The “Covid Crisis” is a peculiar situation insofar as the greater degree of the crisis is constituted by our response to the Covid-19 virus, rather than the virus itself. Never in history has a problem itself been so dramatically eclipsed by the solution to that problem, to the point that it feels as though we have amputated an arm to “solve” a paper-cut. The world doubtless would have recovered from Covid 19, just as it has recovered from innumerable respiratory outbreaks in the past; but will it ever recover from the sustained assault on democracy, freedom, small independent business, children, mental health, logic, happiness, art, spontaneity, etc., encapsulated in our “response” to Covid? Will medicine and public health ever recover from the Orwellian anti-public health practised in the Covid era? Will the scientific method ever recover from the absurdities of “the Science”? Will the human spirit ever recover from the corrosive spiritual poison of the “New Normal”?
In reality, nothing like this has ever happened before – not in the context of public health at any rate. Even the Spanish Flu, orders of magnitude more lethal than Covid, did not occasion anything like the Draconian and potentially irreversible re-structuring of society which has occurred under the auspices of putative Covid mitigation. Looking at the pandemics of the 20th century, we can say with empirical certainty that had Covid hit then, none of this would have happened. So why is it happening now?
We can look at this question from two separate directions. Why did our governments, health authorities, and media/academic elites choose to implement these policies? This is a question of empirical historical record, though one which is likely to remain murky and speculative for some time, since we are dealing with various actors, heterogeneous motivations and a public record which is likely to have many of the crucial details blacked out. An equally intriguing question, however, is why the public choose to accept, or even ardently embrace, these policies.
Why did so many choose to comply with restrictions which radically diminished the quality of their lives for prolonged periods, and were so obviously contrary to their economic self-interest, and the futures of their children? Why did so many who'd been habitually sceptical of governments and large corporations suddenly accept, in respect of just one issue, the merger of state and large Pharma corporation as an almost infallible, unquestionably benign entity? Why did the liberals accept the destruction of civil liberties, and the democrats embrace rule by arbitrary authoritarian decree? Why did those who had made the loudest protestation in history of their opposition to discrimination simply accept legalized segregation with the ease of a dandy trying on a new hat?
Clearly, we are living through a phenomenon of mass hysteria and mass hypnosis the likes of which has not been seen before. There are many answers as to why the ground was so fertile for this phenomenon to take place right now. Some are more straight forward. The public have been subject to what is undeniably the most expansive propaganda drive in modern history, a programme of mass perception management which has been bolstered by the state's increasing embrace of behavioural psychology/economics techniques and theories. The role of the internet and social media, their inculcation of increasingly sedentary, solitary and virtualized forms of social activity, as well as a fervidly tribalized form of politics, would warrant a study in itself.
In this essay, however, I'm going to look at the Covid phenomenon in a broader historical context of the modern west's search for an over-arching system of meaning and value in the absence of Christianity. In the absence of a religion, or some equivalent communal system of shared value and meaning, are western societies destined, sooner or later, to always fall back under the spell of mad, destructive totalitarian projects?
Nietzsche's Death of God and the Dilemma of Modernity.
“Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Parable of the Madman.
When Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed the death of God (in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra), he articulated a problem which has haunted the modern west ever since. The problem, at least from the point of view of an ardent anti-theist like Nietzsche, was not the abandonment of Christianity itself, but rather how such an event would realistically play out in the context of a society which was thoroughly Christianized to its core, right down to its unconscious impulses and instincts. Christianity had dominated the spirit of the west – its intellect, imagination and conscience – for more than two thousand years. As such, Christianity was not merely a set of customs and beliefs that could be hastily jettisoned – it was an entire architecture of belief, a worldview on whose foundations the entire structure depended. Christianity provided a specific understanding of the cosmos and our place within it, an objective foundation for our ethics and values, and an eschatological model of history as a narrative with a definite and redemptive culmination.
Assuming that Nietzsche was correct, and a belief in God was no longer tenable, the question then emerges as to what western society would adopt to replace Christianity as its guiding light. What set of beliefs would unite people as a community of shared purpose, rather than a field of atomized and competing individuals? What underlying principles would underwrite our values and ethics? What would replace Divine Providence as the organising principle, the overarching purpose, of history?
Adherents of the Enlightenment largely believed that the transfer of power would be smooth and seamless: reason, logic and the scientific method would replace God as the central principle of modern western societies. Why wouldn't they, after all? They worked. They exhibited a practical efficacy for getting things done in the physical world that left prayer in the dust. Advocates of egalitarian, socialist and other humanitarian movements believed similarly that the redemptive historical arc of Divine Providence could be replaced by the dream of perfecting human nature and human society within history itself, at some indeterminate future date. It all seemed reasonably plausible: the west would abandon sin, redemption and the hereafter, and pursue scientific progress and rational ethical improvement in the here and now.
