Great insight. Covers in a lot more detail one of the aspects I've investigated in that Region is more of a Psychology than a Theology. Once you see this, so much of politics makes so much more sense!
Agreed that modern Crittery takes up the activist framework of Marxism while picking and choosing from the beliefs.
But the utopian future itself seems to be one of the beliefs they don't bother with. Their doctrines are famously pessimistic. Postmodernisn teaces that truth claims will always be mere power plays. Race critters say racism is ineradicable.
I sometimes hear them use aspirational language on normies. But even that is weak tea. Commies promising to end poverty makes sense when there's a lot of poverty around. Critters rubbing out invisible racism doesn't create vivid vision of the future.
Effective Altruism follows logically--they can model (see climate change) the future in such detail that they can justify any means to enable the glorious, transformational future.
I consistently notice the cognitive shift towards intention > outcome, which is now even being embraced by corporations with the climate agenda. However, in most cases of Marxists I doubt their intention; I know people who are Marxists and are both very compassionate but also have a sense of victimhood/ injustice. It’s a moral and intellectual project for them. I think they are (even if just subconsciously) interested in tearing things down more than anything else. It also helps that being destructive now offers social currency.
My mother, ironically, is a hippie who doesn’t know or understand anything about socialism or Marxism, but is driven by the doctrine of absolute compassion (accepting endless migrants, a social welfare system, carbon taxes to save the planet) and fighting against the “evils” of the world (racism, sexism, inequality, greed). She cannot be convinced she’s wrong because it is a religious belief that she doesn’t understand is a religious belief. It’s very frustrating to be around her because I know she’s apart of the mad crowd thats bringing this system upon us, and that ultimately she won’t understand that good intentions like hers created hell.
Dec 24, 2023·edited Dec 24, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby
I have arrived at this party late. But I’m absolutely loving the quality of Lorenzo’s thoughts and the clarity of his writing.
Reading this Essay No 5, the compelling evocation of Marxism’s intellectually cheap, but physically, disastrously expensive appeal, resonated not only with the weirdness of living in a world in which a minority of elites have captured policy with a reality-denying and obviously harmful dogma, but also with my experience of having lived through the Brexit debate and the UK’s departure from the EU. Lorenzo’s nail-on-the-head description of the irrefutable nature of “arguments” based on appeals to an imagined future - which cannot be falsified by reference to the trade-offs of the past or present time, reminded me of the stomach churning, migraine inducing dissonance I felt over the EU debate.
It occurred to me reading this piece, that Sovereignty was - or at least was presented and sold as - a sacred ideal of the “take back control” slogan. And that the imagined future of Britain free from the dictates of Brussels bureaucrats was an irrefutable ideal which was immune to critique from “trade-off” based objections from pragmatists like me.
Part of the toxicity of the Brexit debate, was how the unattainable goal of supposedly re-establishing an in-fact historically unprecedented ideal of a nation state in complete “control” of its regulations, international obligations and borders, was elevated to a high status beyond the reach of pragmatists who - for example - tried to point out the extent to which exiting the EU was highly likely to leave us with less control of our borders than remaining. (To name but two ways, by motivating the French to cease tolerating UK immigration officers conducting asylum checks on French territory, and ending the UK’s treaty-based ability to return failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants to safe countries in Europe through which they had passed on their way to Dover.) That kind of intelligent, reality based comment (which required actual knowledge of domestic and international law to make) was utterly meaningless in the religious-feeling domain in which the debate occurred. The same was true of comments based on our relative GDP, the present and historical importance of our relationship with commercial counterparties within Europe, and the fact that in reality, this meant that European regulations were set to be of practical application to a large part of uk business for - practically forever - and the consequent question: is there not a benefit to staying at the EU table for the writing of future regulation?
This point was partly made by a cartoon in the FT a few weeks after the referendum, called something like, “If Brexit were a
Roundabout.” The first exit from the roundabout was “remain”. (The commentary pointed out that 49% of those who voted, voted for that, actual, ascertainable, present time reality.) All the other exists were some iteration of “no deal”, “Norway”, “Switzerland”. The point of the cartoon, was that the framing of the referendum question presented “Leave” as if it were a single option, when it really wasn’t. And thus the result was not democratic at anything beyond a superficial level. Quite possibly, this is correct.
