The Catholic Church after Neoliberalism (after John Gray)

Amazon

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The Church after Neoliberalism – a Grayian Meditation

The Catholic Church is older than the states that surround it and more durable than the economic orders that rise and fall beneath its windows. Yet it has never been outside history.

It survived feudal Christendom by absorbing it, weathered mercantile modernity by compromising with it, and accommodated the bourgeois nation‑state by sanctifying it. The age now ending — the era of borderless neoliberal globalisation — was greeted in Rome with the same guarded opportunism. The Vatican Bank placed funds on Wall Street, theologians spoke of a “global civil society”, and John Paul II discovered in progressive human-rights language a vocabulary fit for encyclicals.

But the ideologies that once seemed permanent are dissolving. A Church that trusts any passing order will learn, again, that it has backed a transient construct.

I.  Corporatism, Neoliberalism, and Their Ruins

Catholic corporatism once ranged from medieval guild solidarities to the twentieth‑century industrial settlement epitomised by Quadragesimo Anno. That later model collapsed with the factory belts on which it relied. 

John Paul II’s qualified sympathy for the market in Centesimus Annus (1991) “within a strong juridical framework” was directed chiefly against Soviet centralism.  Yet the order that replaced communism — what Gray labelled “the neoliberal utopia” — carried its own seeds of decomposition: deterritorialised capital, a universal consumer ideal, systemic community damage.  Financial crises, widening inequality and political backlash followed.

In these ruins the Church retains only abstract principles — subsidiarity, preference for the poor, dignity of the person — too skeletal for an age of algorithmic surveillance and sovereign wealth funds.

II.  Demographic Shifts and Doctrinal Fission

As the Western liberal order fragments, so too does the geography of faith.  Europe, cradle of Catholic universality, is ageing and spiritually inert, although Poland and Slovakia still export clergy disproportionate to their population.  North America is richer in money than in vocations.  By contrast, Catholicism is expanding in Africa’s peri‑urban zones and the Pacific Rim’s barrios, arenas where Pentecostal churches, Islamist movements and techno‑pagan cults compete.

A global Church ruled from a baroque enclave on the Tiber presupposes cultural links that no longer exist.  African Catholics confronting warlord polities turn to protective sacramentalism; German Catholics dispute synodality and gendered language; Chinese Catholics practise catacomb piety under Xi’s algorithms.  Francis’ exhortation to be “a Church that goes forth” conceded this plurality.  The Synod on Synodality widened consultation yet retained central control, exposing what was tacit: one communion in law, several in fact.

Digital media, charismatic papal moments and migrant flows sometimes re‑stitch a thin sense of global identity, but Gray’s maxim applies: institutions cannot summon unity by appeal to universals once history has dissolved the conditions that made those universals plausible.

III.  Moral Capital and its Exhaustion

For two centuries the Church traded on the moral credit of saints and missionaries.  Clerical abuse scandals squandered it.  If the priest is perceived less as alter Christus than as potential predator, the sacramental economy implodes.  States question school subsidies; donors shift to secular NGOs; cultural elites dismiss clerical celibacy and sexual ethics as archaic.

In the West the Church has lost authority to police public morality; in the South it competes with movements promising miracles or cash.  Moral capital, once spent, is slow to replenish.

IV.  The Coming Political Topography

Gray notes that globalisation ends not in cosmopolitan harmony but in civilisational realignment.  The emergent map is multipolar: a Chinese sphere combining surveillance capitalism with Confucian‑Leninist nationalism; an American bloc fractured by tribal politics; a resurgent Orthodox Russia; a post‑colonial Islam negotiating modernity through selective technology and Sharia.  The West, as a coherent polity, is dissolving; Rome can no longer pose as its conscience.

The Holy See will revert to micro‑diplomacy: brokering prisoner swaps between Kyiv and Moscow, edging towards modus vivendi with Beijing, issuing climate encyclicals ignored by petro‑states.  Without anchorage in a stable bloc, papal diplomacy risks becoming pious brokerage — useful only when convenient to stronger powers.

V.  Post‑Liberal Christianity or Tribal Remnant?

Some hope the setback of neoliberalism will open space for post‑liberal Catholicism: communitarian economics, integral ecology, a liturgical renaissance.  Gray would counsel scepticism.  The forces unravelling globalisation — great‑power rivalry, hollowed‑out economies, resource conflicts — are indifferent to romantic schemes.  More likely is a patchwork Church surviving locally, inserted in cultures it cannot remake.

In liberal metropolises it may persist as boutique identity (e.g., French bourgeois traditionalism).

In parts of Africa it may harden into a militant socio‑political bloc (Nigeria’s Christian associations against jihadist militias).

In China it will vacillate between underground resilience and state‑managed pseudo‑Catholicism (post‑2018 provisional agreement). 

On the Pacific seaboard it may syncretise with prosperity gospels and neo‑shamanic therapies.

Canon law will still define one communion; sociologically the Church will look like a federation of tribes sharing a contested creedal archive.

VI.  Conclusion

If Gray were writing, he would remind Catholics that their Church has outlived empires precisely because it never fully trusted any of them.  Its future depends on reviving that scepticism: recognising that providence guarantees neither comfort nor permanence, and that no human institution can embody the Kingdom it proclaims.

The neoliberal experiment promised universal prosperity and ended in stratified insecurity.  A Church that tethered its critical witness to that order now surveys the wreckage and must choose: reinvent itself as another moral‑advocacy NGO, or embrace its condition as a pilgrim people — uncertain, divided, and obliged to inhabit the ruins with a humility commensurate with its own failures.

Survival, not triumph, is the Catholic vocation in the century ahead. Survival, Gray would add, is no small accomplishment in a civilisation determined to dismantle itself in pursuit of further impossible ideals.

Nicos Poulantzas: Capitalism in the next decade

I wrote a series of generally admiring posts about the work of Nicos Poulantzas (here, in declining order of relevance).