Nietzsche, however, wasn't so convinced. The west had a double dilemma: it had to extricate itself not only from the deep Christian foundations of its thought, but also from the general impulse toward religion which had provided an organizing principle for virtually all previous societies: “What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?” Nietzsche feared that the majority, unable to invent a new set of values for itself, would fall prey to a deep and deadening nihilism. Unable to cope with this lack of communal purpose and universal meaning, they would fall back into the familiar patterns of their religious worship – but this time it would no longer be towards a religious object. Instead, their appetite for the communal purpose offered by religion would be capitalized by other things – sublimated, surrogate religions – that need not even be conscious of themselves as religious phenomena:
“God is dead, but considering the state the species man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.”
In the first half the 20th century, the emergence of totalitarianism – in which whole populations became hypnotized by grandiose and irrational national projects – proved this apprehension to have been well-founded.
Interlude: Clapping for the NHS – Something Wicked this Way Comes.
In early April 2020, I was somewhat sceptical of lockdowns, but believed, as many did at the time, that they would ultimately be a brief, costly over-reaction, but not the end of the world. I recall very vividly seeing a piece of montage footage of people across the UK engaged in the curious new ritual of the Clap for Our Carers. It almost immediately rubbed me the wrong way. “It's a nice sentiment,” I was thinking, “but something just feels a bit off about this. It's like a cuddly version of Orwell's Two Minutes Hate.”
By the middle of the short clip, I was beginning to find the whole thing eerie for some reason that I couldn't quite put my fingers on. Perhaps for the first time in the pandemic, it gave me an ominous feeling – Something Wicked this Way Comes. Another first (of what was to become an almost daily occurrence): I started thinking about the early years of the 20th century. A poem came into my head – which I haven't subsequently been able to source – about how people were seized by a peculiar and irrational enthusiasm as they cheered off the young men who were going to the Trenches – many to die senseless deaths. That, I realized, was why the clip bugged me so much. Communal fervours are like are almost always the indicator of something bad on the horizon – and when the state whips the public into ritualistic displays of communal fervour, it is usually the beginning of a war, or some kind of cultural revolution.
In hindsight, the premonition was entirely accurate – it was the beginning of both.
The End of History? Liberal Democracy and the Capitalist Ideal as a Way Out of the Dilemma of Modernity.
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| Sintesi Fascista, 1935, Alessandro Bruschetti |
The first half of the 20th century – which witnessed Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, the emergence of various forms of totalitarianism, the concentration camps, the Great Wars - was a devastating blow to the hubris of the modern protect. John Gray once wrote that if human rationality were treated as a scientific hypothesis, it would have been falsified long ago. The naivety of the Enlightenment ideal lay in its assumption that human beings were fundamentally rational creatures. In reality, rationality is simply one faculty of human psychology or consciousness. It may be the predominant faculty in certain individuals, but there was never any particularly compelling reason to believe that it could be the predominant faculty in the entire species.
The point is that the “irrational” components of human psychology – instinct, emotion, imagination – cannot be made entirely subservient to the “rational” components, nor is it clear that it is desirable that they should. As Carl Jung has often pointed out, an intense act of repression in the conscious domain produces and equal and opposite reaction in the unconscious. When western societies attempted to repress their Christian lineage, and the deep-rooted human impulses which have traditionally found expression in religions – the desire for collective, over-arching systems of meaning and value, the need for myths and stories which organise individual experience and collective history, the need to participate in self-transcending communities and projects – these things simply return, in an altered guise, and often with a vengeance. Modern secularists have tended to over-estimate the danger of actual religion, and underestimate the profound danger of the sublimated pseudo- or surrogate religion.
The pseudo-religion encapsulates all the negative aspects of religious phenomena – dogmatism, fanaticism, puritanism, sectarianism, etc. - and yet rarely contains the finer, grander components which the great world religions evolved over very long periods of time.
Under totalitarianism, a pseudo-religion par excellence, the state creates new objects of religious veneration in the form of a charismatic leader or doctrine of racial, nationalist, or socialist pre-destiny. It uses ritual and spectacle to re-tribalize the atomized modern mass; it nullifies the encroachment of nihilism and despair by focusing the public's attention obsessively on a specific national project. It solidifies the new sense of unity in the nation, and restores something of the religious sense of the universe as a locus of moral conflict between good and evil, by the careful creation of an enemy, an underclass, an Other, which will frequently be associated with disease and contagion. Totalitarianism is a monotheism of the State; all values, all beliefs, all goals, must become subservient to its ideology: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."