But as Lorenzo made me recall, this was just the start, and not the end, of the conceptual problems with all the “leave” iterations which the cartoon referenced. Each of those iterations was presented as a real option, when in fact none of them (including “no deal”) was. All of the pro-leave rhetoric about what a post Brexit world would look like, was about as deluded as a spouse (and parent) looking forward to their post-divorce lifestyle as if they could obtain it from a wish-granting genie, instead of negotiate it with their real-life (and pissed off) spouse and/or have it approved by a judge. Not a single vision for Brexit was ever - to my knowledge - presented to the British public alongside an actual plan for agreeing the package with the EU and/or (or, in the case of “no deal” just, or) rolling out the vast, deep and technical domestic changes in law and practice that were going to be necessary once we broke off our membership. When, the day before the vote, I heard a journalist on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme say that the economic arguments were “very finely balanced”, and how to vote seemed to “come down to how you feel about sovereignty”, I actually wept.
The result was to feed into the spiral of decay in the value and prestige of what Hilary Mantel in one of her brilliant novels neatly described as,
“The basic business of thinking.”
It’s also fed directly into the decay of our own statecraft and administration. Someone could write a book on the collapse in quality of legislative drafting coming out of parliamentary counsel’s office since 2016, and the very great harm this has done. It was so, so, so predictable and not the fault of the draftsmen - who were I believe simply overwhelmed. We are now left with more and more legislation drafted too quickly, not thought through, and (ironically) ceding too much detail to ministers to write in future, via delegated powers of secondary legislation. It has weakened the vital but largely unknown organ of the state that is the parliamentary draftsman, and made the office all the more vulnerable to high-jacking by politicians with little respect for (or even understanding of) the rule of law.
I don’t know what the answer is. Even on this one single issue, I’m too much of a pragmatist to believe that rejoining the EU (on terms vastly inferior to the terms negotiated by Thatcher and Major) is a good or viable option. And I do not know how we reinstall the respect for pragmatic expertise, and knowledge of outcome-driven processes, in this dysfunctional New World which is - undeniably - now ours.
I am glued to my seat, to read what Lorenzo suggests.
Great insight. Covers in a lot more detail one of the aspects I've investigated in that Region is more of a Psychology than a Theology. Once you see this, so much of politics makes so much more sense!
https://polymathicbeing.substack.com/p/religion-as-a-psychology
Agreed that modern Crittery takes up the activist framework of Marxism while picking and choosing from the beliefs.
But the utopian future itself seems to be one of the beliefs they don't bother with. Their doctrines are famously pessimistic. Postmodernisn teaces that truth claims will always be mere power plays. Race critters say racism is ineradicable.
I sometimes hear them use aspirational language on normies. But even that is weak tea. Commies promising to end poverty makes sense when there's a lot of poverty around. Critters rubbing out invisible racism doesn't create vivid vision of the future.
Great analysis. Love the Hegel joke.
Effective Altruism follows logically--they can model (see climate change) the future in such detail that they can justify any means to enable the glorious, transformational future.
I’m always amazed by your erudition.
I consistently notice the cognitive shift towards intention > outcome, which is now even being embraced by corporations with the climate agenda. However, in most cases of Marxists I doubt their intention; I know people who are Marxists and are both very compassionate but also have a sense of victimhood/ injustice. It’s a moral and intellectual project for them. I think they are (even if just subconsciously) interested in tearing things down more than anything else. It also helps that being destructive now offers social currency.
My mother, ironically, is a hippie who doesn’t know or understand anything about socialism or Marxism, but is driven by the doctrine of absolute compassion (accepting endless migrants, a social welfare system, carbon taxes to save the planet) and fighting against the “evils” of the world (racism, sexism, inequality, greed). She cannot be convinced she’s wrong because it is a religious belief that she doesn’t understand is a religious belief. It’s very frustrating to be around her because I know she’s apart of the mad crowd thats bringing this system upon us, and that ultimately she won’t understand that good intentions like hers created hell.
I have arrived at this party late. But I’m absolutely loving the quality of Lorenzo’s thoughts and the clarity of his writing.