I was reading this evening an outstanding recent summary of his work by David Sessions.

Nicos Poulantzas

Generally I'm a huge fan.

Poulantzas tried to break out of the simplistic stereotypes of both the Stalinists and the Trotskyists concerning the nature of the capitalist state and its role in mediating and enforcing capitalist class dynamics.

Poulantzas's great problem, the issue that destroyed his theoretical position, was that he wanted an accurate analysis of contemporary capitalism which also predicted transition to socialism (the supercession of capitalist relations of production) as a reachable goal.

All his analysis kept trying to tell him this wasn't on the cards. It simply wasn't possible.

What does the future hold if not a transition to socialism?

The central political problems 'we' face today: the breakdown of consensus politics, the rise of 'populism', leftist hysteria - these symptoms are all rooted in the obsolescence of the neoliberal phase of capitalism. Neoliberalism has created a gulf between the super-elite beneficiaries of a financialised, globalised capitalism and vast swathes of the proletariat and petit-bourgeoisie (old and new - Poulantzas emphasised the distinction) which has not shared in this largesse, which correctly feels abandoned, disrespected, atomised, alienated and futureless.

The problem has been accentuated by 'elite overproduction': the flow of c. 40% of the population through the universities, which has created a febrile petit-bourgeois mass which has internalised neoliberal ideologies and then naively tried to realise them in actuality.

This is the genesis of the SJW, equal-outcome, blank-slate-believing mass movements which self-define as 'left' but which are thoroughly bourgeois-liberal. They have captured the traditional labour parties of the left.

I expect a new capitalist synthesis to arise out of all this turmoil over the next decade. The shape is hard to discern but it will be whatever serves to restore class cohesion - that's the stability point.

Probably a little more socially conservative, a little more redistributive. Only time will tell. The process won't be pretty: I agree with Peter Turchin about that.

It's worth watching the project of Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson in the new UK Government. That's exactly the project they're trying to define.

I expect the Brexit project now to go through, because there's a gathering consensus in the more strategic and hard-headed section of the British political elite that Britain's future is best assured by a strategic alliance with the US rather than being semi-locked-in to a disunited Europe, a power both politically and militarily weak.

In the past there has been the famous 'bridge' or 'straddling' policy, which saw the UK acting as a 'value-adding' middleman between the US and Europe. But in an increasingly multipolar political world resulting from the decay of the naive neoliberal globalisation project and catalysed by the rise of China and an incipent global recession, the UK finally, has to choose sides.

I think the Johnson government understands that, while the Remainers, locked into crumbling, sterile visions of the past, do not.

Such a shame that Nico Poulantzas is no longer with us. I wish I knew what he would have thought.

"In The Long Run We Are All Dead" - Geoff Mann

Amazon link

Maddeningly abstract and allusive, Geoff Mann's book situates Keynes within an intellectual arc stretching back to the French Revolution (1789-99) and Hegel's subsequent theorisation of its lessons for modern civilisation. A reminder of the shallowness of contemporary thinking about values, governance and the collapse of the neoliberal project.

Keynes is depicted as taking a stand against delusional neoclassical (and highly mathematicised) theories in which capitalism is assumed to be always at, or returning to equilibrium. Keynes sees the structural instabilities driving boom-bust cycles, highlighting the essential fragility of the 'civilised order'. His vision calls for conscious state action to underpin the conditions of existence of the masses, heading off a revolution of despair after which 'the deluge'.

The author shares many insights into the form elite ideology takes today, as expressed in newspapers, TV, radio and online. For example, the great issue of 'inequality' (a strangely recent concern) is actually a debate within the (bourgeois) middle-class reflecting the relative deprivation of the top 10% as compared to the super-rich 1% or 0.1% due to the neoliberal revolution and specifically the aftermath of 2008/9. The life-history of the broader working class, where unemployment, precarious employment and stagnant, low incomes remain endemic, rarely features in this debate.

Given that the entire history of anti-capitalist revolutions (over, say the last 200+ years) has been one of defeat and/or deeply unpleasant outcomes, the narrative of socialist revolution, the hopeful leap into the unknown, is completely uncompelling. An enlightened Keynesianism, seeking to save (liberal-democratic-capitalist) civilisation - by illiberal political means where necessary - may, in its final inadequacy, open the way to a more profound transformation of social relations. But we cannot assume a blueprint anywhere, and certainly not in the actually-existing Marxist canon.

Mann is too enamoured of fashionable moralistic crusading on climate change for my tastes and fails (as is usual with Marxist analysts) to factor in what we increasingly know about human nature through genomics, psychometrics and sociobiology. These omissions subtract from the force of his final conclusions, which are unnecessarily tentative. But taken as a whole the book is a tour de force of open-mindedness, synthesis and creativity.

See also: "When Keynes comes to town".

When Keynes comes to town

Amazon link

Maddeningly abstract and allusive, Geoff Mann's book situates Keynes within an intellectual arc stretching back to the French Revolution (1789-99) and Hegel's subsequent theorisation of its lessons for modern civilisation. A reminder of the shallowness of contemporary thinking about values, governance and the collapse of the neoliberal project.

Keynes is depicted as taking a stand against delusional neoclassical (and highly mathematicised) theories in which capitalism is assumed to be always at, or returning to equilibrium. Keynes sees the structural instabilities driving boom-bust cycles, highlighting the essential fragility of the 'civilised order'. His vision calls for conscious state action to underpin the conditions of existence of the masses, heading off a revolution of despair after which the deluge.

I have reviewed the book here: "In The Long Run We Are All Dead" - Geoff Mann.

It prompts this analysis of our contemporary predicament in the spirit of Mann's thinking.

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Social Justice Warriors vs the Populists

There was a time when I did not regularly throw my shoes at the television set, when the TV and print media had not yet morphed into latter-day Pravdas.

It was the time before neoliberalism’s decline, before the great crash of 2008.

