All too often, the intellectuals, even "conservative" intellectuals, have been instrumental in actively pushing totalitarianism, so I suppose it's natural that they wouldn't call attention to it. The process is not as far advanced over here in the United States, probably due to the fact that religion is still farily strong in many parts of America, and due to our heritage, many Americans are still very suspicious of state power. But the trend is unmistakable - the United States is most certainly less free in most ways than it was when I was a young man. Were just a few decades behind Britain, I fear.
Tschafer
31 July 2010 at 13:51
a Finn said...
Large complex organizations want people to be atomized to individuals, because individual is weak in interest conflicts vis-a-vis lco's and more easily manipulated, because the common faith of the community does not give him psychological and worldview constancy and durability.
Local communities are a necessary counterweight to the power of lco's. The following site offers useful information, although it might require occasional conservative filtering.
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/index.html
Schumacher, a Catholic towards the end of his life, published two books with nice titles "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if people mattered" and A Guide for The Perplexed"
I have been familiar with Schumacher since I was a teenager in about 1974. His legacy has mostly been co-opted by the politically correct left, although Joseph Pearce (a Catholic Distributist) is also a prominent advocate. I have mixed feelings about Schumacher overall; but I enjoy reading him and I believe he deserves close scrutiny and reflection.
1 August 2010 at 06:20
a Finn said...
Bgc: "His legacy has mostly been co-opted by the politically correct left, ..."
- True. I have become skillful in filtering in my mind the politicized, distorted, selective etc. leftist information from leftist texts and I don't react much to them emotionally. I wonder how skillful other conservatives perceive themselves to be at such filtering?
1 August 2010 at 17:31
After the end of the Cold War there was a period when pundits and commentators were talking about 'Civil Society', and how this was what distinguished free societies from totalitariian societies.
I came across this idea in Ernest Gellner - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Gellner.
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Civil Society refers to the forms of social organization between the state and the individual: the church and individual churches; the professions, guilds and trades unions; schools; and also voluntary clubs and societies.
This level of society was inevitably either eliminated or infiltrated and enlisted by totalitarian governments.
Yet - in spite of such self-awareness of the importance of Civil Society - in the past twenty years the institutions of Civil Society in Britain have either dwindled into insignificance or else been corrupted and enlisted into the state.
In my personal experinece, this has happened to the medical profession (which was one of the most powerful and independent professions) and to the universities. Both are now branches of the civil administration. A private library of which I am a member, the Literary and Philosophical Society, has also fallen: and it now pursues government driven ideologies in pursuit of state subsidies.
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The societies emerging from the Soviet Union were aware that the suppression of Civil Society had been one of the ways in which the citizens were made helpless, and were enslaved; and that the vacuum created by the destruction of civil society would make it difficult for the post-totalitarian societies to become viable.
There is a functional aspect to this - a society which lacks organization at a small scale will be very difficult to order at a national scale - which is why early societies were segmentary (like feudalism), built of many autonomous and self-sufficient units.
But there is a spiritual aspect as well. In traditional society, a person feels membership of a variety of groups: perhaps a church, a job, a club. When stable and autonomous, such institutions evoke loyalty and love. Participation in these institutions creates a lot of the 'meaning of life'.
So why have they dwindled, or been hollowed out into shells of dishonest propaganda?
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Two factors at least.
One is that distraction has become the major coping mechanism of secular life.
Instead of losing oneself in participation in civil society, one loses oneself in relentless distraction via the mass media, mass communications systems, portable music, images, narratives, news and other stimuli.
The other is that Civil Society has been systematically subverted by the state: by bureaucratic regulation, by taxation, by subsidy and coercively.
In a nutshell, this is because the ruling elite are mostly secular socialists (or communist atheists, to put it bluntly!). The West was too stable for revolution to succeed, but the policy of Fabian gradualism - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society - which aimed to introduce communism graduallly, incrementally, by means of the normal system of 'democratic' government, has succeeded almost completely.
Fabian socialism is the dominant form, and the validity of Fabian socialism is inculcated and enforced by education, media, government propaganda (via the civil administration) and by the remaining shells of Civil Society.
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The implication seems to be that the elite is self-corrupted to the point of being hermetically-sealed from reality, hence unreformable.
Presumably this means that when the Western system implodes from incoherence and self-hatred (or is sufficiently weakened such as to be taken over by outside or alien powers), and radical change comes, such change will involve wholesale replacment of the current secular intellectual elite - despite the massive loss of expertise that this will entail.
Misrule by the intellectual elite on a massive and unprecedented scale - the consequences of which are systematically invisible to the intellectual elite, but apparent to those outside the elite or immune to their propaganda - will tend to lead to the biggest anti-intellectual backlash in history; simply as a matter of social survival. A chilling prospect, for all readers of this blog...
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So, assuming the theorists of Civil Society were correct - we in the West are now living in what, by definition, amounts to a totalitarian society.
But hardly anybody has noticed.
Because we swim in an ideology which apparently renders our situation inescapable, because the ideology represents weakness, chaos and self-loathing as moral progress.
The fact that intellectuals have barely noticed such a rapid, albeit incremental, imposition of a totalitarian system is a damning indictment of... something-or-another.
"The death of civil society in the West"
4 Comments -
All too often, the intellectuals, even "conservative" intellectuals, have been instrumental in actively pushing totalitarianism, so I suppose it's natural that they wouldn't call attention to it. The process is not as far advanced over here in the United States, probably due to the fact that religion is still farily strong in many parts of America, and due to our heritage, many Americans are still very suspicious of state power. But the trend is unmistakable - the United States is most certainly less free in most ways than it was when I was a young man. Were just a few decades behind Britain, I fear.
Tschafer
31 July 2010 at 13:51
Large complex organizations want people to be atomized to individuals, because individual is weak in interest conflicts vis-a-vis lco's and more easily manipulated, because the common faith of the community does not give him psychological and worldview constancy and durability.
Local communities are a necessary counterweight to the power of lco's. The following site offers useful information, although it might require occasional conservative filtering.
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/index.html
Schumacher, a Catholic towards the end of his life, published two books with nice titles "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if people mattered" and A Guide for The Perplexed"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed
31 July 2010 at 21:39
I have been familiar with Schumacher since I was a teenager in about 1974. His legacy has mostly been co-opted by the politically correct left, although Joseph Pearce (a Catholic Distributist) is also a prominent advocate. I have mixed feelings about Schumacher overall; but I enjoy reading him and I believe he deserves close scrutiny and reflection.
1 August 2010 at 06:20
Bgc: "His legacy has mostly been co-opted by the politically correct left, ..."
- True. I have become skillful in filtering in my mind the politicized, distorted, selective etc. leftist information from leftist texts and I don't react much to them emotionally. I wonder how skillful other conservatives perceive themselves to be at such filtering?
1 August 2010 at 17:31