elite vanguard, like all censors, beleive they are immune to, or can handle certain facts and ideas with impunity (and about as self-regarding as you can get), but intellectually and morally defective neanderthals like me cannot. They do this oblivious to the supreme irony that if anyone has been indoctrinated it is them.
Living in central London I can easily access librairies and bookshops and while browsing in Waterstones I came across an A level Politics text book. Curiosity aroused I sat down with it - Waterstones Piccadilly has armchairs for that purpose - and it was no surprise to find socialism got a good write up but conservatism less so. In particular there was no mention of Disraeli's definition. Change, Disraeli said, is an inevitable part of human existence, and the question is not whether change should be opposed, but “whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary general doctrines”. There were many injustices in the 19th century but deference to customs and traditions defined the English.
Or rather it used to. Today we are in the grip of "abstract principles, and arbitrary general doctrines" such as Labour's proposed amendement to the Equalities Act whereby larger companies will have to racially classify their workforce. (Given the increasing number of mixed race children good luck with that).
As to the arbitrary doctrine of multculturalism I had personal experience last Armistice Day. My wife and I were walking up the Edgware Road as thousands of wannabe Hamas jihadists were streaming to that Saturday's rally. We were wearing poppies as we were both well aware of 'how we got to here' having had fathers who fought in the second world war. As two masked men passed us one looked at our poppies and said 'f*ckers".
George Orwell highlighed the danger of "abstract principles, and arbitrary general doctrines” in his brilliant novel "Animal Farm" and came up with the memorable "Four legs good, two legs bad". We live under that abolute morality today and we two legged creatures, to do what Marx once believed of the working class, that a class in itself would become a class for itself, need to become a class for ourselves. We really do.
Excellent points and a very necessary article! When I entered American academia in 1993 as an immigrant from a former Communist country, I remember feeling so suffocated by the atmosphere of intellectual conformity that I thought: "If, God forbid, this country ever took an undemocratic course, this would be worse than communist Romania because the intellectuals here are conformist by nature, while in Romania they were conformist by necessity." I think one can explain conformism in many ways, but if we chose a psychological and sociological explanation, I would say that puritanism as a mindset plays a big role here. A "puritan" is a person whose biggest desire is to be valued morally by her (it is usually a she) peers (hence moral righteousness and "virtue signaling") and who watches and denounces anyone who seems even remotely a heretic. The other big role is the feminization of the institutions (a phenomenon explained by many psychologists, in particular Jordan Paterson). Women are socialized to be "nice" and to avoid conflict, he says. I would add to that: this is the case for middle-upper-middle class women in Anglophone societies. Niceness, "kindness" and social conformity (ie the fear to disagree) are traits of the bourgeois (ie, middle class) women in the Anglosphere (this is very different from Eastern Europe where the middle class is much more rarefied; traditionally, these are societies of peasants, and peasants are not " nice".) And so, the more women in institutions, especially in position of power, the more conformity.
And then, there is another possible explanation related specifically to American academia and the way people are being evaluated there. It is a system masquerading as democratic in that everybody evaluates everybody else, including the students their professors (something non-existent in Europe), and this creates conformity because it encourages professors to play to the gallery and submit to the students' demands. And last but not least, the idea that the student is a customer also creates a context in which the "seller" (the professor) submits to the demands of the "customer" (the student).
The force of the pressure to self-censor is unbelievable. I have met it from those on the right as well as the left. The promotion of the “climate crisis” by the right was as ferociously policed as any campaign on the left. To speak up against it is to risk attack from all sides. But thankfully there are still some strong voices who question the assumptions of this culture. Very powerful piece.