First had come the sixties transition from post-war factory-capitalism, familiar from a thousand Stalinist agitprop posters. No more conveyor-belt mass-production 'on the track'. The new middle-class economy was fragmented, individualistic and complicated. It wanted mass university education and greedily consumed its output. Not that those jobs were particularly well paid.

And so were sown the seeds of elite overproduction.

Neoliberalism took recognisable shape in the 1980s, a pivot away from national industrial capitalisms towards a frictionless world with international just-in-time supply chains and global capital flows. The opportunities to seek profitable investment opportunities and attain economies of scale rewarded some industries more than others: high tech and finance to name two.

Naturally there was an inspiring vision to accompany globalisation. It postulated a world without borders, where all impediments to the free availability of factors of production should be removed: no tariffs and no irritating state/legal restrictions.

The vision ordained that outdated prejudices limiting international access to labour should be abolished. Free migration! No cultural barriers! No acknowledgement could be made that any performance differences due to race, gender, sexuality, age etc might have any biological/genetic causation. Differences in outcome were always and everywhere to be understood as socially-constructed pernicious hangovers - to be abolished in the name of an enlightened neoliberalism!

Thus was born the phenomenon of the social justice warrior (SJW), prepped to fight those dinosaurs who hadn't yet got the memo.

Since 2008/9 global economic growth in the advanced capitalist countries has been anaemic. Profitability has been poor and the neoliberalism project has been fraying. Those never signed up in the first place, most specifically the non-graduate industrial working class were getting restive as their communities, workplaces and personal prospects got trashed. And so arose their inchoate political voice: Populism.

Those who were meant to be the foot-soldiers of globalisation (all those idealistic young social science graduates) were increasingly abandoned by a failing project on the defensive. They formed that new class fraction, the precariat. Of course they doubled-down on the SJW vision, feeling betrayed. They are the scarily militant snowflakes of the Labour Party's Momentum organisation .. and similar movements in other countries.

The SJW programme, increasingly absurd, continues to infiltrate the mainstream media and leftist politics. It has nothing whatsoever to do with anti-capitalism, despite its seemingly leftist credentials. It is the anguished shriek of a decaying neoliberalism.*

The Populist-SJW conflicts are global, though taking different forms and tempos in North America, Latin America and the different countries in Europe. In some cases (France) the neoliberal cause is still somewhat in the ascendant (Macron). In most countries though, the neoliberal elites are on the defensive.

Neither side has a programme which can work. Classical neoliberalism is discredited: its globalist-individualism falters while continuing to cause too much collateral damage. The elites fear disruption; they sense the masses stirring. Yet there can be no return to fifties-style nation-state economies.

There will be no proletarian revolution. Capitalism will find a new modus operandi. It will not be the re-establishment of a resurgent neoliberalism. This is a struggle of years as there is no simple solution, no way forward which does not succeed in defeating powerful vested interests.

Most likely is the theme Mann develops in his book, a Keynesian, somewhat covert counter-revolution. The result: a more hands on, activist state creating institutional forms fostering inclusivity for restive groups currently felt irrelevant and disposable by internationalist capital. Theresa May understood this in her much ignored remark that making Brexit work was the only way of saving the neoliberal project.

In the UK, both Corbynism and May-style conservatism are groping towards this solution. It will place constraints on the free disposition of capital and it will be expensive. You can see why powerful (but short-sighted) forces resist this new direction.

But the re-integration of the 60% plus of the population who are not graduates and that larger part of the more educated 40% who have been abandoned by the real elites requires it. The challenge is to develop a programme which addresses both constituencies: in the UK Labour and Conservatives engage from different directions.

But painfully, in fits and starts, with much conflict and perhaps violence, this is where we will end up, maybe a decade out.

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* Ideologies take on a life of their own. Ideological 'praxis' exhibits a relative autonomy from the material conditions which elicit it.

Put more plainly, even though the SJW agenda derives from and serves the purposes of the neoliberal project, it occasionally bites the hand that nurtures it. Sometimes its logic undermines that project.

Notice the liberal media indulgently rowing back from episodes of overreach. It's usually a humourous demurral and no general conclusions will be drawn.

O'Sullivan's First Law continues - so far

"All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing."

O'Sullivan's First Law. John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist.(Wikipedia). I suppose the RSPCA would be an example.

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The priests invariably propose an ideology, a romanticised (false) view of human nature which usefully buttresses the existing order. The Enlightenment, a secularised Christianity, is popular in the west. I make an observation, not a moral critique.

The ideology's falsity violates innate instincts and therefore requires self-control in application. The priests live rather gilded lives: stresses are few. They find mental compartmentalisation and self-control ('tolerance') not so hard.

Those outside the bubble are ceaselessly lectured, indeed have no other language of norms and morality. As O'Sullivan noted, heretics are everywhere shamed and expelled.

But in recent years there's been a widening gap. Guardian and BBC ethics have been losing purchase on life's not so little problems. The masses mill around, seeking answers. There is no truly acceptable alternative ideology. ''Populism" is an inchoate mishmash.

Most recoil at mindless prejudice and bigotry. In the old days the alt-narratives of Communism (and Fascism, with less coherence) had mass appeal. Today, not so much.

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Ideologies are not forged in a vacuum, they morally and intellectually underpin the order of society - and evolve with it.

Is there a replacement for neoliberalism, with its failing global supply chains and tottering financial  architecture? Is there an evolution which doesn't require a round of effective repression against the uppity masses? Like in Chile, the gold standard for dealing with (leftwing) populism?

I rather fear not. But the priests won't be doing the dirty work. I suspect their time is running out. Though to be clear, we are talking of a decade-long timescale here, not the events of the next year.

"The Robespierrean social justice terror blowing through Silicon Valley"

La nostalgie de l'Ancien Régime

"The Robespierrean social justice terror blowing through Silicon Valley ...".

Nice phrase (ugly reality). Marginal Revolution has some notes on US tech management.