The emergence of totalitarianism and the devastation it wrought on the world made the dilemma of modernity even more pronounced. Moving into the second half of the century, both the Enlightenment dream of a society guided by reason and science, and the various collectivist utopias of the socialist reformers no longer seemed like plausible route out. In the post-war years, the west then settled on liberal democracy and an ideal of individualistic capitalism as the ideological model of the modern west. Much of the capitalist ideal of the post-war period was marked by the shadow of totalitarianism; it sought to be its anthesis. The capitalist ideal sought to emphasize individualism and individual freedom, whereas totalitarianism had stressed collectivism and the duty of the individual to the state. The horrors of the first half of the 20th century demonstrated that human beings had a deep rooted tendency towards tribalism which posed extreme danger when left unchecked. In contrast, the various civil rights movements of the post-war years frequently stressed the unique character of the individual over the immutable characteristics which made them representative of a mass or particular group.
To summarise the capitalist ideal of the post-war years: it sought to create a society in which people were individualistic, without being atomised. They would be rational, insofar they pursued their self-interest, and pursue their self-interest without necessarily being selfish. Beliefs of different kinds wouldn't go away, or need to be repressed, but they would cease to fanatical or sectarian. They would cease to desire to remake the world in their own image. People would find meaning, purpose and identity in various kinds of consumerism. This sounds crude but is not necessarily so; going to see an Ingmar Bergman film, listening to the Rolling Stones, or reading a Thomas Pynchon novel, are different forms of consumerism. Consumerism allowed, in a sense, that art could replace certain of the societal functions of religion. Capitalism, unlike totalitarianism, could contain it's own opposition: anti-capitalist art could be consumed, just like anything else.
In The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Francis Fukuyama famously argued that western liberal democracy was the “end-point of mankind's ideological evolution.” Subsequent events proved that judgement to have been somewhat ill-conceived as far as world politics were concerned; however, for a time at least, the argument could be made that liberal democracy remained the most durable solution to the west's dilemma of modernity. For its many flaws and problems, it at least appeared as though we had a stable set of values underpinning our society – a belief in the autonomy of the individual, in the rights of the individual to equal and fair treatment under the law, and crucially in the notion that, in order to best preserve those rights, our governing institutions and bodies must be subject to constant scrutiny, and rigorous checks and balances applied to their exercise of power. These limits to the state's power would remain the guarantor of the individual's autonomy and freedom, and the idea of tyranny returning to the west was inconceivable.
For as long as this sense prevailed, the west really did seem to occupy some kind of a-historical oasis: accepting the jarring shock of 9 11, the full, convulsive force of history remained consigned to the past, or to other regions of the world. Was the west's oasis at the end of history really so secure, though? As I have argued, much of the impetus to the liberal west's most vigorous period derived from the historical trauma of the first half of the 20th century. The horrors of the trenches and concentration camps were etched deeply into the psychology of the post-war years. They cast a long shadow which those of us who grew up in the latter years of that century were still keenly aware of. The lesson was simple and stark: this must never happen again. Much of the appetite for freedom, the hedonistic exploration of the self, and the anti-establishment values of the post-war world were a response to the trauma of totalitarianism.
But what if that lesson were eventually forgotten? What if the instability of an increasingly byzantine financial system finally scuppered the core faith of liberal democracy in the idea of a prosperous middle class, and the promise that hard work and ambition could bring a high standard of living and stability to the majority? What if the idea of representative democracy itself was gradually corroded by an intensely globalized form of politics and commerce, which saw the locus of power shift to unaccountable transnational entities? What if the west no longer believed in liberal democracy? Would it then slide irrevocably back into intense tribalism, and its appetite for meaning and purpose attach itself once again with an unconscious religious fervour to authoritarian demagogues and grand totalitarian projects?
These questions are of course thuddingly rhetorical. To return to the original query of this essay: why is that so many were so receptive, even to the point of a kind of fanatical devotion, to measures which were entirely contrary to their self-interest, and so lacking for the most part in any kind of logical consistency or persuasiveness? There must be some explanation, beyond the power of propaganda and heightened fear, to account for the eagerness with which liberal democracy embraced it's own potential demise at this particular point in our history. The answer, I suspect, is that we had become ripe for some time for this kind of mass psychological event: a totalitarian mobilization of the public to a single, essentially unattainable goal (the elimination or effective control of a highly contagious microscopic respiratory pathogen), which would express itself, unconsciously, as a new religion and the model of a new kind of society.
Ironically, it may turn out that the capitalist ideal did not ultimately fail because people are too selfish, but rather not selfish enough – or more precisely, not individualistic enough to be sustained by their own self-created values:
“The continuous disasters in man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.” Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up.”
Continued Shortly.
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