Reading this Essay No 5, the compelling evocation of Marxism’s intellectually cheap, but physically, disastrously expensive appeal, resonated not only with the weirdness of living in a world in which a minority of elites have captured policy with a reality-denying and obviously harmful dogma, but also with my experience of having lived through the Brexit debate and the UK’s departure from the EU. Lorenzo’s nail-on-the-head description of the irrefutable nature of “arguments” based on appeals to an imagined future - which cannot be falsified by reference to the trade-offs of the past or present time, reminded me of the stomach churning, migraine inducing dissonance I felt over the EU debate.
It occurred to me reading this piece, that Sovereignty was - or at least was presented and sold as - a sacred ideal of the “take back control” slogan. And that the imagined future of Britain free from the dictates of Brussels bureaucrats was an irrefutable ideal which was immune to critique from “trade-off” based objections from pragmatists like me.
Part of the toxicity of the Brexit debate, was how the unattainable goal of supposedly re-establishing an in-fact historically unprecedented ideal of a nation state in complete “control” of its regulations, international obligations and borders, was elevated to a high status beyond the reach of pragmatists who - for example - tried to point out the extent to which exiting the EU was highly likely to leave us with less control of our borders than remaining. (To name but two ways, by motivating the French to cease tolerating UK immigration officers conducting asylum checks on French territory, and ending the UK’s treaty-based ability to return failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants to safe countries in Europe through which they had passed on their way to Dover.) That kind of intelligent, reality based comment (which required actual knowledge of domestic and international law to make) was utterly meaningless in the religious-feeling domain in which the debate occurred. The same was true of comments based on our relative GDP, the present and historical importance of our relationship with commercial counterparties within Europe, and the fact that in reality, this meant that European regulations were set to be of practical application to a large part of uk business for - practically forever - and the consequent question: is there not a benefit to staying at the EU table for the writing of future regulation?
This point was partly made by a cartoon in the FT a few weeks after the referendum, called something like, “If Brexit were a
Roundabout.” The first exit from the roundabout was “remain”. (The commentary pointed out that 49% of those who voted, voted for that, actual, ascertainable, present time reality.) All the other exists were some iteration of “no deal”, “Norway”, “Switzerland”. The point of the cartoon, was that the framing of the referendum question presented “Leave” as if it were a single option, when it really wasn’t. And thus the result was not democratic at anything beyond a superficial level. Quite possibly, this is correct.
But as Lorenzo made me recall, this was just the start, and not the end, of the conceptual problems with all the “leave” iterations which the cartoon referenced. Each of those iterations was presented as a real option, when in fact none of them (including “no deal”) was. All of the pro-leave rhetoric about what a post Brexit world would look like, was about as deluded as a spouse (and parent) looking forward to their post-divorce lifestyle as if they could obtain it from a wish-granting genie, instead of negotiate it with their real-life (and pissed off) spouse and/or have it approved by a judge. Not a single vision for Brexit was ever - to my knowledge - presented to the British public alongside an actual plan for agreeing the package with the EU and/or (or, in the case of “no deal” just, or) rolling out the vast, deep and technical domestic changes in law and practice that were going to be necessary once we broke off our membership. When, the day before the vote, I heard a journalist on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme say that the economic arguments were “very finely balanced”, and how to vote seemed to “come down to how you feel about sovereignty”, I actually wept.
The result was to feed into the spiral of decay in the value and prestige of what Hilary Mantel in one of her brilliant novels neatly described as,
“The basic business of thinking.”
It’s also fed directly into the decay of our own statecraft and administration. Someone could write a book on the collapse in quality of legislative drafting coming out of parliamentary counsel’s office since 2016, and the very great harm this has done. It was so, so, so predictable and not the fault of the draftsmen - who were I believe simply overwhelmed. We are now left with more and more legislation drafted too quickly, not thought through, and (ironically) ceding too much detail to ministers to write in future, via delegated powers of secondary legislation. It has weakened the vital but largely unknown organ of the state that is the parliamentary draftsman, and made the office all the more vulnerable to high-jacking by politicians with little respect for (or even understanding of) the rule of law.
I don’t know what the answer is. Even on this one single issue, I’m too much of a pragmatist to believe that rejoining the EU (on terms vastly inferior to the terms negotiated by Thatcher and Major) is a good or viable option. And I do not know how we reinstall the respect for pragmatic expertise, and knowledge of outcome-driven processes, in this dysfunctional New World which is - undeniably - now ours.
I am glued to my seat, to read what Lorenzo suggests.