Here are the top nine (of seventeen).

1. "Most tech leaders aren’t especially personable. Instead, they’re quirky introverts. Or worse.


2. Most tech leaders don’t care much about the usual policy issues. They care about AI, self-driving cars, and space travel, none of which translate into positive political influence.


3. Tech leaders are idealistic and don’t intuitively understand the grubby workings of WDC [Washington DC].


4. People who could be “managers” in tech policy areas (for instance, they understand tech, are good at coalition building, etc.) will probably be pulled into a more lucrative area of tech. Therefore there is an acute talent shortage in tech policy areas.


5. The Robespierrean social justice terror blowing through Silicon Valley occupies most of tech leaders’ “political” mental energy. It is hard to find time to focus on more concrete policy issues.


6. Of the policy issues that people in tech do care about—climate, gay/trans rights, abortion, Trump—they’re misaligned with Republican Party, to say the least. This same Republican party currently rules.


7. While accusations of deliberate bias against Republicans are overstated, the tech rank-and-file is quite anti-Republican, and increasingly so. This limits the political degrees of freedom of tech leaders. (See the responses to Elon Musk’s Republican donation.)


8. Several of the big tech companies are de facto monopolies or semi-monopolies. They must spend a lot of their political capital denying this or otherwise minimizing its import.


9. The media increasingly hates tech. (In part because tech is such a threat, in part because of a deeper C.P. Snow-style cultural mismatch.)

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There's a scenario in which a perfect storm is brewing. The Googles and Facebooks of the world are economically and ideologically aligned with a declining neoliberal project which only gets the more shrill as it loses out to the inchoate populism of the increasingly disaffected masses.

As popular discontent grows, the tech companies - deploying personal data and means of surveillance undreamt of by former elites - are increasingly available for repression (in a just cause of course). We forget how authoritarian regimes always spin out self-justification.

When social cohesion breaks down (and this is a feature of the political-economic period we're living through) left and right are equally tribal and nasty, each in their own way. In the end it's always human beings and their antagonistic group interests, dressed up in fancy ideologies.

Makes you nostalgic for the mid twentieth century, Les Trente Glorieuses.

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And here's an antidote to that.

The ties that bind

Antiquity

In antiquity the social ties which bound society were personal, expressed through patronage.

Commodity items like slaves were atomised and disposable, not part of society.

Feudalism

Feudalism, a non-slave mode of production, was 'a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour' (Wikipedia).

Reciprocal - and personal - obligations were expressed vertically thus:

"A vassal would swear allegiance and pay homage to his lord in a commendation ceremony. The commendation ceremony was designed to create a lasting bond between a vassal and his lord. Fealty and homage are a key element of feudalism. The ceremony consisted of swearing the Oath of Fealty and the act of homage."

Capitalism

Capitalism, by contrast, needed contractual relationships between free labourers and capitalists as negotiated in the market, and fought against feudalism under the abstract principles of the Rights of Man.

Amazon link

Capitalism is a less organic form of society. As Marx hyperbolically observed in The Communist Manifesto,

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”.

It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers."

Capitalism finds organic communities an obstacle to its own ultra-flexible development. The obduracy of the National Union of Mineworkers was sustained by the extraordinary social cohesion of the pit villages. Yet, as Marx noted, human communities are naturally conservative: capitalism propelled human progress precisely through its hostility to the natural human longing for a warm, supportive, harmonious and stable communitarianism.

Once established, capitalist economies sheltered under nation states and were happy to promote a nationalistic patriotism as the foundation of social stability. But post the sixties, globalisation moved into prominance. Economies now straddled the planet, peoples moved in their millions as migrant labour and sometimes just as migrants. Nationalism as an ideology jarred in this new reality. The narrative became 'multiculturalism' - an imagined, global, borderless and thoroughly-superficial 'community' of free and thoroughly-equal citizens.

All those first and second world war types, spouting their loyalty to King and Country, seemed so very anachronistic now.

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How useful is this new neoliberal ideology, branded by its enemies as political correctness?

For running a multiethnic, multicultural economic empire it's essential. But when push comes to shove, the shallowness (indeed fraudulence) of its social glue comes to the fore. If neoliberalism celebrates a transient and transactional individualism against communitarian values deemed non-inclusive and reactionary, it's always going to struggle to marshal mass support when confronting a non-compliant adversary.

Why don't we like Russia? Because they're hard on gays??? Saudi Arabia was never so demonised.

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The ideology of a triumphant capitalism endlessly trumpeted by the Mainstream Media has little to offer the masses outside the bubble .. and ordinary folk, feeling that in their bones, turn elsewhere. The revolutionary bourgeoisie of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the populists of their age, but populism is very suspect today.

The Marxist left believed that just as Marxism had unveiled the mystifications and obfuscations of bourgeois ideology, its vision of socialist freedom, of society working for the many, not the few (to borrow a phrase) would seize the masses, that essential engine of social progress. We know how that worked out.

I have an unappealing prognosis: with economic prospects unpromising, social cohesion unravelling and no easy answers, expect more populism and more crazy politics.

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As I write, we enter another Italian political and economic crisis.

Two essays ..

For those of you with time on your hands (I know that's a set with measure zero, but so?), I have a couple of interesting essays for you to ponder.

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1. The Global Elite Is The Only Elite Now

Razib Khan is dipping into the same zeitgeist as I did with my post, "A Christmas message from the Bubble". He writes:

"First, the neoliberal order of infinite plentitude and a universal middle class collapsed in the financial crisis of 2008. Though the global order continues on neoliberal precepts, it is more a matter of not knowing what the alternative could be, rather than genuine enthusiasm.

Second, nationalism and localist movements which cut against the grain of global democratic liberalism have become vigorous. China shows no signs of embracing democratic liberalism, India is home to a Hindu nationalist movement that has the reins of power, and right-wing political movements are on the march in Europe.

Third, a genuine international global elite has taken on greater solidity since the financial crisis, because they understand that their interests are more important in concert than the nation-states which they are notionally citizens of.

Consider Rupert Murdoch. Born an Australian, but now an American citizen. He has media properties of note across many nations. He has daughters who are half ethnically Chinese, granddaughters who are part Ghanaian, and other grandchildren who are being raised British (and are descendants of Sigmund Freud!).

Murdoch may be an extreme case, but his life and ties are not atypical for the global oligarchic class. Below them is the global professional caste which moves between nations as needed, and views themselves citizens of the world. They are foot-soldiers in keeping the machinery of internationalism chugging along.

The banker in New York arguably has more in common in terms of public and private interests with the banker in London or Shanghai than they do with the citizens who reside in the hinterlands of the nation-states in which they live. ...

Over the next few years, we will start to see how the nation-state, and the resurgent nationalisms, deal with the reality of a supra-nation without a state, the cosmopolitan global overclass. At the pinnacle of the global overclass are the oligarchs. This group has always been of internationalist bent due to their reliance or positions in finance and trade.

But in the past few centuries, national patriotism was a feature present even among oligarchs. To some extent, the national and personal interest were commingled. ... And it is also true that during the great age of globalization before 1914 this class was still characterized by a powerful robust nationalist ethos which would be unthinkable today."

Razib is right to identify the ever-increasing domination of the globalist bourgeois elite (he doesn't use the language of Marxism although it's by far the best analytic framework). The neoliberals arrived with an economic ideology of weak government, low taxes and few immigration controls, buttressed by a social/political agenda of individualistic autonomy, a commitment to civic equality which was then taken to infer biological equality and thence extended to a demand for equality of outcome.

This faux-progressive manifesto for maximally-frictionless capitalism has been uncritically swallowed by the left.

 And so we segue to Charles Stross.

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2. Dude, you broke the future!

I wrote about Charles Stross in my last post. He's an interesting guy, a combination of penetrating and incisive intellectual with ranting SJW. We Keirsey Rationalists always have a problem arguing with the INFJs of this world because their emotional values are always deployed to derail dispassionate rational analysis.

His essay is the transcript of a talk given to the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, December 2017. It covers a range of topics including the Singularity, the alleged dangers of uncontrolled 'AI-runaway' (he is as skeptical as I am) and an interesting analogy between autonomous AI systems and profit-maximising corporations.

So far, so interesting. But his inner SJW keeps popping up, leading him into - dare I say it? - politically-correct dogmas which encapsulate scientific error.

I leave him be .. challenging his core assumptions would be as rewarding as debating a creationist.

Still, the emotionalism and factional tribalism which make his politics so tedious and tendentious are just what makes him a great novelist. Fiction is about emotion and conflict, not sterile ideas!

You can read his thoughts - they are unfailingly interesting even when infuriating - or you can watch his video.

It's an hour, though.

A Christmas message from the Bubble

From stratospheric heights we survey our globe. The tendrils of capital lace effortlessly through America, surge eastwards across the Atlantic to pan-Europa; offshoots jut into Russia. Westward they leap trans-Pacific into Japan and Australasia, penetrating India and China like growing roots.

Africa remains dark.

This weave of intangible finance and investment is shadowed by the stately global flow of commodities .. and the migration of workers of all skills and hues to wherever they are best needed.

This is how capitalism was always meant to work!

A frictionless, flexible, adaptable global-scale economy. And we run it, benefit from it. We make it happen, and it makes our culture: rationalistic, individualistic, transactional, civilised, urbane, liberal, secular - truly homo economicus.

Wait: there are irritants. What is that Trump creature doing, railing against us in his absurd bombast? A clown tweeting banal stupidities to his redneck base - who ordered that?

And where did those ghastly Brexiteers crawl from, ruining the future with their atavistic anxieties? They, and their less-potent counterparts in other European 'countries'.

We shall be busy the next twenty years. Our progressive enclave must extend itself: geographically to Russia and China, and also downward, absorbing more and more of those troublesome little people.

(Africa? We move rapidly on.)

Setting the world politically to rights is the tiresome chore of the age but with the media, students and young professionals on our case, we're cooking with gas .. or should I say renewables (heh heh).

No real issues in finishing this up (barring presentation) - there are some great advances in genetic engineering coming down the road.

"Why the Culture Wins" - Joseph Heath

A Culture Orbital

"Many years ago, a friend of mine who knows about these sorts of things handed me a book and said “Here, you have to read this.” It was a copy of Iain M. Banks’s Use of Weapons.

I glanced over the jacket copy. “What’s the Culture?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “it’s kind of hard to explain.” She settled in for what looked to be a long conversation."

Thus starts this appreciation of Iain M. Banks by Joseph Heath, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. It's a long and interesting essay which for me flags The Culture as the literary expression of the culmination of neoliberalism (hedonistic individualism), not of the utopian-communism which Banks claimed for it.

Heath writes:

"This is in fact why Horza, the protagonist of Consider Phlebas, dislikes the Culture. The book is set during the Idiran-Culture war, and is unusual among the Culture novels in that its protagonist is fighting on the side of the Idirans, and therefore provides an outsider’s perspective on the Culture. The Idirans are presented as the archetype of an old-fashioned functional culture – their political structure is that of a religiously integrated, hierarchical, authoritarian empire.

The war between the Idirans and the Culture is peculiarly asymmetrical, since the Culture is not an empire, or even a “polity” in any traditional sense of the term, it is simply a culture. It has no capital city, or even any “territory” in the conventional sense.

(“During the war’s first phase, the Culture spent most of its time falling back from the rapidly expanding Idiran sphere, completing its war-production change-over and building up its fleet of warships… The Culture was able to use almost the entire galaxy to hide in. Its whole existence was mobile in essence; even Orbitals could be shifted, or simply abandoned, populations moved. The Idirans were religiously committed to taking and holding all they could; to maintaining frontiers, to securing planets and moons; above all, to keeping Idir safe, at any price.”)

Horza is not an Idiran, but rather one of the last surviving members of a doppelganger species. The question throughout the novel – and the question put to him, rather forcefully, by the Culture agent Perosteck Balveda – is why he is fighting on the Idiran side, given that they are, rather self-evidently, religious fanatics, with an exclusive and zealous conviction in the superiority of their own species.

(“It was clear to [the Idirans] from the start that their jihad to ‘calm, integrate and instruct’ these other species and bring them under the direct eye of their God had to continue and expand, or be meaningless.”)

The Culture, by contrast, is all about peaceful coexistence, tolerance and equality. So why would a member of an otherwise uninvolved third species choose the Idiran side?

The difference, for Horza, is that the Idirans, for all their flaws, have a certain depth, or seriousness, that is conspicuously lacking in the Culture. Their actions have meaning. To put it in philosophical terms, their lives are structured by what Charles Taylor refers to as “strong evaluation.”

(Indeed, the inability of the Culture to take the war that it is fighting seriously serves as one of the most consistent sources of entertainment in all the Culture novels, as reflected in ship names, which are generally tongue-in-cheek such as: What are the Civilian Applications? or the Thug-class Value Judgement, the Torturer-class Xenophobe, the Abominator-class Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints, etc.)

Consider Weber’s famous diagnosis of modernity, as producing “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.” In the Culture, the role of the specialist has been taken over by the AIs, leaving for humanity nothing but the role of “sensualists without heart.”

Thus the chief attraction of the Culture is the promise of non-stop partying and unlimited sex and drugs. (Genetic and surgical modification provide Culture members with the ability to make almost unlimited changes to their bodies, which typically include enhanced genitalia that allow them to experience intense, extended, and repeated orgasms, as well as the installation of specialized glands that produce a range of psychoactive chemicals, to dull pain, to produce euphoria, to remain awake, or to produce almost any other feeling that might seem desirable.)

One can see then why Horza might dislike the Culture. On the surface, his complaint is that they surrendered their humanity to machines. But what he really wants is a culture that can serve as a source of deeper meaning, which is the one thing that the Culture conspicuously fails to provide – on the contrary, it turns everything into a joke.

The Culture may be irresistible, but for essentially stupid reasons. (“Horza tried not to appear as scornful as he felt. Here we go again, he thought. He tried to count the number of times he’d had to listen to people – usually from third- or low fourth-level societies, usually fairly human-basic, and more often than not male – talking in hushed, enviously admiring tones about how It’s More Fun in the Culture… I suppose we’ll hear about those wonderful drug glands next, Horza thought.”)."

...

"There are a variety of developments that are associated with modernity. One of them involves a move away from ascribed toward achieved sources of identity. The idea is rather simple: in traditional societies, people were defined largely by the circumstances that they were born into, or their ascribed characteristics – who your family was, what “station” in life you were born to, what gender you were, etc. There were a strict set of roles that prescribed how each person in each set of circumstances was to act, and life consisted largely of acting out the prescribed role.

A modern society, by contrast, favours “choice” over “circumstances,” and indeed, considers it the height of injustice that people should be constrained or limited by their circumstances. Thus there is a move toward achieved sources of identity – what school you went to, what career you have chosen, who you decided to marry, and the lifestyle you adopt. “Getting to know someone,” in our society, involves asking them about the choices they have made in life, not the circumstances they were born into.

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to both arrangements. The advantages of choice, for people living in an achievement-oriented society, are too obvious to be worth enumerating. But there are disadvantages. Under the old system of ascribed statuses, people did not suffer from “identity crises,” and they did not need to spend the better part of their 20’s “finding themselves.”

When everything is chosen, however, then the basis upon which one can make a choice becomes eroded. There are no more fixed points, from which different options can be evaluated. This generates the crisis of meaning that Taylor associates with the decline of strong evaluation.

Human beings have spent much of their lives lamenting “the curse of Adam,” and yet work provides most people with their primary sense of meaning and achievement in life. So what happens when work disappears, turning everything into a hobby?

A hobby is fun. Many people spend a great deal of time trying to escape work, so they can spend more time on their hobbies. But while they may be fun, hobbies are also at some level always frivolous. They cannot give meaning to a life, precisely because they are optional. You could just stop doing it, and nothing would change, it would make no difference, which is to say, it wouldn’t matter.

Now consider the choices that people have in the Culture. You can be male or female, or anything in between (indeed, many Culture citizens alternate, and it’s considered slightly outré to be strongly gender-identified). You can live as long as you like. You can acquire any appearance, or any set of skills. You can alter your physiology or brain chemistry at will, learn anything you like.

Given all these options, how do you choose? More fundamentally, who are you? What is it that creates your identity, or that makes you distinctive? If we reflect upon our own lives, the significant choices we have made were all in important ways informed by the constraints we are subject to, the hand that we were dealt: our natural talents, our gender, the country that we were born in. Once the constraints are gone, what basis is there for choosing one path over another?"

The life of a robin in the garden, or a cat in front of the fire, is not bereft of meaning just because neither will ever master calculus.

Humanity has spent millennia .. continues to spend the millennia .. in transforming its environment to remove the obligation to labour for survival. Yet all our instincts, our motivations, are to do with our abilities to deal with existential challenges, to survive, succeed, find a mate, reproduce and have grandchildren.

Absent such challenges such drives, emotions and goals flail on air: great achievements are no longer existentially-motivated but merely discretionary. All actions reduce to the playing of games.

Perhaps we become no more than pets of the Culture Minds. Perhaps we'll alter our genomes so we'll enjoy that. Perhaps our future technology-womb won't be brittle.

So many 'perhaps's.

---

We do actually know what happens, biologically-speaking, when you take a species and move it into an utterly benign environment: step forward the Dodo.

James Damore gets fired

The rainbow colours of diversity

The ex-Google employee was terminated for observing (in an internal memo) that genders differ in their aptitude for, and interest in, computer science.

• Razib Khan predicted: "whoever wrote that memo will surely be fired".
• Scott Alexander rebutted the Google official line indirectly (wrong about aptitude).
• Greg Cochran simply mused about 'The Index'.

Steve Hsu has this to say, while Scott Aaronson has written an elegant and oblique post.

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Blank-slate ideology asserts that all humans - of whatever gender and/or race - are cognitively biologically-identical, and that therefore all detrimental differences of outcome are solely due to oppression. When elites defend plainly-wrong ideas with the utmost ferocity, I am reminded of Marx's point, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas."

Why would the ruling elite want to believe it? Because it would be so dangerously divisive to look at any human subgroup and affirm that group's lower average cognitive performance or competence. Even identifying plainly outperforming groups - such as the Ashkenazim - risks opening the door to the concept of differences. So extreme is this impetus to faux-egalitarianism that many people deny even physical performance differences between genders or races. Social cohesion is the game.

I keep reminding myself (I already wrote about this) that globalisation is the economic driver for blank-slate ideology. Its young, educated beneficiaries are eager converts (arguably against their own longer-term interests) to causes so apparently egalitarian, culturally left-wing .. and economically convenient for globalised capital.

At least we haven't reintroduced the auto-de-fé yet or I wouldn't be writing this.

---

The Google CEO's sophistry was particularly disingenuous: see "If Google did heavy lifting ...".

A field manual for Theresa May

Amazon link

Here's a summary:

"Several decades of greater economic and cultural openness in the West have not benefited all our citizens. Among those who have been left behind, a populist politics of culture and identity has successfully challenged the traditional politics of Left and Right, creating a new division: between the mobile ‘achieved’ identity of the people from Anywhere, and the marginalised, roots-based identity of the people from Somewhere. This schism accounts for the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, the decline of the centre-left, and the rise of populism across Europe.

"David Goodhart’s compelling investigation of the new global politics reveals how the Somewhere backlash is a democratic response to the dominance of Anywhere interests, in everything from mass higher education to mass immigration."

and here's the author bio:

"David Goodhart is the founding editor of Prospect magazine and one of the most distinctive voices on British politics today. He is currently head of the Demography, Immigration and Integration Unit at the think tank Policy Exchange, and was previously director of the centre-left think tank Demos.

"His last book The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration (2013) was runner-up for the Orwell Prize in 2014 and was a finalist for ‘Political Book of the Year’ in the Paddy Power Political Book Awards. David voted remain in the EU referendum and has been a mainly inactive member of the Labour Party since he was a student."

I was afraid I was going to get a typical liberal hatchet-job on Brexiteers and oiks. The familiar stuff about that section of the population notorious for being stupid, reactionary, nostalgic for times-long-gone, and so forth.

I'm pleased to say that David Goodhart's book is considerably better than that: it's well-written and quite a page-turner, despite a fair degree of repetition and the occasional splash of necessary but dry statistics.

Goodhart is open-minded, understands Jonathan Haidt's work on the differing moral foundations of liberals and conservatives, and sees how much light this sheds into his 'Anywheres' and 'Somewheres'. And although he never leaves the outer boundaries of the liberal paradigm, he does acknowledge innate differences in cognitive, personality and gender attributes (normally denied by liberals) and sees atomised individualism for the fanciful illusion it is.

Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory: liberal vs. conservative values

Using an approach grounded in history, economics and sociology, his book details the damage that decades of neoliberalism has done to the fabric of non-elite life across the world. Goodhart's 'Anywheres' are deliberately myopic about this - they either do not care or think it's actually positive.

He makes a further very telling point: with the demise of the mass-unionised manufacturing sector, the elites are no longer afraid of the diminished and fragmented working class. They pursue their own agendas with impunity.

Those chickens finally came home to roost with Brexit, Trumpism and the generic rise of 'populism'.

Goodhart is keen to propose a political solution: essentially Blue Labour or Red Toryism .. which happens to be the position Theresa May has adopted in the current election campaign. He favours policies for strengthening technical education, controlling permanent immigration and improving integration, reinforcing the family and encouraging job/career opportunities for the 'non cognitive-elite'. You can already hear the condescending insults of the 'Anywheres' to such 'reactionary tosh'.

I don't want to get into his detailed policy prescriptions (which in any case seem to have mostly ended up in the Tory Manifesto). His general approach is what Tony Smith would probably call 'the social state', a recasting of 1950s social-democracy for the modern age.

It may well be the least bad option we currently have, even though I'm sure the British elite will put up the same contemptuous, disparaging resistance that the US elites are currently inflicting on the Trump Presidency. (It won't be so strident over here since things are not so polarised and May is a far less abrasive and aggressive politician).

Goodhart is detailed and descriptive, but with insufficient analysis as to why the extraordinarily silly ideas of the 'Anywheres' (expressed most clearly and absurdly in the 'political correctness' of 'social justice warriors') have become the entrenched ruling ideology of the age.

The answer is surely that they happen to express the entrenched interests and practices of the globalised elites themselves. With such powerful economic buttresses, coolly rational critical thinking from people like David Goodhart has hitherto found little purchase. Any influence he may yet develop will depend upon the 'populist' masses in motion - which do seem to be unsettling the elites, judging by their reactions. So although I read the book with much interest, I didn't feel in the end much of a wow-factor, as if I had suddenly understood the world in a new and more profound way.

It's more like David Goodhart, Ambassador to the 'Somewheres' from the 'Anywheres', returned to write down his considered thoughts, careful not to appear to have gone native.

National characteristics and MBTI type

In the previous post I mentioned that Theresa May came across as an ISTJ, and that this resonated with ordinary folk. I was sufficiently interested to google the subject of national character and found this.

Obviously countries present different facets of themselves - different national stereotypes - but it isn't completely arbitrary: the stereotypes do have force, a ring of truth. The methodology one instinctively applies is to think of an individual who seems to embody the character of a country, and then personality-type him or her.

For England, ISTJ seems pretty apposite but I think we need to differentiate between the 'England profonde' - England in the large - and the metropolitan and cosmopolitan elites primarily located in London, who are effectively inhabitants of a different country (the so-called 'anywheres').

ISTJ is indeed the type of 'John Bull', the quintessential English person, but the transnational London-elites are much more like George Osborne, an INTJ, or Tony Blair, an ENTP. So in Keirsey's language, those globalist politicians dealing in economics abstractions and cool self-interested logic are Rationals.

The average English person, concrete to the core, has always distrusted intellectuals 😑. One way of understanding the recent turmoil in the Conservative party is to observe that control has passed from that faction which was the government of London (as the UK-based outpost of the global elite) to the faction which considers itself the government of England, tolerating London as a financial entrepôt.

Theresa May is often, pejoratively, called provincial.

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America has numerous distinctive national stereotypes. In political terms, the coastal policy elites (as represented, say, by Hillary Clinton, an INTJ), are plainly NT-Rational. Trump, a clear ESTP, represents the disinhibited force of nature we're familiar with from Westerns; the blustering and authoritarian 'Big Man', impatient with formal authority and rules, demanding personal loyalty. In this he reflects the yearning values of his mostly working-class base, which I visualise predominantly as STJs.

---

The EU leadership is part of the global, neoliberal cosmopolitan elite, and so NT-Rational. Emmanuel Macron is a personification of this type, as is the French elite. Beneath the surface, European countries diverge: Germany has, in Angela Merkel's public persona, a profound embodiment of the German national character - very STJ; France en masse, like the other Latin countries, inclines more SFP.

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Does any of this matter? Yes: when interests fracture in a country, national types are strongly predictive of values, which then lend direction to political movements.

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For more about the Myers-Briggs personality scheme, look to the link on the upper right sidebar.

Globalisation, then neoliberalism, finally political correctness

Charles Murray at Middlebury College, March 2017

From the Wikipedia bio:

"William Deresiewicz is an American author, essayist, and literary critic. Born in 1964 in Englewood, New Jersey, Deresiewicz attended Columbia University before teaching English at Yale University from 1998-2008.

"He is the author of A Jane Austen Education, How Six Novels Taught me About Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter (Penguin Press, 2011) and Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (Free Press, 2014). ..."

Deresiewicz has a from-the-heart (if overlong) essay on the current wave of 'political correctness' at US colleges. Check it out, or the shorter summary by Steve Sailer here.

"Elite private colleges are ideologically homogenous because they are socially homogeneous, or close to it. Their student populations largely come from the liberal upper and upper-middle classes, multiracial but predominantly white, with an admixture of students from poor communities of color - two demographics with broadly similar political beliefs, as evidenced by the fact that they together constitute a large proportion of the Democratic Party base.

"As for faculty and managerial staff, they are even more homogenous than their students, both in their social origins and in their present milieu, which tends to be composed exclusively of other liberal professionals—if not, indeed, of other liberal academics.

"Unlike the campus protesters of the 1960s, today’s student activists are not expressing countercultural views. They are expressing the exact views of the culture in which they find themselves (a reason that administrators prove so ready to accede to their demands). …

"The term political correctness, which originated in the 1970s as a form of self-mockery among progressive college students, was a deliberately ironic invocation of Stalinism. By now we’ve lost the irony but kept the Stalinism - and it was a feature of Stalinism that you could be convicted for an act that was not a crime at the time you committed it. So you were always already guilty, or could be made to be guilty, and therefore were always controllable.

"You were also always under surveillance by a cadre of what Jane Austen called, in a very different context, “voluntary spies,” and what my students called the PC police. Regimes of virtue produce informants (which really does wonders for social cohesion). …

"There is one category that the religion of the liberal elite does not recognize - that its purpose, one might almost conclude, is to conceal: class. Class at fancy colleges, as throughout American society, has been the unspeakable word, the great forbidden truth. ... It has long struck me in leftist or PC rhetoric how often “white” is conflated with “wealthy,” as if all white people were wealthy and all wealthy people were white.

"In fact, more than 40 percent of poor Americans are white. Roughly 60 percent of working-class Americans are white. Almost two-thirds of white Americans are poor or working-class. Altogether, lower-income whites make up about 40 percent of the country, yet they are almost entirely absent on elite college campuses, where they amount, at most, to a few percent and constitute, by a wide margin, the single most underrepresented group. ...

The exclusion of class also enables the concealment of the role that elite colleges play in perpetuating class, which they do through a system that pretends to accomplish the opposite, our so-called meritocracy. Students have as much merit, in general, as their parents can purchase (which, for example, is the reason SAT scores correlate closely with family income). The college admissions process is, as Mitchell L. Stevens writes in Creating a Class, a way of “laundering privilege.”

Because political correctness is presented by its advocates in moral terms, it's sometimes difficult to understand it as the optimised ideology of globalisation - a form of capitalism which really got going in the 1980s-90s, powered by Internet-mediated supply-chains and the economic rise of China.

More precisely, political correctness provides the moralistic framework, neoliberalism the ideology while globalisation captures the underlying economic dynamics:

"Economic neoliberalism is an economic theory and an ideological conviction that supports maximizing the economic freedom for individuals and thus reducing the amount of state intervention to the bare minimum.

"In this regards, it does advocate the elimination of government-imposed restrictions on transnational movements of goods, capital and people .... However, although these aspects are considered important aspects of globalization, this essay argues firstly that globalization is a much richer and multi-dimensional process that extends beyond transnational economic transactions. ..."

Following Marx, we should understand that causality has worked in the direction indicated by the title of this piece: first the economics, then the political justifications, finally the moral underpinnings. It is ironic that the political left now provides ideological cover for global capital.